Misadventures of Being Home, Alone

My third post in less than five days. Quite interesting how I’ve managed to write this much considering my recent drought of actually penning down the things in my head…thoughts fly, as does imagination, and I’ve been writing poetry more than any story line.

13:25 hrs, 17th March, 2008

This weekend has been one of the best times I’ve had. My uncle, aunt and grandma are at our native town on the east coast of India, for the annual family reunion – a get together while we pray to our family God, and we normally manage to have the time of our lives meeting with all and sundry (of our spectacularly large family, half of whom I still have never met). I didn’t go this time, though, and not just because my sister’s got her exams going on. And even though grandpa’s with us, since he’s at office most of the day it’s just the two of us…and the things we’ve managed to do!! Lord! It’s very amusing. At least to us.

It began on Saturday morning. Neither of us woke up to the alarms we’d set, nor did we hear Grandpa calling our names to make him a cuppa coffee, then the telephone range and both of us shot out of bed. It was 7:45 am and I had to leave for college by 8:15 am if I wanted to be to my classes on time. 8:00 am I stepped out of the shower to realize that we hadn’t thought about breakfast. Our driver was supposed to have brought breakfast from my other aunt but he called up to say that he would be late. I took my own sweet time in getting ready, boiled some milk and had cereal (after a very loooong time), and managed to get to college exactly at 8:30 am. Sending SMSes to my sister just to make sure everything was fine, realizing that I had conveniently forgotten to bring enough money to buy us dinner that night, and knowing that I would have to pay up 500 bucks if I got caught with my cell phone in college was simply worth the confusion. I returned home at 4 ‘o’ clock that evening and the real havoc began as my sister narrated the events of the day, after I had left. She’d left the milk to boil, hence wasting about half of it, the kitchen was a mess with all the used and unwashed vessels till the maid took pity on them and cleared it up, there was junk food in every damn corner of the house, the living room looked riotous, the beds were unmade, the clothes, though washed still hadn’t dried due to lack of sunlight, my ISRO id card was with a friend who was going out of town that night and I had to go back to college to collect it from him, the tea that my sis and I decided to make had become way to concentrated, and to top it all, there was suddenly enough food (and very little space in the refrigerator) to last us a week because my aunt, who was supposed to send food, had packed that much for lunch (there was about four times our normal in take) and she had insisted on bringing dinner.

And so Saturday ended, and we turned in at 2 am, after watching all the EPL matches being telecast and sending frequent updates of the scores (Chelsea won – YAY!!, Man Utd – won – blah!, Arsenal drew – YAY). Sunday morning we once again slept through the alarm, but Grandpa woke us up at 7:15 am. 7:15 am. Let me say that again, 7:15 am on a bloody Sunday morning!! We prepared coffee with our eyes drooping, set out breakfast (courtesy my aunt) for Grandpa, boiled some milk for ourselves, sent off Grandpa to office, lazily had our breakfast while watching the very dramatic first race of the F1 this season – the Australian Grand Prix, keeping other fans updated on the standings, being disappointed that both the Ferrari’s and Force India cars were out of the race, and that Renault managed to get a fourth place standing (damn that Alonso), allowing the maid to finish up her work peacefully without our interference, trying to get an appointment with the dentist to get a tooth re-filled, and sort out my wisdom tooth ‘problem’, once again trying to convince my aunt not to send a lot for lunch (which she did), and then finally settling down to take a nap at 3 in the afternoon. I had my iPod plugged to my ear, and my sis had the radio on…Once again neither of us heard the sound of the car announcing Grandpa’s arrival, his calls to us – which just sounded like a distant voice in the dense clouds of our soporific states. We did awake eventually and groggily set about other work. Again we let the milk boil, the water evaporate, forgot to refrigerate the left-overs from lunch, forgot to put the clothes out to dry, put out the trash, lock the car, water the plants, and have milk.

We spent most of our time cursing everything and each other, between answering phone calls from Grandpa, my parents, her parents, cousins and the rest of the family, who took it upon themselves to check on us every 10 minutes !! We did unhook the phones and leave our cell phones on silent mode though after enduring two hours of exactly fifteen phone calls (’cause I even received calls from my friends, some of whom had a damn good laugh at our plight).

Then I went to get subways for dinner, got stuck in the traffic for half an hour, forgot to pay for the chicken nuggets at the super market, forgot to leave out food for our friendly neighborhood watch dogs, desperately wanted to get wet in the rain, conveniently left the PC and laptop on for five hours without using either of them…We did everything we weren’t supposed to, so it was probably right on my uncle’s part to call up this morning and inquire, “Is the house still standing?”

I was so damn sleepy this morning that I didn’t bother attending classes, awoke at 11 am, had breakfast at 12 am, ordered fish ‘n’ chips and Chinese for lunch, and finally sat down to recount the happenings of the past two days. I do believe in the pandemonium that might’ve occurred had we not kept our wits and brains together. I mean, my sister and I argue a lot, but we have fun doing it ’cause we both end up making fools of ourselves and we do it quite intelligently. It drives people around us barking mad!!

Well anyway, tonight my uncle, aunt and grandma return, and mark the end of the ‘mis-adventures’ we’ve had. But I’m sure there will be many more to come!!

Update: – 17:40 hrs, 17^th March, 2008

Due to the piling mess in the kitchen made by us leaving the dishes we used for lunch unwashed, I decided it was time that I took matters into my own hands because the maid won’t come till tomorrow morning, and my aunt will be back home late tonight. I rummaged through my aunt’s closet and found her apron, putting it on I set about my work. But just before I began to scrub the dishes, which were just five in number because my sister, it seemed, had already washed the luncheon dishes and cutlery, I decided to multi-task, i.e. I was going to make tea while I washed the dishes. Now, it’s a truth known by all in my family that my mum never lets me near the stove because she doesn’t trust me with fire. She thinks I will try to perform damaging experiments with it and will end up hurting myself. Whether under strict supervision or not, none of us ‘kids’ (read, the grandchildren) are allowed to use the stove, and my sis and I being home alone had been forbidden from doing anything of the sort. We had to be content with using the microwave (but with the power cuts it proved to be a hindrance). But I, being the very thoughtful and sometimes overly confident person that I am, put the milk on the stove and boiled some tea leaves with water on another before I began to scrub the dishes. Though I kept a wary eye on the stove, the exact moment that the milk began to boil I lost concentration. In my haste to turn off the stove, I dropped the pan I was trying to wash into the sink, stepped on a knife that had fallen off the sink slab and managed to turn it off as the milk spilled. I was just breathing a sigh of relief when I heard the sound of running water. Damn the tap. I turned around to shut the water when the bloody tea leaves began to spurt around as the water boiled. It took me about half an hour to clean up the mess I’d made, and guess what? The tea I had prepared was awesome But thank the Lord, Almighty, I don’t have to do the cleaning any time soon again…It’ll be a disaster, I tell you. Besides, my hands are way too soft to do things like that !! LOL