Hyd Diaries: 4 - The wall of Venus..

There is a saying that when a door closes somewhere, a window always opens up somewhere else, you just need to look for it. This is what happened with us too. When the 'lady across the courtyard' left and closed the door, another window of the house on the third floor opened. It was vacation time and a beautiful young bird had migrated over there from some Siberia. We still quote this as one of the two proofs for God's existence and his desire to keep his children constantly happy; the other being beer.

Soon the attention of the whole gang shifted from the kitchen to the window by the hall. A money plant which was kept on that window seal soon became a victim of over-watering and finally rot to death. Like models walking on the ramp, it became a habit for us to walk past the open window few dozen times a day. Like people offering peanuts to caged animals in the zoo, one day she came out to the balcony and smiled at us. Like monkeys delighted by peanuts, we jumped up and down and reciprocated by playing 'Smile, the everlasting smile' from our custom made car stereo speakers. She should have found us quite amusing or probably due to lack of any other entertainment opportunities out there, she decided to play along.

So one day when we came back from college, there was this card lying next to the front door. Inside there was a small note with words like love, smile and window. A couple of days later we got another card and a teddy bear from the balcony. It was possible to drop stuff on to the balcony from the terrace. You can imagine the excitement when we got some unexpected response like this. So for Diwali when the whole apartment gathered at the terrace to burst crackers together, we decided to do a little show of our own. Dressed in the best clothes we reached the terrace but she was nowhere to be seen. We even had pooled in all our money and bought crackers to 'participate' in the festivities. The worst was yet to come.. we never saw her after that... she was just gone.

But in a week's time we got another letter, this time posted from Bangalore. Our heroine had gone back home and she sent us a small poem. She had also mentioned her Yahoo chat ID - "V3-Venus". By then we had enough memorabilia that we decided to dedicate a wall in the house for her. Thus we stripped off all the 'Pamela Andersons' and 'Claudia Schiffers' and put all her cards, poems and letters out there... and the wall of Venus was created. The letters kept coming at regular intervals and the wall increasingly grew colorful. We also created a chat ID to communicate with her and all of us used to login to that account and chat whenever we found time. We used to chat so much that eventually she had to rope in one of her friends also to handle the load!!

All good things in life should come to an end and in this case also it wasn't different. Don't know whether she got bored with the game or she visited Chennai for summer vacation and found another bunch of monkeys there, the communications died out after a while. The long distance romance had somehow lost its charm and we also decided to move on... looking for another open window or door!!