Billee-Love

My mom never liked animals of any sort. She, like all other moms is that ultra-clean being who shrieks on just the minutest of dirt particles and can not bare even a couple of objects in a room in disorder...

My dad, one the other hand,  like a typical man, is the adventurous, rough & tough and bold one in the family. Now, although I grew up to be straightforward, independent, etc like my dad, I never developed any taste in animals which my brothers very conveniently inherited from him. The whole the-germs-are-going-to-get-you theory suits my taste very well (that's why I wash my hands more than  a couple of dozen times in a day... potential OCD? probably).

BUT...

Recently my brothers, taking advantage of the favourable situation at our home, turned it into a mini zoo...They adopted that starving neighbourhood cat and bought four ducklings AND one baby FALCON from the animal bazaar near Empress Market in Saddar.

Let me not speak of the ducklings and the Falcon for I shall not be able to stop. Getting to that starving cat is of key importance here... The recently turned into a leopard-resembling-creature that I now lovingly call Billaa (Urdu for 'male cat')evolved from a skeletal, weak little thing to a mota taaza ( fat and healthy ) real Billaa haha!

But the one person who is to be thanked for its whole evolution is my mom... She, Allah knows how, over came her disgust of fur and the dirt (and thereby germs attached to it) that feline animals have and fed the Billaa with Chicken all the time! Yes, because it refused to have roti, milk or even fish beyond a certain quantity, all my mom could do was give him chicken that was not fit for us to be consumed such as long forgotten pieces of frozen chicken or especially bought chicken feet (which are usually used to get chicken stock from).

The Bottom Line...

... is that now, in a conscious attempt to not fear germs and to be more humane towards non-human creatures, I have actually discovered cats to just addoooraablle. Although I admit there are the complete opposite of dogs, meaning they are selfish, attention-seekers, self-obsessed, least bothered to please their masters... However, yet they are just adorable. Its as if Allah has put life into balls of fur haha.. MashaAllah!

And today I befriended two new cats!!! :D I found them in my grandmother's garden. Took me less than five minutes to start patting them withing the first eye-contact... Here's a video and some pictures. You'll definitely enjoy if you are a cat lover! :)

Cleopatra animalofied ... 

This kitten is such a Jaaanuu! She literally played hide-and-seek with me! 

The Cat-eyed pose - by a cat hahaha..

WATCH These Cats in ACTION with meee !! :D

Its my right hand playing with the cats, while the left hand was shooting the show :P

That's all for today! :)

I Fell Ill & Felt Awesome!

Though it is hurting a little typing with a cannula stuck in a vein in my left hand, I think it is worth recording the awesome-ness I have been through in these two days of sickness before it fades away. No, I am not being sarcastic.

It all began on 30^th of January with the daawat at our place. I spent the following night expecting the discomfort, a little bit of rumbling in my stomach, to go away on its own but my expectations crashed the next morning. Whether it was the sheermaal, the cake or the baklaawaa that caused it, I don’t know; but what followed was clearly identifiable.

I was sick, terribly sick with food poisoning. All the minerals had drained out of my body and I was alone upstairs in my bed, too meek even to call my nani or masi downstairs. So, dear cell phone came to the rescue, as it had countless other times. I called my mom instead ( I have been living with my nani for over a year and my mom lives a three-minute-walk away ) because it’s easier to explain her things especially when you don’t have much energy to spare. Then, she called up my nani and I was sent breakfast upstairs. Too weak to wake up and brush up my teeth and too disgusted to eat the breakfast without doing so, I fell asleep again trying to get myself out of the bed.

The next time I woke up, the clock told me it was six in the evening. I saw my breakfast, marie biscuits and a glass of ORS, still lying there. I seriously needed help. Coincidentally, my nani, who was out of the house all the while, came to check on me that very instant. The next thing I knew; I was being taken to the hospital. Dearest nana, who is over eighty, drove me to a nearby clinic. I got a drip for a couple of hours on the clinic’s bed with my mother and nani taking turns being with me.

