Summer snacks

The idleness of lazy summer afternoons always resulted in some or the other form of expression - either creative outlets in crayons and watercolours, or playing with light and air, sometimes the usual sibling fights, and many a time, some innovative snacks.

Our old refrigerator, which is amazingly still functional, used to get a big layer of ice frosting all around the inner walls of the freezer. Every few weeks or so, the fridge would have to be switched off and cleaned after all the ice melted. But my brother and I found a way to have some fun; as a side effect of which our mother's job of defrosting the fridge became much easier and less frequent.

We would scrape the ice with the sharp edge of steel bowls (katori) and add a splash of a summer drink concentrate to it, Roohafza and Rasna being our favourites. And there you go, a refreshing icy snack perfect for summer afternoons. This was probably our first taste of the ice-gola that we weren't allowed to eat outside because of questionable hygiene. The stale old freezer frosting is much better!

We also made a couple of other inventions, like Bikaneri bhujiya with ketchup - a spicy attack on the taste buds, but equally enjoyable and unhealthy! Occasionally, when we had some more patience, we would make a "biscuit cake", by layering the ubiquitous Parle-G biscuits with a mixture of cocoa powder or drinking chocolate, sugar and milk. We would have to wait for a few hours to chill and solidify it in the fridge, but this yummy treat was totally worth it!

Grains of sand

Some days

Not all days are the same, go with the flow.

Teacher - Teacher

If you are a girl, it is highly likely that growing up, you played "teacher-teacher" with your friends or maybe even with your dolls and toys. My little niece tries to play teacher with me now, and I happily oblige (as long as there's no homework!).

Back in Delhi, my dad had painted a part of the balcony wall with black paint and got me some colourful chalks and a duster. Many evenings, my friends and I would cram into the small balcony to play. I don't think I ever got the chance to play the teacher since I was the youngest among our neighbourhood friends. Silly power play, I say. :) Since Pia and I lived in the same building, we would hang out in the balcony more often, especially after it would get too dark to play outside.

Somehow I never got the idea that a blackboard can be used for something other than teaching, and since I had to be the student even while playing, it didn't attract me that much. Looking back, I wish I had used the blackboard more often. It would have been a fun place to doodle, or play cross and noughts. Maybe I'll do that now, with my colourful markers and whiteboard that I use to make boring grocery lists. Maybe I'll try to play the teacher this time. I promise I won't give homework! :)

Newspaper elevation

If you ever feel like killing yourself out of frustration, try talking to my brother while he's reading the Sunday paper. For an hour or so, you cannot get his attention no matter what. He would recline on the bed, Vishnu style, and disappear into the newspaper, and if you are lucky, you might get a rare monosyllabic response from him.

But did I ever tell you that he is the most patient person I have ever known? I mean, he taught me Maths and Physics, so that really is the biggest test of patience anyone can give.

Anyway, when we were growing up, we used to get newspapers rolled up and tied with a black rubber band, thrown up four storeys by the superhuman expertise of the newspaper men. Once in a while, they would miss and the paper would land up in the downstairs neighbour's house. No big deal, if the neighbour is actually there. But our neighbours were out of town for almost the entire year, so we had to get creative.

We would tie a hanger at the end of a long rope and lower it into the downstairs balcony and then try to hook the rubber band with it. It would require some Zen-like concentration, and my brother has no shortage of that. Also, he really had to read the Sunday paper, so he was always up for the challenge.

Long, quiet minutes in the sun would pass as we would try to grasp the rubber band; and once done, slowly and carefully try to pull it up without dropping it. Once the newspaper was within arm's reach, the feeling of triumph was just so rewarding!

But the real challenge was when my brother "accidentally" threw my hairband downstairs and had to bring it back up. He created a weird contraption with a hanger, a clothespin and some rubber bands to act as a spring system. The Zen master of perseverance used some physics this time and caught the hairband in the clothespin contraption, once again proving himself to be the king of patience!

