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More Real Housewives

21 Dec

Because you see, while you’re busy ideating, communicating, spinning sentences into webs of understanding and outreach, the chores don’t go away. So there you are, your wonderful self, doing all these things like researching black feminist thought, organizing resistance movements, investigating the origins of Women of Color, documenting the oral history of the Partition, speaking as a panelist, constructing a sphere of influence around your persona, learning, teaching, sharing, writing, and still, the piles of laundry are unmoved. With the patience of stoics, they wait, to be washed, dried, folded, ironed, closeted away; and the dishes sit heavy in the washer, parked until removed and stashed away; and there’s no telling your bed linen to get a move on and do a DIY job, because it needs your keyboard-focused fingers to fold the shams and fluff the pillows, and crumbs are spilled and countertops splashed and the business of getting dirty-clean-dirty spins in endless cycles every day.

Your plants beg for a drink. Your carpet dreams of a dalliance with the dustbuster. Your car could do with a nice soapy scrub. They don’t care who you are, or what you do, they’re not cleaning themselves up, or putting themselves away, and will outstare and outsit you in every possible battle of wills until you finally relent and tackle them darn chores. For all your fabulousness, and even if you divide and conquer, there’s always that laundry list of things to do around the house that keeps you grounded, with the possible aim of marinating your ego in some well-deserved mediocrity. Amplify that times a thousand, and enter children. But we won’t even go there for now.

Hausfrauness: dripping dullness into the scintillating everyday, one reincarnated house chore at a time.

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Mathematics Commando

24 Aug

To be a comrade in the war on equations, one needs stealth. Patience. Forbearance. And a determination to avenge.

Burn. Bombard. Blaspheme.

Alternating between machete and machine gun, creep up on the long baffling rows of numbers, draw yourself to full height and attack. Pound entire magazines of bullets into the curves of figures, shred symbols with venom, tear through mazes of graphs, rhombi and trapeziums, blasting, blowing apart, uncorking rivers of blood.

Wreak. Havoc.

Rip through logic, plug your ears to the screams, take down as many permutations as you can, hand glide from supertext, applaud the martyrs, put on a show of madness and impatience and flagrant contempt of what is.

Vent. Your. Rage.

Innards will splatter your dark bodysuit, your head furiously churning under the hardness of a tea-colored helmet, blown-up bits and bobs oozing dark liquids and tightly-coiled secrets, your boots crunching out the last of life as we know it in a supposed string of sense, that most despicable of creatures, that heinous crime, that assuredly unpardonable of all sins,

a mathematics equation.

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How to Keep Peace

15 Aug

Peace comes in packets. It is air-dropped. It has quotas. Not served as an all-you-can-eat buffet, where you stagger out pot-bellied, sated after three helpings of mandarin-marinated calm.  Take your packet and run with it. Rock it crooningly, make it last. Soak in its nourishment for treks through the marshland. Teach your children not to play toss with its doughy white balls. Divide it wisely. Sparingly. Warily. And always stock a crate, a spare stash of easy breath. Label it ‘Fragile’ and ‘This Way Up’.

Look to the sky. Look up in hope. Stretch your arms to the ether so they think you are praying. What do they know, Unbeliever, you’re only reaching, your eyes are only searching, your spirit is only screaming, for your next fix of stasis.

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A Home-spun Yarn

8 Aug

My niece came to visit the other day. A feisty 4-going-on-14, she bounced on my chaise lounge and dimpled up at me, demanding a story. Looking around for inspiration, my eye fell on these little fellas who hang off a corner lamp.

Clockwise, from top: Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum, Englishman

And, with her participation, a story took shape. The concept is simple, so with language modifications, this can work well for 2- to 5-year-olds. I hope your children (even the one that lives inside you) enjoy it.

***

This is a story of five friends, elephants all, named Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum and Englishman. One day, Englishman hosted a garden tea party for his friends. It was a beautiful , sunny day and the flowers were in full bloom. As they were all eating cucumber sandwiches and blowing bubbles into their lemonade, Englishman’s Papasan came stomping onto the vast lawns. Englishman started to tremble, because he had done something very naughty earlier in the day and knew Papasan had found out.

“I’ll just be back,” he said in a small voice to his friends and looked around for somewhere to hide. The ground rumbled as Papasan thumped his way over to the little group sitting on their stools, doing full justice to Cook’s jam tarts. His generous figure loomed closer and closer, and Englishman realized it was too late to run! In a flash, he took the lid off the teapot, dived in, and slid the cover in place just as his father’s booming voice shook the table. In the teapot he stayed, breathing through the hole in the spout, all the while that Papasan was looking for him. When he finally clambered out, Papasan was long gone and his friends had run off to the play area for a game of tag.

