The Absolute Best Day of My Life

Since I told you about my most humiliating moment so far, I thought it was only fair that you know about the best day of my life.
The official best day of my life is 28.3.2009 , that was the day on which absolutely everything i wanted to happen, happened. No exaggerations, not a single lie....everything that happened on that day in detail:

The beginning wasn't anything particularly exciting, I woke up, brushed, bathed, got ready for school(ON A SATURDAY!) and not really school but my science theory exam...the board exams that I told you of earlier, the Crazy BullShit Exam(CBSE...in case you didn't notice the emboldened). 'So?' You might ask 'Whats so freaking awesome about that?'. My reply - Its not, whats awesome is what happened after that. Right from 7:00 AM...my entire day was as good as- but not -a dream(Trust me, I checked. I was pinching myself and getting myself pinched all through.).

Starting with something as mild as the absence of traffic on my way to the examination hall and ending with something as wonderful as a 12 hour sleep (That was the last big exam so it was affordable).

The first good thing that happened to me however, was not the absence of traffic. It was what I recalled before I entered the car that reached the examination hall 45 minutes before the examination started. It was this: the previous night I had practiced all diagrams except one, one I'd forgotten about. Namely-Schematic representation of a biogas plant, something dubbed as vitally important by one of my teachers . A single diagram that I had never considered, useful enough to accomodate in my very choosy brain. But in the car...I forced this one in...every detail.

So, as I said, I reached the examination hall on time, after which I had a couple of uneventful discussions with a few freinds. One of whom informed me about a real cool fact in the text book, from a chapter which I had conveniently decided to skip(Dont look at..well....this page like that! I did the notes).

The third thing was something that happened the moment I received the question paper but I found out only after the exam got over. So, I prefer to make you wait until after the exam before tell you that.

Well, I recd. my paper and it was pretty normal, all I expected. But by the time I saw the 7th question in the bio section I had a smirk on my face and and by the time I finished, my smirk had been transformed into a scarily long smile. The reasons being these: The seventh question in the bio section required me to draw the schematic representation of a biogas plant for 2 marks :-] . Secondly, the last question was one in which I was able to comfortably insert the very interesting fact that my friend had told me of and I quite vividly remembered to formulate the perfect answer :D .

And here's the third lucky thing that happened to me, I got the easiest set. And I'm not lying when I say that I was supposed to get the toughest set, but the invigilator was some weird idiot who changed a pre-decided seating arrangement because he suspected someone of copying! God bless him.Also, something i didn't calculate during the examination, was that because of his change..the person sitting next to me had the same set.But that really didn't matter because I had no intentions of copying on that one paper.

Confession: The day before the science exam while I was looking for some details, it occured to me, while searching for my 10th grade science lab manual that I, strangely enough had lost it. A little worried though I was, I decided to ignore the fact and concentrate on the matter at hand, I felt sure I would be able to figure something out the next day. (Confession ends)

15 minutes after the exam ended, I was sitting comfortably in my car, telling my parents about how cool the paper was. But I couldn't bring myself to tell them about the book. I was well aware that going to the school to get my book from the lab would be stupid because it was a saturday. So looking up to the sky I formulated a plan and promised not to wonder about the outcome, deciding that I would get back to when something happened about it(something that had become quite used to doing, you must have figured out. But it pays, so far as my experience extends, which may not be adequate. Its still in the experimental stage, which makes it a dangerous lifestyle).

Having forgotten the manual. A slow half-smile kind of thing was in the development process on my face as soon as my mouth started watering for something popularly known as Baskin Robins' Ice Cream. So we pulled up at the joint. I was half expecting to return empty handed because the last 3 times I tried, BR didn't have the one flavor that I absolutely CRAVE i.e. Cookies n' Cream and I have this bad(or maybe good, depends on how you perceive it) habit that I dont do anything I dont approve of. But this being my lucky day...you guessed it...IT WAS THERE! All white with lumps of brown...I could taste the air above it(I think you can see pretty clearly that Im obsessed and back then I was desperate). I ate it slowly, drop of cream by drop of cream, block of cookie by block of cookie until I'd licked the cup clean(Im not particularly fond of cones). I remember that as the best ice cream experience I had ever had, in fact I can taste it right now.

