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There was an 8-hour power cut yesterday. Curiously enough, I did not feel the need to burn the house down or swear at the fat pigeon that keeps flying into the hall like a moron. The fat pigeon is a very annoying bird. I fail to understand how they used pigeons to send letters in those Raja-Rani days. This one flies in through the lone open window and then flaps around uselessly trying to find an exit. Maybe it thinks it’s in an MGR film where they have one staircase for going up and another for coming down. I then have to strategically open another window while this idioplasthri keeps flying here and there acting like I’m trying to kill it. One of these days, I really am going to have pigeon for lunch.

Sparrows are smarter. There’s this couple that’s trying very hard to build a nest on all the switchboardy electricity things above our dining table. My first reaction was awwwww till M disillusioned me with the idea of bird poop all over the food. There are also some wasps that keep trying to get into the plug points for some strange reason. The beehive in the tree near our balcony is now empty. Sadness. When I first came to this house with my valathu kaal, the hive was full of bee children. Now they’ve all gone. If I’d been Sashi Deshpande, I’d have written a splendid and sordid novel using this one image repeatedly throughout the novel and won the Sahitya Akademi. The bee children would crowd all over the hive and buzz away like bees. When I had to go to the balcony to hang clothes for drying , they always gave me the faint thrill of knowing that I could be attacked, thereby making clothes-hanging a dangerous and delicious experience. I also once saw a long, brown, gleaming beauty of a snake on the ground and screamed safely from the balcony. I’ve never seen that snake again, but I hope to. My everyday friend is the fat moron pigeon though.

I got my Power Cut! author copy (woot, I’m an author, I’m an author, woot) yesterday. It was a very suitable book for the occasion and I showed the thumbs-up to the fat pigeon. It hasn’t come to the shops yet, just the author (yay yay) has received it, so do not immediately book a call taxi and run off to Landmark, children.

Since the power had gone off, I couldn’t work. My laptop’s battery lasts for only twenty minutes. So what I did, I read The Godfather. Then, like a good lady of the house, I boiled all the milk. When M came home for lunch, he told me how to make carrot halwa (M’s true calling in life is cooking). So since there was nothing else to do and all the milk was going to die a rotten death anyway, I decided to try it out.

I bet that at this point, you think you’re going to read about how my carrot halwa got stuck to the pan or how I put off salt instead of sugar or how it was terrible and blah blah.

You are so wrong, children. My carrot halwa turned out to be awesome. It really was. It was the most orangey, yummy carrot halwa ever in the history of the universe. M and I finished it with the melting Mother Dairy vanilla ice-cream in the fridge.

Since I dabaaichufied work yesterday, I have to sincerely dash off a thousand emails now. People must be dying without my Best Regards.

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