PD

Few years ago I was invited to a 1 yr old kid’s b’day party. On a side note, now I get invited on account of my daughter. Ha! I hadn’t wised-up back then so showed up on time for a desi party. Yup. I was at least an hour earlier than everybody. The hosts were scrambling to get everything set up and since I was the dumb moron who showed up “early”, I had to help them carry the chairs to the basement. Anywayz…an hour or so went by and guests finally started arriving. Since I had been there for a while I almost started feeling like I am the host. As I snap out of that I get introduced to a bunch of folks whose name registered in my head as a dictated grocery list from my wife does. It was going to be an evening full of pronouns, I figured.

We stand around while we are served 7 up or fanta or whatever else that was there. Appetizers were also ready so guests reluctantly line up after much persuasion by the host. But you can tell that all they are thinking about are the appetizers. We grab some appetizers and go back to our huddle position with nothing to talk about. One guy mentions something about weather but that topic shows promise like that of a snowflake in the Arizona desert. Apart from being a boring topic couple of them mangled the words climate and weather so it was rather confusing to everyone after the first couple sentences. The huddle is now getting rather uncomfortable and I personally cannot wait to get the hell out of there. I am unable to take it anymore and bring up the topic of cricket in a rather dumb way. “Hey are you guys following the India-Aus series?” Most of them didn’t care for my question and the couple who did said they don’t follow cricket anymore because the Indian team is a “waste” and their importance is “too much”. And that they should bring “youngsters” to the team. At this point, the last muscle in my body has resigned from the party. Now what? It is getting way too awkward now with plenty of silence in between some kid coming up to his/her dad and the dad saying “No, xyz, No. Go to mummy”. It was almost invariably the same answer irrespective of what the kid’s request was.

Like a ray of light in a cold deserted cave (never been in a cold deserted cave to know this but sounds cool doesn’t it?), guy brings up a topic which lights up everyone’s face in that huddle. All he said was this, “did you guys check the September bulletin?” It was like everybody got a booster shot like the Universal Soldier gets. Back then I didn’t know what the September bulletin was and its significance. Of course I could not ask them to I pretended to be excited as well. They started talking about it and I realize that it was Green Card. Ah ha!! The group that I am talking about loves this topic! After much chatter about the irregularities in the system and how some friend’s friend’s friend got his GC in 6 months, they move on to much personalized conversation. It looked like each person is rated by their PD (priority date) and the amount of reports he has from forums. The guy who had eaten most crap out of the forums was the loudest one. So I am rather quiet in this conversation because for one I didn’t apply for GC then and two I had not read a single forum on GC then. The loudest guy turns to me and goes “So what’s your priority date ahh?” Almost shamefully I go “I haven’t applied yet”. If you could see those faces as I spoke those words you would think I committed a cardinal sin and have no moksha for eternity. I give some explanation about why but they have already written me off. In a few minutes I excused myself from the huddle and tried to find my wife…

The next couple hours went by with cake-cutting, buffer dinner and games-for-kids. As they start playing the games, we excuse ourselves under the pretense of a visiting friend at home and take off. What an evening! If only I had a priority date I would have been included in the cool conversations that followed...To PD, the foundation for desi american dreams!