The Look

Cramped like a doll in a cardboard box -- at the window seat in a crowded bus, you travel to work. You still can't figure whether to put your feet up and rest your knee on the back of the seat ahead or ground your feet on the floor and sit uptight. You fidget and fiddle to fit. You wonder how the fat fuck next to you with a sticky sweaty white shirt can sit with such deadpan tranquility while you try every feather in your number-fucked mind to achieve that calm! Yes, your mind's perpetually number-fucked. Dates, Schedules, To-do lists, Birthdays, Meetings, Appointments, Friend requests on your blackberry, your GMAT score, the damn E.M.I, the number of comments on your twitter post, the money in your wallet, the time on your watch, count of days for your next pay, recurring adjustment in today’s daily budget to compensate for last night's fat dinner bill --- the list's pretty extensive! But all you think of right now is the number of coins you have in your pocket and the tantrum the conductor will throw once you play a prince with no chchutta paisa. Wrestling your hand into your ass, you somehow manage to traject out the wallet. "Teri Maa Ka! No 10 re notes, no fucking coins, not even a 50 - just the damn 500 re note - the jackass is gonna throw a fit." Anxious as hell and full of shit, you squirm like a prisoner and frown like satan’s dick! Showtime! Standing on your head with his botox’d fat-ass grin, the bus conductor looks like Google’s answer to God! You so know he so knows that you don’t have so many coins! The sticky sweaty white shirt fat fuck just bought his ticket with so many coins. They have shared a smirk and formed a team and they know you are a prince. Moment of truth! But something happens just then. As you crunch, you realize it was the front jeans pocket. It always was! The coins – the fucking coins! Their smirk transforms into straightfaces, your straightface into a smile! But your pants are tight. You need to get up to remove the coins. But to get up is to give them respect. You don’t wanna do that! You have a solution! There’s still that tiny space underneath the back of the seat ahead, you can spread and dive your legs straight in. You slant your spine and slide your ass forward to give your hand a clean slip in your front pant. You glide your legs oh-so-smoothly beneath the seat infront, remove the chchutta paisa from your jeans and start pulling back just when you hit the bottom of the front seat with your feet, hard. Fuck! You just kicked the lady’s butt sitting on it; and dude, how!! The lady turns with disgust, you squirm in embarrassment, the fat fuck’s anxious to see what happens next, the conductor’s bugged. They all exchange --- The Look !

If cell phones were monsters, the internet would be an orgy! But ‘the look’ – the look is inevitably the mother of all communication. We all give the look - be it conscious or faint, plotted or impromptu, straight or slant, focused or hidden! Because spiritually, as mammals - that is ‘THE’ only way we truly speak! And cynically, the lone way to determine a lie is only by the fucking eye! (or more recently, the lie detector polygraph machine).

So when you walk past people on the street, turn back after taking tickets from a window, sit in your car waiting for the traffic signal to go green, waiting at the doctor’s clinic – you consciously (more often than not) or otherwise, make eye contact with most people at your arms distance. Customarily, those strangers return your temporary gaze. But just at that moment when they fix their tangent with yours – you abruptly withdraw your look. You suspend and move forward. You let the moment pass. You stop communicating because there’s frankly no fucking need to, well – most times!

You enter a washroom in the movie interval. Most guys subconsciously dread to pee in between 2 other guys. They’d rather wait for one of the corner urinals to be vacated. It is by far, the weirdest feeling on the face of the earth to be in between and at kissing distance from 2 guys taking a leak. But as in most theatre intervals, the space and time crunch gets the better of you and ‘To Pee or not To Pee’ is no longer the question. ‘You got to do what you got to do’ takes center stage! And here comes ‘The Look’. You make it so obvious that you aren’t looking to your side that you go totally deadpan. The side look, in most cases here, comes with extremely emotionless-driven-rawness. With absolutely no expressions, your tangible relief of having a good pee is surpassed by the psychological relief of having the guy next to you zip up and fuck off from there before you! Phew! It is slightly simpler in the queens section though - Unlike men, a woman expects and knows that it is highly likely that she will be checked out by all women in front of the basin mirror. But they will still do the side glance. And if caught on camera – that is so beautiful sometimes!

The Look is always the first initiator of any communication– the first smiling eyes when you meet your soon to be boss, the first time you actually brush skins with the woman you love (lust in most cases), the look your new born gives you when you hold her in your hands. The look is always the last of any communication – when you look at your boss in the eye when you are quitting or getting fired, when you look at your wife when she is calling it off for some fuckbag, when someone you love is breathing his last. The look is the first act and the final act – there is no foreplay in this with a sweet kiss and a Thank you Miss! The look’s the beginning, the look’s the end – the only deal is how many of them are there in between!