Ma behen and all that jazz.

It is one of those sticky hot afternoons when you don't really have anything to do and you cant even sleep because its so damn hot. I remember Patna during the summers. This was before I bore the brunt of humidity ruling over my life. Before I had had the experience of living in Calcutta/Bombay. The time when I hated the idea of an afternoon nap. For me, afternoons were meant for treasure hunts. In that big dark house in Patna, treasure hunts were not that difficult to organize. I would be all alone, since all the other members in the family were either fast asleep or watching "Shanti" on TV, I would slip away to the gol baranda, which was not exactly a room, neither a balcony, you could call it an inner balcony of sorts. It was a storeroom for paper. All kinds of paper. From long forgotten medical files to just abandoned exercise books to grocery bills to the weird orange coloured "Economic Times" stash of newspapers.

I would sit there for hours leafing through the stuff, sad that it would soon be given away to raddiwala. I have this thing for paper. I just hate the idea of throwing away paper. So therefore you might as well just find inside my otherwise pink glossy handbag, some very ugly brown wrapping paper remnants.

It is on one such afternoon, that I first came across the word "ejaculation". I Was thinking of asking my father the meaning. Just that he wasn't there in the afternoon so I had to resort to the dictionary. I did thank God afterwards.

So it was then that I did not know what I was missing by not having an afternoon nap. I was missing the following:

1. my mother's physical proximity. As in getting to sleep near her. The smell of Pond's cream.
2. The drone of the big, steel colored water cooler which could easily pass off as a refrigerator due to its hugeness. The smell of the water cooler.
   
3. The absence of humidity.
4. the pleasure of it all. Afternoon nap. A cool room in an old house with rickety windows and a cooler-refrigerator with its drone.
   

So now I sit here. Roasting away, sweating away, not able to sleep and no Pond's cream to smell either.