Thursday, July 7, 2016

The 68th thing. A memory.

My cousin and I used to hang out a lot when we were kids. He used to live in another city and we would play a lot of games whenever he would come over to visit. Naturally after playing the entire day, we would feel like having some snacks, so we would ask our mothers to either make something tasty for us, or for some money so that we could go to a shop nearby and buy something to eat. It so happened that one day we were given some money. We were excited at the thought of buying a blue Ruffle's Lays 20 rupees packet (now known popularly as Lays Magic Masala). The shop that we generally go to is maybe three or four hundred feet from where we lived. The road is lined with houses on either side. There is one particular house where the owners have a dog, and my cousin is extremely scared of dogs. The dog usually barks at everyone who walks by, and my cousin and I are used to it, so we find it easy to ignore it. That day though, as we were passing by, the dog was nowhere to be seen. The compound wall of the house is raised but not so high that we couldn't see the dog if we chose to walk up to it and peep inside. My cousin was curious as to where the dog was, but we decided to just walk by. All of a sudden, the dog sprang up, head sticking up and front paws on the wall, and was barking madly at us. I was startled. My cousin got scared out of his wits and turned tail and ran back towards our house as fast as he could. I called out to him to say that everything was alright, that the dog wasn't chasing us or anything. But he ran so fast, and kept running and didn't slow down. And then his shorts began to slip down!!! 

There was a strange moment when my brain was parallelly: assimilating the fact that his shorts were actually slipping down, the mad desire to burst out laughing but also wondering if I should be concerned instead, predicting when he would stop to pull them back up, and calculating whether his underpants would fall off too. His shorts continued to slip. I burst out laughing. He didnt stop to pull them up; even when they were pooled around his ankles he waddled off as fast as he could. Thankfully his underpants didn't fall off.

The expression on my mother's face, when she came to the door, heard me roaring with laughter, saw my cousin pulling up his shorts with me nearly blind with tears of mirth, was priceless.