Reading Buddies!

My mother, well, it’s hard to say much about her… mostly because, there is so much to be said in the first place, it would be a very fat book, and yes the pun is very intentional if you know her. Ever since I’ve known her, the last 22 years, give or take 9  months, she’s been juggling just one or two things too many, and getting bye, with an élan that would put ‘happy go lucky’ to shame. She has always known how to enjoy the smaller pleasures of life, maybe that’s why she chucked me out of the house, once I grew up a little – Not small, not pleasure! Okay, I’m being charitable to myself, but then this story isn’t about me.

The story is in part about my mother, but only partially, all of her wouldn’t fit in a story in the first place. The rest of the story? Well, it’s about a tree, a saree, a patio, a chair, and a reptile. Quite a strange cast for a story about maternity isn’t it? Well, perhaps the only thing stranger is that it’s true.

Mother enjoys reading, or perhaps I should use the past tense, thanks to the tv. However, back in Bhutan, in the little village we lived in then, there was no tv, except on weekends when communal screenings of Mahabharat were held… mother would squeal everything Bhishma pitamah came on stage. He does have a thing for older men! Waaaaaaay older… On days that were not Sunday, and on hours that Mahabharat wasn’t playing, she’d entertain herself differently. From baking to washing clothes to beating up her children for leaving the soap out of place, she’d come up with something or the other to do.

Her favourite way to spend lazy summer afternoons though, was to read. Perhaps to explain why reading was so enjoyable, I’d have to explain, firstly there wasn’t facebook or youtube back then! Also, our house was a little cottage, on a hillside, surrounded by a stream on side, a blackberry hedge on the front, an embankment next to a foot ball pitch on the other side, and almost virgin forest to the rear. The boundaries of our yard and gardens were far enough from the house to allow for a considerable amount of space. Dad had rose garden with some prize rose bushes, there was a huge pine tree, that tried to lord it over the fig. We also had a conifer, that shot up straight into the sky, almost forgetting for the first few metres that it needed leaves and branches too. We called it a criptameria… But I haven’t heard of another tree from that species. But the crowning jewel was the patio. A stone paved square outside our front door, with a rock garden next to the house, from the pinnacle of which grew a bougainvillea that during the spring turned not just itself, but the whole roof of the house a vibrant magenta. On the opposite side of the patio was a peach tree.

It was in these peachy surroudings that our story takes place. My mother would sit under the canopy of the merging branches of peach and bougainvillea in a cane chair and read. Quite often immediately after returning from the college she taught chemistry at. The work is the reason for the saree, she always wears sarees to work… She would sit under the tree, with the wind whispering random things in the leaves, and open a book, whatever the book might be, and read.

But for our story, there is a particular saree I have in mind, it was blue, a sort darker sky blue, with large floral prints all over it. I remember it quite well, though I was quite small at the time, because it was the first time I identified a daisy. It grew on her saree! And all over the rest of the college, but somehow the only place I recognised it was her blue saree. So one day as she sat reading some book, in the front patio, quite oblivious to the rest of the world, out story happened.

Something fell on to her head. Since gravity had long since been worked out, the fact of something falling on her head didn’t precipitate(she did teach chemistry after all), a discourse on gravity, but mild annoyance. Whatever it was, didn’t remove itself, and was quite heavy, so after while, she reached up with her hand, and brushed the top of her head, she felt something rough, slightly scaly, and a claw, as she dislodged whatever it was from her head.

Slightly perturbed but content that she had averted the danger she settled back down. As happens often on summer afternoons she dozed off at some point. When she woke up, she had this odd feeling that all was not right in the world. Not the large premonition associated with the end of days, but the subtler sensation of misplacing your car keys, when you’ve forgotten that you don’t own a car in the first place. Assuming it would pass she returned to her book, hoping no one had noticed her doze off. Apparently it would have embarrassed her, something she seemed to forget when relating the incident to me later. Perhaps she didn’t think I’d put into a story!

A few moments later, when the unease didn’t dissipate but settled down to a neglectable degree of perturbation, she decided to investigate. The house looked the same, no random tornadoes had carried it off. The stream was still tinkling somewhere behind her, and trees didn’t seem to have moved either. Hmm… what could it be then, she turned her attention to herself, there was definitely something amiss with her person. Slowly she zeroed in on the cause for her discomfort. That was it, her head felt oddly heavy, like there was something on it.

Once more she gently reached up, brushed something scaly from her head, there was no recistence of any kind to her brushing away of the scaly visitor, and somehow she didn’t find it a cause for concern to have a strange reptilian thingy sitting on her head. Most ladies I know, would have jumped up screaming and shut themselves indoors for the rest of the evening, but not my mother. She returned to her book with a stoicism Brutus would have been proud of.

A few minutes later, she felt the soft thud of something dropping on her head again, seemingly quite deliberately this time. Without much hesitation this time, she reached up to brush whatever it was away again. This time though she looked over at fell from her head. Her crown was a flashy green thing, with an enormously long tail. As she followed the wiggling tail up towards the body, she made out what it was- a chameleon.

Satisfied that it wasn’t much to be alarmed at. Chameleon’s are actually quite harmless, she sat back to read, I’m assuming she wasn’t reading the same page over and over, but it’s quite possible she was. After a while, the sensation of something dropping onto her head repeated itself. This time she was quite exasperated, and in an impatient gesture brushed him off. Only to feel him drop again on her head a few minutes later.

This time she didn’t bother to brush him off, and instead just settled down to read her book. 

When I found her later that afternoon, she was dozing in her chair, her hair strangely flat on her head, with a lump poking up from its parting.

“Mom,” I said, completely unmindful that I was disturbing what must have been a terribly comfortable sleep, “wake up, mom.”

“Oh ah hi beta,” she said, as her eyes flickered open, “what happened.”

“Nothing” does a 5 year old kid need an excuse to disturb his mother?

“Okay…” She seemed a little confused about what to say next.

More to fill the void than anything else, I asked her what had happened to her head.

“Nothing it’s fine.”

“But there’s a bump on it.”

“Really?” She reached up and once more brushed her guest off his throne. I watched quite stupefied as he scuttled off, his body raised on his front legs, with an affronted wobble to his body, as if to say, “hmph, it wasn’t that comfy anyway lady!”

I was still standing there perplexed. “Oh that was a chameleon, he was sitting on my head.” I knew that much, what I didn’t understand was why. Why was a chameleon sitting on my mother’s head as she dozed on our patio? “He must have thought I’m a flower, in this saree, and come to catch some insects when they came near me…”

A chameleon was using my mother as bait? I still have difficulty coming to terms with that one. Imagine what his fishing rod would look like… “but ma, he was on your head.”

“Oh it’s okay beta, he was keeping away all the flies and mosquitoes, it’s quite alright, they’re harmless, and he didn’t do anything to me.”

The chameleon became a bit of a fixture on my mother’s head after that, specially when she wore her blue flower bed saree. Their symbiosis not only is the strangest collaboration I’ve ever witnessed, but also rendered me completely incapable of distaste for reptiles. It also serves as quite a lesson to the rest of humanity, about one-ness with nature, or some such tosh!

Why bring that up you ask? Well I had to find an excuse to write a story about this whole thing, or how would anyone notice me? It’s not like I walk around with a chameleon on my head!