The Evolution - Part 2

I managed to fill in the rest somehow. However, it might have a serious tone to it from the last part owing to me being not a child anymore. So read on :

13 Yr:    I found myself looking at the mirror more often than once each day and started to wonder if I was pretty or fat or ugly or thin. I loved listening to Backstreet boys, Spice girls and Westlife. I even used to collect posters of singers. It was also my last year in Bahrain, I cried when I left my school and moved to India.

14 Yr:    Had a tough time coping with the education system, school, food, life and everything. I could never have imagined anything worse than this happening to me. I found the world to be not so much of a nice place like I imagined. Gibson laughed at my school uniform  and my double braided hair ( it looked like a dog's ears for him). He told he’s going to join some better school but in 2 months time he joined my same school.

15 Yr:    Life was getting more bearable, I was getting really close to my sister. I enjoyed being with my friends and bunking tuition. I cut my waist-long hair till my shoulders for the first time in my life. I also started talking in Tamil more fluently.

16 Yr:    I wondered if I should go to Chennai for college after my boards. Everyone was going there and my brother was also calling me there. This was the part of my life where I fell in love with a person who I was going to be glued with for the rest of my life- yes my husband. The love-life looked all easy and filmy- the chocolates, the smiles, the hushed-up phone talks, the gifts.

17 Yr:    I joined a college here because of Dan who wanted me to study with him. Even my close friend Ranjana joined me. I suffer immensely during my first year and ended up having an arrear, sleeping in class, firing from the lecturers but the next semester I get the hang of it. At this point of life I come to know about dark things in the world and wonder if all this could be really true.

18 Yr:    I started sharing my sorrows with my sister and we bonded like anything. I go for occasional visits to Vellore for my mother’s treatment. In CMC Vellore I see the crowds of sick and handicapped and understand the value of good health God gave me. I started to wish the next 2 years would fly real fast so that I can finish college and go for work.

19 Yr:    I got placed in TCS and I thought everything is going to be awesome in future. I knew there was only one more year left and I could finally do something I wanted too. My sister applied for a college in Chennai. I cried because I missed her a lot.

20 Yr:    Tuticorin is all I could remember as I did my final year project here. I learnt to catch buses, get toasted under the merciless sun, share a bed with 5 girls, wait in queue to go to the loo and come exhausted home. Finally, all goes well and I become an engineer. I also missed my college life  a little.

21 Yr:    My better-half wanted us to get married so we struggled and suffered and we finally got hitched. I thought marriage was a bed of roses like in the big screen but soon I realized it wasn't exactly like that as it comes with a add-on package of ‘responsibility’. The first few months were the hardest but we made it through thick and thin.

22 Yr:    I master the art of cooking with few incidents of burning my hand, cutting my hand, opening the pressure cooker with steam inside, salt-filled food, hot-oil creaming over me and burnt-food. I also start to hold fishes, chicken, meat without wanting to throw up. I also truly understood the pain of losing someone precious to my heart when my dad passed on.

23 Yr:    Today, I am balancing life between family and work. I have the most remarkable husband who gives me so much freedom, a caring mother with her helping hand, awesome siblings who no matter what will stand by my side and generous-hearted friends who would do anything to see me happy. I understand now that the good people are not that good and the bad ones are really not that bad. I know that people can be the worst judges most of the time and the world can be cruel, but I also know that amidst all this I can truly learn to be happy and that somewhere down the lane I might be able to look back at all this and have a wonderful story to tell.

The Evolution - Part 1

I would be completing another victorious year of my life soon. I just thought I might pen down all the wonderful years which made me who I am today. Since the post is long I thought I'd write it as two parts, the first being this and the next one after a while. I scribbled only the first thing that came into my head at each year else I would need an entire book to fill. So here goes:

1 Yr:    I really don't remember what happened. When I was 1 year old I probably wanted to learn to walk properly or wondered why people were all being nice to me.

2 Yr:   When I was 2, my parents always played with me and cuddled me. I also noticed they did the same with my brother, who by the way was elder to me by just a year. I was also applauded for my extraordinary skills of calling my dad ‘appa’ and my mom ‘amma’.

3 Yr:   At 3 I found myself exploring the house, being stuffed with lots of milky cereals and putting unwanted things in my mouth- which of course was forcefully extracted out by my mother. I was also caught red-handed by a mean looking aunty for stuffing bread in between suitcases and sofa cushions; at this point my mom was at the hospital welcoming my sister into the world.

4 Yr:    4 was the year, when I was closer with my brother as we went to the same tuition for learning the alphabets. We both hated the teacher because she gave us lesser play time and kept asking us to write numbers and letters. She had a plastic scale too, that was never used for drawing lines on books instead  she used to seal temporary lines on our backs and hands.

5 Yr:    During my 5th year, I joined school landing in 1st grade directly. I felt alone and I missed sitting at home and watching cartoons. I never made friends easily. I also remember Gibson bringing all the stray cats, pigeons home and my mom chasing him and the animals out with a silver kitchen spoon.

6 Yr:    I moved onto the next grade, loved playing with the battery cars at home, my Minnie mouse and the small blue tub where our mom used to bathe all 3 of us. My dad always got me a strawberry ice-cream cone when Gibson and Gulbsy got a vanilla.

7 Yr:    I had a cycle with 4 wheels (2 on the side to help me balance). When ants used to die in my house, me and my brother used to kneel and pray to God to bring them back to life. The next morning we used to wonder why God never did that.

8 Yr:    Studies were getting harder, I took a decision not to marry because boys were tagged 'yucky' by my fellow girl classmates. I was the teacher, my brother was the banker and my sister was the customer cum student in our pretence games. We made sure we had the better roles because we were elder. Gibson also had a gang named ‘the hart foundation’ which was dedicated to our favorite wrestler from WWE- Bret the hitman hart. Gibson fought dangerous gang fights after we got down from our school bus with other supposedly dangerous gangs. I made sure I was always present to cheer for my brother.

9 Yr:   I was Mother Mary in our church play. Some boy was Joseph, I was embarrassed because all the kids made fun of us. I resolved to be Angel Gabriel or Elizabeth the next year. Secretly, me and my brother put dead rats on the entrance to our neighbor's door and made their mean kids scream. Noone messed with us. We were rewarded at night with spoon marks on our back by our dad. We understood at that point  they complained.

10 Yr:  We got our first family game; Gibson liked to shoot ducks while I liked playing Mario. Gulbsy always saved her candy for me from school. I still liked Gibson and thought her cheap ways of saving candies to win me needed to be improved, though I did eat the candy. I was Mother Mary this year too. Sigh.

11 Yr:   I started trying to be cool at school which did not turn out very well. I did study well and always ended up in the first 5 ranks. This did me no good in making me ‘cool’.  Gulbsy wrote in her bible, “I love Gibsy so much but I don’t know why she doesn’t love me”. I am not impressed.

12 Yr: I met my sweetest friend Sabeena. She had an amazing voice. I also started talking on the phone a lot for the first time. This time it was not only about subject doubts but included class gossips and movies. I had come for a vacation to India and I never wanted to step foot in it again.