Waking Up...

Ah, a wake up call.
Been slumbering a-la Rip Van Winkel for long.

Gods are angry at me, perhaps.
In the last six months at Pune, when the extended rainy season
provided us all with a bonus, low temperatures and slow breeze
to live up to the reputation of an 'air conditioned' city, misfortunes
trickled quietly in.

In the manner of spy soldiers, sneaking into a slumbering village.
Dark shadows bodiless, soundless, noiseless, never stumbling,
always creeping.

The first kill was my ageing car. It died. It died at the hands of my dear
anti-technology wife who is a scientist at loggerheads with science on
a 24x7 basis. It has transcended repairs, facelift, overhaul -nothing
remains except cannibalizing it piecemeal to get some cash now and then.
I haven't touched it for months. It seems to glare at me like a grandma
on her deathbed, I shudder at the implied meanings, and quietly
change my path, every blessed morning.

The second kill was my dear laptop that I got in Chennai.
Toshiba Satellite. It had grown to be an extension of my
body, and if looks could kill, well they do in my case they
bloody well do... my wife had been giving it looks as if it
were a nubile young female I had smuggled in to have
orgies with.

In a way, my relationship with the highly obedient laptop was almost sinful.
I used to wake up at four in the morning, long long before the neighbourhood
cock would get up to crow and strut about as if he were the Prez of USA, about
to order half a million troops into another devastated land...

I guess feminine jealousy transcends words, phrases and poetic expression.
It equates in terms of all-knowing chemistry with aviation fuel, plastique jelly
that explodes with a puff, and chillies that make your eyes water.

Looks, dirty looks, wordless looks, unabashed killing looks killed my laptop.
It just shut up shop one fine morning.

The born tinkerer and handyman that I am ( I have mastered practical
electronics on my own to be able to put together complex stereo systems
or repair the keyboards and industrial machinery) I couldn't help toggle
a loose connection. The power cord had a very guilty looking jack that
could be pushed slowly or hard. The results would be different. I invented
six ways of pushing the bloody jack in, and probably gave untold trouble to
the laptop that had to bear my tap tap tap for four hours in the ungodly hours.

It started switching itself off, in 45 minutes.
Later on, it got more cranky than a teenage girl, and may switch off in
five minutes. Once off, it would remain off for days, weeks, and even
a painful, agonizing month.

I made the mistake of finally taking it to a repairer who claimed they
had facilities for chip level repairs. After making me wait unceremoniously,
pining away like an adolescent male first time in love....in fact all through
our four nights and five days at Goa, that piece of Heaven on earth, I pined
away, unashamedly.

The motherboard is gone. Said the sly repairer. It cannot be repaired
and all that is possible is an exchange (so that he gives me another
time bomb or a landmine that will go off at the most importune moment,
I strongly suspect).

Now the PC, my workhorse that struggles with half a million files,
that I have either created or downloaded or allowed to sneak in, went phut.

Gosh.
More later.

cheerz!