Lunch Break

Three friends came over for lunch today. They are all working women, so they took a long lunch break on a working day and took a long drive from their respective offices (home-office, in two instances) to come and meet me and the kids. These are friends I made in the workplace. Two of them I first met back in 2001 or so; the third I met even earlier than that, at another organisation. So I’ve known them a long time, but I’ve been in touch with them only sporadically. One of them I have met every so many months, or so, but the other two I was meeting after several years – certainly more than two years, because I hadn’t met them after the twins came home. So I was quite excited about meeting all of them for lunch. I even washed my hair and put on one of my more decent (new) T-shirts. Isn’t that a little pathetic? Well, such is life as a career-woman-turned-stay-at-home-mom.

Initially, lunch at a nearby restaurant had been proposed, but I suggested lunch at home because the kids would be happier, and then someone suggested potluck, so that’s what we did finally. It was great. I brought the kids home from school, got them bathed and dressed, and laid the table and just as I got the salad dressed, my friends turned up. They’d even managed to synchronise it so that they all arrived together. They were all a little short on time, so we started lunch quite soon. The kids ate with us, though Mrini grabbed the opportunity to play with her food and eat almost nothing at all without coming under serious fire from me. I was, of course, hopping around serving the kids their lunch while grabbing bites of fish and chicken from my plate in-between servings, but that’s something I’m used to by now. Desert, which I’d made (chocolate puddle pudding), was a hit, of course. The best part was that I parceled out whatever little was left of the desert, while they left behind the leftovers of the fish and chicken they’d brought.

So everything was just perfect.

Only… while the three of them chatted about bosses, appraisals, raises (or the lack of) and other work-related matters, I sat silent and felt out of place. It isn’t that long ago that that was my world too, but now it’s all so far away… and I wish it weren’t.

On the other hand, though… two of them are married and have two kids each. The third is still unmarried, though – now – she wishes she weren’t.

I suppose there are no easy answers.

Sad Goodbyes

It’s one of the many things – not all good – that start at an age when we’re too young to know what the word means, and keep on cropping up at inopportune moments till the ends of our lives: sad goodbyes.

When their biological mother left the twins in the hospital, when they were barely a day old, it must have been a tough, even a heart-rending goodbye. I don’t think – whatever the circumstances might have been – that it could have been an easy decision for any mother. But the twins were too young to know.

When we arrived in their lives, and uprooted them from the only home they had ever known and tore them out of the only arms that had ever cared for them, it was yet another momentous goodbye. Maybe they knew, maybe they understood goodbye by then. But several months later, when we took them back there, they showed no signs of recognizing either the place or the people. It was already a forgotten goodbye.

More recently, when their playschool closed for summer holidays, it was just the end of another day of school, for them. Again, though we told them, they didn’t really understand that it was a goodbye; that they would never meet all those kids, those teachers, in that happy environment, ever again. Even now, if asked, they will rattle off the names of some of their “school friends” and till a few days ago, they still asked rather plaintively for school. I know that there are bigger and better things in store for them, come June, but they don’t know that what they thought was an integral part of their lives just came to an end one fine day. Nobody asked them about it, nor about any of the previous goodbyes.

And so it goes. You leave a city, or a country; you leave a preschool, a school, or a college; you leave a workplace; or you stay, but other people leave. Or you stay and they stay but your paths just don’t cross that often any more. So many goodbyes come and go, some sudden, some so gradual you don’t even realise until much later. Saddest are those that you never asked for nor wanted; that you couldn’t avoid; that you’d give anything to reverse; but they come and go just the same.

You don’t know what exactly I’m talking about? Neither do I. I’m just saying… goodbye is a sad lesson that we start to learn too early in life, and keep learning, right until the last goodbye.

This Is Why I Hate Bureaucracy

We have owned the apartment we live in for about seven years. We have never paid property tax on it. I’m not quite sure why this is so: Amit just thought we didn’t need to and I never thought about it at all. And actually, why should you have to pay tax just because you own property?

