The pain wasn't what you'd call extreme or intolerable.
But yeah, it was paining all the same.
I mean what was I thinking? What else should happen if anyone tried to involve themselves in as extreme an act of stupidity as I did? What else would I expect from being overly impulsive and leaping before I could think for a minimum of two shakes? What else should happen when my annoying conscience jumps wide awake from its normally safe and hibernating mode when it comes to other people's belongings?
What else must happen when I pit myself against gravity?
No, I wasn't doing an experiment on the feline powers on landing on the feet.
Nor a survey on the aerodynamic nature of the Homo sapien sapien body.
It all started with my three best friends getting their room a million miles away... oh alright... two floors above my room in our campus hostel.
Not so bad you'd say.
Not so bad they'd say.
Very, very bad, I'd say.
Needless to say, the inclination to translocate my not-so-inconsiderable fat ass two floors above via innumerable fights of stairs was something that had the potency to reduce me to a blubbering mass of lethargic angst.
So, when the inauspicious day came that I puffed, panted and wheezed all the way upstairs to visit my three best friends; who lived, as far as I am considered, on the top of the Mt. Everest (or Ever-tiring if I could have it my way...) I wondered for the umpteenth time why in the world was life as cruel as to subject me to such tiresome troubles. Nevertheless, being the altruist I am, I thought of granting my three best friends (well, friends when at sea level anyway) with great honour of a visit to their abode. After a journey that involved trekking of many a perilous stairs, I reached my destination.
After some meaningless chit chat (well, the only conversation that would be worth going through all that effort of the journey up three flights of stairs would be a conversation with God...) incessant rumblings from the general vicinity of my stomach prompted me of the only thing (other than the aforementioned) that would've made it worthwhile to embark on as tremendously tiring a venture as that.
Hunger.
Food.
Mess.
So as I shooed the three from the room to the stairs to scale down the stairs (curious how trips down the stairs, especially when you are starving more than an anorexic who's been told by her boyfriend that she seems microscopically plumper than she was last Wednesday, is always so much shorter and so much more painless) I inexplicably and inevitably (It's all pre-ordained and pre-conspired, I tell you!) left my bag behind in their room.
After being satiated with the more-crappier-than-usual food that they serve in the mess (the trick to surviving the ordeal of food from crappy college cafeterias is, you starve yourself so much that even grass served with the rind of a bitter gourd would start looking mighty appealing) and three minutes away from being chucked out of class for unpunctuality, I realized that my bag was upstairs.
Now as I already told you, two things.
1) Conversation with God.
2) Rumbling tirade ensuing from stomach
And not necessarily in that order.
Henceforth, I issued a direct order to Rekha, to go upstairs and throw the bag down.
As the bag whistled down on its way down after being unceremoniously dumped from the greater heights, two things ran through my mind.
1) Hair clip in the damn bag.
2) A very realistic imagery (with all the sound effects) of Kaarunya’s (my roommate) screaming when she finds her precious hair clip in pieces.
Showing the intelligence of a siliconed Hollywood blonde, I proceeded hitherto to rush to embrace the free-falling bag.
Ever heard of one of those did-you-knows that a penny dropped from the top floor of a sufficiently high sky-scraper could lodge itself in your skull and kill you instantly and agonizingly, if you’re unlucky enough for it to crash land into your head as it reached the bottom?
Well the effect was about the same.
The height was lesser, the weight- a zillion times more.
As soon as the bag pounded into me like a ton of bricks, I blacked out for what seemed like eternity to me. Well ok it was about three seconds. But, the point is, I lost three precious seconds of my life! My right arm felt dislocated. Without stopping to think, I rushed to class. It was only when I was safe listening to the comfortable monotonous drone of the professor did I dare to look at my arm.
Right in the plain view of everyone was a perfect round bruise which uncannily resembled a hickey. There was absolutely nothing I could do but suffer through a week of snide glances, unnecessary remarks and hours of pain of the time where every thing that passed by me would gravitate towards the damn bruise (isn’t it so unfunny how that happens with any wound?)
The climax of the story lies a week from this incident…
Scene: Room no LW 108, Ladies Hostel, NITW
Kaarunya: (bouncing into the room in throes of the usual perennial excitement) MALLADI!... YOU WON’T GUESS WHAT HAPPENED IN CLASS TODAY!
Yours truly: (wincing at the sudden increase in decibel level) Uh huh…
Kaaru: (Rushing to her bed and proceeding to bounce on it) Well basically…
CRUNCH.
Kaaru: ?
Malladi: :O
Hair clip: (chokes and dies)
Kaaru: Oh dumb clip. Never liked it anyway… Haan, where was I?...
Moral of the story: Hair clips are meant to be broken.
