I am at Calcutta for a very short trip. Just discovered that I had not packed my laptop power chord in the skin tight case. So BB blogging it is. Painfully slow. Only one window at a time.
Reached home pretty late. The fragrance of gobindobhog shrouding the house. This is the short grained special occasion rice favoured in Bengali houses. Our Basmati. Mom said she hardly cooks these days. So the chicken curry she made was special in a way too.
Role reversal post dinner as I helped her open the Boots sugar free hazelnut chocolate K sent for her. Mom muttered something about ‘satan and eden as she broke blocks of the c.
And then she started showing me her new write ups. This time on England. She spoke about the things she has written. The connections she made with the present. NHS. Madame tussaud. Blackpool and her first disc. Pubs and how they reminded her of the coffee shops of mumbai. Visit to wordsworths house. Shakespeare’s statford. Going with my dad as he presented at a conference of Edinburgh. I was a month old. My fault. I was a late delivery. Lazy and unpunctual from birth I guess. The royal marriages. Seeing the kohinoor. Being fish in a fridge like cold storage. There are billion stories furiously being scrawled into a diary whose cover says ‘life begins at sixty’. Whoa the lady is addicted.
She told me about how your comments inspired her to write. And spoke of a BEd theory of reward and punishment. How reward works a lot better as realised through this.
And at the end, with a deadpan expression, ‘blogging’s going out of fashion. Now its about twitter and facebook’!
Home with mom
