Dear Friends

I am taking a short break from blogging, owing to extenuating circumstances and pressing issues of importance, that will require my undivided attention elsewhere.

Hope to be with you all again!

First Kiss

The Clouds had floated away leaving the atmosphere a washed with a fine shower and the moon hung  once again lighting up the brick lined path. The rose bushes on left became faintly visible once more in monochrome shades of the night turning the leaves black as the flowers shone bright  white by the cool dark neon  light reflecting from the moon as it poised over head. The trees on the right cast black shadows of leaf like  patterns on to the ground.

They stood still for a while soaking in the moving spots of shadows playing truant around them, over them . As they lifted themselves up from the wet earth, the shadows of the leaves moving in the soft breeze leaped like impatient fingers trying to grasp their bodies. They stood there very still , neither touching the other, even as the shadows tried to urge them closer, now eagerly, now impatient, trying to merge them in their camouflage so as they appeared to be one.

Her face shone in the pale bright moonlight. Her eyes shone brighter against the rimmed outline of her thick dark lashes as they lifted up in a sweep to look at his face. His face glowed too, reflecting the luminosity of her visage  so close. She could see very  fine rain droplets glittering  like stars against the rim of his hairline and wanted them to shower on her, soak her, plump her rising bosom further as it rose and fell   Even from where she stood she could see his pupils dilate and darken yet she was not sure if it was from the darkness of night or desire it evoked between them.

"I am so happy" his whisper reached her along with the murmur of breeze caressing her ear lobes to shivers of excitement and suddenly she was afraid that he might notice her tremble. She almost winced like a child caught stealing as his face broke into a sudden smile and caught a ray of moonlight that reflected from his teeth and fell  like a flashlight  upon her face. In one singular motion she turned away to leave as he reached out to pull her back to him and as his mouth sought hers she felt hers limbs weaken while she melted and  turned to steam existing only as condensed dew where he touched her, drank her...

Some Color....

Ok, so my blog looked pretty dull today and so I decided to add some personal color to it :

Those are my brand new tulips. I LOVE tulips and my favorite dream is running a mile between rows & rows of Tulips in Holland... a pretty Bollywoodian dream ;)

And these are my 'Astadhatu' figurines. 'Ashta' means eight and 'dhatu' means metals. These are made of an alloy of eight metals. I love my little iron... er...brass..er... bronze...well Ahatdhatu Men ( Tony Sharp still has a chance, he is HOT ! ;) )

Then again, these are Indian musical instruments made from metal alloy. The stringed one is called Veena and the two drum like instruments are called Tabla.

A Side view....
But wait.... are they really musical instruments?
Can you guess what they are???? ;)

Surprise!!!

This is a After mint & tooth pick serving set!

And this box is my family heirloom! It belonged to my Mother- in- law . It is a handcrafted sandalwood box, with some finest craft I have ever seen! I just love it! :)

Top lid view! That is not very clear in the picture here. It is a pastoral scene of deer grazing in the forests! It reminds me of the scenes on John Keat 's Grecian Urn!

In inside view :) to show you that this is a really really old box being handed down in the family!

And this is my green marble dinning table; inlayed with granite, lapiz lazuli, white marble and some other stones. The coasters you see there are hand made with flat wooden beads colored and strung together with a strong string.

A closer view!

My green marble coffee table hand inlayed with granite, lapiz lazuli, onyx, coral and white marble!

A close view of the design and potpourri :)

She ( does not) sell sea shells on the sea shore ;)
Those are some shell I collected from a beach from South India

Ariel view!

Well this is a sad story. My rooster's faithful hen died . He broke a leg trying to save her but could not ( there you see her lying by at his feet while he is grief stricken and is unable to look. He is leaning on the wall crying his heart out ( Sniff!) ) The whole host of animals heard him crying and came running to see what the matter was. You can see the whole giraffe family there trying to console him and the parrots are observing two minutes of silence. The mother & father horse came with the baby horse too and the deer family came a running as well. The ambulance could not reach on time because of the traffic jam caused by humans, so the bull ran to get his bullock cart. But he could not reach there on time to save the poor hen. (you can see the bullock cart reaching only after the sad demise!
Please observe two minutes of silence even if you are cooking chicken at this moment! Thank you!

This is another sad story. The milkmaid is so sad here, because her cow has been stolen ( really it is the truth. The cow was stolen by one of those painters who came to paint my house, along with a Walkman and some of my son's toys and T- shirts)
In reality , this is a salt & pepper cellar :)

I sometimes dabble with paint on canvas too! :)

& this is acrylic on canvas ...

And this is again oils on canvas

Ok, there is not one but two of these, serialised ;)

And this is where I decided to add some color to the ugly ventilators of my skylight

& this is another story. It was a fancy dress handmade by me for my son's fancy dress competition.It was made from scratch. At eight o Clock in the evening, my kindergarten going son started bawling . When asked why he was crying, he said he needed a dinosaur dress for the competition the next day. He made us rush to the market. all I could find was some green plain material and some fabric paints. I came home armed with these and set to work, using sewing machine and scissors and soon the body suit with a tail was ready. Stuffing tail with cotton made it too heavy and it failed to stay in place. So I finally had to stuff it with rolled up old news papers. And yes, before that, I had to paint those yucky red & yellow spots on the suit. Then I set to make the head. I had to cut two similar heads out of cardboard (teeth & all) and stitch them up to a cap. Then I had to cover the cap with another strip of cardboard , and then paint the spots and the fierce red eyes. I had to stick cones for claws on his fingers too!
All this took me the whole night long! You can see the result for yourself!

