Triska-blah-blah...

Triskaidekaphobia – I like the sound of this word and I was going to name this article just that. However, due to its longish and multi-syllabled attribute, I chose to name this piece of writing “Triska-blah-blah”. This may also be interpreted as my humble endeavour to ameliorate the effort a reader will have to put in to correctly pronounce the title and in turn, to endear and impress my on-the-verge-of-being-termed-Extinct readers (Being in a Sales and Marketing domain does have certain profound unseemly effects on your head)

The multi-syllabled and complex word this post is based on means this: – “Extreme superstition regarding the number Thirteen”. Now though, I pray not to be looked down upon as a girl who holds the back of her palm to her mouth to suppress a scream when a black cat crosses the road. I am also not that girl who carries a horse-shoe in her purse for the want of good luck (there could be other reasons unapparent to the superstitious eyes for which I may carry a horse shoe with me. Escaping from a mob in a darkened alley, after having hit the robber with the horse shoe in my purse could be one of those obscure reasons) I am however, an unfortunate and consistent victim of the comrade of such superstitious enthusiasts. 

A passable narrator that I am, allow me to recount some such tales of my predicaments.

Incident 1: Come lunch break, we are at the canteen.  I take a spoon full of rice that was served and I shove it into my mouth. I chew. I recoil. The rice in my mouth reminds me of when, as a kid, I once tried to chew our carpet. Only, this was like a shredded carpet wet with yellow liquid, devoid of salt. I choke it down my throat and look around for the table where the little salt shaker is housed. It is on the table next to mine. I pat the shoulder of that table’s occupant, outstretch my hand and ask her to pass me the salt. Her eyes widen, her mouth turns into a humongous “o” and she inhales audibly for about 5 seconds. I only asked her to pass on the salt to me. I did not ask her to gorge her friend’s eyes  out with her fork. I look around me; shocked stares everywhere (wow I just rhymed!). I am at loss of words or apprehension before someone whispers into my ears and tells me, it is not okay to ask someone to pass the salt by hand, unless I want her to become my deadliest enemy. This one simple act of assistance, apparently, tends to jeopardize, stamp on and expunge anything that might be left of the relationship between the giver and taker of the broken crystals of Sodium Chloride.

The same, I was educated later, also applies to tamarind, chilli powder and oil. So next time, be warned before you ask someone for such a monumentally callous favour. 

Incident 2: It is 6.00 pm, and I have less than twenty minutes before the end of my office hours. I am running all around the place, looking for a colleague of mine. He is not a very close friend and people mostly consider him slightly demented. But I have to get some very important piece of information from him before he leaves from work. I finally locate him in a meeting room. Just as I enter, he is hurriedly leaving the place, off to elsewhere. I ask him “Hey! Wait. Where are you going?” The guy screeches to a surprisingly abrupt halt and looks up at me with his eyes ablaze and nostrils fuming. I, for a second, wonder if I cursed him, his family, his close friends, his neighbours, his neighbour’s parents and his puppy in that one innocuous question of mine. He says “How could you do this to me? I was going to ask my boss if I could get a week off for a vacation with my wife!” Meanwhile, I am still

gawking at him. He shakes an unsteady index finger and says “Oh don’t you dare pretend you don’t know! You knew that if you ask someone where he is going, just as he is leaving to do some work, he will fail miserably. Now I know for sure my boss is not going to permit me for that vacation. And if my wife breaks up with me because of this, it is all your fault!” I am still staring at him, my jaw half open as he storms out of the room. It is possible for one to be stark raving bonkers. He is. 

Note: That he subsequently did get permitted for a week-long vacation did not, unsurprisingly, persuade him to apologise to me any time after that. And, to this day, I smell a slightly charred odour when he glares at me. 

But this incident has not failed to incite in me, a sense of warning before I ask someone where he is going. So these days, I go around asking people the list of places, where they might decide to go to all through the day so that I won’t have to ask them just as they are leaving. And it has earned me some cool names like Aish-Wacko and Ms. Goofy (though I fancy only the latter).

Further encounters with people who reckon it is very unlucky to sneeze when someone is talking, who also find it lucky if the person sneezed twice under the very same circumstance, who stumble on a stone on the road and say they can’t move for another minute to enervate the bad luck generated by their stumbling, who won’t wear a black dress on a Friday or to a family festival, and other ludicrous cuckoos, have rendered me sceptical, or maybe even indifferent. I think someone from the world of science should take this up for study, as a basis for their thesis (I did it again! I rhymed without meaning to!! ) and find out how bizarrely futile people could be.

On a conspicuously noteworthy contrary, Triskaidekaphobia leaves me a tad vacillatory. With the onset of the year 2013, my “writing” took a serious blow. It coiled, shuddered into tumultuous seizures and fell unconscious. It woke up groggily only after it was very sure that the year 2013 was well gone. Even now, my “writing” has a serious medical case of Triskaidekaphobia. It still shakes uncontrollably and does bewildered gestures when I talk about the year 2013. 

Nonetheless, the word Triskaidekaphobia still appeals to me. It sounds like I am conducting a mini orchestra with my tongue, upper palette and lips when I utter that word. Triskaidekaphobia, triskaidekaphobia, triskaidekaphobia...

P.S: The clip arts I flick from Google search never let me down! Thanks to those sites that let me  download water-marked copies of their images!