It’s 11:30 p.m. All is quiet in the Insha household. Everyone has been asleep for the past two hours; the husband, the children, the parakeet, the fish, even the teenaged gecko that conveniently resides on the outside of the bathroom window every evening. It is a little early to be in bed for most normal people, especially on a weekend but we, as a family never claimed to be normal. In fact we are as far away from normal as anyone can be. It’s hard to believe that just a few hours ago, this was the same house. One wouldn’t really call it chaotic but it certainly had moments which one could call ‘not very quiet’; the maids in a rush to finish the chores, the driver trying to convince ‘baji’ to give him a little advance from his salary and not to deduct it this month, the daughter demanding lunch at 4 p.m. just as she returned from her guitar class and the salon where she insisted on going for a frightfully expensive haircut and the husband and son playing the deafening ‘Portal 2’ on xbox 360. It was less the commotion and more the condition of the house that was troublesome. Not that it was in a bad shape where one would dread to have people over. It was just the small things that were enough to unnerve a ‘normal’ person like me. As if the fact that I found four rubber bands on the living room floor was not absurd enough I also found my husband’s spectacles under the bed. Every morning he leaves them in the bathroom and I pick them up and put them on the nightstand. How they managed to crawl under the bed is yet another mystery I have to solve. The dining chairs also seem to have a mind of their own. There is a particular spot for each one of them yet every time I see them they are not where I like them to be. God puts us mortals through such tests! As if that was not enough I also realized that there were no apples in the house. It’s not a good day for me if there are no apples in the house. Not to say that I have them all the time, but more often than not you will find some in the fruit bowl either on the coffee table or the dining table. See, apples don’t just serve one purpose. There is more to them than we realize. You eat them; of course you knew that! There is nothing that I like more than apples to munch on. The sweet, crunchy, juicy fruit of heaven! I can live on them! Well, not really but I do love them. If I don’t eat them raw (which I do most of the time), I use them in desserts. The yummy fritters, the divine apple crumble, the cinnamon-flavoured stewed apples and the sweet-smelling apple sauce served with vanilla ice cream. Of course all of these are sinfully delicious but very fattening; so I stick to raw apples most of the time. But this is not it. There is a ritual attached to apples in this house. After I have personally chosen each one, I bring them home and wash them immediately. Then comes the fun part! I take a freshly washed and ironed tea towel and buff them to restore their sheen. Then I lovingly arrange them in a clear glass fruit bowl so that they look picture perfect and they take their place proudly either on my dark wood coffee table or the dining table. Anyways, I was telling you that the house was in too much of a lived-in state for my taste. So I got to work. the first step was getting my husband off the couch and turning off the game. Once that was done, the tough part was over. The kids were not much of an issue; one look at them and they knew what to do. A quick clearing up was all that was required. With the servants given the rest of the evening off, the children settled in peacefully to watch some TV with a snack, the husband convinced to go visit someone who was ill and all non-living objects in the house back to the places where they belonged; the world seemed a place worth living again!
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