Hold Thy Judgement!

I’m a bad, bad person. But in my defense, I want to say that I had to do what I did. There was simply no other way out. Now once you have heard me out on this one, I will proceed forward to narrate the exact incident (which I am really NOT proud off). Till then, DON’T judge me.

The crux of the issue is, that I had to pinch a kid in the train. And by pinch I obviously don’t mean I stole it. Okay here’s the thing. I was sitting in the train on a homeward journey from college one afternoon, minding my own business and fantasizing my afternoon siesta to the point of drooling. I pulled out my paper and began solving the crossword, when this woman got in at one of the stations. Her son was with her, around one year of age. I ignored them, until the woman made the boy squeeze on the opposite fourth seat. She handed him a packet of Zalani Jaljeera Powder (???) to…er…lick off from his hand. Moreover, the boy split that stuff on the seat, which he actually stood up and licked RIGHT OFF THE SEAT!! Most women around me wanted to throw up around a week’s meals to commemorate the event, but I suppose we were too shocked to do even that. One woman shut her pack of Good Day biscuits, and I bet she silently vowed never to eat anything in her life again. So well, what was the mother doing when her kid was ‘cleaning’ the seat? She gave him a benevolent smile and said Aisa nahi karneka!

I know the confusion that’s crawling about in your minds. If the kid licked the seats clean, why did I pinch him? No, no. To know that, you need to hang on a bit. Anyway, the next thing the mother did was to bully her way to our seats, made the boy sit right next to me, and promptly plopped down where the boy formerly sat. Immediately she handed him a vada pav this time. And I prayed there would be no more casualties in the second course. If there would be, I swear I would have thrown up all over him. And I was right! There were casualties. Apart from the fact that the vada pav eating induced machaak machaak sounds (really loud ones), the kid’s nose was to snot, what Niagara Falls is to water. This whole exercise was punctuated by continuous staring at me, like I was a really phenomenal zoo exhibit. I even chose to ignore that, till the kicking started. He was supposedly swinging its feet, making neat shoe prints on my new jeans. I swerved my foot rather harder than I intended, and he stopped doing that annoying thing after he got the point. Five minutes of peace, and that is when he laid his head on my shoulder like we were in love or something. I had had enough just about then. The last thing I need is coots from a two feet tall monster. I jerked my shoulder sharply, and this time the freak started crying. His even freakier mother wasn’t bothered even then. What happened next, you will NOT believe. This child took the vada pav it was eating, actually WIPED a portion of the train wall with it, and promptly ate it. And the cherry on the cake was, he wiped his grubby paws on my bag! After the initial shock of watching him eat dirt of the walls, the hand-wiping struck me, and that is when I had to give him the smallest pinch I could. I’m sorry, but then, I’m really not. The crying spree induced by the pinch made his mother take him onto her lap, which is when peace reigned the compartment.

Do you still wanna talk about judging me, matey?