If only I could stop the time...

I had lived under this roof for months. Now it feels like home.

Ma is here :)

I look forward to coming home. It feels nice to know that someone is waiting for me and anticipates my return over a cup of tea. Someone who feels free to pamper me, forces me to eat more. Yeah, she thinks I look malnutritioned. And thanks to her massive Ma ki mamta, I already have a spare tyre in the making around my waist.

We go shopping together. Cook together. I am unlearning to eat straight out of the refrigerator and learning to heat up the food, put it on a plate and sit down to eat like a “decent human being”. We watch some really dumb-n-grumpy-old movies while eating, because she thinks Shashi Kapoor-then was sexier than Shahid Kapoor-now (But I strongly disagree!).

When her household chores are over, she sits down to spend her spare time with me, trying to catch up on things, from where I left. Acting up stories of our neighbors, my sisters, dialogue-to-dialogue, frame-on-frame!

When I hit the bed, the hot water bag and a tube of Moov ointment await me. The bed doesn’t feel so cold anymore. Everyday I rolly-polly in to her warm body until she warns me that she would kill me the next time I tickle her with my cold hands. And two minutes flat following the highly entertaining tickle session, she droops in to a horrendously funny snore.

The weekends which used to be extremely long seem to vanish now. My friends are having gala fun chatting with her, at my expense! Trust me if there was to be someone who is capable of embarrassing me to the core yet smoothly getting away with it, Ma would get my vote, hands down.There is just no end to the anecdotes she has collected over the years. The other day, she didn’t even blink once before narrating the incident of my wrap around skirt coming off mid-jump while I was jumping rope. So while there was a massive uproar in the crowd, I was left wide eyed and utterly shocked!

But life comes with bells and whistles. The merry making sessions are interrupted by some heated arguments too. Thanks to her unsuccessful attempts to discuss certain “very important issues” like marriage and all, and me not getting too amused by it, I am subjected to sudden explosions, sometimes.Although we’ve decided to continue with such engaging topics only once per week, it doesn’t seem to work at all!

My understanding of a lot of things has changed, unlike what Ma saw during my formative years. While people ponder on the profoundness of my “I am what I am; I feel how I feel; I will face life as it will come” ideology, Ma doesn’t find it widely representative. For her, it is way too progressive, way too intimidating. And standing at her end of the age spectrum, she warns me to deflate "My narcissistic bubble" before it bursts abruptly. So, we have strong differences in opinion and we argue, but we make up soon enough. For she comes first. She made me. And any given day I would sacrifice my voice, in favor of our simple, happy, goofy and silly times together.

Deep inside me,I know the clock is ticking away and every moment that I am spending together with her is never going to come back. And while she is snoring away to glory in the background right now, I really really wish the time would stop, right here, right now.