Prologue: In my nineteen years, I have come across various
testosterone-fuelled individuals many of whom have left their mark and scarred
my once flattering perception of the opposite sex. The world tends to group
together all men as a single identical unit with homogenous emotional
capacities and an identical ‘world-view’ (read ‘female-view’). In the course of
my first-hand experiences I have realized that this in fact is a monstrous lie;
men are ever-changing and inconsistent with varying tendencies to handle
emotional stress. I like to believe that there are certain ‘shades’ to the
opposite sex that can be grouped together under a few broad categories.
Henceforth, I take my pen and bring forth in first-hand accounts, the colorful
chaps that have shattered my hopes of ever finding a Prince Charming who will
sweep me off my feet and take me off into the sunset to a land where the
unromantic traumas of in-laws and bawling off-springs do not exist. But before
I do so, I believe brief introductions are in order:
1.
The Sappy Flirts: After watching a series of gyrating Munnis and
Sheilas on the telly, they have foolishly been lead to believe by Bollywood
that women are epitomes of perfection underneath their Gul Ahmed and Generation
outfits. They pine for true love and believe that a perfect relationship or
happy marriage is the key to a blissful life. Did I say ‘relationship’? Oops.
Sorry I meant ‘relationships’-plural please.
2.
The Chauvinistic Bastards: A female looks good on their CV. To
enter the choosy executive world is their hearts desire. However they realize
that they cannot do this alone. After all you do need a female who will clean
up after your mess, provide you your daily nutrition and then dress up to look
good on your arm at executive dinners where your Boss’s wife requires company.
Girlfriends are too much of an inconvenience so they jump straight to marriage.
Enough said.
3.
The Self-Injured Neurotics: They did believe in love. Once. Unfortunately their world shattered
soon after their lady love ‘gracefully’ declined their advances. Unable to
accept reality or give other more sensitive females a chance, they spend the
rest of their life chasing and then discarding random ‘chicks’.
4.
The
Enticing Untouchables: Living examples of ‘life isn’t fair’, these men
have looks the likes of Richard Geere, mental acuity comparable to that of Steve Jobs and the sincerity that can only be
likened to Prince Charming. These sadistic individuals are almost ALWAYS
‘taken’ and are happily committed to females that have been blessed with the
beauty comparable to the legendary Greek Goddesses.
**********************************
1.
The Sappy Flirt:
Well aren’t you the ego-booster? We met only a
few hours ago and already I have a FaceBook friend request from you, ten
text-messages in my cell phone and more than just one random
‘bump-in-to-each-other’ on campus. Dare
I venture into the content of your messages? You have lauded the texture of my
hair, commented on the ‘mystery’ of my eyes and quite wrongly remembered and
then complimented the color clothes that I wore when we first met. Well, well
you’re quite the ardent admirer aren’t you?
Our next conversation, barely two days after our
formal introductions went something like this:
You: Hi Sanniah! Kaisi
ho?
Me: I’m okay! How was
your day?
You: Buss yaar. Tum
nahin mili aaj. Din kaisay acha guzarta?
Me (quite flattered but
not willing to admit): Aisi bhi koi baat nahin hai.
You: Kyu nahin ho sakti?
Buss tum mujhay kisi din milo aur mera din poor ka poora badal jaye.
Me: Umm. I’ll talk to
you later. Bye.
Him: Chalo I’ll see you
tomorrow (insert random nickname). Tum ne meray liye time nikalna hai buss.
We’ll write poetry together under the trees!
I admire you. I really do. Your inconsistency to
adhere to social norms and proper decorum is fascinating and inspiring. Rather
than follow the unspoken code that applies to modern-day relationships, you
quite obstinately follow your heart’s desire to say what you want and whenever
you want and to whomever you want:
(Two months after our introduction)
You: You’re pretty.*wink*
Me: Haha, that’s kind of you. Thanks J
You: You’re nice too. You
know something? We should get married.
Me:
-----------------------------------
You: Nahin tum meri baat
ghalat samjhi. We owe it to the world! With your
personality and my good
looks, the world will thank us for producing the perfect kids!
