Afternoon readings

I would sit at my mother's elbow after the Sunday lunch and fill up the page. Find your way out of the maze. Spot the differences. The complex Shabdkosh, which I would fill with my grandma's help.

Mum would open-up the in between pages of Mumbai Samachar and for more than an hour I would sit on the bed, head down, rummaging through the supplement. And then, if there were still some time for the gully cricket to commence or if the marble game had yet not begun in Champak kaka's garage, mum would read to me the short stories from out of the paper. The fiction stories of Kanti Bhatt, Suresh Dalal, Gunvant Shah would shape in front of me, just below the teek-teek of the rotating fan.

Their vivid stories would fill in the room and mum's narrative pitch would rise and fall behind Jayshri bai's washing of utensils. A nurse helping a patient to get to feet... An old uncle living an independent life... the stories always having a moral, a learning, which mum would stress after the reading. And when at times, a friend would ring the bell and the match was about to start, mum without reading further from the paper would spin her own tale, and even in her quick ending, there would be a message that would remain with me, like the change that would lie in the front pocket of the school bag.

I do not quite clearly remember when these afternoon readings stopped.