And this is Heavy Indian silk with gold and colored beads hand embroidery. This is usually used to make Indian Bridal dress!

And this is Mona wearing the self same Bridal dress on her wedding! :)

& Remember? I told you a long time ago that when I was a kid I was a " candle stick with matchsticks for hands & legs" ( No prizes for guessing which one is Mona out there ;))

An Ideal camouflage to hide "bad legs" ;D

Only Nanny could pull her ears and get away with it!

I swear this is just one girl! She is preparing for a beauty pageant!Her cocktail dress and her evening gown are not yet ready!

Buddha having the last laugh!

The Senselessly Constructed House

I .

I am missing Z.

And I’m sure Z misses me as much as I miss her.

Just two years junior to me, we could have easily passed off as twins to the observer. “Chip of the old block” some people called us when they saw us together. Even though some of them had never seen the old blokes..oops… blocks! It was just their way of saying how much we resembled each other. When they said that, I would often keep wondering for a long time as to ‘HOW’ they could utter such statement.

Perhaps, Z and I are mutually-contradictorily-similar in some mysterious sense…

Looks wise, at that time, I was a candlestick with matchsticks for arms and legs, had shoulder length hair which mother would comb each morning till I felt that the teeth of the comb must have left multi-lane freeways on my head and I imagined that if some lice were to ping pong from one of my classmate’s hair into mine, they would at least have a good infrastructure to roam around with ease . My mother would then, pull up as much of my hair as could assemble on the very top [ not the ‘back’ top, but the ‘center’ top] of my head, and tie it up with a tight hair band ; and there it stood falling on all sides like a fountain .

Z on the other hand was quite roly-poly, and wore a tomboyish haircut, with a few ‘ridges and furrows’ here and there: thanks to the old barber with shaky hands and and one-and-a –half moustache. Yes folks, he DID have one and a half mustache and he came home to give us haircuts, as we sat right in the middle of our courtyard- a mirror less victimization! We couldn’t even see what he had made of us, which was usually worse than cartoons, as we judged afterward as soon as we became free from his clutches. O how we hated him!

While Z was the extrovert roaring lioness, I was the timid bleating goat, & yet we were always partners in crime, catastrophe, calamity, cataclysm, comfort, curiosity and younameit in a cohesive companionship. It was some kind of unwritten contract between us.On one hand we would fight like cats tearing each other’s hair, while on the other, if anyone so much as raised a finger at one, he would have had to taste the tempestuous grapes of wrath from the other.

It was the time, when Z was in her nursery class and I was in my upper kindergarten at a St. Mary’s convent. It was a Day School and we went to school in a rickshaw. On some pretext or the other Z would cry everyday while we traveled to school, all the way,and her crying was as continuous as the stars that shine for full forty- five minutes that it took us to reach .Even when she got tired a squeaky wail would continue to emerge from her lips and we sometime had to look hard to see if it was ‘her wail’ as her face became as passive and straight as freshly botoxed .

Now this particular day was special. It was special because that day, when Z perched on her seat in the rickshaw, she was smiling! Whew! Her pre- school blues were finally over I thought, and the knowledge brought in such a tremendous relief!

“Z, you look happy today!”

Smile.

“Hey Z look around, everyone is going to school and they are enjoying it. See? It is not so bad after all is it?
”
SMILE.[ without looking around]

“Z would you be able to eat from your tiffin without my help at lunch break? I want to play hopscotch with my friends during that time.”

GRIN.

“Z, I shall take you to your classroom and the Ayah will take care of you, Remember, no crying in the classroom.”

BEAM.

Having arrived at our destination, I picked up both of our school satchels and led her by her finger to her classroom. Sister Celestina was already there with most of the children. I left her at the door and turned to leave for my own class.

“ MONA” [ a shout from behind]

Alarmed, I turned back and the sight that I beheld there had me going dizzy for the first time in my life!

Z stood there, holding her skirt up, and she was not wearing her panties!!!

And she had done it all deliberately!


If you think Sharon Stone was the first one to go without her underwear to face a crowd , folks, update your knowledge!

No amount of making excuses for her and trying to make her coax into confessing that it was a mistake of some kind would make her budge from her insisting that she had done it on purpose! In fact, she was ADAMANT that she had done it on purpose and IN FRONT OF SISTER CELISTINA TOO!!!

Sister Celistina … the pincher… who would pinch you on the arm so hard that it drew blood!,,,, In fact she had grown and shaped her index finger and her thumb nails specially for that purpose!

So Z said, she had done it on purpose.

What ‘purpose’?

THAT still remains a mystery till today!


II.

