A Typewriter!

A typewriter came to be mine! It’s wonderfully ancient; it belonged to my great-grandfather who bought it as an antique. And it writes in italics.

It was hidden away, forgotten for many many years and surfaced when my grandparents moved into their new house, along with old recipes and black and white photos and a certificate that claimed that my grandfather was a 1000 years old.

Since it came into my possession, I have been writing type-written letters which is marvellously inconvenient and makes a great big racket. Punching keys, rolling in paper, turning knobs for spaces, pushing little levers for new lines and whatnot.
This is also why I want to own an old Padmini Fiat or an Ambassador. I’d love to splutter around and turn the steering wheel wildly and wrestle with the gear, whilst cursing the car.

(Thwack thwack ping! Zzzpt! Thwack thwack!)

PS: If anyone wants a typewritten letter, mail me your address!

Could It Be?

I think I caught the first whiff of Summer! Or the lovely in between, transient Spring that we have.

Three little tailor birds caught it too. They danced across a wire outside my window, while discussing it loudly.

Chronicling My Crime Fighting Days and Bob the Mosquito

MSN Spaces has packed its bags with all of our stories and all our conversations and has headed to a quiet beach where it can enjoy a drink while listening to the waves.

There was a time it had fostered a dwelling for a two hundred odd community of people who had so much to say of everything. A few of us liked to think of ourselves as happy small-town neighbours who leaned out of their windows everyday to exchange stories and happenings of the town at the top of our voices. There was, as usual, one person who knew everyone and was liked by everyone in the whole village and would drop by every house to exchange only news that were of an eccentric nature. She called herself Pixie.
The druid of the village was known as Zofo, the Hermit of Wandering Thoughts who would bring us stories from the mountains.
I have the most wonderful memories of things that were spoken of.
And one day, as all great stories have a movie made about them, we had two made about ours! (Cue curtsy, Pixie and AnotherPrickOnTheWall)

My blog chronicled the time I used to call myself The Mosquito Swatter, when I valiantly fought the cause of freeing humankind from mosquitoes. I still do this, but not as avidly, and the title has been bequeathed upon another(this was decided by a small community of individuals who couldn't sleep one night because of a gang of mosquitoes that were hovering around their ears).
One such mosquito which met its demise continually, due to it continually reincarnating as a mosquito, was Bob. This character was influenced by Agrajag in The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy who was inadvertently killed by Arthur Dent in each of his reincarnated lives.

A loud holler and a happy waggle of the head to the townsfolk from Spaces.

Sometimes I Want a Moustachio

Sometimes I want to add a little flair to my day and a long luxurious moustache seems like just the thing I need. If only I could grow one.

I want to twirl the end of my moustache for that pensive look and bristle with rage so my moustache would flutter about angrily. I’d smile into my moustache while laughing inwardly at a joke and one day, it would grow so long I’d have all kinds of oddities hidden away in it. 

A walrus moustache seems quite perfect.

An Early Morning Resolve

At six o’clock in the morning, when the moon was bright and the sky was aglow with thoughts of the sun, a dragon fly awoke and zigzagged its way around sleeping plants. Its wings caught the eerie blue of the early morning. It wondered what it was doing awake so early. But the world looked so pretty. It was slowly unfolding like a flower, with beautiful colours spreading over it. It found a sleeping dog and settled on its ear and meditated about early mornings.

I’ve been going jogging! At six in the morning when the moon is still bright. By six thirty, golden waves of the sun seep into the sky. Skippy, Pretty boy and Mr. Boogers all wake up and keep me company for a while before curling up and going back to sleep.

Die Kamblipoochis!

A while ago, I had briefly resumed killing many-legged things. It was when our balcony was considered prime estate by a kamblipoochi* with the mind of a speculator. Soon what seemed like the complete family of the speculator kamblipoochi including thrice removed cousins and a string of fat aunties, descended on our balcony. And soon after that, our balcony floor was a carpet of blanket worms for they multiplied every time someone had a warm thought.
After being horrified for a decent amount of time I started my attack on them.
First came eucalyptus oil. A bottle of this golden liquid had been procured by my mother for our combat against cockroaches and had since earned a standing of being quite deadly. Apart from killing cockroaches instantly, it also filled our house each time it was used, with an intensely pungent odour that gave everyone a headache. I used a syringe to squeeze out little drops of oil onto the kamblipoochis and watch them shudder and die. Gosh that sounds terrible. But it was be manic killer or be very slowly and with blanket fuzz around the edges, suffocated by multiplying kamblipoochis.
After running out of eucalyptus oil, I grimly wrapped my mom’s dupatta around my head and climbed up to the terrace. I had in my hand an effective death spray that had a formidable reputation of killing within seconds. I held it a few good feet away from me. And hunted every last little bugger down.
You have to hand it to the little blanket chaps. They’ve got an eye for the nether regions of the wide open. In my balcony, they had found homes on all the tiles that were the same colour as them, a broom, the underside of a drainpipe and any inaccessible corner.

Kamblipoochis when dead are little bits of black and brown fluff that blow away with the wind. We had a haze of black and brown of a million kamblipoochis over our balcony the few days after I mass murdered the lot of them.

*Kamblipoochi: Literally translates from Tamil to Blanket worm.

Wherever You Go a Fruit Fly Will Follow

Fruit flies form misguided ideas somewhere inside their tiny beings. Once fully formed, they spend their entire lives believing these ideas and putting them into action.
There is one misguided idea that every fruit fly firmly believes in: It can be your best friend.
Case in point: fruit flies collectively believe that I am in need of a friend who will lazily hover around my face all day. They have an uncanny knack to appear at my elbow, wherever I may be and particularly like to believe they make good study companions.
This last belief is terribly misguided. While I try to make sense of the variously interesting and obscure and dull textbooks prescribed for students of Computer Science, a fruit fly will sense a need for its support and be at my side at once, vaguely flying near my eye. An impatient wave in their direction will only result in renewed efforts at being helpful. This would be nice if their efforts included:
a) Perching on my ear and talking in a tiny voice that only bordered on squeakiness about brandishing swords and doing somersaults in the air while keeping on a floppy hat.
b) Not vaguely flying near my eyes.

To be your best friend, a fruit fly must also hover uncertainly around your face while you say anything. I think they like to believe that they are agreeing wholeheartedly(read:vaguely) with anything you say. What this really does is make me forget my line of thought and focus all my attention on swatting the chap away.

That said, I don’t think I could be a Fruit Fly Swatter*. It just wouldn’t be satisfying when they’re so vague about being frustrating.

*It is little known that I used to be a notorious Mosquito Swatter who ruthlessly slayed mosquitoes. One Bob the mosquito was my favourite victim.