Teenage romance with uncles

 

Teenage girls of the present generation are hyper-smart. They know exactly how to act as pickpockets on sweet-toothed, grey-haired, balding uncles who easily believe in fairy castles. Just to feel the breezy spring of youthful, naughty talks he has a few teenage girl-friends who keep stabbing his pockets for buying costly gifts for their real, young boyfriends. One of his little friends cajoled the liberal-hearted uncle with honeyed words to an extent that it found him joyful enough to open his wallet, fully allowing himself to be stabbed deeply in pockets. It enabled the little girl to buy an Apple phone for her local history-sheeter, goonish boyfriend who had grown glum after a recent beating by the police. So in a way the gentleman helped them in darning the torn collar of their shirt. Of course he didn’t know about the end point of his gift; wasn’t aware that his gift has landed in thuggish claws instead of her soft, fair, pinkish hands. He came to know about it from another source. He was bawling and snarling for a few moments but then his aggrieved energies subsided as they are supposed to be for a man in his late forties. With grating but muffled anger he told me that she had lied to him. ‘We have four cars and my father runs a business,’ the smart teenager had lied about their financial standing. She turned out to be the daughter of a small corner-shop tailor in a narrow alley where a car couldn’t even enter. Her father had a rusty moped only.

Another little one tried the same trick with me at a popular eating point, named Madras restaurant, in the town. I’m eating a dosa with unhindered zeal, having arrived from a trip to the Himalayas, and feeling ravenously hungry after the daylong journey. Maybe she got this sweetened assumption that a graying man in forties spiritedly gorging on spiced dosa is still caught in the unwearying aroma of youthful desires. This proclivity turns the purse strings of such men very loose.

These are very smart kids with their personalized set of endearments to fan the air of desire in the men in their forties. From their clothing and bearing they estimate the gentleman’s financial worth and calculate that thousands can be easily drawn out, while a young man would give hundreds only in terms of dining and petty gifts and would demand much costlier returns in privacy.

She is sitting facing me; her young, boyish boyfriend facing the other way. She ogles at me with love-drenched eyes—at my purse rather. I’m eating very spiritedly, so she thinks I have enough youthful strings to be hummed by the fingers of desire and lose my grip on the wallet. The maiden finery spreading sensuous shine for a liaison. She spreads her arms on the table, puts her chin on the back of her palms and takes a sniper-precision aim for long moments, spraying translucent bullets of fake love. The air around me is profoundly speckled with feigned love-notes. Little does she realize that I lose myself to books only. I smile, get up, pay the bill and leave gently. I take a last look from outside. She is grimacing. ‘Of no use anymore!’ she must be judging me. Well, I’m happy to be of no use in the way they mean it.