regarding the world with a jaundiced eye?

Outside my window the autumn sun lights up the buildings in the next lane. A squadron of dragonflies does formation flights over the mango tree. Pujo weather, except that the Pujo has come and gone and I’ve spent it right here, flat on my back watching the light change on the trees, listening to the dhaak and the mantra paath in the mandap downstairs. Lots of commiseration from friends for missing the Pujo eats, but what I really missed is the adda in the old red-painted thakur dalan on Ekdalia Road. We sit there every year from shondhi pujo to shnidoor khela, catching up with friends and acquaintances, comparing notes on the year gone by, revelling in the entire milieu of laal paar and chunot kora dhuti and the flock of pretty women bustling to and fro on errands too abstruse to be comprehensible, grinning at the family banter, wondering at how the kids have grown with each passing year, just soaking in the atmosphere. For someone like me, who’s not very big on family ties, it’s an annual immersion in the clan and at the same time, an affirmation of the self.

So this year I’ve missed it. Or most of it. I did get one Sunday afternoon with friends and beer while the sound of knashor ghonta floated up and the ladies fluttered in sudden panic over being late for the pujo. The rest of the time, really, I was just too sick to care.

But being sick isn’t so bad. I can’t remember the last time I spent an entire week at home. One. Whole. Week. Haven’t even stepped out of the front door. How strange. No office, meetings, dinners, cocktails, gym, library. No Saturday-lunch-and-shopping, no let’s-try-that-new-place-for-dinner. No stopping-by-the-office-to-send-off-a-report. Nothing.

Instead … a succession of books. The Kite Runner. Sea of Poppies. A Dibdin. More fruits and fruit juice than I’ve tried in the last ten years – apples, pears, grapes (SUCH grapes!), papaya, grapefruit, custard apples, pomegranates. The Better Half, who normally never enters the kitchen, is cooking up a storm. Watching television – it’s been so damn long since I did that. Or just lying in bed watching the light change, hearing the cheep of sparrows as the sun climbs and the long cawing of rooks as twilight deepens. All sweetened by the additional sound track of VSP pitter-pattering about the house singing to herself, happy that Papa’s not “going to office” for the longest time.

I could get used to this. Far too easy.