Up in Smoke

Sitting in the cleanness of my room with colourful stars falling all around me in the sky and clouds of black smoke trying to screen them. We celebrated DeepavaLi yesterday and I was celebrating also the fact that there was hardly any noise around. But the security guard had warned me that it would be today and he was right. It has been incessant noise right from the morning and I kept my call with  Japanese partners mostly on mute, lest they think we too had dangerous neighbours.

Coming to think of it, this is the first DeepavaLi with only four of us at home. We either had parents or a resident-maid with us otherwise. I miss my parents but yeah, it's been a happy DeepavaLi nevertheless.

Raining Memories

One of my favourite childhood songs, from the time when rain dropped from trees like it was telling us a secret and dripped from rooftops compelling us to put our palms out...a word or two may be amiss because the last I heard it was more than 20 years ago.

Rain Rain Go Away

I've had enough of it, waking up to a gloomy day and keeping my clothes unwashed thinking tomorrow may be a sunny day. My red chillies are getting damp too and I can't dry my ragi to powder them.

Walking to Happiness

When you love walking, there is pleasure in getting lost in the bylanes.

Voicing It

Answer papers of half-yearly assessments have been sent home and Rishi is on a high. His marks are great, he's teachers' darling in school so much so that he doesn't even lose marks when he makes small mistakes(!!). So his only worry right now is his sister who's scored below-par in Maths. And worse, her cool remark to his rants is "I don't care for marks. What is their use anyway! I'm going to become a storyteller when I grow up." It has taken up my entire afternoon and a lot of breath to bring some semblance of sanity to the house.

Anu's latest obsession is becoming independent. She says by the age of nine she will make a mountain in the park below, build a house on top of that mountain and live there. I asked her not to bother me with her food then but she wouldn't agree.

Voices are misleading. One gets used to hearing gruff and aggressive voices at the other end of the phone for long and develops a matching image. So it's a pleasant surprise when you finally meet him and see a very mismatching figure who is also personally nice to you. 

MaLegalada Ondu Dina...

It's raining like June any time of the year now. If you discount the bad roads of Bangalore, which is no mean task of course, all you know is that you won't have water shortage this year but I don't know how my farming in-laws cope up with unpredictable rains and cloudy atmosphere.

I went to school without an umbrella and of course it had to rain just when I reached the gate. After a while thankfully an auto-guy spotted me and asked me to hop in. I took along a lady and her kid who is Anu's classmate, because they were in the same state. We usually cover some distance together on the way home but I still don't know where they stay. So I said, somewhat weirdly, that I could lend them a couple of umbrellas once I reached my building, which comes first. They readily agreed but a while later it struck me that I was being silly and I said why shouldn't they take the auto till their home, as it was still raining pretty badly. My lady friend was willing but the daughter jumped and said, "No Auntie, then it'll cost us a lot of money, it's better that we take the umbrellas and go!". Money was not on my mind because I had told the driver I would pay him later as I knew him well but I could see that the lady was embarrassed. She tried to convince the kid but the moment my building came, the girl just jumped out of the auto and stood her ground demanding my umbrellas. It took a considerable coaxing from her mother to make her board the auto again. Where was my darling daughter all this while? I don't think any of it made any sense to her and she had walked off the moment auto stopped.

I paid the guy later but I was very proud of that little girl. She reminded me of myself long ago, the girl who was so aware of her monetary deficiencies and tracked her finances in her own little ways. Small things were valued and kindnesses of others painfully remembered. My husband's childhood was only tougher so I guess my daughter has only just awakened to something called money which counts for her as piggy-bank coins and paper with Gandhiji.

The Gut-feeling

Cooking is one day feeling like you are a magician and the other day, wishing you had Alladin's genie. I can't make out which days win. But on my genie days, it's mostly because of Rishi that I force myself to make something meaningful. He makes no bones about his displeasure when the food is bad but he's a boy of few words when it's upto his taste. But nowadays I get to know...if he wants to leave the table and sit with the plate on the sofa with the TV on, that means he's loving the food.

Rishi's birthday today. We called his friends home and cut the cake for the first time...In his early years he wasn't very sociable. Later on, it mostly happened that the birthday fell in Dasara holidays so there wasn't enough number to call and celebrate. Today he was happy, eagerly waiting for his huge list of friends in the building to arrive and they did, in their usual style. I like to see them together in such parties mostly because they break my stereotypical notion that urban kids are not having enough fun. They may not be climbing trees, roaming in wilderness and eating the now near-extinct fruits but they are happy too. Their boisterous laughs in the corridor wake us up from our afternoon naps but they also make me smile and feel better.