After years of being a dog person, I finally fell in love with a cat who broke my heart. (Check out my post My Neighbour: The Queen to find out about this drama.) Deciding that I didn’t want to be treated as an automatic scratch-post, I decided to never get anywhere close to anything feline.
That is why when my brother in law brought in another kitten to foster, I kept my distance and didn’t go anywhere near her for one very long night. The fact that my fingers itched to touch her was warning enough. But the next day, I had to run interference since she wasn’t eating or drinking anything.
I am not a kitten expert but this one is Tiny with a capital T. She is a little bigger than the size of my palm. The guy who gave her to us took her from the litter when she was less than a month. She is a month old now. It felt like the time I held my daughter for the first time. She was so delicate I was afraid to hurt her. One look from her doll-face and I fell. Hard.
Ever since then, I had been trying to keep my distance, all the while telling my brother-in-law to send her back to her mother (can’t happen since they are in another state) and check what to feed her before feeding it to her. Apparently, the guy who had gave her to us was feeding her Buffalo’s milk with chocolate syrup so that she would eat something since she wasn’t. And she can’t digest it. Now, this fostering between her supplier and next forever home feels like a rescue mission. My brother-in-law has consulted people who know kitty stuff and I’m hoping he has finally got it right.
Because if he hasn’t, I might not be able to deal with the loss.
All the while I have been avoiding her, she has been claiming a part of my heart. I have been visiting her on the pretext on accompanying my daughter. Everyone here knows I am bluffing but they have enough sense not to call me out. When I go, I watch her quietly as she plays with her ball. I sometimes push the ball around to draw her out to give her a chance to attack it. That’s the extent of it. But my eyes never leave her.
I think she prefers me that way.
Because yesterday, when I was sitting on the bed watching her eat, she quietly came to me and climbed on my leg into my lap and sat there. Just sat there. And ignored my daughter who actually came to play. My daughter kept on patting her own lap, inviting her to play, twirling her fingers to catch her attention, while Coco sat chewing and licking my fingers in one hand while I stroked her with the other hand.
And I fell in love.
And she isn’t mine. She belongs to her forever family. She will only be here for this month, if that.
Well, what can I say? It is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. Sigh!
My daughter started telling stories when she was three.
Most of it was reused, recycled and repurposed from the stories I had told her or what she saw on You Tube (Link to the proof: Plagiarism with Brains: Reuse, Recycle, Repurpose). She would add or changes animals in my animal stories and replaced mango with pumpkin in fairytales.
Yesterday, she wrote her first piece of poetry–on the fly and in 60-seconds flat. I actually had to ask her if she had taken ‘inspiration’ from someone. She claims she hadn’t.
Here is the piece. Before you ask, I have taken Your Highness’s permission.
Touch the sky,
Touch the sun,
Just go on and have fun.
You don’t know how long it will stay,
Or rather it will just go away.
I haven’t correct anything there. I had just asked her why she wanted to write game score on the diary I had given her to write poetry and stories in. So, she just took a pen and jotted these lines on the first page (rather the cardboard) of blank diary.
Now that she has a foot in the door, I can hope. I know, there is no guarantee that she would want to continue at all. But that’s life of a parent.
Some of you might have noticed that I have published a new short stories compilation, “The Bracelet and other short stories”. It is currently available in PDF format in the Free Books tab in the Menu. Grab your free copy now!
“Kindness is a star on a moonless night. It walks with you through the darkness.”
There are people, and there are moments, but it is the gestures of people in those moments that stay with us forever.
Long back when internet was not available, I went to live in Pune shortly. One day, I went to a recruitment agency. In my hurry to leave, I left my wallet behind that had all my cash and new address. Considering that I had not managed to memorise my address yet, I should have been worried. Initially, I wasn’t bothered by the miss because the person who brought me to the agency had also promised to take me back home.
I waited for the person to come pick me up until it was dark outside. He didn’t.
Then the office closed and I was ushered outside. I panicked because I am not used to being out after dark. In small town India, girls get indoors while it is still light outside.
