The Nostalgia Toast

Nostalgia on a toast!

I loved my summers, which we spent at my grandparents' place in Bangalore. My cousins from Bombay and Coimbatore, my two sisters, and I would spend a few lazy weeks, playing elastic, Hopscotch, bouncing a ball from a pillar and counting till we missed, playing hide and seek, and solving the crossword puzzle of the Deccan Herald and eating!

That crossword puzzle must have started it all. My cousin, and I particularly would compete to see who would get the paper first and solve the crossword. We would try to get up as early as we could, take a shower, gulp down our milk and wait for the newspaper man. Which was a good thing. The not so good thing was, in our eagerness to be the first, we sometimes woke up before 5am, and though my granny never showed it, I'm quite sure those tears i saw were not so much from happiness, but from despair. She must have thought "Oh no the brats are up, couldn't they wait till I had one tiny sip of filter kaapi couldn't they?

And ofcourse, being a grandmom who equated love with food, she had to think of a quick and filling pre- breakfast meal which would please us and yet not distract her from the cooking of the actual breakfast. I remember her in the kitchen, smearing slices from two jumbo loaves of bread, with homemade butter and chutney powder. While they would be toasting on the tawa, she would be washing the grinding stone for the chutney and setting the pressure cooker up. We would be given the very important task of getting the toasted bread to the table. The towers of bread slices would vanish in no time, and each one of us would be in a corner, eating, talking, fighting or reading and of course one of us would be solving the crossword puzzle while the other one would sulk and resolve to get up even more earlier the next morning.

Every once in a while, I make this, not just because I like it but because it takes me back to a world only I know about. My happy place! Today I made it almost the way my doddamma would make it, I curled up on the chair and I savored nostalgia with every bite I took. and Time actually stood still for a wee while.

This is a memory that uniquely binds the seven of us even though we are all in different parts of the world and I'm so glad for it. If this had a happiness quotient that i could rate, I would give it a perfect 100.

Grannies are the best, always!

Puzzling effects...

What's this?

It is a picture of two adorable kittens with a yarn of wool. It is also a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle being puzzled over by a six yr-old and his mother...

Yes! We are very smart, thank you very much! Much to the amazement of the resident snorter who thought we couldn't do it...(*i think he was just jealous)

Little S has always been fascinated by puzzles since he was almost 2 years old. He's spent many a rainy day with Kaleidoscope, the puzzle made up of colored little squares, which i love too. But jigsaws are his favorite. It's addictive and a great stress buster. Solving it teaches one about perspectives, about tenacity and is good exercise for the mind. This was the first time, though, that he tried his hand at a 1000 piece puzzle.

It is a fascinating thing to sit down with these odd shaped pieces and coax them into forming the complete picture. At first they are just meaningless shapes, and it's difficult to make sense of the mayhem. But we figured it out, me and my little helper. We started with the border, because the border pieces have one flat edge, thereby making it easier for us to start. It was not very easy because the fur looked almost the same. Sometimes, I would hold the piece the wrong way, and then lil S would slap his forehead and put it…right there where it belonged.

Every time S returned from school, he would wash up and bounce into the room, first to check how much i got done without him and then to try and beat me at it...

Sometimes it just wouldn't move forward. And then miraculously, when we tackled it after some time or the next day, we seemed to instantly find that missing piece. And everything would fall into place for a while. So much like life, isn't it?

Little by little, piece by piece, we finished it. And the look of satisfaction on his face when he fitted in that last piece was worth recording. He didn't know I had completed it hours before but had messed it up a bit, just so that he could have the satisfaction of finishing his very own "big people' puzzle.

And as usual because i just can't help it, i think of associations.

Of Scrabble boards. Of incredibly lazy evenings, of worry free minds and easy laughter, of a family bonding over a scrabble game, which my sister would invariably win.

I hope that my kids too would weave happy associations around certain things. I'm sure they could never look at a football without thinking of G, of all those evenings spent kicking the dratted ball or watching the games together. Maybe the 11 yrold would look at books and remember the books devoured together by him and me?

And perhaps, jigsaw puzzles would do the same for my 6 yrold. Sometimes, i look beyond and see a young man buying a puzzle for his child, and telling him "See this? i used to do that with my mom". sigh!

*a happy Sigh!

There you go again, my wistful heart...why peer into a whimsical future when you have such a beautiful present....?

So tell me, since i'm a curious cat sometimes....are there certain things which bring back an instant happy recollection for you?

What's on my fridge?

"What's on your fridge?" asked Preeti, who is just a mother of two. :)


'A few somethings", i wish i could have answered, few being the keyword here, but ...take a peek

My fridge surface continually changes. In Delhi it looked a whole different than it does now. Besides, the arrangement keeps varying. My boys keep moving it all over the fridge surface.

