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Short of Change
Yesterday, I was on my way to the Nehru Place. Excited and happy, out of many reasons at all. I found an auto-driver who agreed to charge according to the meter was one of those many reasons. The weather had taken a smooth turn and it was more-or-less cloudy which gave my burnt skin a salving respite from Delhi’s charring heat. After a short-siesta and a shorter lunch, those fluffy clouds played the role of the dessert.
The auto-driver was exercising his racing skills and it added to the fun since the not-so-warm wind was kissing my bearded-cheeks all throughout. The speedometer was touching the likes of nineties and I was feeling that the auto-driver had some ulterior motives of setting some speed record or testing the agility of the tyres, until my body started experiencing the sudden forces of inertia. Yes, the auto started decelerating. The image of a red-pixellated-disk of the traffic-light managed to cross my spectacles to finally paint my retina. The image was clear-enough to furnish my curious mind with the reason behind that sudden advent of inertia. Continue Reading
There were a lot of things I liked about my grandma’s house. I liked that it was the biggest house I’d ever been in. It had a kitchen, a dining room, a front room, a parlor, a sick room, and a bathroom. It had two stairways to get to the upstairs where there was a maze of four bedrooms, no bathroom or hall. You walked through one bedroom to get to the next. It had great hiding places where I could stay huddled until a cousin called, “Ollie ollie oxen free!”
I liked how Grandma’s house smelled. The kitchen smelled like spices and the basement smelled like burlap bags, walnuts, and 3-in-One oil. Any one of those aromas today takes me immediately back to Granddad’s side, hammering walnuts in that basement.
I also liked the location. Grandma’s house was two straight blocks down the sidewalk from my house. My school was two blocks from my house and two blocks from Grandma’s. The sidewalks made a triangle that I mostly lived within. The thing I liked best about the location was that my aunts, uncles, and dozens of cousins inhabited many of the houses within that triangle. The two safe blocks down the sidewalk meant I could walk, run, skip, ride my scooter, peddle my bike, skip rope, or roller skate all the way, back and forth, at will, since about age five. Continue Reading
In a world where the ideal of a relationship between two people follows the course of “finding your one true love” and then planning a life together, their true story is one that took a different path…
Right from the start, neither of them wanted to get married, but didn’t have a choice. Their marriage did not involve their consent, and there were times they thought perhaps God hated them. She was opinionated and vocal, and so sharp of tongue that her new husband at first felt he would have preferred to live with an adder. He refused to be outdone and their newly married life was far from the marital “honeymoon” bliss.
They suffered each other, yet would dive into anything they could find to distance themselves from their undesirable situation, and from each other. The first few years of constant fighting evolved into the silence of rejection and resignation.
Their days were taken up avoiding each other; their nights were spent in opposite rooms of the house. There was no “hope” of divorce, being legally and culturally bound to live together; otherwise, they would have most likely divorced each other ten times over if only for the great sensation it would have been to be liberated for good. Continue Reading
Sometimes, as a mom blogger, I get the feeling that my kids somehow tap into the wavelength of a post I’ve written – before I even post it. And then they come to me and totally disprove whatever I’ve written about them.
For instance, the night that I wrote “Polite Conversation,” about Nigel using lengthy delayed echolalia at the dinner table one evening, he came into my office – minutes before I posted it – and began what was undoubtedly the most incredible conversation I’ve ever had with him. I honestly didn’t realize that he was capable of a serious back-and-forth discussion regarding intangible ideas for over half an hour. And he revealed so much more about himself during the course of it.
He started off by running into my office, eyes wide. “Mom! Have you heard of something called ‘home births’? Because I think I want to have my children that way and I wanted to see what you thought of it.”
Definitely didn’t see that coming. “Yes, I’ve heard of them. But I think that you should talk to your wife about it first. And I don’t think you need to worry about that for a long time.” Continue Reading
Touching the thick glass window, I could feel heat emanating from the pane, although I was seated in a chilly, air conditioned passenger plane. It had just landed and was still coasting the rough gravel runway of the Mumbai airport, yet the familiar clicking of seatbelts being unfastened, though the “fasten your seatbelt” sign was still on, brought my senses to full wakefulness.
Everyone around me was rushing to gather their bags and depart the cramped quarters, as I just sat, contemplating. “Am I really here?” I slowly got my backpack and stood along with the rest of those waiting to disembark. As the plane’s doors opened, a wave of heat rushed in to greet me, along with a blend of unique scents: some good, some not-so-great.
Excited, but terribly nervous at the same time, I tried hard to remember why I was doing this. “Come on!” I told myself. “You’ve wanted to do this for a long time! You’ve been working for more than a year to afford it. Imagine, a year in India, working to help the underprivileged, giving classes to inmates, cheering mentally handicapped children. This is what you want to do.” Having sufficiently psyched myself up, I stepped out of the airplane, descended the rickety staircase, and my feet touched the ground of the land I had dreamed of so long. Continue Reading
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