Tag: gift

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Hobbies Musings

A Rainbow of Memories


Colourful diaries
Colourful keepers of memories – Gifts from my mother, aunt, sister, sister-in-law, friend, a complete stranger (and even myself).

The typewriter and keyboards may keep our memories safe in a digital locker. But they will never be able to replace the smell of paper, the crisp look of bound books and the firm grip of a clasp — reassuring a sentimental fool like me, that her priceless emotions are locked safely.

The Daily Post has a guest this week – ROY G. BIV. Head over and say a big hi!

PS. I always fancied that some day I’d be famous and my journals and sketchbooks might become collectibles — maybe even included in an auction. I know it’s unlikely. But a girl can dream 🙂

Categories
Hobbies

Orange!

Orange origami
A bright neon orange origami gift by my mother's little student

This week the Daily Post asks us to post something orange. Strangely, there is very little orange surrounding me. Not even my repository of photos has a hint of orange. I turned away from the monitor, wondering what to do, when this neon orange paper flower caught my eye. So for the first time, I decided to shoot something new for the challenge.*

This flower was made by one of my mother’s little students. It was great fun to shoot this adorable gift.

Just as I was about to post, I read the fine print — it had to be gallery. Bummer! I told my mother I needed more images with orange. And one by one, she brought things for me to click. An Indian tri-color ribbon, a bangle, orange candies — which were also from her students. My mother encourages me in the sweetest ways possible 🙂

This morning, we visited the Mughal Gardens, and there too, she pointed at everything orange. To be honest though, we weren’t very impressed by this year’s flowers.**

And so, for today, I will stick to just one picture. Hope you like it 🙂

Orange origami
A bright neon orange origami gift by my mother’s little student

The Daily Post is painting WordPress town Orange

* Yeah, I cheat most of the time by picking shots I’ve clicked before, and most of the time my posts are drafts waiting to be posted. I just adapt each draft for each challenge!

** The Mughal Gardens are within the President’s Estate — the Rashtrapati Bhawan. The gardens are open for public, free of cost, for one month, every year. Maybe we have very high standards… we Delhi wallahs are spoilt rotten, I tell ya.

Categories
Hobbies

Gift


chocolate
Cute little gift

A little student in my mother’s class brought a gift for her. There was no occasion. But it was out of sheer love for her teacher. As is always the case with us, we admired the packaging more than the content 🙂

Categories
Stories

Recipe for Disaster – Part 1

Bouquet Tarts

Where’s the bucket?

Bouquet Tarts
Anna* and I used to fight like cats and dogs as little kids. Our fights would often get physical, and we’d hurt each other pretty badly. Our mother would patch us up more frequently than she would have liked, and grudgingly we would apologise to each other.

To the outside world, though, the story was entirely different. We were extremely well behaved around guests, and even stood up for each other. In family photographs, we looked like the sweetest sibling combination.

Maybe there was something there that the photographs captured, that we couldn’t comprehend. It was perhaps due to our silly childish stubbornness, that we chose to ignore the obvious. Despite all the petty fights and bashing up, we made one heck of a team – if we wanted to.

It was a week before our parents’ anniversary. I was very small – maybe eight or nine years old. My brother had saved up a little money. I have no idea how,  but that was not of any concern to me. Anna and I went to a local florist, and we chose a beautiful bouquet for them.

On our way back, anna kept the bouquet a little further away from the staircase leading up to our apartment on the first floor. He asked me to go in first.

Our house was seldom locked at the time, and we went in and out of the house without having to disturb anyone to close the door.

My job was to enter first and distract my mother, while anna would come in later and hide the flowers somewhere inside the house. And then we had to wait – till one of them found the hidden gift. It was a perfect plan!

I did my part of the job, and anna did his. So good was the execution of the plan, that even I didn’t know when and how my brother hid the flowers. The hardest part was waiting for the bouquet to be discovered.

And we waited for a long time. I grew fidgety and restless. After what seemed like aeons, when I could no longer control my impatience, I pulled my brother into the kitchen, and asked where exactly he had hidden the gift. In my excitement, I blabbered ‘Where is the bucket?’. He gave me a bewildered look.

‘Where is it – where did you hide the bucket? They haven’t seen it yet!’ I continued, ignoring the strange looks.

He looked past me, and refused to answer. ‘What are you looking at?’

I turned around, and found our mother standing right behind me. She looked down at me, and unable to control herself any more, burst out laughing.

That day went down in our family’s history as the ‘bucket fiasco’ and the source of laughter for years to come.

* Anna is a Tamil word meaning elder brother.

Image based on Photo by Meg Zimbeck CC-BY-2.0