Scaring People

From childhood it’s been a hobby of mine to scare people—I startle them in guilty moments and play on their phobias…OK, fine. I mostly just did that to Marian because it’s always funny.  One minute she’s up in the schoolroom, thinking she has convinced Mom that she is doing her math when really she is reading Little House on the Prairie for the twentieth time (I’m all for multiple readings of good books, but Laura Ingalls Wilder makes me want to ride a buffalo over a cliff). The next minute she’s jumping up in the air, hitting her head on the ceiling as all tall people do when they exceed the normally accepted boundaries of human height, and grabbing at her math book…one minute she’s confessing to me her deep dark fear of finding a dead body behind a shower curtain and the next minute she’s wrapped in a towel, screaming at my doorway holding a bundle of soggy clothes that looked just like the corpse of someone who had been murdered just before slipping and falling into the bath. 

Scaring people can be wonderfully cathartic and stress-relieving. It also gives one a sense of accomplishment if one has put any kind of careful and/or spontaneous thought into the act of terror. But as I found out this week when I scared two separate groups of people at two different times completely by accident, it can still be funny. And laughing at other people really is a way of bonding across cultures. For example…

I was off for my morning run the other day. Now that it’s getting lighter earlier, I can go running earlier, which is nice because there are less pedestrians (four-legged and two-legged) wandering around in the streets, blocking my tiny paths around mud puddles and pot holes. (I hate having to stop in the middle of a run to wait for a cow to saunter around and give me room to get by.) But I found out that a solitary runner, in a place where morning exercise means standing in a group and clapping together or laughing as loudly (and fake-ly) as possible, can be a suspicious person.  Since I hate running dead ends, I always try to find as many loops as possible—around two blocks or three or even one, it is better than getting to the end of the road and having to turn around.  It always looks like you forgot where you were going. Well, as I was running around one of my little loops, I happened to come up behind two unsuspecting ladies…one lady heard my footsteps behind her and suddenly grabbed the lady with her and yelled, “Run! Hurry!” Then they looked back and saw me, and as I apologized profusely while laughing and continuing to run in place (because I hate stopping), they also laughed (embarrassedly) and we had a quick bonding moment in the street. Later, because it’s India, Karma struck me for my inconsiderate, culturally inappropriate pastime, and a bug got stuck in my eyelashes. That was traumatic, though, so I won’t say anything else about it, except that I did NOT stop running.

Later on that day when I was no longer running, I managed to scare some of my friends when I used the wrong word to tell them that I had a problem. The problem was that our office water filter was not working, but I made it seem like there was a DISASTER happening to me--one could argue with the prevalence of arsenic in the water system of Patna that me potentially contracting cancer could be considered a disaster, but it didn’t necessitate that my friend and his sick wife rush right over (and they did).  We laughed again and then had fun hanging out in the office while we called someone to come fix the filter and had a Hindi lesson. I've got to say, it’s kind of annoying learning languages from books. The expression I used is translated in every book as “I have a problem,” but the connotation is that impending doom is coming, apparently.  Like the word “dhobi” which is in every single Hindi book I have ever seen and always used in sentence examples (The dhobi is washing the clothes. The dhobi was washing the clothes. The dhobi had washed the clothes. The dhobi is about to have been wishing that he had been almost having been washing the clothes.). Then I use the word to suggest that we hire a washerman (dhobi in case you didn’t figure that out from the context) to wash some bedding we had purchased and the room erupts in laughter.  I learned that calling someone a ‘dhobi’ or especially a ‘son of a dhobi’ is a profound insult and could potentially land me in a fight. So at least that language mistake was totally useful: I now know a great and devastating insult to throw at people who annoy me.

Before I sign off this blog post, which I am writing because I missed my train and now I have lots of extra time with my new beautiful wireless internet, I want to post a beautiful photo of my little sister screaming over the shower corpse…since she posted some photos of some of my earlier hijinks in her usually deep and insightful blog (www.inkblotcoffee.blogspot.com) which you probably all read already because she is so famous.

Faces are blurred to protect the terrorized.