Anyway, a couple of months ago, Amit suddenly woke up to the fact that we DO have to pay property tax. Since then, it’s been hanging over us like a Damocles sword, threatening to slay us every Saturday when we try to work up the enthusiasm to tackle the task. Once the 31st March deadline had come and gone, we could breathe easy. The next deadline was 30th April, which gave us another whole month to procrastinate over it. Meanwhile, in the course of some diplomatic negotiations of the kind that frequently occur between man and wife, the responsibility for this onerous task mysteriously got dumped on yours truly.

Since I’m not the kind of person to let grass grow under my feet, and since it has already been growing for six years, unbeknownst to me, I charged off to pay the tax at the first opportunity. I had no idea what this involved – and Amit failed spectacularly to brief me – so I went armed with ignorance, the sale deed, a largely blank form (the scariest looking form I have EVER seen, full of entirely incomprehensible jargon and asking me things I had absolutely NO clue about), my cheque book, and a truckload of determination.

I reached Mayo Hall a little before 10.30 and spent some time getting pushed from pillar to post. One chap (in an office right next to the public toilet, and looking like part of the said public toilet) spoke to me in English, ogled my cellphone, chastised me for not reading Kannada, gave me a cellphone number to call, and told me to go to the Koramangala BDA Complex. I called the cellphone number, and the fellow told me to go to Mayo Hall and then cut the call before I could tell him that I WAS at Mayo Hall. I got pushed around a bit more, coincidentally bumping into my cook, who was trying to obtain her Election ID card. Several people told me to come back after 20th/24th/28th of April because they were busy with “Election duty” – when all they seemed to be busy with was chatting and drinking tea. So why, I demanded belligerently, are you people putting large ads in the newspapers urging us people to pay our property tax NOW, if you actually want us to do so only after the blessed elections?

That, of course, was a waste of breath.

One chap took pity on me, so I put on the poor-little-lost-girl act for his benefit. He took me under his wing, marched me into the Manager’s room (only to find that the Manager was still enjoying the long weekend break), calculated the tax for me and scribbled it in my still-largely-blank form, watched me write out the cheque and scribbled the cheque details in the form, then marched me to the counter where I could make the payment for the arrears. He spoke to the person behind the counter in Kannada, assured me my work would get done, just as soon as electricity came back, left me there and disappeared. I had thought that he was some kind of tout who would ask an exorbitant fee/tip for his help, but apparently he was happy to do it for free. It’s hard to believe.

I hung around for 45 minutes. Electricity, in fact, came back in about five minutes, but there was some problem with the UPS, so just that particular computer that was needed specifically for my work was not coming up. I stood glued to the spot for 45 minutes (I could actually feel the roots growing under my feet), and at last somebody fixed something and the computer came on. The fellow stretched out his hand to take my papers. I handed him my scribbled-on form. He returned it and asked for the receipt. I explained that I had never yet actually paid tax, so I didn’t have a receipt, so could he kindly accept my cheque for arrears and issue me a receipt? Pretty please?

No. I had to have a receipt and if I didn’t have a receipt I should have an order and to get the order I should go back to the other office and get one and without out he couldn’t take my money. No. No way. No.

I don’t know too many people who take kindly to being jerked around, but I know that I’m not one of them. I don’t like being jerked around and I don’t like wasting 45 minutes only to be told that they can’t do something that they could just as easily have told me 45 minutes earlier they couldn’t do. My truckload of determination rapidly turned into a truckload of frustration which I was just itching to dump on the fellow’s head… but I somehow gritted my teeth and walked out and went back to the other office.

By this time it was close to 12 noon, and the Manager had finally showed up. I went and put my case to him. Guess what he said: We’re busy with election duty, come back on 28th April. Several of his staff smirked behind me, saying, clearly enough, “I told you so.”

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!!!

The Manager went on to add that if I hadn’t been in any hurry to pay my taxes in the last six years, surely I could wait another couple of weeks. I told him that since I only came in to do my duty once in six years, it might be another six years before I came again. But that’s no skin off his nose so he sent me away with a shrug and returned to his “election duty”.

And home I came, having achieved nothing other than a significant spike in my blood pressure. Sigh.

A Really Long Weekend

It seems like more things have happened on this weekend than can possibly be crammed into three short days.

