Fishtail..

Today I was talking to my mom like I always do when she said something that caused me to go back. Once when we were driving either from chennai to cochin or from cochin to chennai, there was this railroad crossing kinda place. We had a lorry parked right in front of us, waiting for the train to pass and let us through. As soon as the bar preventing us from crossing the tracks was lifted my mom, who was at the wheel, got a sudden burst of inspiration from the spirit of Speed Racer (I'm assuming he died since no one who talks that long without taking a breath lives to be too old). My mom revs the car and overtakes the lorry and is heading for the tracks (the lorry guy gave her the little wave by signal which stands for "you can quit bugging me and just go on now" ).

Suddenly we had a lorry bearing down on us from the opposite direction and even though my mom tried to get us completely out of the way she was only partially successful. The result was that a good portion of the car was dented and an even greater portion of my mom's ego was bruised (See....she had thought herself capable of teaching speed racer a thing or two, one thing about driving and another about breathing in between sentences).

As we proceeded on the atmosphere in the car was weird. We knew that once we got back to Cochin, oh yea, thats where we were going, our relatives would be all over this. There would be all sorts of theories flying around the place like "She was drunk", "Family has no control", "Bad car", "She was drunk", "Faulty railway gate", "Government must change", "Global warming", "She was drunk" and so on. In order to avoid this we decided to come up with a believable story upon hearing which people would like at us with golden sympathy dripping from their faces and also, all the alcohol related issues would fail to exist any longer.

I was so excited at this prospect of being able to contribute to such an important story, and it was at this point that I uttered the magic word. "FISHTAIL".

I had come across this word in some tintin comic or somethin and I thought it sounded pretty cool.

Y'all know how the tail of a fish moves in a direction opposite to the rest of its body right? Well, this word is also used in connection to the movements of objects other than fish (yes, and also seaweed..come on..!!).

Suddenly everyone was thinking about this concept, of telling the folks back home that the lorry fishtailed into us thereby causing the damage seen on the car.

Whether that story ever saw the light of day I do not remember, but the creation of the story in itself was as grand an adventure as I could have hoped for at that point.

I think even my little brother threw in a few comments here and there.

I just wanted to record my memories of that event.

magus.