When I called the guy, he just said he was busy so I should take a bus, and hung up without waiting for a reply. My mobile phone was now out of call balance too. I could not message him to ask for my address. I didn’t know anyone else in the city and had no way to contact anyone.
I also didn’t have the money to take a bus and didn’t know where to go anyway since I didn’t remember the address–just the general location, which was the size of a couple of towns. I was scared and alone on the streets. Being raised in a traditional Indian family, I was used to having a chaperone everywhere after dark. I felt deserted! I wanted to confront the guy and demand an explanation. But for that, I would first have to either survive the night on the streets or reach home somehow.
At first I thought of waiting on the street; surely if I didn’t reach home by late night, someone would notice and come looking. But it was a commercial area and, once all businesses close up for the night, there would be no lights outside and I was afraid of darkness.
Also, I was no Mary Jane and my “Spiderman” had just left me to hang and dry. So I decided to take the bus.
I was shaking head-to-toe out of anxiety as I stood next to a couple of girls who seemed to be waiting for a bus as well. There was no bus stand there. They sensed my discomfort and asked where I was going. And when I told them the general location, they pointed me towards the other side of the road. Apparently, I was standing in a place that would take me in the opposite direction.
I moved to the correct side and boarded the first bus that came. When the ticket conductor asked me where I was going, I started telling him about my situation. I am not sure how many words I uttered before I started sobbing and, then, crying in the earnest. I had never cried in front of an audience before.
I told him the general direction I needed to go but when I recalled the name of the colony, he told me there was no such colony on the route. He had never heard of it. But he allowed me to ride and tell him when I see a familiar landmark.
I told him I had no money on me and he assured me it was okay.
A woman offered me water to help me calm down.
The bus was packed with people standing but, still, someone offered me a seat.
Some time later, familiar wall hoardings started to emerge. I am someone who rode a scooter back home, so I recognise routes by large hoardings, trees with particular shapes and buildings that stand out. I recognised the route now and told the conductor that this is the correct route to my home.
And then, I pointed at a road which was around three kilometres from my house, requesting to deboard since the bus seemed to be going in a different direction now. But he assured me that he now understood where I was trying to go and the bus would turn around at the next corner; that they would drop me at a more convenient and well-lit stop closer to home, so I wouldn’t have walk three kilometres on the completely dark road alone.
When I finally got down, I was just a kilometre from my home and in a brightly lit market that I recognised.
I don’t remember the faces of all those people who helped me that day because I was distressed, scared and crying most of the time and my vision was blurry. I don’t remember whether I thanked any of them.
Looking back, if I have to choose the darkest night of my life, I would choose this day when I was deserted by someone I had trusted implicitly and stopped trusting others to keep me safe. But it was also the brightest moment because I decided to try getting back up and there were so many kind people who helped me pull myself upright.
With 17 years gone, I think the gratitude is long overdue.
I want to thank everyone who ever helped someone like me. You make the world a place worth living.
P was the most popular girl in the class. Boys were often falling over themselves to impress her while she basked in the light of their attention. Face shining, open laughter, plucked eyebrows at 15, I was awestruck by how she carried herself confidently among our classmates. When she sat on the desk to talk to me between classes, she looked like the queen of hearts, while I was a Knave, complete with a light dusting of a mustache.
Not that minded it. (I mean, I didn’t mind her being the queen. I did mind the mustache and removed it later that year.)
Inspite of being popular, she was pretty nice and happy to help. Her grades weren’t impressive, but she managed to scrape through High School somehow. In fact, she got her Bachelor of Arts degree too later.
She was one of my closest friends at that time and my mother often worried that her influence might derail me.
I wouldn’t say so. I had quite a few other things derailing me those days. Maths had never been my best friend. But ever since Algebra was introduced, I was struggling. Once I joined this school mid-semester, Trigonometry joined the ranks, and I gave up completely. History I could trudge through but, with an ever-absent teacher, Civics, Geography and Economics were quickly turning into mystery. Biology I understood but Physics and Chemistry were beyond comprehension. So, I solely concentrated on languages that did not give me hives. It meant that while I would pass English, Hindi and Sanskrit with merit and an A in Drawing, I would probably fail in all the other subjects, ending any future ambitions that I might have.
