The Gym Figure

[Note: The actual conversations in the story are in Italics. Everything else is voices inside the heads of two people]




Man, Reddit is so interesting! Why didn't I do this earlier, I have missed out on so much, Facebooking all these years...Ugggh... Always the same photos, same status and the same people liking them. What a pretentious world! Is that the figure across my cubicle talking? What's the deal with her voice .So husky. If I hadn't seen her face first ,I am pretty sure I would have fallen in love. Anyone would . God , Couldn't you have made her a little pretty ?What time is it ? Let me look . 5.30 already . Aiyayo I have to go to gym .Why did I start going in the first place. Damn.



What day is it today ? Thursday va . Cardio . Cardio day is the worstu . At least I'll get to see that girl . 11..12..13.. This is so hard ..14..15 . Get down. Two more sets to go . Pull ups are not fun at all . Hey , That Girl . Good thing I came to the gym today. Mallu ah ? Tamil ah ? She always wears the same T shirt but I guess that's common at the gym . There is just something about this girl Is it her curly hair . Did she just say something with her eyes ? Oh yes . She did it again . Parra . Continue doing your pull ups . Let's see what happens . Is she actually walking towards me . Today after all these days of eyeballing . What's special today . Here she comes .



Why did I just walk towards him? Am I an Idiot? Indian women don't walk towards men they like and just start talking. What are you doing? Stop. Stop before you embarrass yourself. Excuse me,.. Yeah you.. Could you please help me adjust the Machine ...This one ..A little lower... Thank you so much .. What did you just do . Did you just go talk to him. Just like that. You have got some metaphorical balls . If it works out he will mention that you approached him first for the next fifty years . Guruvayur appa .Why do I still behave like this . What now . He will be so impressed by your use of the English language that he will fall in love .No , No .. Not Tamil , I speak Malayalam . He talked ! He talked to me ! And I actually answered back . I should remember this day . After three weeks of just looking , today you've managed to talk . His voice is not bad huh . Husky !



Mallu figure ah . Super ! And she is so much more beautiful in close up . Thank you gym . Thank you so much . I wonder when girls started approaching us . Not that I am complaining . What do I do now . Should I go talk to her ? Should I be thinking about talking to her when I am wearing shorts . I look like a schoolboy during the physical education class . When do you talk to her then ? You don't know her name , her department . There are 16800 people inside this office campus . Where else if not the gym . You are always going to be in shorts at the gym . Umm.. Interesting.. Can I wait a couple of days , buy some track pants and then talk ? Is she leaving . Already . It's only 6:30 . What's her hurry . Maybe she has the 6:50 bus to catch .I should go talk .Go. Go. Go. What do I say . Uh.. Hey.. Hi.. I am .. Uh.. Would ? .. I am sorry . Let me start again .I am Dinesh and I work at Building 4 for the Manufacturing vertical .I know we don't even know each other but It has to start somewhere . So.. Would you like to have coffee with me sometime ?



What do I say ? Should I say yes . Do good girls agree for dates on the first attempt ? He is so smooth, Isn’t he . I would never have recovered from that bad start .How do boys do that ? Is there some sort of manual to being a boy. Boy 101 - Woo Women in three easy steps . Haha . He is waiting . Say something . Actually, I have a bus at 6:50 and I am already very late .Can I go ?  Turn around .. Keep walking .. Keep walking .. You idiot . Why did you say that . Were so late for the bus that you couldn't say ' Yeah Okay , Let's get coffee tomorrow ' . He must think you are an idiot . Who wants to be with an idiot . He is never going to speak with you again . You can tell your cats at home when you are 40 that you let him go because you had to catch the 6:50 BUS !



Playing hard to get eh .. I like that . Also I told you not to go in shorts, you Idiot!

The Goddamn Plan

It was a warm sunny afternoon . Sitting there in his cubicle and looking out through the window , he noticed groups of people returning back to their desks after lunch . Groups of women giggling , men enjoying their cigarettes and a few others  engrossed in conversations .  He rocked back on his chair and noticed how everything inside his office was grey . Was it symbolic ? was his first thought . He glanced back at his monitor.He had an excel open . It was staring at him right in his face . Big numbers , charts and whatnot . It seemed irrelevant to him . Suddenly his new phone buzzed . It was from one of those numbers which refer to you as Dear customer . He didn't bother . He just sat there and stared into space .

Not so long ago , he shared a room with someone when it could barely hold one person , he barely had money to cover his expenses ,all his stuff could be packed in a small travel bag and he would consider himself lucky if he got six hours of sleep in a day . Now it had all changed . He lived the life a lot of people only hoped to live someday . Wholesome paycheque , motorbike , branded clothes and shoes , a flat in an apartment and people always addressing him with respect . Something was missing though . His heart was never in the place  he was . When he got up in the morning , he wanted to get dressed and be in the office . When he was at his desk , he wanted to be in the food court . When he was in the food court , he wanted to go home and when he was home , well you know where he wanted to be .Often in the middle of conference calls his mind would wander onto a football pitch , him playing with a bunch of his friends with just boxers in the rain . Would anyone be bothered if i didn't show up ? Does my updating the quality centre with my results affect how much my company makes ?

