Category: My life

Posted in My life

Tattoos and Difficult Clients

Posted on by Shaily Agrawal

Mehendi is a lost art…

Okay, not entirely lost, but it is certainly changed quite a lot. Mehendi tattoos are a pain (only) in the ass because of sitting ducks for hours. You can’t even twiddle thumbs. The traditional subjects for the designs include flowers, peacocks, plants and marriage. But the new generation has changed that.

I made my 4-year old daughter’s Mehendi tattoos a couple of days back on the occasion of Eid. Any guess on the subject?

Right hand (my fault): Before, After and Between

What better way to give your child a Maths lesson that sticks, literally? The numbers are mostly illegible, thanks to my superior(?) skills with Mehendi cones, but well, it served the purpose. In case you are worried, it will wash off within a couple of weeks. 🤣

Left Hand: Kung Fu Panda and Furious Five

It all started with a random doll and a beaver that my daughter took fancy on. But beavers live near rivers that have fishes and octopus, and they need trees to gnaw. And then, gnawed trees could fall on little dolls. (Please don’t ask me to label the characters. It is too embarrassing. 😁)

So, Po, the Panda Dragon Warrior, had to come for rescue along with the Furious Five–Monkey, Viper, Mantis and Tigress. I know, there are only four here because Crane decided to stay back to take care of the old Master Shifu (Pssss, I forgot both of them but don’t tell my daughter that.).

Overall, my client was satisfied and declared her Mehendi better than mine, which was, I guess, the best praise I could expect.

What do you think?

Posted in My life

Fourth Day

Posted on by Shaily Agrawal

Four days back when I started my Eid break, I was over the moon for the 9-day break. And in the daze of happiness, I made a hasty promise to my daughter. I said I’ll spend the entire holiday playing with her.

Trust me, I had no idea of what I was getting into when I uttered those words. I had assumed, I will attend a few tea parties with her dolls and, maybe, draw a few animals. But now, I am dealing with the horror of Disney Princess and Animal Planet full blast.

I have binge-watched Grimm’s Fairytales and animal-drawing. Later, as my daughter slept, I willingly watched Masha and the Bear alone to wash out the taste from my brain!

Every day, I am the teacher teaching a class-full of stuffed animals good manners, maths and zoology. Every night, I am the Evil Step-mom taking the stuffed monkey and bear to the ball. I am the Fairy Godmother and also the Prince. I am also the Royal Messenger who puts shoes on Cinderella. I am afraid she will ask me for Snowwhite. I am unsure how to be 7 dwarves at the same time.

Every inch of my daughter’s artbook is now covered with different scenes from Fairytales.

Cinderella walks out in the yard wearing her tiara and best dress while a female dwarf stalks her.

Snowwhite in her tiara deals with lions, beavers, oversized ants and, guess what? sharks in the little rivulet outside her place. All in a day’s work.

The jungle overflows with animals and their babies while a jungle princess (Pocahontas?) in her tiara oversees their comings and goings.

A fairy with specs (Yes, those are wings, and you thought you knew what fairies looked like!) teaches a shorter fairy how to look after whales…

Now, no one can say that fairytale heroines had it easy…

I am so over it. I’m already counting days for this holiday to get over.

Posted in Blogging, Published, Random Thoughts

The Forest Bed: Free ebook

Posted on by Shaily Agrawal

It is finally here! My very own short stories collection: The Forest Bed and other short stories. After long delays for ‘technical’ reasons, my book is finally available worldwide as an ebook. What’s even better?

The ebook is free.

The Forest Bed ebook is available to readers worldwide for free on Amazon Kindle

Offer valid from June 22, 2021, 12:00 AM PDT till June 26, 2021, 11:59 PM PDT.

  1. Open your Kindle app.
  2. Type The Forest Bed in your Search bar.
  3. Select the book.
  4. Download and read.
  5. Provide an honest review.

Or depending on where you live, you can find it on Amazon. Just click the relevant link below:

Amazon.com

Amazon.in

Amazon.co.uk

Just type in the comment box if you can’t find it. I’ll provide the link.

Book in Print: If you are more of a love-the-smell-of-books person like me, you can order the printed book from Amazon or Pothi and they will deliever it at your doorstep. Just click the link of your favoured distributor.

Site name
Amazon.co.ukBlack and White Coloured
Amazon.comBlack and WhiteColoured
Pothi.comBlack and WhiteColoured

Free sample: If you are wondering why you should spend your money on the book, here is a free sample with five representative stories from the book. Please click DOWNLOAD to take a sneak peak and provide reviews that would help me raise the sale.

The Forest Bed Sample stories

Spread the word!

