Of Mannerisms and more.

8th June, 2014. Sunday.

Today's evening suddenly became beautiful. It was unexpected, considering the prolonged dry spell we've been experiencing for the past week, with only rare gusts of wind and pathetic drizzles as the only short-lived comforts.

This evening, however, was accompanied with wonderful, strong gusts of wind, although no rain, and streaks of purple lightning criss-crossing the sky that had turned a soft red. This time tomorrow evening, the house would be swarming with guests and filled with loud laughter. My cousin sister's fiancee's family will be coming for an unofficially official meeting with my sister's folks.

Super-secretive, my cousin is. Everyone in my home is that way, actually. Including me. We are mysterious people, which is all the more reason for us to have an unusual ability for speculating.

Take me, for instance. I had speculated a long time back that the person my cousin sister stays up late to talk to every single night cannot be a female. And I was right.

However, what was not right was me trying to eavesdrop on the doubleton's conversation, even if I could catch only one side of it.

Secretly, I feel thankful that I remember nothing about my incorrigible act. And that is the only weak murmuring in my defence. I mean, I must have felt guilty about it ; otherwise I wouldn't have tipped her off by saying she ought to speak in a muffled voice during night times as our adjacent rooms shared a rather thin wall and my only window rather near to her balcony.

I remember giving her this forewarning, while watching 'Conjuring' in her laptop. The warning must have been effective, because the succeeding nights became, very calm.

The fact that me and my cousin watched a gory ghost story together shouldn't make one think that we're close. We're, in fact, the opposite of it. But that's another story.

The night is comparatively cooler now, though the wind has stopped.

I'm sitting at one of my most favourite spots in the entire house - an almost circular balcony overlooking the vast green expanse belonging to Madhav Prasad Birla, a pastel-grey road running beyond the gate, and remnants of what used to be a proper garden once. Mosquitoes pecked my bare feet and hands constantly. I have to retire to the solitary confines of my room sooner than I'd like.

The sky has turned a dirty shade of purple and still looks pretty. The silhouette of the trees looks dirty too ; emaciated with age and unmitigated exposure to sun and rain.

The curtain outside my room always looks super-dirty too - patches of dirt clearly visible in the soiled creases of the pink cotton material. I don't think it's a proper curtain. It might have been made out of an overused bedcover, the artist being my father. I developed a habit of using this soiled embellishment as a substitute for drying my hands, often. Which makes it soil-ier.

Last to last day, I heard my Boroma (cousin sister's mother) rapping at the door, asking for a safety-pin. I opened the door and was surprised to see her holding a silky-smooth curtain, struggling with the string which supported my trusty soiled curtain.

'What's the matter?', I asked, looking pointedly at the curtain and it staring back at me.

She broke into a smile and said that this Sunday, folks will be coming to our place regarding my sister's wedding-talk. I smiled back automatically. That explained Boroma's fuss. The silk curtain needs to be slipped into the the string with the aid of a safety-pin and is to perform a short task as the doorstep decor for that night, until the folks finished their wedding-talk over dinner and went home.

I can't say I heavily missed the soiled curtain, but I couldn't get used to the feel of silk sliding over my arms and fingers as well, each time I slipped in and out of my crappy room.  There is something about newness that unnerves me to the point of shunning any type of alteration. Also, I felt a pang of discomfort when, out of habit, I wiped my wet hands on the curtain today, realising instantaneously that the curtains had been swapped yesterday. Discomfort arose due to two reasons : one, the curtain belonged to someone else, looked expensive and I didn't have the right to soil it ; two, my hands were still wet. The curtain-material, silk or no silk, couldn't soak the moisture readily. My old curtain was a master at it.

I feel hungry. I wonder where mother is. The bloodsuckers have eventually forced me to withdraw myself to my room. It's almost eleven. My eyes burn a little from sitting in the dark for too long and straining them under the faint white light of the streetlamp. I look down at the garden from the window, half-clouded. The floor of the garden is sweeped clean. It looks disrobed, naked, bare, as the earth is usually strewn thickly with dry, crisp leaves falling from the overhanging trees. The leaves fall in abundance, throughout the year, nobody sweeps them. They continue to fall in a thick layer, giving the garden an unintendedly classy look, an air of painless abandonment. The leaves get baked in the scorching heat and turn so crisp that you can distinctly hear a sharp scrunching sound when they get crushed beneath someone's feet. It is an oddly pleasing sound, oozing crispness. Personally, I believe it's an unerring way to let you know that there's an intruder in your house at night. Sometimes it's just a local stray dog or its feline counterpart. And now that alarm has been snooze-hit for at least a month.

It seemed childishly offensive - these stark indicators that your house was being straightened up for some people soon to be tied in fresh bonds. Take for instance the fat, dusty stacks of newspapers which have been accumulating in the basement for more than a month, and has recently been done away with. Their absence has left a giant, gaping hole in the basement, and nothing can be done to make the hole look like a prettier hole. It's not that those piles of paper added a whole lot of meaning to our boring stories ; if anything, it serves as a rats' den at night - but that's beside the point.

The fact that suddenly everything had to be sweeped and dusted and stripped and donned and plucked and pinned - seemed part of a desperate heartfelt attempt to hide something so ordinary, so familiar, that the calm surrounding the whole endeavour proved difficult to process into one meaning.

It's 10:25 now. The guests came, laughed, talked, had dinner, were mildly intimidated by the pug, and left. I noticed two, only mildly interesting, things. That the fiancee didn't come. And the moment the car parked outside revved up, my aunt carefully removed the heavy ceramic flower-vase that had been adorning the living-room and folded up the pretty crocheted white fabric upon which it had been placed.

I changed into an unwashed skirt and a washed tee from the kurta and bottoms I had been wearing that night, and soon after, was called to a simple fare of rice, daal, and mashed potatoes.