Hairy Legs, Brussels and ‘I think she likes me’

The hair on my arms is the length of my toes. The hair on my legs has reached my toes. I wouldn’t say it is a completely new experience, but it is certainly most novel to experience it when a country is celebrating, yes celebrating, all 13 degrees of its summers with skin and sunshine. On the cobbled streets of Brussels I am probably the only one wearing stretch denims while the world is sprinting ahead of me in airy, breezy and frivolously delicious summer clothes. The moment I spot a pair of smooth legs enjoying the sunshine, it is as if the jeans grow four sizes smaller to kill me with asphyxiation, or whatever the hell tight jeans can do to your health when the heart burns green. 

But my hands are tied. 

I am thousands of kilometres away from a long-trusted tin of Shabnam Cold Wax (Rs 70) and a packet of disposable white waxing strips (Rs 25). Are there no salons in Brussels, you ask? There’s one in every Rue, but with my level of fluency in French I believe I might as well discuss foreign policy with a plant, and succeed in having a path-breaking dialogue, than explain to la fille successfully that I need a wax. Um, there is another reason why I have been Google translating salon menus but not garnering the courage to enter and ask for a pure and simple wax. 

It seems to me to be a secret kind of … something. It caught me by surprise. And I have been trying to unravel it as much as I have been my overgrown eyebrows from my lashes.

Cousins

‘I’m going to go meet my sister since I’m in Gurgaon. She stays close by, on Sohna Road’, I told a gathering of friends over lunch.

‘Sister? But you said you have a brother?’ asked a doubting Thomas.

‘Oh, my cousin’, said I with a smile.

‘So say cousin, na. Not sister!’ he was quick to correct.

‘But we grew up together, in the same house, so the concept of ‘real’ … but the conversation had moved on. The thought, however, remained stuck. 

~

Most of us trying to grow up since the 80s have lots of cousins. That’s because at that time children did not wait for office promotions or ‘right ages’ to come. They just came, like a logical next step to a formally organized marriage and a year or so of couple time, at best! Single children were as uncommon as a house without a carrom board, and ‘hum do humaarey do’ as common as evening cricket in the lanes. Kid 2 happened right after Kid 1, riding on the wave of left-over nappies, or after the mother had regained her breath and sanity and combed her hair. Economy of time, money and getting done with bodily expectations for the woman remained the drivers for “completing” a family. With romance and drama in it the movie reel went from I’m ready, set, go, boom, aaaa, push, out (times 2). Pack-up!  

As a result of all that mathematically proven conception and delivering, happening in all our extended homes, we in our 30s have a vast network of cousins. If we compare the spoils with how many our parents had, we don’t have the same numbers. So let us not. But, if we compare with how things will be, with the single-kid wave spreading like a chalky patch of hopscotch in rain, we know Cousins, as a role and relationship, will slowly fade away. 

And so will the Superpowers that cousins have had ever since the Big Bang. 

Back then, when the bones were young …

… we did lots together! If you grow up in a joint family, like I did, you’re far above the rest of humanity in the Republic of Fun. Top class, really! But it is not the only way to know what cousins are made of, of course.  Cousins, lived with or met over summer vacations after a day’s train journey with our mothers, were precious wherever they were. Distance no bar! Age no bar! 

An older cousin was a window to our own futures, setting standards for a younger, aspirational demography of children in at least a couple of houses of the family. From getting princesses in Mario Brothers to ones in school; from acting guides on how to pluck mangoes to being buffers against bullies in the lane, older cousins were relied on with wide eyes and mouths agape. Idolising one such was as easy as the swish of hands pulling out a sling from the back pocket, or a billet doux. Looking up was especially easy if your relationship status with the ‘real’ brother or sister was … ahem … complicated, making you wish your parents never got a second ‘from the dustbin’ after they got you from a ‘pretty nurse in the hospital’! 

Older ones put in place standards – of smartness, sportiness, suaveness, sensibility, sense and maths scores, sigh. They did the hard work of setting benchmarks, and the younger ones like me simply had to try to reach them. No marks for guessing the parental dialogue we heard-unheard if we did not. Let’s not go there! 

On the other hand, a younger cousin, with kachhi mitti in all games, was exactly that. Soft clay in the hands of those who had lived slightly longer, and an inspiration for the older ones to act wiser than their milk teeth could ever allow. For all we know, those emulating hands and feet forced them to cut the wisdom teeth in time. In the complete food chain of all cousins put together! A sister who first taught you how to plait your hair may have grown into a confidant to discuss your period pain. A brother who let you in on his school bunking secret did so, so as to sneak you along to the cinemas. Another told you how bees do it because she had a chapter in the biology book. An army of cousins who made your goriest battles their own, and only in exchange for WWF trump cards (everyone wanted The Undertaker, and to see his face).  

Yes. Our cousins were a cross between best friends and siblings, and they were great at being both; like those double-sided tattoos Boomer gum came wrapped in, or audio cassettes where both Side A and Side B were equally exciting! They oscillated from becoming kith to being kin, helped us grow up or grow down, and most importantly left us feeling a part of a big happy family, because they were family.  No matter how infrequently we met them.

   

Now, when the hearts are getting weaker …

…families have undergone a change. We’re not just smaller, we’re also living lives within our own addresses. And our cousins are scattered all over the world. That proximity when we batted not an eye lid to share a bed with three others (tallest near the feet, please!) can no longer be achieved, not even at their weddings or our children’s first birthdays. We’re still close but we’re living apart and our lives are very different from those days when the same jean-pant passed down three pairs of legs, or the same Tobu cycle changed its moulded plastic seat for three toddlers in a row. 

Does that mean we are islands drifting away from who we thought were our ‘real sisters’ and ‘real brothers’? Was what nourished us and shaped us as children and teenagers that impermanent? No. It has to be about scarcity of time and a busy life. Has to be. You can’t make invisible the little bits of our cousins that we have inside each one of us, no matter how you have found your I-for-Individuality in the maddening urban crowd. Nope, you can’t.

As I sit and type this, I realize how there is a very important secret superpower we cousins can tap in each other. The power to keep holding hands even when factions of families feud - over property or businesses or marriages or mere gossip - things that adulthood in our parents often comes furrowed with. What if we kids-of-yore stand up to our respective parents to say ‘You and your brother don’t get along. But my brother and I still do.’ Do you think this insistence to look beyond the temporary ‘now’ will help bind extended families with glue better than the translucent grey one we used to make birthday cards with, popping brushes into a shared blue-and-black bottle?

Isn’t it worth it to ground ourselves in happier memories of climbing trees and playing pitthoo than letting grown-ups fight like the kids we never were, not permanently at least? Isn’t it worth using that superpower, the power of choosing to be brothers and sisters despite all odds and above all else? Totally worth it, then, not growing up enough to let differences seep in. And especially now, at a time when cousins are an endangered species. Endangered, because the family tree is tapering and one day this role and relationship will … 

Fade into nothing? 

No. Not in my lifetime.

Will you have a drink? (And BlogAdda’s #WIN15 awards)

It was a usual Friday night. God had been thanked for the lauki-roti on the table, watching late-night TV called Disney Jr. was underway and our morning’s fight was still continuing. Silently, for he had called from office to say sorry but I was yet to make up my mind - to forgive, or to milk it over the weekend till good Chinese food entered my tract? Difficult decisions. Tough life.

Will you have a drink?

I didn’t answer. Why should I? But I am kind.

You go ahead. I don’t feel like it.

