There are straight lines
There are curves
In some places there are dents
Yet it’s complete
In the curves blend mine
My extensions fill the dents
Like yours mine
If I look from the sides
There is no shape
When I look from the top
It’s a perfect circle
Like the sun
Or the moon
Or the eyes
Of anything perfect
Of Us!!
Last week as I was talking to my father about Father’s Day and what my sons were planning for my husband, I realized I should do something for him. I ordered a bag of Hershey’s kisses on Amazon India (my regular shipper of goodies to my father). I wanted to keep it a surprise so I did not tell him about the order. The norm otherwise is to tell him everything I order, I tell him when the item is due and he updates me when he receives the item. Just so he wouldn’t be alarmed while opening the box, I added a gift message ‘Happy Father’s Day Appa’.
This morning around 6am IST, I got a message that the package had been delivered. I did think it was an odd time for an Amazon package to be delivered and thought his alarm instincts would go up.
Like everyday, I called him on my way to work and immediately he asks me “did you order something on Amazon?”. I told him, I had. He said, since he was not sure, he did not open it. He went on to tell me that he had recently read in Mathrubhumi and Manorama online (his net-savvy newspapers for a few years now, since he became a netizen), that mysterious packages were being delivered which someone had not ordered. I told him to go ahead and open it. He opens it to find my small pack of chocolates. His relief at finding chocolates was quite funny. “Ooooh chocolate-aa?” He added, “the watchman said it was delivered at 6am, who delivers packages at 6am? The Amazon packing is not all that good either”. I asked him if there was a note inside the box. He did not find a note. So then I had to tell him, that I ordered them for him, for Father’s day and he was supposed to open it as a surprise and find a note saying ‘Happy Father’s Day Appa’.
So much for surprising my old man with a bag of chocolates on Father’s Day! His true happiness was when my kiddos called him and wished him a GRAND Father’s Day..
The little moments of a heart full of happiness.. tiny moments of immense love.. blessed!
His arms carried me as a baby
His arms bore the weight of my education
His heart celebrated my every success
His heart cried at my loss
His legs walked for miles for me to stand straight
His legs stopped for me to catch up
His eyes saw the now and fretted tomorrow
His eyes dreamt of my tomorrow
His words cautioned me of the world
His words strung a thousand stories for me
He is
My hero.
This is one of my favourite stories. I was standing at the intersection of Gandhari Amman Kovil Rd and MG Road in Trivandrum. A tall girl stood there with her father. We had just attended a training class together. She wore a brown striped salwar, handbag on her shoulder and books in her hand. Her grizzly hair was tied back and she looked at me with suspicion. Her father asked me if I was looking for a roommate. I said yes. He suggested we look for a place to stay, together. I looked at her and thought, why not? I had no idea who this girl was.
Either the same day or the next, another girl from the training class asked us, if she could join us. She was a short, round faced girl. She wore a salwar with a dupatta neatly folded on one shoulder. She wore glasses and pretty much looked like a mirror image of me. She had the widest smile on her face and spoke faster than either of us.
We said yes. Again, we didn’t know her, except her name.
We found an agent, a short, stout guy who rode a TVS moped of the early 2000. I don’t remember how we found him. He wore a hat, probably to hide his baldness and glasses which he kept pushing up on his nose. He spoke like he was going to take us to the moon. We tagged along with him to find accomodation in the then unknown city of Trivandrum. The tall girl I met had an Ericsson mobile that looked like a modern day big remote. This mobile was to become our communication channel with our parents in the near future, for which she even charged us a fee. So coming back to the stout man with the hat, we set up appointments with him after the training session for the day, and hopped into an autorickshaw to see the place he had found for us. The short girl knew the in and out of Trivandrum, so it was relatively easier than I thought.
During these trips, we learnt a little more about each other. The tall girl had graduated from MES College Kuttipuram and the short one from Jain Engineering College in Chennai. We made many trips with the stout guy with the hat, to various nooks and corners of Trivandrum until one day, he took us to Pattoor. This was the first floor of a beautiful house which the owner was willing to rent. A one bedroom accomodation with a kitchen and bath. It was a luxurious setting. There was a PCO booth nearby to make STD (Standard Trunk Dialling, in case you thought something else) calls. The landlady was nice and liked us instantly. We paid the stout guy with the hat his commission and sent him away. The next day we moved our belongings to the Pattoor house and embarked on a beautiful journey of friendship, laughter and a million memories.
