little bit difficult, but with his mother by his side he will, by God’s grace, surely make it.
12
Saturday, 2 July 2011
Last evening Vineet smsed me to call him up. Actually, he sent me six smses to call him up before I finally picked up the phone. The reason that I took such a long time to call him up is because I thought that I was confused. Ever since that day when we met each other at the electronics showroom, which was two weeks ago, I had been feeling a little bit odd, and I had thought that this feeling was confusion, and I don’t like to feel confused because confusion is actually a sickness, a sickness suffered by the weak-minded, and I don’t like to boast, but I am not a weak-minded person normally, I am actually a person who has quite a lot of strength, which, I think, was a gift from my father, an inheritance, an inheritance that I want to pass down to my son. So, I did not want to keep feeling confused and that is why I did not want to talk to Vineet. But then after thinking about this for some time I realised that I have not actually been confused. What I have suffered is not actually the disease of confusion, but just the headache of twoor three unanswered questions. And so I called him back.
See, all of us live with questions that cannot be answered. As long as we can answer our own questions with honesty, we should not worry about those questions that only others have answers for but sometimes refuse to share with us. That is how it is, and so not only did I call him up, but I also agreed to meet him when he asked me if I was free this morning.
And what did Vineet want? He just wanted me to go with him today to see some new properties in Greater Noida. The MCD, he said, had issued his mother a show cause notice for the illegal construction of a second room in their flat, and they were always harassing them and asking them for money, and his mother’s blood pressure was always so high because of this, and so she told Vineet that he had to get them out of that place immediately, before the MCD killed her, and because an order from his mother is like an order from God, this is what Vineet himself said, he needed my help, he needed a woman’s ideas, to buy a new house.
It was a very interesting experience, and more importantly, it was very educational. We went to six different properties in Greater Noida and Noida Extension, and what can I say? Each one was better than the other. One had Italian marble in the drawing and dining rooms, and we thought that it was so beautiful, but then the next one had one of those new modular kitchens with all the latest appliances. One had false ceilings with fancy lights, but then the other had imported cupboards and what they called Velvet Touch Paints and Textures. It was so difficult to choose. And even though all the buildings were still under construction, the developers had made thesebeautiful show flats so that prospective buyers could see what they would finally look like. This was my favourite part. It was so nice to walk through the flats, to walk around all the different, different rooms, to sit on a beautiful sofa, to stand in front of a shining gas stove. Maybe it looked like a film studio, because there was not even one stain or scratch on the walls, and the floors were shining, and there was all this beautiful Italian furniture that was so nicely arranged. Maybe it looked a little bit artificial, but still, it all seemed very real to me. I imagined myself in these flats. In each show flat that we saw, I imagined my husband and I living there retired and happy, our Bobby well settled in a foreign country, and the two of us here, with respectable neighbours all around us, neighbours who had beautiful dogs that they took for morning walks, neighbours whose children were also working abroad. It was so easy to imagine all this and my husband and I growing old together in a nice, new, modern flat.
But obviously the purpose of this outing was to find a
12
Saturday, 2 July 2011
Last evening Vineet smsed me to call him up. Actually, he sent me six smses to call him up before I finally picked up the phone. The reason that I took such a long time to call him up is because I thought that I was confused. Ever since that day when we met each other at the electronics showroom, which was two weeks ago, I had been feeling a little bit odd, and I had thought that this feeling was confusion, and I don’t like to feel confused because confusion is actually a sickness, a sickness suffered by the weak-minded, and I don’t like to boast, but I am not a weak-minded person normally, I am actually a person who has quite a lot of strength, which, I think, was a gift from my father, an inheritance, an inheritance that I want to pass down to my son. So, I did not want to keep feeling confused and that is why I did not want to talk to Vineet. But then after thinking about this for some time I realised that I have not actually been confused. What I have suffered is not actually the disease of confusion, but just the headache of twoor three unanswered questions. And so I called him back.
See, all of us live with questions that cannot be answered. As long as we can answer our own questions with honesty, we should not worry about those questions that only others have answers for but sometimes refuse to share with us. That is how it is, and so not only did I call him up, but I also agreed to meet him when he asked me if I was free this morning.
And what did Vineet want? He just wanted me to go with him today to see some new properties in Greater Noida. The MCD, he said, had issued his mother a show cause notice for the illegal construction of a second room in their flat, and they were always harassing them and asking them for money, and his mother’s blood pressure was always so high because of this, and so she told Vineet that he had to get them out of that place immediately, before the MCD killed her, and because an order from his mother is like an order from God, this is what Vineet himself said, he needed my help, he needed a woman’s ideas, to buy a new house.
It was a very interesting experience, and more importantly, it was very educational. We went to six different properties in Greater Noida and Noida Extension, and what can I say? Each one was better than the other. One had Italian marble in the drawing and dining rooms, and we thought that it was so beautiful, but then the next one had one of those new modular kitchens with all the latest appliances. One had false ceilings with fancy lights, but then the other had imported cupboards and what they called Velvet Touch Paints and Textures. It was so difficult to choose. And even though all the buildings were still under construction, the developers had made thesebeautiful show flats so that prospective buyers could see what they would finally look like. This was my favourite part. It was so nice to walk through the flats, to walk around all the different, different rooms, to sit on a beautiful sofa, to stand in front of a shining gas stove. Maybe it looked like a film studio, because there was not even one stain or scratch on the walls, and the floors were shining, and there was all this beautiful Italian furniture that was so nicely arranged. Maybe it looked a little bit artificial, but still, it all seemed very real to me. I imagined myself in these flats. In each show flat that we saw, I imagined my husband and I living there retired and happy, our Bobby well settled in a foreign country, and the two of us here, with respectable neighbours all around us, neighbours who had beautiful dogs that they took for morning walks, neighbours whose children were also working abroad. It was so easy to imagine all this and my husband and I growing old together in a nice, new, modern flat.
But obviously the purpose of this outing was to find a
Similar Books