There are 15 magnets, out of which a few are of places we have visited together, the rest are put there by G. So much for this place being just my very own.



Most of them have a tale to tell. Some have been with us for ages. The Singapore one was picked up by my eldest boy on our first visit here...it brings back lovely memories of our first trip abroad with the children.





That's the family at the beach and the other was taken with two orangutans in Pattaya. I was quite happy with my resident monkeys and really didn't want these two lesser additions but of course who listens to moms any more?



The picture of the baby is a favorite one...It is of Swaraj when he was @ 4mths. I just LOVE that pic...







There are two tiny Garfield ones (in pink and blue) added here courtesy my boys. i also see a Spider man one very ingeniously taped onto a magnet making its way here. And of course two animal magnets courtesy the zoological park here.



The black magnet with a pouch, has something very important - the white paper consists of lunch and dinner menus for the whole week that G managed the boys when I was in Bangalore - It was mainly followed to the T, even to the no of cookies put in the snack box, barring a call I got from the boys on a paratha dinner day, begging for Maggi noodles. :)


The resident environmentalist (my elder boy) has added his two magnets (the ones in white at the bottom)from the NEA (national environmental agency) . One of them bears the words "Turn me on, FAN my ego' ! (i'm glad that it has a pic of the fan, otherwise we would be giving people ideas, wouldn't we...*wink)


The Santa Claus has been clipped on by my lil one...


And yes, the blue/white background is an old project chart done by Swaraj...Most apartments in Singapore come furnished with basic electrical appliances and amenities (the air con, the washing machine etc). Since the fridge is not my own, that paper is supposed to prevent the magnets from scratching the fridge surface. (That's why it ends up looking neater too)

So what's on my fridge? Mostly fun memories, the current and the old, jostling for space there!

And what story does your fridge tell?

Abha, pink dogwood, ugich, Joy, preethi, rayshma, actually everyone who wants to...its showtime :)

Forget-me-not....

I walked all the way to the MRT station with the family only to realise that I've left my mobile outside the door. Ignoring the outbursts, i hurried back to find my trusty phone waiting patiently for me. This phone has survived many such scares. Leave alone woman-handling it by shoving it under umpteen things in the purse, I've left it behind in various shops, only to get a call from the owner to collect it back...That's the advantage of saving a number under 'home'.

I've always been err...absentminded ...Coincidentally, I married a guy who's equally so..He's misplaced 3 sun glares, one of which he placed on the roof of his car and then drove off...He sometimes forgets which grades the kids are in (I NEVER forget that!!)...I have to remind him about his Mom's b'day (he's never forgotten mine, though i think my sister reminds him!)...A sneaking suspicion that he uses this excuse very effectively when it comes to finishing the 'to-do' list

I think that marriage to him has definitely given me more than two kids......its increased my tendency to umm...forget...my son carries the legacy on...he drops the towel into the dustbin and the tissue paper on the hanger...not to mention the numerous waterbottles he loses at school each year...

There was this time when i sat in my car only to see a stranger there...the guy's jaw dropped...my eyes popped out...you see, it happened to be someone else's car...he was too busy sweating(probably his wife was due back any minute) by which time i had made good my escape to my own car where my driver (a necessity 'cos a car in my control is always out of control) was hyperventilating (i like this word!!!)'cos the memsahib had lost her head!!...Come on now, its not my fault all Esteems look the same...

Once I boarded an aircraft only to realise that my seat was also issued to another gentleman...gravely shook my head at the sad, sorry state of the airlines' management, i really rubbed it in...when a harried steward enters and informs me that I've managed to board the wrong flight!!! Oops, I did it again!!! If looks could kill, i definitely died with all the glares when I finally boarded the right flight...They had been kept waiting while the crew was tracing the elusive Suma...

At family functions, where everyone is always related to someone, I get to hear a lot of "don't u know me, i am your father's aunt's cousin's daughter-in-law",Huh!!! I'm always tense at such gatherings and once ended up introducing my husband to another man (whom i knew as a relation-in-law on my sis's side) who replied " I should know him my dear, I'm his uncle"! He in turn happened to be related in some way to somebody's somebody on my husband's side...(Blush...Blush...the only excuse...we were "just married"!!!So blame it on temporary amnesia ;)

I think that moving to Singapore has put my hubby more at ease...less chances of me sitting in someone else's car...even less chances of me locking myself out of the house with the keys inside...it's a door which cannot be locked unless you have the key!!!

Sigh...And you know what, I had to make that trip home again, i had forgotten to lock the house this time!!!

Psst...hubby seems to think it's selective loss of memory...'cos according to him I still remember the things he's done or not done and the growing list includes stuff from 13 years ago!!!...Hrrumph...(i hope that came out as a snort)...