1. The Curious Case of a Pink Jacket

Somewhere in the suburbs of Gurugram Lollita let out a long, soulful sigh that unsettled and tickled her Trishul nose-stud into opening its Eye. Lollita’s kohl-smudged eyes looked through the lens that was her fettered French window. Arresting her gaze was the grand Gulmohar, frilled in full-blooded feistiness, a blood-thirsty redness, as Spring gasped for breath and sighed its last in the blazing arms of this harshest and hungriest of summer.

Lollita was hard put to fathom what it was that the contact lenses of her mind’s eye were staring at. Was this the most unforgiving of Summer swallowing the most unsuspecting and unarmed Spring of hope? Was this the uncommonest of times for the commonest of dreams?

The asymmetrical attractiveness of Lollita’s face was plastered with the pallor of a peculiar paste. The smallness of her elfin ears was suffering a sensory overload from an orchestra of shrillness emanating from the heart of the house. The unmanicured unkemptness of her tapering fingers toiled away at her Work In Progress on the ThinkPad, between bouts of her battery recharging she indulged in through the sheer curtains of day dreaminess.

Driving her daydreaming in these digital times, defined by Bucket Lists, Big Basket Lists, or Big Bazaar Lists to Swiggy-Zomato wishlists and such sundry business-of living inanities, were more of surreal lists.

The elusive B-Lists.

Perched near Lollita, upon the condo’s caged windowsill, her queen cat, ‘Bholi Punjabban’, aka Iraa Singh, peered curiously at a creature, resplendent in royal plumage, prancing on the Gulmohar. This solitary summer tree’s bejewelled boughs, brimming forth crimson couture from between their condo’s concrete high-rises, looked like Tabasco oozing out of a Subway sandwich.

Bholi Punjabban’s cocked calico ears and piercing peargreen pupils were all agog at who was this majestic migrant gambolling upon the Gulmohar. Her snooty nose sniffed the air as if to ascertain why no neighbourhood folks were trooping out to toss the customary grains under the gigantic

Gulmohar, why there were scarcely any pigeons promenading near their patio for her to long and lust after.

Wafting towards the windowpane was a decibel-ism that made Lollita reflect at the peculiar paradox. What was it that the feather-fragile filters of her senses and sensibilities were finding more unsettling—the squeaking on the small screen or the silently stifling stranglehold of this unprecedented season?

A voice on the Idiot Box dripped swag as much as swagger. It caterwauled with war-like emergency on one of the channels which made up the Theatre of the Absurd that was tamasha TV.

“Black Friday. . .Black Friday. . .We have a new enemy. . .Black Fungus!” the bloke babbled out the Breaking News. On another channel, another voice prattled. Much in the manner of a rapper Himesh Reshammiya or Honey Singh ululating to higher octaves, stuck and stranded there, unable to lull the lungs to a lower pitch. The only difference, this particular piercing vocal cord was not rapping, it was rasping.

“The Nation wants to know. . . Will we flatten the curve? The Nation wants to know. . .when can we flatten the curve?”

Unsettled by this ‘Flatten the Curve’ telly narrative, she shifted self-consciously on the EMI-funded extravagance that was her chic chaise lounge. Lollita’s right hand unwittingly inched guiltily to an alarming curve. It strayed and stayed for a second, subconsciously stroking this curve’s convexity. The mid-anatomical curve as convex as an idli fluffing up to bloatedness. Disquieted and disconcerted, Lollita’s hand hastily twitched back towards her ThinkPad.

“Fatten the Curve, sounds more like it,” she mumbled, sinking into the cushiness of the chaise lounge. Her hand, too, plunged, dipping into her comfort food—Aloo Bhujia—an excess of which could partly be blamed for the protuberance popping above her pyjamas.

“Enough of this jibber-jabber about ‘Flatten the Curve’, better treat myself to the newest on Netflix!” Lollita pledged purposefully as she patted her plastered face that was now pricking. The pale paste had dried up and resembled a parched Mother Earth whose skin, in a horribly harsh summer, creases into a crowdedness of cracks. The oxidised, ‘Trishul’ nose-stud, the flag-bearer on the landscape that was her asymmetrically alluring face, was bestirred by this air of determination bouncing out of her nostrils. It quivered into the ‘Chali’ dance mudra.

Lollita reached out for the television remote on her mantlepiece. The sudden sweep of her hand unsettled a piece of her framed Past. It crashed into the encroaching paraphernalia from the Present.

A mahogany mantlepiece. An intricate ivory inlay-work antique chest of drawers, a Hoshiarpur-crafted heirloom of haveli living from her great-grandmother. A solid legacy but heavy to shoulder. An asymmetrical ornate oddity, tottering on its last legs with one wobbly taped-up limb, in an apartment dressed in the minimalism of modern condo living.

A mantlepiece that was a monument to gilt-edged milestones, filtered through memory’s maple leaves mapping faded seasons, making up the four decades of her lifetime. Portraits from a golden childhood with parents long since gone, a giggly girlhood of them three siblings in polka-dotted and pig-tailed chubbiness long since outgrown. Frames that clocked the growing up from girlhood to a yummy mummy-hood. Of cradling her son to adulthood. Frames that were Canon chroniclers of loves lost. Of happier times with her former spouse.

A mantlepiece that was a miniature museum crowded with curios and collectibles culled from crafts fairs. With one sweeping stroke, the face of the mantlepiece had metamorphosed when an uninvited guest had knocked on their doors.

Move over, memorabilia. Move in, new must-haves. Standing as sentinels on the frontiers of the mantlepiece now were New Normal’s impersonal safeguard souvenirs— sanitiser bottles and safety masks. A mantlepiece makeover emblematic of the times. Lollita snapped shut the negativity on tamasha TV and called up her Netflix Encyclopaedia 1. Her goddaughter niece Kaavya, the teenaged offspring of her younger sister, Radhyaa.

“Hey sweetie pie, wassup?” Lollita’s voice dripped saccharine sweetness like syrup pouring over a perfectly done pancake. “What was that new flick of the Holmes chap you were watching last week?

“Awww, Maasi, it’s not a chap, it’s a chick,” Kaavya chirruped.

“Chick?” Lollita sounded at sea.

“Enola Holmes!” pat came Kaavya’s reply. “Maasi, can I chat up later, please? I’m in the middle of watching the F.R.I.E.N.D.S. reunion.” Kaavya signed off, as Radhyaa then took over the conversation and chatted a bit.

Next, Lollita called her Netflixing Encyclopaedia 2, elder sister Meera Di, aka Meeraya (named after Meera Bai for being besotted from babyhood with the blue-skinned God, Krishna).

“Di, how’s that latest Kangana flick just released on OTT?” Lollita asked, all agog for the Netflixing ‘breaking news’ from her IIM-A alumnus sister. 

“Thalaivii,” Meera Di said and delivered her verdict, “A must-watch!”