A random summer weekday

It was like any other weekday for me. Waking up early, preparing breakfast and lunch, gulping down my breakfast in hurry and rushing to office in the hot summer sun. After not so tiresome work at office, I find that its already 5.30 p.m. and pack my bag to head back home. As soon as my scuttling feet reached the exit gate, I met the most unlikely thing for a summer evening, a cool waft of breeze. It was already getting dark and the sky was so very cloudy. WOW! I stood doing nothing and looked around just WOWing for a couple of seconds with the breeze soothing me.

The autowalas honked at me volunteering to take me home. But I decided to walk. It was a 30 minute walk from office to home and I wanted to  savor every moment of it. As I was walking home, I felt the sudden cravings for corn. The one they roast on charcoal and you get to eat with salt, lime and chilly powder. Oh so YUM for a cloudy day like this. My mouth was watering as I thought of it and is still watering as I write. I was scanning every corner of the road as I walked, but did not find any good man selling corn. There were people selling bhajjis and pakoras. They would have served as the best snacks for a cloudy evening if I wasn't following the no junk diet. I was busy scanning the other side of the road for corn for quite some time and decided to look at my side of the road too for the life saver corn. And I realize that I was inside the compound walls of a play school.This play school had its gate (which was open) on the road and my corn scanning eyes missed it. The confused me continued walking inside the compound looking for the exit gate which was no where to be seen. I did a U turn and came out the way I came in, conscious of the people staring at me. But I just gave a smile as they couldn't see me. No, I wasn't invisible but my face was masked with my scarf to cut out the pollution.

I quickened my pace towards home as it started drizzling. On my way home, there is a vast area of government owned open land filled with greenery. It was like any other open space you see in hyderabad, filled with plants and bushes, plastics and waste strewn here and there. But the unusual sight that caught my eye was the peacock. Yes. While the peacock stood there contemplating if the drizzle was enough reason to dance, my heart was already tap dancing not just for the summer drizzle but for the fauna that existed very close to my home. I stood there for sometime marvelling at the most handsome male creation of God and sighed for not being a peahen. I continued my slo mo walk and reached home. Deprived of corn I consoled myself by feasting my eyes on the handsome peacock.

Of Stories

Most of my childhood was spent either listening to stories or reading them. So I wanted to dedicate sometime everyday to tell a story to my son. In fact I told him stories when he was in my tummy. Once he was born, I got him lots of picture books and started narrating him the stories. I wouldn't read them but would just tell him the stories and let him correlate them with the pictures in the book. Not just from books, but most of the times I tell him stories of mythology, stories that I heard from my grandmother and stories from our day to day activities.

When he was around one and a half year old, he would ask me story about things he saw at home. Like story of a fan, story of AC, story of the bed etc. And I would weave a story around the objects and amuse him for a while. I enjoy story telling most of the times but it gets redundant when he asks me to repeat the same story again and again for tens of times. Or it gets challenging when he asks me the next day to repeat the previous day's story because I would not remember what I had told him. Thats when I realize I am growing old at a rapid pace. He loves stories of duckings, kittens and rabbits the most. He hates moral stories. Whenever I try to drive some moral into him, he cuts me off. For instance, one day I told him the story of a naughty monkey who had the habit of poking into others business and in the end he had his tail cut due to his attitude. He paid atmost attention to the pranks played by the monkey but when it came to the conclusion, he quickly cut me off and asked me to repeat the story from the beginning.

Needless to say, these days it gets difficult to tell him any story that has moral attached to it. So there go the panchatantra stories, in the archives of our bookshelf. Sometimes we sidetrack from the main plot of the story due to his inquiries into other irrelevant details. For e.g. I am narrating him the story of a baby goat that wouldnt sleep and instead roams around the country side with his dad. All of a sudden he interrupts and asks me about the huge fan. Only then do I realize that there is an image of a huge fan of a wind mill in the background. So, I detrack and tell him the story of the fan while the goat family lay forgotten on darkest of  the nights, lost in the country. On other such instance while narrating him the story of a selfish crocodile who is mean to every animal of the forest that comes to drink water at his lake, there is an image where the crocodile hurts his jaw while clearing his teeth with a toothpick and lo! My son wanted to know what the lizard was doing there. Needless to say it was another insignificant creature placed on the colorful background of the page along with the bees and butterflies. But we had to make it the protagonist of our story. Sadly, the next pages wouldn't agree with our plot and had to be ignored and torn. Narrating story itself has become a suspense thriller for me because, I wouldn't know what story would be demanded from the book I read.

Very recently, I got to know about homeschooling which meant teaching children at home instead of sending them to school. But my son learns nothing more than scribbling on the walls at home. Since I don't have the patience of homeschooling, I decided that I would teach him something new everyday. I showed him the climber in our garden and told him how different it is from the other plants and trees. I showed him how it climbs taking support and grasping objects coming its way. I also showed him how the tiny cucumber formed under the yellow flower of the climber. After few days we also noticed it grow in size. Yesterday as a bedtime story, I told him that God has created us with eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hands, legs and tummy. But internally there is a lot going on. I told him that we have wind pipe going to lungs and food pipe going to stomach and the food pipe is thin and any large objects that we swallow gets struck in there and chokes us and that is the reason we have to bite and chew our food patiently. The toxins and dirt we eat go to liver which cant hold the dirt for long and we get diarrhea and hence do not eat dirt. the kidneys take care of the water and dump the waste water into bladder, which when full, you get the urge to pee. I told him we inhale and exhale air with our nose that goes to the lungs. I showed him how his tummy went up and down while breathing. I put his tiny palm to his chest and urged him to listen to his heart beat. I rolled my fist and showed that was the size of the heart and it pumps blood to our body through thin pipes I said pointing at the green veins of his hands and wrist. Well, this elaborate story or lesson of body parts and their function did catch his attention. Yesterday while sleeping, he kept looking at his tummy going up and down in rhythm with his breathing. Occasionally he put his hand to his chest and showed his fist to me confirming his heart was still beating. When I mentioned the bladder, he said it was not full and thus, talking of the body parts, we drifted to sleep. Looks like in the coming days we will come up with a new genre of stories. Stay tuned. :P

PS: There are stories everywhere. Pick up the one that suits your mood and lose yourself to it. Just for a while let yourself drift with the seemingly impossible and abnormal possibilities of the stories world. That is how creative you can get as a kid. I can't thank my son enough to rekindle the child in me.