A chain of events

I complimented a friend on her long, rather-interestingly strung, beaded chain. No, she did not brush the compliment aside, as most of us are wont to, and say, ``it’s-an-old-one-that-I’d-bought-off-the-street,'' or ``it’s-one-of-those-ghastly-gifts-from-my-inlaws-that-I-wear-only-when-they’re-in-town.'' Instead she told me a story about the chain that took us to Chennai first, and then to a fire-accident which the chain survived when the rest of her house had burned to cinders, from there to Singapore where she stays; and to where she took the chain along as an fortuitous omen and then for a last stop in Beijing, where a Chinese chain maker read the inscription on the locket of the chain which when translated read, `keep safe’!

Ask me about my bag and I’ll probably say Garuda Mall or Hidesign and that’s where my story will end, if you can call that a story. I very seldom have long-winding descriptions about how I came to posses the said bag, and what circumstances followed after, or occurred before and during its purchase. I see, I buy. The only variation in my story would be that I either paid for my purchase with the Citi Bank Gold Card or my old and trusted HSBC classic, whose limit has remained modest like my earnings.

Same goes for the furniture in my house. I don’t possess a centre table that I once saw lying neglectedly in a hamlet near Karaikudi, which only my peripheral vision picked up even as we rounded a corner on a dusty village road, and how I had the driver back-up the car to take a second look at the table, found it too beautiful to leave behind, and picked it up but not before I went in search of the village panchayat to verify if it was truly disposed off by someone in the village who believed it brought him bad luck, and since I was a skeptic, I decided to take it nevertheless, but not before asking if there was any money I could offer if not for the table, then alteast for a trust fund to preserve old wooden treasures! No, I don’t own such fanciful `anything’ with such far-fetched ancestry. Mine is all store bought. And they remain inanimate, mute and do not trigger off cataclysmic events that would bring about a new world order. Quite unlike the toys who come alive in an Enid Blyton story.

That’s not to say my friend with the lucky chain is spinning me a yarn. I believe her and all the others. For every story-teller, there must be a listener!

Four and twenty blackbirds...

I could get used to Sunday afternoons. When my house is bathed in the golden afternoon light - warm, daffodil yellow and content - the family is fed, the dishes are done and stacked and the rest of the day stretches lazily without an agenda. Today, the champak tree outside my house was full of activity and I'm partly to blame. I've started feeding the feathered visitors, mostly crows, who come for the coral-like fruit, hanging in bunches from the champak tree. Why would I do that when there's fruit a-plenty? Because a certain grey-chested crow, with one slightly limp wing, came to rest on my boundary wall last week. I placed some rice and milk in a corner and he polished it off in a trice, his beak a Hoover, sucking the grains of rice and then slurping the rivulets of milk, noisily. He was back the next morning. And he got warm idlis and chutney. The next day I didn't see him but left some upma all the same. My father later told me he saw some squirrels nibbling on left-overs too. Today, there were four crows, a mynah, a baby squirrel and an eagle who flew over the pieces of dosa and scared away the crows for a few minutes. The banquet table is getting crowded.