Serenade the night, it feels like teenage love...

He sat on his favorite, dilapidated chair, brimming with nervous excitement. The cell phone in his lap, the cordless on the table lying next to his chair… He had forgotten which number he’d given her.

In between flashbacks of her flawless hair and breath taking smile and almost feline grace, he kept wondering if he should have his ribs removed. All the nails on his fingers were now grotesquely chewed back to further un-chewable extent, and yet the tremors rising now and again like Vesuvius bracing for another molten burp hadn’t abated any, so he kept eyeing his toes and the suddenly irresistible length of fully grown nail peeking from beneath his shiny new slippers. If only he didn’t have any ribs, he could probably start gnawing at his toes.

But thankfully he did have ribs, and thankfully the phone did finally ring.

Instinct led him to the cell; before he could possibly formulate a logical thought he had flipped the cover and was mouthing hellos into the speaker. And the bell rang again. Bewildered and confused, he looked at the cell with eyes that said, “all these years of not replacing your obsolete ass and you’re playing stupid mental games with me?” The phone sighed and rolled its eyes, smacked him behind the head and said “You moron! It’s that stupid land line ringing”. Well okay, it didn’t quite do that, but it may as well have, such was the lad’s surprise when the bell snuck up behind him and rang for the third time.

In one excruciatingly clumsy move he hurtled the cell far far away like one would instinctively toss a lizard that accidentally fell into one’s lap. A guy anyway, women would probably jump up and down, shrieking in that cute manner they have of shrieking, doing nothing but giving the lizard stuck to their garments the ride of its life. A soft bouncy ride on a soft bouncy bosom, ah to be a fallen lizard…

Aanyway, so yeah the excruciatingly clumsy motion… well the flying cell phone’s trajectory was rudely intercepted by the bottle of water lying on the mental piece. As mentioned earlier, the set was a senior citizen as cell phones go and therefore wasn’t light enough to not topple the bottle over, nor was it slim enough to aerodynamically glide through the air and come to a gentle landing besides the bottle, nor was it artificially intelligent enough to maneuver it self around the bottle, out the window, across 12000 miles of land and ocean, into the West Wing of the White House, and up the pimply Texan ass of the President practicing his Viagra induced libido on himself to visions of oil gushing out of the wells he has ‘acquired’ in someone else’s country, into his pork corroded stomach and explode with the force of a 10 tonne nuclear bomb; in the process settling the score for Hiroshima and Nagasaki and pretty much every other atrocity suffered by the world in the past 100 years, by annihilating all of the united states of the united states of America. Except Texas, cuz I know people there…

Wishful thinking, again.

Anyway. So the bottle of water was actually a bottle of glass filled with water. And as it fell to the uncarpeted floor (thank you cheap daddy!) it did so with quite a bang. Crash rather. So that as soon as our loser of a hero switched the cordless on and managed to wheeze out an expectant and terribly frightened hello it was clearly out-sounded by the crash of the bottle smashing against the floor.

The girl of his dreams, therefore, was greeted simultaneously by a wheeze and a loud crash, as if she had rang up a missile half a second before impact.

Now, contrary to male propaganda, women tend to be just as nervous as men when calling a member of the opposite sex for the first time with obviously unholy intentions. Therefore when she found herself greeted by what sounded like a constipated stomach farting, the phone slipped out her trembling grasp and crashed to yet again an uncarpeted floor(cheap fathers abound!) breaking into about 5 and a half pieces; Hopelessly beyond any probable communication capability.

This crash that followed on the heels of the explosion that occurred not 2 feet away from the man in this story was further fuel to an already raging fire of bitter sweet anxiety. Unfortunately it added only to the bitterness. He found himself so confused that he didn’t know what else to do but to shake the cordless in his hand in a motion that was embarrassingly familiar to him.

“Hello” he said, this time in a louder whisper.

As an answer he got the horrible squeaking sound one gets when licking an overly sensitive microphone.

Convinced that it was a horrible joke being played on him by the idiot best friend he had told about the newly acquired love of his life, he switched the phone off and went back to wondering how he would go about having his ribs removed. The bottle lying forgotten in its untimely demise, slowly oozing its life blood upon the floor.

On the other end, the heroine in this sordid tale proved to be of considerably greater intellect. With practiced ease, she silently ran all around the noiseless house, just to make sure that no one had heard the phone blowing up and was still soundly lost in their respective dreams. Satisfied that she was as yet undiscovered, she gingerly collected all the debris from the floor and neatly piled it upon the cradle.