But, as I said, it wasn’t P’s fault. She had similar worries herself about studies, but she wasn’t a worrywart like me.
In fact, nothing seemed to worry her at all…except once, when she told me that one of our male classmates now had a caller ID on their home phone. I wondered why it should worry her. Later, she told me that his mother has explicitly told her not to try calling him again. I wondered why his mother would say that.
But as I said, generally, nothing really seemed to worry her.
Honestly, I liked her for what she was. While she wasn’t particularly attentive in studies, she was a well of information on some topics that seemed to miss my attention.
P had introduced me to blank calls. A couple of years into our friendship, she made a blank call to my brother (on whom she had a mighty crush) right in front of me. I was completely in awe now. Honestly, I would never blank-call my brother–he had learnt Marshall Arts and could break a brick with a single flick of hand. I had held that brick he broke, so I knew not to annoy him while living in the same house. So, I warned P, considering she visited my house pretty often. But she assured me that she has been making those blank calls for an year now, and my brother had always been polite.
As I said, nothing seemed to faze her.
From her, I found out about an infamous park where willing boys and girls went to make-out, as she rebuked one of our other friends for going there with her boyfriend and kissing him on first date. “What else would you expect if you go meeting someone in such a place? First, you should have gone for a lunch at—” Apparently, the park was also notorious for Police raids because of obscenity in public areas. Though I never visited it due to want of company, it was a good-to-know information as places to avoid in future.
A well of information, as I said earlier.
P also had a better aerial connectivity than me and seemed to know when boys were interested in her. She once told me how some boys seemed to follow her everywhere she went. I wondered if she was delusional until I saw it with my own eyes.
This particular incident stands out to me. One day, the two of us had gone to watch a movie. The plan was that two more female classmates would join us there directly and we would all leave together for home in evening. But they ditched us, and we arrived alone. It wasn’t much of a worry because it was a day show. Also, in small-town India, the cinema hall (and everything else) was within city limits on rather crowded streets.
We left the hall around six in the evening. It was still light outside. We took a rickshaw home. Soon, she told me, “Don’t look back but a bike is following us.”
Being the worrywart, I wanted to look back but I couldn’t now since I have been expressly forbidden. It could be someone I know but I was scared that it wasn’t. Suddenly, I saw a PCO (A public phone booth that survived solely by feeding on the fears of anxious females and new lovers; declared extinct due to the invasive species of mobile phones).
“Let’s call my brother.”
Checking her hair in her hand-held mirror, “Naah! Don’t worry. They are harmless.”
“How do you know?”
“The guy who is driving has been following me around quite frequently. Always on his bike. Never does anything!”
I didn’t understand. If a stranger had been following me on bike quite frequently, I would have called the Police. P was merely amused.
“But what if he means to hurt you?”
“You don’t know their kind. He is just trying to get my attention.”
Now I was curious, “But if he is behind you, how will he get your attention unless he calls your name, which he isn’t doing? Does he even know your name anyway? Shouldn’t he probably try coming in front and talking?”
P rolled her eyes. As if answering my question, the bike revved and shot from our left and overtook us like a bullet in the narrow street. And then, suddenly, it became very slow, almost idling. The riders let our rickshaw overtake them at a snail’s pace.
“See, attention-seeking behaviour…”
I was unused to such stupidity, never having encountered such a species before (or maybe I just missed it due to aerial issues). I wondered if they knew normal speech like us lesser humans. “Are you sure they won’t crash in our rickshaw at some point? This is quite a narrow road. If their bike so much as touches our rickshaw on that speed, it will overturn.”
“You are hilarious, you know!”
The bike revved again and overtook us. Some people on the road in the direct hitting range jumped to the sides to take cover. It happened two more times and I wondered why no one was calling the Police.