And then I got busy with things we do to look busy when we want to appear disinterested, even though our ears stand upright waiting for a placating offer we cannot refuse. Obviously more than one which just has 60 ml vodka in soda with lime juice, and three ice cubes in it!

I removed invisible food scraps from the table cloth, took ten minutes longer to set the chairs back, another fifteen staring at my toes, that is after loudly sighing and plopping on a dining chair with Atlas’s domestic burden on my shoulders. Toes done, I leaned back to stare at an errant cobweb peeping from behind the fridge now. I was desperate to hear something, other than his unimaginative shuffling feet, till I went delirious thinking I could hear the spider's footsteps entering the jaali behind the Whirlpool monster. So quiet this Friday night.

Time ticked by. The silence of a wife not talking was deafening to his ears. I am sure. The kid couldn’t care less. Captain Hook had just stolen Jake’s gold doubloons and the suspense on his pretty island was thrilling and unrolling to a peppy tune.

Let us please have a drink?

Tch. Still there. No progressive ache din here. Hello, time warp. Good to be stuck in you!

I said I don’t want to.

And I picked up my phone looking intelligent and thoughtful and philosophical because that is the look you give as you scroll down Facebook pictures and more pictures of strangers you like to call friends. And then I saw … a friend asking for votes to be a finalist in BlogAdda’s WIN15 Awards!

Oh teri! The shortlists are out! I said to the spider behind the fridge, because it was the only one I was talking to.

The shuffling feet had hurriedly come to stand behind me, with teeming curiosity, or perhaps just happy I was feeling my Punjabi self again, in words if not deeds, for I was still refusing the peg. (It was a day of wonders.)

Shivering timbers! 

No, that wasn’t me. It was the kid on the bed, shaking his tiny cot at that exact moment. Momentarily, I had looked away from the loading awards page. When I looked back my eyes popped through my pink spectacles.

WHAT THE …!

That was me, full frontal me, not the feet. (Feet take longer to speak.) I had spotted my name among 11 other finalists. My blog had been shortlisted by BlogAdda. In the Creative Writing category. I can write creatively. I am in the running for winning this. I can win. I can win. 

You can win this, honey!

Finally he and I were on the same wavelength. Phew!

Oh darn. I need votes.

So?

I have to ask for them.

Ask. What goes?

I don’t know. Nothing, I guess.

Yeah. Ask your best friends, family, everyone. They’ll vote. You’re good. 

I know! But, votes?

Yes, votes. Your blog is public. Readers’ views matter. I will share your link.

YOU will share my link?

Yes!

Can I have a drink?

What?

A drink! A drink! Usual wali. Why do you look surprised?

(Please note that it was not that I had forgiven him. But, greater frontiers beckoned and I had re-scheduled my faux annoyance to be published on Saturday morning, 7 am. I am practical, that way.)

There was not much left to do, except to swallow, remember Hanuman ji, and make a list of who I had been naughty or nice with, and ask the latter to support my candidature in the ongoing elections. Last date for voting– 13th Sept.

It was about 9:30 pm on a Friday night. I chanted TGIF, thrice, and composed a message which did not show the begging bowl bluntly but carried enough overtones of supplication as would make the recipient feel a patron of great value with the orb of an Elizabethan King in his hands, or an executioner’s axe.

Meanwhile, Jake and the Neverland Pirates had made way for Sam Sandwich, teaching kids good eating habits.

Cheers. Oh! Can you change the channel? I don’t want him learning that too much cheese is bad.

Obviously he did as he was told. Our marriage on this Friday night was still on shaky grounds.

Parental duty done, I started sending the vote-for-me messages. One, two, three, twenty-three … selecting those I was close to, avoiding burdening mutual blogger friends with unnecessary existential crisis. Thirty-three, forty-two …

Of course I was feeling odd. Never done it before only. But what to do? The Romans had spoken, and I had to parade in a toga with a smile on my face, to earn my laurel wreath. It requires courage, if you ask me. It was a night to remember. I felt like a cross between a politician, a best friend, a fund-raising NGO worker and a cow, rolled into one.

Can I help with anything, honey?

Yes, please. Can I have another drink?

Tick. Tick. Gulp. Tick. I realized I was fast running out of those I was close to, so I did the next best thing that vodka suggested – messaged the ones I felt close to. So what if the other person did not feel the same for me? I felt for them. It’s good to love. My heart grew tender wings, it soared with love and vote-hope and pressed 'send' and dunked the vodka with equal speed.

Jake had long left. Sam Sandwich and even Mickey Mouse were asleep. My son was dangling between sleepiness and wakefulness with Hotwheels cars all over his tummy and Mister shuffling feet was standing behind me, no longer shuffling and with his right hand on my right shoulder. Was this chance pey dance? Did he think he was forgiven, totally?

It is then that I reached that number of messages sent that my arrested mathematical development had never allowed me to spell, even though it was double-digits. On top of that, FB wanted to know if I wasn’t a spamming robot and asked me to differentiate pictures of dogs from cats, in a photo grid. I passed with flying colours in the third go. Because the day’s tiredness (no, not the 60 ml + 60 ml) was taking its toll. Also, I had called a school teacher ‘mama’ instead of ‘maam’ and … err, some more errors you needn’t know about.

It was time to call it a day.

A day’s worth of hay had been made. I had to make more tomorrow. Had to. I had tasted blood!

That's my story from Friday night last. Today is a new evening. (Is it Sunday?) I take this opportunity to say this to all my readers. I have always felt very close to you, probably more than you can imagine or see in this lifetime. So, please, would you be so kind as to vote for me? Click on the 'You can write, creatively' below and just FB like below the blog image.

'You can write, creatively'

I have nothing to offer in return for you supporting ‘Between Write and Wrong’. No cash, no movie award tickets, no free grains, no LED TVs. But I can offer you one thing, which I have just been asked on this Sunday night –

Will you have a drink?

Some things are not meant to change.

We are losing our Zen

Part-by-part and day-by-day our Zen is going away from us. Remember Maruti Zen, the oldest model? It’s a 15-year-old car I got married to, after my husband bought it as a young adult with his father’s hard-earned money.  We know it’s going away because every month it needs to be upped, with a part needing replacement or some other dying permanently. The engine is coughing with over-use, protesting at every ignition now. The belts screech as if in pain every time the engine starts. The rear windows are getting jammed like arthritic knees. Mysterious groans of ageing are heard through every trip. And the AC? It’s 45 degrees in Delhi, what can you expect?

Some of you will not even remember what this car looks like, while others may have missed noticing these tiny cars amidst the monsters ruling the road roost. The only people who do give it public attention are the two cops at the Gol Dak-khana round-about. Every once a week, en route Connaught Place, they stop our Zen to ask with a smile, ‘RC, please? Just checking if this should have been scrapped already.’ Confidently, the Registration Certificate is shown to the uniformed men. It’s not time. It's in its twilight days, not good night time yet!

Ah, our Zen has had its days! 

Once upon a time a boy just entering college with a car was hot property for hitch-hikers, and his parents the ideal providers, God bless them! The Zen has driven his family to countless places. Then, it made space for me like a loving mother-in-law does. The front seat became mine, the gear-shaft the resting place for my hand, over his. (Oh, why did they have to ban tinted window screens?) This small car has been filled beyond capacity like our fridges, with a chirpy family going to Mussoorie, or a couple enjoying the beauty of silence driving on the green Ridge Road, in Delhi. We have even shifted our first 'home' from NACEN, Faridabad to West Delhi over three choc-a-block trips to and fro, without a truck! The Zen has been a cause for neighbour's envy too, though only when it came to finding a parking slot in fancy Khan Market. It has also stood by us in our most difficult times, say speeding to a hospital in Dehradun, 270 kilometers away in the middle of the night. I remember I was in my second trimester then. And it made us reach just in time, which it still does, but then the nagging thought remains that it has numbered days on its hand.

