or the rain softly scattering...
the best story i've heard so far this year comes from the indefatigable reigning queen of goofs and slip ups - swati puri, most recently remembered for her sterling performance last year in "The Man on the Beach - His Heart or his Packet". The matinee idol now comes back in the summer blockbuster titled "Stuck on the Turnstile or Another Strange Man Who Spun Me Around". it goes something like this...
first, god's operation was a success and we are now getting regular, tho' still slightly wimpy, rain. (tho' i warn you it is a futile attempt, if you still wanna try and make sense of that sentence, see below dated june 29, titled 'and there will come soft rains'. or don't)
so.
pretty miss puri sitting on a tree, kay-aye-ess...
ok sorry, forgot.
It had rained all night, and delhi woke up to the usual more rainage less drainage morning after.
miss puri found herself stranded in the wilds of far south delhi, somewhere around AIIMS, and suffering from a drastic cash flow problem. Being a conscientious hindu, she immediately invoked the gods, and mammon appeared in the form of a huge neon arrow hanging in thin air, flashing in the direction of the nearest ATM (yes anything can happen as long as you have faith).
Now the arrow pointed in the direction of a harmless enough looking shiny red turnstile, so what with her predilection for the colour and other things, she headed straight for it. (Warning, the following description, tho' tedious, is not redundant, and is necessary to go through for the sake of the story so all cruise readers are forewarned, or in other words, SKIP IT AND COME BACK AGAIN LOSERS!!!)
The turnstile led down a step to a path which was hedged on both sides by embankments, fences and lawns, in that order. Predictably, this inadvertent pool was now a miniscule pond, and regular users had devised a rather ingenious way of getting across: they hung on to the turnstile and swung till they reached the embankment on one side of the path, where they lunged for the fence and sidled along it till they reached where they needed to be. (What can i say, every indian is a trapeze artist at heart, or has some kind of repressed circus aspirations)
Anyways, our li'l miss women's lib 'anything-they-can-do-i-can-too' wasn't to be left behind, "Why this, there's nothing to it, if i can grapple with KRC's foggy meanderings, what's this to stop me?" Undaunted, valiant, unaware of the will of gods, such was the fate our heroine was to suffer in her ignorance.
so.
she found herself atop the slightly rusty turnstile, and swung. All went fine so far and she was rather pleased with her success. Alas, at this point the fickle friend fortune deserted her, so to say, mid-stride, and our lone brave warrior realized something she'd so successfully managed to evade for years: her legs were too short. Try as she might, she could not manage to reach the little cemented island on either side, and so she did the only thing she had so far been succesful at - she swung. Now she did it with all her might but there is only so much even a punjabi can do on an empty stomach and a rusty turnstile. She swung forward creakily till she was stuck right out in the middle of the little puddle. There she was, literally hanging in midair, too far from any surface where she might gain purchase enough for another push, sort of pumping in thin air, as if riding a rather viciously bucking turnstile. After doing this to no effect for a couple of minutes, she decided to glance up. her eyes fell on her saviour, the tea stall man, who at the moment was too debilitated by laughing fits to come to her rescue. Having nothing better to do (it was a slow day on radio) he had been watching the shenanighans of our ravishing redoubtable rapunzel, and had probably given himself internal haemorrhaging from all the rolling and falling and side clutching.
well, he finally recovered enough to take pity, came and swung her around and politely, with an almost straight face, pointed to a proper gate, some five feet away, as a perhaps more manageable alternatives.
Watch this space for more exciting episodes from the Swatian Chronicles
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