Strange Connections

Who is she to you?, that's what a lot of you have asked me. Frankly, I too wonder the same. Many an hour I have pondered over it as I sipped several tall glasses of ice-tea and stared at the green patch that reluctantly rolls out on the small terrace garden overlooking her room.

It's not really her room. It was just another room in my house till one day she kinda slept over and then on it just became her room. It now has so much of her stuff that I cannot imagine anybody else claiming that room to be theirs.

Her room can be accessed directly from the street. There is a spiral staircase that leads from the driveway to the terrace garden and from there to her room. Some nights she gets into her room from there and I realise she is back only the next morning when she walks lazily down for some breakfast. I would be sitting at the table in the kitchen, with a cup of coffee, a bowl of cereals and some fruit, reading the newspaper and she would gently creep up from behind, plant a tiny kiss on the top of my head and reach for a fruit. Sometimes instead of reaching out for a fruit she would instead gently rub my shoulders while both of us read the newspaper open in front of us, her warm breath tickling my ears.

Generally both of us treasure the morning silence and its takes a lot for either of us to disturb it. So we would continue like this till one of us would, with a wave of the head, indicate to the other that breakfast was over.

She loves to fiddle with her hair and would often wind a strand around her finger, starting at the bottom and going all the way up till her finger would jam against her head. I have always found this habit of hers mildly irritating and many a times I have gently tapped her finger to make her stop. She would invariably pout and very reluctantly let go of her hair.

She read somewhere that chewing a gum was an effective way to keep her teeth clean and thereon she became a fanatic gum chewer. I would carry bits of paper in my pocket and pass her one whenever she wanted to get rid of the wad in her mouth. She understood my need for cleanliness but that kind of stopped at her door. Once inside she would pull out the gum and merrily stick it anywhere out of her sight. These would eventually harden into dried pips and I always thought they looked like small microphones put in by some sinister undercover agent. Every once in a while when she was not in her room I would don a hat, put on some gloves and pretend I was some sort of a spy sent out to 'debug' the room. I would tiptoe around looking into all the nooks and crannies and let out a whoop every time i found one of them 'microphones'. In the beginning I used to have great fun and would easily spend an hour looking for the pips but now I know all the little places where she is likely to stick her gum and can clean the place up inside of ten minutes.

Some evenings when she is home we would sit in the living room and play a board game or solve the Scrabble or just laze and listen to the Hi-Fi. Sometimes while listening to the music she would slide up and snuggle into my shoulders. When that happened, she would always shiver a bit and I would gently hug her hoping to drive away the devils inside her. We both like to listen to the music with our eyes closed and every once in a while she would doze off and I would have to lug her all the way up to her room and tuck her in. I don't sleep much, so often I would pull up a chair and watch her sleep. These were the only times both of us were in her room together and I would get this desperate urge to hug her. But invariably I would just walk out and go to my room downstairs and catch up on some work.

Often she goes away for many days, sometimes on some project, sometimes just to be on her own and I would wait for her to return. If the waiting got too long and I was missing her then I would often go to her room and soak in her presence, sometimes I would slip into her bed and just lie there, mind blank. Once I lay like that the whole night and in the morning she walked in. She saw me lying in her bed and she had this amused smile on her face as if she had caught me doing something very naughty.