365 DAYS 365 TALES

Words and Letters

I was waiting in the Bus stop for the past 15 minutes as the rain poured down continuously. I was staring at the rain, shivering and angry with myself. Oh Lord the rain was so sick...the clothes stuck to my dress and the mud and the puddle...eesh. I glanced at my watch for the fifth time in five minutes. The bus was not coming...

Oh Lord, why rain now and make me wait for the bus in the rain. Only if you are also here in the rain with me, you will realize what I am going through. I thought looking at the sky angrily.

I heard a loud hearty laugh near me. An old man was standing near me and laughing out loud. For some strange reason, hearing the man laugh made me even more angry. I wondered why he was so happy. As far as I could see, he was also getting as drenched in the rain as I was. He was also slightly shivering and mud splattered all over his pants. And I wondered again...what was the man laughing at? His wife who looked as old as him whispered something in his ears as she giggled.

I wondered when was the last time I had laughed like that. To my horror, I could not even remember when...My life had just become a whirlwind of meetings, phone calls, status updates and headaches...The whole lot...

The bus came after another solid ten minutes and watching the old man with his wife was enough to drive me mad with anger.

I stomped home wet and angry and found a message from my husband. He would be coming home in fifteen minutes. I started cutting the vegetables with anger for the night. There was no getting around it. I was tired, angry and generally annoyed at everything. I had no great hopes of the dinner coming out great. (The probability of my food coming out good was inversely proportional to how annoyed I was feeling.)

The dinner was more or less over when I felt movement in the hall and knew that it was my husband. I went to the hall and tried to muster a smile and found that I was too tired even for that. My husband looked at me and said nothing. I went back to the kitchen and was putting the finishing touches to the dinner when I heard some tumbling sounds from the rack. The rack was the one portion in my house which needed real cleaning. All the things that the two of us had used and thrown was lying there.

I frowned wondering what was happening. ''Shall we have dinner, now?,'' I called.

"Nope! Making coffee for the two of us! We will have dinner later!," he called out as he was going to wall.

I frowned some more. "Aren't you hungry?" I was on the way to the hall as my husband came inside the kitchen boiling the milk for the coffee.

"Not now!," he said as the heavenly brew of the coffee shot up from the kitchen. For a minute, things actually seemed right with the universe as he handed over a cup of coffee to me and picked his own cup.

I looked at him enquiringly as he pointed to the hall.

A first real smile lit up my face when I saw the scrabble board lying right in the centre of the hall. The game had done more than teach me new words. It had also got me a good man as my husband. But now after marriage, neither of us had even the slightest time to even dust the thing from the rack, let alone play it.

"Office? Meetings?" I asked.

"I think the office can survive a day without me!," he said as we both sat on the other sides of the board.

The next half an hour were probably the most enjoyable time I had had in a long time, as the two of us formed words at breakneck speed.

Then suddenly my husband frowned. I looked at him enquiringly. He looked at his words and at the board.

He picked up the letters and placed XMAG on the board. "That's a programming language which I am going to develop!," he said grinning roguishly.

I laughed unable to stop....Both of us were laughing so hard...The dinner, the meeting, office....nothing existed at that point of time....

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(07/03)

By

SA Krishnan (SAKrishnan)