“Here I am!” he announced, catching up with Fee, Fi, Fo and Fum, and ready to join in. “Why is the rock talking?” asked his puzzled friends, and ignored him, as he stood in the rockery, camouflaged by a thick brown coat of tea water on his hide.  Englishman scampered after them. “Here I am!” he tried again, waving his hands and wiggling his amply belly at them. “Did that tree say something?” his friends asked, as they stopped playing Pin the Tail for a brief moment.  Quickly moving on to a game of Ele-ballet, they ignored the voice, leaving Englishman bewildered and wondering what to do.

“I know!” he said to himself, and climbed up the play structure to the tree house, decorated in earth colors and natural wood tones. “Here I am!” he shouted down at them, certain they’d look up and spot him. “A talking tree house?” they shrugged, now used to voices emerging from things, and unperturbed, Fee, Fi, Fo and Fum continued to play.

This is getting absurd, thought Englishman, who stood alone and sad in the doorway of the tree house, watching his friends play and missing being part of all the fun. He hung his head dejectedly, and lowered his eyes to the ground, but they fell on something else instead. A slow smile split Englishman’s face and he considered the object of his attention. The tree house was built over a frog pond, and, clutching his trunk tightly shut, Englishman made his second dive of the day.

Splash! And he was in. The sound made his friends turn around, and they saw Englishman, now rinsed of the tea and his natural red again, climbing out of the pond, a family of frogs looking on in alarm.  “There you are,” they cried in unison, and tumbled over to him. “We were wondering where you’d disappeared to!” Englishman only smiled, shook himself dry, and joined Fee, Fi, Fo and Fum at their grass-stamping game, glad to be nothing but himself again.

Now do you understand why Mammas and Daddies say tea isn’t good for children?

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So Spain

21 Jun

Let’s get back to my intercontinental gad-about, shall we? For those of you who follow me on Twitter (@orangejammies), the entire six-week trip is hashtagged under #PlaneTrainBusFuss. This is my longest post on the blog so far, so if you’re fairly confident 1800 words won’t knock you unconscious, grab a cup of something, sit back, and enjoy.

***

I’m not a morning person. Working full-time, hamster-on-a-wheel jobs and running businesses for the last 9 years have ruined my propensity to sleep past 8 am, but yank me out a nanosecond earlier and Shiva’s tandav will seem like a serene waltz through a starchy English ballroom. So what was I, bleary-eyed and nose in cappuccino, doing at Gatwick airport at 5.30 in the morning? Trying to drown out the adrenalized-beyond-caffeine shrieks of a hen party togged out in identical pink feathers. Trying to ignore booming golfers as they strode around eyeing the aforementioned chicks. Trying to be civil to my poor uncle and aunt who were whisking me away to their penthouse on the Mediterranean. This is where you commiserate with the drudgery that is my life.

Even before you board the aircraft for your 2-hour flight to the south of Europe, you know what Malaga will look like. A veritable English suburb, crawling with golfers, gaggles of party girls and British retirees with second homes under a punch drunk Spanish sun. Donning my sunglasses, I strode out of the Pablo Ruiz Picasso airport and into a throng of paparazzi screaming my name, popping flashes and wooing me to pose. Okay, so maybe not quite. We just hopped into a rented car and drove away to Fuengirola. But let it be on record that I like the first story better.

My uncle and aunt’s apartment is white. Cool. Marbled. Bright. With a spiral staircase that leads to their sun-roofed bedroom that leads to a wooden deck that overlooks the Mediterranean that is the reason the word “blue” was born. Forty miles yonder, say hello to the Atlas mountains of Africa.

Did you know Antonio Banderas is a local boy? Puerto Banos has a square named in his honor, and I spent a good quarter hour lusting over the letters of his name: the strong, masterful, lines, the sinfully sinewy curls, the simmering glisten of the bronzed god he is .  Get a move on, OJ-girl. That’s XXX territory four inches away. Aching back to real time, Marbella was next. Playground of the rich, famous, and rich-but-not-so-famous, its sprawling villas discreetly behind walls of foliage, Marbella’s rarefied air is suspended with currency signs. Riyals hang off potted palms, Pounds Sterling drape themselves over tapas tables, Dollars dangle over the glistening sea, and Dirhams bungee jump off the shelves at super-exclusive boutiques. In case you were wondering, it is also populated by people. Typically of the skinny, underclothed variety, their wraps are glamor, air-conditioning and the heady scent of power. And then there was me. Far from skinny or underclothed, splashing undaintily in the waves, collecting perfect and quirky shells for a little boy with eyes the color of Andalusian gypsies. Clearly I’m a local celebrity, though–Marbella beach had a bar named after me. My pet name, to be precise. The one that my uncle and aunt use. That I will not share, so don’t crowd around me now.  I’m 33 years old and get to keep my last shred of dignity until babies arrive.

