High On Life

In response to Dancing Elephants prompt 50 of 52

Once upon a time, long, long ago, my boys lived at home with us. We took them with us when we went to most places. Holidays and vacations meant the four of us traveled together to hill stations and resorts for a weekend, or the entire week.

Those were interesting times. Both my sons wanted to watch movies all through the night, sleep late, and wake up in the afternoon, or evening, in time for lunch or dinner. Their father wanted to get up early in the morning, (which he never did, back home), and go for a walk, or early breakfast, or sit in one of the shacks on the beach, if we were in Goa. The boys wanted to eat things that scandalized the man. His mother had told him what children should eat, and he knew terrible things would happen if they ventured beyond that pale.

“It is all your fault”, the man said. “It is all your fault”, the boys said. All three of them were convinced that I was responsible for all the friction in some mysterious way.

I was reduced to making excuses about the boys, to the man: and about the man, to the boys. After a point of time, I refused to intervene and agreed wholeheartedly to what each of them said. I allowed them to fight it out, and I sat in the stands, watching them. When I was neither umpire nor referee, the fights stopped, in a remarkably short time.

The very last time they consented to accompany us was on one of my birthdays. We went to a fancy restaurant that my husband had selected. I was exhausted after five consecutive lectures in a class full of teenagers. And I was hungry. Very Hungry.

The man I live with decided that I would have a ‘screwdriver’. I have never had it before and I loved it.

A couple of minutes after sipping on that, I revived, like a wilting flower after summer rain. I sat back in my chair and looked around at all the people in the restaurant. I smiled at whoever caught my eye. Sometimes, I thought of strange things that made me want to giggle. A man on the other side of the restaurant caught my knowing grin and grinned back. The man I lived with turned around to see who I was grinning at, his gaze going from warm to arctic in the space of a second.

The unfortunate diner looked at him: his grin froze, he picked up a glass of water drank from it, and began to choke and cough. The man’s glacial expression relaxed. He turned back to the table, and me. And found that I was not in my place.

I discovered that on every table in the restaurant, there was a beautiful rose in a slim vase. Only the rose on our table was a withered one. I wandered over to the next table, smiled sweetly at the three people seated there, dropped my wilted rose in their vase, picked up the one in their vase, and sailed back triumphantly to our table.

My boys were alternately trying to hide beneath the table, and pretend they didn’t know me. The waiter descended on us swiftly, after darting an apologetic look at the three diners I had deprived of their rose. “May I help you, madam?” he asked frostily. I waved a finger at him playfully. “No, no, thank you”, I said beaming at him, “I wanted a rose, that’s all.” His mouth dropped open and he closed it with a snap, made the smallest of bows to me, and retreated in a hurry.

The man who lives with me wondered whether he should say anything to me, either in censure, or reproof. I looked back at him, smiling beatifically. He decided not to.

My boys, meanwhile, had a hurried and whispered discussion. My eldest son nominated himself spokesperson, and declared, “we just remembered that we have an assignment to turn in tomorrow.”

I said that we had not had dessert yet, but they insisted that they were too full for dessert. I looked at them severely. “How can you be too full for dessert?” I asked them. “I am, too,” the man announced. I glowered at all three of them and wondered whether I should dig in my heels and insist on dessert. It was then that I burped: and that made me giggle so much, I almost fell out of my seat.

The boys looked at their father in desperation and mute appeal. By the time I had stopped giggling, the waiter had materialized at our table with the check, the bill had been paid, and the three men were escorting me back to the car. Our driver looked nonplussed when he saw me: and that made me giggle some more.

That was a decade or so ago. But to this day, my sons look nervous when we go out for lunch or dinner and there’s a rose on any table.

ⓒ 2023 Suma Narayan. All Rights Reserved.

This is a roundabout response to a prompt by Vidya Sury, Collecting Smiles, featured in her story

What I learnt that day, and on other days, is that I am a ‘lightweight’; that I can’t drink anything even lightly alcoholic before I begin to feel warm and happy and gleeful, and as high as a kite. I feel intoxicated by life itself: why would I need a drink? Sometimes I begin to grin even when I see a glass of the usual.

Shoutout to Linda Caroll for this fiercely compassionate piece about kindness, and why kindness would NEVER go out of fashion:

Shoutout, too, to Dr. Gabriella Korosi and this story about making gratitude the most important virtue of our lives:

Ida Adams has written a fun piece about a bench she cared about, on a beach…and what happened to it: