Wo(w)men!

Continued from here.

All the coaching didn’t help and I didn’t make it to IIT. Instead I ended up in a college called AIT. The worst part was that for some reason, almost every girl there was a fat midget with pimples all over their face. I felt I was being punished by God for my sins. I tried concentrating on studies for a change but talking about what I was majoring or minoring in or about pulling all-nighters put very different thoughts in my head. I somehow scraped through each semester with a little help from my friends. A year went by and life had lost all meaning. I was in bad shape. I had never spent so much time without the touch of a woman. And then, one day at the canteen, she bumped into me, literally. Unfortunately, actually fortunately, she had a plate full of food in her hands and it splattered all over my jeans. She hastily grabbed a bunch of napkins and started rubbing my jeans mumbling sorrys in between. The rubbing felt so good that a part of me never wanted her to stop but I was reaching my threshold. I stopped her and said that it’s alright. We ended up having lunch together.  She was like an oasis in a desert. We started meeting after classes and I enjoyed her company. All was good with the world again. I liked her and the way she wanted to be with me made me feel that she felt the same way. One day I asked her out for a date, just a stroll in the mall, maybe lunch, some quality time together. I waited outside the mall. She was an hour late. I was looking up and down the street searching for her when a huge armoured car came and stopped right in front of me. Five Arnold Schwarzennegers came out of it holding sawed-off shotguns. Then a posh lady came out holding a purse which looked as if it was made of diamonds, followed by her. My heart was in my mouth. I fumbled to say hello and all that came out from my mouth was an idiotic moan. I coughed to ease the pain in my chest. I stood there for what seemed like an eternity with my mouth open until she finally spoke and introduced me to her mother. I just nodded and her mother left us with three of the Arnies and went shopping. One of them strip searched me and made sure I wasn’t carrying any weapons. Unfortunately, I was never really a big fan of wearing any underwear because I would feel suffocated...you know what I mean? So, when Arnie dropped my pants, everyone in the mall let out a collective gasp. My twisted head had got me in an embarrassing situation yet again. I decided never to date a girl again without knowing her family background first. After I put my clothes back on, we went for a stroll, one Arnie on each side of us and one following us. She wanted to window shop. I used to think that window shopping meant looking at things and moving on. Instead she bought whatever was on display. After seventeen straight hours of window shopping, she suggested we go eat. I had lost almost half my body weight by now and really needed something to eat.  She walked straight into a five star restaurant. I had 400 bucks in my pocket and just a glass of water there cost 700. I tripped a waiter passing by and let all the food on his tray fall on me. I pretended I was really angry and left the restaurant. I took her to a cafe where I knew I could atleast afford a meal for two. Two of the Arnolds guarded the entrance while the third one checked everyone’s pockets and bags for guns and bombs and tasted everything we ordered just in case someone was trying to poison us. We sat there for a few minutes, I somehow managed to eat a burger and then I left saying I had a test to study for. I never saw her again. We were finished with our course and I flew off to Canada to chase the Canadian Dream (free healthcare baby!). Two more things had changed in my life: 1. I never watched an Arnold movie ever again. 2. I started wearing underwear.

After that I decided to stay single for a while. Although I was surrounded by blondes and brunettes and redheads, I controlled myself by thinking that if Indian women had been so stressful on me, I couldn’t even imagine what these women could do. After all, it seemed I wasn’t that lucky when it came to being with a woman. I found a good job, some guy friends to go out and have beer with once in a while, and all of this kept me busy. Two years passed. One day, a beautiful Indian girl walked into my office. She said she was here for her internship and she was told to report to me. I almost pissed in my pants. Not again, I thought. Anyway, I somehow controlled myself and just made up some work for her to do. I wasn’t going to get in trouble again. However, as each day passed, I slowly kept forgetting the various traumas I had been through. We started talking and I felt myself getting more and more smitten by her. We used to have long conversations and she was very sweet because she used to agree with whatever I said. Just the kind of woman every man wants to be with.

“I think shopping shouldn’t take more than an hour. Don’t you think?”

“Yea. I agree.”

“Why do women take so much time to take a bath?”

“Yeah...even I wonder...some of them do take a lot of time.”

