A whole lot of Squish!

“Rise and shine!” That’s the first thing I read in the morning. It was 5am and Addy had given me orders to wake him alone up, assuring me that he would manage to wake everyone else up. I did as he said. I was sandwiched between Preethi and the side of the tent. With great difficulty, I found my phone, which was beeping loudly and held it high up in the air so Addy would hear it and wake up. When no one stirred, I yelled out “5 O CLOCK!!” To this, Addy responded saying “5 minutes”. He didn’t even open his eyes. I shrugged and went back to sleep. Every five minutes my alarm rang and I announced the time each time but there was no point anyway. (It seems like only Suraj didn’t hear my calls. He was completely unaware of the announcements when asked about it later in the evening.) Eventually, all of us got up at 10am. There! We blew up our plans of trekking early in the morning to KP. Mr.Prepontaneous was up before any one of us. We went to Battey maney and brushed, washed our faces and answered nature’s call. Preethi made bread cheese breakfast for us. It was very tasty. Addy and Suraj licked the box clean and threw it aside. We went back to our tent and realised how amazing the shape was! “Wah!” :P It wasn’t even a triangle! Sheesh! We sat near it for a while. It was a “plan meeting”. We planned to stay back that day at Bhatta’s house and leave to KP in the evening. In order to kill time, we started exploring the places around Battey mane. We saw a small stream where I saw a guy wearing an Arsenal jersey. As always, I got damn excited. His gang (mainly comprised of old men and a few boring nerdy guys) was sitting by the stream. We walked up along the stream looking for snakes and in Cosmo’s case, crabs. We found a small pond covered with leaves and maggots. Addy wanted to clear it up and make it a Jacuzzi. Haha! Yeah right! We went back towards the gang of old men and sat somewhere close to them. We sat idly for what seemed like an hour. We were relaxing, you see. Addy came up with a game, which required us to put on our thinking caps. He challenged us to create something with all the junk lying around. (Remember TV, Microwave oven??) It was when the boys were having some stupid competition with their Kings; Prepontaneous came up with the word squish. Hehe. Finally after enough rest, we went back near our tent to put our plans to action.
Then again (it’s almost predictable now!), the super girls foiled the plans. It was around 35-40 degrees and we had absolutely no interest, curiosity or anything to do with KP whatsoever. We called Addy’s mum and explained that it was too hot to trek. Addy spoke to her for about ten minutes. This conversation included heated arguments, convincing his mum about how hot it was, general discussions to do with the number of tents and all that. Finally we heard Addy say “What? (Oh shit!) Happy Birthday ma!” Hehe. We all started laughing. He reminded her of some gift that he had given her and spoke nicely for a while and hung up. It was decided that we would go to Madikeri after trekking down so that we could “chill” at Abbey Falls. :P We packed our tent, went to Bhatta’s house, took our entire luggage which now included the bus people’s tents too! $&%^**! It was around 12 noon when we started to trek. The boys dipped their tshirts in water before we could start. Lucky bums! Anyway, we were full of energy. Suraj led us and I followed. Cosmo was behind me, closely followed by Dimps and Addy. We started a small game where Su would sing a word and I would add another word and we would go on until we had a nice one-line song. Hehe. The only sensible sentence we made was “The drums sound so weird”. So creative! :P We had gained superb momentum and it was hard to stop. As we were singing, God blessed us with network and Cosmo got a whole lot of text messages. We heard him say “Holy Cow! A guy from my hostel died!” We were all shocked for a second and did not know what to say. Cosmo broke the tension by running down the hill, full speed and then falling, skidding and yelling at the same time for five seconds. Lmao! None of us could control laughing. I asked who died and he said “Bhaskar! Oh no! Now I have to go to Udupi!” Hahahahaha! Prepontaneous enquired Cosmo about the idea of running down the hill. He said Cosmo thought he could go and save Bhaskar if he ran. Or maybe he planned to run to Udupi. God knows what made him run! That incident was so damn funny! He got a message that said “Bhaskar died” and he just ran! Hahahahaha!! Only people who were there will understand. Hehe. The whole process of climbing downhill was funny. We all seemed dazed and confused and wasted. We laughed at absolutely anything! Cosmo promised to give us all anything we asked for if we reached down in two hours. We took up the challenge and trekked down swiftly. Addy was suffering from ankle pain and was finding it hard to walk. We found the “2500 mts” part and sat down there for fifteen minutes. We sang the Chun Chun song and we realised that Dimps had a very weird way of saying “Om”. She would say “Aaaum” in a so-called “deep” voice. Hehe. Laughing about it, we all ended the break, this time with lesser enthusiasm than the beginning. Slowly, the break frequency and duration started increasing. Cosmo and I saw a gigantic snake. It was brownish with black stripes. We made Suraj so jealous. We met some mental guy on the way who said we had 6 more kms to descend. The bloody thing seemed endless! We went on and on and on and on and on. Finally when we could trek no more, we broke down. With no fuel to energize us, we lay there, rummaging our bags looking for signs of food. We were starving like mad. We ate a packet of raisons and ellu-bella hungrily. Our last resort was cheese. Sigh! We opened a box of cheese and ate it. Addy said “oota kodi” to passers by. Such was the misery that fell upon us! That was the longest break ever. We wasted a whole hour sitting there. We