Summer Little Me

The warm summer breeze hurled the curtains hung outside our balcony right into my face as I made my way from the kitchen to the dining table dangerously balancing a glass of chocolate smoothie on one hand with my grandmother’s Nokia phone on the other.

As you may have guessed from the mention of that dated device, this piece clearly belongs to the flashback-trip-down-memory-lane genre.

You see, rather than paying attention to the fact that the glass was filled to the brim and would probably induce me into crying over spilled milk any moment, I was channeling all my energy into completing a particularly difficult challenge in one of those games that no longer seem to be available in smart phones these days. I vividly remember the game being called ‘Bounce Tales’ or something of the sort and the purpose of the game was to help a rolling stone (as it went about trying to not gather moss, I presume) to jump across the many hurdles that came its way.

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I live with my parents and sister on the second floor of an apartment in a street on which there seem to be more restaurants, cafes and eateries than residential buildings; in Alwarpet. My maternal grandmother and someone we all call 'Ambi Thatha' live on the fourth floor.

My grandmother is perhaps the most interesting person I've met. She is vivacious, mischievous and truly the life of any party; be it a gathering of four or forty. For some reason that has now escaped into anonymity, I started calling her 'Thathi' as a child and soon, my sister caught on. Ever since, the moniker has stuck, so much so that we attach the suffix 'Thathi' to any elderly woman instead of the more common 'Paati' one can hear in most Tamil households. Ambi Thatha meanwhile, is most kind, most genuine and most selfless. Adored unanimously by children and adults alike, he is a magical story teller and has spun the longest of yarns to get my sister and me to fall asleep on warm summer nights. Another of his tricks to tire us out when we were being too boisterous was to hide an eraser somewhere in the house and challenge us to find it’s whereabouts. It would not be hyperbolic to say that he truly is uniquely special.

I know that my grandparents got married in the 1970s and within a few years, shifted to Calcutta. Around this time, a gentleman known to them was moving out of the country introduced them to a young man who was living with him at the time, and suggested he move in with them. This is how Ambi Thatha came into our lives.

Their dynamic can be best described by drawing a parallel to the some of Wodehouse's popular fictional characters thus: Ambi Thatha is the Jeeves to Thathi's Bertie Wooster and Thathi is the Aunt Agatha to Ambi Thatha's Bertie Wooster. Coincidentally, if I have anyone to thank for helping me cultivate the now-elusive reading habit, it is my grandmother. She really was the one who insisted on gifting me the first books I read (rather had read to me by my mother- I definitely recall demanding that the story be read to me every single day, and would not be surprised if she is able to effortlessly narrate away the "Tales of Noddy and his friends" if woken up from slumber).

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Most summers were kickstarted with a visit to the Landmark store at Nungambakkam which sadly does not exist anymore. Almost each time any book so much as mentioned food, my tummy would begin grumbling and I would begin to feel the necessity to have something equally delicious while reading about scones and egg salads. (I have written about this in another post which you can check out here)

Like most grandmothers, Thathi is a wonderful cook. I think she loves giving extant, time tested dishes a facelift and they turn into something novel; be it a salad with fried strips of chappathi or cutlets with all possible combinations of veggies. Some of the best moments of my brief existence have been munching on some of these beauties in the knowledge that pesky things like school were a distant reality for the next few weeks.

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I cannot begin to count the number of times my sister and I have gotten into trouble with her because we moved a cushion on the sofa and did not bother placing it in its original position before leaving the room.

I was, and still am, extremely mischievous. When we were younger, I loved fooling around and more often than not, would factor in and rope my unsuspecting sister into my plans. Now that she's older and wiser (at least that's what she likes to believe), it's a tad more difficult to convince her to do anything that harks trouble. I think Thathi was quite a handful as a child because none of us can ever get away with anything with her. She smells a rat when most people see mice and has the uncanny ability to call us out on our tricks when we're up to no good.

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Channelling all that energy into Bounce Tales rather than that smoothie was a disastrous move from inception. Unsurprisingly, I spilt the smoothie onto my white  tshirt (which is infinitely many times worse than spilling it on the floor) and when I realised that it was far too adamant a stain to be removed, I decided that the perfect way to save a bust would be to paint over the stain. I ordered my sister to fetch the paints and shutting ourselves in a room we set to work.

When I subsequently wore the tshirt, no one except Thathi realised what I had done. Obviously, I was taken to task and my scam was exposed while simultaneously also stomping out any artisitic dreams (more like illusions) I had at the time.

Which is, perhaps what makes this piece rather ironic because it has been inspired by a prompt based for artists ( I know all creative people are artists, but I'm referring to the Da Vincis among the Leonardos rather than the Di Caprios). One of my closest friends (let’s call her A) whom I’ve known since we were idiotic six year olds, is a brilliant artist cum designer cum illustrator and she's been generating content over this past week based on a series of prompts she unearthed from somewhere on the wondrous place that is the internet. And that, dear reader, was what helped me turn a long forgotten few paragraphs I had scribbled ages ago, into something complete, so thank you A :)