Share the post, if you will. Please, pretty please! 😇

Posted in My life

Busy Bee (Part 2)

Posted on by Shaily Agrawal

I mentioned a couple of projects for my daughter in my last post, but elaborated only one–the folding kitchen. Well, the other one is a jungle/zoo/farm backdrop.

Everybody at home had been complaining about how my daughter’s toy animals turn up everywhere in the house at the most inopportune moment, like on the floor under your bare feet, on the pillows when your head hits it too hard, on the chair seat when you are too tired to check before sitting, under the bed where you can’t pull them out without getting yourself dirty, behind the huge almirah which needs four grown up men to move (we have only three at home)…

I guess, the herbivores have the habit of running away to go looking for grass and plants, and the carnivores follow them to eat them…

Well, it became important to build a ranch/sanctuary/safeplace where they were allowed to roam. It also helps my daughter create stories that I could, then, publish in the blog (Hah! Mastermind me, stealing stories of the minions…).

So, I used an old flat cardboard box to build the backdrop with water colours (all that I could find at home during lockdown).

The walls have silhouette of a deep forest.

I also built a detachable cave and a hollow tree out of a plastic box. The 4-year-old Madame Leonardo Da Vinci coloured it to perfection.

The forest comes with yellow and red trees built out of old coloured cardboard boxes. It also has a fishy pond and an even fishier river that can be moved around at will. These were made of the old plastic sheets from my old organiser diary. The stones donated by an unsuspecting relative add to the effect.

To ensure flexibility to convert it to a zoo, we have combined it with a set of foldable cardboard cages and coloured by the family artist a few months earlier.

The piece is a continuous work in progress since we plan to add grass, a few more trees, a lying down hollow tree, and other cool stuff to build stories. We are gradually working towards adding farm buildings to the set as well. I’m looking forward to building a nice blue ocean out of the box top, thanks to my daughter’s new found love for water creatures.

The best part is that it also works as storage space for all these sets.

All in all the hard work seems to have paid off, considering the time my daughter spends with the set. I had too much fun…so there’s that too.

Posted in My life

Busy Bee

Posted on by Shaily Agrawal

So, you might have noticed that my posting frequency declined greatly lately. Earlier I used to write at least a couple of posts every week. But in the last month, since mid-Ramadan, I went slow, too slow actually.

No, it had nothing to do with fasting, something to do with my book–The Forest Bed–and everything to do with a couple of projects I had going on for my daughter.

As you might know, I love building things with hands. Earlier I saw on You Tube a folding kitchen that a father had created for his daughter where she could stand and cook. The kitchen was simple, clean and orderly with hangers and stands for utensils, a microwave and a working sink. I was specially struck by how everything was in place and ready to play when the girl opened it so the child doesnot spend time setting it all up.

My house doesn’t offer enough space for anything that elaborate. But setting the kitchen up is my daughter’s pain point. Usually by the time she is done with it, it is time to sleep, eat or study. So, I definitely agreed with the ready-to-play and folding kitchen part.

So I built it out of waste material.

The cardboard was home, thanks to Amazon–around 12 X 8 inches. I just cut one side to be folded up and down. Then, I used the side flaps to add to the depth. Of course, they close too when we are folding, making it a compact storage for all the things that were earlier found all over the house. Since cardsheet was not available due to lockdown, we covered it with the artsheets my daughter had already coloured. The utensil hangers are made of old buttons. The racks are made our of smaller cardboard boxes.

Since the space was too small, rather than sticking the oversized plastic stove on the counter top, we painted it on the counter…by we, I mean my humble-self and my very own four-year-old Leonardo da Vinci.

I added a bit of rough outlines for accent…”rough” being the operative word here. I didn’t want to take away the childish feeling from the paintings so I ensured that the outlines were not clean and symmetrical…they were drawn as if I didn’t have my glasses on (which I didn’t)…way off the mark but still leaving a mark (smudge, actually) on the sheet.

Closed front gates open upwards all the way back and down to form the floor.

The crazy fun I had during the process made me question my mental age…which was about five a couple of years back. I think now it has shrunk to three and a half.

I am planning to add a refrigerator and oven on the outerwalls in my next vacations. Any ideas?

Posted in My life

Negotiating with Intelligent Beings: Act 2

Posted on by Shaily Agrawal

Author’s note: I recently had this conversation with my daughter. Note how priorities change with time.

“Mom, Make me a fairy. I want to fly.”

“Baby, I can get the wings from the market for you, but I’m afraid that won’t help you fly. You need hollow bones.”

“Fairies don’t have hollow bones but they fly.”

“First, you don’t know that yet. You’ve never met one. Second, fairies are born as fairies. You were born a human. Maybe you can grow up and become a pilot. Then you can fly.”