Apart from the puncture saga related earlier, the highlight of the weekend was an impromptu dinner party during Earth Hour. We were actually supposed to go to S&S’s place for dinner on Saturday (two dinner invitations in a row!), but the venue was changed at the last minute to our place. It didn’t matter too much, because nobody was cooking – it would be an order-in kind of evening, with some drinks, snacks, and ice cream. A fairly typical get together with S&S, V&V, and their respective kids.

I managed to organise some ready-to-fry fish and chicken snacks, and S&S contributed ready-to-fry french fries (leftover from another such get together in the distant past).We laid in provisions of juice, soft drinks, and ice cream, and we already had Vodka at home, so we were all set for a good time. It had been a long time since the six of us got together at our place, and I must say I thought it was a lot of fun. The kids, after an initial ice-breaking pause, completely freaked out together. We turned out almost all the lights at 8.30 and kept them off till 10.30, and the semi-darkness was quite nice, too. Ordered in food arrived promptly at 9, by which time three of the four kids had been put in bed. In fact, everything went like clockwork and we even got to bed by about midnight.

So that was fun, but that wasn’t all.

On two of the three days of the weekend, we took the kids swimming. And they loved it! Of course, “swimming” is a bit of an exaggeration – Tara got into the water and held on to the railing quite happily, but Mrini for the most part preferred to sit on the edge and dangle hands and feet in the water. But she was happy doing that, so that was good enough for us. She was, of course, eager to see the “fishy-fishy” in the water; apparently, she still has fond memories of the trip to Lakshadweep, specially the short trip in the glass-bottomed boat when she saw lots of lovely, brightly-coloured “fishy-fishy”; however, this did not induce her to spend too much time actually in the swimming pool.

So much for highlights. I didn’t have to spend any time working this weekend, which was good, but… I did happen to glimpse an email from the customer’s customer saying that they probably didn’t have any work for us for the next several weeks. Which was not so good. Now I have the unenviable task of telling my team of 30 writers that I can no longer provide them with the jam for their bread and butter right now. Plus, that pretty much puts paid to my bread and butter as well. Such are the vagaries of contract labour.

And then, there’s the whole Earring Saga. But that’s another story.

Powerless. Again.

The fact that on a daily basis we can’t depend on a regular supply of water and electricity is really, really frustrating for me.

When I was growing up in the early ’80s in Delhi, we used to get water for two hours in the morning and a few hours in the afternoon or evening. We had regular loadshedding in the afternoons, which made it too hot to sleep. If you ran out of gas, and weren’t among the lucky few to have a two-cylinder (or double-barreled) connection, you cooked on a kerosene stove. That was even more long ago, but I’m old enough to remember it, so it wasn’t that long ago. (Either that, or I’m really old; but my age is no secret.) As for telephones, you were lucky to have a landline, there were no cellphones, long-distance calls had to be booked, were connected by an operator who could then follow the rest of your conversation and interrupt peridically to ask whether you needed an extension. Of course,there was no internet, and practically no Tv.

My point being, in those days, it was a tough life and you had to work with that. But that was 30-odd years ago. You’d think things would’ve changed by now.

In fact, it does appear that things have changed. We have TV and broadband, we have telephones by the dozen, we have double-barreled gas connections, we have electricity and water almost around the clock.

Or do we? Well, there’s load-shedding in the summer and pre-monsoon months, of course. And with all the squabbling over Cauvery water, we get borewell water, whenever the borewell has some. And provided there’s electricity to pump it. And provided that when you run it in the kitchen in your home, there’s electricity to run the water purifier with. None of which is a given.

Take the last 24 hours. We had guests for dinner last night, and by the time they left (which wasn’t actually very late, just a little after ten), there was no water in the kitchen, so we had only a limited stock of purified water for drinking and cooking with. As for water for washing up with, I had to fill that up in the bathroom and ferry it to the kitchen. Because they won’t run the pump at that hour. Because the fellow with the keys and the technological knowhow would have gone home and gone to sleep.

