scrambled!!

A strange thought occurred to me in two consecutive days. This is about the two ladies at my office food court counter. The first day: one looks like an unforgiving teacher; the next day, the other lady looks like a doctor.

The teacher behave-like with her grim face, questions people with her eyes, listens with her ears directed towards people and shrinking one of her eyes, right hand punches the keys of the billing machine, the left reaches out for the money, the right hand now tears the printed note and hands it over, picks the change and places it on the billing machine with her palm turned inside.

The doctor behave-like has a pen in her hand, converses to people with her eyebrows, listens to the people with a nod, scribbles on a chit, circles the numbers, issues the chit and then receives the exchange, smiles, and expects the next one in the line.

Those were the days my friend...

When we blew our first big bubble out of the clandestine chewing gum; learnt to neatly roll the string around the ridges of a top, and swiftly flung the top from the tethered end of the string; first felt a thoroughly used prohibited catapult from a group of nomads who were ruthlessly aiming at the dogs, stretched the catapult to the maximum and splayed a mango off its stem; teamed up together, and contested with our next-door neighbors for wet-and-throw where we drew a circle on the wall, wet the tennis ball and threw it on the wall, inside the circle, and exchanged smuggled goods for the points we won; collected crystalline green marbles from our roadside friends, rolled it over the muddy roads and played aim-and-hit, and sometimes rolled ourselves over the mud, fought with them over a missing marble that fell into a nearby gutter, and when the rains gushed in and left us in solitude, we gazed at the small green marbles that had innumerous frozen air bubbles inside them.

Those were the days my friend, we thought would never end...
- Mary Hopkins