Excuse me while I ramble

The last few weeks left me breathless, gasping for time. My soulmate – my cook went off for two months for her annual vacation leaving me with anxiety pangs and petulant desolation. Her replacement was a nightmare, someone who couldn’t differentiate cumin from aniseed and looked at the pressure cooker as if it were a UFO.

I also had relatives over for a short stay. And when you have visiting relatives, you can’t get away with shortcuts. You are expected to cook proper meals and put on your best behaviour. I remember as a child, how I excited I would be every time we had our gaggle of relatives visiting us during the summer break. I would be in a fevered state of anticipation of the good times ahead and thought Maa was a big spoilsport with her concern for all that extra work. How drastically your perspective changes with age – now it’s me who frets about the extra effort and the infringement of my valued personal space.

This series of unprecedented events also coincided with me enrolling for yoga class, besides my regular workouts at the gym. My cleaning lady in her endeavour to further spice things up decided she needed a break too. It was harrowing – piles of unwashed utensils, spending most of my day in the kitchen cooking while my trainee cook looked on. And I wasn’t willing to compromise on anything. I had to attend my yoga classes, household chores couldn’t take a backseat either and I didn’t want to give up on my blogging. For me writing a post is not about switching on my computer, thrashing the keyboard and magically producing a post. I do get my bursts of spontaneity but most of the times my write-ups, especially the memoirs, are a labour of love. Sometimes I spend days working and reworking my articles.



All this multitasking left me stressing, cribbing and at the receiving end of the mandatory “you should count your blessings” lecture.

My Yoga class was another story all together. The first few classes I spent just laughing incredulously. “Ab aap apne pairon ke toes ko apne ears tak le jaiye” “Apne left leg ko right shoulder taak pahunchaye” “cat posture mein aa jayeen”. And on top of that we were expected to inhale all the available oxygen of Gurgaon and exhale like noisy pressure cookers. Aww c’mon you can’t be serious was soon replaced by a sheepish me quivering my stomach Baba Ramdev style and twisting my body at vicious angles. Thankfully I don’t grunt embarrassingly, like the woman on the adjoining mat. At least not yet.

It’s been a month of groans and grunts, trials and tribulations. A string of cooking and cleaning ladies later, I feel I’m ready to embark on a brand new career - Didi’s Maid Finishing school. After a kissing couple of frogs I think I have managed to find “the ones” and in the process have emerged incredibly wiser and skeptical to the ways of the maid world.

And in the meantime a friend of mine bought an I-Pad and can’t stop gushing about it. This is what a happy long married life does to you - Your I-Pad becomes the best thing to have happened to you and your cook becomes your soulmate.