Boredom?

Growing older one realises that one has lesser things to do. Work no longer is that headlong tip into tasks, chores at home are easygoing chums of old. Travelling could have been a pain, but I am fortunate to walk home from work, collecting the veggies for dinner and dawdling in the pani-puri queue for an occasional snack as I trudge back. Workouts are shorter than what they ought to be but longer than what one would like them to be. Television has long been banished from Pat's kingdom so it is the desultory web-radio, usually tuned to BBC - the plumminess now giving way to a bewildering mix of accents and flexions. And of course the library.

Yet there is more time to spare than ever before. I know I potter round the kitchen more than I would like to and read even though the book demands to be laid aside. However, I do not feel bored. Thoughts and memories fill my senses - a thread of an incident unravelled with the help of recollections and imagination, or a vague feeling of having heard a tune somewhere, and then humming it in various combinations to see where it fits to an existing song. Suddenly I'm awakened from these warm, slumberous cogitations by the clanging of the doorbell or the ring of the mobile - only to realise with a start that the shadows have lengthened and the darkening evening is sending chill breeze and ravening mosquitoes through the window with equal impartiality. Thus is a Saturday woven with idle dreams.

Unless, of course, if there is a 'plan' - then it's the helter-skelter of a movie, or a mall or the company of friends in smoky cheer and sparkling spirit. If I have to be honest, I must say that I love the languorous afternoons, curled with a book, a bowl of amla, some dhana daal and saunf (with maybe a box of Rajnigandha?), a packet of sharply spicy cinnamon sticks, maybe some home-made chivda or just plain muri within grabbing distance from my hand and the rich tones of the chaps at Bush House rolling away at the back somewhere - ah! Bliss!