Kids, dogs, cats and other animals.

Many years ago we lived in a small cottage. Ground floor us and 1st floor big fat snooty woman, her arrogant husband and their nice children. Opposite building, assorted kids of assorted ages and dispositions, a mad gardener who had pyromania, a piano teacher, assorted movie personalities and a few undescribeable human beings.
 I wanted my kids to learn some elements of wildness, the same which had turned many of my mother's hair startling white. So the kids raced around barefoot and ate with dirty hands, climbed trees, cycled at dangerous speeds, rummaged in the overgrown garden and ofcourse lived with assorted animals. We had one dog, and another walked in our garden leaving his brothers and sisters with their mother. He was all flurry and cute and was promptly adopted. The lady upstairs had cats - lots of them. They slunk around all over the place, hissed at my dogs and drove them batty. So much so that when my daughter went up to play with the kids, one of my dogs kept guard, and kept giving her warning barks- telling her not to get too friendly with the cats. We kept fish, but they ate each other up. Many other dogs ran amok in the compound and my dogs would take off randomly to the beach. We had direct access to the beach, which was also an invitation for more wild dogs.
One day the kids ran in, highly excited. There was a gaggle of them kids. (I felt so proud looking at my dirty haired, filthy nailed, muddy faced kids..!!) In her tiny hands, Kanak had a small parrot baby, looking all disoriented and bewildered.
We immediately fashioned a large basket, tied up four ends, looped up the rope and hung it high on our balcony, which opened to the sky. We were loathe to close the bird in a cage. It was a fledgling, could barely fly, and we all feel in love.
Nippy (for he loved to nip at my gold earrings) soon grew as did the blood lust of my younger dog, Teddy.  When we realised he could fly, but could not stay up for too long, we had to put him in a cage.
Nippy was then taken to our closed living room and left to fly. He would flutter, rise to the ceiling, try to sit on the fan (switched up please) and then land on my shoulder, climb up to my shoulders and nip my earrings. We were both in love with each other.
I realised that Nippy was desperate to fly. Thinking its natural for a bird to be that way, and be on his way, I let it be, until one day I saw something which made me take a deep breath for I had paled.
We would leave Nippy in his cage, and Teddy would place himself strategically right under the side Nippy was sitting, and alternately smack his lips and hang his jaw open.  Just hoping that the bird would fall into it. To top it all Teddy made direct eye contact with the bird. Open mouthed and slack jawed I moved closer and saw the little bird's heart beating wildly in panic from under his little breasts.
I had nightmares that night and a few more, of waking up one day and seeing small birdy feathers and a few bones on my balcony, and Teddy sitting in a corner and looking like - well like- a dog who has swallowed a bird.
We left his (or was Nippy her?) cage open at nights and one day Nippy was gone. I admit I looked hard at Teddy, opened his jaw and checked and all that, but apparently, Nippy had flown his (makeshift) nest!
We have since shifted, kids have grown, so have the dogs, but I still look for Nippy across the skies when I hear parrots every morning. Teddy ofcourse had plenty of wild dreams, when he would smack his lips and paw the air, thinking he had killed a bird for a tasty morsel.
The gaggle of them kids, have grown, some become film heroines, some doctors, and my kids still have fond memories of those wild days. 

We went to school too..

We had 49 students in our class, not, 15.  We had more friends!

We had standards, not, grades.

We were but one class, we did not have 8 divisions.

The teachers knew us, they did not have to hold up our I cards, to talk to us.

We had no I cards, our faces were our identity.

Gurkhaji knew each child's going home schedule, Fernandes bus child, new bus child, BEST bus child, car child etc, we did not have 10 security guards doing the job.

We had school at 10 am to 4 pm, not 7.30 am to 4 pm.

We had throwball and athletics, we did not have fancy extra curricullars.

We had one PT (physical training teacher) , we did not have a fancy team of PE (physical Education) teachers.

We were known by our names, even to the office staff, 

On sight the teachers knew our record of pranks, academic excellence or non excellence, they did not have to drag us to office and drag out a file and look us up.

The teacher who  taught me in KG also taught my 10 yrs older sister and 10 yrs younger sister in KG, they did not change every semester.

We had terms and not semesters.

We got no summer homework. 

We got a holiday in pouring rain, we  did not have to show our sincerity by rushing to school in knee deep water.

We played honest to goodness inter school games, arranged by the educational board, in semi playable grounds, we did not have special interschool tournaments organized.

We were atleast once hit by our teachers, and our parents applauded it, instead of coming to school with cavalry and names of politicians.

Our parents could never enter school just for the heck of it, corridor walking parents were not allowed.

We beat each other up and took care of the problem, our parents never heard of any issues.

We did not have fancy restaurants running our canteens, we DID NOT have a canteen.

We had a huge garden to play in, and not a rugged concrete passage.

We had ranks and marks and percentages, we did not have grades and percentiles.

We had 2 tests, 1 terminal exam, 1 Final exam (which decided the status of  our promotion to next class) and not TOK, EE, IOC, IA, II, HI, WL, PP, CAS,  and many other combinations of the english vowel and consonants.

You see , we went to school too!

