My son and I are practicing atheists. We believe in being responsible for our own actions and do not think some heavenly body is responsible for our happiness.

Yaya is agnostic, according to her, “I am not saying there is no God and I am not saying there is God” She thinks religion was invented by mankind to blame someone for the miseries, because no one needs a God when things are going well. Her extended essay ( ee) for IB is looking at the fall of Roman empire and rise of Christianity.

My youngest is religious. She truly believes in ‘Jesus Christ died on the cross for sinners’. She attends the religious class at school and argues passionately about Jesus and all he did for mankind.

Dinner time is really fun on Fridays. My youngest has religious lessons on that day and eagerly waits to tell us the ‘true facts’ about Christianity.

I believe in live and let live and that  my children have a right to follow whatever religion they want to. But I can clearly see how the Christian Ministers are working hard to brainwash little children like mine and terrifying them about sin and salvation. I really want to sit down with my child and tell her she got it all wrong and explain to her that religion is the real cause of all human miseries. But I didn’t do that with my son or Yaya. They chose their own path.

Sometimes it is really hard to live and let live..

He is my friend’s second child. My friend and her husband are Ivy league  graduates. Their oldest child is exceptionally brilliant and I know for sure will get admission in one of the Ivy league college.

But the boy is different. He has severe learning disabilities. But what I found absolutely interesting is the way his parents raise him. They raise him exactly  like they raise their oldest child, as normal.

I hired both kids to work as waiters for the party. The boy was in charge of making fruit punch and serving it. I expected the mother to stand next to him and guide him. She didn’t. She trusted him enough to be able to handle his chore all by himself. He did a brilliant job.

His parents know that academically he is not going to get in to an Ivy League. But that didn’t stop them from treating him as a normal human being.

How often we push children who struggle academically because their failure is considered a failure of the parents not doing enough? Wouldn’t it be better to raise your child by encouraging their strengths and accepting their weakness?

After 24 years, I wore the saree that has been with me everywhere I go. I am absolutely certain that I am imagining it, but the saree still has a faint smell of Kouros.

I don’t remember the name of the shop where I bought the saree from, it was very close to Majestic bus station in Bangalore and had marble steps in front. It was the first time we went for shopping together. Two strong willed people coming to an agreement took a long time. I like green colour and only wanted a green colour saree. He liked blue. I also do not like to wear prinited sarees, I prefer plain sarees with a border ( binny silk style). I ended up buying a peacock blue plain silk saree with a silver zari border. I can still see the grin on his face as we left the shop because he got me to buy the blue colour saree and I threatened him and said ” if you don’t stop grinning, I will wear a green colour blouse with the saree” and for which he replied ” you should, you will look like a lovely peacock”

I think that was what I loved the most about Beautiful eyes. He always had an answer that makes you laugh so much.

The trouble is, I am left living with a void that I have tried so hard to fill and sometimes it is just so hard. Sometimes I think how lucky I had been to have known such love, but most days I think how dare he left me alone to grieve like this

It all happened during a drunken night of madness. Few of us were celebrating the end of summer and someone asked What are we going to do about K’s 40th birthday party.? I am a bit sketchy about what happened after that. It turns out that I offered to host the party and we agreed it is going to be a Bollywood theme party.

Hosting a party is no big deal for me, I have always done it. But this one is going to be the most difficult one I have ever hosted. First of all everyone thinks, being of Indian origin, I should be the best to host a Bollywood theme party.

They don’t know that I am a typical oreo..black outside and white inside.

I own one saree, bought 24 years ago. I wore it when we had a party to celebrate end of first year MBBS. I have no Indian jewellery to match with the saree, let alone safety pins to hold it all together.. I am really ashamed to be an Indian, especially because even my friends who have never been to India and have no Indian blood running through their veins has better sarees than I do.  It is really sad that the only Indian among the 40 coming for the party will be the worst dressed 🙁

I have not listened to any Hindi songs since leaving India and I still haven’t got the music sorted.

I still don’t know what to do with decorations. I would have loved to have diyas. But the deck is timber and the nearest  fire station is 20 km away.

I bought colourful muffin cups and am planning to fill it with a mix of murukku and banana chips  and serve as nibbles.