Yes, bold, daring and insanely reckless is how I
would describe you. Bravo you deserve a hearty applause. For a second there,
you almost had me reeled in; a man who proposes marriage in the first two
months that I have known him is a rare find and a man who talks about his ‘good
looks’ while proposing to the object of his affections? Let’s just say we’ve
hit the jackpot, haven’t we?
If only not too long ago you hadn’t used the
exact same lines on my best friend, then on her friend and then again on her
friend of a friend and then again on her friend of another friend. Tsk tsk.
You’re quite the player aren’t you? Surprised I know? Let me share a well-known
fact; most women don’t keep quiet when someone uses the words ‘you’, ‘marry’
and ‘me’ in the same sentence. Time to buy a thesaurus you say? But, of course.
2.
The Chauvinistic
Bastard:
Well hello there. We met yesterday to discuss our ‘prospective’
marriage as you may remember. Our eyes met for a second over the translucent
cloudy steams, teetering in graceful convulsions above rim of your delicate
china teacup. As our fingertips brushed you probably thought that you
felt my heart flutter as the tip of your manly, calloused fingertip lingered
over my not-so-feminine stubby fingers. You graced me with a hello, your deep
voice resonating in the room that had gone momentarily still because our
mothers were watching our every move. You looked at me deep in the eyes and
watched me demurely lower mine and ask you whether you take sugar with your
Earl Grey. You seized this moment to graze the ends of my hair with your broad
palm to whisper: ‘You look beautiful-head to toe, lips to fingernails, feet to
eyebrows.’
It might just have worked. I might have fallen for the faint
scent of Hugo Boss drifting from the inside of the collar of your primly
pressed Ralph Lauren button-down, your platinum cuff-links and your BlackBerry
blinking with the thousands of emails you had to put off just for me. Why thank
you, I forgot to tell you I was touched. What a coincidence that my phone
was blinking upstairs with a hundred text messages inquiring details about you
from your hair color to your shoe size and other indelicate physical features.
But here’s the thing, if you say that you believe in love at first
sight, I know that you’re lying. I know about your previous hooker
girlfriends, tanned and blonde back at the university in California who you
proclaimed undying love for just to get them into bed. Surprised I know? You
should have cleared out the lusty comments left by Rachel, Jennifer and Naomi
on your FaceBook page before sending me a friend request.
Today I got a haircut in preparation for our next meeting. Tomorrow you just might notice the change and
then will rack your brain as to what exactly is different in my face. When you
won’t figure it out you will say, ‘You look beautiful-head to toe, lips to
fingernails, feet to eyebrows’. You will forget that you used the same line
yesterday.
Then what is it that makes our ‘contract’ agreeable to me? Is it
the red Deepak Perwani jora that your mother promised me because ‘red is my
color’? No it’s not. Is it the huge Damas diamond ring that you plan to get me
so you can show off my hands to your executive friends and get them back for
laughing at your bald head in high school? No it’s not. It’s the designer
clothes that hang in your closet. No seriously. You know that I’m from a middle
class family that couldn’t afford designer clothes. I relish in the fact that I
shall get to wear your Ralph Lauren’s, Calvin Klein’s and Gucci shirts and
model them for you at night before bed in an attempt to look ‘appealing’ and
‘alluring’. I’ve heard that men like to see their girlfriends- sorry, wives I
mean- in their clothes. There’s something incredibly appealing in it for them
that a woman is attempting to get to the top in their shoes. I’ve always wanted
to know what designer men’s clothes feel like and you provide the perfect
opportunity. If you don’t have a problem with that then we are in short-
made for each other.
3.
The Self-Injured
Neurotic:
There is something horribly wrong in the balance
of the universe when men who are not in their right state of mind and are only
on the lookout for a little bit of ‘playboy’ fun become insanely attractive.