We lived in a huge mansion of a house which had more than twenty rooms , two servant houses and [ believe it or not ] a well! It was a huge house, and it was the most senselessly constructed house. If a thief ever got a chance to enter that house, he would have had an access to all the rooms by default .All he would have had to do was to do was to keep passing from one door to another till he emerged from the last. There were huge verandas though, which were quite a relief and large lawns and big courtyards that could accommodate any game we wished to play.

Yet, it was one of the servant quarters that held our interest. It drew us to it like iron to magnet, like bees to honey, like robbers to gold, like neighbour’s wife to a man, etc. etc. And it drew us, because Annu the Atrocious lived in it.

Annu was the son of a poor relative.Annu & co. had landed with us quite by accident.It was a huge showdown between the mother in law and daughter in law [ Annu’s mom] and of course, as usually is the case, Annu & co. were driven out of their house by the MIL, on a dark and a stormy night, with just the clothes they had on their back . Thus, penniless and hungry, they came to my father. My father, the benevolent soul, immediately took them under his guardianship, tutelage and aegis .

Annu had arrived!

Annu was Z’s batch mate in the birthclass, her diaper buddy [ ‘langotiya yaar’ as we call it] and our bosom friend. He had the largest eyes I ever saw in a head, buckteeth and a perpetual grin .He of course was born with that grin, but we were too young to realize what being born with ‘things’ was all about.

It was Annu who taught us the beauty of being wild: to “ run through the jungle with wind in our hair and the sand at our feet” kind of wild! It was with Annu that we learned to fly kites. Annu taught us how to climb a ten feet wall with just a bamboo pole in order to pick plums from the very top of the plum tree [ and those were ace plums for they had grown and ripened well, in peace, without facing the reverse rain of our torrential catapulting from below]. Annu taught us how to roll an old cycle tyre down the road with a stick, Annu taught us to play ‘ gilli danda’, an essentially Indian urchin game,played with a long and a short stick; the short one sharpened like a pencil from both sides. This stick was tossed on the ground, then hit at any chosen end in such a way, that it flew up in the air. This flying short stick was then to be struck with all our might to make it go as far as possible. Whoever could fling it farthest , was declared a winner and got piggy back rides from the rest; irrespective of the fact whether he was fat and pigged out by overeating and whether the poor beast of burden resembled a victim from some concentration camp. Also, this game has created more one eyed people on earth than all the pirates at sea put together.

Heck, Annu even taught us, the girls, how to pee, standing up!

Annu was clever at EVERYTHING…except studies [ that is normally how it usually is]; and Annu wore only shorts and grin . No matter how much his mother would beat him or begged him to wear a shirt, he never wore it. And even if he did, by some chance, he always came back without it .We loved Annu in ALL respects, except for one thing…the Grin!

For whenever we were caught performing some monstrosity and were being scolded, Annu stood at a distance GRINNING.! O how that infuriated us!! It piqued us to vexation of highest degree, which we, at that moment, buried in our bosom, swearing in our heart to give vent to later.

And this is how Annu- chasing began .

Annu was the fastest runner I’ve ever seen till date. And Annu running faster than us… [ of course there was this one-upmanship snobbery that went along with us as in some racist kind of a manner ; no matter how much we loved him, we never forgot that Annu was a poor relation ; {Of course now I am totally ashamed of that!}] ;… so Annu running faster than us WITH the GRIN was a maddening fury to contend with!

Sometimes we would catch him using some strategic ambushes and beat all the sobs out of him . We also tried to pull his cheeks down using our knuckles to wipe that grin off.[ Later his mother learned the trick to oil his naked upper torso, so that even if he got caught by our devious scheming, he might be able to give us the slip.]

During our summer vacations we got one set of some particular game, which we could learn. That year we got a cricket game set! Boy! We were so excited, we couldn’t wait to try it out . So everything was set in place as they show it on the TV.

But then we had a problem. None of us knew the Rules of the game. Suddenly our eyes fell at a grinning Annu standing at a distance. Inquisition revealed that he was a champion at it! Yay!!!!!

But wait a minute! Annu started to turn his back and leave. What was the matter? We asked him to teach us, he refused. We demanded- refused, warned and threatened- refused again. Our threats took a U turn to coaxing, pleading and finally bribing!

Ah!! His eyes had lit up, and we saw some hope.

Then Annu started demanding ‘ransom’ . He wanted the booty immediately! My Mother’s Sandalwood face powder, My Mother’s favourite candelabrum, My mother’s hair bun net…..and we complied at first without a thought…but wait!

Something was wrong here. Why the hell was Annu demanding My MOTHER’s personal items???? It took us awhile to realize.

Annu was taking Revenge!

Annu wanted us in trouble for all the spanking we had given him in the past, he wanted us to be spanked by the worst spanker around [ My mother ].

That Annu failed miserably in his machinations is another matter. For all the needles of suspicions pointed towards the maid , considering the ‘species’ and the ‘essence’ of the goods that were lost and the poor woman had to bear the brunt.

Still, Annu had managed to scare the shit out of us.

Annu had , in some manner ‘ grown’, we realized . We never beat up Annu after that.

A month later, Annu started wearing his shirt too.