another long silence. shorry 🙁

but i have some time now before i fly off for my scriptwriting class this afternoon. so i thought if i don’t stop today to give you an update, i never will! 🙂

mid-january/february
i have been writing a lot yes, and in fact, i just got the results of my 14,000-word coursework i was going on about towards the year-end. guess what, i topped my class! just two marks short of distinction though, but for someone who’s never scored above 55-percent all her life, this is happy news 🙂

mid-february/march
we moved home. i loved that house in hemel hempstead. i still do. but i think i loved it too much. houses are like that. sometimes they love you back. and they hold you back.

like the cage that a restless bird had painted golden because there was nothing else to do. the bird was so happy and absorbed with the shiny details, she simply did not think of flying away. one day she discovered a door that had always been there, and it was always open…

on our way back from a friend’s place sometime mid-january, both praveen and i had the same thought. why don’t we move away from the house, just for a little while? it was going to be difficult…the house was perfect, just the right size kitchen, just the right amount of light through the windows, just the right small office-plus-computer room for my writing, in fact, just the right kind of retired life we ideally should have with our own grown up children… when they come that is.

so we did. a month of viewing flats and houses and meeting agents, we moved to rayner’s lane at harrow. we’re in a smaller, cozier two-bedroom-flat now. it’s on the second floor; i don’t need an alarm clock anymore because big fat pigeons wake me up with their goottergoogoottergoogoottergoo 🙂

i don’t depend on praveen any more to drive me to the tubestation, as it’s just a five minute walk from where we stay. we no longer need to drive to southall for the asian ‘exotic’ food that only got thrown in the compost bin after a week. there are the local, asian grocery stores down the street so i only buy the fresh vegetables i need – yes! lots of methi and spinach 🙂 we also have two gujarati snack shops for that occasional bhel, samosa or kachori. i now have a maharastrian friend in the same building who gets me yummy vada pavs in exchange for masala dosas…

march
my mother always said i was a fussy child, to which i would retort in my defence, frowning, “if i’m not fussy how else will i get what i want?” i’m glad i stuck to that line. because now, after almost five long years of knocking at doors and being turned away, i finally have the opportunity to work in a field i always wanted to be 🙂

the restless little bird used the door. she saw another cage in the distance that didn’t look very comfortable, but it had a lot of windows. this time she decided she would not paint it golden. but she would make it cozy enough just for her family. and then she would flap her tiny wings and reach for the sky…

it looks like this is how it’s going to be for the next four months at least. this semester at university is tougher, with scriptwriting, feature journalism and writing london as my subjects. i am going to have to submit a 20,000-word-coursework by may-end and june, and i have a three-month trial-period at my new job. wish me luck! and yes, touch wood!