Why are my husband and I losing sleep over the inevitable change of car? We must be like those typical middle class kids from the 90s ...

… kids who knew not what class meant, except the one we were studying in in school with tenacious loyalty to our sections – A, B, C. We were so free of frills, that a string attached to a polythene or possessing a pile of the flattest pithoo stones in the colony meant having enough. No, having it all! No one was sitting and comparing who had a fancier Geometry case, or who wore branded shoes. Old habits die hard. While the world gradually started speeding past our Zen in shinier cars, we stuck to truly feeling that we have what we need. 

Did our Zen keep us grounded? It did literally, because it’s a low chamber and speed breakers are not for them! Close family started hinting it’s time we felt embarrassed and the salaam of guards at Gymkhana continues halfhearted. As for us? We still feel free of it all, just like we kept our Zen free of labels (even that red ‘Government of India’ sticker sarkari people slap on their very personal wagons). Freedom, from the race towards glamour and social mobility that is supposed to go only one way – upwards, is delicious. It's the most important ingredient for Contentment. But you must think us crazy, isn’t it?

Our son has with utmost happiness over-turned the ‘Baby on Board’ to now visibly read ‘Child on Board’ on the rear windscreen. He loves our Zen, calls it a racing car, but doesn’t love that he’s no longer a valid applicant for sitting in my lap in the front seat. The other day some friends I made in the world of blogging were over for the first time. While I was changing my shoes to go drop them to the Metro station, I over-heard my 4-year-old telling them a story. ‘And then, papa pushed the car and mumma sat inside to start it. I sat on the bonnet.’ This was a few weeks back, right outside the Café Coffee Day on Janpath. We had to change the Zen’s battery; a bright green replaced the older one. I smiled at my friends then, not knowing if they were contemplating taking a rickshaw to the station instead, but happy to learn that the kid had formed a memory – and his too, like ours, was about riding high on our Zen.

That 15-year-rule of scrapping may not be valid soon, but time is ripe to change our loyal friend for a new one. There’s a child to be picked from school every day. There are social obligations to attend to every weekend. And there are emergencies … ones we never see coming at hours when all we can do is depend on the car to make us reach where we just need to.  The old has to make way for the new. Has to. And we’re at it. Looking and looking. 

But apart from nostalgia for the simpler, string-free life, and the trembling feeling of seeing out-turned empty pockets, we’re scared about another thing... Will we become runners in the urban rat race of features-packed swankiness? Will a car become more to us than just a means of transport – reliable, comfortable and a necessity? 

Will we lose, with our Zen, the zen-like freedom with which we drove this mini-dinosaur with not a care in the world? Now that remains to be seen. The only definitive for now? 

That we are losing our Zen. And it feels strangely sad.

About my mother-in-law

‘And please don’t scream during labour. It is embarrassing. Women should not scream out loud’, had said her mother to my mother-in-law, as a part of the list of pre-wedding directives.

My mother-in-law came from Nakodar, a small town in Punjab, from a huge joint family, the ruins of whose house sit whispering alone now. Despite all the educational degrees she earned, whatever all girls from many decades ago were taught was a part and parcel of her upbringing too.  One would assume, then, that she carried in her make-up - as a daughter, a wife, a mother and a mother-in-law – seeds of what the younger generation, our generation, views as “old-fashioned” and regressive. Including, not screaming in the face of deadly pain! One would also assume, thanks to the massive stereotyping on silver screens and easy banter part of ladies’ parties, that all mothers-in-law are monsters-in-law – overtly possessive about their sons and equally about their hold over household systems. 

One would assume. Or maybe, I got lucky? 

Some of the most cherished lessons and moments in life came to me from her, my husband’s mother and a woman who grew, in no time, to really be to me what I never thought I could call another – ‘Mummy’. 

While most parents cannot help but consider their children kids forever, perpetually to be guided, mummy respected your age, no matter how many times that number lower than hers. She welcomed advice, encouraged maturity. Just a couple of days into my wedding she made me choke on aloo-puri at the dining table, when she asked me to decide for her on a matter I never thought my turf. It made me feel confident, a participant in a house she had nurtured for 40 years entirely her way. She was an expert at regarding every individual as a person first, and every mind with an opinion which mattered. No ‘I am older so I know better’ for her. (Of course, what that did to my husband’s sense of ‘I know’ is another happy story, altogether.)

Because she never wallowed in the differences that old age usually starts spotting in us new-age youngsters, she was something of an expert at moving with the times and rejecting nonsense as exactly that, nonsense. Once, I had to go to the neighbour’s house to extricate her from her party (for she loved them so!) and meet the ladies of the locality in turn; usually not top on my radar and certainly not on my husband’s. Expectantly, questions about baby expectancy flew over left-over samosas. When asked when her daughter-in-law will bear her a grandson and they will get laddoos, said she to a lady she knew since decades, ‘Laddoos you will get even if it’s a granddaughter. Baaki, let’s leave it to the kids. Really not our age to think of childbirth, don’t you think?’ and gave her classic half-blush, naughty smile. I had clutched the house-keys tighter in sheer happiness. And pride.  

She belonged to her children’s times, moving aside and making way. All the time. She pushed me to begin my PhD, called up a list of people to share the joy of my proud decision. Not faith but ritualistic religiosity was considered a waste of time in her house. Most satsang invites for three hours of chatting-chanting were refused with ‘You know my knees!’ She would scan the newspapers instead. Or we would go for shopping and chaat-party. Often, for much longer than three hours. Thanks to her expertise in slipping while shopping with unbound generosity …

… for who would buy, after serving water to the door salesman, 12 boxes of incense sticks, get 12 boxes free with it and all that when she didn’t even use it? ‘It was so hot this afternoon and he was selling them for a good price, poor thing’ was her defense on seeing her children’s incredulous expressions on coming into the sudden, good-smelling riches on their dressing table. (This was five years back, and I still have those cones!) 

But the one motto that she had engraved on her soul was to keep the family together. Not just because she loved to cook for an army and even more, the fun and good times that would ensue, but also because she realized at the end of the day how important it was. Much more to her than to anyone else I know. What we saw as insane levels of ‘being accommodating to silly relatives’ was to her a way of life. She wanted to move forward with everyone around. Not because she did not see through pretense, but because she knew of no other way to bring estranged hearts back to love. Except, by giving it. She wanted to live life to the lees, with everyone, not without them.

But life often doesn’t want to be lived to the lees. It protests. 

While my mother-in-law went about her expert routine of keeping us all happy, fed, together, and herself pleased with the love-of-her-life, tea, a battalion of medical problems followed close on her heels. Doctors used to say for her that whatever can go wrong, is wrong with her physical condition. Ever since she was my age. 

In my few years of marriage she went through major surgeries every six months. (She tricked all but one of them.) Her expertise? That will to get wheeled out of the OT feeling better and looking for a hot cup of chai even before the anesthesia wore away. Her right knee was made metal because she wanted to wear saris again, wanted to travel again, would you believe that? When I made her leg exercise in the recovery period, she would rent the air with her screams. But on being asked if I should stop she would expertly say ‘Why? Let me scream. This is important. Push. Let’s make the heel touch the hip this time. Has it happened, yet?’ and other patients in Ganga Ram Hospital would look her way admiringly. (Oh yes, she was screaming, in case you didn’t notice. Her mother’s lesson regarding screaming women long forgotten!) 