Main course, , I am cooking  nadan erachi curry, butter chicken, gujju style dhal,paneer butter masala, boondi raita, naan and neychoru..

My friend is baking an enormous pink elephant cake ( heffalump)

My children don’t help me with house work. Sometimes when I am tired, I get really annoyed with my children that they don’t help me at all with house work

Yaya told me once when I complained bitterly how mean she is because she doesn’t lift her little finger to do any house work  “Mom, you chose to have us, all these chores are your responsibilities, not mine”.

She was absolutely right and so I continue to do all the work by myself. ( My son does help me with mowing the lawn and Yaya always put the groceries away, but that is all they do)

Last weekend we went to Coffs harbour. Because of my exams, we didn’t go to the beach during summer holidays and I really wanted to go camping and spend time with the kids.

We always make it a point to go to Muttonbird national park and as usual, I was busy vayum nokkifying.. My youngest is a dare devil and she ran ahead. Yaya hates walking.. in fact when we were doing  bush walk, yaya was whining so much that a stranger asked her ” Do you want some cheese with that W(h)ine?”  After2 minutes of walk, Yaya complained that she thinks she is suffering from Altitude sickness.. needless to say, it took a long time for the mother and her forever complaining  child to reach the top of the hill.

This is what I saw.

There stands my son next to his dare devil sister watching over her..it is a 30 foot drop to the ocean from there… My son suffers from severe Osgood Shlatters disease ( growing pain with.knee swelling) and he really would have struggled climbing down the rocks to get to his sister.

When she went too close to the edge I heard him tell her ” Baby, get down” and she listened to her brother.

I guess, I should stop complaining that my children don’t do anything at home. It is not doing the chores that matter.. it is being there for each other that matters the most.

Few days ago, I went to pick up Yaya from her friend’s house ( mother is my best friend).

This is what I saw.

In the guest bathroom, 5 teenagers ( 3 boys and 2 girls) are sitting in the bathtub packed like sardines in a can. The weather is getting pretty chilly and the kids have created a teenage version of sauna. They jump in to the cold pool and swim for few minutes and run back inside the house and sit in bath tub ( hot water running in full steam !) The girls were wearing bikini and there was a lot of skin contact.

I imagined how my mother would have reacted if she was with me. All hell would have broken loose. If I was in Yaya’s place, Amma would have dragged me out, slapped me a few times and I would have been grounded for eternity, all because I sat semi naked next to two guys.

Sometime ago, a cousin of mine wrote to me to ask if she could stay with me while she writes the Australian medical council exam. she did MD in India and got married to a doctor and is desperate to leave India because her mother in law wouldn’t even let her hold her husband’s hand in public. ( apparently cinema style alla jeevitham)

Why are Indians behaving like this? What will happen if you make a body contact with the opposite sex. It is not like sperm could swim through the skin and impregnate you.

And why can’t a wife hold her husband’s hand in public? What has movies got to do with that?

My friend ( the lawyer) told me to shut up  and I am still a bit shaken.

It is the same guy who told me that I am an awesome mother, so when he told me to shut up, it really affected me.

A bit of history. My mother loves maidenhair fern and during a trip to Ikea, I found drinking glasses with maidenhair fern design and bought them. Yaya broke the 5th one when my friend was home and looked visibly upset. I have never scolded my children for breaking something and don’t see the need for them to be terrified of something so trivial.

I told her ” Yaya, the 6th one will be very sad without its mama and papa and brothers and sisters, so you should break it too” Obviously my comments cracked her up and she was back to her cheerful self and helped me clean up the mess. My friend told me : “you really are an awesome mother” and my head grew few sizes big.

For dinner, I decided to make Russian cabbage rolls ( another one of my son’s favourite food ). But before that, I was already annoyed with my son. His room was a mess and he didn’t rinse the plates and cups and put in the dish washer, instead he just chucked everything in the sink. He also left his shoes in the hallway and I almost tripped on it. I didn’t want to go after my son in front of my friend and lose my halo.

