Goodnight, brother

Today, it was different. A tiny firefly had come to greet me goodnight. Of all the places, it chose to sit on the table clock, unperturbed by the ‘tick-tack-tick-tack’ noise it was making. It took me back to my childhood memories, when we used to run behind them hoping to catch them all in vain and even earlier when we used to get scared by their tiny little blinking ‘torches’.
It was a long, long time ago when me and my brother used to share a room as little kids. We used to stay in Mathura (UP) where fireflies were not a rare sight. My brother, who was five years elder, used to frighten me by singing ‘kahin deep jale kahin dil…’ from the movie Bees Saal Baad in a shrill, scary voice whenever he saw fireflies in our room. I used to duck under the quilt, trying my best not to hear what he sang or to see the glowing flies.
A little later, the firefly moved from the table clock and settled itself on a photograph right next to the clock. We were still kids then – I wearing a huge Ray Ban glass on my nose and my brother wearing another equally big glass on his slightly bigger nose sitting hand in hand in front of the majestic Taj Mahal, the symbol of eternal love.
But when we grew a little older, fight and screams were the order of any normal day. It was as if his day wasn’t over without irritating me and mine wasn’t over without bearing with him. But now that we’ve both grown up and live miles apart, the fights are the only thing that reminds me of the khatta-meetha bond that we shared and makes me smile.
He’s a married man now, recently blessed with an angel girl, and I have my job to worry about. I could barely see the clock strike 12 as the fly started to fly again. Maybe it was trying to find its way back home, I thought as I opened the window. I searched for my mobile in the moonlight and typed ‘remember those firefly nights... goodnight, brother’.

Confessions of a shopaholic

“It’s like you were challenging the poor guy,” my friend told me just after I snubbed the coffee mugs the shopkeeper was showing to me and walked away. “He is just selling ceramic, it’s not gold. You are not making investments,” he said, as I gleefully moved on to the next shop selling similar stuff.
I was on a happy trip to Dilli Haat and was in a perfectly happy, happy mood. But the word ‘challenging’ lingered for the rest of the day. This friend, a male, accompanies me to almost all splurging trips and perhaps has, by now, mastered my tricks of shopping. Whenever I ask him which colour or design to pick, he smirks, and says, “Will you pick what I ask you to?”
He knows, and I won’t.
But if men don’t know, or don’t want to know, what goes behind choosing a particular colour, they better stop “helping” us. Or, better, we women should go to those selected shops where the keepers are from the fair sex. That way, at least, both will be relieved of the tension of the battles to be fought every other hour, every other day. What actually is the science behind how women shop and how men shop?
They claim women spend unnecessarily lengthy time to choose and finalise or drop the whole idea of buying something, while they are those smart things who take decisions instantly. While we claim that most shopping decisions taken by men are lousy, colour combinations rubbish and they often go for ‘not-the-best-of-best’ offers.
Frankly, my shopping, more often than not, involves a serious series of calculated, methodical and economical steps to choosing, selecting, pondering, cross-questioning and then finally loosening the purse strings. But I never thought that my serious series of calculated steps could actually challenge shopkeepers. It must have – because after I asked the shopkeeper to pack four different colours of the same form of coffee mug with different prints, he looked flummoxed.
If challenging is the word – then be it! At least I will have a peaceful sleep if I match the colours right. Did I finally pick the right mugs, sis?