Seven Shades of Grey Read Free Page A

country lived in, the culture born in, and the language spoken. With the birth of something new, the death of the old was inevitable. And I was in the midst of it all.
    *
    My eyes travel to the clock in the waiting room. It seemed to me that I had been lost in thought for an eon and in reality had just been gone for less than five minutes. The door of the room is still closed which means that I have yet to become a father. The magazines on the table in front of me were probably picked up from the refuse of a barbers’ shop. I am the only lucky bloke whose wife was in labor, alone in an air-conditioned temporary prison strangely called ‘Waiting Room’. Unseen chains hold me here, forcing me into seclusion, making me dance with my thoughts, confronting me with those that I don’t want to be confronted with. But dance they must, a jolting waltz, back to Marilyn, my first friend on the net, one who has become a part of my soul, although she did not start out as one.
    *
    I downloaded Pager and quickly learnt to use it. The first few times I logged into it, I did not see much of Marilyn online. The odd occasion that she did chat with me revealed more about her family and herself. And strangely did not actually reveal much.
    She told me that her husband was a Marketing Manager with GE and refused to reveal his name. He was known as Panda and his id at yahoo chat was RoadDog ! She had five children that included two pairs of twins and yet she refused to give me their names. She told me she lived in Canada, not too far from Ontario and yet refused to give me the exact city. I asked for a photograph and she refused to discuss it, let alone send me one.
    ‘New Rules for the New World’ rationality at its feeble best, welcoming confusion.
    Confusion seemed to be my pet emotion, a comfortable state of mind if you may, and I sometimes wondered if I would ever feel another emotion as strongly.
    It is my nature, as I guess it is of every human, to rely on old rules when I did not know the new ones. I hoped these would scare confusion away and was I ever wrong!
    Marilyn insisted that life on the Net would stay securely locked in her computer and never clash with her real world, an impregnable belief defining an unknown New World. I wondered then how this duality could ever exist. Somewhere deep inside me I firmly believed then that this artificial barrier would crash someday.
    And it did!
    But not as soon as I hoped it would.
    My early days with Marilyn were elegantly kosher. We discussed general subjects like food, the weather, the distance, the cultures and sometimes the real lives we led. Two swordsmen testing each other, evaluating weaknesses, discovering strengths and one day one of them lunged. She introduced me to her husband, another faceless, strange and quixotic ID on the Internet.
    When Marilyn first suggested that I chat with her husband, I was appalled. What would I say to the husband of the woman that I hardly knew? And yet she persisted; pleading and reassuring that all was safe. And I gave in. Panda used his own id of RoadDog to chat with me. It began comfortably, chugged along merrily, and then hit a boulder when he suggested that I might be flirting with his wife. The merrily chugging train almost derailed.
    It is one thing for a man to fantasize about someone’s woman, another totally alien to have the husband of the woman suggest that it could be a possibility. I rose to my own defense and staunchly denied any ‘wrong doing’. Panda merely chuckled and said it was OK even if I did flirt.
    ‘New Rules for the New World’ rationality feeble yet getting stronger.
    Then Panda logged off and I was back to chatting with Marilyn. This time around, there was a pleasant change. Her conversation had a new spring in its stride, a new gurgle in her voice, all suggesting new levels of comfort being online with me, confusing me as never before.
    How could a man suggest that a stranger was flirting with his wife, even if the