A Simple Story

This is a simple story. A story about a day in my life.

I woke today at 5 a.m.
I had been thinking about waking up earlier than my close to 7 a.m. time for a few days. Cold winter mornings, late nights, and friends who woke up even later were the excuses and deterrents.

I got up to watch a dance-song show on Andal’s Thiruppavai on televison.
After missing out on Tamil in school, I have been teaching myself slowly and now I’m into reading the Devaram. It may be like reading Shakespeare to learn English but no harm comes from reading the best. So Thiruppavai allured me. And it seemed a good excuse to make myself get up too.

I watched another breakfast show later, again on Margazhi Thingal.
So I learnt today is the first day of the month of margazhi. Andal, the consort of Perumal, urges everyone to rise at dawn, bathe in cold water and visit the temple.
I remembered being dragged off by my grandmother, bathed in half darkness, to sing bhajans at the temple, and coming fully awake only when the prasadam was served. I thought I must visit a temple since I was getting bits of the song right.

I extended my afternoon walk to visit a temple.
I had doubts about walking so far and it was downhill which meant I had to pant back uphill. But I thought I should try. The temple was closed but I didn’t really collapse from the exertion, which was more in my head anyway.

I saw a strange structure which had little round cement vats and good washing stones next to them in a row, all neat and scrubbed clean.
I stopped a couple of women passing by to ask about it, learnt it was a dhobi ghat existing from the time of the British and now maintained by the Municipality. I thought maybe that was where our dry cleaning got done. The women turned out to be regular patients of my husband and praised him rather effusively. Though I take it with a handful of salt, it helps me accept and forgive his minor foibles.

I passed a couple of very little girls playing.
One smiled broadly at me. I fished out a couple of cough lozenges I had in my pocket and handed them over. She promptly asked for one more for another sister.
I handed over the one I had left and fled when more of the family started coming out of the house.

I saw a lorry carrying away loads of soil from the hillside to dump elsewhere on another hillside.
It looked like good red soil. I asked the driver if he would mind driving a little further and dumping it at my house. The garden needed it badly. We settled on half the rate he was asking which surprised me and made me happy. And him too. A win-win situation.

Moral of the story: By extending myself and doing things out of my routine, I gained a lot today.
Probably other people can draw lots of inferences and other things. Go ahea