Then, this morning at 8.30, before I could replenish our stock of drinking water, electricity went. Luckily, we still had running water – they run the pump early in the morning. But no electricity. And at the time of going to press, at 1.30 p.m., we still had no electricity.

Which meant, apart from other things, that my laptop and two UPSs were out of battery, so I couldn’t do any work. All I could do was blog about it, thanks to GPRS.

So 30 years on, have things really improved, as much as we’d like to think? We have new technology, but where’s the infrastructure?

And how am I supposed to get any work done??

Cops ‘n’ Robbers

Some time ago, we had a spate of burglaries in our apartment complex. In particular, our block and a neighbouring block were targeted. The modus operandi was simple: somebody would climb up (or down) into a balcony, somehow open a window, climb in through the window, open the front door (perhaps) take whatever was visible and available, and scoot.

Of course our windows have grilles. I would not have imagined any person could climb through the grills, but apparently they could.

The raids were made typically on a weekend night, and as many as three apartments were raided in one night.

Naturally, this was worrying. Our twins sleep in a separate bedroom and have a balcony attached to their room. What if someone got in? Could we be sure they wouldn’t harm us or the kids? As for cellphones and cash, those were the least of our worries.

Security was beefed up, gates were installed, meetings were held, trees were cut down and lighting improved, and several security guards were taken in by the police “for questioning” (synonymous with giving them a thrashing). For a while, all was quiet.

Meanwhile, one Sunday night a couple of weeks ago, I was awoken by a loud crash and the tinkling of shattered glass. Thief! I thought. The sound seemed to come exactly from the direction of the baby monitor, which is also, as it happens, the direction of the window in our room. I shook Amit awake in a whisper and told him to go check on the girls. He promptly told me to come along. Armed with nothing at all, we crept into their room. They were peacefully asleep and there didn’t seem to be anything up. Moreover, it was 5 a.m. – hardly the preferred time for burglaries. We went back to bed.

The next morning, I was somewhat alarmed to see on the eaves (if that’s the word I want; I’d call it a chhaja in the vernacular) of the window of the apartment below us, that is, just a couple of feet below the balcony off the kids’ room, a small wooden ladder. It was just lying there.

How did it get there? When? Why? By whom?

In light of the burglaries, I was suspicious. So was Amit. But, when we told the building manager about it, he was supremely unconcerned. It must belong to some workmen, he suggested. I thought it an odd place for workmen to leave their tools: by no means would it be easy for them to either place it there, or to retrieve it when needed. Moreover, after some days and weeks had gone by, no workmen showed up to claim it – that seemed even more suspicious. However, nobody had reported a shattered window pane either.

As usual, nothing was said or done, and the matter slowly faded from consciousness, even though the ladder continues to lie there, unclaimed.

Then, last weekend, there was another attempted burglary and this time, the security guard (perhaps mindful of the fate of other, less alert security guards) caught the thief. It was a 12-year-old boy. Another young chap came by and pleaded his innocence, but when the police arrived, the latter did a quick vanishing act. Some spry fellows gave chase and followed him to his hiding place, an apartment nearby. The police followed and found…

35 men holed up in one two-bedroom approximately 800 sq ft apartment!

Apparently, they are employees of a bar and restaurant across the road, whose boss thinks this is the best way of providing accommodation to his staff.

I don’t think these circumstances provide any excuse for outright burglary… but… I find myself more shocked at the thought of such a thing happening in our neighbourhood than I am at the fact of the burglary itself.

A Day in the Life of a Stay-At-Home Mom

Life as a Stay-at-home Mom is so completely relaxing, don’t you think? Here’s how a typical day in my life goes:

7.45 – Just back from tennis on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays; on other days and rainy days, just woken up

8.00 – breakfast for the twins, pack something for Amit

8.30 – tidy up, toilet calls

9.00 – my breakfast

9.00-10.00 – fold up laundry, show kids their picture book, talk to mum on phone

10.00-11.00 – exercise, toilet calls

11.00-12.00 – boil rice, bathe and dress the kids

12.00-1.00 – boil eggs, dish up lunch, tidy up the kids’ toys, put kids to bed, tidy up lunch table, wash up