With a strange sadness I realize we hark back thus often after the person is no more. So late. But then not too late, either, because as life goes on so do its little lessons lodged in our minds and memories, habits and hearts. She’s not going to read this, and probably never realized what I thought while I was her daughter-in-law. A stabbing regret, but what can one do except pick up the fallen flowers off and on and make a garland to decorate the house with?

My son, all of 4 months when she passed away, never got to experience the woman that she was and the grandmother that she would have been, spoiling him to bits with panjeeri and mango pickle, jams and cakes, pakoras and hot paranthas and her specialty – a bottomless martbaan of love and laughter to give, like pure homemade desi ghee; which, like fresh green chillis, she enjoyed thoroughly!

Lalita Nanda. That was her name. 

And I was so fortunate to have her as my first expert in so many ways. 

[Written for #MyFirstExpert Story, sponsored by Godrej Expert and hosted by IndiBlogger.]

The Uncle’s Secret

Once upon a time there lived an Uncle in a double-storied house, with ornate railings and palm trees, in a small colony of New Delhi. It was a colony where the pride of knowing the property’s worth was much more than the breadth of the lane separating the windows of houses. Not once did the residents mind what others saw as congestion. After all, most Jaguars could well slide into the ground floors, uniformly turned into garages with elevators to carry the owners up one floor, or more. Uncle’s old-but-maintained duplex, enjoying a view of the lush-green Jassa Singh Park, was considered prime property. Plus, he had no tenants, like some others. He didn’t need to. This fact had got him a seat in the RWA Executive.  

At the time of this story, Uncle must have been 50, or something. His dusky cheeks, slightly saggy, were usually clean-shaven except on Sunday mornings. On Sunday mornings a grey stubble was allowed to erupt in holiday mood to make merry with the wet henna in his hair, now receding South-ward. The draw strings of the Puma hosiery shorts he slept in dangled in delight till late afternoon, and in places they waited all week to be walked to – garden, gate and even across the lane. It was an exposure they did not get, thanks to Uncle’s realty business where meetings with parties happened so often, so suddenly and in such secret circumstances sometimes that Aunty stopped caring about waiting to eat her meals with him. That she was usually on a gluten-free diet helped. 

He was a proper Punjabi, this Uncle, as was his wife, the parents tucked away in separate places, the two daughters, one son and one dog he bought instantly on learning from a close family friend that it was imported. Overall, it was a happy family. The women in the house had their lives, the boy his, the Uncle his own. But, it was this routine of Uncle’s that had always carried a secret none knew, except Shaggy. 

Yes, he had named the dog Shaggy, the one he bought from his close family friend, and for reasons unknown to him his children hated that word, or its short form. And so they hated the dog. Uncle loved Shaggy though, so much that not a morning would pass without them both going for a walk to Jassa Singh Park, adjacent to the Press Colony (only a patch of which was an open-defecation ground). There Uncle would talk to Shaggy ever since he was a pup, about his secret. 

His secret love for dancing. 

Yes, Uncle lusted after dance. Anywhere. Any kind. Just watching good dancing was not the point. Being in the middle of it, hands and body and all, was what made his heart beat like the clang of drums. In long dialogues with Shaggy, Uncle would tell him how he always wanted to become a dancer but never spoke another word after his father threw a ghara full of water his way to drown the dream forever, in a small village in Punjab. Uncle had taken two days, and downed three glasses of Lassi just before mustering enough courage to whisper his dream to his father. But the Punjabi expletives deafened his passion out.  Like the five rivers in monsoon had flowed Uncle’s tears. Then one day, they just dried up. As did the sound of some names his father called him, in place of a simple 'dancer'.

Shaggy knew the whole story. Shaggy also knew Uncle secretly danced. After all, he and the mirror alone stood witness to this expression of hidden love, every time Uncle’s wife and children were off to live their happy lives in their own cars with their own friends. Oh, those were the times when Uncle felt so alive! He would tune in to FM Radio and without bothering to select the music just let his arms and legs, belly and thighs, feet and toes, fingers and hands follow his heart. He would pant, he would sweat, stop a second to catch his breath or put the stray orange-and-grey strands back from his forehead, but he would not stop till a party was calling his mobile, or the gate guard was calling him because the gardener had spoilt his wife’s rockery, again. He lived to dance. He loved his secret. He loved Shaggy for being his confidante. He loved his wife and children for seeing the sweat and thinking it was cholesterol’s doing. He didn’t even mind that on such days he was asked to not eat the meat-curry. For health issues, that is.  

That is why, when the doorbell rang and he received an invite for a wedding, he was ecstatic. Of course, there would be a DJ called Melodhika with lights and sounds from another planet for him to dance to. But before that and what’s more, he would be dancing in a baraat! It was a distant cousin’s son’s wedding, and following the mare-with-the-groom would be a glittering mob footloose on the road. That special moment of dance, knowing that one is being watched, yet also knowing that one can dance without being noticed, being judged, being mocked by one’s father, freed his soul. 

He still remembered the wedding from last year, when he had danced from Subhash Nagar all the way to Tagore Garden, crossing markets and a temple, a metro station and even two schools. It was a joy he could recollect with such passion as would make his pulse treble. That day on the road, he had lost two shirt buttons, his watch and the shagan lifafa, which his wife believed he used to stock-up his cousin’s Car-o-Bar but only he knew he had rained the currency all over the orchestra and light wallahs. Happiness made him generous. Plus, he could swear he saw appreciation in their eyes for his dancing moves. 

It was a freedom he hungered for. Oh, he could barely wait!

But not all stories that begin ‘Once upon a time’ end with a ‘happily ever after’. This chapter of Uncle’s story does not. On the evening of the wedding it rained. It rained for hours on end, refusing to let up. In the middle of March, the unexpected downpour refused to stop, spoiling everything from the wedding pandal to the wheat crops. At the auspicious hour, the baraat was reduced to a train of one decorated Merc, four SUVs, and three smaller cars humbly following behind. The mandap has been shifted indoors, and the DJ had fled. In umbrellas and over three rounds he tucked his family into one of the cars, and promised to reach Hotel Privilege Punjab the moment the rain stopped. It was a promise he knew he would not keep. 

He didn’t go, at all. 

His wife called once to ask after him, and then told him over a happy din to warm the pulao with dal and have it for dinner. She thought she heard wrong when he asked about the DJ. She hung up after telling him to instruct the gate guard about their expected time of arrival, to lock the main door since she had a key and just go to sleep. They were going to be very late. So, Uncle did as he was told. He gave Shaggy an extra helping of Pedigree biscuits and switched off the lights of the house, one slow click after another. Shaggy knew his master’s heart was broken. Only Shaggy knew why.

As if in a syrup of sadness, Uncle changed into his shorts in slow-motion and looked at himself in the mirror. Was this his father’s doing, colluding with the weather Gods and pouring a ghara of water on his day’s dream for which he waited three whole weeks? He laughed a quiet laugh at the analogy. It was just the simplest of wishes, of dancing freely as if the world didn’t exist, wasn’t it? When fathers and sons all danced together. Yes, they did. It was just that wish...just that, wasn’t it?

In the quiet of the house, the refrigerator chortled to a halt. The tap in the basin seemed loud, suddenly. The rain made the rest of the music, on the ornate railing, the palm trees and the snoring guard’s hut. The furrows on Uncle’s brow eased and he took a deep breath. And before Shaggy knew it, the walls around him became alive with shadows of arms and legs, belly and thighs, feet and toes, fingers and hands following his master’s heart. He had slipped to the bedroom door and curled up there a moment back. 

