Once upon a time, long before you, me or even the hero of this story was born, there lived a vivacious duck called Duckie who fell madly in love with Rake, a handsome drake. Everybody warned her he was only after one thing but she ignored them and foolishly went headlong into the relationship. So Duckie and Rake quacked their hearts out to each other and finally, she let him have his wicked way.
After about a year into their relationship, her biological clock started ticking so loudly, other ducks panicked and began to give her a very wide berth. They assumed she was a suicide bomber for Lashkar-e-Tauba or some other nasty terrorist group. She knew she had to do something really quickly or else the CIA would be on her trail.
She tentatively broached the subject of marriage and spoke longingly about the patter of little webbed feet but Rake curtly said the world was over populated already and went back to his newspaper. She quietly went off the pill and soon started waddling about in an ungainly fashion. She knew she had to confess to Rake before the pretty Mother Care smocks came out. One night, after a torrid roll in the hay, she mustered up courage and told him she had a few buns in the oven. Rake said no thanks, he was on a zero carb diet. Poor Duckie had to muster up some more courage to spell it out clearly. There was a pregnant silence. Then Rake quietly picked up his toothbrush and stormed out of the house. Last heard of, he was living in sin with a fallen duck called Suzie Wong.
So there was Duckie, pregnant and deserted. She laid her eggs in a little shady nook near a pond and spent days keeping them warm and cosy while she flipped through child care magazines and articles by Germaine Greer. Occasionally, ducks who were liberated enough to speak to an unmarried mother-to-be dropped by for a chat. One by one the eggs hatched and Duckie forgot her heartache and was happy and excited.
There was only one cloud on Duckie’s horizon: the hero of our story still wasn’t born. He was in the last egg and stubbornly refused to hatch. Duckie started getting impatient. She hated being fat and frumpy. Indeed, once while glancing at her reflection in the pond, she was horrified to realise that she’d started looking like her mother: homely instead of comely. She wanted to get back to her svelte figure as soon as possible, but instead of swimming 100 laps a day, she had to park herself on the egg like a couch potato and watch re-runs of F.R.I.E.N.D.S on TV.
Finally, one stormy monsoon day our hero emerged from the egg. To say that he wasn’t Cover Boy material would be the understatement of the millennium. Next to him, even Frankenstein’s monster looked like a gorgeous hunk of manhood. He was a dingy gray instead of cheerful sunshine yellow. To make matters worse, he had a blotchy red birthmark on one wing. While Duckie was speechless, the other ducks started talking. Some said he was a turkey. Others said he was a you know what. All agreed that it was the same thing. And though Duckie did her best to protect him by loudly exclaiming, “Don’t you think he has his father’s beak,” nobody was fooled.
His siblings named him Ugh and teased him mercilessly about his looks. Even Duckie made it perfectly clear that she favoured her other ducklings. Ugh was very unhappy. On a cold day in December, Ugh decided that he couldn’t take it anymore. He picked up his meager possessions and ran away from home.
He spent a few months doing solitary on a lake, swimming up and down to keep warm, when one day he noticed a flock of the most beautiful birds he had ever seen in his life: they had long, slender necks and were as white as snow. He thought he was dreaming and bent down into the water to splash his face when he was struck by his own reflection. He looked just like the beautiful birds around him. He thought he had died of the cold without knowing it and this was his next avatar since he paid a heavy price for his karma by having a miserable past life as an exceptionally ugly duckling. Suddenly, one of the graceful creatures glided up to him and politely asked to get a closer look at the birthmark on his right wing. Then he hugged him, saying “Yo, bro.”
Ugh was perplexed, but the stranger showed him an identical birthmark on his right wing and said they were twins separated at birth, just like brothers in tedious old-fashioned Bollywood flicks. He took him to meet his real mother, a beautiful swan, who clasped him to her bosom and said she dropped him in Duckie’s nest when he was just a little egg because she had been taught in school that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. She wept and begged him to forgive a foolish old woman. Ugh tried to live happily ever after with his new found family but didn’t succeed.
His hot new looks went to his head. He attracted more chicks than teen stars in vampire movies could. Within a few months he became the mascot for international ballet troupes performing Swan Lake and frequently toured London, Paris, Rome, Tokyo and New York with the jet set. Unfortunately, he fell in with a sex, drugs and heavy metal crowd, and over time became puffy, florid and horizontally challenged: a lot like Elvis after he had buried his pelvis under junk food.
Once again everyone made fun of his looks. It was a déjà vu of his unhappy childhood. Ugh had a nervous breakdown and was sent to a lunatic asylum called The Cuckoo’s Nest. It was here that he finally lived happily ever after because everybody had too many problems of their own to bother about looks.
Moral: When success goes to your head, you join the brain dead.
Rupa Gulab’s latest book is The Great Depression Of The 40s( http://www.flipkart.com/great-depression-40s-rupa-gulab-book-014306780x) Check more books by her in the Store.