Costa Del Sol has a thriving weekend market that hawks everything from handmade Italian leather bags to kitchen implements, local music to fresh vegetables. We spent a fun morning people-watching, puppy-petting, jostling amidst strollers and sunburned Brits, acquiring adorable and unnecessary things, then traipsed off to do justice to The Full Irish breakfast, in honor of my aunt. Just so dinner wouldn’t feel ignored and sob in a corner, we danced, supped, and toasted the night away at a performance by the enthralling Divo & Divas ensemble. The sky glimmered over the crash of waves, candles made shadows sway, flavors teased the palate in their own seduction sideshow, and I basked in the bonhomie of old family friends who last met me as a teenager-on-fertilizer.

A night so memorable needed a stellar day in its wake, and the village of Mijas held the promise of just that. Nestled in the mountains, looped around curving cobblestone streets, its whitewashed balconies, brilliant bougainvillaea, high-roofed church, and tinkling donkey carts transport you to a gentler century, and your denim-clad reflection, if you happen to glimpse it, makes you wonder who that stranger is. Ignore her entirely and walk into the world’s smallest chocolate factory. Fancy your own bar of the sweet stuff? Let the Mayan Monkey Mijas be your stage. And us, merely players, conjuring dark cocoa fantasies, cramming our gobs senseless, having to be hauled out kicking and screaming but still loved, the way only family can after you’ve embarrassed them into the dirt.

Why pamper one end of your body and leave the other feeling second-born? (Birth order studies show that younger children are humans too, the little snotty runts.) So tickle yourself pink. Treat your tootsies to a fish pedicure in your own dedicated tank, while sipping champagne and squirming on your plushly perched derriere.  The result: baby-smooth feet and a very giggly aunt-and-niece pair. Add an evening of boat-watching at the Benalmadena marina and a hunt for an ostrich steak dinner, and I was rapidly stocking up on memories of a lifetime.

For all the times in my life I’ve called someone my Rock of Gibraltar, I waved goodbye to my uncle and aunt and trundled off the next morning, to see the Real McCoy. The ginormous bus was packed with tourists, mostly from the UK and western Europe, and I chatted with the friendly Irishman next to me.  A girl from Prague struck up a conversation when I shared I was Indian, and then just as quickly ended it, appalled that I did not know who “Babajee” was.  The bus turned a bend and the Rock came into view.  Rising out of otherwise perfectly flat land, its strategic geographic location is of military (and therefore political) significance to the United Kingdom, and Spain apparently still chafes at the loss.

At the border crossing, a UK visa official got on board and asked to check our passports. Amid the flash of red UK covers, I held out my lone Indian blue. His eyes halted at my visa page. He shook his head. And said I couldn’t go through. A hush descended on the bus. All eyes converged on me.  I blinked, then calmly reasoned. I had been to the United Kingdom on this visa and sailed through immigration. Surely its own territory had no reason to see me as a threat when the country had granted me access?  The border official shook his head again.

You need a one-year visa to enter, he said. Yours is valid for six months.

So let me understand this:  the United Kingdom considers a six-month visa acceptable for tourist entry, but its own territory requires a one-year permit?

That’s right.

She’s only here for the day as a tourist, other voices spoke up. She’ll go back with this bus.

Let me check with my supervisor.

3 minutes later, he was back. It was no go. I had to get off in Spain. The bus couldn’t go on with me in it.

I swallowed hard, collecting my things, and walked to the door with as much dignity as I could muster. “It’s too bad,”  my co-travelers complained audibly, “they let terrorists into the country all the time and won’t let this harmless girl visit for the day!”

Go to the bus station and buy a ride back to Malaga, said our tour guide, and gave me sketchy directions in his hurry to get on with the day.