The only witness to Uncle’s secret.

On Compassion

I missed writing for a day I had pencilled way in advance. February 20th saw thousands of bloggers the world over write on Compassion – the satin ribbon that binds, should bind, one creature’s comfort to another’s pain, one human’s fortune to the other’s need. I checked the exact meaning before deciding to write this. It was always a big word for me, but it became humongous after looking at what it meant. So much bigger than all the big words I like to keep as friends. Way beyond mere Politeness, surpassing stray acts of Kindness and occupying a pedestal next to felt Humanity, no less. 

Even though I was saddened that the bus full of beautiful posts on compassion had long left, leaving me and my pending work behind, on the desk still, I caught myself wondering aloud if at all I would have had anything to say about Compassion. That unconditional giving of what you have and what the other doesn’t. At all times, under any circumstances and without the slightest hope for reward. The emotion that makes you feel one with the other; human, animal or even an old oak. The ideal definition of compassion. 

And then I think, what about in life?

Every Tuesday the scene outside our neighbourhood temple is like it is on no other day. A mini-fete. There’s a balloon-seller standing alongside the Kwality Walls cart, together and away from the two parallel lines of beggars sitting lining the holy walls. A flute-seller plays devotional tunes, but the hungry stomachs hear no music. They beg for alms. For prasad, orange over-sweetened balls, from those visiting the temple. People walk in and out, and some passers-by dig into the newspaper packet to give some around. Often without looking who they are showing concern on, with measured hands. Three grape-sized pieces per hand. Deed done. Then they scurry on. Away from the house of God to their own homes where piping hot chapattis are being rolled. Leaving behind a question hanging in the air to be plucked by those like me, sitting and typing away their thoughts.

Is this compassion, pure and simple, or an automated ritual? Can the feeling of real concern be fleeting as the blink of an eye, or last the time it takes to brush the dust off the pants where the hungry-dirty hand tugged, in askance for food? Pity is short-lived, for who has tears to spare in such evil times? Or guilt. It vanishes quicker than grass thrown in the wind. But then, does it matter? Someone gave something. Shared. 2 seconds, 2 minutes. The heart opened. So, does it matter – how real how staged how in return for extra blessings?

The idea of giving, material or in thought, to the other has to stem from some degree of compassion. Or so I wonder.

Closer home. 

I don’t have half the number of compassionate bones as, say, my own mother. (I’m still checking dictionaries to see what it means!). My mother. So many times I get bugged at her idea of “doing good” at the cost of her own well-being, time, energy, health and bank balance too. What could have made her ‘adopt’ a student and sponsor his studies through school? What makes her spend her holidays teaching girls and boys from schools we never went to about the natural wonders of planet Earth? What makes her keep bowls of food and water for strays who lose their path into our driveway only to find a home in the verandah till their dying day? I used to think she is in love with the idea of charity but I corrected myself when I realized I’ve never heard her talk about it. It doesn’t make it a better version of being compassionate but it does make it seem more real in a world which we love to consider a stage, and all acts our performance to a gallery.

To feel and do silently is beautiful because compassion sings then in the highest note of the octave. I’ve heard that music through others in my life. The most fortunate ones hear it. See it. Learn to emulate it too, perhaps. 

Have I learnt? I don’t know.

Sure, I feel empathy for feet whose shoes bite, like mine. So many people’s failures are mine and cries of grief emanating as if from my lungs. I don’t hurt with rude words, even less with actions. I do try, at least, unless you hurt me or mine. Those who work for me never leave, those I have worked for are kind enough to call me caring. But what do I do in deed which can confirm to me that I am a compassionate person? No alms giving, no adopting. No routine cause-hankering, no fancy charity fairs. No impulsive gifting, no unaffordable donating. I could almost be the most apparently cold-blooded person on your friend list who moves not a finger till she feels. Gosh! What do I do to prove that I am compassionate? 

‘Mumma, wipe my nose please, or puppy will get a cold from me’ and the thoughts break with a prick. Oh no, not again. Please let it not grow into congestion. He feels so uncomfortable. He even thinks his stuffed toy will get a runny nose.

And then I realize, just like charity begins at home perhaps compassion begins right there too, along with answers and definitions to big words which need have no absolute versions. Just like the thousands of bloggers who wrote so passionately on the 20th of February, I too was looking to get in touch with the compassionate corner of my heart… 

Spent sleepless nights when he slept hot with fever, feeling the heat in my every bone. Spent impatient days when I knew he’s burdened in office, and today he needs a respite, he looked so. In tending to their needs, keeping mine aside or feeling loved when the pain was mine, this time. One feels towards toy animals and dolls, the other towards everyone who touches his life. And as I admire those compassionate acts done by my loved ones, I learn on-the-go to see what compassion really, truly means. I also realise where we discover true compassion breathing silently is what we call home, because real love breathes alongside. And there can be no compassion where there is no love.

Is that a selfish kind of compassion I feel, unable to fully grow beyond the hearth, and embrace all in one unconditional hug? 

I don’t know. 

Do I want to know right now? 

No. His nose is running, and him I need to be with. Or his puppy will get a cold, and he will then be 'hurt in the heart'.

What to expect when you’re not expecting

Thank you, Google.

It is that exact time in my life when people have started poring over my stomach to look for signs of a second pregnancy. After all, my first child is now going to be four! And even Doordarshan has known since times Krishi-Darshan that just like the ideal gap between two saplings is 3 feet, the one between children is the same number, in years. While I feel intelligent enough to draw myriad pleasant-thorny parallels between children and plants, wrap those inferences into a theorem and publish them as natty derivations, I am yet to figure out how to keep those eyes from gazing intently at my belly. Or those stranger-getting-weirder mouths from pronouncing, ‘It’s high time now!’

High time it is, indeed, that I claim my uterus and its neighbours, my husband’s similarly located organs and my family’s personal choices as exclusively my own. Oh, add my fertility (waning as it may be, main lut gayi) to that list too! 

That family-planning is the community’s business is the single greatest truth that drives the generation which has been-there-popped-theirs’ and packed up the nether regions in chaste panties and briefs for reproductive use in another life now. (Thank God! Some genes need to go dormant till the dinosaurs walk back!) But that doesn’t mean well-wishing minds will jump into the noise-cancelling well just when you want them to, which is exactly the second they ask ‘What about number two now? This is the best time!’ One would imagine they mean it’s a good time to go shit, but a few years into motherhood and you know they mean … well, shit still. Regardless that they barely know you. Oblivious that they may be intruding into private territory. And ignorant of the expression they make when they ask such silly questions – one eyebrow raised, half-a-smile and fleeting glances at your spouse which may want you to scratch their faces with pitch forks.

Such violent thoughts seep into your cherubic minds as would shock you, but probably not more than being asked in McDonalds over an extended family-cum-friends birthday party and across a table-for-twelve in a hall full of din – ‘Your first child is going to school. Are you trying for the second one now?’ Around you heads turn to look (often at your stomach) and on your lips are the words – ‘Yes, madam, I am, with my hand on my softy and his on his Maharaja Mac right this second. Demi-Gods have been born in such super ways one never knows, right?’ But you just smile, shake the image of those hair-spa heads into the fryer and convince your mind that some murders will be in self-defence. Plus, God helps those who help themselves. Amen.

To be asked ‘when next?’ by those you don’t feel akin to is like hearing the sound a fork makes when your tod’s teeth rub against it while having a banana, again and again. But to be advised to ‘have one, one more’ is like seeing the same banana-infested fork being shoved up your nose. These being my exact feelings.

