Of feet :)

After many days I feel like writing something random, so all ye 'random lovers' welcome aboard!

You know how it often is..ow when you try to catch hold of time and stretch it and make it last longer, the exact opposite happens..time flies and the more you try to slow it the faster it slips from your clutched fingers.

I have been trying to do the same.

I have been trying to stop time, trying to make memories, trying to learn faces, places, smells, touch.
I have often wondered who the one person I love the most and cannot live without is . Funnily enough, these are two different people in my case. I love my brother the most and it is my mother I cannot manage without.

I was a year and a day old when I became the elder child of the family, my brother was born a day after my first birthday. So, Ma suddenly had two very young kids to put to sleep. She would pat my brother to sleep with her hands and would use her feet to pat me to sleep.
That probably explains the immense love I have for her feet. I never sleep next to her, I always sleep next to her feet. The entire bed might be empty but it her feet next to which I would crawl to and find my heaven on earth.

My mother has the most unglamorous feet. Her toes are thin and have been kinda shriveled up ever since I can remember. She is, in fact most embarrassed about her feet, but I really do not find anything more calming than placing my palm or even my face against what are amongst the most non good looking pair of feet on this planet.

It is so unhygienic also! I mean Ma's feet do not have to be clean for me to place my cheeks against her feet. My father, a doctor, has regular heart attacks when he sees me do this, but how can explain to him the peace, the quiet I feel when I do that.

I remember coming back tired from college during Btech, Ma would be sitting on a chair and I would simply sit on the floor next to her , next to her feet and I would start feeling better.

I come from a family where my Mother always wanted her children to not blindly ape the West. Which is probably why I have never had a single 'western' type birthday. Yeah, I am soooo many many years old and yet I have never cut a birthday cake!

Her dream was to have a daughter who could on one hand speak the 'fluentest' of English and would on the other never be embarrassed to touch an elder's feet when she met him while in a mall with friends. So, I have been trained that way.

Touching of feet is a very serious issue in my family. I cannot imagine not immediately bending down to touch a relative’s feet no matter where I see him/her; in college, in school, in a mall, with friends whatever! I see a relative and I obediently bend down to ask for their blessings while my uber cool friends gasp in horror!

Training has to start at home. Each night before I go to bed, I touch both my Mother and Father's feet.
Each night.
Without fail.
Both of us, my brother and I do this.
It is now mainly a habit I cannot let go of. If supposing I forget to touch their feet, I will simply not be able to sleep. I mean just before I am about to like really fall asleep I would wake up and remember that I have not!!

Ma's take it this. Apart from the fact that it is a part of our culture, she says it is important, for success, to be able to bend in front of people, at times. Touching of feet, at least in one way, is all about bending, right?
Hehee

Yes, it is not very cool these days to do this, relatives is may be a bit all right, but parents, both of them, each night, that certainly is very uncool..but aaah..well..thats the way it is and if some day I have a child to bring up, she[preferably]/he[*sigh*] would be doing the same.

It will be funny to not be in my room in 20 odd days' time. It will be funny to not have Ma and Papa there in person.
These days I try to fall sleep while they are still moving about, I like the feel of Ma and Pa being around and awake . I like the sound of Harsha Bhogle's commentary as some how I associate cricket with Papa.I am at times so hopelessly trying to memorise evry tiny detail that it gets claustorphobic.

I will miss touching their feet at night.
I will also miss the 'Kush raho beta' which is in its own quiet way one of the most comforting and familiar phrases I have ever heard.

Gunite.
RP