“It’s a shame! Be safe! Don’t worry! Take care,” my companions called out, as I stepped off the bus, looked the officer straight in the eye and fought back mortification, anger and worry with a savageness I rarely need to employ.  Thank You for Visiting, mocked the board above my head as I walked back into the border town of La Linea, exhorting myself to keep that chin up and draw on the reserves of toughness that have seen me shout off a gunman and tackle house robbers with nothing more than a kitchen knife by my bed.

I assessed my options. They weren’t plentiful. I had barely any Euros, having carried Pounds for Gibraltar, and my cell phone, still on American roaming, was down to its last bar of battery. And since we weren’t in a British-populated principality, nobody spoke much English. With my rudimentary Spanish, picked up in a year of living in California, I found my way to the bus station. Uno billete Malaga, I signed, pulling out my last remaining Euros. How much? The woman in the window held up four fingers, then slashed the air with a horizontal palm. Four and a half euro, man this place is cheap, I thought, until I saw her pointing at a clock on the far side of the hall. Damn. She meant 4.30 p.m. It was presently almost noon. There was no other bus that day. I’ll take it, I said, and paid her, and prepared to wait four and a half hours.

Sitting on an old bench, I saw an old man watching me. He was grey, grizzly, with rheumy eyes and dressed much too warmly for this blazing April day. He nodded, half to himself, and continued his inspection. With nothing else in the waiting area to distract me, I called my uncle and aunt to update them. “We’re coming to get you!” cried my knights in Skoda Fabia. And no amount of reasoning would budge their belief that a towering woman of reasonable sense and experience wouldn’t crumble to pieces without their instant ministrations. So that was that and I now had two hours to kill instead of four. Walking into the strip of shops and block of flats that comprises the satellite town of La Linea, I considered soothing my bruised spirit with some retail therapy. Except, there weren’t any stores of that kind. I could exchange money, buy luggage, check email, rent a car, and eat a sandwich. Those were my options. So I swapped Pounds for Euros, strode into a cyber cafe, and put my time to productive use by writing this post. You’re welcome.

In no time at all, my uncle and aunt had screeched into the town’s sole parking lot and I was spirited back to a universe where border officials play violin concertos and swoosh crimson carpets to welcome me. Over the phone, the Boy’s voice echoed with worry and relief, my uncle stopped ribbing me for a whole day, and a moon-sized platter of fragrant paella was dished to me at dinner, lest the trauma of the episode melt my stores of lard and gasp, unearth a waist.

With fun times and adventure under my unshrunk belt, we flew back the next day. England welcomed us in her usual chilly, wet way, but even the greyness of the skies couldn’t eclipse the radiance of her rape fields and my delight at being back in the Land of Aapri Rani.

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Purple is the Color of Guilt

19 Jun

I often wonder why medical technology hasn’t made guilt in injectable form. It could come in a syringe, with a shiny new needle, and flood its dark jamun color through your veins.  But first, your skin would puncture, and then, not satisfied with a mere hole, a stray hissing comment would rip open a half-healed wound, and you’d be left with tattered skin, hanging frayed from its edges, and a wound that looked aggrieved at being awakened, yet again.

Oh don’t look away, it would say, as you turned to count new leaves on the rose bush. Stay. Survey the bits and blood. Study the massacre sprawled around your feet. And ooze would lap at your ankles as you stared into the distance.

Your hope lay in naiveté, in spanking new beginnings; wouldn’t striding away faster leave time further behind? An unseeing back to the gore and the guts, fractures heal even if they aren’t set right. Pain is your bread basket, tucked under an accustomed arm, a belly-filling helping is always at hand.

And there you were, golf-carting your way through existence, when the dud cracker scorched your stitches, melted them, and you were agape, stark naked, opened up for the ravaging.

So let them be done with it. Money could buy prepared pain. You know what’s coming in the glint of slivered steel. It approaches your flesh, enters at the point of contact, plunges through layers of self-numbed cyclical stories, the ones you cradle in your marrow, will escort to the grave. And the spread begins: deep, dense, soul-sapping. Then you lie back and smile. The drug is warming to your body. You know how it feels. And guilt… feels… good.

You turn the page. It’s a familiar manual. Step 7, (level: easy), heartache. Further down, something will fold, and you’ll limp back to the business of living, but you both know, as do you reading this, that it’s Never. Really. Over.

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Dervish

12 Jun

After nearly 6 weeks, I click a Word document open. The whiteness blinds me and I shield my eyes from its accusatory glare. The knot in the pit of my stomach is baby-sized now and ‘WTF’ flashes in large neon letters to the beat of a funeral march. Loo-ser, loo-ser, left, right, left.

