Missed Opportunities...

I hate people who give missed calls. There are quite a few among our relatives and some among the friends too. I mean, I can understand if the person has a shortage of money at that point of time and so you get missed calls once in a while. But what about people who do that on a regular basis and laugh about it?

One of my uncles(aunt's husband) is one such person. He has so many skills - can fix up wood, electrical stuff and almost everything, is a good orator, the best chess player in our circle - but it seems he lacked the skill he needed the most - working hard to make some money. He neglected his arecanut plantation in his youth and is now dependent mostly on his second son not being on good terms with his eldest.

I don't know what to say - his eldest son is a decent artist. He was very interested in taking it up as a profession and the first day of my visit to their house was always spent in their attic where he had set up his world - full of paintings, posters and stereos and other smaller electronic items that he had assembled himself. He even used to make some sort of animated movies for us for which the ticket would be some cashewnuts! I mean, it was something to be so advanced 30 years ago in that remote village. Anyhow, he was not good at studies and wanted to go and join J J Arts in Mumbai. I think he did go to Mumbai but couldn't get admission or something, so he came back. Next few years of his life are not very clear to me and all I know now is that he has set up an electrical shop and looks after that while doing some painting of people's houses and temples and neglecting his plantation just like his father.

His second son's is even worse story. He was an intelligent boy, could play chess very well, sing very well and draw decently too. His uncle who has a small industry in Bangalore had promised to take him under his wings if he scored well in twelfth but my cousin missed that, but finally joined a decent engineering college.He used to write letters regularly to my mother from there and some of the Sankranti cards that he sent had beautifully written Kannada poems in them. I still remember some lines of them! When he wrote that he had joined music classes there, he had joked that he was learning everything except his subjects. Unfortunately he seemed to have really done that and he couldn't clear some of his papers. So today he's working in a place totally unworthy of his talents and it's a sad thing to happen to one of my childhood idols who taught me the meanings of many songs that I used to sing mindlessly and all wrong.

Wedding Bells...

Wedding bells are going to ring in my aunt's home soon and she being the dearest to one and all in the family, I get the feeling that everybody is highly excited. My mother is going to desert us for full two weeks and I'm wondering how it's all going to work out. One of the options is sending out SOS signal to my old maid to fill-in the gap but the thought itself is a bit painful. So I've postponed thinking about it till I'm really pushed to do so. I would've shamelessly asked for a working-from-home a month ago but now things are different at the office. Everybody is jumping at the mention of a 'bug' and I don't even dare stand in front of my boss with the proposal of being absent from my seat.

My mother has been giving us all some anxious moment by being temperamental and irritable. My son is the one who's getting the most affected by this, having been her darling all these years. Actually she's been working very hard, not allowing me to do a single thing as if she's taken a vow and I feel she's getting tired and worked up. But unfortunately she's never been the one to listen to anyone and arguing with her is worse than banging your head against the wall; both the parties end up getting hurt.  And as regards to my son, she seems to be gripped with a sudden fear that he is growing up to be a spoilt brat and at times I feel sorry for my son when he looks bewildered at the sudden burst of my mother's anger towards a benign mistake.

My daughter has been speaking a lot nowadays and our favourite is when she says "aphisha"(office) when we ask her where her Baba has gone.My mother says she is more reluctant to say the same when asked about me but she's slowly getting used to it. She speaks many other words too and has started getting attached to books, her pet being her brother's textbook with cars, elephants and fish.

Living Life to the Fullest

Last day of half-day working at the office and I'll be working full day after a gap of one and a half years. Not that I've really been working half day actually. Now that I've got a reliable internet connection and can work from home, I've just been taking unnecessary pressure and advantage of my dear mother's indulgence. Not that it's great work either but there is lots of it for sure. But I've decided that I'm going to work only for 8 hours in the office, not more. And I want to stop working at home afterwards too. My son has only a month of holidays left now and he's restless all the time. We've put him into swimming and started him off on badminton too but we are not able to do either on weekdays thanks to the fact that it is only my husband and I that can give him coaching in these two things respectively. So over the weekdays he's mostly irritable after finishing his daily quota of TV and ends up caned either by mother or me after having exhausted us. Promises follow but the same story the next day. Today finally I thought of fulfilling my old promise of joining him into a library but we were too late to step in. Tomorrow I'll try again, even my father hopes to find some useful books there.

