Category: Life

The world’s outpouring of grief for technocrat Steve Jobs has been unprecedented. Death seems to have magnified his personal appeal. Suddenly, the world not only talks about his family and his estranged father, but of his culinary skills, what a nice person he was and all things apple. Food blogs cry out about how they choked up while baking apple tarts and how he loved apple as a child with the same fervour as geeks crying out about iPads and iPhones. And to think it all started in a garage.

The garage has a mystic, romantic appeal in the makings of tycoons. Journalists writing his eulogy pumped up the garage appeal to the masses. In fact, I suggest those who don’t have garages yet get one pronto. Who knows? Our progeny may make it big and if they don’t, we will have ourselves and the lack of a garage to blame for it.

I wish to tell everybody that my parents’ home did not have a garage. Our scooter occupied either the front verandah or a part of our drawing room. That’s right! We didn’t need any toys to play on, we played on the real thing. Though I can’t say my mother was too pleased on rainy days when the scooter’s wheels would slide in alongside our muddy footprints onto the polished teakwood floors. But those are minor irritants in the life of mothers and children didn’t have to worry about them.

One never knows what life has in store for them. As the garage factor was missing from my life while growing up, I had to ensure that I gave myself a garage experience.

I lived in a garage when I first started work in Bangalore. I can’t say with entire honesty that it was beautiful, but it kept out the rain and taught us a lesson or two on bladder control on rainy nights. Obviously, the garage could not contain a bathroom and a kitchen – one corner already had the kitchen. The other corner the entrance. There really wasn’t place to add a bathroom. Garages are rectangular and that was the plan.

So, the bathroom was outside the premises and a heavy outpour meant getting soaked in the rain for a pee. One weighed the pros and cons (bladder and rain volume) and made the decision.

I digress, but the point is, I read so many things about Steve Jobs in the past week and almost all of them had the garage featured prominently. So much so that I threw my mind to my garage days and decided to share it. Now that the garage part of the story is intact, I can choose to meander about life in my usual manner, and lay that worry behind me. If ever anyone wants a garage story, I have one. Phew!

Please throw your mind back to the time you are holding the attention of all present. Your speech is flourishing, the mind drooling – powerfully cruising along with great confidence about a pet topic. A topic in which you are hitherto considered the expert, when somebody throws this at you. “How do you know?”

I don’t know about you, but there are only two ways to answer this question. One is uninteresting and long-winded wherein you whip out the facts from your bosom and lay them bare for the audience to consider, sift and form their opinion. If the audience is quieter than usual, then you go on whipping more and more facts till you fall into your own fact trap. The problem with this approach is that sometimes, I’ve seen the firm rudder flounder a bit in the wind and get into the “I agree with this, but on the other hand, I also agree with that.” boat.

The other can be interpreted in a wide variety of ways: rude, arrogant or funny depending on the tone and situation. Answers such as, “I know, therefore I know.” fall into this category.

Which is why when we saw the daughter’s to this question, we couldn’t help laughing and relishing the innocence of it all.

Qn: What ties a unicorn and a book together?
Ans: A tie

Ten years is a short time. Seems only yesterday that I met the man I love and gave him my first useless material gift. (The gift of my gab he still enjoys.) A decade later, we have managed to fill our lives up with our children, our friends and family, our own interests and hobbies and our careers. But it never does to forget the past, or look through them with rose-tainted glasses.

In 10 years some things have not become easier, in fact they have become harder – like finding a suitable gift for my husband. He is a minimalist. He doesn’t wear a watch, saying he prefers to see the time on the cell-phone given by his company. (The one he uses to cut me off mid-sentence because there is never enough charge left on it – that one) His clothes are bearable if I spend enough time to get him some new shirts and t-shirts and place the products so he gets them where his hands automatically reach out. Otherwise, he will willingly wear the maroon t-shirt (also given by the company) or the gray t-shirt everyday till I shriek in agony.

So, I lay in bed racking my brains on what to get him for his birthday when the brain-wave struck. Of all my gifts, the most useless has got to be the one I got him first. Allow me to ramble a bit.

My father was always dressed in a suit and tie as a school teacher in the Lawrence School, Nilgiris. Suits on school teachers make them look regal and I suppose is required to set the atmosphere among a bunch of kids trying to place wet soap on the hallways for fun. He looked majestic as he strode through the Assembly of students in his suits(even though the suits were often tailored to fit somebody else, but that is the subject of another blog). Every time I bought my father a tie, he beamed and sported it the very next day.

