Lord of Mundane Things
by Geetashree Chatterjee
(New Delhi)
This is a grand motherly tale......
Weekends are generally spent in a whirlwind swish- finishing all the unfinished chores, cooking, cleaning, washing, drying, dusting, fussing over my pet, taking care of my mother and last but not the least getting prepared for the next five working days. Last Sunday, it was bad!!!! The day before, i.e. on Saturday, water supply played truant. As a result, all work got stalled and carried over to Sunday. To top it all, my maid took leave without prior notice. A tornado of chores ensued which did not calm down till the late hours of the night. Hard work becomes a drudgery if intercepted by disappointments. That was exactly what happened when before going to bed I checked the curd kept to set on the fridge and found the milk drooling at me. But by that time I was too exhausted to commence a repair job and just let it be thinking sometimes curd had its own eccentricity and took time to accept its own mould.
As the lids drooped on the cheeks, a worry struck and sleep bolted out of the window. I rushed out of bed straight to the fridge - the vegetable rack was empty as I had apprehended! What would I cook tomorrow? Mismanagement to the extreme! But it was past twelve and even if I had sung a tragic lore, holding the branch of the nearest imaginary tree, aka filmy style, no sabziwallah would have materialized out of the blue, with his vegetable cart, in the dead of the night.. So I opted for the best i.e. retire to bed.
In the morning, half awake ( in true sense of the term - only the left eye opened/right eye still glued), I uncovered the lid and found the curd happily swinging to an unheard tune. Angrily I put it to boil till the water got separated and chunks of homegrown cheese giggled at me ready to be scrambled with onions and tomatoes, sprinkled with a mouthwatering garnish! My meal of the day was ready!
So, what's so great about it? Daily household trivia?
But the manner in which the events of the morning and the day previous unfurled stirred a thought. Had the curd set in time from where would I have got my cheese? And who told the curd not to set whenI had been doing it routinely almost everyday for so many years without a flaw? Every nano moment in this Universe is so premeditated, I being just a minuscule dot in the whole game plan ! And whose game plan is it by the way?
The sages, the seers have for ages endeavoured to find the ultimate answer to these labyrinthine questions which lead to one another with the ever elusive reply finding an escape route every time the snare readies itself to clutch it unaware at the very next step!
Nevertheless the nagging doubt poked and persisted..........it must be Him! Who else will have every tick of a nano second in his grip and count? But the Omnipresent and the Omniscient who observes and absorbs all unnoticed.
It just took an unsettled curd for an ordinary, homely woman to perceive His Handiwork in the myriad mundane which the wise men have taken aeons to gather from the infinity.
As the first rays of dawn bleached the sky, I bowed my head to my God of Mundane Things! I was contented to be the microscopic punctuation in His Larger Scheme of Arrangements which might or might not be fathomable or graspable to the limited perceptions of a closeted lesser mortal like me.
I whispered my gratitude quietly!