We almost reached the corner where we would take the turn. It looked pretty wide from where we were, but I had been on the road on bicycle before and knew what lay ahead. The engine revved again. “They aren’t planning to overtake us here?”
“Of course, that’s their grand finale before they make their exit.”
“Are they foreigners? Don’t they know what’s around the corner?”
“Are you worried about them now?”
I took a second to decide, “Yes. But I will not carry them to hospital. I have homework.”
We had almost reached the corner now.
The engine revved again, and it was too late to stop them anyway. The bike overtook us at the highest speed it could muster. It took a wider cut to avoid our rickshaw, which was now turning the corner too.
I could see the bike drivers’ eyes go wide as it entered the huge nullah (a large open drain) with a resounding splash!
For a second, I was worried they had died. But then, two black, lumpy, smelly ghosts were rising out of the nullah, staggering with the weight of muck and impact on their bones, helping each other stand.
I could hear peals of laughter and realised they were coming from the both of us. Both P and I laughed all the way home.
Henceforth, this particular pair never followed P again and this event marked the end of this tale of unrequited love, cut short severely due to the local Municiple Committee’s failure of cover the nullah. Since the drain remained open for several coming years, I wonder how many other boys without the skill of human speech lost potential opportunities at love.
I also wonder whether these boys forever resorted to the language of engine revving or if they ever learnt human speech, like, “Hi, my name is XYZ. Would you like to come on a date with me?”
But what would I, who never had a boyfriend, know about the matters of heart?
A month back, I and my 8-year-old daughter had a drawing competition. The challenge was paint a dog without looking at it. I asked her to allow me to look at a picture since I am not good at animal drawing.
At first, she was unwilling to bend rules since the whole point was painting by memory.
But after some negotiation (“I will not play with you anymore!”), I was allowed a brief look (“Okay, fine! But only 10 seconds!”).
I quickly pulled out a doggy pic from Google and concentrated at it for 10 second. My daughter counted seconds in the background, declining the offer to look at it herself (“I don’t cheat like you!”). Then the picture was closed.
It took me 10 minutes to draw the picture directly with sketch colours (since I was too busy to use pencil first. Here it is.
If you think it was cheap of me to force an 8-year-old girl to allow me to cheat during a competition, you should look at what she drew using just her memory.
There was no competition–She is a pro, I am still learning!
As discussed in the previous Matters of Heart post, my close friend X was having difficulty in decoding the language of Indian love. Of course, you need to learn Morse code to understand the language that relies completely on reading body language and crooked pick-up lines. (“What a wonderful weather for a long drive!” means “Will you join me for a long drive and go to places unknown so your family can’t catch us snuggling?”)
So, even after I happily supplied the explanation (a rare accomplishment), she remained incredulous. She was sure that if Y has wanted to take her out on a date, he would have said so. He didn’t need to resort to this round-about way of showing interest in me first.
I could only sigh!
One day, she came to college in a really foul mood. Apparently, Y had told Z (another male friend) that she was engaged. He had been very detailed about the ceremony and Z was sold on the idea. Z had then told his aunt who knew X and she called on her family phone to congratulate her.
Since family phone offers no privacy, she was having a difficult time in keeping it from her parents. If they found about this prank, they will obviously ask the most obvious question: Who are Y and Z and how come she is friends with them and their relatives without telling her parents?
You see, in small-town India of early 2000, no girl spoke to a boy without parental supervision. X had just struck a friendship during extra-classes in a co-ed institute and kept it under wraps to avoid any parental obstruction. It was a regular practice in those days. No girl in her right senses would talk to her parents of all the boys she was acquainted with.
Boys, however, could boast about all the girls they had befriended (or claimed to befriend). No pointed questions were asked from the male counterparts. Girls, however, were usually grounded.
