Mondays!

Some things never change the way they are perceived in the childhood…hatred for Sundays. Yes I hated Sundays. I always woke up to a depressing Sunday morning, thinking about ‘what would I be doing this time tomorrow? Ironing my clothes? Eating breakfast which would taste damn good on Saturdays, bad on Sundays and worst on Mondays? Wishing that a routine practicing Artillery centre helicopter crashes on the top of school and burns it off completely!’

The only soothing moment came at 3PM, where I used to imagine ‘AAh! I would be out of the school at this time.’

A decade after school, 5 years after college, 3 years after a job, one and a half years after marriage….this feeling has been faithfully with me….like a bad old dog….which comes out barking and biting every Sunday and Monday…The nagging, irritated, half pant school boy starts jumping out of me on Sunday evenings…hating everything about the up coming Monday.

My field took me to Mumbai from Nasik…my work took me to money and money took me to the malls…for shopping (Alright !!! The ‘Money’ part is fictional if my boss is reading ;>) which actually is not a bad stress buster. Picking clothes from a mall outlet is exactly not as refreshing as picking fresh tea leaves from Assam Tea Gardens, but then tea gardens don’t offer a 50-70% season sale on clothes…not even on tea(plus you don’t get clothes in a tea garden…yes you do get tea in a mall…in all forms)...back in the outlet…a seemingly good shirt on the right, an almost perfect trouser displayed diagonally opposite and a random thought right on the top ‘Where did my earlier lot of clothes come from…there were no malls before?’…being random the thought dissolved and the hustle bustle regained….

Then no such thought nudged me and I kept on wadding my ‘bhari hui Paap ki trolley’ (Yup! Like they say ‘Paap ka ghada) and it was time to pay for the sins…quite literally. A U turn…a sharp right….an easy left (I am an NFS fan)…a small shortcut through two display baskets….and yet I got stuck in the traffic (Yes! I am still in the shop and not on the road. There IS heavy traffic in the shops during season sale.)….and joined the line which was 1 KM away from the actual billing counter…the look of it again gave me a bad feeling about Monday morning railway ticket counter lines…

The line ahead of me condensed and expanded behind me...but not without some entertainment around…a cranky kid crying fairly, his father reciprocating the same feeling without tears and a happy wife with a sense of victory…a group of guys spread across multiple lines to bill up as fast as they can, exchanging their positions to have a fair chance of looking at fair & fairly beautiful girls in the rows...a new couple managing to find a confinement in this traffic...amazing place full of people and life…

Finally the counter came after good 40 minutes and I instinctively said ‘Ek Andheri return’…the counter guy smiled as synthetically as he could and started billing up. I wonder if these counter guys are trained to smile falsely as well…if they do so they really do it well…his ’Thank you sir!’ really made me feel as if I am the king of the outlet…the real nuance of it was realized just the next day in the office….

We reached home in the rickshaw…and had a spat with him as his meter ran over by 14 points. The look at my shopping bags and ‘chalta hai’ attitude gave him the balls to say ‘Kya saab aap? 16 rupayon ki toh baat hai.’ To which he got a prompt reply from my wife ‘tab 2 rupiyo ki toh baat thi. Mumbai bhar band kyun kiya?’ He had nothing to say and 16 rupees to give back…which he did with a ‘sorry’…I was happy that my wife helped me win ;)

The day which I hated the most dawned…but like a kid I was very happy to have a new set of clothes to wear for the office…I put on my consolation prize and left home happily, thinking of compliments that I would get over the shirt…’Hye! New pinch!!!’…and I reached the school…errs…office…

The moment I stepped in I felt like stepping out and go back home….there were at least 20 people in the same kind of shirt and having same kind of tea (yeah! The one from Assam)…my self motivational ‘new pinch’ talk altered to a ‘same pinch’ tease and it did pinch hard…last evenings ‘Thank you sir’ now sounded like ‘Thank you one more Idiot’ & I realized the real meaning of his smile now…it was indeed a Monday Morning, being in the school feeling, with everybody around in the ‘uniform’....The old bad dog prevailed good…and it did bite nice and hard…

Some things never changed for me…the Monday Morning Blues bagging the top spot.