Looking for the Silver Lining

No matter how much you crib about the pitfalls of a middle class married life, it’s never a nice thing to battle it out on your own in a lonely city (for official purposes) far away from the man. I genuinely cannot believe I just said that…but there you have it. Loneliness does cruel things to your left brain.
So while I was battling it out on a sultry May evening last week, feeling weepy and helpless as always, a surprising silver lining appeared, so completely out of the blue! It’s a pity I’ve ignored it for so long…the unintentional humour on Indian roads.
I was in an auto rickshaw, mindlessly screeching across the city, through a sea of angry traffic, feeling the moisture in the wind. And then I noticed it on both sides of the road…the names of the shops, and the unintentional humour that goes with them. Here are some examples:

• ‘Anbu Tailors, we make gentlemen’...I am frightfully serious. Dear old Anbu, I presume has decided to make a gentleman out of every living male, through his Armani-esque finish.
• ‘James Bond Laundry’…I have no freaking clue about this. Why would the sexy spy want himself to be synonymous with soiled clothes of everyday people?
• ‘Jam Jam Biriyani’…whatever! A dude sitting inside, surrounded, almost gheraoed, by super oily woks and loads of empty egg shells and onion peels, waiting to serve a sticky lump of yellow rice.
• ‘SMS Nursing Home’…considering the fact that I am in a southern city, this could well be an abbreviation for Saravana Muthukumar Subramanian. It was a pink mezzanine building with three windows, all of varied shapes and sizes. The windows were at such close proximity that I almost expected to see the head of a patient from the first window, the torso from the second, and the feet from the third.
• ‘Cool Joint’…’Cool’ is as cold as it gets. Everything in this city stops at this sad temperature, despite the soaring mercury. These ‘Cool’ places usually reek of stale pineapples, jack fruits, mangoes and the occasional kiwi due to the advent of the IT nouveau riche. They are almost always full of sticky tables with half-eaten ice cream blobs on them…sometimes mangled with the remains of smashed ripe bananas.
• ‘Born Babies’… meaning what exactly? Does it mean that this place sells clothes for all humans who are born babies? Do we have humans of any other kind? I am still guessing.
• ‘Sri Shiddeshwara Tiffan Centar’…need I say more?

Conclusion: No matter how completely unbearable life and living gets, it’s never too difficult to find fall guys, misplaced humour, crude jokes, and silver linings.