Who asked you to invite people over for dinner on our wedding anniversary?
To make up to me you have to start singing again.
Or else.

In school you sang to me in snatches, very quietly, so that no one else would hear. The King of Wishful Thinking, Unchained Melody, It Must Have Been Love , The Music of the Night and Stand by Me.

You know that line in the Music of the Night- “Silently the senses abandon their defences?” Well, I abandoned my senses every time you sang it!

Now to mark the occasion of fifteen years of togetherness and five years of matrimony, holy and unholy, please start singing again.

But, I also want to say I love you very much. Thanks for putting up with me all this time. As you said yesterday, we’ve come so far and we love each other even more now than when you were 15 and I was 16.

We’ve been through pain, hurt, struggle, tears and penniless days, but ultimately the love and laughter have won out.

Thanks for finding my new gray hair sexy. I hope you feel the same when I am 85 and ALL my hair is gray.

I love you.

Share/Save

“Why are there so many copies?” I asked A.

“To give to people,” replied the Math Evangelist.

One week later, a new laptop arrived for me. Thank God.

Share/Save

I want my mummeeeee! I’m going through one of those phases when I need her hovering over me. Sometimes she drives me mad when she does that (especially when we have two hour conversations on the phone, revolving around what I’m eating and what I should be eating), but will be very glad to have her here in the summer.

Share/Save

“Don’t look like that,” said my trainer.

“Like what?,” I said through gritted teeth.

“Like that cat in Shrek-what’s his name (English is not my trainer’s first language, so he was struggling to remember the name), when he has that expression he puts on to get people to do what he wants.”

I nearly fell to the floor in surprise. I knew what expression he meant. A has said for years that I have a couple of puss-in-boots looks, but I thought it was limited to my crazy husband thinking his wife resembled a feline.

So apparently, I look like this when I am trying to wriggle out of an exercise:

A says I also do the evil puss look:

I can only hope my whiskers aren’t as prominent.

Share/Save

When I was growing up I was lucky to have an extended family of parents, and am lucky even now to still have a village bringing me up.

First there are my parents. Then there is my uncle and aunt who now live in Chennai (I have many lovely uncles and aunts but these two are special) who took on the role of paternal grandparents, since we never knew ours. Then my parents friends. Two couples in particular. One set doesn’t have children of their own and sort of adopted me. They were my refuge in the Delhi years. And one adopted grandmother, the mother of the Delhi mother. The other set had a child of their own but R2 and I are their other two, and their daughter like a sister.

One of the reasons I do a Bharat darshan when I visit India is because of all these parents.

So many of them are ill, some seriously so. At times like this, I just hate that I am not there, helping them.

My parents had me “late”, ie later than was the norm at that time, so often my peers tend to have younger and healthier parents.

Not everyone has been so lucky as to have so many adoptees/surrogates as I have had. But what that means is my heart is in various bits of India at the moment.

Share/Save