Wide awake

When you're an overthinker, your mind starts going full speed as soon as your body is at rest. And it's not worry or anxiety usually, but most of the time it is ideas and plans and lists of things I want to do - that makes me wide awake as soon as my head hits the pillow.

This is me - every night.

Light

The lighthouse beacon
Standing tall and bright
Spreading that life beam
In all directions far and wide

The last ray of hope to a lost sailor
A joyous invitation to a new life
A safe shelter from the open storms
A welcome sight to tired eyes

Below the lighthouse lay an earthen lamp
Dimmed by the ships twinkling brightly
All it left was black soot on the wall
It flickered in the wind and blew out quietly.

Self care

It can be quite difficult to come to terms with the whole idea of "self care', especially when you've spent the last year and a half doing exactly that. I guess the biggest part of taking care of yourself is not the things you allow yourself to do or not do, but to do them without guilt, or a sense of panic that you're wasting your time. There's a lot more to learn and like they say that with every challenge there's a learning, I'm hoping I'll end up learning something from this challenge I'm currently facing.

New books!

There is something about the smell of new books and stationery that takes me right back to school days. I can boldly say that not many other smells compare to it. Our school used to reopen for the new session during the first or second week of April, the days leading to it were quite exciting. New books and notebooks, so neat and pristine, waiting to be dog eared over the course of the year. I would also get some of my brother's old books and I was quite lucky because he was so neat that his books looked like they had hardly been used.

We had to cover our books and notebooks with brown paper sheets, topped with another layer of clear plastic sheets. We would gather scissors and tapes, clear the space on the dining table and get started with an assembly line of sorts. When we were younger, our parents helped us with putting covers on the notebooks. I could never match up to how neat my dad's method was. I still am quite a lousy gift wrapper, a skill I still haven't inherited from him.

Sometimes we put sticker labels on the notebooks. There were all sorts of stickers available, colourful ones, decorated with cartoon characters or flowers, but I preferred plain ones, or even writing my name directly on the brown paper.

Of course, I loved this entire process, for the excitement of new books, the thrill of writing my name along with the name of a new class and yes, savouring the smells of fresh paper and stationery! 

Holi hai!

Living on the third floor of a building, with access to the terrace has many advantages, especially so on Holi. It was the only day where I would wake up early willingly, without any excuses or tantrums. Only because I had an evil plan in my mind.

I would be up by the chilly dawn (it used to be pretty cold during Holi before global warming hit us all) and get set to prepare my ammunition. I would start filling water balloons, forgetting in my excitement that I hadn't yet learnt how to tie them up. So I would wait, quite impatiently for my brother to wake up and help me tie up the water balloons.

Once a couple of buckets were filled with water balloons, we would go up to the terrace or sometimes the balcony to target unsuspecting passers by. Quite a stupid thing to do, in retrospect. Thankfully I had, and still have, very bad aim and would have a success rate of about one in a hundred. My brother was an easier target being at close proximity, so at the end of it, we would end up hitting each other with water balloons and make a mess of the terrace.

Well, making a big happy mess is what Holi is all about, isn't it?

Bubbles in the balcony

Kids have a fascination with bubbles, and I've seen that with my little niece, who becomes an even more bouncy version of herself when she sees bubbles. I still love bubbles and once in a while end up buying those small bubble kits from street vendors. And I blow bubbles and stare at them till I realise my fingers are all sticky and my feet are wet.

As kids, we didn't have the patience to go and buy bubble kits, so we made them at home. The timing of our bubble play would coincide with my mother's stitching projects. As soon as a thread reel would get over, it would become a bubble blower. Laundry detergent mixed with water in a little steel bowl from the kitchen - that's all we needed for an afternoon of lazy fun.

Sometimes we blew air into the bowl till multiple bubbles would overflow all over, and the bubble-y sound was a bonus. I'm sure you've done that with the last bit of some milkshake and a straw.

The bubbles from laundry detergent were not as great as those you get in a bubble kit, but it was good enough to keep us occupied as we watched them slowly drift down three floors. Shaking and wobbling, sometimes touching a wall and bursting quietly, sometimes reaching all the way to the ground, it was quite amusing to watch those bubbles shining in the afternoon light.

