Baby blues.

My baby is ill.
She is going to a playschool these days, all grown up and all:). She loves it, and I love it when I get to extract a few familiar syllables of popular rhymes from her usual everyday blabbering. But there's a downside, one kid gets sick and the whole school comes down with it. So she is ill. High fever, throat and ear infection, my poor little baby. I have never seen her so miserable in these last 2 years. It broke my heart to see her suffer, at one point i was just sitting beside her and crying, didn't know how to help her feel better. The brave girl that she is, she is almost fine today, atleast her cheerful self.
The upside of this entire episode? I have finally become a mom, I think and act like one. I have developed motherly instincts, I just know what my baby needs....that's a great feeling. It came late, but it did:). May she not fall sick again for a long long time to come.

Just a thought

I came across a question in the web......how moral is it to adopt on grounds of childlessness. I was a bit perplexed and it made me think things over....conclusion:-most actions are fuelled by thoughts...and thus a thought behind any action, negative or positive is equally, if not less responsible for the actual action. When we give or receive a gift we often colloquially say....the thought behind this gift is more important than the gift itself. But adoption, for whatever reasons, under whatever circumstances defies this idea, the way I think, the actual act of adoption is more impactful, more relevant than any thought that has worked behind it. Thus morality status of any kind of adoptive parenthood stands futile in my opinion.

Chhotku potku.

I am missing Chhotu....today is her birthday. Chhotu was my kitty(she obviously grew up, and mothered many a kitties herself), she will always be a baby to me. Chhotu died in 2006, sometime after April, in Calcutta. I saw her last in April that year, when we went visiting. My brother had also come down, and God was she pampered! He used to sing whenever he saw her..."fat cat gant(bengali word) sat on the mat!"...ha ha and she would just purrrrrr away.
I remember the morning we were leaving, it was pretty early, I was very sad as Chhotu was nowhere around, and I just wanted to see her once. Miraculously from somewhere she emerged and started purring at my feet. It was hard to say goodbye, but I was happy that I could atleast see her before leaving.
Now everybody around me seems to think what's the big deal!!! It is actually a big deal for me...I have never lived my life without animals until now(which is pretty hard i confess). I am completely myself when I am with animals(and ofcourse when I am drunk). There's a special bond, a kind of Dr. Dolittle thing, only I don't hear them speak. But i understand them, I feel closer to them than fellow human beings, I swear. Most of the times I wish I was with animals than humans!
Coming back to Chhotu....I remember the day she was born. Her mom was in labor, I cleared up a shelf of my bookcase, and put her there telling her that she and her kitties will be just fine, turned off the light and came out of the room. Everything fell silent after half an hour, I peeped in with a lot of apprehension, and lo! there was one single kitty...white with black and brown spots. A single kitty is a rare happening as u know, usually there's a litter. So in my own little way I believed that she was meant for me. That was way back in 1997....July 9th....she was a cancerian:). One day she just fell off from the shelf...a little woolly ball of fur, I picked her up and put her next to me on the bed(some people will surely flinch at this point)....and she became my baby, as if her mom understood that too...she became pretty negligent in her motherly duties and the responsibility of feeding Chhotu with a dropper was largely left to me. Oh how I used to look forward to those moments. I had just got a job then and my parents had to go to Bombay for a month visiting my brother, I was asked to take leave for a month by my family as the very idea of me living alone in big bad Calcutta shocked them then. I didn't even mutter a word to my boss about a leave and told my family that I was not allowed to take one this early in the job...the very thought of leaving Chhotu, who was just a few months old then at the mercy of her negligent birth mom scared me. And so I stayed back....and what a great time we had....(I actually met my husband then, and poor guy, all he got to hear all the time was Chhotu did this today and that today).
I miss you baby....I am sure you are doing just great in the happy hunting grounds.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

I finished reading a book..."A thousand splendid suns" by Khaled Hosseini. It's heart wrenchingly beautiful. We always get to see and listen to news of war on TV. We click our tongues in sympathy and switch channels, all forgotten, all stories from faraway lands. This book actually made me realize what war is. It takes away everything, and yet gives inexplicable strength to carry on, to fight for survival. It results in death and despair on one hand, and on the other gives power to strive for survival. In it's ugliest form it does nothing but kills, but then it also make stronger and real human beings, the way we are supposed to be, out of man. This story is about great loss, and greater achievements.
Mariam inspires us all....oh I cried for her so much. It broke my heart to realize that such characters do live in real life. I so often think of things I never got, how often do I count my blessings? And this woman, she got nothing, absolutely nothing in her life due to no fault of hers. Oh she deserved something, some love, some happiness, but she was always denied the simplest pleasures of life. And yet she rose to become a hero....I actually cannot express the way I felt as I finished the book, the emotion was too overwhelming. I felt a knot in my heart for this character, which lasted for a few days afterwards, which is quite an achievement on a writers part, because after all it is a work of fiction.