Knicq

My sporting prowess has been one of the most well kept secrets about me. It ranks right up there with my various musical talents, my insurmountable courage, my exceptional culinary skills, my unbelievable linguistic capabilities and myriad others which are too secret for even me to know about. Oh, and lets not forget my super-powers – any of them.  There’s that thing to do with memory, for instance, …

For the most part, these are secrets which were locked away in vaults and the keys swallowed – just as they are wont to get done in animations. Most of the vaults were thrown into the ways of erupting volcanoes. The not-so-great thing about secrets though is that they are hard to keep. Every now and then, a secret jumps up at you from behind a door, and takes your breath away. The sporting prowess secret did that to me today. It sort of did a Kung Fu Panda on me actually. I will stop talking in riddles shortly. It is another well-kept secret, my ability to not talk in riddles, that and perhaps the immense gift I have of summing up the gist of the matter with elegance, panache and class – to get to the point in a hurry. But until I do that, stop talking in riddles that is, and let the cat out of the bag about my love for brevity, you must resign yourself to the fact that riddles are the order of the day.

Fate, it would appear, was going about humming a merry tune to herself and minding her own business in general. The tune was catchy, she remembered the words well, the weather was nice, there were clouds aplenty, sunshine in moderate quantities,  and if the swishing trees and their branches were anything to go by, there was quite a nice breeze too; but she couldn’t really know, since she had her airconditioning on despite the wonderful weather out there. “What is one to do?”, she had mused aloud to herself, “with all this dust swirling about in the air, you just can’t roll the windows down.” All in all…, all was well.

And then… she took that turn, and found herself embroiled in the Dubai-Sharjah traffic jam. Panic began to set in, as she tried frantically to cut her way into the fast moving lane; but people were just mean. They would not let her through, not even when they were driving Nissan Sunnies with the red ribbons tied to the center view mirrors. Generally, this is not the kind of people who will risk a scratch/dent on their beloved Sunny by refusing to give way in a traffic jam. Nor did Nissan actually design the Sunny as a car which could play the nudging and pushing game so often played by the Pathan-driven-Corollas and Egyptian/Syrian-driven-antique-BMWs. But it appeared something was amiss today in the general scheme of things – either that or there was a new element at play.  She smelled a conspiracy, but put the thought away for the moment.

She tried again with the Sunny guy, even brought his attention to her manicured nails as she pointed to the blinking indicator, but he was being anything but sunny. Perhaps the sight of something pretty and feminine had awoken the masculinity hidden thus far behind his sizeable moustache. It was quite apparent this was not a fight he was willing to back out of, and Fate was, at this point in time, not exactly in a mood to pick a fight with the moustache macho. So, she decided to try another route. The other route happened to be on the right side of a yellow line, which was incidentally also the wrong side of the law. It reminded her of that phrase she had heard once about one man’s fredom fighter being another’s terrorist. In her current predicament, she could well understand the whole philosophy behind a freedom fighter, and decided to take the (wrong) route on the right side of the yellow line.

Being fate, as she would have it, there was one of those contraptions installed on the road ahead, which caught her in the act of being on the wrong side of the law. “Why do the flashes on these cameras go off like firworks?”, she thought to herself just as the flash lit up her dainty little car, and blinded her for a millisecond. As her vision was restored, she looked around to find that her costly sojourn on the wrong/right side of the yellow line and the subsequent lighting up of the road had in fact been a source of amusement and comic value to quite a number of people. It was at this moment that something clicked just as something snapped in her. So, she thought to herself, it has all been a conspiracy then eh? It was quite obvious to her that there had been a conspiracy to lure her into the traffic jam somehow, and then force her out on the hard shoulder just so she would have to part with a sizeable amount towards fines when she went in to get her car registration renewed.

“So, they like conspiracies then, dont they?”, said Fate. “I will show them conspiracies.”

Now it is a given that when Fate sits down at the drawing table and begins her conspiring, she starts with yours truly as her prime subject. So she began her conspiring, ergo I landed in a Squash court today, carrying a squash racquet, armed to the teeth with ambition and adrenaline pumping through my cholestrol lined blood vessels. My opponent was AP, a life long fiend of a friend. He came in carrying his racquet, armed with his disarming charm, and loaded with his incisive sarcasm and wit which often become his principal allies in a sporting outing. Its a pity he never did play Professional Cricket, or else sledging would hardly have been associated with the Australians. It would have been Pakistan’s second gift to Cricket after reverse swing. The odds were stacked in my favor, heavily. He had never played Squash before, and even though I had played back in 1993, which was another lifetime, I could certainly and safely lay claim to being the more experienced of the two players.

We began hitting the ball. AP relied on his physical fitness and natural sportsmanship to play the game, while I kept banking on my experience and sporting prowess. Seven points into the game, my sporting prowess pulled the “Kung Fu Panda” on me, the ’scroll’ fell as if from the cieling and hit me “bonk!” on the head. I heard Fate collapsing in fits of laughter just as I realized that there was no secret sporting prowess. All the sporting prowess in that squash court belonged to the person who had scored the seven points, and I had yet to score my first point.

Secrets, if you ask me, are over-rated.