At home, the first thing I did was to take my 4X4X4 rubik's cube out of it's package and instantly break it. I recommend people who don't have an understanding pair of parents like mine to look for more productive ways of solving it, rather than getting irritated with the devilish thing and banging it to a wall. Kidding. I was just admiring it, twisting it around and as a result of the cheap quality, it just spontaneously fell apart.(Support to China: The cube that I had was definitely not produced in China because China is well known for making the best Rubik's Cubes on the planet.)

The hours between 2:00PM and 6:00PM weren't very eventful, but the 2 things that happened after that were what compensated for a whole day's worth of the most disgusting luck one could have. They were these:

It rained. The showers were unusually late this year and once they started they were pretty frequent. I was waiting for the boards to end 'cause I love the rain, but when you've got to break your head over CBSE social science you just can't concentrate on anything else. But then just 2 weeks before the end of my papers, the sprinkles ceased and we started getting sunny afternoons. The 28th of March posessed a particularly hot lunchtime, but at 6:15 just before I left to implemet my sort-of masterplan to locate a usable lab manual, the clouds began to conspire and while I was in my cab it began to patter and then it poured, and I was awestruck at the beauty and that cool and fresh feeling of the rain. That day I experienced the rain like I would have had I been sitting in my terrace apartment in my building in Barra Bazaar(Calcutta).

The second awesome thing was that my sort-of masterplan worked(only just). The idea was to go to the house of a science tuition teacher who I'd joined a couple of months before cause my mom had all her faith in my genius but zero faith in my responsibility. And I have to admit that without her help I probably wouldn't rock so much at organic chemistry. Well anyway the idea was to go to class with the pretense that I needed help in the two experiments that CBSE decided to very conveniently insert into the portions 2 months before the exams, thereby giving us no time to actually do them. Anyway, I decided that I would then tell her towards the end that I wanted the lab manual of some other publishing house, just to get that extra bit of exposure and then I'd pray that she had and extra(because her son was giving the boards too). So well, I did this, but what happened next was, disastrous. She said that she dint have an extra. She said she'd check again and went out to honour her commitment, while I in my desperation searched her book drawers frantically and then I saw it, lying there in the second drawer from the left and second drawer from the bottom was the much blessed copy of the book I needed. Surprised at my finding, she let me have it, asking me to return it after the MCQs. The fact that I dint really use that book is very different, but in due thankfulness of all the help that she had bestowed upon me, I broke my age old tradition of not returning borrowed books.

When, after a while I got out of her place, It was raining again. I stepped into it with a strange, almost daring cheerfulness and let the cold strings of water beat upon my forehead, neck, anxiety and books. By the time my father got there, the last two of those were diminished and for the first time in 6 months, I didn't care. It was the feeling one would get were he to escape from a war prison and that was exactly what had happened. After a year of toil, I had escaped, content with the condition I was in, knowing that I had to live for a year in the next 10 days. Knowing that, a peace of mind that would have made the village idiot jealous came over me. I knew that this was something I could achieve, something that I would achieve. I had my dinner, and went to bed thinking that If there really was a God, he'd proved himself to me today.

Welcome to the Hotel California

Most of you, who were in school 2 years ago would be hate-ably familiar enough with the shit that went down in the Rendezvous 3 years ago. I wanted a friend to try out for western vocals, but he wouldn't do it cause there was no one else from 9th trying out, so I decided to back him and for the fun of it, gave the auditions. The irony lies in the fact that I got selected and he dint. I backed out and so the in charge made me a stand by. I took comfort in the fact that standbys are merely what jokers are in a game of bridge, nothing.

But of course, god hated me back then and decided that he was getting bored and needed to wreck someones reputation. "What the heck," he thought"I'll spin the REAL wheel of fortune". Then he went through the 6 and a half billion names on the thing and spun it, only to stop it very conveniently on my name with his little toe(yeah, reflexes.) So while some day of some month of my life in 9th so far was going well, he went about his stuff, he made series of hilarious prank calls and sent the kid who was gonna sing to the hospital(I don't know how and I still don't know what that motherf'er's name was, If i did he'd be fking in his grave right now) and I being the stand by that I was was naturally the one chosen to replace him as per the age old system of hierarchy though it dint seem nearly as pleasant to me as it did to nephews and princes when somebody when their dads or their dad's brothers or their cousins or pretty much anybody died.

