Very well kids, as you very well know, your mother and I crossed paths in Madras in the 1990s, when we were both studying MA English, the first time I saw her she was wearing full moon-shaped spectacles and of course, she looked gorgeous, she was typing furiously on her typewriter Rudyard Kipling’s poem “ If’, if I remember correctly. From that moment I understood that her typewriter is her constant companion, like God’s Holy Spirit and like my notebook and pen.
There was this coffee mug beside her, heat entirely dissipated, because your mother has this habit of forgetting her surroundings and getting transported to other worlds, while she is writing, thinking. And I was looking at her, till the vapors in her coffee cup vanished, yet she didn’t even blink her eye in my direction, fully engrossed in her work, and me fully engrossed in my work of reading her!
And everything was silent, except the rotating sound of the long-necked fan, behind your mom, Miss Anna Joseph, there was a big red book that terrified & baffled me: “ John Milton’s Paradise lost’. Oh, the King James English, the language that ends with “th’, “eth’, never had been a big fan of it, and trust me, kids, your mother is a huge fan of my sense of humor, which involves berating King James English!
And suddenly there was a light drizzle outside, and the room is filled and suffused with petrichor, then she looked out not towards me for my disappointment, but towards the window, back again pulled by the rain, into the world of reality we are in.