Just another day

Saturday December 20, 2008 Gurgaon India

The weather was awful. No sunshine. Madam went off to work. She said we have to go for neice's birthday at 3pm, so all of you better be ready. It was more like an order than a suggestion, so all we could do was say 'yes'. Well, after she left, the kids blissfully forgot all about mother's plan and went about their daily task of doing..well.. nothing worthwhile. One settled on his PSP, the other went to the TV set. These are actually default modes for them. I said a few cliched lines, like 'do something useful', 'how about some books?', 'if you study in peace time, you'd be much better off in times of "war" (exams)'. No one was listening (as usual). So I let them be. Why bother? I spent about an hour on my emails. And then switched to 'paper-sorting'. It is one of my proven stress busters. It refreshes my to-do list an helps me to replenish the 'which paper is where' data in my brain. The number of packets which store all the assorted unfiled paper, doesn't really decrease. Ever. It just gets re-sorted and re-re-sorted. And some valuable bills and bank statements get rediscovered in each such sorting. I guess, these discoveries render those small bits of happiness which my mind craves.

After about an hour of 'doing nothing worthwhile' , I realised that madam was going to return home soon & if she found us in the current state, she'd freak out, and would scowl forever. I yelled at the kids to get bathed and ready-to-go. I stressed the fact that unless this instruction was followed, none of them was going for that outing to cousin's house. That worked. In 60 minutes, they were ready and when they saw me in the same dishevelled state, they silently went back to their default state (PSP & TV).

Miss P came up and announced that she was hunting for the roll of bubble wrap because she wanted to use it to wrap her (new) quilt. I thought this was a good opportunity to move those cartons from the glass room adjacent to my bedroom, to the store room on the terrace. I joined her in her hunt. We couldn't find the bubble wrap as we'd probably thrown it into the garbage last month, but we managed to sort through the cartons, and took most of them to the store room upstairs. She seemed visibly disappointed, but when I told her that she could use the packing paper role to wrap her quilt, she cheered up again. She's bought this huge bunch of clothes, quilt, etc. to take with her for her annual Christmas visit to her village, it really makes me wonder how she plans to lug all that stuff onto the train and then onto the mini-bus which she's going to ride for 6 hours to reach her hamlet.

Anyway, her wrapping paper notwithstanding, the cartons did get arranged. Rearranged actually. I have arranged them in that room a couple of times, each time thinking that they've been grouped logically according to their contents group, but when I return to the room, I cannot find anything that I am looking for. I end up opening all cartons when I want to trace something. The clothes end up in the pile of books' cartons and vice versa. It's a pretty meaningless exercise, arranging all that junk. I don't think I'd miss anything valuable if I simply set fire to the whole room. I'd also get a blessed empty room as a byproduct. Which I suppose is worth much more than all that garbage filled in the 50 odd cartons strewn about the room.