Now, the only images of America I’d had back then were from movies where I’d seen dashing handsome chaps sit around in suits and have lunch or walk very fast along shiny corridors. I observed. I deduced. And when the man from Sunny California was to come to Sunnier Chennai to see me after months of chatting and talking on the phone; I bought him a present that I hoped would be appropriate and useful. A tie.

I don’t know why I bothered gift wrapping it, since it was clear he didn’t want to discern the difference between the wrapping paper and the tie housed inside. I was guilty of choosing similar patterns for both, but still….

I thumbed through the albums of his school days hoping to see if they had a tie as a uniform. Many “English” schools in Chennai boasted of this monstrosity, and sold ties that could double up as leashes since they had a buckle on them. His school even had “English” in the name. No luck there either. He truly had passed life skirting ties entirely.

It was a perfect gift in many ways, since it set the expectations right. It set the trend for a lifetime of poor gifting from me.

Every now and then, we would laugh about the tie, and since I don’t ever want him to think that the woman he loved has changed, I renewed my vows of poor gifting and bought him a tie!

Then, I got to work on the easier gifts for the 7 & 70:
I got my daughter a magical pony i.e. a unicorn and wrote a book for my father.

My dear father loves the stock market and anything to do with it almost as much as his children. I know we rank higher in the love chart, because he doesn’t forget facts about stocks, but he does forget facts about us. Lock him away without a physical copy of Economic Times therefore, and he gets forlorn. So, imagine his glee when the husband got an opp. to visit India on Business.

“Please get me a copy of Dalal Street and Economic times, pa. Not the Sunday ET mind you.” he told him as soon as he heard the news. The husband nodded glad to be able to buy something that would make the dear man happy.
A hectic packing schedule later (another blog waiting to happen), we went to drop him off at the airport.

The father gong sounded, “Remember to get the Economic Times pa. Remember not the Sunday ET. I will send you an email also to that effect. Not Sunday. Any other day is okay.”

He gave him a final wave before leaving the airport with the loving words, “Not Sunday!” (Once a teacher always a teacher – repeat after me, “Not Sunday”)

Now, my father knows that life can be intense and people tend to forget. So, he typed out an email mid-visit thus: (I shall, in another blog, touch up on the typing)
Dear XXX
We are all finehere.My new boss(the Baby ) and hisstser are doing well.Pl. buy Dalal Street and Economic Times.
Love
Appa
PS: I do NOT want Sunday Economic Times.

Now, the husband glanced at this email on Monday morning. He was supposed to leave India that night. So, his head swimming with ‘Sunday’, he tried his level best to procure a copy of the Sunday Economic Times. Failing to do so, he weaseled up to the peon in the office and asked him to see if they had a copy of the Sunday Economic Times anyway. He was in luck as the peon had stored away the Sunday copy. It isn’t everyday that working-in-America saabs thank the peon for old newspapers. The heart felt thanks made the man’s heart swell and he felt morally obliged to give him Monday’s copy as well.

One can imagine the triumphant scene whence the prince was told to slay the dragon (not the parrot) to obtain the approval of the king. Slay the dragon but not the parrot. Remember not the parrot. And the prince crosses 7 seas, dons bitter pills, fights gory creatures and slays the parrot.

The king and prince have since made up, since the dragon was also slain by mistake, but there it is – not the parrot!

It turns out that the Sunday Economic Times costs 3 times the amount and has 1/3rd the content of a week day ET, hence the “Not Sunday”

With great advances in technology, the size of things produced has become smaller and smaller, while we seem to be getting bigger and bigger. Consequently searching for something in the house means ransacking the house more thoroughly than a bunch of bandits would. Why not keep things where they belong you ask? A fair question to anyone who doesn’t know the pride and joy the father and husband take in leaving the house a messy place. “That is what makes it a home, otherwise, it would be a hotel!” they proclaim loudly and admire each other’s sentiments and pat themselves on the back. I would pat them too, albeit a bit too hard for their liking.