In a bid to escape, I jump paragraphs. As if leaving a line behind will usher a stampede of ideas, a veritable troupe of trapeze artists who will fling themselves onto the safety net of this page, then loll a while before swinging wildly onward to another.

I stand in the ring. And I stand alone. It’s awful quiet when you’re all gone, I say to nobody in particular. There is no echo. And the knot is now making its way up to my throat.

A peculiar freeze takes over this warm summer day. First a bird’s clatter, then an insect’s hum. But this page, it isn’t moving. I quake, to give the Valley company. Only the Valley’s tremors subside. Writing needs to be more like mowing a lawn. A precise patch of L-shaped tasks, and then you’re done. Trimmed, neat, rinse, repeat. The knot decides it prefers the ampleness of my stomach. It slides back gutward, suspiciously fuller.  I continue to flail, in a cycle of panic and ambiguity. I would be happiest in an assembly line. Concrete, solid, done when done.

Noticing two straight sentences beginning with ‘I’ brings up concerns of ego injection. A lifelong aversion to navel-gazers jumps into the pool party that all my baggage decided to throw when I wasn’t looking. The knot’s moving heartward and the constriction hurts. I should wring the curtains and howl. Let me switch on the iron in preparation. And Purell my palms so the drapes stay white.

I can’t fathom potters or painters. Wash those hands, people. And eat with a fork. Ickiness makes me squirm.  So I sit myself down, after nearly 6 weeks, and click open a Word document. Its whiteness blinds me and I shield my eyes from the accusatory glare. But then I think of the options and soothe myself that at least writing is clean. The knot yawns demurely, cups its chin, and waits for me to begin.

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48 Hours in Eire

17 Mar

This piece was commissioned for the Business Standard in Bombay, but due to a change in editors, fell through the cracks and did not get published. I am posting it nearly two years after it was written, in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.

***

Everything you hear about Ireland is true. It is primarily emerald-colored, with friendly folk, free-flowing Guinness and locals leaping at the chance to fiddle for you. But you won’t see it with a guidebook and set itinerary. A locally-born islander is your only way into the true heart of the land of lochs and bogs and I very conveniently happen to be related to one. My uncle, in all his wisdom, picked an Irish partner, and it is to Aunt Margaret’s aga-warmed and patchwork-quilted family home in Glenfarne village, County Leitrim, the Republic of Ireland, that we headed, 48 precious hours in hand, in the hope of ale and leprechauns.

Flying into Belfast from London’s Stanstead airport was exciting for entirely unexpected reasons. How often can you sing a song about a city while hovering 15,000 miles above it? Wouldn’t you sing Boney M as loudly as stiff upper lip decency permitted?  The three-hour drive to Southern Ireland was quick and painless. With an open border and no checks, you’re likely to notice you’ve switched countries only if your eyes are peeled. First stop, J. McHugh’s pub.

No ordinary watering hole, this. In our case, it’s all in the family. Owned and run by Aunt M’s sister and brother-in-law, generous pints of Guinness were pulled, passed around and refilled until the darned Super-ego clobbered the Id on the head and banned more drinking before lunchtime. In a village where half the homes are occupied by blood relatives, you only have to cross the street to a family fiddling performance. Celtic music came alive in a cozy kitchen containing a blue checkered table cloth and its owner with a matching apron. Much clapping and tapping was interspersed with stories about upcoming dances at the Rainbow Ballroom, a large shed that doubled up as the dancing barn where local lads and lassies meet, marry and contribute to another generation of beer-guzzling fiddlers.

Warmth must be the Irish national policy. Where else do you get offered free membership to a public library within 10 minutes of walking in to check email? Ladies and gentlemen, I have a card from the Leabharlann Chontae Liatroma (Lietrim County Library) to prove it. (And of course, all the Gaelic around the place exists only to charm the pants off you as you walk out feeling like a four-leafed clover just graced your life.) Driving toward Sligo, the nearest big town and home to Yeats’ resting place, a brief stop at the Glencar Falls and Lake provides an opportunity for photography. The deep shades of blue sky and lake, emerald grass and snowy sheep are a postcard you want to capture and mail home.