“Oh yeah! The wrestling match is going to be awesome!!”

“Wow! I can’t wait to see it!”

She was made for me. I just knew it. I was ready to forget everything that had happened in the past. I soon proposed and we moved in together. My dreams were soon shattered. The wrestling match turned out to be a women’s debate on casual sex. Shopping for a while meant me sleeping in the car till she came back after four hours with burger and soda for me, and a lot of bags, and then she’d say “I’ll be back in a while.” One day I got frustrated and asked her why she had lied to me that she didn’t take too long to take a bath. “I don’t” she said. She had just taken a two hour long bath. Anyway, I tolerated everything because I loved her. One evening, we were having dinner at a restaurant when I noticed a girl walking towards me. She seemed familiar and as she came closer, I realised it was the safe sex psycho. I panicked and ducked under the table. Unfortunately she had seen me and came and sat at our table. My girlfriend was taken aback. The psycho started blabbering about everything bad that I had apparently done to her...the three years...the cheating. My girlfriend retaliated and said that I wasn’t like that. I don’t even know when and how the catfight started. Now, one thing that every man loves to see even more than two girls making out is a catfight. Men love catfights in reality, in dreams, in buses, in trains, in bed, on TV, catfights between girls they don’t even know. It was a rare opportunity but I controlled my manly instincts and tried to stop them. NEVER, I repeat, NEVER try to stop a catfight. That is the only time when you will find women physically stronger than men. Try to stop it and end up with a scratched face and a hurt ego from a wild slap. Male ego is an unusual thing. It can be hurt by any reason like a slap from a girl, a girl riding a bike, a girl taller than a man, richer, another man having a better looking wife/girlfriend, bigger car, bigger house, bigger anything, in short male ego can be easily hurt. Mine was hurt by that slap. It didn’t matter from whom it had come from. I decided never to try and stop a catfight again. I was angry at both the women, and at myself. How could I have been so stupid? I should have known that something like this was bound to happen sooner or later. We came home and she kept asking me if what the psycho was saying was true. I was angry and upset and I lied that it was. It was then that she told me that she was pregnant and she didn’t want me to have a bad influence on the baby. Knowing that she was pregnant had changed things. It was too much for me to be able to handle her, let alone a baby. On top of that, she didn’t want me to be there anyway. So I left, changed cities, my email, my number, everything. I don’t know if it helped or not, but I later felt that it was a bad thing I did, hurt a woman who really loved me. I felt guilty and called her up a few days later and told her that I was sorry for what I did and that I wanted to be there for the child. “I wasn’t pregnant!” she shouted on the phone. “I just wanted to see if you would stay or leave. Now I know, you dog! Don’t you dare show your face again!” and slammed down the receiver. I don’t understand the fact why men are always termed as dogs. Dogs can roam around nude, peeing wherever they want. They hump the hottest bitch and leave them when they are pregnant...umm...never mind. I agree. All men are dogs. Two things changed in my life that day. 1. I bought a dog and named him after myself. 2. I stopped keeping an ego.

Life went on, I found women who wanted to do what I had been doing all my life...fuck around. I found women drunk at parties, ready to go home with me, have one night stands, no strings attached sex. I had women cheating on me, double timing, and sometimes triple, sometimes more. I got hurt by women who lied to me. One day I got up from the nightmare and realised that I had been getting a payback from life for all the time I had used the beauty of a woman for fun and personal satisfaction. It wasn’t them. It was me. I wanted to be with the kinds that would be easy to get in my life and get them out too. I realised that it didn’t matter whether the ones I had been with were good or bad, but I wasn’t going to give life another chance to teach me any lessons anymore. And so, that day, only one thing changed in my life, me. I moved on to be a better man and learnt from my mistakes and the lessons life had taught me through the means of a woman.

Today I know that women are exactly like they have been portrayed in nearly every song, the poems, and the movies. Every day always was, is, and will be about a woman. So I salute the women in this world because without them, love, life, shopping, gossip, affection, letters, food, long drives, bike rides, daily soaps, school, sex, basically everything would have been no fun.


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Dedicated to Mansi Sharma, the best woman, and friend I know.