Discard

This is something I wrote for the anchor space in the Edit Page of DNA. That's the newspaper I work for. The piece had to be a funny life experience. Having had many such, I just picked the most recent and wrote all about it. The editor discarded it calling it too "risque". The piece had been feeling lonely, lying in the 'Sent items' folder of my gmail for over a month. And also my blog had been feeling a little lonely for some time. So I thought of helping two lonely subjects. Here you go...

Wilson College Nature Club trips have marked a major high in my college life. The tiring climbs, sore bodies, parched throats and obsessive environmentalism compensated by fresh breaths of air at mountaintops, blinding fog, greenness and much more…

I am not sure of having learnt the finer nuances of nature conservation, but if there’s one aspect of being in natural surroundings that I have mastered, it’s beckoning nature’s calls in the open. Yes, more often than not, when tents are pitched on remote green plateaus, one can only see trees and rocks as makeshift curtains while attending nature’s calls.

On one of these trips, I was in northeast India with a few friends, returning to Gangtok in a van after a failed attempt to reach Nathula pass on the Indo-Chinese border. One of the most common problems encountered at altitudes above 10,000 ft is high altitude sickness, something that could even turn fatal. To ward off the adverse effects of the illness, the best one can do is sip water at regular intervals. And that’s exactly what I had been doing after already having experienced some dizziness on the downhill trip.

I have always believed that I have been cursed with an extremely small and non-elastic bladder, which always lets me down. With my shortcoming, it is only natural that I had the urge to relieve myself at an interval of 20 minutes. After a couple of halts, the driver grew impatient with my demands and pretended as though he was short of hearing whenever I pleaded with him.

To my delight, we got stuck in a traffic jam in the ghats with a few uninhabited shops in the vicinity. I took the opportunity, hopped out of the van and began scouting for a good shelter to do my business. I looked around. There my van was, last in the beeline of many vehicles. A few trees dotting the spot. Nah, too far away. I saw the rear tyre of my van. It seemed too alluring. I could just squat there, nobody would have an inkling of what I was up to. And, it wouldn’t even take me a minute. So I looked right, left, right again, and go.

I was enjoying the growing emptiness within me, and vroom. The damn traffic jam decided to clear. There I was, exposed to the world in front of me – mostly my friends who had got off to stretch a few muscles and a few strangers. A few moments of silence and shock prevailed before I zipped myself up with a job half done. And what followed through the trip and still does is insurmountable embarrassment.