The gift

Note to self:

Happy Diwali

Our roles and responsibilities were very well defined at Diwali. I would be in charge of making Rangoli and my brother and I would put up the lights and decorations. Puja was dad's department and food was mom's. I would intend to wake up early to start off the Rangoli, but it being a holiday, I would always end up oversleeping. Then I would start planning an ambitious, elaborate design, the rough sketch of which would take up half the day. The fun part began after that - painting in the design with bright, thick poster colours. By this time, it would be late afternoon and slight panic would creep in.

In the meantime, we would remember that we should put up the decorations before making the rangoli, not after. But since I wouldn't have really made much progress with my rangoli, the day would be saved and decorations put up. Our favourite ones were those colourful paper-accordians with colours that never seemed to go very well with each other.

By early evening, everyone would pitch in to compete the rangoli, just in time to get ready and start the celebrations. Somehow we managed to repeat the same sequence of events every single year. What fun it was! 

Moody blues

Moderation is the key.

A little to the left

We got a television when I was about three years old, and as I grew up, I saw it change from one channel - Doordarshan, for a few hours in the day, to countless channels playing non-stop on cable TV. Of course, I had to wait till the last day of my 12th Board exams to get cable, but till then, we had DD 1 and DD 2, and an antenna.

Now, this antenna would wobble and turn in the wind, losing signal at the most crucial moments. And then the task of adjusting the antenna would begin. It would take some brilliant co-ordination from the entire family - one person checking the TV, one in the balcony, one at the terrace and one adjusting the antenna - relaying messages and instructions. Some back and forth and a bit of precision, and the signal would be back. Sometimes as soon as we would get back to sit and watch TV, the signal would go again and off we'd go to our respective places to fix it again. What patience we had!

Fast forward a couple of decades and I can't even sit through a twenty minute show without my phone next to me; you know, just in case there is a ten second boring scene. But I feel lucky to have been born at a time that I could see things changing, to have had a childhood without the distraction of smartphones and a world of information at my fingertips when I'm old enough to handle it. We might just be a most unique generation.

The mind is a vessel

Just some random things

Charger, lip balm and my house key
These things I always bring with me.
A notebook, for inspiration can strike at any place
Some crayons (of course) and a bag of glitter (just in case)
Strangely a torch, cells and a magnet
Some safety pins for my gaping placket
A spork and straws from that time I ate out
Band-aids – I’ll need them, without a doubt
Not one pencil but there’s a sharpener
And for my clumsy fingers a nail cutter
A handkerchief I never use
A lens to read the news
Pen drive and a measuring tape
Just some tools of the trade
Paper clips are always handy
And instead of change, here’s some candy
A toothbrush for last minute plans
Some bells for my fidgety hands
Buttons from an old shirt
Tea that tastes like dirt
An unsent letter
A beautiful feather
In all this clutter, and all this madness
Is a quiet world of my own little mess.

Sleepy sleeperson

Being Goldilocks.

Puddles and paper boats

Anyone who is old enough to have experienced climate change would know that it doesn't rain like it used to. At least two or three times every monsoon, it would rain so heavily that water would fill the streets and we would have to wade through almost knee high water while coming back from school. Sometimes the water would come all the way inside the apartment buildings, getting into the scooter garages and even going up a couple of steps.

The water would be muddy with all sorts of debris floating in it. I distinctly remember getting tiny Gulmohar leaves stuck to my legs as I would make my way back from the bus stop to my house.

But the dirty water never stopped us from playing in it. The building entrance with the garages would give us shelter from the rain, while also giving us easy access to water to play in. We would tear off pages from old notebooks - the rectangular shape of those pages was perfect for making paper boats - and float the boats in water.

Paper boats are probably the first thing I learnt to make by folding paper, maybe even before I learnt how to make paper planes. I'm sure anyone who has experienced heavy monsoon rains would definitely know how to make a quick paper boat. 

Fun(ny) Run

Sometimes I go to the park for a walk / run. This is how I look. :P