I was pestering my daughter for the past ten days , to trace a jacket missing from my wardrobe.
‘It’ll be somewhere, dad!’
‘Somewhere means, where ? I have searched the entire house’.
‘It’s warm outside. Why worry about warm clothes now?
‘If it suddenly turns cold?’
‘You have a dozen jackets in your wardrobe’
‘If a thief had entered the house and took away my jacket?’
‘No thieves here and if one enters, he has better things to carry away’
‘I want my jacket. It was gifted to me by Poornima’
‘Ok, wait till Saturday. I’ll search, Appa’
Today is Saturday. Soon after up from the bed, I asked Aparna, ‘Konthai, did you find my jacket?’
‘Yes, Appa. Here it is. It was on a sofa in our patio’
‘Which idiot kept it there?’
‘No one except you, goes near the pool, as the water is cold. You sit on the bank and watch the moving water in the fish-less pool’
‘Moving water in the fish-less pool
Takes me back, on my way to school
Paddy fields on both sides with water
We jump into, with shrieks of laughter’
Aparna has better works to attend, than enjoying my poetry.
But I had no other work.
So, thought about my Chamikutti athimbar’s anxious moments when his thorthumundu, short towel, was missing . He said he had, after his bath, put it for air drying on a string in the veranda.
He asked everyone whom he came across, searched in the hall, kitchen, everywhere but the damn thorthumundu was not to be seen.
I noticed a piece of cloth, hanging from the hip of an aunt, tagged to her ocher cloth.
‘Oh, isn’t it athimbar’s torthumundu. How did it come to you? ‘
‘Camukkutti gave me ‘, was her cool reply.
‘But Periammai, aunt, athimbar said he had put it for air drying and is searching in and out of the house!’
‘Mookkupodi jaasthi eattiruppan- rough meaning- he would have inhaled an overdose of snuff’, was her confident reply.
I don’t use snuff. I don’t smoke. But moving water in a fish-less pool makes me forgetful.