Silence of the Mallus

Lazy sunday afternoon and a relative decides to drop in. Nothing wrong with that except that I don't know the relative very well and my Malayalam is passable at best.

As it is I'm not very good at making conversations (as some women I know would gladly testify), so I knew uncomfortable silences were going to be the order of the day. To add to the piquant sitation, I didn't have a T.V that would have helped tide over the lulls in conversation. There was nothing to it but to see the event throught its logical conclusion.

Our man turned up with a friend in tow who turns out to be yet another shy mallu whose name I managed to completely forget 2 seconds after he'd told me.

So there we were - three mallu's in a room trying our best to keep the boat of conversation afloat. In 10 mintues flat we had covered the usual topics regarding life, work, weather and health. After that it was long moments of fidgeting, staring out through the window at nothing in particular, examining the floor and other symptoms of men who wished they were somewhere else. The mallu-whose-name-I-forget seemed to be happy to sit silently throughout the conversation (or lack thereof) with a bemused expression on his face. I'm suprised he didn't burst out in a guffaw at my atrocious Malayalam wherein I defied every grammatical rule and logic in the book.

When we did have a conversation of sorts it was more like a question and answers session with mostly me asking the questions and the other(s) giving the answers. It wouldn't have been so bad if my questions hadn't sounded so contrived and utterly pointless to the point of being ridiculous. There was also a fatal flaw in this type of conversation - I had to constantly think up new questions every few minutes to keep up the conversation, which isn't easy I tell you when you have nothing in common with the other participants.

Anyhow, after 45 minutes of this utter torture had gone by, my relative glanced at his watch furiously (never mind that he'd been doing that for the past 20 minutes) and decided that he finally liked the position of the hour and the minute hand for him to throw in the towel thereby putting us all out of our misery.

"Okay then, I think we'd better be going now," he said. I would have enthusiastically shook his hand at this announcement if it hadn't been for my conscious effort at politeness. Instead, I merely feigned surprise and uttered a word two involving the words "oh" "already" and "okay" in more or less that order.

The exit was calm and controlled consisting of hurried goodbyes and much bashing of the lift-call button.

And so ended a boring lazy sunday afternoon. I don't think I'll be seeing my relative for a while.