The sea of -- Humanity

Let me start with the sparse and go up to the time where all i can see is people. I mean the beach, the sand and the sea which is supposed to be Water and not Humanity. The weekends are packed, and from as far back as I can remember, we would never go to the beach on a Sunday. "its a sunday!!" we would exclaim and panic if our guests wanted to "see the sea" on that day.
I have never been able to figure out, why women don their finest while visiting the beach, Sarees of the colour, which could put the sun god to shame. Why? when u know your enamoured spouse is going to drag a screaming you into the water, and splash it all over you, and then proceed to take pictures of you, wringing your saree dry, and ask another unfortunate soul to stop his jogging and take one with his arm around your drooping sodden shoulders. Why would you wear the saree you wore for your own wedding???
Then one level worst is the summer vacations, for which mercifully we were out for 2 weeks and the remaining went along, waiting for high tide days, when people would refrain from majorly long picnics. Then is Ganpati visarjan. Those days are filled with men and women dancing with abandon. Now if it was a dance of joy and godly love i would sincerly surrender the beach to them without a single angry word. But these nuts, they dance to film songs, in stupor, drunk on alcohol and high on drugs. These are the elements which leave behind headless trunks of the elephant god, only to be sweeped away by the garbage van the next day. Forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do!
The worst day is the day of the CHATPOOJA. That day , the entire UP and BIHARI population surface and fill the beach.. that day is the day which i call the SEA OF HUMANITY.
This is THE festival. About 15 days after Diwali. And I am ready to swear on my cycles, one cannot see sand. All you can see is - red , orange, yellow, red, and another shade of red. and dazzling gold. AND the green is huge stumps of banana leaf, stuck on the poor sand. The only black one can see is the heads of the men. Women are covered from head to toe in red, orange, yellow......
Women light diyas, helpless flapping their hands in supersticious agony when the wind blows it out. But obviously, on Chat Pooja even the wind is supposed to desist this silly behavious of blowing out diyas! Ridiculoulsy careless, this wind!
On all high tide days, the water thrashes on the sand and the sand starts piling up and one can see a complete demarkation between two areas of the beach, one about 3 feet higher than the other. But on Chat pooja, the sea of humanity does the work of nature. The sheer number of people trampling the beach on that day, level the sands for the next full year.
For the rape of the beach on this day, I have a immense dislike towards Shatrughan Sinha. The Bihari actor, who did this Karmic deed for his brethren.
Last Chatpooja's fashion was the "Phataphat" saree. !!!
If you have grown up in a non posh school in Mumbai, you have definately eaten phataphat. It is jerragoli (yum !) in a packet the color of muddied Shiv Sena flag, hanging limply outisde a mill, closed for the past 12 years.: and black round balls (representing the jeeragoli) printed on the muddy orange.
Atleast 25 of the 40 women I caught sight at first glimpse had gone for this latest trend. At that time i admired them, for they carried on without any grudge towards the other woman copying her fashion statement. Had this same thing happend with some of our upper class women, .. some would have running sobbing into loos, some shreiking back home in anger, and few would have got down to the nasties and torn each others' clothes off!

Airplane travel

In an airplane I normally knock off, within 30 seconds of buckling the seat belt. In the last few years if a new life saving device has been introduced I have no knowledge of it. For some odd reason, the flight to and fro bangalore I just could not sleep, and since i cannot read, I looked around.

My friend was an airhostess in Cathay for many years. i have heard craziest stories, but the best one was about the man who entered the plane with a crash helmet. (this was before the times of "get nude" security and where turbans were not asked to be removed). The man kept the helmet on during take off. My friend and her colleagues thought that he would take it off post, but no matter how much they explained, cajoled he point blank refused. He lifted his visor and pushed his meal through it.

The man sitting next to me was of average built. (this -while going to bangalore). I wanted to sleep, but the smell of vada sambhar woke me up. My co passenger started eating, slowly and steadily he made his way into the food. First he chewed and finished the fruit plate. Then the bread butter and jam. Then the chicken cutlet, some gravy dish and poha (which was stale, as if made in the last centuary) and 2 cups of tea and every grain of the after mint. The packet of salt and pepper was also used. By now i was on the edge of my seat. His plate was clean, every container shining. I swear i had not seen him lick it. He had annihilated every single particle.When he started nibbling at the fork, the alarmed air hostess swiped the plate away. I sat back in my seat heaving a sigh of relief.
One gentle man had arrived, with only a huge bundle of papers neatly tied by string. The minute the flight took off, he got it down from the cabin baggage and threw them on the floor next to his feet. He took out 3 neatly folded garbage disposal bags from his pocket and opened them up. He then proceeded to tear up all the 200 odd A4 size pages into tiny bits. When one tears up paper to such small bits, one cannot take more than 2 or 3 at a time. He then patiently distributed each torn paper into the 3 bags. No paper shredder could have done such a detailed job. The one in his office had broken down from a massive inferiority complex. Just before landing he finished his task and stuffed them back in the cabin stow. He left with all his bags. I will go to my grave wondering what the papers were about.
While returning from Bangalore, I had my eye shields on, in the hopes of doing my normal stuff- sleeping. No luck, but the eye shields stayed on. At some point I smelt something super putrid. A fart is a fart and this was not a fart. I slid off my eye shield and saw a man standing next to me. He had his arms resting on my head rest and therefore his armpits were exposed to the air. By God! I swear he had taken a dip in a urine pot. The eye shield slid to my nose, but even that was not enough. I tried to kill my self by suffocating with the pillow, even that did not work.  He had never every washed his armpits with even water, forget soap! If taken into police custody and questioned about the last two bodies found dead due to unknown circumstances, the case would have been cracked. It would be found that he had taken them by the scruff of their necks and shoved their faces into his armpits. Dead in 2 seconds due to intense toxic fumes!!!!
The flight was delayed due to airtraffic and he got restless. With every restless move, more smell wafted into the air. Everytime the airhostess would passby, I would smell eu de cologne. i think they were surreptiously spilling from a bottle as they walked past him. I came home and had a shower with the most fragrant body wash I could find.
There was an ambulance waiting outside with 2 stretchers. I saw his co passengers (he was sitting in the middle) being taken away in blazing siren, with gas masks attached to their faces.