For the past weeks, my arms have been aching. Literally. From the elbows to the wrists. From the neck to the elbows. It hurts even when I sleep. It is very distracting and am trying to get to the bottom of it with advice like “Check yourself for arthritis” (from the smugly youthful), “Lose some weight” (from the painfully thin), “Try alternative therapy, do Yoga” (from the chronologically similar) to Jayanthi's VERY very simplistic solution: “Rotate your shoulders” . Her daughter told me that she complained of a stomach ache and her mum replied, “Rotate your shoulders” . Tooth ache? “Rotate your shoulders”. Sad? “Rotate your Shoulders”. So despite my aching arms, I rotate my shoulders with all my might, I have cut down on the carbs and food items that are said to cause arthritis and I even throw in a dollop of Yoga every day. My arms still ache.
And that’s not the only problem. The car and I have been having our battles galore wherein I cleaned the battery myself and stretched the over 4 year-old battery’s life for 3 stuttering weeks more till today. Today I got fed up because there I was dressed to the hilt in trousers, shirt and boots, starting up the car to drop daughter at the bus stop and since the car refused to budge—in full-view of neighbors hanging lazily over balconies—I had to sprint down the road with high heels, hair flying in all directions (those shots of those heroines running in slow motion with their tresses gliding along with the breeze is all bunkum), with daughter's junk-fattened backpack till I reached and flagged down the bus and found the daughter very calmly lady-like, walking in leisure way behind me. "Ayesha??"!!! And with a smile to match, she has the gall to say "I knew you would catch the bus, Mimi". This is what happens, when you spend too much time with auntys Sangeeta and Preeti. As she elegantly climbs on to the bus with a very very Deepika Padukone Dreamy Girl wave, I rotate my shoulders, smooth down the hair and walk back as daintily as is possible for me and decide to work from home, call the Hyundai ERS and finally buy a new car battery. That is the story of my life: I get a bonus and God rotates those divine shoulders and thinks up dozen ways to spend it. Anyway—now at least my car will not stop on the road but my knowledge of what's under the bonnet of the car has impressed the Hyundai people enough to forget to charge me for the ERS help. Err… Hope they don’t read blogs…hope they don’t compound the interest.
It’s not just over yet—to compound my woes, my cell phone seems to have arthritis and it has no arms to rotate. There I am at home, after my humiliatingly lost battle with the car, trying to dial in for a meeting with the boss and like the armless Thakur in ‘Sholay’, the cell phone stubbornly refuses to acquiesce. “Your call cannot be completed-Please try again”. In fact, it doesn’t even let me try again, for heaven’s sake. Thank god for a boss sent from heaven (at least God rotated the shoulders right while allotting bosses)—she not only reschedules my meeting, she reschedules the team meeting. I meanwhile am pledged to get certain documentations finalized and guess what—the internet connection is gone! I breathe deep and rotate my shoulders. Then I call the Internet provider and begin very politely till the lady assures me again and again that someone will resolve my problem at 4pm—politeness rotates itself out of my shoulders and I cannot contain myself from giving that poor gal all I have in terms of verbal paranoia—I have deadlines I wail as she keeps telling me she understands. I then literally breathe deep again, rotate the shoulders again, invoke divine intervention and then as miraculously as it disappeared, the internet is back!
The cell phone is not. After furious online instant messaging with office colleagues, the advice to switch off the phone, replace battery and reboot again does work. But some calls which the armless Thakur does not like are truncated instantly. Buy another cell!!! The cell phone expert in office swings into action—what’s your price range, what kind do you want—I can sense the glee—as I am the only one in the team with a cell phone that NO one wants to steal. Forget about stealing, no one even wants to pick it up by mistake if I drop it somewhere. The same cell phone expert had walked in one day with the news that she had finally seen someone else carry the same phone as mine—the autowalla. Then my daughter does nudge, nudge, as we drive back in the cab from the airport, “Mimi, look even the cabbie has better phone than your’s, his is a Motorazor.” No please God, don’t rotate your shoulders—not just yet, leave me some moolah behind—I need that extra paneer after I lose the extra weight!
Moral of the story—even God rotates the celestial shoulders. Considering that we are from the land of the many splendoured gods and goddesses, we probably have the whole pantheon rotating their shoulders and may be not even in sync (which can probably account for all the dichotomies and dilemmas and the doldrums of our lives). May be they made a collective request to Jayanthi to spread their word? Whatever it is, my arms still ache. Then my mum calls and suggests the exact opposite: “Rest your arms”. Longing to do that but hello, Mummy! I am part of a documentation team, I have to write to make a living—I’d rather rotate my shoulders?
