Seeing Myself...

This Friday, one of my teammates quit and he was the first one to leave my team in a long time. I had kind of prepared for my speech but got a bit nervous somehow. He's a good guy, not great but good. Unlike the previous two ex-teammates of mine who embarrassed me by going ga-ga over how good a human being I am in their farewell mail, this guy wrote a usual thank-you-all one and I was expecting that. So I was all set to get back to work when I saw this guy along with his batchmate who's the next to go standing next to my seat. I've hardly interacted with the other one who's in another team but it was him who started off on a farewell note. It was as if he was going to make up for all that we'd never talked about before. And they both talked for one hour! My teammate was mostly playing the supporting role but this guy was like - how he thought I was a strict person when he saw me first, how brattish they were when they came in, how proud they felt entering the office first, how they wondered if they really deserved it, how people back home thought about them, how good our team was compared to others, how they came to love the product, their salaries, their apprehensions about the next job, how naughty the other one really is, how cute it looks that all the heads of our teams(My colleague, my boss and myself) have food together every day! He even said he felt nice observing that I had interest in cricket and I had espnstar open quite a few times!! I talk quite freely with my teammates but I wasn't prepared for this barrage! My boss came and joined for a while and went off. So did couple of others and it became quite awkward for me in the end when people started giving us glances. I don't know what all I said.

I'm not very good when people have high expectations from me but it happens to me every now and then. Someone coming and telling me about the kid they never wanted to have, another on how he wants a child but his wife does not and so on...I try my best to give them the advice I think is the best but I really don't know if I'm doing the right thing. I think men need women to confide certain things and given that I'm older than all these folks and may look trustworthy(which I assure I am, I've never gossiped about these things), they come to me I guess. Alright, may be some use I am!

Hissss.....

Today the kid excitedly called us up and said he had seen a snake in our yard and that he screamed and dropped everything he was holding and ran into the house. It seems the snake was medium sized and he was scared that it would bite him. Actually he's very fond of the snake stories that my husband tells him but it was his first live encounter with one, that too alone.

When we were growing up, we lived in the middle of trees with a Nagabana nearby which used to have visitors except for us only on Nagarapanchami. Huge anthills were very common in the area and so were big snakes. Pappa who used to come in the middle of the night after his AIR duty never used to carry a torch with him and somehow managed not to get bitten by the snakes he almost walked on. I have seen a cobra, a king cobra and umpteen number of water and rat snakes in my childhood. The small stream near our house would be dammed in the summer to provide water to the nearby plantation and the mud bank was our bridge to the other side. After 6 if we were returning home after playing in the empty paddy fields, we would see many a water snake creeping up the mud bank and hurrying back into the water seeing us. Rat snakes would often find our house a good source of food thanks to the mice which periodically nested in the crevices of our wooden roof. Long snakes would show up even in the daytime scaring me out only to return back relieved that it was only a ratsnake.