Never Mind The Tulips

I do not know why I even considered going again this time after last year's experince. I guess my husband had gotten his way with me as usual: planning outings with everybody else. Except me. And then telling me at the last moment.

So on the second day of Tulip festival, here we were, a group of five, half-dead and half asleep from a whole night's journey to see the tulips again only to find we were too early this time.

The long winter had not let the poor plants emerge in all their glory. Those who fought winter vanished, those who struggled, blossomed a flower or two here and there among the beds. The smartest were those who just wanted to be late-comers and were only beginning to form buds. To my utter disappointment again.

While returning, my friends ask me, what about next year? I thought to myself but did not utter a word then: Tulips!!! Do not even mention that word to me. Yet I know myself. Next year when my husband aks me , I will say: Well, let's go only if you are ready to wait till they all bloom together again.

Along slept the driver...

What was left of Tulip Festival 2006 was the remains of the tulips. I was so disappointed to see them that way, drooping in the rain like somebody had mowed over the petals with a big fat lawn mower. My husband said I had that same look on my face in all the photographs that we took that day. We were one week too late in coming there and they would not wait for me. And the rains that day added insult to injury. Obviously, I had expected too much.

This was our second trip to Ottawa. The first one had been about one month before, made almost in the same manner - leave home on a Friday night, drive all night and all morning, roam around and leave after lunch to reach home for a peaceful night's sleep after a tiring journey. What about in between? Umpteen halts at Tim Horton's - not so much for the coffee or titbits but for answering Nature's calls.

Well, I for one, would recommend LOTS of coffee for the driver and the navigator. And for the back seat passengers as well if you have to travel all night. That first time our car almost crashed and we were saved from falling into a river by a hair's breath. My husband had driven the whole night. So his friend took over from him in the morning around 6 o'clock. (Please consider the two wives dozing off in the back non-existent for a while). Seeing the guy too sleepy,the driver told the navigator to sleep for sometime and that everything will be fine. Then in five minutes, Mr. Driver slept off with the rest of us!!!

And the rest is not history. We are still alive to tell the crappy story. Fortunately, the tires skidded over the highway ( whose sides had been made bumpy by some visionary of an engineer) and made such a loud noise that the four of us were jolted out of our respective beauty sleep.

What's the Game of the Names?

It all started on our return trip from Niagara Falls that the Guy sitting next to me asked something from Uncle. So I said, "Uncle? You call him uncle?" Further inquiry proved that he was using the right term to address one of my husband's good friend. Guy also calls my husband Uncle. But the two uncles in the front told Guy, maybe he should not call me Aunty. Why, look at me, just been married for five months and if he addresses me by that particular term of endearment I would feel so old. That's what I blurted out at that moment.

But upon further reflection, I guess it is OK if he calls me Aunty. What's wrong with that. I asked Guy whether he calls our good friend, at whose house I and my husband are presently staying, Aunty also. He said no; in fact he has never addressed her with anything, not even on the phone, it seems. That's strange, I thought.

Our conversation, or rather my own reflections went to the place from where we moved recently. My husband used to stay with some acquaintance, Bhabhi (Sister-in-law), from his home-town before we got married. And she has two sons. The younger one is fifteen years old, about four inches taller and weighing as much as twice my husband's weight. And his name is Chhotu ( Small one)!!!

Chhotu calls my husband Bheiya (Big Brother) and he addresses me as Didi (Sister). Bhabhi's elder sister is the wife of a high flying government official and we all call her Maasi (Aunty). And the best part of it all, my husband calls Maasi's husband Mousaji (Uncle) while I call him Jijaji (Brother-in-law). I have been trying hard to call him Mousaji just the way my husband does .But in random conversations, the name that pops up in my head is just Jijaji. Because he doesnt like being refered to as Jijaji. Says Saalis (Sister-in-laws) are the root cause of too much tension.

House of Movers

Every house has a story to tell. Except that it hardly finds a way to communicate . It was a particularly thrilling moment of my life when I first came to take a look of 79 Rundlehorn Terrace. It was the kind of house that immediately welcomed you in its warm embrace. Perhaps because people never seemed to stay long under its roof. And perhaps the periods of emptiness were longer than that of being occupied by tenants.

One fine evening we arrived at the said place with all our belongings and I set out to make it a home. The first thing we checked was the mail box, wherein lay the mail which started all of this. My first weblog and my first post on it. A mail addressed to a former occupant, which from now onwards we'll refer to simply as Chadwick.

I do not know even now why I opened that particular mail because I was supposed to throw it away with the garbage. Maybe it was the handwriting on the envelope. A child's hadwriting. That could be identified at the first glance. And bearing the sender's address from some charitable organization somewhere in Africa. Was it Make-a-wish foundation or something else? I do not remember.

Yet I knew after reading that letter, which was from a child as guessed earlier, that our Chadwick guy must have been a lonely sweet old guy, living life luxuriously and still caring about lesser fellow-beings of this planet. It also turned out that the handwriting belonged to the kid's father, not the kid himself and it was a thank you letter to Chadwick for sponsoring the child's education.

Other mails followed suit including some mails bringing bad news regarding my own life. However, I was always on the lookout for mails bearing Chadwick's name. To find out what happened to him, why he did not notify anyone about his change of address and most of the time, wondering what might have happened to him, other than the stupid conjectures that I keep making about the possible sequence of events that might have occurred right under this very roof.

I received a mail that informed him that he has got a scholarship of two thousand bucks a month from some college, another one that brought him his renewed driving licence , another informing about his employee stock options from a renowned company here and yet another one that had his health insurance and one that told me that he drove a Honda Civic. I kept wondering what might have happened.

More mails kept pouring in, the majority of which were our monthly bills which we barely manage to afford under our present circumstances and those of other previous occupants of this house including Chadwick's. But I did not open other mails except Chadwick's.

The last few mails of his made me reconsider my first impression about him: lonely-sweet-old -guy living-life -luxuriously, because one was a Return-of-Employment form from a nearby restaurant which stated he had worked as a waiter and had quit the job on so and so date and the other concerning his licence but which let me know he had a room-mate named Aaron. So our guy wasn't alone after all and had a friend with him.

I am moving out of this house in three day's time, after staying just four months here, under not-very-happy-circumstances. I might never come to know what had happened to our guy because I will not be able to receive other mails sent for him. Yet I know this house has seen it all, the same way it sees what has befallen us at the moment. I have met the next occupant of this house, who will move in right after we move out. Packing up all our belongings for the move has been heart-breaking for me. Taking out each and every item that one had so carefully and lovingly put up to make this place a home. I wish this house would tell me what had happened to Chadwick. Or would it tell the next occupant what had led to us packing and leaving the first real home of my life?