Last month, we met in a boardroom full of stiff
people whose every breath resonated with proof of an impressive IQ and an
intelligence surpassing that of ‘normal’ people like me. As I squirmed
restlessly on a faded green, once-plush chair worn down to threads, afraid that
any suggestion I was to give to this ‘productive’ meeting would give rise to a
collective snicker that would vibrate through expensively beige-painted walls,
you took the stage with your hands in your distressed, faded denim jeans and a
hint of a smile. With a few words you managed to maneuver the conversation and
dispel the tensed up atmosphere with carefully placed jokes. I felt my heart
beat pick up, my palms become moist and an uncontrollable quiver of feminine
pleasure made its course through my body as you turned to address me directly
in front of a difficult-to-please audience.
Seconds turned into minutes, minutes merged with
hours and hours churned out days and ‘somehow’ we were talking every day for
hours into the night as professional topics of conversation melted into more
personal ones. Your text messages to me were tinted with obvious attraction and
mine to you were gushy and full of adoration. As our paths unwittingly crossed
in University, I could not hold back the red hue that colored my cheeks every
time you so much as glanced at me. Invisible birds were chirping musically and
the world seemed to coo as we playfully continued our little escapade on
electrically transmitted signals.
You: Can I ask you
something?
Me (fantasies of a
proclamation of undying affection and running off into the wilderness already
playing in my mind): Yes, of course?
You: Why do we talk so
much?
Me (utterly bewildered):
I don’t know. Does that bother you? =/
You: Yeah it does. Just
don’t fall for me =P I’m only going to break your heart.
Me: O.o. I think I can
manage?
You: I didn’t want to
tell you this but I’m in love with somebody else. She is the most amazing
person I have ever met in my life and I can never stop thinking about her. But
I can never be with her. She says she’s getting committed to someone else…family pressure....I
want to be just friends with you.
So there we have you; the heartbroken, unstable
male that I like to call the Self-Injured Neurotic. Rumor has it, that you have
‘broken’ the hearts of many other tender-hearted, un-suspecting females by
first ‘falling’ for them and then pulling back with a ‘guilt’ of insulting the
untainted, ‘pure’ love that you entertain for your unreachable beloved. Wow.
You’re full of drama aren’t you? You certainly would give Bollywood serials a
run for their money.
Am I heartbroken because of you? Certainly. Are
you worth the trouble? Probably not. Am I insanely jealous of your lady-love?
Maybe. Are you a lost cause? I like to believe not. See, I may be a hopeless
dreamer yet at the same time I am sensible enough to safely predict that
someday you will wake up to the stench of heartbreak as your beloved spends her
life happily in the arms of her betrothed. A word of advice: it’s time to
purchase the much needed dose of pure caffeine at Life’s very own Coffee-House
before it hurls itself at you in a swirling, murky mass of steamy despair and
unbearable, hot disappointment.
4.
The Enticing
Untouchables:
I’ve known you since the
day my mother handed me my first Lady-Bird reader labeled ‘Fairy-tales for
Children’. You are Prince Charming; you are the knight in shining armor that
saves the day when all hope is lost and you are the inspiration behind the lead
male role in every Hollywood romance. You are also very much unavailable to the
likes of me; a healthy, mentally-stable, purely heterosexual and very much
single female because your heart has been ensnared by a ravishing creature
whose very mention sends a spear of jealousy through my possessive heart.
What is it that makes you so special? Is it the fact that your
deep bass voice resonates with the frequency of my heart when you speak? Is it
how even the brief minutes of our conversations leave me light-hearted and relaxed?
Is it how every time, you step back and open the door for me when we step into
class? Or is it because I believe that if I googled ‘perfect’ I’d end up with a
picture of you? Combine the above and we have you- the reason why my faith in
men still persists.
Since your amore for She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named does not allow you
to spend more than five minutes talking to any other attractive female, I do
not have any snippets of conversation to allow me to delve more fully into your
character. However the portrait of you in my mind, allows me to escape into
self-constructed fantasies where my Self-Injured Neurotic miraculously adapts
your persona and adores me with the same ardor that you honor your inamorata.
Till then, I continue to ramble on a personal grudge, lament on shattered
dreams, muse about a disappointing reality and carry around the hefty guilt of
a low self-esteem.