So with an air of non-existing confidence which shouldn't have existed even in the non existent form, I marched up there when my name was called which it shouldn't have been and been and sang the very song which I shouldn't have sung but had to sing because the not-nice-lady of a comparer had taken the name of the song, Hotel California. Now it wasnt all that bad for about the first 5 seconds or so, then it started, Oh, what was i doing for the first 5 seconds or so? Adjusting the mike, that part went off beautifully. My air of non-existing confidence growing denser and denser and my smile grew larger and larger by the minute with each freakishly loud creak that the mike made because I thought there for a second that the mike may explode and bury the sharpnel in the judge's skull, maybe even my skull, but then I heard god giggle and the mike was set in front of me in a perfect manner waiting for the perfect acoustics of my voice visibly impressed by the largest cloud of non existent confidence it had ever seen, I glanced at the crowd of about a 150 disrespecting souls sitting below me from the foot of the stage to the back of the rather smallish auditorium if you could call it even half a one, I saw them talk and laugh and chat and fucking enjoy themselves, and at that moment I felt like repeating Virginia Tech all over again, but alas, Virginia Tech hadn't happened yet and so because of the lack of ammunition or any other idea, my bubble of Non Existent Confidence decided to decapitate itself and there I was stranded, lonely ,almost dead, but god thought that death would be too good for me compared to what was going to happen next(Of course he knew) and shook hands with the idea of leaving me there still stranded, still lonely, still alive.

So after these 5 seconds, I knew I had to run off stage and eat my socks and play dead, probably get cremated if that would help instead I began: "On a dark desert highway" the speakers boomed, creaked and creaked and the ones sitting close to the speakers, the ones I call the lucky ones closed their ears or ran outside to puke out an eardrum or two. I went on: "Cool wind in my hair" and saw the crowd, once evenly distributed, now huddled in the back of the room trying to not very inconspicuously at all 'get the hell outta there' as they later put it but a flaw in the room acoustics prevented them from doing that and it was this: there were speakers in the back. By the time I got to the part: "There were voices in the corridor" and if you read the lyrics you'll know that that's not very far, I thought I heard someone in the not so very far back at all say "DIE BUDDY! DIE!" and substituted the next line with this line from after the comma onwards to the end of the second double inverted comma close. And again, if you've read the lyrics, you'll realize that it doesn't sound all that bad with the song but it wasn't physically the most appropriate time and place to insert such changes. When I got to the second paragraph the judges were looking around, as if to see how many were still alive (which after further speculation was reported to be exactly what they were doing) and choked as if to say "If you leave them all impaired in no more than one region of the body ,we won't send you to Juvenile court, we swear." (which on further unnecessary speculation was reported to be exactly what they were trying to signal) and then one of them collapsed(the cause, after the forensics was reported as such: The intestine leapt through the stomach and strangled the brain in a superbly heroic display of self defense.).

The second paragraph went off relatively uneventfully and god got bored. "I want people to pray to me NOW!" he cried. "Oh, shut up you sissy!" called Satan. "But..." began god. "Just wreck his life some more"said Satan. In a moment of relative quietness god, recaliberated his interests and priorities and with an ingenious motion of the 2 little toes on his left foot caused another series of hilarious prank calls to happen and somehow mysteriously make me forget the rest of the song. As I stammered, the mob listened for a moment of stunned silence and took a deep breath and then the breathed out and listened for yet another almost exponentially more tensed moment than the first one of those. "Thank you" I managed, and they breathed out for the 7th time since they'd started breathing in during that stunning moment and then screamed and shouted and hooted and rejoiced and prayed and jumped up and down in glee and decided to lynch me cause the day's proceedings were visibly and obviously over, so they erected a cross on the school roof, picked me up on their shoulders and danced their way to the cross. During the rather comfortable several seconds i spent sitting on a senior's rather broad shoulder I heard a giggle and then It hit me 'Candles on the ceiling' I thought 'Candles on the bloody ceiling'.

I was rescued from this train of thought by a sudden thud, I bruised my shoulder, when I looked up I saw the mob was dead, all of it, I fainted. Later, forensics said that tha cause of the crowd's simultaneous deaths was along these lines: They were too excessively elated about something and forgot to breathe in. When I woke up in heaven I waited at the reception for a bit and then God called me in. "You killed me." I said. "Well, that was the Initial plan" he pointed at me accusingly(I honestly don't know why)"But Satan said that It would be more fun to just see you get mentally tortured by that astoundingly worthless no. of people in what you call a school"(At this point I thought of pointing out his grammatical error) but he dint wait "Also I wanted to see what a dislocated shoulder looks like, haven't given anybody one in ages. Is that a third degree?" and then I woke up again and felt a sharp sting.