Sense and Senility

Now that I’m back to my senses after a week’s holiday in Goa, maybe I can actually write a post for a change. One week of doing little but eating, drinking, making merry and learning how to say, “Do you do it doggy-doggy?” in thirteen languages. In other words, quite a fun time. Especially if you happen to be a [cunni] lingual enthusiast.

I returned by the overnight bus. Like most guys, when traveling single, I always hope that I am seated next to a pretty, young female. Well, as it turned out, I WAS seated next to a pretty female, it’s just that I got there about six decades too late! She looked about a gazillion years old, and moved like it too.

A lot is said about the horrors of sitting next to an overweight person on a flight/bus. But I think sitting next to an overaged person is almost as bad. (You get a 320-pound octogenarian next to you on a 6+ hour flight, and I wouldn’t even bet a potato on your chances of surviving it.)

To start off with, old people don’t trust young people very much. This lady looked at me as if I were a serial-killing rapist with a degrees in pickpocketing and thuggery. I could almost hear her say, “Oh dear God! Why did they have to put me next to this frightful piece of half-man half-monster?” I know for a fact that she kept one of her bags on her lap the entire night and used two more to build a fort-like wall between us, which kept falling on me all the time. If her plan was to suffocate me to death, it nearly worked. More than an asphyxiated demise though, what I was really scared of was that she might lose a shoe or something and that I’d get lynched for it.

Old people also don’t like to move too much. I’m the type who needs to stretch my legs when I get a chance. So every time the bus stops, I need to hop off. This meant a regular routine of first bringing down the fort wall, then seven minutes for her to stand up and then by the time I was off the bus, it was already time to get back in again. I’d crawl back into the corner and the ramparts would be slowly reconstructed once more.

And what if she just happened to pop it during the night? She’s old; old people die. I’m sure there was a non-zero chance of her passing away in that bus. I spent half the night with my ear pressed up against the wall of luggage to see if I could hear her breathing. I did NOT want to wake up in the morning with a dead body beside me!

Okay, okay! Don’t get all mad at me for saying such bad things about dear old ladies. I like old people, okay. Just not in the seat next to mine!

(Still, it was better than this.)