Aunty Obnoxious and the Emerald Fixer

Brother was too timid to hate her but I hated her! Aunty Obnoxious invited everybody possible that she could squeeze into one dinner so she would not have to bother again for a long time. So the dinners would be crowded, loud, boring, never ending, with almost the whole day wasted. Aunty Obnoxious was a dreadful shopper and when she came to India she shopped till she dropped and there was a whole room full of shopping bags that she hadn’t even opened in five or ten years!

Worse, she was a snoop, a bully, a nosy-parker who always said the meanest things to make people squirm as she pretended to be very concerned about their personal problems. All the way I groaned and grumbled and my brother scolded and refused to let me off the ‘feast’!

Then we stopped at a supermarket to buy sweets for Aunty. I waited in the car near a small garden when the amazing Fixer of Fury and Rage found me, as if hearing my dark and dire thoughts about irritating brothers and their maddening goody goody habits.
The Fixer was an emerald green willow tree like a penthouse that dropped out of the sky  with four rooms! And curtains of shimmering green inside this awesome willow house, arranged each room for a purpose – inviting a very angry, very furious, very rattled sister inside.

Lit up by a tender April sun, this sturdy, green giant’s hideout had  a brown burnished staircase-trunk  and  green scarfs swished in its first room, a tea-parlour where my soul parked itself and began to disgorge its rage! It was as if Pavarotti sang his most soul-pampering ‘’Nessum Dorma” just for me, and moistened my drying heart!
The second room had a lavender and gold coated cabinet in which I found a stash of my discarded poetry and an unused journal stitched with silver pages waiting to be filled up with the wisdom that always emerges from my woes. It also had a large bed for four fat snoozing cats to at once wash  away my filthiest frown.

Upstairs in the third room angels laced in pond green were busy healing bruises and burns and prickles, raining down rest and repaired roses of brother and sister wrangling!  
But the most enchanting was the fourth room with a bronze sofa on which sat Beethoven, Mozart and tubby Pavarotti himself, with a free personal concert of all the saddest, most haunting requiems and most embracing music ever gifted by all of them! Beethoven’s awesome 9th symphony, Mozart’s Laudate Dominum and all his choral music that almost makes us bear  all the Hitlers and Vampires of our world, soared up to the sea green roof of this astounding Emerald Fixer!

Aunty Obnoxious had made the tastiest dhoklas, puris,  laddoos and fried tapioca for dinner, no doubt, but I would still have preferred to enjoy the feast alongside Mozart and gang in that limpid green library of learning.

If not for waiting to buy that astounding  aunt’s sweets, the Emerald Tree may never have found me! But of course it did not make me like her! The Aunties Obnoxious of this world never change – they keep on minding other people’s businesses instead of their own, bullying and badgering and being unpleasant and unnecessary. And wondering why people stumble backwards away from them.

But the Emerald Fixer’s green nibs sent out the weather of wisdom to my heart and taught me how not to be rattled by bullies and how to move safely around their odious orbits with the magic of imagination.