1.00-1.30 – bathe and dress self

1.30-2.00 – lunch, usually seated in front of the computer

2.00-3.00 – on computer

3.00-3.30 – kids wake up, toilet calls

3.30-4.45 – play violin

4.45-5.15 – hang out laundry, get kids ready for park (if it’s not raining)

5.15 – 6.30 – park outing

6.30-7.00 – organise kids’ dinner

7.00-8.00 – kids’ dinner time, tidy up, toilet calls. If Amit is handling this, can go grocery shopping or go for a walk instead

8.30 – watch kids play

8.30 – 9.00 – put kids to bed, tidy up the house

9.00 – 9.30 – dinner time

9.30 – 10.00 – tidy up kitchen, wash up

10.30 – crash out.

Ups and Downs

It’s specially when one of the girls takes off her pants, tears her diaper, and spreads the sodden silica gel all over our 1350 sq ft apartment, and that, after the cleaning girl has departed… It’s specially at those times when I’m spending a good part of the morning cursing under my breath and scrubbing the mosaic flooring where the diaper bits are virtually indistinguishable, that I wonder: What possessed me to leave a relaxed and lucrative job (career) to become a stay-at-home mom? Surely there has to be a less unpleasant and more positive-cash-flow way of parenting?

(And, by the way, if anyone knows an easy and effective way to get a million bits of pee-sodden silica gel off the floor, please let me know. I’ve tried dry mopping, wet mopping, sweeping, vacuuming, praying and cursing – none of these approaches really works.)

But then again…

Today when I picked up Tara from her high chair after lunch, when she was 90% asleep as usual, she put her head on my shoulder as she usually does, then she smiled, curled her left arm around my neck instead of sticking her thumb in her mouth as she usually does, and continued to sleep. Such a simple thing, yet all of a sudden, my heart skipped a beat. Usually she fusses a bit as I wash her face and hands, and continues to wail or whine till I put her down on her bed, but today she seemed actually happy to be held by me! And just like that, it suddenly seemed all worthwhile – even cleaning up bits of burst diaper didn’t seem so bad after all.

Perpetually tired, mildly depressed, and thoroughly irritable

I don’t know why I’m feeling like this, but this is the way I’ve been feeling the past couple of weeks or longer. I’d love to blame it on the twins, but I don’t think I fairly can, because they are being their usual selves – sometimes cute, sometimes maddening. Of course, that’s enough to drive me to distraction from time to time, but not to the extent that I’ve been feeling lately, I think.

And it’s not as though there’s anything specially tiring going on here nowadays. The gas crisis got resolved on Monday morning, and we now have two full and functional cylinders again. No further developments on Amit’s knee. I went and played violin duets on Sunday afternoon with Mrs F and that was great – I actually found that I hadn’t forgotten as much as I feared I might have. I even managed to sight-read some simple pieces. I had struggled quite a bit, years ago, to play with other people and not get lost or distracted by what the other parts were doing. Apparently, it’s a skill which, once acquired, doesn’t go away all that easily, and I found I could even listen to what the other violin was doing and enjoy the harmony, without losing my part.

So all in all, things are going well enough. I went for a movie yesterday – my first movie-hall movie in over eight months and my first ever alone. So I should be feeling all rejuvenated and happy this morning – it’s not very often that I get a whole evening off, after all. In fact, the last time I did that was on March 4th – over three months ago. But despite that, I’m just feeling tired and with a nagging sense of depression again already. And it’s not even 10 a.m. yet – there’s the whole day to get through.

I really can’t identify the cause for this lowness. It’s not PMS. It could be the weather, cloudy and cool, but I thought I rather liked this weather. Maybe it’s a sort of delayed post-partum depression? Or maybe it’s because I’m trying to lose weight?

I mean, I’ve been trying to lose weight for years now – along with about 90% of the women I know. Only, my efforts were largely limited to envying all the slim women around and wishing I could look like them. Watching women’s tennis on TV doesn’t help – just think of Sharapova or Ivanovic. That alone could be just cause for severe depression – except that it’s never worried me much before. Nowadays, however, I am taking some more serious steps towards a slimmer me – minimizing eating out, and focusing on healthy eating, combined with an increase in my daily exercise regime.

