I am sufficiently deluded and self-centred to always be happy on my birthday. Maybe it is my fascination with death and ghosts and traversing the years to get to the final milestone and beyond is extremely appealing. I also like to think that my existence has touched and gladdened the lives of many. I have emails from several clients and other communications from friends and help of yore that contradict said assumption. But they don't matter.
My brother got me a pale pink kurta that's really pretty. I wanted to wear it today but the only place I was going to today was the diagnostic center to get a COVID test done. So this will have to wait.
R got me a cake (Appa means big sister in Oriya) and made me a vegan tiramisu without rum. There were flowers. Someone else sent me flowers and a cake with a card that read, "May your year be as fresh as your smile, your Anonymous Wellwisher". I don't know who that is but if it's my sparkling smile they have registered, it's certainly not a dentist.
Anyway, my father told me about a childhood memory of his ( and several of these seem to come flooding his mind considering he is in a room all day.
When he was three or four years old, he would go fishing with his uncle and cousins. They were a troop of eighteen children of various ages. My father, being a little one but with very sharp eyes, used to sit on a low bough of a tree and fish. The idea that no one thought it dangerous to let a child be on a tree near water unsupervised is beyond me but he really did grow up in a different time.
Anyway, there seems to have been a hierarchy of sorts in the household regarding the use of baits of rods. The seniors had use of proper fishing rods with metal hooks and worms as baits. The others got handmade rods with ropes and water reeds to which little bobs of floats were tied. Their bait was interesting. They would roast fenugreek (methi) until it got really fragrant. Then they would spread cooked rice on a large plate and add these methi seeds to that. Then they would make balls of this rice mixture and throw these balls in the water. The smell was good so shoals of fish would swim towards these balls and even the amateur fishermen amongst them (basically four year old kids) could catch them. Then my father told me that in the early evenings, his uncles would go on shikaar or hunt down large birds and cook them on stone.
His face seemed happy thinking of those times.
Anyway, I gave his medicines and left only to check an hour later and find that he hadn't taken them. I was so pissed and I wish someone up there will give me a medal, a HUGE GOLD MEDAL for all the irritation I am swallowing down.
Testing my other limits of patience is R. She equates te following things with the equal amount of urgency - rise in Dad's temperature, running out of medicine, not finding the right granular formation of aamchoor powder, not having change to give the dhobi...and for each of this, I am either woken up from sleep or pulled away from a bath or interrupted in the middle of a call.
I miss my empty space in Bandra. Heck, I miss it even if it has a ghost.
Anyway, one is coping. I remember what my friend Rahat had told me eons ago. "Sabar karo. Shukar karo." (Be patient. Be grateful.)
Lesson to be applied, I guess.
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