The Phantom Thieves of My Imagination

When I was younger, Miss Pukaak(who is the chicken in me) used to be apprehensive about being home alone late in the evening. This happened on the rare occasions that my grandparents, whose house I would go to after school, went out and I had to wait for my parents to take me home.
 An overactive imagination didn’t help too much either- I always imagined that come late evening,  ruthless thieves materialized out of nowhere and hid under beds and behind curtains, waiting for an opportune moment to strike. By then I had figured out that Wee Willy Winky was just a clever hoax to get little children to bed early so I was considerably advanced in the time scale of Scary Things That Kids Believe. But thieves were still my bane. Fortunately, during such times, I had a well-rehearsed routine to bolster my confidence.

A Timeline of Scary Things Kids Believe

Petrified though I was of the band of thieves in the house, I would jump into every room, switch all the lights on and make a quick inspection of all the potential hidey holes in the room with a torch. I looked under beds, behind doors and curtains and in shadowy corners. It was the hardest to climb up stairs to a dark room, but it seemed a better idea to know there wasn’t much danger of the villainous plunderers than to leave it uninvestigated and stay in suspense. Once I was done inspecting rooms I would feel considerably braver but still not entirely convinced that a thief was not lurking in a corner. 

Looking for thieves in my imaginary cape

 I would then race to the living room and turn the TV on, cranking up the volume as high as it would go.

 And then began my charade.

Sitting on the sofa, I would bring to life an entire family of wrestlers who would make any thief flee. I would yell over the sound of the TV, taking the parts of father, mother, son daughter and several uncles. Each would boast of how they thrashed someone that day and how no one had better be planning to plunder the house. For some reason, it was a Singh family. 

“Hello beta!”  I would boom in the deepest of deep male voices. “Who did you beat up today?”

“My muscles seem to have doubled up in size!” an uncle would say casually.

This would go on for a while till I felt quite safe in the hands of my make-believe Singh family of wrestlers and the rest of my time alone would pass quite uneventfully.

One day it so happened that the Singh family came to life sometime after I finished talking on the phone to a friend and forgot to turn the cordless off. I had a lot of explaining to do the next day in school.


Mr. Jukebox Sings: Put Your Lights On by Santana

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Also Read: The first post Miss Pukaak features in: In The Sky With Diamonds.

In The Sky With Diamonds

I have a terrible case of vertigo. Looking down from the second floor of a building is enough to make my knees turn into jelly. I also have a terrible case of being morbid. Looking down from the second floor of a building will also make me think of scenarios where I am plummeting to my death or hanging on for dear life at the end of a fraying rope. But I look down anyway and some part of me, a chicken whom I will name Miss Puk-Puk-Pukaak(Miss Pukaak for short), calls me all kinds of names. Seven years ago I did a lot more than look down from the second floor of a building. Or even the tenth floor.

Charming log huts between pine trees

We were in Devbagh, a picturesque and untouched island off the coast of Karwar. The minute our boats neared the island I felt, as I always feel when I see a beach, I was returning home. The island was something out of a Hansel and Gretel story, with charming log huts on stilts and tall pine trees between which you could see the sea twinkling. Jungle Lodge Resorts which owns Devbagh, provide a whole lot of adventure and water sports and we thought we would give a few of them a try. We went on a banana boat ride, where we were unceremoniously dropped into the water at a thumbs-up signal which I always missed on account of being so mesmerised by the surroundings, and rode the waves on a water scooter and finally decided to go parasailing.

“What is parasailing?” Miss Pukaak asked me. She makes it a point to know as little of anything that terrifies her as possible.

“Oh, you know, that adventure sport where you are thousands of metres above land and dangling from a parachute,” I informed her nonchalantly. This part of me is quite the daredevil.

At this point Miss Pukaak had all kinds of hysterics and seizures while I smiled at the sea breeze and tried hard to contain my excitement.

We were taken to another miniscule island which was just as pretty if not a little more than Devbagh. I saw people take off into the air and become little specks in the sky. The parasailers were attached by a long rope to a boat which guided them, and to their parachute which made them airborne.  Soon, it was my turn. I listened to the directions of what to hold and how to land and Miss Pukaak went over all the worst case scenarios with the guy in charge. She was patiently informed that she would not meet her untimely death.

Looking suspiciously at the ropes I was tied to, before lift off

Then I took three big steps forward and was suddenly pulled into the air and went higher and higher. My eyes were screwed shut and I gripped the straps around me tighter than was necessary. And then when nothing catastrophic happened I slowly opened my eyes. And gasped in wonder, at the same time my heart leapt to my trachea. I was high up in the sky. Below me was the greenish-blue sea speckled little patches of green land and hills that rose from it. Miss Pukaak had revived herself after passing out and I nervously wiggled my toes and sang Climb Every Mountain from Sound of Music. I was bobbing in the sky, for the first time in my life, with black kites and amidst the clouds.

On top of the world

 It was a victory for me that day. And also for a lady in a sari who parasailed and didn’t let her sari get in the way of what she wanted to do. I realized that I could break free of Miss Pukaak and find how it was worth it. I decided I would not let her get in the way of what I wanted to do.

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, along with old recipes and black and white photos and a certificate that claimed that my grandfather was a 1000 years old, when my grandparents moved into their new house,.

Since it came into my possession, I have been writing type-written letters which is marvelously 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!

Oyster-Shaped Biscuits

I have the most wonderful memories of oyster-shaped biscuits. They are always intertwined with my grand uncle, my great grandmother and big glass jars. When my great grandmother in Salem was still alive, she would bring home a packet full of golden-yellow biscuits that would crumble and melt in my mouth before I even crunched them up. And they tasted like biscuit-flavoured pieces of bliss. My grand uncle who always has a word of advice used to ride me to a small bakery in Cananore and I would watch with bated breath as the baker would drop sand and sun coloured biscuits into a plastic bag that would expertly be wound around at the top, to seal it.

A while ago, I walked as I always walked to Iyengar bakery-in a trance. Iyengar bakery is especially adept at finding my invisible puppet strings and duly wielding them to lead me into its lap. This time, my eyes fell on the oyster-shaped biscuits. Three trays of them! In varying shades of the sand and the sun. I was only obeying the divine plan when I bought about ten of them.
I like to think that food tastes best when you stumble upon it by accident or chance, when it isn’t part of any scheming or pangs of craving, when it sort of slips into place with your present, without any prior warning. But somehow, oyster-shaped biscuits cannot be touched by chance or everyday triteness and still melt me into a little puddle of happiness. They need to be nested in a wonderful day long past and handed to me by the frail hands and grey hair parted exactly in the middle of the small dark face of my great grandmother, or by the crinkly eyes and uneven teeth of my grand uncle.