Sligo, dotted with bars, bars, more bars, Yeats’ building and, interestingly, a Poppadom Restaurant, bustled with a population grateful for the rare sunshine. You’ve brought the Indian sun, I was told. You can keep it, I smiled back. Next stop, Yeats’ grave. Or so I thought. An exciting antiques shop derailed our journey and while my uncle and aunt checked out the clocks and gramophones, I did the same with the owner (who was, praise the Lord, considerably younger than his artifacts). Beauty appreciated, we crunched into a church yard for a meeting with Ireland’s poet laureate in his “country of the heart”. Too bad he wasn’t likely to reciprocate our delight. We rounded a corner and there he was. William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939, instructing us to

“Cast a cold Eye

On Life, on Death.

Horseman, pass by.”

Recounting our first memories of his work, we chose to linger, loath to leave a man whose words had nestled in our 13-year-old hearts, but when forty-eight hours are all you have, ‘what’s next’ is a perfectly valid question.

Bundoran is a seaside town from a 1920s American movie. Craggy cliffs, dashing waves, vanilla ices, amusement park rides and seaweed baths provide a delightful alternative to modern-day foreign beaches with tanned bodies and a pounding nightlife. A stroll on the seaweed-laced beach and a steep climb up to a cliff-top later, we enjoyed the salty north Atlantic breeze that showed all the friendliness of the land with perhaps a little less warmth. In the summer, carousel music and the shouts of children will compete with the roar of the waves, but for now, in mid-May, they reign supreme.

Ireland lives in its lochs and bogs and a brief visit to both followed. Every home in the county is assigned its own plot of land on a peat bog. It is here that families come up the hill to harvest peat that will warm their homes through the year. A naturally occurring fuel, peat is an accumulation of partially decayed vegetation and is readily available and widely used in this part of the country. The harvesting process itself can be back-breaking if one isn’t used to it. Sometimes a shortage of time turns out to be a good thing! Loch MacNean appeared out of a clearing in the woods, a magical blue with picture-perfect ripples. All was calm, all was bright and I couldn’t for the life of me remember why I live in Bombay.

More family visits followed, with exclamations about how perfect the weather had been, though I noticed that didn’t stop cozy fires from roaring in their grates. Much Irish stew and many potatoes later, I hauled myself back on a flight to England. The heart, however, decided to stay. I’ll have to go looking for it sometime very soon.

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The Girl Not From Here

7 Sep

Swanley station.

1 degree celcius, 1 a.m., and a solitary woman awaiting her cab.

Eynsford, she said, sliding in the back, grateful for the warmth and the driver’s turban.

You’re brave, he said, for a girl not from here to be out alone this late.

I’ve been alone to many places, she explained, and silently counted the destinations where she was the girl-not-from-here. Days in the city of her childhood when she was the outsider. Times in her home when she did not  belong. Months in arms she felt like a stranger. The everywhere girl, the nowhere girl. Only mirrors knew her and let her be. A rebel against conformists, non-believer to the benders, among them, but not of them.

Movement helped, she sleepily mused. If you didn’t stay long enough, they couldn’t expect you to fit in. And so the girl not from here took cabs. And trains and planes and boarding passes, stepping off belief into affirmation, through revolving doors, up metal-railinged stairs.

“Be safe,” he smiled, engine purring at her door. And a pang helped her realize that kindness from strangers is easier than the wall of contorted faces people are sometimes forced to call home.

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‘Cause If You Like It, Then… [iii]

22 Aug

Read the story so far here and here.

 

Maybe emerged isn’t the right adjective. It rushed out, stick in hand, to investigate who was molesting the fair maiden of the unintelligible sounds. Unfortunately, said fair maiden had started in alarm and had taken off to the street corner, staggering about in exaggerated hysteria (stomach-churning must follow a proposal, never precede it) and emanating guttural sounds. The gallant erstwhile ring-bearing knight chased her down the street in a bid to keep her fat hand now that he had won it, and neatly in queue for the Puducherry version of the Amazing Race was The Night Watchman of the Blue Door.

They stopped where the streets intersected: him, her and the watchman. Three dwarves named Puzzled, Hysterical and Suspicious respectively; all of them playing their parts, none making the first move. Until she, with her newly-minted pebble, felt incumbent to explain. We’re engaged, she cried out to Dwarf S—look! And the dazzling light from her circle of love had him scuttling back into the nether regions of his blue-doored world, stout stick lowered and the scent of resignation in the air.

With monsters and the world successfully fended off, they turned back to each other, Dwarves P and H, now magically re-transformed into Boy and girl. And so it came to be, that on the corner where the Avenue Dumas and the Rue Du Bazaar Saint Laurent meet in the quaint French Quarter, they shared their first affianced kiss under a night sky that was finally, delightfully bright.

~The End~

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