I don’t know which animal it is that does this – I think it is a badger.(It is not an ostrich contary to popular opinion – the only pic I could find was of an ostrich though) Namely bury its head in the ground till the danger passes and then surface. I tried the badger technique the last time around and was quite unsuccessful. You see midway through burying myself in the hole and ignoring the whole search act, the corner of my eye caught a sofa being upturned. I don’t think badgers have sofa sets in their homes to be overturned while searching for something, but if it did, I think badgers would revise their opinion of ignoring events such as these.

I had merely uttered the threat idly because of I was tired of finding things that I was not searching for just then and not finding the things that I was searching for then. Little did I know that the threat would result in the house being turned upside down in the literal sense of the word.

All because the latest thing being searched for was a memory card. The size of my thumb.

Also, I wonder if you’ve noticed that the size of our belongings seem inversely proportional to our size. For instance, the youngest offender in our household, Tucky, is but a few months old, and he too cries when he loses sight of his possessions. But unlike our possessions, he does not need sofas upturned. He just has to look around the room – his possessions are there – loud, clear, big and bright. Whereas ours are dull grey, or better yet dirt colored memory sticks!

Just because we learn the art of camouflage doesn’t mean we impose this learning on our belongings – but alas, humans apply their learning everywhere. If Google could come up with a search engine for the wild, wild web, why not come up with something for physical objects?

“Can you imagine plumbers charge $50 for something as simple as replacing this lever? It takes five minutes to do!” proclaimed the husband holding up a black-ish looking object. I looked impressed. He was holding up a contraption that looked technical in a very plumbery fashion, not to mention that triumphant glow on his face. Having repaired the toilet flush when it acted up once before, I felt he was entirely justified in feeling competent in the general area of plumbing.

He started off at the end of a long, hot day after a refreshing shower. The flush in one of the bathrooms was having a minor hiccup. Once the water filled up, the water continued to leak without shutting off the water supply. This was because a lever that was supposed to tell the water knob to “Cheese it!” when the water filled up, wasn’t doing it’s job. I hovered around for a minute or two, and then loitered about the house doing the intangible, unnecessary things that I do. Then, I put the children to sleep; all the while listening to the water go on and off. By now, it was evident that it was no 5 minute affair the c.plumber was dealing with. I mean two children don’t go to bed in that span of time in our household. So, I went in to the bathroom – just to get a general status, you know – mutter the encouraging word and pat the tired back sort of thing.

What met my eyes shook me to the core. On the floor was the erstwhile dry, clean man that I love. He looked like the flush had whipped him a couple of times, while rapping his knuckles and making him kneel down in a pond of water. My heart bled for him, and I enquired. I must have sounded like a rattle to a baby, because I was given the situation in so many words. Pretty soon, I was kneeling down in the wet bathroom and oggling at a petulant knob with my neck corked at 22 degrees in the NW direction, with a cutting plier in my hands.

I’ve been meaning to talk to these architects about this. Why place these toilet flushes in a corner – why not in the center with a full view of all the knobs? While I struggled with the cutting plier and tried to angle the grip, I banged my head a couple of times against an inconveniently placed closet. The husband had replaced the lever just fine and while tightening the knob found that it was an obstinate one and refused to tighten all the way and stopped one turn short. Anywhere else, that would mean a creak, but with water it means an incessant drip, and could not be ignored. So, I tried my hand at it. “All I need is a small mirror to get a good view of the knob”, I said.

So, the husband handed me one. While calculating the length of the mirror and estimating the length of my hand, there was a difference of a couple of centimeters and the dratted thing fell with a resounding crash.

The children asleep in bed, the husband and I in the bathroom, the sound of a mirror breaking and the steady sound of ‘Drip Drip Drip’. All you had to do was turn off the lights, and I would have screamed. The experience had set us both on edge. I wonder how tightening corks and screws and things under the flush can frazzle one’s hair, but it did. We both looked like a ghost chased us down a scary lane in the middle of a cold wintry night.

Cleaning up broken glass in a pool of water has problems writ large all over it. To cut a long story short, we took out the new lever and put the old one back on to stop the drip. Then I cleaned up (without cutting myself on the shards of glass I might add), had a shower and came out to the welcoming cries of an infant demanding his midnight snack.

“I wonder why plumbers only charge $50 for this!” said the husband, and I agreed whole heartedly. The solution to the flush problem was a simple enough one – we just pulled the lever manually and made it do its duty forcefully.

“Leave the old flush alone”, is the new watchword in the house.