April 21, 2001

have we really grown up so fast?

when you love something
set it free
if it comes back, it is yours
if it does not, it never was.

it took me seven long (and adventurous) years, but i have now returned.
congratulations praveen, you won 🙂

ps: thank you, you naughty little cupid, for breaking the seven-year spell

our first lunch together, honest!

pps: come to think of it, ever come across someone in your life, who’s wished for something long and hard and patiently waited for it come true? what kind of a feeling must it be? and what will it be like to live with such a person?

oh, by the way, it’s official, we’re getting married! (asap ;-))




April 8, 2001

aaaaaaarrrrrgghhhh! she’s out cold!

ever had the feeling you know exactly what’s happening to you but have no control over it?
it happened to me this afternoon. for almost one whole hour, i was blind.

i blacked out.

my sister freaked out. my parents were not at home, so she called my chitti who lives, thankfully, a couple of storeys above us in the same building. my cousins followed her…

i could hear everyone around me. i was cold from head to toe, and it felt like blood had frozen in my veins. painful cramps in my stomuch and back made me writhe on the floor, and i was told a few hours later (after discovering a nasty bump on my head), that i was banging my head on the floor.

hmm, looks like my bp needs a little pumping up, and i need a lot of rest. i’m taking the next two days off 🙂

(by the way, it feels good to know what a fright i gave everyone, and i dont think i’ll ever forget the horrified look on their faces when i came to! hee hee 😉




aaaaaaarrrrrgghhhh! she’s out cold!

ever had the feeling you know exactly what’s happening to you but have no control over it?
it happened to me this afternoon. for almost one whole hour, i was blind.

i blacked out.

my sister freaked. my parents were not at home, so she called my chitti who lives, thankfully, a couple of storeys above us in the same building. my cousins followed her…

i could hear everyone around me. i was cold from head to toe, and it felt like blood had frozen in my veins. painful cramps in my stomuch and back made me writhe on the floor, and i was told a few hours later (after discovering a nasty bump on my head), that i was banging my head on the floor.

hmm, looks like my bp needs a little pumping up, and i need a lot of rest. i’m taking the next two days off 🙂

(by the way, it feels good to know what a fright i gave everyone, and i dont think i’ll ever forget the horrified look on their faces when i came to! hee hee 😉




April 5, 2001

mouse grrrrouse…(continued)

april 5: day 2

7:00 am
the tomato and banana were nibbled at, one of the cake-cubes was missing. must be a really hungry rat, and dumb. can you imagine it just walked right onto the specially laid-out newspaper (in the centre of the kitchen) that had its favourite food on it? i wonder what will kill it first, the rat-poison in the cake, or its absolute lack of curiosity.

8:00 am
we found a dead rat in the building near the elevator. the rat-cake literature had said rats ‘mostly’ die outside the house, three to four days after having consumed the cake. which only left the three of us puzzled, “how could it have died so soon?”

anyway, we’re going to lay dinner for the rat again tonight.

april 6: day 3
the banana is missing! another cake was eaten.

i was trying to be brave and sleep on my bed last night, but rupali and daniela strongly insisted i shouldnt. both of them have sparate bedrooms and it would not be safe to sleep in the open hall, which has just a mattress and no doors to keep the little glutton away.

this morning, i’m glad i took their advise. the pieces of rat-cake and food all over the mattress sent a shiver down my spine. it’ll take me some time to get over that…i would have been sleeping there!

and btw, we found another dead rat in the building, lying flat on its face as though it had fallen from a fatally significant height. well, we live on the third floor…

now the three of us are petrified, “who knows, there could be more than one!”

rats!

april 7: day 4

we’re beginning to get tired of this now.

i don’t know about the others, but i haven’t been able to sleep well, thanks to the nightmares happening to me again…one time i wake up startled when it jumps on my face, another time i break into a cold sweat when i see black rats running all over freshly painted white walls…

this evening, i bought a rat-trap from the hardware store. very confident that since it has been ‘conditioned’ to walk to the centre of the kitchen each night expecting food, it is very likely to walk right into the rat-trap.

setting the trap was fun. i placed the piece of tomato right behind the hook…the rat seemed to like tomatoes, but the hardware store guy instructed me to attach a piece of hard bread to the hook, so the rat would find it difficult to get it off, and when it eventually would…SNAP!

hmmm, wonder how much longer we’ll have to wait…




April 4, 2001

never underestimate the power of the small…

i was enjoying my solitary walk home from nerul station, when my cell phone rang…

hello?
radhika!! where are you?
i’m on my way home…
come home soon! there’s a rat at home and i’m standing outside the door
er…what?
THERE’S A RAT IN OUR HOUSE!!

rupali sounded really frantic on the phone, and sure enough, she was standing outside the building when i reached.

frankly, after i ended the call, i found myself smiling. but i realised the situation could turn serious. as i continued with the daily purchase of milk, bread and eggs, i wondered how big the rat must be.

if its small, its going to give us a hard time, i thought. and the bigger it is, the more difficult it will be for the rat to move. that’s it! hoping that it was a big rat, i walked on, and remembered how my dad had once used a stick to scare a mouse away at our home in thane. but i was a kid then, who knows, perhaps i was so afraid i would have been standing on the tabletop. (or was that when i saw a cockroach?)

i always wondered how it would be if i were that small. imagine huge towering figures that track you all the way into a corner, or land on you from nowhere, just like that. its also interesting how we always run away at the sight of a cockroach or a rat, when in all probability, the poor animal must be terrified out of its guts when it sees us. to top it all, its we who study psychology using it as a subject, and call it a r-a-t…rat. but how does an animal know what it’s called.

as i reached the gates of my building, i saw rupali standing in the compound, still waiting for me, with nothing in her hands but the housekeys. suddenly i seemed to feel very responsible, like how a father would laugh at his child and lead the lets-get-this-rat-out-of-our-house expedition. as rupali filled me with how she saw the “big” rat and locked the doors of the other two rooms so it doesnt enter there, and that she’d already asked mahesh and daniela who were at at office, to come home quickly (i was coming back from vashi), i knocked at my neighbour’s door and asked them for a wooden stick, or something that was noisy, so i could drive the rat out.

my parents would have never believed had they seen me tapping the walls and the dabbas and boxes in the kitchen. i was beyond surprise myself…i wasn’t afraid at all! twenty minutes later, i was still tapping.

soon mahesh came in with daniela (her first week in india), and we thought it best to buy a rat-trap, since it seemed to be the least messy. what we were not sure of though, was when the rat would be inside the trap.

it was past 10:30 at night, and all we found was mortein rat cake, or rat poison. what we did next will remain unforgettable…stuffing rat cake into tomatoes and bananas!