I've become a Dale Steyn fan thanks to this year's IPL. Though his team is doing abysmally, he's doing a fantastic job and most of the times, all I remember is not the winner but his bowling. He's just being terrific. Of course Dravid is playing very well too and I watch only his matches regularly, may be partly because this is the last time I'll get to watch him play.

My daughter is growing up quickly, talking a lot of gibberish and making us all very happy by doing many intelligent things. She's a very loving and lovable kid and seems to have a good temperament, at least for now. She's very fond of her brother, though he treats her with a lot of indifference many a times. Of course he showers her with bursts of love often and gets upset that she's not reciprocating enough.

My son who's a huge fan of Chota Bheem stories and Panchatantra asked my husband the other day how many gold coins his boss was paying him!!

May His Soul...

...rest in peace!! I seem to be mostly writing obituaries on blogger but it's only fair considering the fact that I've lost yet another relative - my youngest uncle this time. This time it's been less painful, even to his siblings, because he was an invalid for the last four years, having fallen along with an arecanut tree and broken his back irreparably. I remember how I went cold when I heard my mother over the phone telling me about it and I still anguish over that moment when he went on an impulse on a rainy day to climb that damn damaged tree and fell with it. Life changing moment, if ever there was one and if it's so nightmarish to me, I can't imagine how he would've cursed himself and the fate throughout the agonizing, almost vegetating four years of his life.

My youngest uncle is my mother's younger brother and elder to my twin aunts though they always referred to him as 'Tamma', just like everybody else. He was the only son to remain with his parents and work in the plantation as others had all found work in the cities. I always remember him as a very hardworking guy, always either going to work or coming from it. My earliest memory of him must've been taking 20Rupees from him for collecting the fallen arecanuts from the 'tota" everyday. This was my mother's idea who knew how much I liked the idea of helping my parents with some money and how the arecanuts were being taken away by passersby when they weren't picked by us. But I also remember being chided by Manjanna how shameful it was that I was taking money in spite of being one of the family. Of course I got ashamed and was all set to return the money but I remember my uncle shut him up well and praised my 'help' and I stopped feeling guilty.

Next...must be the coconut breaking and drying season in which my mother and Gangakka were the breakers, my uncle carried them up the hill to the drying area and it was the children's job to watch over them while they dried in the hot sun for a week or so. We always accepted it as our rightful duty and did it with enthusiasm for most of the time. Our uncle erected a small hut of 4 sticks covered with some coconut leaves and tarpaulin and we played, talked, sang and slept under that. Occasionally we would hear the summons from home below, asking us to bathe one by one, fetch our 10 a.m snacks or other errands like calling an uncle/field hand for food. Only at lunch time we would all be relieved from our duties by one of the uncles and we would trudge uphill with a full stomach to take turns in sleeping under the shade with a cool breeze in every direction. Monkeys were the biggest pranksters around and once one of them even jumped on one of my cousins and threw us helter-skelter. I had found a green snake on one of the trees one day and after that everytime I passed that tree, I couldn't help feeling that it would be there again, looking at me.

Then....a toilet was built with a lot of fanfare when I was around 10 years old and it was a great relief for all the visitors and natives alike who were either womenfolk or people living in well-to-do accommodations. But my uncle gave us all a scare by declaring that he wouldn't allow it for 'public' use - it would be only for the creamy layer which consisted of his four brothers, two brothers-in-law, 3 sisters-in-law and a couple of my high-flying cousins. We actually believed it because one could never be sure with our stubborn uncle but this one turned to be one of his jokes, after all.

Then...I guess I lost touch with him once I grew older and also, I must've come in for a sharp criticism from him for marrying outside my caste because my uncle is a hardcore Brahmin. On one of the visits after that, he even asked me if my husband beat me up because he was sure non-brahmins couldn't be trusted with their 'culture'. I did my best to control my temper then. It was also the time he fell out with all his siblings thanks to his obstinacy with respect to the design of the new house and rude behaviour to some of his sisters-in-law and sisters. He seemed to carry some resentment about their 'city-bred' status and visits by close relatives became rare. Then the tragedy struck and when I went to see him at the hospital, his only desire was to be able to walk at least like an unsteady toddler. That was not to be and ...

Life as they see it...

