In-laws, Pedicures

October is around the corner and that means - holiday season! In addition to a three-day weekend and a five-day weekend, we have two mid-week holidays… a state-wide bandh, a national holiday, and three major festivals (Dushera, Diwali, and Eid) all in the span of 30 days. No wonder October is such a festive month.

To start off the festivities, Amit’s aunt will arrive at Bangalore this Sunday. She’s close to 80, hasn’t recently traveled alone, and is not really looking forward to this trip. Quite understandably, the prospect of a long, lonely flight followed by two whole weeks in unknown environs is giving her the heebie-jeebies. Why’s she doing it? Her brother, who is also in Bangalore, is insisting that it’s high time she paid him a visit. So she will be in Bangalore for two weeks, and will spend some of that time with us.

This, inevitably, involves major preparations such as - getting a bed. Well, we don’t have a single bed in any of the three bedrooms of our flat. We sleep and sit on mattresses on the floor.  We have plenty of mattresses, but no bed. In the past we have found out that it is possible to hire a bed for a month at a paltry sum of Rs 500; but Amit, who is responsible for this, has as yet taken virtually no action on this front. So I have my doubts that there’s going to be a bed awaiting her when she arrives early on Sunday morning.

Then, we have to move out of our room, so that she can have the room with the attached bath. This means not only reorganizing our cupboards, but also reorganizing our bathrooms.

That apart, we have to organize food. Being virtually a two-bachelor pad (in some respects) we are singularly lacking in essentials such as dal, atta, potatoes, rice, fish, mustard oil and so on (though well stocked in other essentials such as Maggi). Saturday will clearly have to be spent shopping. Not to mention cleaning up the place (not that there’s much hope of achieving anything in that regard).

Saturday, meanwhile, is also the day I attend the Google “writing contest”. I hear that it is only a vocab test, but I am secretly hoping that they will actually ask us to write on some topic. This writing contest is supposed to lead to monetary rewards and potentially a job with google. I’m not sure whether the latter interests me - it depends on the job, I suppose - but the former is always alluring. In any case, it has piqued my curiosity - it does seem an unusual sort of recruitment methodology.

So anyway, after entertaining Amit’s aunt for some (unknown) number of days, we drop her off at her brother’s place. Then we pick her up - perhaps - for the next weekend, and drop her off again at the start of the following week. Then we pick her up on Friday the Thirteenth and take her back to Cal (Kolkata) on Saturday. At that point starts our 5-day vacation to Darjeeling, and Peling, in Sikkim. Back to Cal for Amit’s birthday and an overdose of in-laws, sweets, fish, and festivities, and we’re back to work on 25 October.  Phew! I’m tired just writing about it.

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On a different note, who would pay good money to have complete strangers messing around your feet - and specially your toenails - with pointy instruments? In some languages they call this torture. In English, it’s called a pedicure and it’s supposed to be a luxury.

The first time I subjected myself to this indignity was when I was getting married. It made me wonder whether marriage was worth it. After that momentous initiation, I very rarely ventured to repeat the experience. My feet, I felt, were quite satisfactory for their weighty tasks with just a daily bath and an occasional cleaning.

Trekking takes it out of the feet. Apart from having to walk for anything from five to ten hours a day, they’re subjected to wet socks and stinking shoes. Sometimes it’s new shoes, which cause additional trouble such as chaffing or not fitting quite right. Throw in climate changes like the extreme heat and humidity of Delhi followed by the extreme cold and (usually) dry environment of the Himalayas and you’re begging for trouble.

So, when I returned from the last trek, I decided to take my feet off to a beauty parlor for a good pedicure. When some of the smaller, more modestly priced beauty parlors turned up their noses at my feet, I walked into one of the super-sophisticated ones and demanded a pedicure. The place was empty and the women were quite delighted to find a customer; one could say they were falling over themselves to service me! Hot water, soft towels, perfumed oils and lotions were brought forth in short order and did little to dispel the horror of the proximity of pointy instruments to my toenails.

I got a buxom young girl in sneakers, who seated herself at my feet and scrubbed diligently at my soles for the next 45 minutes, using an assortment of scrapers daubed with strange liquids. I have to admit that my feet looked much better after just five minutes of her attention and that vast quantities of dirt and dry skin were sloughed off with apparent ease. And when she finally got around to kneading and squeezing my feet and calves with all her strength, it was really quite nice! All the same, those pointy instruments digging at my toenails and tickling me between the toes was close to agony. It was all I could do to shut my eyes, and try not to erupt in hysterical giggling or screaming.

She topped off her tender ministrations with a double coat of nail polish, which made my feet look as though they belonged to somebody else. They had the audacity to charge me Rs350 for the entire process; but as I continued to feel pleased with the way my feet looked for the next several days, I suppose you could say it was money well spent.