Laughter is the best medicine, but what when that is the disease.

This is a story about a time that was a while ago, about a place that was Hyderabad. It was the second time I was in Hyderabad, the first time being when I was very little. Now straight away to the story. From college a large contingent of around 14 students had gone to attend summons, the feast at NALSAR. It was fun, literally 9 days of planned fun. On one of these days we decided to go see the city of Hyderabad. Five of us that were free that evening went roaming around, first ate Hyderabadi biriyani at this place called paradise which is famed for its biriyani, it was okay, nothing out of this world. Then I remembered from my first trip to the city that there was a very nice ice cream parlour by the name of snow ball. Trouble was it was no where near where we were, but in the absence of any specialized knowledge of the vicinity we decided to find this parlour and have some nice ice cream. We searched till evening turned into night but apparently something had happened to that parlour in the last decade of so. Then we decided to go put something in our tummies and headed for this mall that had a Delhi 7, 8 PM, 9 o’ clock and 10 Downing Street we visited each and every one of these sitting for a few minutes in each of them only to get up and go to the next, soon we were in the mall outside with nothing to do, once more. Among the five of us that were there was V a.k.a voix. She was getting increasingly bugged that no one was doing anything amusing, she insisted that we do something, I really wandered what she meant but well that’s what she seemed to want something.

 

After this what I experienced is something both funny and scary. It’s the kind of time you think, was that not supposed to be the medicine? V looked up; saw a guy wearing a ‘Super Man’ T- Shirt. She exclaimed, “Supppper Maan” and burst out laughing. It was all fine for a while since her bad jokes are legendary. This however was different, she refused to stop. She just kept on laughing, for around 30 seconds I was happy, at least the whining about doing something had stopped, but the laughter showed no sign of retreat and after that I was wondering if that’s the way V laughs, for a long time. This went of for another few minutes, the laughter receded, but just as it was reaching its ultimate she decided that it was also very funny that another one of the five had bought a ‘thumbs up’ and was letting us drink it and the laughter went on with renewed fervor. V laughed for 20-25 minutes, I was freaked out. It was a proper fit, she just had no control over her laughter. On hind sight it is very appropriate, she wanted something amusing, she got her medicine, we got amused.