As the expenses of running the house are increasing, we are trying to teach our son the value of money. He's taking them very selectively, though. On one hand he is still crazy about chocolates and ice-creams, gifts and toys and on the other hand, when we go to buy something for ourselves or others, he exclaims loudly "oh, how expensive!" embarrassing us in front of salesmen! But in our mundane lives, often it is only children who provide the refreshing laughs and smiles. Here is a sample of a conversation between my husband and son -

Baba - "Son, I want to build a house just like that one for you some day".
Son - "Why not now, Baba?"
Baba - "I'll need to make lots of money before that."
Son - "No worries Baba, I can give you 50 Rupees!"
Baba(laughing) - "Son, 50 Rupees will be hardly enough!"
Son - "No problem, you can sell off some of your old clothes, I guess you'll get a lakh for them."
Baba(laughing more)
Son(very seriously) - "Now don't tell me you need some more!"

My daughter is becoming stubborn and demanding. She hollers badly when I take a toothbrush near her and my agonized son curses the entire household for that. I hope she realizes soon that she cannot escape the ritual, already I can see her teeth turning yellowish.

It's surprising sometimes how little one observes even while seeing something regularly. I mean, the road in front of our house finally seems to be getting laid and they've cleared some space and made it wide.The area is looking different suddenly but however hard I try, I cannot recall what was there before they cleared it. It's as if I was galloping along that path everyday with blinkers on!

Days are galloping too! Just the other day I was talking about last weekend having come so quickly and there is another one waiting tomorrow.

The Year Gone by...

My daughter is a year old! It's as if I saw her first only the other day and now it's a joy to see her walking all around the house mumbling some cute nonsense. She's trying to imitate what we say and do, she loves her father a lot, though I must admit she loves me the most. :-) Her relationship with her brother is not very consistent so far; vice-a-versa is true too.

We had a low-key celebration on her birthday which in itself was only thanks to the insistence of my son whose real motive was show off the new toy that his grandfather gave to his sister. But very few friends turned up thanks to the holiday season and were a little taken aback with the lack of any kind of 'real' ceremony. But they were decent enough not to express it in words and I think the off-season mangoes that my father bought made them happy enough.

The apartment living reminds me of my hostel days at times. But time is not in abundance as it used to be in those days and you see activities only during certain times of the day - like the mornings when kids go to school, next after an hour when most go to work, afternoons when kids are back from the school, then after a long gap, around evening when ladies group together to talk. But typically each floor is an island; you know there are people living elsewhere but they are not visible to you so you sometimes forget that they exist. So most of the occasions are celebrated among the floor-mates and the ladies follow that pattern too. Actually I hardly knew even these people before my daughter was born. After being at home for a year, I'm glad that I've socialized and made at least some friends along with my son.

Dazed and Drowsy

If last month I thought my life was hectic, I would call that life very decent now. Things have really taken a worse turn. My husband now travels to Whitefield everyday and is almost a visitor at home except for the weekends. And predictably he's very tired over the two days or wants to read some more about the work so they are almost gone too. So days are passing like a whirlwind for me managing my time between the schedules of the other three. My husband leaves home at 7:30 and does not appear back before 9 in the night. He sleeps around 10:30 and we keep each other company till then. My son wakes up at 7 and leaves for the school at 8:15 and returns at 3:15. He sleeps around 8:30. My daughter wakes up anywhere between 5:30 to 6:30 in the morning and goes to sleep in the night around 7:30. So I, forced to wake up with my daughter, see my husband off after breakfast, get my son ready for school and cook his lunch, put my daughter to sleep and rush to office around 9:30. Life in the office is hectic too, what with the damn list of never-ending issues. I rush back home around 2, reach home and gobble my lunch and give my daughter a bath and put her to sleep. Then I take stock of his school activities from my son who's back by now and make something for him to eat/drink. By this time my daughter typically wakes up and I put her back to sleep and if I don't sleep off in the process, I get to write my blog,read newspaper or go to the shop to buy something that has been missed out over the weekend. But those days are rare and most of the times I write imaginary blogs and mails and have monologues with my friends while I'm putting my daughter to sleep.

The evenings are even more hectic thanks to the swinging moods of my maid and her health. I feed my daughter,play with my son and her, also get my son to study and rehearse it, cook food for the night, feed my daughter again, get my son to finish his dinner, put my daughter to sleep, accompany my son to sleep and then, finally get to sit quietly on the sofa and wait for my husband to arrive.

The only silver lining, if I may call it so, is that the stock market is pathetic and my serial, worse than that. I mean, otherwise I don't know what would have happened to my spare time at all!