Tied in a game

Three disparate objects

Rahul, aged 12, joins Shalini’s birthday party exactly about 30 minutes late in a baggy shirt and a casual looking trouser.  Shalini, looking graceful, in a wine red dress opens the door.

They are friends from early childhood, living in the same apartment complex and going to the same school. Now, with their teen maturity, birthday celebrations are low-key affair with only the close family friends. Decorations and other paraphernalia have given way to more of discussions, schools, preparations and the things happening around.

Apparently Rahul is not carrying a gift, which makes Shalini angry.

Shalini obstructs Rahul at the door and asks with a tinge of anger and mischievous smile on the face: “Where is my birthday gift?

Rahul answers with a naughty grin:  “I was busy the whole day and did not manage time. Will make sure you get it next time”.

After little more chit-chat and banter, Rahul is allowed to enter. He plops himself unceremoniously on the bean bag at the corner, which was in Shalini’s possession till now.

Then, he slowly brings out one small tear drop sized ear ring from his back pocket and hands it over to Shalini.

Rahul: “Here is your gift”.

Shalini (utterly shocked): “Only one!”

Rahul (promptly with a smirk): “Gave you the other one last year. Have you lost it?”

This makes Shalini angrier and she is at a loss what to do with this boy while other friends are amused.

Shalini after few minutes, as if nothing has happened and in a cool disposition, hands over Rahul half a piece of cake on a plate.

Rahul (with a veil of innocence on the face): “Only half, is there a shortage?”

Shalini (disguising smile): “Be happy that you got the other half three days back in the school on Sudip’s birthday “.

Shrugging his shoulder, Rahul, says “Ok, ok”, being satisfied internally that his plan has worked that Shalini is now trying to take revenge in some way or other.

Friends and other family friends are quite familiar with these bitter-sweet verbal dual between these two and everyone enjoys as it never gets ugly and both know where to stop and draw the line.

However, Shalini’s mother jumps in and tries to cool down the warring folks by hugging both of them together trying to divert the topic to something else.

While on the rounds to meet others around the house, the picture of the WoW prompt on Shalini’s study table caught Rahul’s attention and he enquired about it.

“Interesting”, says Rahul after getting the details from Shalini’s elder sister- a writer and blogger for quite some time now. Few other friends also joined them at the study.

Rahul (addressing everyone): “Let’s put our brains to work for a fun game.  Let’s connect all these three either through a common word or sequence of events.” Everyone seems to like the idea and agreed, including Shalini, who was so far sulking at everything Rahul was talking about.

Abhi, a gadget freak amongst the friends, comes up with the idea that the ear ring is actually a Bluetooth device which gets paired with the smart phone to make an order for a birthday cake.

Seema conjures up with a short story that they went out for celebration at Dominos on her baby sister’s birthday last month. The cake has just arrived when her sister started having a pain in her left ear from the recently done ear piercing. To relieve her of the pain, her mother took out left ear ring thinking that will take care of the matter in next few minutes. When the ache did not ease, her father used the smart phone application to find out the nearest doctor for a quick visit. The party started in full swing once they came back. 

While everyone is busy with what can be the possible stories or events, the author-Jay, incidentally present at the same birthday party to pick his daughter comes up with an idea of involving everyone in a picture dumb charades.

 Jay will provide the connecting clues and everyone has to guess the connection.

With that, he holds out the ear ring.

When someone says “ear ring” amongst other guesses like “small”, “beautiful”, “jewelry”, he points to the “ear ring” and gestures to break it into parts in the way one does as per the rules on dumb charades.

They decide on to consider the second half that is “ring” and then Jay imitates a music player playing a tune.

After different attempts for few minutes, Tua, holding out the smart phone from Shalini’s mom, comes with “tone” which completed the word as “ring tone”. That makes sense to everyone and they settle with that answer. Everyone is satisfied and happy that ear ring and phone got connected with the common word “ring tone”.  With that being done, the cake is left, pushing everyone’s brain into a spin to dig more on to what can be the next connection.

While everyone is aware of various kinds of ring tones as piece of music, jingles, the next indication from Jay comes in the form of decoration around, balloons, babies enjoying a party.

The way Jay presents the clue with his immaculate mannerisms-it was not difficult for everyone to get to the famous “Happy Birth Day To You” song as the ring tone from the phone indicating that cake follows just after the song.

With glee in their faces and content at being able to ultimately decode the connections, everyone thanks Jay to come up with this teaser in the short span of time he is there. They all look happy, satisfied. Rahul and Shalini did not notice when they forgot the initial acrimony that they both were feigning at each other and got involved into the hilarious flow. 

Dinner is served by now. Everyone gorges over the delicious food and enjoys the blast in the party.

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This post is a part of Write Over the Weekend, an initiative for Indian Bloggers by BlogAdda.

This weekend we have a picture prompt for writing.