No breaks, please

One drawback of this age of manifold connectivity is that we are liable to be interrupted by unwelcome intrusions. They seldom accord with one’s mood and need when they occur, but when they do, we rejoice.  The Tamils have a belief expressed in the idiom: “Whose face did I look at when I woke up?” We shape our time by our attitude on rising to meet the day. 

One cannot live with an assurance of continuity and planned progress in the interrupted life of cities.  The call bell is the worst offender and the mobile phone, being ubiquitous, is worse.  One must suspend whatever one is busy doing at the moment and open the door to find someone wanting money or a document conveying an unpleasant message of dues or demands. So the poem or the essay or the pending report which must be sent off has to wait while one juggles with accumulations inside in utter frustration, while the intruder waits and fumes.

At home, dinner is the meal we enjoy most when the day has gone without a hitch.  We had a lady who came to prepare it, with two chappatis each for us with a veg or a sauce, a helping of rice and a bowl of curds. Our trick was to sweeten the cook to turn up in time and to entice her to wash up. We discovered that the best way to achieve this daily miracle was to ensure that the cook-lady felt sufficiently at home to sit on the sofa and watch our wide TV screen for her ‘soap’ serial story which had become more real than her daily drudgery.  It was equally important to ensure that there was no interruption whatsoever during the half-hour of that episode. 

But once or twice we got calls from visitors and friends precisely during the exciting denouement of the episode. The cook got up in a huff and nearly walked out on us.  We tempted her to return by sending word through the driver that her serial was reaching a dramatic climax with the revelation that the scion of the family was the father of that foundling baby. 

Great was our wonder when, a few nights later, with that baby grown into the prattling stage, we found our cook calling to it from our sofa. When asked why she was admonishing a TV child actor, she explained that the boy was talking rudely to his biological father, which was not right. Luckily she realised it was time for her to go to her next employer, there to roll and puff a dozen chappatis, not just four. 
 
Thus we learnt the hard way that it was an absolute no-no to phone a cherished friend or kin during the time-slot reserved by the other side to live an alternate life through soap opera from the US, set on a picturesquely rocky sea coast, with turbulent waves crashing in and heroic rescue acts by acrobatic surfers on precarious rafts and romances on the beach between machos and beauties.

We lost a dear friend by making an untimely call, since she never forgave us for being left in ignorance of the wedding spree planned by Tim and Ruby for the next episode, and could never see the sequel.