I realized I don’t talk about the old, tiny, frail lady who lives across our house enough. She is 70 odd years old and walks like Charlie Chaplin when he walks slow. She is alone most of the time and keeps an eye on the whereabouts of the whole society. So along with obsessing over the business of her own house, she obsesses over ours.

Imagine a scene in my life: papa is playing a game on his phone that he recently got addicted to, mummy is yelling at me for having grown up all wrong, my grandfather is asleep in front of the tv that is playing weird news at deafening volume and suddenly this duck-like lady trots past our living room, goes to the kitchen and asks the maid why she is not cook Brinjal today. We are so used to this behavior that we don’t even notice her sometimes.

She walks in and out, slowly but energetically, of the bedroom to check if the floor is mopped or the bathroom to look for God-knows-what. She knows when my father leaves for the office, when our air conditioner was repaired last, what we made for lunch yesterday, why we didn’t cook brinjals, why mummy skipped swimming today. She is that innocent character in the movie of my life that annoys but also provides comic relief in scenes of deep distress.

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