INFLUENCES II: PAIN

“Pain is to my intellect what daffodils were to Wordsworth.”

When girls my age were just about getting a grip on the intricacies of their 28-day cycle, I was engrossed in exploring the dimensions of trauma. Every time there was a death in my physical or filial vicinity, my cerebrum seemed to run overboard with ideas and tales. Almost like a spurt for me to stretch my imagination to the expanse of space. I remember doodling the above line around then in my little notebook. It seems to have stayed with me for a long time now. The book, as well.

Marriages are an excuse to practise your fighting instincts. Our (both mine and my sister’s) formative experiences in this regard conditioned us to the futility of the much-vaunted institution. Normalcy was a desired state in the household. The son was a brown-headed delinquent, the daughter an obstinate kid. No known vice could be traced in any of the parents, yet the ground appeared to be amiss between them. Consequently, the kids could sense themselves to be unlike their peers from mundanely non-volatile homes. A fact they seem to have handled adeptly at hindsight.

Looking back at those tempestuous times of childhood, what seems to have helped me endure them was Richmal Crompton. Author of the very popular William series, her books were the ultimate guffaw in irreverence. They were my refuge after a dorky day in school which would invariably be followed by a harrowing time or two in the school bus. School buses, I can tell from my feeble learning in sociology, are a counter-culture in themselves. Dominated by species like the hen/cock-pecked teachers, love-infested doves and the venom-sputtering rowdies, their brand of education is the opposite of how things are perceived in Indian classrooms. The last rows of seats are occupied by the enlightened ones – the ones who can concoct the most noise. You can expect ample whistles and comments from their kind as a response to fortuitous events like bullying of a newbie, nearby traffic snarls and the appearance of eye candy within a radius of 25 feet around the bus. The quieter ones, usually huddling around the front seats, are yet to see the light. They are yet to realise the fact that the only way in which to come out mentally unhurt from your school days is to croak about your life and its instalments in the bus.

Buses and their ordeal notwithstanding, events like these really got my neurons wringing. If something set me thinking, it invariably had gray shades to it. I can hardly recall sitting resolutely in some corner to myself whenever the sky was blue. Blue brought with it endless possibilities and a brimless reservoir of energy. It was only when the skies were overcast that I found the time to sit down and listen to the innate echo. One of the quirkier things of existence is that happiness of any kind is often too good to be expressed adequately. Misery, on the other hand, can be painted pretty effectively to the observer. Wordsworth has been doing that for ages now. And we are all the more gloomy because of that.

TO FLASH, OR NOT TO..

Mona Lisa definitely wasn’t smiling when she was being painted. Or else, Da Vinci would have been too charmed to deface her by not lining the eyebrows.
The power of the 32 calcium stones adorning your jaws is, to be brutally honest, overrated. Personality-enhancers, from Dale Carnegie to Colgate, swear by them. There are civil laws in some countries that ban the public display of skin above the wrists, but none that forbid the flashing of those pearly whites (or flossy chromes, depending on oral hygiene). Someone called Frank Ryan once joined a call centre and found his operator name altered to Frank Berry within an hour of reporting for work. The reason – All names in that office had to end in a –y or –ty syllable because it made sure that whenever you said your name, you ended up smiling. Or, at least flashing.
Plastic smiles ought to be the greatest threat to existence after the H1N1. Waitresses have them while they are fussing over the coffee you spilled on the upholstery; employers have them while dishing the pink slip (but distinctly not, while signing your pay cheques); Kingfisher stewards will have them even as a drunk passenger abuses him/her; even mannequins have them alongside the inordinately-priced tags of the clothes they adorn. Somewhere inside the deepest of our intestines is the belief in a smile as the greatest disarming technique after freestyle karate. Next time you hear an engaging speaker, observe how he lures you with laughter. Remember the joke you cracked at the luncheon last month to get yourself out of a spot? Irrespective of its banality, humour works. Simply because it puts 300-odd of your muscles at ease. The moment our neurons sniff a smile, they know they are on familiar ground.
Beware of a smile. It intoxicates your rational senses. Especially if it comes from a 24-year-old female intern (even the not-so-great Bill Clinton couldn’t resist that). The threat is particularly enhanced in those consumerism-plagued times where markets will go to any extent to suck out your wallets. Comedians, with the exception of Mike Myers, may be past their sell-by dates but the parody that is civilization lingers on, with all its perils and contradictions. Remarkably, we manage to keep ourselves mentally solvent as recessions surge, leaders cheat, earthquakes recur and 15-year-olds sleep around. Should we be still laughing at the shallowness of it all?

Maybe yes, as long as they do not insist on your molars being sparkling white.