Now that the conversation had happened on the family phone (no mobile phone in those days), she had to lay it very thick to avoid detection. Pointed questions were asked. Her standard answer–“a friend (obviously female) called”–was not sufficient. She had to go through the details of the call ensuring that all her facial reactions on the call matched the explanation without revealing the truth. Not satisfied because the conversation was whispered but finding no reason for open hostility, the parents had dropped the matter. Obviously, the next few days would involve close scrutiny.
While it was uncomfortable, X was mainly upset because of the loss of trust. She was clueless why Y would lie about her. She wanted to confront him. But she had to play the good girl and go home on time after college to avoid any further issues.
I offered an insight yet again based on my previous assessment–“Y was deleting competition. Once Z heard of the engagement, (having no way to contact X to confirm the news because he would obviously not call X on home phone), he would have bowed out. But, Y had not counted on relatives being involved.”
X was not satisfied with my assessment because it now implicated two male friends–Y and Z– and suggested that they “liked” her.
But she had run out of all possible excuses for Y’s odd behaviour. Unfortunately for Y, no matter what his reasons were, X now wanted revenge. She was angry enough to take my advice and I let my inner vamp take over.
A couple of weeks later, X came to college wearing a heavy gold ring on her ring finger that belonged to her mother. Two of us went to meet Y after college hours. She was still unsure how it would act as revenge (engagements were usually happy events) but I insisted her to try. There were no relatives involved at Y’s front so there was nothing to lose.
Once there, she declared she was engaged–that her parents had found her the most amazing husband and marriage is due in three months. (To learn how the process of finding a husband for a daughter works, please look at I do: The Indian Way series.)
To make the charade more believable, we carried a box of chocolates as a “gift from her fiance’ ” and offered him a piece as celebratory sweets. We discussed a whole lot of believable lies coming from my experience from my cousin’s recent engagement–the families being in touch discussing the matter for a long time, the sudden visit of boy’s family, quick arrangements and engagement on spot.
We also gave him the details of the amazing ‘boy’–looks based on my brother and education, job, family and other details of my cousin…
For a Home run, I thanked him for the joke from earlier, and assured him that his words had acted as a prayer and have landed X with a such a wonderful future.
As expected, Y congratulated X and we took his leave to “further spread the news”. I am usually not a sadist. But as I sat in the auto for home, I laughed all the way eating the “celebratory chocolates”.
Later that day Z, who was already in on the plan, informed X that the news had hit home and Y had called him to tell him about the “real” engagement; that he had consoled him with the standard “it was bound to happen someday” statement; and that Y had assured him that “he was usually quite happy these days” with a tone akin of a funeral.
Z didn’t tell him the truth for a month. Considering they were best friends and spoke every day, I would say, it was needlessly cruel…
But what would I, who never had boyfriend, know about the matters of heart?
Author’s note: My Matters of Heart series is about Indian dating culture and my failsafe ways of dealing with it. This is the sixth part. To look for the rest, just search for Matters of Heart in the Search box.
India may be the land of many languages but regarding the matters of heart, it is pretty much the same–vague! At least, small town India in my teens was like that. You needed to learn Morse code to be able to receive a signal.
That could be because if a guy didn’t hit the mark with 100% accuracy at the correct time and in the correct place and correct company, he might spend the rest of the month in a hospital ward with both hands and legs, and skull in bandages–if he was lucky!
If he was unlucky, he might land up in jail for eve-teasing, harrassment and obscene behaviour in public, or even end up starting a full-scales riot spread across several Indian states–especially if it was a Hindu-Muslim union he was looking for.
As I had mentioned in one of my earlier posts, until the age of 20, I never got a proposal. But honestly, I probably never recognised an attempt to propose. Many of such incidents were due to the vague language signals, which relied solely on reading body language and breaking code words (such as, “I am going for a movie alone.” means “Do you want to come for a movie with me?”).
Considering that I am rather thick in that department, it took me several years of quiet contemplation to understand the full meaning of a lot of these conversations.
