A place called home

There, everyone! How ye doing? Yeah this took a long time coming, I know, many of those who have wandered around these premises musta got bored and left by now. I don’t know what will it cost me to have them back… Whatever, I’m ready to bear the cost.

Yeah, I was sleeping all these while. Just got myself shut up in my little den in the snow, and hibernated for a month. And a lot of things happened outside, meanwhile! Some things even changed their identity. Like I got this forward titled “Katrina Kaif: Careful”. Suddenly I was slithered down into this wonderful little reverie of a skimpily clad goddess with long legs and a killer smile. My urges got the better of me and I opened it in broad daylight, one hand strategically placed on “alt+tab” to take sudden evasive action, and I was greeted by this picture of a very very sexy, well….hurricane, and a cricketer, whom some of my female friends might consider sexy, not me, naah I’m too straight for that. Katrina Kaif!! Bad taste! Very, very bad taste. Wait, if that didn’t get the mucus going haywire inside your esophagus, then this will. The best ever act of Charity in those difficult times came from none other than Britney Spears, who donated her diamond studded bikini and brassiere to be auctioned, for the benefit of Katrina victims!! Diamond studded what??? She would have done much better if she had opted to do a live performance in New Orleans free of cost, hip swinging and tummy shaking and all that! Hurricane relief, and what a relief would that be!

I digressed. This is what I intended to say...Yesterday while I was traveling home, it rained outside. You know, rain, it does many nasty things to our imagination, and it’s a wonderful dreamlike feeling if you’re sitting in a Volvo, with 80% of the sides open to nature and anything to suggest motion would be a gentle hum of the engine from the rear and the occasional lunge forward from shifting gears. (I suggest you don’t look out through the front windshield, unless u have at least 100 hours of in-flight experience in any one of these - Mirage. Mig, the Sukhoi or the F-series! Not one for the faint-hearted!) So the world whizzed past me in a hurry, and I was thrown back, around 20 years, to the place, which is the first I remember to be, my home! As a result, here’s the post-series on the places I have lived so far!

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Draw a 2:1 rectangle, longer side as the base, and divide the width into three equal sections. And the section in the middle is what my first ‘home’ looked like! Imagining the rooms are simpler still, extend the rectangle three-dimensionally backwards, and divide the length into 4, bingo, you have four rooms! And toilet was outside! That was the super-duper premium quarters of this great settlement of tenants ranging from the municipality-insecticide guy, to a group of three engineering college students, who lived in the quarter next to ours. And all owned by one man, whom my parents used to refer to (pssst…) in secret as, surprisingly, “The Owner”! He had a sprawling house in the middle of this entire cornucopia and two Tasmanian devils for children. I don’t even remember those engineering guys, any venture into their premises were dealt with serious repercussions, them having to bear this ‘dubious’ reputation of being "engineering college students”! O boy didn’t I find out the reason later!!! There was a little rock in front, where we – the gang, used to make burrows and houses. I once made an entire burrow out of characters from “Balarama”, including Kapeesh, Kaloolo, Mayavi etc. I forgot the name of the lion, which I placed in the throne inside, surrounded by all his loyal subjects, complete with thrones and council and all that! And there was this big “njaval” tree in the premises, which became the centre of activity during the summer days. Some really smart boys used to climb on top and shake all the njaval-pazhams to the ground, which, more enterprising people like us, collected and ran for our lives! Don’t remember much of the neighbors. Again, the rains were the most pleasant and dangerous times in the place, dangerous because, the ground was hard and collected a lot of moss during monsoons, which became free-waltz training floor!

We shifted after my sister was born.

To be continued…