Not So Pretty After All

I have never understood what people see in her. There’s an entire section of humanity, who unlike me, wait for her with bated breath. They count the days until she’s in town. They plan their days around her arrival and hope she makes it on time. Even as I frown with disgust, I realize I’m one of the few people around this side of the city who dislikes her. I mean, sure, she can be pretty and refreshing and all that. But there’s nothing about her that has struck me as extraordinary. You need to have a different sort of taste to like her. Me? I’m not used to her kind of beauty. For that, you have to put up with her vices as well. She has her good points, but she’s messy and filthy and I don’t have the patience with her kind.She’s unpredictable, she’s a party-pooper and she gets you all lazy and drowsy. I like beauty that makes you sit up and stare. That makes you do things, go places- just for her, or atleast because of her. But she ain’t like that.

But I can see why people like her so much. I mean I saw it last evening as I was getting home from work. I knew she was in town because I’d received way too many phone calls about it and plus everyone at office was talking about her. It made me groan, the way people get so excited about it.

Anyway, I stepped out of the doors hoping not to run into her. And I’d just about made it home when she bumped into me. But that’s a different story.

So as I was sitting in the rickshaw, I noticed that she’d already been on the street that I was on. She’d left her trails. She’d left her signs- she’s so arrogant. I hate that she can’t keep quiet about her arrival. But there it was, right in front of my eyes. Proof that people are crazy about her.

The smile on everyone’s faces was unmistakable. One look at them and I knew that they’d encountered her and they’d loved it. Children, college students, men, women, people walking on the side walks, people in their cars, people in the shops and even those I could hear on the radio- everybody looked and sounded happy. I could hear their excited chatter. I could see them huddled in groups talking about her no doubt. I could read their minds from meters away. At every lane and at every corner people were singing and dancing and enjoying the fact that she was here and she was here to stay for another couple of months.

It amazed me for a while; that she had cast such a spell in just hours of her arrival. But the amazement soon turned to the much expected impatience as I realized, just a few yards from home, that she’d caused a major traffic jam at the junction. It satisfied me just a little bit that there were some like me who were irritated by the confusion and chaos she had caused. But she couldn’t have let me gloat in the realization that people disliked her. Because as soon as I stepped out of the rickshaw under my building, there she was, in all her power and glory. And she took her revenge.

God! I hate the rains. I don’t understand what people see in her.