I was the Diwali Grinch.

The whole office is lit up. Everyone is in a damn sari. And as if to remind me that I am not in one, there is a sari strung up from the ceiling falling over my damn laptop…cos that’s the happy thing to do. And then I have people climbing up my claustrophobic workspace to tie a cutout lantern from the ceiling. It was cubicle decoration day, and we were competing with the liquor bottle team. They had placed around fifty empty ( 😦 ) beer bottles on each cubicle, dressed up of course, stripped off their earlier life, like reformed criminals, and now in Christmas lights: yes we beg/borrow/steal our traditions as per workplace constraints against fire, and nobody likes those fake fire drills, so we definitely can’t take the real deal.

In the middle of last night, someone bursts a cracker, and I scream an expletive as loud…my hubby comes running….”what the f**k…don’t they have a sense of time….is this the time to burst a cracker”…he says..”baby its only nine…you just slept off early”….and I’m even more pissed ‘cos I don’t have the moral high ground to scream at the happy bursters….and I walk….the zombie in disneyland…’cos I have no life…or can’t pretend to have one….and nothing gives me bigger joy than to sink my damn teeth into the nearest happy holidayer and watch her turn zombie.

Back in office, I go to the loo and return, and find a gigantic pot on my work cupboard, and not the kind that would actually make me happy. No this was the one that’s muddy, and all set to host a nice happy lily.   I look further and find half my CDs  ripped off the table, their paper end pasted with insufferably luminescent color paper….and strung into a wonderful attempt at a flower curtain, hung from the ceiling again, sheer reflective brilliance. The only thing missing to make the place more happy was the stringing of the office Grinch up there too, in a bakrid like sacrifice…to finish the earlier beg/borrow/steal from other festivals cycle, and also my own misery.

But of course, the Grinch must return, happily back to civilization, and I am dragged by my hair into a dance charade, which is like a dance version of charades, with the dumbness still included, and I don’t mean just the keeping the mouth shut kinda dumb. The whole room was screeching at the sexy twirl of that nerdy booty and guessing the song. The other team was hooting. “We know it, we know it, how can these guys not guess it”. Supposedly in Bollywood, each song has a classic guessable dance move. Hmm….I learnt something new about humankind and now I am redeemed (because that’s how we grinches roll).

Selfieeee!! Can you selfie a crowd? I didn’t know this either. Our director struggles to hold the entire group into the frame of his phone. Supposedly to show all the holidaying and absent employees what they were missing. I’m the only lifeless zombie. I struggle into a smile while I slink behind somebody, only to be caught by my savvy director. The guy was good. “Amel, don’t be shy”, says Sana, a team mate. Sana was a fire cracker. She should come with a permitted noise and brightness level or I shall whine like a polluted mother earth, unable to take the weight of it all.

If anybody’s looking for me….you’ll find me in that pot.