Tuesday, February 08, 2011

Wriggle wriggle, my thumbs a twiddle

I should, I tell myself, get off my ass, and DO SOMETHING. Be a power puff girl. Take charge of life. Tweak my CV. BE the CHANGE. Get motivated! NETWORK! Meet people and not run out of steam before I put my shoes on because, well, I do that a lot and I don't, after all, have a job and I can't forever be selling cakes with Gupta ji -- what everyone in my family calls the boyfriend -- so, what's it gonna be?

I'll have a comic silence with no income on the side, please.

~

Like a best friend and I used to say in this one phase of ours:

Point to be Noted

And in not a bad way, is that I am amazed at my parents. They don't seem to care whether I'm working not, going to office or not, trying to get hired or not. Forget pressure, all I see on their faces is happiness presumably because I'm around more and sometimes, gasp, even smiling!

Maybe the smiling bit is from this humility thing that comes when you have scraps of rupees in the bank. I'm eating at home. I'm saying yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir. I'm picking up after myself. If I get out of the house, I'm back home for dinner. When I'm out, I sometimes check if anyone wants anything from the market. I'll turn to my mother and ask, soya milk? She'll say no, you don't know which is the good one. And the love will continue to flow.

My father? All he wants in this sabbatical of mine, as he calls it, is that I get more exercise and more sunlight. Really. It's his two-point agenda for me. This is the man who when I was finishing college, told me: Thank goodness you aren't like these focused 21 year olds. They scare me.

Sunlight and exercise, fine fine.

Back from my little blood donation outing today, I, boasted to daddy dearest about what I thought was a brilliant my hemoglobin level - Papa! Papa! 12.7'. He looked worried, almost admonishing that it wasn't good enough (!). What sort of man doesn't care about what I do 'in life' as long as it makes me happy, but I should always come first in haemoglobin?!

Curious man, my father. I'd like him even if I didn't know him.

On Saturday, I even went out to the Gymkhana with my soy milk drinker mommy and lover of sunlight daddy. The entire evening, I hung with them and our thoroughly entertaining house guest, a friend of my mum's, had three Bloody Marys, and after the third, reached the conclusion, that when she's in form, I don't know a more lively soul than my mother.

In hours more sober, I'm less generous about her virtues but nowadays the fad is for me to try and throw in a kind word or two. It won't last. But for now, as far as the 'rents are concerned, my unemployment rocks.

Filed under: Job, What Job?
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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

you have a good life, really.
and love how you write. when is the book happening?

Miss. Mystic said...

Pen down a book, now that you are free, write about an undercover spy working as a baker who is madly in love with a bookstore owner who happens to be ex-KGB and her prime target. :D

Nimpipi said...

My good life is not making it to no book just yet. There's laze to be overcome, but not now. =)

The Unbearable Banishment said...

What is Gupta ji?

You must be pure joy to be around. Perhaps you can demand a stipend from your parents for hanging around the house and having dinner with them. Might that alter their smiling face?

Nimpipi said...

Gupta is a baniya surname.(Remember the lesson in shopkeeper titles?) And ji is this random unisex suffix we Indians traditionally add to the name of anyone older and presumably worthy of respect, like, for instance, Gandhi who, most well brought up school kids will refer to as Gandhi ji.

Sometimes, and more new age-ly, jiis said sarcastically or jokingly, even endearingly and tongue in cheekily.

We used to have an elderly tailor -- master ji/Gupta ji who died, but my smart ass brother chose to revive the epithet after he met my boyfriend. The family thought it funny and it just sort of stuck, to the good-sport amusement of Gupta ji