When the Hunter became the Hunted

Over the years, I’d become used to the idea of being the one engaged in a perpetually bootless pursuit of tail. That I was not to be one of the Don Juans of the world was driven into me when I was about seventeen, and the first girl I’d ever tried to ask out gave me the raspberry (a story that merits a post of its own, surely). She spoke in no uncertain terms of what she thought of me, and went on to elaborate on the defects in my demeanour, outer crust and general appearance to all and sundry.

Therefore, if an egg (or for that matter, a bean or a crumpet) had walked up to me a couple of years ago and asked me if anybody had ever bothered to try and pick me up from a pub, I would have laughed at him. I would have asked if he were trying to mock me, and warned him with the cautionary tale of what happened to the little children who mocked the Prophet Eliza (they were eaten by bears, in case the reader was wondering).

But then, nobody ever told me there are girls, and there are girls. It’s the latter that I shall talk of today – the women who turned the hunter into the hunted.

Cut to: Northern Ireland, March 2006.

Almost a year ago, a few friends and I decided to pop in and pay Gerry Adams and his drinking mates in the IRA a short visit. After three exhausting days spent photographing IRA graffiti in Derry, Ballycastle, Giant’s causeway and Belfast, we decide to partake of the blushed hippocrene at one of the numerous taverns that dot every British (and Irish) city.

The Irish, I must hasten to add, are among the friendliest people that a chap can hope to meet. It is nigh impossible to go anywhere in Ireland without being drawn into a conversation with the locals – whether one likes it or not. So, we were not surprised when the three middle-aged people at the other end of our table began to ask us what we were doing in Belfast.

It was as one of the chaps decided that the best way to regale my German friend would be to show him pictures he’d taken of the holocaust memorial in Berlin that the lady with them began to talk with me.

She was probably in her forties, and as unlike Stifler’s mom as was humanly possible. After disposing of the preliminaries, she began to tell me about how she worked for the Revenue Service, and how her life was often very lonely and boring. I assented mutely, thinking nothing of it whatsoever. When she began to talk of how rarely she managed to get out and meet nice people, I began to grow slightly uncomfortable. A few minutes from then, I felt a hand grab my arm ever so slightly.

If life were a Shakespearean play, I would probably written, ‘Exit Hurriedly, followed by bear’ and that would have been that. But it was not, and I began to signal to my friends that now may be a good time to check some other pub out. They apparently found my discomfort highly amusing. But, thankfully, my German friend’s patience was running thin in the face of the other chappie’s almost inexhaustible pictures from Berlin, and the exit I had been fervently wishing for was executed with great finesse.

Cut to: England, September 2006.

Ryanair, as I have had cause to mention earlier in these dispatches, has this distressing habit of flying out of airports in the middle of nowhere. It was while staying the night waiting for one of these flights in a nondescript little place called Bishop’s Strotford (Ryanair called it London) that I decided to grab an ounce or two of a restorer at this quiet, little pub.

I walked into the pub, a Harry Potter held close to my chest. After asking the bartender to dispense a pint of the needful, I settled down in a cosy nook and began to read of what would indeed happen to the horcruxes. It was as I was getting to the particularly exciting bit about Ron snogging Lavender (yes, I’m an adolescent, and found parts of Harry Potter 6 to be the very best erotica I’d ever read) that I heard a voice pipe down towards me from the next table.

I turned around to espy a plump Englishwoman in her early thirties.

‘Is that a nice book?’, said she.

‘Oh, I say, yeah, rather!’, said I, trying to hide the cover of the book. I was not able to find the adult cover to HP 6, y’see.

She smiled, and relapsed into silence.

And I went back to the book. I had just begun to contemplate how generally awesome it would have been if I’d studied at a school like Hogwarts where one could snog Emma Watson in the common room for all it was worth when the voice piped up again.

‘It’s considered anti-social in this country to read books at a pub’

‘Er… I’m sorry…it’s like, I was here alone, and so I thought I’d kinda catch up with my reading. There, I’ve closed it.’, I said, rather flustered at having apparently committed a faux pas in the land of the stiff upper lip.

She continued unabated, ‘So where are you from? My name’s *^^(‘

After we’d exchanged names, and I’d told her I was from India, she told me that she’d always wanted to visit India, and that it was so very mystical.

I grinned non-committaly.

‘You know, the Kama Sutra and stuff, it’s really cool’, said she.

I hummed and hawed, for the Kama Sutra and I had never been formally introduced. My Kama Sutra education was limited to a few clips of Indira Verma watched surreptitiously on a mate’s mobile phone.

It was then that she spoke again.

‘So do you want to see the sea? I could take you’

‘Er…I’ve lived in coastal cities all my life, so I’ve seen more of the sea than the average beach bum. Besides, British beaches are rather chilly at this time of night, I believe’, I said. The terrible memories of Belfast had begun to rear its ugly head again.

‘Ah ok…’, she said, ‘so, where are you staying at?’

‘Er… me? I’m at this B&B called the Phoenix Lodge, right down the street.’

‘Oh… you don’t have to stay there tonight, you know.’

I couldn’t help but notice the maniacal glint in her eyes, and I must admit it scared me some.

I gulped down my drink, looked at my watch and said, ‘Oh my god! Look at the time, its almost midnight. I’ve got a really early flight on the morrow. I better rush to bed now.’

Cut to: Germany, last week

I was at one of Germany’s prettiest cities last week, enjoying the hospitality of a friend who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the best night-spots in town. It was at one of these places – which, the connoisseur may wish to note, offers the cheapest alcohol outside of Goa – that we were having a tipple. We had just ended an extremely interesting conversation with an Irish chap who seemed to have taken it upon himself to tell us his life story. It was then that we noticed this middle-aged woman who bore more than a passing resemblance to Chyna walking towards us. I observed that she was sporting a bindi.

She walked up towards me, and folded her hands in a Namaste.

Being a well-bred, young Indian boy, I folded my hands and wished her a cheery namaste. Now that I think of it, Messrs. Guinness and Jaegermeister may have been responsible for the namaste being a tad more effusive than planned.

She immediately sat down next to me, and began stroking my cheek. To say I was terrified would be an understatement. Though I was aware that a man always holds the trump card in encounters of this nature, I was also aware of the muscles that rippled within her t-shirt. I could not bring myself to contemplate what would ensue if I pushed the woman away, and therefore contented myself with little shoves accompanied by ‘Please… what’s happening?’.

She then began to sidle closer to me, and was pretty much all over me – which felt rather like having a sackful of coals thrown right at your face.

At this point, my friend decided to intervene.

‘Listen, why don’t you just go away?’, said my friend.

‘You don’t know anything about his culture. Don’t shove your oar in here; fuck off!’, said the well-muscled one.

I made a mental note to murder whichever Indian gave her the idea that it was in our culture to appreciate the act of ugly, unknown women thrusting themselves upon us.

It took about two minutes, a lot of pleading, and something I did not follow, before the woman walked away looking particularly malevolent.

Note: Pretty women are urged to note that ugly is the operative word here. I do not mind, nay, I would welcome pretty women – unknown or otherwise – who decide to feel me up, or otherwise hit on me. For some reason unbeknownst to me, the only women who seem to be even remotely interested in a piece of the Warrier are either middle-aged, ugly, or both. Hint hint!!

The author has been single since he can remember. Pretty women (age no bar, caste no bar, race no bar, height no bar as long as you don’t mind midgets) are encouraged to consider the exciting possibilities that this unfortunate concatenation of circumstances present them with.

Traveller’s blues

To the fine folk who visit my blog regularly:

This may be the last post I’ll be writing in a while. I’m in a bit of a blue funk right now, and find myself incapable of thinking cheery thoughts – or thoughts, even. Ah well, here goes, then… Hope I get out of this here funk sooner rather than later!

Living in a country without speaking the lingua franca is never the most pleasant experience. Travelling can be even tougher, when one has to figure directions out. It gets even worse when you happen to be me. The Warriers have never been, since the dawn of time, a race capable of sniffing directions out like one of those bloodhounds you always hear of (assuming bloodhounds sniff directions). Philosophers, yes. Saints, quite possibly. But intrepid adventurers we never have been and never will be.

When I first flew in to Germany, I decided to save the ten quid that I would have to shell out to get a Berlitz German phrasebook – an act of parsimony I shall forever regret. But I never regretted it more than when I was to fly to Glasgow from Duesseldorf.

My RyanAir ticket – curse their black hearts – informed me that I was expected to be among those present for the ritual sniffing of one’s genitals by the Alsatians from the Bomb squad at an airport called the Duesseldorf Weeze Flughafen. Flughafen, I assumed, was the operative term. All I had to do prior to boarding the airplane, I assumed, would be to go to this airport in Duesseldorf called Flughafen – a task within the reach of even one as inept as me.

In fact, I observed that the authorities had been kind enough to draw a (rather ugly) facsimile of an aeroplane to indicate the direction to this Flughafen airport. It was, therefore, with a song on my lips, that I alighted at the railway station conveniently attached to this airport that was called Flughafen.

Five minutes into the airport, however, I began to smell a rotten fish – an aroma that made me hark back to the Shastri Nagar fish market. (I didn’t actually smell a rotten fish, except metaphorically). It was a confused self that walked towards the helpdesk.

I decided to try my pidgin German out.

‘Hallo, ich bin Ryanair flight FR8789.’

The chap at the counter could not repress a laugh.

‘What? You’re a Ryanair flight? (Oh so that’s what it meant)!’

‘Er…no, I…want.. to… get… Ryanair…flight…to…Glasgow!’

I spoke in loud, slow and ringing tones – accompanied by feverish movements of every appendage of my body. Though I have never understood how this would make things any better, and why people do it – but I can’t help myself doing it.

The chap at the other end of the table, watched me do the cha-cha-cha with thinly veiled amusement, and spoke,

‘Well, you’re at the wrong airport, mate. Ryanair flights use the Duesseldorf Weeze Flughafen’

‘Another airport named Flughafen?’, asked I, shocked that they could do something like this in one city.

‘No, Flughafen is the word from airport’. said the bloke, rather like a chap measuring a lunatic for a straitjacket would.

It was then that a line I read long ago in the Lonely Planet came back to hit me – ‘In German, it is not just the proper nouns that are capitalised.’

I asked the chap, reaching a state of panic, ‘So, where is this other Flughafen?’

‘Just about a hundred kilometres from here’

‘What!!?? Then why do they call it Duesseldorf?’

‘Well, the question you should ask yourself is why you choose to fly RyanAir?’

‘Er..because its cheap!’

‘Well, now you know WHY its cheap!’

And all this while, I thought it was cheap because they used slave labour to fly the airplanes. (Later, sources assured me that this was also the case).

It was thus a chastened self – cursing my parsimony for not having got that Berlitz phrase-book – that travelled to Berlin.

P.S: Attempts to confirm that this was a deep-dyed conspiracy hatched by George W Bush, Tony Blair, and Ahmed Chalabi expressly to discomfit me have now come to nought.