And then came the smile

(first appeared in www.thousandwordpicture.blogspot.com)

“Keep steady man, be cool, be cool “I told myself. She was 200 meters away from me. Immediately I sucked in my burgeoning paunch, adjusted my Infineon badge so it was prominently displayed (why I do this every time, God only knows. Even the sweepers in ITPL, Bangalore have their own badges to show off).I walked towards her with an air of nonchalance. She was my junior from college, and a damm pretty one at that. I had never spoken to her in college though; this must have probably been due to the aura of nerdiness I used to radiate back then. Now the aura has turned into a small halo, but is still definitely there.

This is my big chance, I told myself. My plan was simple (too simple, some of you might argue). As I strutted past her with my stomach tucked in, she just had to notice me and say Hi, I reasoned (the smallness of my halo of nerdiness being prominent in my reasoning). I would then pretend to notice her and feign surprise. In my surprised state, I would blurt out how beautiful (and sexy, if I still had my guts around me till then ) she looked in her maroon outfit today. She would then have to blush, I reasoned again. And so on continued my reasoning. I’m actually very good at reasoning , be it logical reasoning, verbal reasinong, reasoning to evade blame, to gain time etc.

Alas! Today my reasoning made me lose time instead. Before I knew it, she was only 20 meters away from me. And to add salt to the injury, she walked with this huge swarthy bouncer like character next to her. What I had imagined to be a magnified shadow when I first saw her had suddenly turned corporeal. Complimenting her sexiness seemed akin to committing suicide now. Why can’t I be one of those pathetic losers who miraculously seem to have a hot babe stuck to one of their shoulders, I sighed at the world in general and at God in particular. I resigned myself to fate. I decided to go with the ‘strong hunk’ look. Puffing my chest and narrowly avoiding a coughing fit in the process, I walked majestically towards the ‘couple’, all ready to supremely ignore them.

And then came the smile. Bang; without warning, when I least expected it, when all my defences were low. This girl has one of the cutest smiles in ITPL, and that’s saying a lot. ITPL has at least fifteen thousand people, to hazard a guess (as with all my guesses the figure may be considerably off the actual value, so please take this with a cup of salt). We can safely assume that 40 % of them at least are females, which gives us a minimum of six thousand females. Of these at least four thousand would be in the age group of 18 and 27 years. Needless to say, every girl in this age group is trying her best to look gorgeous. Let’s say about one fourth of them are successful. That leaves us with thousand gorgeous females in ITPL. My girl (‘my’ sounds possessive and ridiculously untrue, but what the heck it’s my blog) would rank somewhere in the top twenty to thirty – close to 99.9 percentile.

Anyway, about the smile. She did notice me, and flashed her perfect teeth at my two day stubble. Her face was framed by two narrow strands of jet black hair and her right cheek showed the hint of a dimple. It was a warm smile to say the least and a super hot smile to say the most. And she waved at me in a silly girlish manner which I found very arresting. And even more embarrassing was the fact that I dropped my strong hunk attitude before one could say ‘strong hunk’ and stood engaged in a silly hand wave exchange program with her for a full 3 seconds. And even more embarrassing was the fact that the bouncer guy started waving back !! I smelled something fishy here, and I was not standing at the seafood counter of Civet.

She came forward and introduced me to the bouncer guy. Believe it or not, the bouncer guy was actually a co-worker of hers. I still looked quizzically at him, I had not taken well the act of being waved back sillily(dictionary check) by a hot babe and a monster man at the same time. She explained. Turns out during the time we were separated by a distance of 200m to 20 m, the effects of my mental reasoning were quite physically conspicuous. I had narrowly missed colliding with who dustbins, trod on the toes of a elderly man, walked mostly on the wrong side of the walkway leaving big brown footsteps glistening on the otherwise spotless recently cleaned surface.I had even walked headlong into a nervous gang of girls without noticing, scaring them away from Coffee Day Café. The bouncer guy had found this very funny (I hate his guts by the way) and had motioned my girl to observe me.

I grinned sheepishly at them with a men will be boys kind of look. And walked away huffed. However the after effects of her smile lingered with me, strong and everlasting like the smell of my socks (note to self: quota of one disgusting comparison over for this post). Everything in the mall began to look brighter, and my work for the day didn’t seem so hectic after all. I was even prepared to walk all the way upto the barber shop to get my unsightly stubble replaced by an irresistible clean shaven silkiness (if half of what the Gillete Mach 3 advertisement promises is true)

Ah, the simple pleasures of life! A smile is all it takes to make the world a better place. So I need to stop cribbing and start smiling more even if others take me for a dork, I reasoned.