Diabetic Reverie

Whenever I wear this ring
I remember the ruby droplet of blood
on the fingertip
I pierce with a lancet
for my home blood test.

Dear Blogger

Please get well soon.
Some published comments have disappeared.
You are not available for several hours each day.
Please be back in the pink of health again soon.
In the meantime, my apologies to those whose comments have disappeared.
Hoping for the best,
Dipali

Dil Boley Harissa!

A friend and I went grocery shopping yesterday afternoon. After dumping our many bags in the car, we went back into the mall for a cup of coffee. Since we are both fond of trying out new things, we looked at the snack bar and saw something called a cheese and harissa bun. I asked the boy at the counter what harissa was, my chief concern being whether it was vegetarian or not. He assured me that it was vegetarian, and said that it had coriander leaves etc. in it. We decided to share one, and asked for it to be cut into two pieces.
Well, my friend and I sat down and waited for our coffee and snack to arrive. We were wondering if harissa had anything to do with hari (green) chutney. One bite told us otherwise. It was fiery hot with not a speck of green. My friend opened out her portion and scraped out what looked like at least a teaspoonful of chill flakes before eating it. We decided that we owed it to subsequent customers to enlighten the boy at the counter, so we did. He was most apologetic, which was not really the point. We both felt that whoever is selling a product should have accurate, basic knowledge of what he is selling.

Of course I came home and asked Googleji what harissa was.

According to Wikipedia: Harissa is a Tunisian hot chilli sauce commonly eaten in North Africa whose main ingredients are bird's eye chili peppers , serrano peppers and other hot chillis and spices such as garlic paste, coriander, red chili powder, caraway as well as some vegetable or olive oil. It is a standard ingredient of North African cuisine, most closely associated with Tunisia and Algeria but recently, commercially produced Harrissa also making it inroads into Morocco and the Arab Gulf countries, Egypt, Mashreq and Turkey.

It was really really hot and spicy. Well, now we know.

Of Mice and a Man!

We got home late on Saturday night after watching the movie "Chalo Dilli." (A decent, enjoyable movie, by the way).
The SRE felt like listening to something.
Now Boseji's table has a very small part of our music collection- some albums of poetry, but mostly bhajans, which we keep in a box to save them from the dust. God alone knows what the SRE felt like listening to at that point in time. He scrabbled about, and managed to find an MP3 disc of film songs, which were duly listened to.
The first photograph shows the results of his search.
The second is what the table usually looks like, on any 'normal' day.

A spouse of many decades is a privileged person, who does not get scolded. He gets teased instead.
"There must be a great big mouse in here, who messed up all the CDs."
The SRE grins and says, "Yes, we need a great big mousetrap."

All I can say, in the immortal dialogue of countless Hindi movie wives,
is "Tum nahin sudhrogey."

The Bonus Month

By the beginning of May last year, my father was rapidly sinking, and seemed to be in obvious distress, breathing with difficulty despite our keeping him on oxygen for much of the time. I called in his physician, who examined him, and gave him just another forty-eight hours to live. He also prescribed a morphine patch, to ease the acute discomfort. I called my sister, who flew in the next morning.
On the afternoon of the 4th, which was the second day, a close friend came to visit. The three of us were chatting, having tea, and exchanging our rather sombre thoughts, when we were all jolted by a mighty roar from my usually soft-spoken father. He'd woken up from a nightmare in which the home nurse was apparently trying to poison him. He said he didn't mind dying, but refused to be murdered!
I somehow managed to soothe him, explaining to him that it was just a bad dream, and that the home nurse was the last person who would murder him, because she was attached both to him and to our household, and that both the day nurse and the night nurse would be bereft and without work for a while at least if anything happened to him. His doctor came to see him, and thought that this recovery was nothing less than a miracle. I seriously wonder if this bonus month was God's gift to the home nurses, who seemed to be very attached to our family, and especially to Daddy. My sister and I were, somehow, resigned to his inevitable departure- once Mummy was gone, we could see that he had completely lost his will to live.
As it happened, Dad's doctor went away for a couple of weeks towards the end of May. I consulted him once over the phone. Somewhere within me, I knew that he would not see my father again.

A Deliberate Blemish

This is the kilim we bought in Istanbul last year, which is now finally on view in my sitting room.

Kilim, a word of Turkish origin, denotes a pileless textile of many uses produced by one of several flatweaving techniques that have a common or closely related heritage and are practiced in the geographical area that includes parts of Turkey (Anatolia and Thrace), North Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia and China.
(Source-http://www.kilim.com)

We went kilim shopping in Istanbul with a Turkish colleague of the SRE.
After a glass of delicious home made lime juice served by the shopkeeper, and the painful business of choosing one kilim that both of us liked, we decided that this was the one.
Which is when we noticed the small dark blue section in the corner, an obvious defect. We were about to reject the kilim because of this, when the shopkeeper told us that this was a deliberate blemish.
I thought that it was probably a nazar-battoo, against the evil eye. (Turkey is full of these amulets, called nazar. So is Egypt!)
The kilim, however, was not woven with its own nazar, though.
The deliberate blemish was a humbling reminder that only Allah is perfect, His creatures cannot create perfection!

A Strange Dream

This afternoon
I dreamt that we were in
a hotel somewhere
packing to leave,
and I look round
making sure that
there's nothing left behind
And I see a bag and/or a pillow
that we need to take
(Dreams are vague like that)
The toilet flushes
and my mother emerges
and I hope that she doesn't ask
"Where's Daddy"?
because I know he's not there,
and I don't know how to tell her.