“Who’s a pilot?”

“Well, you saw those aeroplanes the other day? Pilots fly them.”

“But I don’t want to fly inside an aeroplane. I want to fly like fairies.”

“Well, there is hand-gliding. You hang on those gliders tied to the wings and fly.”

“I don’t want to hang to anything while I fly. It’s dangerous.”

“Okay, then become a pilot.”

“Fine, make me a pilot.”

“Well, to become a pilot, you must study a lot…for many years…”

“How many years?”

“15-16 years…maybe more…”

(A pregnant pause)

“I think, I’d rather have the scooter you offered the other day…”

Posted in Dream

The Train at Naught

Posted on by Shaily Agrawal

I wait for the train, sure that it will cross my verandah today. I plan to hop on and leave. Where to, I haven’t thought yet but, surely, somewhere nice. So, I wait alone in the dark place that feels like sitting at the bottom of a huge well. I wonder when it will arrive…

I dread the ever darkening walls, the silence, the loneliness that fills my heart…

I dread the newness of the journey, the unpredictable schedule, the uncertain destination…

I dread that I might not want to return to my life full of certainty…

I dread that the train might decide to go another route and all my preparation might be for nothing…

I dread the hopelessness of my heart…

The train enters my verandah from a door that, in ideal world, is too small. The floor vibrates by the sheer force.

I stand up shaking with anticipation, holding all that I posses tightly against my heart, afraid to lose it when I board. Balancing all of my worldly possessions in my slender arms, I wait for the train to stop, afraid yet expectant at the unplanned journey.

I wave my arms wildly at the train to stop it. It doesn’t seem to be stopping. My heart drumming a double beat, I decide to jump once it slows a little.

It doesn’t. Smoothly, it passes out of the verandah through the opposite wall. Dropping my possessions on the ground, I wake up trembling at the rejection, tears ready to spill…

Posted in My life

Delay in Story Compilation

Posted on by Shaily Agrawal

Hi!

Some of you probably know that I am writing a short story compilation. It was due January first half this year. I had taken a vacation in early Jan just for that.

But I sustained a back injury on January 4 and have been on bed rest. Hence, there is a long delay since I have used up all my sick leaves and nearly all vacation. Also, I am trying not to push myself too hard in the coming month while I return to working part-time with full-time motherhood.

Sigh! I really wanted this one out for Valentine’s day! But I guess some dreams need time to nurture! 😁

Wish me luck for future.

Posted in My life, Nature stories

My Neighbours: The Underbird

Posted on by Shaily Agrawal

My area is used to seeing 10-12 birds at any given time except during the intensely hot summer afternoons when these birds are hiding in the cool shade of trees along the roadside. On winter mornings, this number rises to 20s.

Today started as any winter morning. I am on bed-rest because of a back injury and was looking out of the window. Pigeons were enjoying the sun perched on the electric wires on opposite side of the road. There seemed to be a lot more than usual…so many that I had to count them–58! It made me wonder whether a high-tension wire could break down under the weight of 58 full-grown rock pigeons.

And then, all of a sudden around 70 crows flew in from the right side of the sky. There could be more. Since they were coming in large groups and continued circling the sky, it was impossible to count unless I had a very quick brain. But after 14 days of bed-rest due to a minor back injury and 5 fantasy ebooks, my brain is less cognitive and more imaginative. They were cawing at an intensity that made me wonder whether it was a war cry.

Suddenly, the crows started retreating. I turned around and saw a huge number of pigeons flying in from the left side of the city. Suddenly, the pigeons perched on the wire took flight together, swooping in from the left, filling the sky with at least a hundred pigeons and my brain with the scenes from the movie Underworld. I wondered if I was stuck between a war of shape-shifters–the Crow clan and the Pigeon clan.

The remaining 30+ crows were clearly outnumbered by 1:3 ratio. Holding my breath, I waited for the fighting to begin. But the crows descended and perched on trees on the right of my house (which is the tallest tower in the area) looking irritated and guarded. Then, the bulk of pigeons retreated and nearly 50 pigeons stayed to take their rightful places on the electrical wire in front of my house, looking watchful yet at peace, as always.

I was left waiting for the rounds of silver bullets and wondering if they can penetrate the walls of my house…the only thing between the two clans. Only time will tell, because they are still in position, so if I live to post tomorrow morning, you’d know too.

Posted in My life

Someone Special

Posted on by Shaily Agrawal

I love variety in life. If there is a choice, I never take the same route to a destination twice in a row. Not sure how I hung about you for ten years.

You must be someone special!

-Dedicated to W, the one path I’d take till eternity