Phew!

It is only 7.00 AM in the morning, and I am already wiping away tears with the back of my hands. I splash cold water on my face, willing the tears to stop, but they don’t. I curse and continue peeling onions. I need to get an edible curry ready before Dad and Bro bring the place down with their claims of how they have never been late for work/school.

“We could have got something from Nilgiris!” grumbles Dad, scrubbing the kitchen sink. “Breakfast will be ready by the time you finish your bath”, I announce in my most-reassuring cheerful voice. Dad shakes his head and storms out of the kitchen.

Sigh! It has been more than a month. Thanks to Mom, who is enjoying her extended vacation in her hill-station cum hometown, I have been confined to the kitchen walls on all weekends. Sundays included!!
A typical weekend starts like this.

SATURDAY:
I come home after a crazy, breathless, impossible deadline achieving work-week to this mess. After a hurried dosa-making session and packing lunches, I return to the kitchen for a round of washing and scrubbing vessels. The Pooja room is a mess. The lamps have turned green. This according to Dad is because of some chemical reaction between oil and copper. He illustrates with a formula that he makes up at the spur of moment. I scratch the formula out and write in bold letters, ‘This reaction would have never happened if you cleaned the lamp.” He goes back to polishing his shoes muttering about how he could have grown paddy in the fields and helped poor farmers instead of wasting time giving birth to me. I want to point out a fundamental mistake in his time-space hypothesis of making children and growing paddy...But I keep my mouth shut.

After a couple of bear hugs, both of them leave the house. I start with cleaning the kitchen. Mom has a particular order in which she arranges her vessels, and anybody who messes the order will probably get hit in the head with her favorite wooden ladle. So I fix the jigsaw and wash clothes. Our washing machine thinks it is a pet animal and works only if Mom is around. The other members of the family do not exist in its world. So I end up washing clothes manually (White-turned-brown clothes are surprisingly more in number than colored ones). After trudging the million stairs to my terrace, I dry the clothes out, hopping from one foot to anther, to avoid roasting my poor legs completely. Then I start sweeping, mopping and dusting the house. By the time I finish it is already time for lunch. I mercifully gulp down the rice and rush upstairs for a nap.

I wake up after an hour to make coffee, and start my usual round of washing vessels. Bro returns and I have to make another round of coffee and wash vessels. Dad comes back, and I have to make yet another round of coffee and wash vessels. I cut veggies and make dinner. Of course, there is another round of washing vessels.

All of us eat dinner and thankfully this time, Dad washes the vessels. I quickly check mail and reply to the ‘Are-you-dead-or-what?’ messages on Orkut. All of us tuck in for some bedside reading and Bro sleeps off with his book open. I hardly get through three pages and groggily ask Dad to switch off the lights.

SUNDAY:
All of us wake up only by 8.00 AM. I get the customary call from Mom, and I almost ask her to pack her bags and get back. The goodness of my heart and the angel that I am; is the only thing that makes me say, “I am having fun here. You come back whenever you want.” I also nicely let the ‘I am not cleaning the house today’ fact, slip in between our conversation (In my classic ‘Am-I-not-your-bundle-of-joy’ voice). “Varsha!” she says. The only time she calls me by my name is when she disapproves of what I am doing. Otherwise I take the names of various species of cattle depending on her mood. She tells me if I make this a habit, what will my future in-laws think of me? “Fine”, I grumble and go back into the kitchen. I hope she never finds out that I blogged this conversation. Her daughter ruining her own prospective marriage alliances is not something she can digest!

MONDAY:
My boss asks me in a cheerful voice, “So how was your weekend?” and I am tempted to reply, “Squeaky clean”.

Acrobatic lizards and anxious lasses

It has been more than three weeks of peak workload, leaving me very little time to blog, mail, or even read. So, when I did get some time to leave a bit early, I decided to work myself out of the 'Will-I-end-up-like-this-for-the-rest-of-my-life?" mood, by cleaning the kitchen.

So, I started with the stove. The stove in our common kitchen is buried under layers of spilt milk, noodles masala, burnt rice, dust, grime, and dirt (Of course it is not all that bad, but I love making embroidered statements). So I painstakingly removed layer-by-layer of the dirt, until I saw the first glimpse of the silvery aluminium.
Satisfied with my handiwork, and egged on by the gleaming aluminium, I ventured to clean the trivet and burner of the stove. The burner successfully transformed the kitchen sink into a dark hole, and I ended up cleaning the sink, only to find my scrubber turn jet black from light green. Then I washed the scrubber, to find my hands turn into a ravishing shade of grubby brown.

It was only when I started cleaning the trivet, did the dramatic, or rather a swift termination to my cleaning spree come. I pulled the trivet out, to find a lizard hanging upside down from it!!! As expected, I screeched as loudly as possible and put it down. The acrobatic lizard with the mighty swung, got back to its feet and scaled to the top of the stove smoothly.

I couldn’t but appreciate the impudence it had, to stay there quietly amidst all the clatter I had created. Before even it could think of doing something funny, I slowly tapped the stove with the gas lighter, silently urging the dear Lizzie to back off.

Yes. I named the lizard too, in the middle of all the commotion.

Lizzie did not budge. I hit the stove harder. This time she only backed off a few steps. (I decided the lizard would be a 'she' because she was captivated by the kitchen stove and exhibited unusual daring). Then I began a slow rhythmic tapping against the stove. Lizzie moved into a trance-like state, inching backwards with every tap, and before I could stop her...She slipped and fell into one of the holes inside the stove.

I swallowed hard. Did I kill her? I pictured headlines in the 'The Creepy Crawly Times'. “Chef Lizzie burnt to death. Lizzie, a successful chef and also the co-author of the book, '100 Tasty Insects And Where To Catch Them' was cruelly hypnotized by a two-legged slaughterer and burnt to death inside a stove. Investigations revealed that the two-legged being is still on the prowl, brutally putting an end to all the successful career-minded woman lizards. "She is a shame to the two-legged community. She is an obstacle to the empowerment of lizards” said the spokesperson of ‘The lizard on the wall’, an NGO for displaced woman lizards."

In a second I had become a serial killer, shunned by the lizard community. Still panicking, I peeped into the hole for any sign of life. Gradually I could see two beady eyes glowering from inside the hole, admonishing me for my deed. A wave of relief spread over me as I watched Lizzie slowly clamber over the hole, struggling to find a hold. And when she finally did, she fixated a stare at me. It was an acutely piercing angry glare. No doubt.

I muttered a hurried apology and quickly switched off the lights.