Back to childhood

My parents are back from a month-long vacation in Pune, visiting my sister. They got here at four in the morning. I was up and had made tea for them, and was generally being woman of the house but the moment they stepped in, something changed. Perhaps it's my perspective: once my parents are here, somehow, sometimes the child in me inevitably peeps through. It starts by my automatically assuming that my Ma will take on my burdens: in this case, feeding Ditu (a laborious three-hour task divided into three acts during the day). Never mind that my parents had just got in after a 36-hour journey.

Usually, I would even hand over the kitchen as well, including preparing the menu. That, I skipped 'cos I have a maid-in-residence who had been briefed extensively the night before. (The maid is a whole other story that I will put down in another post.) 

The contractor doing my new apartment's interior work is presenting the plans today, and guess who's coming with me: my dad!! Of course , I can do it without him... And we'll probably never agree on the design anyway (I'm all for contemporary lines while he half-lives in the past). Yet, it somehow seems important that he sees it.

My mobile phone company's innovations mean that we can talk endlessly on our cell phones (closed group or some such thing) for a nominal 99 bucks a month. So we end up chatting on every little dustball spotted, Ditu's little spills and thrills, maid woes and a whole lot of 'relative' banter, which adds up to more than seven phone calls a day. And some of those calls can go on up to 20 minutes or so! Just thinking of it gives me earache... but this whole month (when their phones were on roaming), it was pure torture not calling them up the moment my maid upped and quit without a notice, when Ditu said something particularly funny and when I had 'in-law' trouble. On second thoughts, maybe I wouldn't have told them about the last even if they were here; it might be just easier for me to forget the whole thing than to erase 'how bad my daughter must have felt' ideas from their minds.

And now, though I'm running tight on an impossible deadline, I feel calm and collected. Mom hai na!

P.S. Thank you, Anna, for pushing me to post. Love u