It has been eighteen years since we moved in together – three girls who didn’t even know the other existed till then, one from Bangalore, one from Kozhikode and one from Chennai. I cannot help but think, that this is destiny. Our paths were meant to cross and our lives meant to mingle with each other. We grew from naive (this is the short girl’s favourite word) twenty two year old young girls’ to mothers of children ranging from five to fourteen. It feels like a lifetime, and yet like yesterday when we were huddled in the autorickshaw following the stout guy with the hat, on his TVS, to the nooks and corners of Trivandrum.
May our conversations never be silent!! Love you girls, always and forever!!
xoxoxo
Not very often life presents you with a completely new set of choices. It retains the long and important relationships but everything else gets a reboot. The place you live in changes overnight. The building you call home changes to new walls, paint and furniture. Suddenly there are a whole set of people you meet to form new relationships. People you have never seen before, people you never knew existed until today. Your life mingles and meshes with theirs, even for a day, a few months and sometime years.
You tread new paths, intersections, turns. You are wading in new waters, swimming to new shores. All this happens just when you think that yes, now I can sit back and relax.
The most curious and aaha moment for me in this whole ordeal is meeting new people. After a few days you feel did you already know them, in another life maybe.. As you get to know people you hear their stories and are indirectly connected to a lot of people in their lives.
Change is inevitable, is a basic characteristic of life, and comes at a time when you are unprepared. But in each change when we are able to see it’s beauty, essence and it’s fitment in our life, the whole diversion makes sense.
In new waters.. I wade..
It was around 9pm and I was pondering about what life lessons I should write about today. There were no obvious triggers during the day. As I was doing the dishes I thought about a particular family where parents and children are going through a strain in their relationship, primarily because the parents didn’t meet the child’s expectation. The parents are retired from professional life and the child is a grown up person. I am due to return a call to Uncle and Aunty and I got thinking of their not so happy days for the past few months.
As children there is no end to the expectations we have from our parents. When we are young we expect them to buy us that toy, that particular food, the specific dress, take us out and what not. As we grow up, expectations are different but they still exist in various forms. When I had my children I expected my mother to come to the US and take care of them. She did it without a second thought, six times. She made six trips across the globe with her Parkinson’s to take care of my children. At that time it was something natural, it was what all parents of children who live in the US, did. I just expected her to do it.
As parents get older the “density” of our expectation most often than not hits the roof, because now we expect them to “behave” a certain way. I am guilty of this as well, for many years. I wanted my mother to talk a certain way, I squirmed when she said some things in a gathering, which “I” thought were inappropriate. I expected her to spend money in a certain way, because by then she didn’t have her own income. I was a very bad daughter as a grown up, to her.
When she passed, in her passing, she taught me life lessons, like she always did. The biggest one being, all she expected out of me was to understand her. I didn’t have to do anything about it, but letting her know that I understood remains my biggest failure as a daughter. With my father, I expect “nothing”. He expects me to call him everyday and give him even five minutes of my time, just so he knows I am thinking of him. I give him that time and often more. When he goes on long distance trips with his friends I just listen and encourage. That is all he needs and expects, a few minutes of my time everyday and encouragement at his age. All he needs from me is to hear him out and understand him. He needs to feel that I am there for him no matter what and that he can depend on me.
I am blessed that my mother taught me this extremely important lesson as she left. But when I see soooo many men and women around me who don’t get this simple equation of life, I feel sad for the parents and for the men and women. Life can be so much simpler and happier if we as grown ups take that tiny effort to understand them. Do they really deserve a struggle during the resting years of their life, after they slogged it out for years and years to make us who we are today?
The daughter-in-law and son-in-law can easily mess up this equation, which is extremely plausible. But it’s not about how the daughter-in-law or son-in-law treats your parents, it’s always and only about how you treat your parents. Everything else is a bonus!
For the wonderful parents I have and for everything they have taught me, I am blessed, many, many times over!!
indupatikkal 