Thankfully, I wasn’t the only one. My friends were equally befuddled. Most being bookish-nerdy-artist variety girls, they all had similar unyielding conversations. Surprisingly enough, I was sometimes able to break the code for them (but never for myself). Unfortunately, my decoding style used to put their hackles up and they would start avoiding the guy making the moves.
So I had a close friend (let’s call her X). Once one of her close friends (let’s call him Y to rhyme with a “guy”) told her that he “liked” me. Now, in those days, “liking” in India was the code word for “kind of crazy about and wish to take on a date”. Note that I had met him only once for 15 minutes in an office setting. When X expressed her surprise, he added, “Yeah, there should be somebody to drive around on my new bike!” And then, when she offered to pass the message to me, he said, “No! No! Promise me you won’t tell her I said that.”
So obviously, X told me. It is the girl’s code to share everything that is expressly forbidden.
Technically, this was the first non-proposal I had received, or I should say the first time a guy had clearly shown any interest in me. It didn’t get me interested. It got me curious. I had to dissect this conversation to see where it came from and where it was going.
Because the three statements together did not make sense: while it is natural to “like” someone and want company on a new bike, you need to tell the concerned person to get that company. Why expressly forbid?
Also if I was a guy, I would never want someone like me just to drive around on a new bike. Men LOVE bikes. They are their equivalent of a lover. (I have a colleague who has the name of his bike tattooed on his arm.) So, if they want a girl for a new bike, that girl will have to be a new-bike equivalent: shiny and polished-to-hilt girl with red glossy lips, eyelashes that are thick enough to be braided, plucked eyebrows, manicured fingers and pedicured feet, and fitted in a dress that shows it all.
A girl who new knew make-up and is a walking ad for “Just Books” wouldn’t fit into the image of the “bike” girl. Besides, I owned a new scooter and would never ask a lift from anyone anyway. So, the statements were not making sense.
Naturally, I wanted to ask Y directly to save me the decoding effort. But X told me that it would look like a breach of confidence to him. And I would move mountains for X. So, I had to solve this mystery on my own, trying to join the dots but always coming back in circles.
What did Y mean by…
Could he seriously consider sharing his new bike with me? I mean, I could take it for a drive…not with him in the back though…
What if he didn’t mean it and was just saying for the sake of conversation…a very dangerous conversation with a potential of public beating?
And why would he bluff to X?
Then inspiration hit–Dil Toh Pagal Hai (One of Shahrukh Khan’s movie–the god of Romance in India)!
Y was testing waters. He was checking X’s reaction to see if she would be jealous, like Anjali in Dil Toh Pagal Hai when she saw her best friend show interest in another girl?
If he was actually meaning to ask her out, he would draw her attention to his intention of getting a girl (and to the fact he had acquired a new bike). Since she was a close friend, it would switch on her jealous-friend track and (considering she wore her heart on her sleeve) it would show on her face.
But the plan backfired because X was truly disinterested. She offered to pass on the message, leaving him scared that I might walk in with my brother and he would have to be admitted in a hospital for broken bones (if he was lucky!).
I offered this explanation to X, telling her that she had a secret admirer who was wondering if he should ask her out. But she was as thick as me, “Naah, if that’s the case, he could have simply asked me.”
My daughter has done it again. She has surprised me and given me chance to showcase her creativity 😊. Sometimes I wonder if I am taking advantage of her creativity…that doesn’t stop me though 😁.
This time it is a doll dress👗. Lately my daughter has acquired three new dolls 🎎 and is facing a sudden dearth of dresses. She has recruited both me and her new aunt for dress designing and got 10 new dresses 💃👘👗 from her father but you know how a woman can never have too many clothes?!
And we have 6 dolls 💃💃💃💃💃💃here.
So, she has started helping herself. She created this one out of a shiny plastic balloon–the kind that doesn’t stretch–and cello tape. Can you believe it?
I love how she has created the complete diva look by sticking three pieces together. It would have taken me hours to create a body hugging dress. Add to it the accessories her father has got her!
I wonder if I should retire and let her take up dress designing for dolls🥰
Short Stories | Fish-eye Perspective 