So, what’s my plan? 

Maybe I can carry an 18”x18” cushion and push it in my jumper whenever my radar catches the signal of an individual with an inverted red triangle (c.f. GoI) for a mouth. What fun it would be. ‘Second trimester, aunty ji. Cancel your Europe trip and stay ready for an invite to the baby shower soon. Theme – Stone Age.’ 

Perhaps, a better idea would be to ask the experienced to speak up in the same gathering they advise you so politely in - ‘Do you think a particular rare position is conducive to producing a healthy second child? Planetary, planetary position of course. Your pandit ji should know, nahi?’

On a day when I feel totally vanquished I will just remind the tied and dyed kitty party that ‘You know, the world’s oldest mother to conceive naturally was 59 years old. And you are way beyond natural, so why not try it yourself, hain ji?’ All this with one eyebrow raised, half-a-smile and fleeting glances at the revered uncle jis, of course.

Now, any questions? 

Anyone?

The Winter Sun

I began typing this sitting outside my son’s school, waiting for it to get over for the day. As always, I was the first parent to arrive, because I am yet to get over the look in his eyes when he sees me as the first person at the classroom door. Before any other ma or papa or driver uncle. I like it that way, so I make sure I leave home a little early and catch his face lighting up before the crowd catches up with our special moment.

Today, though, I was exceptionally early. There were 65 minutes to go before I could get up from this plastic chair under the tin shed and walk up to his class to take him home. Who knew the part of the Ring Road that was squeezed by the Metro workers for months would be thrown open to traffic. What a relief really to have a full road, but still … how much can I just sit and look around now? And look around at who? Or what?

But then, have eyes had time and had to look around. 

The recess had just got over. While the bell announcing the end was met with a loud uproar, a sudden silence was descending over all visible parts of the school. Much like how a dry dupatta falls off the clothes line on the first floor and comes gliding down. In no real hurry but getting there. The silence. The breeze felt nippy. I tightened my stole around my shoulders, hid my hands inside, and re-crossed my legs for the 14th time. Some minutes must have gone by, when I heard a screech loud enough to make the bus driver in the far corner of the parking area turn, and make me look up from fidgeting with my phone.

The guard at the main gate had dragged his chair two meters away from the post and was now sitting in the sun; the metallic letters on his shoulders making tiny reflected moons on the nearby tree. And his face? Gloriously snug and warm. Seconds later, as if it was a sign I was waiting for, I did the same. I shifted my own grey chair right on the shadow line where the tin roof’s shade ended and a sea of sunlight began. 

To describe what I felt when I re-crossed my legs for the 15th time, this time in the sunlight, is impossible for me. It did not feel like first love, no, but certainly like the first warm kiss of the season. I knew that the dark blue top would absorb too much too soon and I will have to relocate, but who worries about teething babies on their honeymoon night itself? I still had a lot of time on my hands, but at least my hands were in the sun now. I looked at them. I ran my left thumb over the slightly visible veins on top of the right hand. Like a ship breaking through pieces of ice, tiny brown wrinkles of collected skin formed. Dryness, despite the lotion. That’s when a scene from my childhood scooped me away from the present …

It either used to be petroleum jelly, which one of her NRI sons brought for her, or mustard oil. Most of winters you would find her rubbing either of those on her arms and feet. My grandmother. My dad’s mother who would enjoy the winter sitting on a folding bed in the tree-lined back yard, and always in the sun. More than the gold bangles it was the patterns on her wrinkled skin that held my childish attention. If I think now, I would say they looked like hexagons made from the most delicate glass. They shone so bright. So thick the layer of oil, so thin the skin. Once done, she would call for her sacred book and its exquisite wooden stand and go oblivious to the world around her, a world which was making its own life around the winter sun.

The older children, with their backs towards the brightness because young girls just didn’t want to get tanned, would be busy with their school books. Winter holidays never came without home work! One of us from the middle rung would be seen helping an aunt spread the orange peels and amla slices on newspapers. To dry. In another sunlit patch, empty plastic jars would sit agape, to be ‘dry-cleaned’ to hold this winter's pickles. Pickles too would be basking in their preserved glory a safe distance away from the two youngest imps throwing mud around, digging the flowerbeds and burying broken idols hoping for a temple to grow. At least one pair of just-washed sneakers would lean against a wall, snoozing in the sun, much like the writer of this post would right after lunch and just below her favourite mango tree, with a shawl on her head because some falling leaves can have tiny bugs on them, plus those fruit flies ... 

There was so much happening in the Sun back then, that the Sun just couldn’t have got bored for the day. Today, I sit wondering here in Delhi - where is the time, the space? Where are the people? And where is the full blown winter sun to enjoy? And then I answer myself – I think we bored the winter Sun away. Because even when we have such moments of free time on our hands and a bright sunny sky, we just don’t know what to do with them. 

Maybe, those bright patches of yellow sneaking in from our windows and doors or catching us unaware outside offices and schools are just asking us to see. To look closer, even if at our own hands. For who knows what streams of thoughts, what journeys into the past are waiting to happen. What bonds asking to be re-lived. And what stories knocking up there, hungry to be told. Spontaneous ones … told just as they come to mind, like this one here. Unedited for now, but a polished version of it waiting especially for him, for bedtime tonight. 

Him. My son. The one I was the first to pick, today again, and around whom my life now revolves. My sun for all seasons to come. 

An old fashioned song, on his 100th

The old folks don't talk much

They talk so slowly when they do

They are rich they are poor

Their illusions are gone

They share one heart for two

‘The old folks don’t talk much’? John Denver did not get it right. Or maybe that’s because he never met my grandfather. Old folks can talk a lot, I tell you. Mostly, about things and incidents from the longest time away, as if memory starts ageing backwards and what remains freshest in their mind’s eyes are those choicest of images from younger days, cherry-picked – to be mulled over in free time or to be shared. With grandchildren, first and foremost. What a fortunate relationship!

Two days back, my nana ji turned 100. No, not on Earth. I have no conclusive proof of better places but I do know that wherever the dandy went he must still be wearing his best skin, and not just because it’s his birthday. Some gentlemen are like that. It’s their birthday, everyday.  

You know how it is after a certain age. You start preparing for your exit. Not that you are ready to go, no matter how much you say otherwise, for who knows what reality unknown lands may hold? So, they prepare – in worldly matters and matters spiritual, clinging on to the former and clasping on to the latter for dear life. 

'They are rich they are poor' makes me think. The will is signed with bad eye sight but eyes which have learnt to see people much better. See through them too. That gets done and dusted, signed, rolled up and locked in, before the ageing mind plays tricks of its kind. But that’s serious business, and I am digressing into a mood I don’t want to. This is about him as my grandfather. Why get a will into it? 

Where was I? Ah, rich-poor. Perhaps as a way of acknowledging the big number, my nana ji started a ritual after he turned 80. Every birthday he would give us four cousins money which equalled his age in number. Did not leave him much poorer but made us all so rich. Or was this his way to keep us looking forward to the increasing numbers? Praying for them too? Maybe. He alone knows. I for one enjoyed the pocket money. And still wonder how hard he must have worked to arrange the exact change.

The paan wallah at Astley Hall chowk must have helped.

