An uninvited guest

 

However sweet your ringtone is, however lovely you think it is, you will have a moment of quiet introspection when your mobile starts ringing while you are having a nice sleep.

Now I certainly do.

"Hey, you there??"

"Yea.. ah," I replied, not having fully recovered from sleep.

"What were you doing? I have been trying your number for a while."

"Sleeping," I said sheepishly.

"What? It is just 8, man!!!"

"Oh.."

Pause.. I checked my watch, it was just 8.

"I fell asleep."

"OK. I will be there in ten, fifteen minutes.. Don't go anywhere."

"OK.."

I put the phone down and tried to sleep. Sleeping further was pointless. He would be here any moment to wake me up again.

I got up, put on my slippers, and went outside. It had rained while I slept. The air was still cool. I felt a gush of refreshing cold breeze on my face and a chill running through my spine. But it wasn't just the cold breeze. The origin was somewhere else, under my feet if I am not mistaken, giving a tickling sensation now and then.

When you touch a burning object or get pricked by a sharp substance, you make an involuntary movement. That is ‘response to stimuli', I remember my biology teacher trying to teach us in high school. Know it or not, without it, lazy, sluggish people like me would end up dead more than once on a daily basis.

Response to tickling it was. Somehow I got my feet detached from the slippers and, with it, a small reptile, black with prominent white bands all over its body, took its leave. It wasn't hard to recognize: Velli kattan, shankhu varayan, or ettadi veeran. You might know it as the common krait (a member of the "big four", including cobra and two types of viper—species inflicting the most snakebites in India).

My body had made its maximum reflex possible and was reluctant to make any move. I was transfixed. But my uninvited guest had realized he was unwelcome, made no fuss, and took his leave.

"Why are you standing there like that???"

I could lift my head and make a feeble sound. "Snake."

"What??? Where?"

"It left the way you came in."

He started jumping around like Tigger from Winnie the Pooh.

"Why didn't you kill it??"

He was already on top of one of the chairs.

I didn't say anything.

"Where did you find it?"

"Under my feet.. over my slippers.."

"What the... and did it bite you???"

That was when it struck me. Did it bite me?? Does the bite leave marks? I went back to my room, sat on my bed, decided a bite should leave some marks, and started checking my feet.

After several minutes of inspection, I shortlisted several probable bite marks which had an appeal. Moreover, I started having pain from more than one of those.

My friend was still on top of the chair.

"Did you find any?? Hey, don't panic. If it had bitten, you would have been long gone by now."

I didn't say anything. I was trying to see if I could find more bite marks.

"And common krait is a decent snake."

He had opted for science in his plus two.

"It doesn't bite much unless provoked."

Does standing on top of it meet that criteria? Who knows.. I didn't ask.

"Even if it does, death is less violent as compared to a viper bite. Their venom is neurotoxin. It causes paralysis. You know, if it bites you in your sleep, you will die peacefully in your sleep and you won't even know."

He then went on giving lectures till midnight about several ‘to-know' things about snakes, several folklore stories from his village, and more. Whether it was paralysis seeping in or just fear, I didn't have any energy left to pay much attention to his lecture. I slept at some point.

In the morning, I checked the mirror, just to be sure I hadn't turned blue like someone from Avatar.

Ten kms ten kilos and ten K

 Ten kms  ten kilos and ten K - the 3 K's


"Ten kilometers  is not such a big deal, not hard at all. People run that all the time."
 

"Maybe not for marathon runners. For me it is.  I am not an athlete."
 

"You used to say you were a cricketer once. " 
 

"Did I ?" 
 

"You know what your problem is? You give up quite easily and you are dead lazy." 
 

"Certainly not. This is a boring bet to begin with."
 

"Not my problem anymore, bro."
 

This conversation happened a month after the bet was made. So a month had passed since this conversation (or was it two?).  

I don’t quite remember how I got into this one. I was slowly walked into this trap, I assume. Silly me. And even sillier me !! I got myself into not one, but two such bets.

Inherent human nature. Possibly.

"I will try my luck one more time. I can make up for my loss and if it goes well I can make some profit as well, who knows ". This could be the thought that cross the mind of people who gamble a lot. The advice I can give in retrospect, don't mind the loss; just walk away when you have time before you go knee-deep into it. Well I dint know it then, I learned it the hard way. Experience teaches you a lot of things.

My friend Nikhil was back in Bangalore. I had reached a month back and was enjoying the cool metro life, mostly the cool climate, until he showed up. He was having a realization that the B-school life and the post training period had taken a toll on him. Life was demanding, work pressure was immense. Like the Kung Fu Panda he was stressed eating. Moreover food was tasty and in abundance. He had put on some extra kilos. 

 

He was committed to getting back to where he actually was a couple of years back. All that we heard during his first few days in Bangalore was ‘calories’. The rest of the time was spent in several bicycle shops across Bangalore, studying international bicycle models and their features. He didn’t go alone, dragged us, me and Ojas, our friend with him. We went bicycle hunting in a couple of shops in Madivala, where we stayed, then to Decathlon. If you haven’t already heard, Decathlon is a major French sporting goods chain store, with stores located throughout the world. They got a couple of stores in Bangalore as well. I must say it was an amazing experience, everyone must go there once. We had spent a whole evening there.

This is how it started: we were coming back from Decathlon; I told him that he would stop cycling within a month. He took it as a call for a bet.

I didn’t see that coming, should have.

 This is where it ended: If he sheds 10 kilos in 5 months, I should pay him 10K else he would pay me the same.  And the second bet? What can I say, totally my foolishness, nothing else.  Like I said earlier it is an inherent human nature to overdo, or is certainly mine. I tried to compensate for my loss and ended up in other. New bet: Within the next five months I have to run 10kms at a stretch. If successful, I can buy books  worth 10k and he will pay for it or else I will have to do the same for him. Oja, the self-appointed bet commissioner, sealed the deal.

You never challenge a guy who is seriously determined to do something, say to lose weight. My roommate Chathan comes up with such declarations every now and then. Rigorously follows  it for a week or so, lose couple of kilos in the process (mostly due to loose motion over eating on a cheat day). Claims he can shed weight whenever and however he wants, then goes back to his eating spree. Prior experience being this, I didn’t take Nikhil very seriously and inadvertently gave him motivation to do it. These management guys you know, when they see a window of opportunity they grab it and try to do it at someone else's expense. He takes Joker’s ‘when you are good at something never do it for free’ theory quite seriously and was experimenting it on me.  

 There are two ways to go about this.

For the love of books I can try running.  Or I can tempt him to eat more.  Couple of months have gone by.  I am yet to run 10 meters.  And about plan B,  I tried buying him fat filled commodities. But he didn't fall for my trick.  

There is even a plan C.  Stop talking about it altogether. Be indifferent to his calorie theories and behave as if you don’t care. He may lose the motivation or even forget about the bet. 

Who knows?

P.S. Nothing happened, mutual understanding it was. We don't talk about it anymore. The bet commissioner, now and then, laments about wasting a golden opportunity. He says he had a gut feeling that both of us wouldn't complete our respective bets. He should have had made a bet, he feels.