When George Bush and I became the same

It happened last year. It was amusing. This writer had been corresponding with me and since he was leaving on a holiday with his wife, he decided to make a printout of a page of my blog where a particular piece on my city was. This is what transpired as recollected by him:

“When we landed at the airport and passed through the immigration, I was stopped and the lady at the counter asked me a long list of unnecessary questions. Her poor English and in spite of my knowledge of Punjabi, Urdu, Persian and English, not knowing any Spanish was not any help. She asked me to open up my bag and started looking through my books and papers. Rather than focusing on Mao tse tung’s biography or collection of Urdu poems, for some mysterious reason she zoomed into your Blog. She found your picture and asked, “Who is she?”

“Farzana Versey.”

“What is your relationship with her?”

“We are internet friends?”

“What does that mean?”

“We write letters to each other.”

“Why do you have her picture?”

My friend could only smile weakly. For, he had not even bothered to look at the picture. He wrote further, “She took your picture and showed it to other women and had some passionate dialogue in Spanish. I was amazed that even your picture stirred up raw emotions.”

Okay. Now here comes the fun part. The picture in the blog is so small. Did I fit into the terrorist profile? In the next note he asked rather innocently, “Who is Dubya?” Aha, so this was it. Check it out. My friend must be really naïve and to imagine that I looked like George Bush in drag!

When I asked him about it, he said, “Below it was written posted by FV, so I thought…and I had never seen you.”

Ah well, when they returned from their holiday his wife managed to show him that I wasn’t quite as interesting as Dubya.