When dinner was served, my son saw that I made cabbage roll, he came and hugged me and said ” Mom, thank you for always making something nice for dinner, I really appreciate it”

For which, I with a halo replied ” No, you don’t, you left the dirty dishes in the sink, you left your shoes in the hallway, you room is a mess, you don’t care how much I struggle” and so it went.

Then I head these words ” shut up Sarah, you really don’t know how to take a compliment”

There was only one word to describe my feeling at the moment. ‘stunned’, No one has ever told me to ‘shut up’

And I realized what my friend said is really true. I think years of living in India where you are taught to be a fake when it comes to compliments is still ingrained in me. I remember wearing a new saree and  a friend asked “is it new” my answer was ” No, it is very old” or if someone tells me ” you look gorgeous” the answer was always “nah, you need new glasses”.

All I had to say to my son was” you are absolutely welcome” and perhaps I could have got a bit more mileage by adding  “You mean the world to me and I enjoy cooking your favourite meal”

So like Gwyneth Paltrow, I am now consciously uncoupling my Indian “fake” responses to compliments.

The past few days I have been busy doing a spring (rather autumn) cleaning and went through a lot of my children’s school work that they brought home at the end of every term. I didn’t throw them out right away as I am supposed to because I wanted to read their work and amassed a huge collection of work and felt if I don’t go through them, it will only grow bigger.

My children often don’t show me their assignments and I don’t think there is anything wrong with it, but I really like to read what they wrote, for it shows me their thought process.

I found this among my son’s school work. I am not sure when he wrote it, I assume it is grade 6 or 7.

Those who grew up in India in the early 1990’s will remember MTV vj David Wu (man) playing this song over and over. I loved the song so much that I recorded the same song on one side of a 60 minute tape ( the other side had Sacrifice by Elton John), so I didn’t have to rewind the tape to listen to it. In fact when Amma was here and the song came on the radio and she told my children ” your mom’s song”.

I remember playing this song often when I gave birth to my youngest. My son was 22 months old then. I certainly haven’t played this song after we left Penang because CD’s were becoming more popular and I gave away all the music tapes to our driver.  My son was three when we left Penang.

I am touched by the fact that of all the songs he could have picked, he picked the one song that was really meaningful. I am also terrified of the impact of my role as a mother. If a song that I used to play when he was 22 months old made such a huge impact on my son, what about all my other actions? Have I been a good mother?

PS:My apologies,  I know the photo can only be enlarged to be able to read on a smart phone. Anyone knows how I can post it, so everyone will be able to read it?

As I mentioned before, I host a tea party once a week for my elderly women neighbours. It started purely as a selfish motive from my part. I needed the presence of a mother figure in my life and a grandmother for my children. It started off with two and now grown to 18.

Last weekend, I met Edna ( not her real name). She stays 4 blocks away from my place and heard about the Sarah’s Mad hatters party ( Thelma named it ) and decided to come and check it out.

To be frank, I have never met a person like Edna. To start with, she is 91 years old and visits Australia every year to stay with her son. She grew up in a farm in South Africa and only studied till 9th standard and reads medical journals for fun. She  survived 4 major cancers, the first of which was breast cancer in 1957 and underwent radical mastectomy. ( Surgery has advanced so much since then and they don’t mutilate a woman’s body like they did in 1957)

It was not her medical history that fascinated me the most. While we were talking, she mentioned losing the family farm that has been in her family for 6 generations to the black people few years ago. She talked about how the new owners chopped all the fruit trees that her grand parents and great grand parents planted for firewood. What surprised me the most was there was not a tinge of bitterness in her voice.

I asked her how did she cope with seeing the destruction of her family farm and she replied, “you can’t stop tides of change, but you can learn to live with it”

When my father cut the jackfruit tree my grandmother planted years ago for  timber, I felt murderous. I still do. Perhaps Edna was right,  I really can’t stop the tides of change and I should stop fretting and accept the change.

It is the rich tapestry of life, all these women weave that makes my life beautiful.

Long weekend..3 more sleeps before I can open the bottle of vodka. See you all on Tuesday.

Quick question. Does any one know how to make pezhaha appam? My great grandmother used to make it every Pezhaha. It was unleavened, steamed and had cashews and raisins on top.