“I told you this damn house is haunted, now look what the ghosts have done” Would be her alibi, she decided. Everyone thought she was bimboee enough to actually believe that and the blame would fall squarely on her elder and notoriously promiscuous sister or her younger and intolerably incorrigible brother. Being stuck in the middle had its advantages after all.

Damage control formulated, she focused back on the task at hand. Verbally seducing the young boy she had met at Zouk today.

Plan Bs are almost always dicey.

Hers involved a pre-Mesozoic era telephone that her father kept securely displayed in his study.

Getting there involved no great innovation on her part. All she had to do was open a few doors, skip over a few land mines, and slide under a couple of lasers... Dad was convinced that the government of Pakistan was out to get his treasured telephone. But this wasn’t the first victim for the Butt sisters, very appropriately named after all, owing to the spectacular derrières they both sported, remnants of some Latin lovin; in the family tree, no doubt. Nor was it the first time that the cordless had been rendered unusable. Therefore, this night ended up being not greatly different than the many other nights she had spent in trying to satisfy her never ending curiosity about the behavioral disabilities afflicting the opposite sex.

She nestled her magnificent behind, snuggled into loose fitting pjs, onto the leather chair placed at her father’s table.

The dialer was bolted, of course, this phone wasn’t meant for making calls after all. But alas, Butt Sahib had very little knowledge of the extent of his daughter’s ingenuity; she knew how to dial a number by tapping the ear type thing sticking out to support the receiver.

So the phone rang again. The poor boy nearly jumped out of his skin. The cordless took flight, came down, bounced once… twice, and finally came at rest on his lap.

Almost in disbelief, he slowly brought it closer to his face. Never taking his eyes of the blinking indicator right by the on button.

He switched the phone on, and suddenly silence descended within the room. For an extended moment he just sat there staring at the phone wondering whether he should bite the bullet and let his asshole friend have it right away or should he hope against all plausible hope and muster up his sexiest hello.

The latter option seemed a safer bet and so, he gingerly placed the receiver next to his ear and gurgled.

What was meant to be his impersonation of James bond turned out to be an impersonation of a gargling frog.

No harm done though. Ms Butt gurgled back.

For the next few seconds gurgling ensued on both ends, as if two aliens form two different planets were trying to discover how a telephone is used.

Eventually one of them managed to utter something similar to coherent speech and all of a sudden the tension multiplied.

Given below for you viewing pleasure is the conversation, verbatim:

Girl:” ummmmm, hello?” sultry

Boy:”h-h-h-h-h hhello” lame

Girl:” hey you!!” beaming

Boy: “h-hey you:” lame

Girl: “how are you?” sincere

Boy: “h-h-how are you?” lame

Girl: “tee hee” cute “you sound like my echo”

Boy: “:heh…hehehe…hahahahahahahahahaha” super lame

Girl: “ohkayyyyyyyyyy” mumbled “doesn’t take much to make you laugh does it?”

Boy: oh for god’s sake stop talking in English!!! “hahahahahahahahahaha… hah, haha, heh” kill me now lord, kill me now.

Girl: “So ummhh, what happened earlier?” desperate

Boy sitting up:” huh when, what, where… what happened. Kiya hua? You okay?” fuckin EH!!!!

Girl: “huh? Nae abhi when I called na, tau there were some weird sounds coming from your end… I thought u had an upset stomach or something. Hehehehehe… so I dropped my phone and it broke and I snuck into dad’s study and used this old ass phone he keeps ya? It’s a hassle ya? But you better be worth it” emblematic

Boy: “heh you have no idea how much I’m worth” woah… down boy.

Girl: “ummh, okay… well it was nice talking to you I guess I better go ab…” disappointed

Boy: “hey, no, don’t hang up you went to so much trouble for this call give me a chance” sweet sweet redemption..

Girl smiling: “hmm, okay. So what up?” relieved

Boy: “you mean besides the sky?” in his head:cool, in reality: painfully lame.

Girl rolling her eyes: “yeah doofus I mean what’s up with you?” annoyed

Boy :” huh, nothing, nothing is up with me, why do I sound like something is up with me? I’m fine, just fine.” Cue to bang your head in the wall.

Girl: “well, you sound nervous…” valiant

Boy: “oh… well… I am.” Eureka!!!

Girl, blushing: “yeah.. me too, a little…” Hail the lord!!!

Boy:” really? I… you… I… figured girls were always really confident?!” keep it up…

Girl: “you don’t know girls too well do you?” exasperated

Boy: “well, no, but I’m learning now. Maybe you can help me change that?” bold…

Girl: “hmmm, maybe I can.., what’s in it for me?” touché.

Boy: “me”. Bingo.

Drum roll please.

And so it begins.

The chase, the game, the damnation of souls… Etc etc etc.