Twenty- five Seven

Rainbow over the city

September 2, 2014
The gloomy wet greyness of September spilled over to the second day, strangely proving true the weather forecast of the BBC which had assured us wet weather with thunder showers all through the weekend till Tuesday.

It wasn’t as wet as I’d expected though we did get caught in a sudden cloud burst after which the sky turned brilliantly bright and sunny. I was just pottering around wondering whether I should get down to some Yoga or do something less physical when I got a call telling me to look out of the kitchen window . I ran to the back of the house and saw a brilliant rainbow rising out of a cluster of buildings reaching out to the darkened sky, straddling almost the entire city! I’m glad I rushed out when I did because I managed to catch its ethereal beauty as the colours split into a faintly visible orange, yellow and green band hovering over the skyscrapers below. Sadly I couldn’t follow the rest of the rainbow as it got lost in the murky sky but I’m sure at the other end, there would have definitely been a pot of gold as the belief goes.

Rainbows are fleeting, a brief reminder of nature’s beauty even on the greyest day. And by the time I uploaded my photograph, the rainbow had just melted away.

For some unknown reason, rainbows always bring to mind the lines by Ogden Nash’s poem ” Song to be sung by the father of infant female children” which I’d learned way back as a fourteen year old when marriage and children were far from my mind.

My heart leaps up when I beholdA rainbow in the sky;Contrariwise, my blood runs coldWhen little boys go by.For little boys as little boys,No special hate I carry,But now and then they grow to men,And when they do, they marry.No matter how they tarry,Eventually they marry.And, swine among the pearls,They marry little girls.

My little girls have long since grown and flown the nest but strangely these words still linger in my subconscious mind to be brought to the fore each time a rainbow brightens up the sky.
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The rainbow connection(wcs4.blogspot.com)
Song of the Circus

September 1, 2014

Aaah ! As I sit down in front of my PC I realise that it is the beginning of yet another month. September has come faster than August did and even faster than July. Am I the only one who feels that time gets faster as the years go by? It is already the middle of the second half of the year and it will be just tomorrow when we welcome December.

After a dry June and wet July and August, we thought we’d seen the last of the rains when we celebrated Coconut Day mid August. But the monsoons seem to have revived with all the coconuts the sea received and this weekend was the wettest ever.

I have Wow Dinga to keep me company and after a four day break which he spent with his parents, I was happy to discover his new words and antics while the rain poured relentlessly outside. For me it was my own clown show with Wow Dinga’s exaggerated wobbly walk and forced fake laughter. He was the veritable ring master with his masterful “Tung” as he flung the bright Duplo bricks far and wide. And we his four care-takers were like the lions he’d tamed as we’d pick them up and lay them at his feet, only to have them flung again. Yesterday, he found a baton among the walking sticks left at the entrance and he marched up and down the house pointing autocratically at things.

Indeed, it reminded me of the Circus I used to visit every year with its trapeze artists and elephants and sad looking lions. My heart would be in my mouth as I watched the trapeze artists perform high above the crowd and would close my ears at the sound of the Ride of Death with the motorcyclist going round and round a caged ball. And the tin pot band with its screechy trumpets would play out melodies like Come September which remains in my memory as a circus song.
Celebrating Ganesh

August 31, 2014

Long before it became environmentally fashionable, I’ve been celebrating the festival of Ganpati with my tiny silver idol. It all started with the aim of introducing my children to some of our traditions which tend to get lost in the day to day course of living. Initially we used to keep out the idol for all ten days during which time the girls would happily sing the ‘aarati’, enthusiastically decorate the spot where we kept the Ganpati and vigorously ring the bell and clang the tiny cymbals. However, as they grew older, my mother-in-law felt it more prudent to keep the idol out for just the day and a half because even if our idol was not a family tradition, she still felt we needed to observe certain practices while Ganesha was at home (being vegetarian, not imbibing alcohol, doing the puja twice a day) which may have been hard to adhere to and rather than risk the wrath of God with certain lapses albeit unintentional, we began keeping the Ganpati for just a day and a half.

Last year ,with the house bereft of children, I wondered whether we should bring out the Ganpati at all but Hubby Dear insisted that we did and so last year’s Ganesh festival was not as exciting as this year’s since it would be Wow Dinga’s first Ganesha festival. I could hardly wait to see his reaction to everything – the flowers, the lights, the bells and of course the modaks.
I spent the better part of Hartilaka (the eve of the festival) shopping for floral decorations and was shocked at some of the astronomical figures that the florists seemed to quote so effortlessly. I was also amazed at the new fangled decorations – floral arches made of either real orchids dyed in hideous colours or blatantly plastic flowers that would far outlast the festival.

Despite the innovative use of roses and orchids, I still prefer the traditional garlands made out of seasonal flowers like marigold and mogra. Sadly the market didn’t have any of Ganesha’s favourite blooms – red hibiscus and red balsam.

With our Ganesha now back in the cupboard, I will spend the next few days visiting the community Ganesha in different neighbourhoods which I hope to capture with my new camera.