But if it is the increased exercise and fewer (hopefully) calories that is causing me to feel tired and depressed and irritable, then we’re all just going to have to live with it, because this time I’m determined to lose 4 kilos or die trying. (And the latter is beginning to look like the easier option.) Sigh.

And we’re off to Pondicherry tomorrow for the twins’ adoption hearing.

Impending Surgery, On-going Gas Crisis, and Other Minor Happenings

I’m hungry.

There’s no gas, so I can’t cook.

It was like this. Being a Sunday and everything, we decided around 10 a.m. to treat ourselves to an omelette breakfast. Yes, an omelette for breakfast is considered a treat: breakfast is usually bread, sometimes porridge.

Amit whipped up the eggs, while I chopped up the onions and green chillies. Then he put the oil in the pan and lit the gas. A few minutes later, I noticed the pan was still cold. Huh? Oh, ok, gas ran out. No problem, we’ll just switch to the spare cylinder and I’ll order the replacement tomorrow.

I turned on the new cylinder and was alarmed to hear a hiss. I quickly turned it off, fiddled with the regulator and turned it on again. Still hissing. I called in the Marines – that is, Amit. He fiddled with it for a few minutes, then opened the kitchen window. Bad sign. I took the girls and retreated to the farthest corner of the house.

In the due course of time, Amit removed the defective cylinder to the balcony where it was well ventilated and hopefully would not explode with a passing spark. There followed a couple of hours of phone calling and general laziness. When it was apparent that phone calling was not going to have any effect whatsoever, Amit loaded the empty cylinder in the car and drove off to the gas depot, where he could not get a replacement, but brought home a technician instead.

This fellow twiddled with the defective cylinder, and proclaimed it in good health. He tested it by connecting the stove and lighting it. A delightful blue flame erupted, just as it should. “There, see?” he said in a self-satisfied manner. I pointed out that the real test of a defective cylinder lay in ensuring that turning off the cylinder resulted in the flame going out. This he tried, but the flame continued to burn merrily. “Oh, that’s nothing,” he said airily. “You just turn that off by doing this,” and he turned off the flame from the stove!

“Arrrrrrrrrrgh! I KNOW you can turn off the flame by turning off the stove. I wanted to check that turning off the cylinder really does stop the supply of gas to the stove,” I shouted. His answer? Once you’re done with your cooking, turn off the cylinder and remove the regulator. Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh! Somebody rescue this incompetent fellow before I strangle him.

Amit took him back to the depot, leaving the twins and me at the mercy of the microwave. Luckily, the fridge held enough leftovers to provide for our lunch, and we already have a dinner invitation, so we only have to survive breakfast tomorrow and by then, hopefully, we’ll have a replacement for one of the two cylinders.

That only leaves the surgery to worry about.

It’s not for me… it’s for Amit. His right knee has been hurting for many months now. He’s done the round of doctors, X-rays, MRI, ice packs, ultrasound, physiotherapy and finally wound up getting an Ultrasonography (?) test done. What had been diagnosed as Patellar Tendonitis turned out to be Patellar Tendenopathy instead. His current doctor recommended surgery to fix it. Apparently it will take 4 days in hospital, one month in a knee brace, and three to six months of rehabilitation before he can get back to tennis. Sounds tough, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, Friday the Thirteenth is just around the corner. We’ve decided to attempt the excursion on our own, without any additional help. We checked with a local lawyer, who assured us that a timetable would be pinned up in the morning, and that we could be present in court just half an hour or so before our case was called, and that I could even wait outside with the kids and go in only if and when required. That sounds more reasonable than our lawyer, who said we’d have to wait inside the courtroom potentially from 10 a.m. straight through till 6 p.m. – apparently she was only being deliberately unhelpful.

That apart, I’m breaking the ice in a completely different sphere of life. After a month of irregular but determined practice, I’m finally going to meet my violin duet partner to try to play a few small pieces with her. This used to be a regular Sunday occurrence, but it’s been years since I stopped and I am a little apprehensive about it now. Let’s hope I’m not completely useless at it.