put peanuts in cheese and ate it. We put cheese in ellu-bella and I was dared to eat it. Big deal I thought and ate it! I actually enjoyed it and ate more! Hehe. By now, the Brahmin – Gowda – Golla – Browda argument had long begun. Each of us argued about our status in the society. Hehe. God pitied our pitiable state and gave us power to walk again. We got our asses off the hard rocks and trekked down with determination ready to face a long, irritating path. To our pleasant surprise, we reached the bottom just after two bloody minutes! We wasted an hour for two minutes’ trek! Shit! We laughed for two days at this thought. Hehe. We quenched our thirst with Citron from a small shop. There were around four black cats lingering around. The white shirt flirt came down the path and said “Hi yaar. I expected something from you guys. Why didn’t you go up?” We told him we went to some other peak. We asked him how the view from KP was. He said “the view was….” And he made an action like he was trying to wriggle out a cockroach from his shirt. Lol! Addy completed his sentence with ‘beautiful”. Hehe. Laughing at that bugger, we entered Kukke. We had a nice snack at Neo Mysore Café or something like that. (Wow was it called Mysore café?) We got rid of our bags and headed towards the temple. Addy was adamant about the whole idea of going to temples until he got to know that the ladies in the temple were topless! (LOL!) He was suddenly Subramanya’s No.1 devotee. He was damn excited when we entered. He threw his eyes around for hot chicks. :P We told him he’d find them inside the room where the idol was kept. We went in search of the water body, which is usually there at temples so that Cosmo could throw the thread that he was wearing. We went through a market place where bhajans served as a background for our crappy talk. We sat by the peepal tree and spoke about how Ganesha got an elephant’s face. We laughed a lot generally and prayed to God and went to the market. Addy went absolutely crazy on seeing the fake tattoo moulds. He got five tattoos, which included an eagle, a tiger that read TIGER :P, a hanuman, a ganesha and a politician. Suraj got a KSRTC symbol, a hanuman, an eagle and a snake with a heart shaped head. Cosmo got a flower and an eagle. Preethi got an Om. I got some random design. Omg! How could I forget?!? Addy got one that said “Life Wife” in a tacky heart shape. That was the best tattoo! We laughed our asses off while getting tattoos. When the tattoo lady said 55rs Addy and Su were like “parvagilla” and started walking away. Haha! Slowly we walked towards the astrologer. Cosmo was going to get his palm read. We waited outside for fifteen minutes while Suraj read Cosmo’s palm and said quite a bit that made sense. At least he made more sense than the astrologer. The astrologer claimed that Cosmo would become an artist! He also said that Cosmo would become a man at 40 years of age and that he had “monk buddhi”. LOL! After the chap read his palm, he sat waiting for cash. As usual, all of us ran out. Cosmo gave the astrologer 10 bucks and came out looking embarrassed. We went back to the temple and met Vishwanath. With completely straight faces, we told him that the purohit in the temple tattooed everyone who went in there. I can’t believe he bought that. Giggling, we all ran out of the temple. After one shot of Lime soda each, we sat near the car playing Dumb Charades. Khoon Mein Taley Samose, Monochromatic Destiny, Mother of Incandescence, The Gallous Bladder, all of which are made up movies were acted out with sheer brilliance! We then set off for dinner to Neo Mysore Café again. We had a proper South Indian Meal, which pretty much sucked. Suraj kept giving Strum arbitrary sentences like “there is not one in the Jacuzzi” and “You are a clown” and “You suck at acting” to act out. Hehe. I gave him “Dude where’s my car” and something happened and Cosmo called Dimps a citag and things went a little out of hand. We saw Suraj and Cosmo having a heated argument standing outside. Dimps and I actually got scared to interfere. Later Suraj came and told us that his justification was that Cosmo was a close friend so he could pick on him. He didn’t even apologise! Haha! After dinner, Vishwanath came and gave us some cash for the tents and left.

We left to Madikeri that night. The driver played kickass Kannada music. Loulou loulou crazy loulou nangay Lou illa. (Lmao!) After that, all of us fell asleep. We reached Madikeri at 1:30am. Since it was a weekend plus Republic Day, all rooms in all lodges were occupied. Even Hotel Lodge! Hehe. We were all dreamy and confused. The driver had parked the car outside a petrol bunk. Our plight was so hopeless that we decided to pitch our tent in the Petrol Bunk and sleep. I am NOT kidding! We were all ready for it when Addy rejected the idea. Then we considered a school ground but didn’t want to seem like aliens in a weird space ship to the kids. Hehe. So we kept driving around when Addy and Suraj found a flight of stairs to the right, leading to some clandestine area. They came running down the stairs. They had found the perfect spot. The rest of us climbed up the stairs hesitantly. It was damn cold. On the right was a silhouette of a water tank and some buildings that looked abandoned. On the right was a burnt down forest. It looked eerie and gave me the creeps. The top looked like a local sight seeing spot. It had sitting area with a roof. We pitched our tent there and I lay down in the tent until I got scared. Everyone else was sitting outside and enjoying a terrific view of the city in the dark, with nice slow music perfect for the night. Addy and Dimps gave the Rang De Basanti pose. No one spoke much. Suraj seemed to be in a bad mood for some reason. He didn’t utter a word! After enjoying the beauty of the night, I went into the tent. Suraj followed. Both of us slept off. I have no idea what happened after that. Maybe Addy or Cosmo could complete the night.