Objectively speaking, they weren’t actually doing anything to me to make me feel better but their presence… that’s something I can’t explain. Just then, I remembered a friend whose mother had passed away when she was 14 and imagined how I would have felt if I didn’t have a mother who could be with me when I was sick, who would comfort me when the nurse injected the drip in my vein, who could engage me in random talk to distract me from pain. More than I was feeling sick, I felt depressed at the thought. Right now too, it pains me to imagine how my friend must feel at such times.

I came back home, my mother helped me go to the restroom, with the cannula still stuck in my vein for future drips. She made me khichdi and laid my bed in the drawing room so that my nani could check on me every now and then. She sorted out the many pills the doctor had prescribed and wrote the directions for me to follow. She even watched a part of the show at DawnNews which I badly wanted to see and then left for her home just before midnight.

The next day, a Monday, a working day, was even more awesome because I even got to miss IBA and that too without using an absence! My mother brought me a nurse at home to fix me a drip from the railing of my curtains. She gave me khichdi again and set off for her job. Three hours later she left the kids at her tuition centre and brought another nurse to remove the drip. Yes, my mom’s a super mom. Then I watched The Addam’s Family and Facebooked a lot. For some strange reason, I felt like a second grader who had skipped school after pretending to be sick and was enjoying the day with Cartoon Network.

The day turned out to be even more awesome when I found out that all my classmates had ended up doing nothing at university because the campus portal wasn’t working and that disabled them from doing what they were supposed to do; registering themselves in courses of their choices for the current semester. Lucky I had got to be in bed with my supermom’s lovely love, tasty khichdi and later at night a burger, The Addam’s Family and hours of Facebooking and intermittent sleeping.

Few in this world have been blessed so much.

Numb Reverie

Something… something bit her inside. She couldn’t name it, yet it was there. It used to pop up at totally unexpected times.

It was when all the colours literally burned in her eyes that the sepia-toned-filter turned itself on. The people and things moving around her all turned into an insignificant haze while the tinnitus-like sound in her ear-drums grew louder and louder making the trifling noise around her sound like a hum. The fingers that technically almost froze with the cold felt dead already and the smell of the freshly baked pizzas from the restaurant she passed by did not tease her numb taste buds or her neglected stomach. There was a much more painfully engaging stimulus she was trying to deal with, which was inside her for some odd reason; her emptiness.

Her heart, which otherwise beat lightly against her ribs, turned silent and stone cold, so exceptionally cold that she felt it in spite of the indocile numbness that prevailed over all her senses. The colder it went, the number she got and the number she got, the colder it went and so on till the point that her brisk walk broke into a run. Yes, she ran; that was the only way to feed the thing inside her that fed on cold things; all cold things –cold, physically, emotionally and … she didn’t think more than that. She just knew how to identify cold things instinctively. The run instead of warming off her muscles had the opposite effect for she had deliberately left her coat at home and the ice-cold wind blew even more fiercely almost through her.

She had plenty of time to feed the emptiness; she had left her warm apartment feeling claustrophobic an hour earlier. She ran and ran; the wind blew and blew against her freezing nose, ears and lips; the thing fed on and on. She knew not where she headed towards; just that she never wanted this anaesthetic high to end. Her wish came true exponentially when a sudden downpour began soaking her through and through with ice cold water; what a rush she felt! It was like heaven, or putting it more appropriately, like a cold hell.

Lost though she was in her pathetic reverie, her unconsciousness had steered and brought her towards the doorstep of her office but it couldn’t guide her longer. It couldn’t over power the thing that was still feeding on the rain. So she stood motionless thoughtlessly outside the shed above the huge glass door; running wasn’t increasing the wind’s velocity with the dense rain anyway. Just then she felt something, something otherworldly.

