This incident is from the time we had been married for a
year or so. We were both working full time, leaving home in the morning and
coming back only in the evening. Since we were just the two of us we lived in a
simple house in a unique locality which had been built on land that originally
belonged to a village. While the builder had managed to acquire most of it,
some of the villagers had refused to give up their land and chose to continue
living there with the result that the otherwise well planned locality with
three storey houses all over had a village right at the heart of it.
Our house happened to face this walled village and large
piece of fallow land which had not been used by the builder due to its uneven
shape and probably with the hope of buying the remaining land from the villagers
sometime in the future. Since this was next to a village we would sometimes
find buffaloes, donkeys, pigs and dogs roaming around on this empty piece of
land. I did not mind it since I preferred to see them instead of a concrete
structure. In the monsoons it would turn green with wild grass and shrubs. It wasn’t
a bad sight to wake up to except if you decided to go into the balcony, you may
have to bear with the smell of dung occasionally.
Once it so happened that we had a huge brick of ice-cream
sitting in our freezer for months. It had become so hard that it could compete
with a brick used for construction purposes in its frozen form. It was way too
old to be consumed and thus had to be discarded but I had to put some thought
before simply chucking it into the dustbin. Had I thrown it into the dustbin in
the evening there was a good chance that it would melt overnight and leak onto
the kitchen floor by morning. The garbage collector usually came much after we
had left for work and I could not leave it in the outdoor dustbin either again
to avoid any mess outside.
After another few weeks of procrastination I finally decided
to discard it and thought it would be best to leave it at one corner of the
empty piece of land across the road from our house, where it could disintegrate
into the soil. My mister felt he could do better and told me to stand back
while he would toss it with all his strength far away and out of sight. He took
the package into his hand and flung it like an expert shot put thrower. But,
what happened next was not what we expected. He got the angle wrong and that
brick of ice-cream landed with a huge thud in the backyard of a house in the
village!
He and I looked at each other for two seconds. My face had
the what-the-hell-did you-just-do expression on it. What if someone was to come
out of the house to check what made such a loud landing into their house? I did
not know what to expect from a native Haryanvi villager, what if they came out
with a “Dando” (Haryanvi for stick). The next second I grabbed his hand and ran
into our house. Once I bolted the door I burst out laughing at what he had
done. I was thankful that it did not land on anybody’s head and laughed till my
stomach hurt.
In retrospect I feel that it is sometimes these small
insignificant incidents, random stupidities and emotional impulsive decisions that
made us laugh or happy is what we remember for a much longer time compared to
all those times we did the ideal things and walked the beaten path. So go ahead
do something crazy. Make memories that will make you laugh for a long time. Have
fun today, because it will be gone
tomorrow.
Enjoy Life! Happy Weekend!
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