    

Their homes all smell of time

Of old photographs

And an old fashioned song

Though you may live in town

You live so far away

When you've lived too long

Oh, for sure their homes smell of time. Time has a smell. And by the time it takes its toll on your senses, your nose is the only one which cannot smell it. The young may pucker theirs because odours from balms and favourite woollens, newspaper clippings and boxes with precious little are not something they can take for long. Others who stay around the old get so used to it that a house scented with designer candles would make them want to throw up. 

My nana ji had lived a glorious life, which found innovative ways to be preserved. Why not! A wooden cupboard which went from being an out-of-bounds treasure trove for our children's eyes to one which creaked, always ajar, as if asking desperately to be noticed. Right behind where he lay. In it we believed were things from his past, though no one really ever found out. The finest suit pieces he wore, the diary which documented how he never lost a case in his life, odes to Gandhi when socialism became an obsession, a wrist watch held so dear that it ticked away its life hidden from all eyes. And a radio, the sight of which will make you smile. Silent now. A life and its times preserved, to be rummaged through in the middle of the night. When sleep refused to come, or a nagging ache kept him awake – in the heart or in the mind? No idea! To think of it, I never slept next to him. Never spent the night with him. I wonder why?

But, what’s the point.

Have they laughed too much

Do their dry voices crack

Talking of things gone by

Have they cried too much

A tear or two still always seems

To cloud the eye

Can laughter reach a ‘too much’ point? The teeth may go, the lips wrinkle, but there’s more to laughter than just that. Or so I think. Why else would he guffaw remembering us four tots playing 'Paploo' with playing cards till his dying day? Must be the joy of seeing us kids together. Just for that I would swallow this inherited pride and become Miss Paploo all over again.

His voice was cracked but what could act a dam to the flood of stories he came with? Stories from old folks that make us travel to scenes and situations which no children’s story books contain. A world used to open in front of our hungry eyes. Fergusson College, Lahore to High Court, Allahabad came alive with his voice. Dehradun in all its lost glory, with its clubs and bars, and the Rs. 2 shared-auto experiences when coming to meet his grandchildren. If only words could translate into pictures, real pictures to hold and slide into family albums, what a collection I would have had today to boast about. 

The scene he recalled the most, and with utmost pride, was the one that unfolded between him and a Brit lawyer in a bar. Where he overheard ‘Hamlet’ being discussed at the white table, being quoted incorrectly. Oh sacrilege! He went over to repeat the soliloquy and gained a friend for life, that is once the incredulous look expected on hearing an Indian quote Shakespeare verbatim in those B/W days was washed off his white face. And then down with good whiskey. This friend flew home to England and left behind ‘the house with a 100 rooms’ - the one in Doon, the one especially constructed as if to play hide-and-seek in. With the gate that opened every evening at 5 pm to walk the kids to the dairy. Fresh cow’s milk, and an excuse for the cousins to meet!

Tears? I remember none. None of regret, for sure. He was a proud, proud man. Perhaps, that helped with keeping the back straight till the 92 years of his life. Kept him fit and fine. And he tried, tried his best to make us four as proud of ourselves as the ripest plums are. My cousin was to work towards becoming the finance minister, and I was to do a Ph.D. She’s at it, getting there with her love for numbers and scores of yore which made him go into extreme states of beaming happiness. I quit. I could not complete my Ph.D like he dreamed. Maybe he went too soon. Or maybe, I was just left without any inspiration any more.

They tremble as they watch the old silver clock

When day is through

Tick tock oh so slow

It says yes it says no

It says I wait for you

Then comes a point when their thoughts become their confidants. It happened with him. Slowly, but surely, he was busier with them than with us as if they had replaced all of us. Sometimes walking on a street in Pakistan. The next moment attending Gandhi’s talk in Delhi University’s gardens. When he came out of his reveries, panic would strike. A phone call to my father to come, hurry, something is happening to me. False alarms. Or fear? The tallest, most regal succumb to the fear of the dark valley. The sharpest of minds end up not recognizing their own kith and kin. That's what happened with him. One day he thought I was the nurse, another day another stranger. No longer his granddaughter. It hurt, in his last days. 

But then, what if we were to believe that they reach their new worlds much before they leave ours? Maybe, it is indeed a beautiful homecoming after a glorious journey on Earth is done?

Yes. Just the thought that I was looking for.

The old folks never die

They just put down their heads

And go to sleep one day

It doesn't matter now

The song has died away

And echo's all around.

[Written for WordPress Daily Prompts : 365 Writing Prompts. The prompt for today was - Prompt - Take the third line of the last song you heard, make it your post title, and write for a maximum of 15 minutes. GO! – I picked “Old Folks” by John Denver.]

Soldiering On

The last black pin pierced the tiny bun of white hair at the nape of her neck, completing the neat circle. She patted it in place with a dab of oil. And then she looked at herself. What was once a cascade black as the night had lived its life over the past 80 years. It had turned thin, turned white. Does white mean an absence of colour, or is it black which signifies a vacuum in life? She smiled, raising her chin ever so slightly so as to show the mirror the jawline, set as tight and taut as determination itself. Her hair, her companion who never cut-away from her even when so much else severed …

A trickle of sweat down the side of her face reminded her of today’s task which lay waiting to be done. To defeat the 46 degrees of heat. With creased fingers nimble as those of a tea-picker she rolled away from the comb’s teeth those stray strands which seemed to part her head every time she combed them. She rolled them into tiny white ball, no, silver … like a ball of pure silver wool.  

She called it silver, her hair, ‘as silver as the thunderous lighting in the sky, powerful, alone and brave in all that darkness’ she used to tell her granddaughter when she would play with her plait. But that was when they stayed together. Now, Simar stayed in the same city but in a different house. Bigger. Better. Where her son moved with his family when the confines of Amar Colony and even more claustrophobic memories of what was once refugees’ shelter disturbed his peace, his dream of upward mobility. The day he drove into his lane in a Maruti Esteem too big to park, bigger than anything the coiled wires or shoulder-to-shoulder clotheslines overhead had ever seen, that day he left Amar Colony behind. The car was now parked in its own garage, in a plush Delhi locality. Along with a few more signs announcing how far he had come away from all things past.

And that is where she was headed, S-13, Green Park. Always putting in an extra effort to look her best. Hair all neat, fresh clothes from the cupboard and not those partially worn ones off the hooks in the corner of her two bedroom flat. ‘Mummy ji, please use this before meeting the guests,’ her daughter-in-law had asked her once, giving her an expensive looking bottle of perfume. She was over for Simar’s birthday party and had forgotten to change her suit after rolling 50 besan laddoos at home specially for the occasion. Foolish excitement had made her board bus number 469, totally unmindful of her dusty slippers, a mismatched synthetic dupatta and patches of sweat all over the body. It was July! She had done as the daughter-in-law told her to, but had quietly left soon as Simar had cut the cake, and the guests got down to eating chocolate fondue and tiramisu.

And so, when she handed over her house key to the tenant above and boarded bus number 469 this day, she was neat and fresh. She even carried a newspaper to shield herself from the sun. After all, the doctor had given her strict orders to beat the heat. Strangely for Dr. Singh, there was a connection between her failing kidneys, the arthritis in her left knee and a developing cataract in one eye. Or maybe, he was just being caring, that handsome sardar! She smiled as she remembered how far back they went. Dr. Sukhjinder had come from Pakistan’s Punjab the same year as she and her husband. A widower now, he practised and lived alone a few houses away from hers. All efforts of his son’s to make him shift abroad went in vain. At least that was the story Dr. Singh, MBBS, liked to tell his neighbours.