Pass kar behen****  , people would scream in a room filled with smoke when he took a wee bit longer . With just over three hundred  rupees in the back account , eloborate plans would be chalked up for the weekend and implemented too . A twenty rupee pack of cards had kept  them entertained for about two years . Poori and aloo in the morning  seemed to them like a rescue boat to Robinson crusoe . Even remotely funny things would cause a laugh riot . All this was exactly one year ago . Now , he could watch the simpsons on high definition and not once would he come remotely close to smiling . Man ! Where did it go wrong ?

He got back to his Excel sheet , he looked at it for a minute and decided it didn't matter . Nothing he did that day would matter . Nothing he did sitting in his cubicle would matter . He thought for sometime and looked outside his window at the people in disgust . How could they be laughing and smiling at this life .  This superficial , pretending to be happy and successful life that everyone led where they could be easily be replaced by machines and clients wouldn't know the difference . Was this where evolution was supposed to take us ? Something somewhere has gone terribly wrong .

He couldn't bear  to be in the office anymore . He got up , rushed to his bike and pulled it into second gear .The ride back home was the only high point of his day . He could feel the cold wind hitting him straight in his face at 80kmph. It made him feel alive . He then reached home . He parked his bike and just when he was about to ring the doorbell, He could hear his mother proudly explaining his job description to her friend . It was at that moment he realized that it hadn't gone wrong anywhere . Things had gone exactly to plan. Just that no one told him that THIS was the plan all along .


When I was a child
I caught a fleeting glimps
out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
the child has grown
the dream is gone

Update

I realize I haven't posted in a while . And today being my birthday , I thought this was the right time to just slip this past you . I have started working and it is sucking all the fun out of my life , Also I live in the suburbs and don't have an internet connection as of now and I am working towards getting one soon. Yes,soon . The posts will be back on hopefully by the end of this month . Thank you for all your kindness sent to the inbox . I really did not expect that . Cheers .

Last Puff

Did you smoke now ? How many times do you want me to tell you ? Did I not tell you if you don't quit this is not going to work. She had figured it out from the excess smell of mint ,which filled the air the moment he talked . She looked at him with a mix of adoration and anger , the anger for having smoked and the adoration for not being able to hide it . She gave him a big lecture and he appeared to regret his action . She was happy that she was finally able to put some sense into his head. He spent another hour with her and promised he was already trying and would quit asap . As soon as he dropped her ,he bought a pack of Lights ,lit one and told himself that he would quit soon.

He remembered the incident and smiled to himself as he lit his last cigarette . He was working now and the smoke hating girl had left. What good times those were ! It had been more than two years since then . A lot had happened in between . He had quit smoking,briefly,  they had fallen in love madly all over again , left college , found jobs , did long distance ,admired the beauty of life  and then fell out of love .She carried on with her life , he couldn't . He took to smoking again . The time had come to stop now . He had tried quitting a couple of times before and failed miserably , but somehow this time felt different . This time he really really wanted to quit .

Man , I need a cigarette now . Why does this girl not understand my need to smoke ? It's okay now ,It's just visits now and then , I can manage without my cigarette but can I do this my whole life ? Imagine having to sneak out to smoke , everytime , your whole life ! God , That's a lot of sneaking out  and a lot of toothpaste wasted trying to make your breath smell humanly again . Good food, good sex, good sleep: to these basic animal pleasures, man has added nothing but the good cigarette and now she wants me to drop that too ? If only I could somehow convince my girl that in comparison to the smoke  from cooking and driving ,mine was nothing .There's only one problem though . You could succeed in convincing a drunk man that he is wrong but you can't succeed in convincing a woman that smoking is okay. Talk about women being stubborn .

That was after college , when he had gone to visit her . He would not smoke for days together when he was with her . He had started the habit again as problems began to resurface between them but he didn't have the heart to tell her . He remembered the mind-voice like it had happened to him yesterday . He took in another puff  . His last cigarette was half way through . He had thought he could never quit . He had started smoking during his final year at college . The addiction had become so intense but sooner or later, everyone stops smoking. One sudden day the smoke felt disgusting to him and  decided he didn't want to do this anymore.

The cigarette was almost over . He could feel why this white stick had enslaved him for years .He imagined how he felt during his times with the stick. When he didn't smoke he scarcely felt as if he was living. He didn't feel as if he was living unless he was killing himself. The cigarette had burned it's course out . There was one last puff . He looked at it . Hours , days , months and now years of smoking had to end at this puff . The last puff is always the strongest and it looked inviting but he realized he didn't need it anymore . He threw the cigarette down and put it out . A flash of how happy she had become when he told her in college that he had quit crossed his mind . He had never seen such joy on someone's face . His face showed a gentle smile. If only quitting her was as easy as quitting the smoke was .