Ashok Vatika!

Ashok is my house-help.

He keeps to work all day and even playing with the kids forms a part of his job. He is good. Good till the time he does and not ask...

All my Mum does all day is sleep.

Everyone says she's sick(in the body) but having known her all my life, I know she's utterly sick, though in the mind. She looks distressed when asleep but when this Kumbhakarna endeavour of hers ends, our Lanka gets teeming with noise and chaos and tantrums and what not!

The worst part comes when Ashok's asking get teamed with Ma's being awake...Ashok gets a scolding, a bitter one indeed. This gets me imagining whether I'd even be able to handle any such stuff without bursting. Ashok has to. All I know of Ashok is that he left his study when his father died while still in Nursery and had to become a helping, rather an earning hand in the house. He has his mother, a brother and sisters to tend to as all that his father left to his name. Ma hired him for a 1000 bucks a month, which is money that doesn't even go to him. It goes to some kind of contractor who helped Ashok manage a job. Why, Unemployment overshadows even these strata of society!

I used to be some kind of a revolutionist who once gave instructions that the employment of any child below 14 at home would cause me to act against my own mother. But now that I am faced with the situation, I am unable to act by myself, and also because the others tell me not to so as to maintain peace. Till the Kumbhakarna goes to sleep again. Whilst Ashok makes this place his home, somewhere he was destined to when he left home and now cannot escape...

The longest three hour journey!

How long can a 146 k. m. journey be? Or rather beCOME? Well, I'll tell u.

It all started right with the bus. It was a 2 by 3- seater with US sitting on the 3-seater side, with him utterly disagreeable to the fact that the middle seat could be left empty. My co-passenger, say Mr. XYZ, started with his relentless bak-bak right from the time the time the bus started. For him, it was as though he had met an old friend while for me it turned out that I didn't even recognize this old friendship. I was lost in my own varied thoughts and he was... well, he was lost in me as said his comments about me. First of all, he was very concerned about my bag and that it caused no kind of a problem to me. Then, he took to the task of making me comfortable about the journey by enlisting the stats- the number of hours it'd take, a regular sirening of the place we had reached and things like that.

I was relieved of this typical Akashwani behaviour once I had the pleasure of going to sleep. But now I'm reminded of a phrase that satisfies my position then- This Too Will Pass. And it did. As soon as I got up, he 'informed' me that I had slept for two hours and that the bus was going fine. The bus had stopped for tea and the commotion made it impossible to sleep but like that wasn't enough I found this guy strangulating me to have a cup of tea. I mean, even my Mum's never asked me SO many times for a thing. And a Sukh-ki-saans as he got away for a while to have tea. I wished the bus would leave him or he would stop seeing the bus or something, but of course, nothing such happened and he was back with a fuelling of chattering. And thus commenced the Aapka naam? sort-of business. He went on gathering all details about school and home as if he was onto a project of publishing my bio data. How much he spoke can be ascertained from the fact that though I let escape a number of words that can be counted on fingers out of my mouth, I can enlist all his major details. I still hoped the bus would move but either the driver or the driven had taken up an enmity with my poor being. Like all that wasn't enough, he started with a Koffee with Mr. XYZ kind of enterprise and ended up giving me details about my sleep. When I was totally pissed off, I preferred looking out of the window, gazing into nothingness, but at least away from this blabbering baboon. I rested my head on the window pane and went to sleep the same way when at last the wheels took to rolling.

I had a few 'entirely' peaceful minutes which vanished into thin air when I heard him call my name. Now, he wanted me to lay back and go to sleep lest I'd hurt my face. I did so and after a lot of dedicated trying, went to sleep. And now, the same state of affairs as my previous nap. Or rather, worse. As if notifying me about the pros and cons of my sleeping wasn't already irritating enough, he started cooing over my sleep with references to how cute I looked when I was sleeping and how my face hung when I slept and how this and how that... it was endless. I discerned that he had been constantly looking at me all through the half hour. Why, he was the first one to catch my cap when it fell. Even before I knew.

He tried I get down before he did, but finally, in my own city, Luck favoured me and he had to get down before me, but not without making sure that I got home without a tinge of discomfort. Ah, how could I get discomfortable when the cause was going. Going, going, going off. Yippee.

Honestly, that was the only time I felt like 'really' happy to see him- the time he was going.