The bus barely stopped for the passengers to get off. She almost fell on the hot tarmac road, but steadied herself before she could get hurt. Or her clothes dirty. In Hardeep’s house everything must be presentable. Just like the kind woman who always opened the gate to her. She was about her age, reminding her of her best friend from those days of gay abandon we call school. They would chatter at the gate itself, like excited girls, but just enough. ‘Madam will get upset if she sees me away from work for so long. I better go. Come, come inside. I’ll ring for her once you make yourself comfortable,’ and she would sit on the chair closest to the door. Closest to the door. You know, where one hangs umbrellas and caps and keys to storerooms. Things which have no use, no business no point being inside, on marble floors and under chandeliers. It was that corner in S-13 where she usually felt most comfortable. Never far from the door.

‘How are you, daadi?’ shrieked Simar when she saw her grandmother sitting uncomfortably on that chair they jokingly called "In the middle of nowhere". They hugged so tight no air could pass between them, and talked so fast an express train would hide in shame. Simar told her about that boy in class, ‘Oh and I won the tennis championship so mummy got my hair styled at fancy Madonna Salon and papa says if I do well in school we will holiday in Europe this autumn and how do I look? We’re going to the pool party at Sainik Farms …’ and she just sat there listening. Smiling and listening and enjoying the excitement in Simar’s voice, an excitement that made her feel … how should I say? Um, it makes me feel … wanted! Yes, wanted. And what is wanted is loved too, right? She loves me so much…

Hardeep’s leather soles announced his arrival. As he bent to touch his mother’s feet, she got up to caress his cheeks, as if he was a little boy, her boy, still. As if. They sat for five minutes of silence sipping lemonade, broken only by Simar’s interjections of things she wanted to share with her daadi, skipping whole words and certainly all punctuations to fit into this moment as much talk as any 8-year-old could manage. You see, time was short. The farmhouse the family had to go to for the pool party was far.

Plus, the rickshaw walla who was to transport the cooler and her daadi back to Amar Colony was already clocking his fare outside the imposing gate.

Silently, she saw her daadi get on to the tiny cart next to the cooler they no longer had any use for. Will you be okay, daadi? It’s so hot and what if the rickshaw bumps plus you have so many kilometers to go and papa, don’t you think we can drop … but before her thoughts found breath as spoken words, she was waving a good bye. She looked at Simar straight and smiled, that chin-raised-that-tight-jawline smile the mirror had seen just this morning. As if her teeth were gritted inside, proudly, determined to make her journey comfortable, and safe. She tightened the black strap carrying the kirpan and looked ahead.

Like a soldier on a mission. 

Wait till Dr. Singh learns. I must carry his favourite jalebi next time I go visit him to tell him about my new companion. My own cooler. How pleased he would be that I am taking care of myself ...always mumbling how we children of a past lost to time are our own sentinels to our selves, to take care of our selves. 

The sunlight bounced off her hair, hair which shone as silver as the thunderous lighting in the sky, powerful, alone and brave in all that darkness.

[Written for WordPress Daily Prompts : 365 Writing Prompts. The prompt for today was - Take Care - When you’re unwell, do you allow others to take care of you, or do you prefer to soldier on alone? What does it take for you to ask for help?]

Circle of Life

She had no idea what she was doing on the yellow bench, staring at the patterns the union of rust and old paint made on it. She had been married in the biggest house around this park, but she had never been here. Office and work and parties and shopping and spa and movies and office and work. That busy thing we call Life. To think that for 10 years she parked her Honda Accord right behind the stone wall this rickety bench rested upon. And on which she rested today. Alone. With some papers by her side. With her hand holding them down on the bench. What was she doing here? Shouldn’t I be in office? Damn, it’s 3:00 pm and Linux Tech comes calling in 30 minutes for handing over Eastern Region’s project to me and ... and this is what I have been waiting for, working for all my …

The wheels of the pram screeched on the jogger’s path every time it turned around the oval’s bends. They did now too, just at the yellow bench. The baby giggled, the dribble running down the chin doubled, as did the loud delight at the turns. The mother did not seem to notice. She pushed the pram along, looking straight at a point only she could see. A face devoid of expressions, but thoughts sprinting into each other at full speed. Somewhere else. Certainly not here, where the two pig-tails on the pram were dancing with glee. The baby let her mother be, as if she understood. But who can ... can anyone understand, help? This ... guilt, this feeling of nothingness. Just burps and nappies and sleepless nights. This worry I am too tired to admit as real ... bone fatigued. These chapters I had not signed up for my entire …  

She straightened up on her bench at the noise, where wheels met pavement to turn a different direction. The grinning jingling monkey hanging on the pram pulled her out from the abyss of her thoughts. Her Linux meeting was tucked in a drawer. She noticed then, the pram, the baby, the mother. And then she stared with an expression her face had never before seen. The papers felt the pressure ease, but only slightly. What a darling baby! Oh look at that hair those curls the twinkle in her eyes. How happy she is. How old must she be? A few months, maybe a year? I love how she claps her hands when the pram turns ... as if she is flying. They are called bundles of joy ... Oh! What a lucky mother … and her nails dug into the bench. Green with jealousy. Now yellow with old paint. She looked away at a barren tree. The papers still struggling to breathe under all that weight.

She swerved the pram with one hand and adjusted her dupatta. Took a long breath. Her mother used to say it helps whenever you feel cornered by customs or people even. Breathe, and keep that scream from coming. Keep it in. Will I ever wear my ghunghroos and dance ... Oh! I must be mad. God’s gift of a child in my pram and such ungrateful thoughts. Evil ... Her swollen feet seemed to agree with the noises in her head. Sent a shot of pain rocketing up into her thoughts, where it remained. Pulsating. Where it would remain for every waking hour of her being it seemed. What would I do to just feel free! Lie down on this grass with not a lullaby to breathe or story to tell. No night becoming day becoming night. Just dance ... hear applause. No responsibility, none depending on me. Like ... like that woman on the bench. Sitting free without a care in the world enjoying the sun the calm. If only in her place I could be … and it sprung within her. Jealousy. She averted her gaze skywards at the lonely cloud drifting aimlessly. The hand clutched the pram tighter. It picked up speed.

And then the wind blew. As if it was eavesdropping. Peeping inside their minds. Colluding with an unseen pattern, the wind blew strong, then stronger.

The baby’s joy knew no bounds. It soared like a polythene on a string, as did her joyful shouts all around. In the meantime, one woman’s dupatta with stains of milk and baby oil protested and was set free, even as the hands tried holding on to it. The other’s papers blew away with the wind, no longer wanting to be clutched, leaving the yellow bench behind. There was confusion in the air. Hair and papers and clothes and pig tails all going wild. Together. The wind kept blowing as if it had a purpose to. And then it slowed down, just a bit. The baby’s mother helped collect the papers spread across the lawn. The woman on the bench unravelled the soiled dupatta from her legs. They walked up to each other to hand over what was not their own. And then to sense what was theirs, together.

The tears. 

They had both been crying. One because she had a child and the other because she perhaps never could. That’s what the papers said, those medical reports. She had just found out and had driven home. Straight. To this bench where she had never been before. 

The wind was gone. Left a quiet behind, intentionally. Also left behind a lawn peppered with leaves. Mostly dry and wilting but some fresh and green too. Like hope, no not jealousy! Or say, like finding a friend to share a yellow bench with, no matter how rickety the bench or how unknown the friend.

To share a circle of life, and understand the patterns drawn within it too. 

[Written for WordPress Daily Prompts : 365 Writing Prompts. The prompt for today was - Green-eyed – Tell us about the last time you were really, truly jealous of someone. Did you act on it? Did it hurt your relationship?]