Plays and Puppets

Offering flowers in prayer is a Hindu tradition that is followed flawlessly at home. Buying flowers for the next day's pooja was an amusing cause of quarrel between my brothers, who are now blissfully settled in places where flowers are probably used for any purpose other than prayer! Why quarrel? Because either of them had to chauffeur my grand-dad to the flower cart of the old lady sitting outside a small temple at the corner of a street 5 minutes away from home. And of course there'd be times when my grand-dad would walk right out on them and walk it up to the flower woman and buy his flowers! But well, times change. My stubborn grand-dad, who staunchly believed that the best flowers in the place were sold by the old lady, had to settle for home delivery of flowers by someone else becuase it didn't seem feasible for him to walk down everyday, and nobody was ready to do the chauffeuring everyday anymore (maybe that means I didn't make the trips for him after my brothers left!). That is how it all started... the flower lady began to come home every evening with her basket of flowers.

There's some unknown force that links our flower lady to dinner time. Her timing is indeed commendable, considering we have no fixed time for dinner everyday. She makes it a point to ring our door-bell atleast when my grandparents are eating, if not the whole lot of us. And they have to leave their plates and slowly walk to the door, where she is comfortably seated, gaping at the television, and asking for a change of channel to catch glimpses of her daily soap - more commonly known as 'serial' here! You can just about assume that her eyes have forgotten how to blink...she's anyway too busy cursing the lead character or the villain! One evening i caught my grandmother in deep discussion with the flower lady. It was a little weird, considering my grandmother (a) Didn't have a plate with half-eaten food on the table and (b) wasn't calling out names of flowers with the amount she wanted. What was worse was that the discussion was almost a whisper, and my gossip-craving soul was instantaneously attracted to the hushed tones and the definitely drawn expressions on my grandmother's face! Maybe Flat no.2's servant maid's sister-in-law's cousin's daughter got pregnant before she got married? What disappointment my poor soul had to face when my ears made it clear to my brain that my dear grandmother was catching up on some episodes she'd missed from the 7 O' clock soap! Does this have any limits? *sigh*

Apparently, it doesn't! Gone are the days when i tried the tricks of elongating my round face to make it clear i don't approve of the remote control resting its half-broken back on my grandmother's hands rather than mine. Now, we accept the fact that the remote control belongs to her on week days, and even better, watch the soaps once in a while because something's better than nothing! And it has been my immensely useful discovery, out of true experience, that it is enough to watch one episode every 2 months to follow the story of every soap! Of course the finer details can always be skipped, or in desperate situations, brought out as a narrative from dear grandma! Thus the daily routine continues... they laugh with the characters, cry with the characters.... after all, all world's a play!

Thasall...

To those who were once here, and now dwell in a more wonderful place....Rest in peace. You'll be remembered forever, in the depths of our minds, in the smiles of our eyes, in the fogged memories that may be hazy, but never too unclear to see what we wish to see. God bless.

Yours "All world's a play...and all mortals, puppets"ly
Signign off....