The thing totally changed her perception. It made the thing go away and made her realize the real situation. The revelation sank in gradually; boots filled with rain water –like a boat in a storm – half way up to her shank, fists tightly closed denying to give in to the frost bite, muscles of the entire body stiff, shivering hysterically from head to toe, the thick rain washing her like a car in a car wash and also that the otherworldly thing that had stung her cheek was a tight slap. There, her vision adjusted, came out of the sepia-toned world and saw her friend trying to hold on to her swaying umbrella with a retired expression. ‘Oh!’ was all she managed to mumble and walked past her friend, into the glass door. What followed pushed her into a well full of realization, out of which there was no coming back.

Yes, she was Rapenzel, trapped by loneliness, but there was no prince that would come to the rescue out of the sheer goodness of his heart, fighting against the bramble bushes fate had grown for her and risking his life or in this case his time to climb up the walls around her. Yes, she was Cinderella with sorrow around her but there were no fairy godmothers to depend on. Yes, she was Snow White with evil around her but without a prince with magic lips to kiss the vice away. Yes, she was Fiona, almost ugly (read: not anorexic) but there was no good hearted Shrek. Most importantly, she was she in her own unique world, that life had to go on and that there was no room for lamentation over her who she had imagined to be her prince.

Numb reveries were mocked upon.

The Story of Hee and Shee

This is the story of Hee and Shee or Shee and Hee (scared of feminists I am at times :P).

Well, when Hee was a kid he liked toy guns and dinky cars and dad used to bring one whole pack of dinkies so that he didn’t have to buy them over and over again after Hee disintegrated –one dinky each day –the parts to see what was inside. Also, Hee collected trash dad threw away in the garbage can to get ‘spare parts’ out of them and ‘invent’ things. Sadly even though the interior of all the dinkies was the same Hee would still disintegrate them and no matter how much ‘useful trash’ he discovered, he wanted more; it would never be enough for his fantasies.

And when Shee was a kid, she loved kitchen sets, empty cosmetic kits, and dolls and mom used to bring one doll on each of her birthdays and on special occasions. She kept them in a special shelf and collected all the cloth left over after mom’s sewing to make dresses for her dolls. She also loved collecting things labelled trash by mom to make temporary homes for her dolls for her play sessions. Sadly, no matter how many dolls, left over cloth and trash would be there in her shelf, she’d still collect more and more; it would never be enough for her fantasies.

When Hee grew up he got popular with his buddies and they loved going out at night playing night matches, falling asleep somewhere in their cars for a few hours and then getting up early to watch the sun rise by the seaside enjoying the blissfully silent company of each other. Hee also liked taking short trips to his virtual fantasy land – stuff like GTA and CounterStrike seemed so cool with those shiny cars and shiny guns and yeah off course shiny plastic girls too.

And when Shee grew up she got popular with her ‘fairy-club’-friends and they loved sleeping over at each others places. Shee and her friends would stay up late cosily cuddled in their blankets and go on about things such as how to make the tastiest pizza with the least carbs. Shee also liked reading the Twilight Saga and watching Pride and Prejudice (1995) over and over again hoping to miraculously run into a Darcy or Edward in real life.

Then there came a time when two fat aunties who met each other at a painting exhibition decided to get their kids married to each other. Yeah, you guessed it right they were Shee’s and Hee’s moms.

So Shee and Hee were made to see and meet each other. And apparently they found themselves in luuurve with each other after the very first. They thought they had found exactly what they had been searching for.

After a couple of years, they were like strangers. They had been wronged –by their own selves. They had married the wrong person –some one not at all according to their ‘dreams’.

Actually Hee was nothing like the heroes that Shee had dreamed of; he couldn’t be caring, loving, romantic or even tidy enough (the benchmark being Edward!). In fact, he wasn’t even an average husband, let alone a lover. (PS. Husbands are exponential times boring versions of lovers; so she thought)

On the other hand Hee found out marriage something wasn’t he wanted to commit himself in the first place, let alone the fact that his wife was no where near the ‘hot-babes’ he saw while playing his adrenaline-rush-inducing games such as Tomb Raider and Duke Nukem:Planet of the babes.

They lived not really happily ever after just as many husbands and wives had done in the past fantasizing about two worlds which were poles apart from each other. In fact they never believed that an ever after was even something they were looking forward too.