Musing from Madras on a Monday Morning in May

whats up with chennai? someone send something to this city already. like cool winds. or a city-sized air conditioner. it was 10:30 when we landed yesterday. thats a whole story in itself that i feel unwilling to share. horrid nasty flight it was. all of us passengers seemed to bond over stupid things like our indianness and the misery of being loaded on like cattle to a plane that was closed to the atmosphere, hermetically sealed in, with no artificial cooling and ejecting of ether molecules carrying heat to the outside atmosphere, and the spelling of connect with a k, what? did ekta kapoor think that one up?

back, as it were, at home. it was nice to sleep in ones own bed even if the monster(s) did do their utmost to push me down. we still have not removed out the plastic from our new! therapeutic! keep a glass of orange juice here! jump there! see! it does not spill! it adjusts to the contours of your body! wah! wah! mattress. so i was sleeping on plastic by five am. wondering disturbedly about: (a) my passport (new yorker, dude, dont kill me, i will find it in time for the big day, i promise) (b) sundry other things that i have lost in the past fifteen days thanks to my brain. so anyway up with the larks and my ladies, dear old friends, back in the house and cleaning and washing clothes but not yet unpacked the gadzillion bags i seem to have accumulated.

it was wonderful to kick back and hang out with the mater in mysore. i saw all my lovely nieces and nephews. spent lots of time with them. lovely lovely lovely kids they are. growing up so fast though. so far, they do not dislike me. the monster accused me, thanks to Roald Dahl, of not being a 'sparky' parent, however. the husband man was furious with her for that. anyway thats fine. i had fun with the kids. i also met up with a whole lot of my old relatives. like really old folks. my grandmum and her siblings and my dad's friends and so on. i love hanging out with them, usually. we seem to manage to chat about the most wonderful things. i love their reminescences, about their childhood, about mum as a little girl, stuff like that. but this time, as i discovered (rather proudly!) more grey hair in my own head and glanced at their fully white heads of hair, it was not all fun. aging is such a thing you know. fun for a bit but then its all fuzzy brains and repeating the same thing over and over again and failing to recognise anyone and i suppose it feels like you have a film over your retina that has nothing to do with the cataract thing that can be nuked by laser rather easily...