Rajni can, I can't!

After Effects

It happened over the weekend. I got out of the bed and took my spectacles with my hands crossed, then twisted them back and forth a couple of times before I finally hung them over my ears! 

At the breakfast table my wife served me idlis, which I cut with a knife, poked with a fork, hurled it into the air and waited for it to land right into my mouth! Unfortunately, the piece of idli that went up towards the ceiling never came down. It hit the fan and was deflected by its blades, out of the window while I sat there with my mouth open. My wife was livid. “What’s the matter with you?” she hollered.

“If you don’t like my idlis, just say so!” I decided to make my point by twitching my head, followed by running my hand through my hair, then looking up, down and sideways with the mouth twisted into a sneer. “Naan oru dhadavai sonna nooru dhadavai sonna madhiri… If I say it once, I’ve said it a hundred times,” I said. My wife was shocked. She hadn’t heard me speak in Tamil before. Neither had I!

I got up from the breakfast table, leaped out of the window and landed right on the roof of a BEST bus to Juhu. The driver hit the brakes. I tossed a coin at the conductor and said, “En vazhi, thani vazhi… my way, unique way!” The next thing I know, I was lying on the road with a bruised butt.

So I went to my doctor without an appointment. “You didn’t say you were coming today,” he said. I took a cigarette from my pocket, tossed it up, lighted a matchstick behind my earlobe and waited for the cigarette to land on my lips. But again the damn ceiling fan deflected it into a bottle of cough syrup. Nevertheless, I pointed my finger at him and snapped, “Naan eppa varuven, eppadi varuvennu yarukkum theriyadhu, aana varavendiya neratthil correct-aga varuven!” As I spoke, the subtitles appeared on the dark Ray-ban glasses, which I was wearing on top of my spectacles: “When I will arrive, or how I will arrive, nobody will know, but I will arrive when I ought to!”

The doctor slapped me hard. “Naan solrathaiyum seiven, sollathathiyum seiven…I will do what I say, I will also do what I don’t say. But the next time you go for a Rajnikanth movie, take me along!”