Pink, Pray, Peeling

Musings from 31-03-25 Breakfast - a half-eaten apple and chocolate-dipped biscuits Spring cleaning after breakfast Dust and hairballs unite, swirl and swirl. I read a new book under the early afternoon sun on my balcony. The kind, towering clothesline shades me, frays of worn towels flapping in the intermittent breeze. The oak chair I sit on is stained white-green by dried bird poop and my burgundy hair spills around it. Damn. My legs stretch out and hook themselves onto the low glass.  I finish a chapter. A few stories below in the building opposite mine, I see two ladies dressed in morning gowns. I wonder how they are related to each other. I land on mother and daughter-in-law. I get called for lunch, and that's that. Late afternoon, I watch a movie about cannibalism, and I am both disgusted and in awe.  Then coffee, dinner, and rest.

On double-scoop servings and crying at my optometrist's  It had been months since I sat in a rickshaw beside my mother earphones-less, absorbing the sounds of the metropolitan city I still hesitated to call home, without music loud enough to deafen a man being forced into my poor, unsuspecting eardrums. I wouldn't be deafened though, contrary to my mother's belief, the source of which being Unqualified Men on Instagram Posing as Doctors in Scrubs to Bait Indian Mothers.  For lunch, I dragged my germaphobe mother to a semi-street food place, with alternating red and green plastic chairs and a power outage delaying the college kids' pizza order. She was not one bit the food-poisoning-phobic lady she is now in her prime time, she explained to me. Then, for her and her friends, roadside snacks were a religion to be worshipped day and night. Her preferred argument now is, "Times have changed." I urged my mother to pick out her ice cream order quickly, power outage ...