The Whistle

Words often have magic. They, sometimes unknown to us leave and impression in our minds so real that every setting reflecting a similar condition take us to wolrd of the words themselves.

Recently , I have heard a number of times a faint yet shrill whistle somewhere out in the dark. A definite single whistle .....always in the dead of the night but never at the same time. It lasts for a second and half at the most. The whistler must be very used to it since it is always the same tone scale and pitch. I wonder if it is a call for someone, discrete and in code or a signal of assurance or danger, a part of a game or serious work....who knows.

Yesterday as I walked back to my room from the water cooler at the other end of the corridor, while crossing the terrace I looked at the sky. The moon hung above the trees in dim blue glow, gradually being covered in thick wisps of clouds. The edges of the clouds gleamed in silver and scattered eerie beams of moonlight across the sky. The night was lightly breezy and cool. And amidst this setting I hear from nowhere the familiar sound.

It instantly reminded me of the one story that I have read and that send a chill down my spine when I first read it. The Speckeld Band by Arthur Conan Doyle....an adventure of the ace Sherlock Holmes. The thrill and tension woven in the words of the Conan Doyle is very graphic, very real. I shall recount the story only as much, as would not tell too much. The plot of the story is macabre and yet is presented so realistically. The words describing the night build the night itslef in the readers mind. The way time passes in the words is almost like a real wait for the kill. The wistle in the story was a key to unravel the mystery of a death, and also a hideous murderer. The murderer and his deadly weapon....a sinister combination that imprinted itself on my mind.

So once back in my room I waited .......quietly. I was chiding myself for being scared, yet I waited with bated breath, for a hissing sound of a slithering reptile............

Of Butter Sheets And Malai Puris

I have been working on my design scheme now for very long. The tracing sheet is scribbled upon and a new layer added with changes.....more and more layers slowly accumulating and filling up the white of the sheet. It is through this that my wandering mind retreived a seemingly forgotten memory from the backlanes of my mind. Long back I remember watching a program on television on Mathura and its legacy of pedas and mithais.

At one halwai's shop I remeber seeing a huge cauldron...characteristic of mithaiwalas. The huge vessle of black with ivory milk boiling in soft hemispheres. Small mounds of creamy silk rising and dissapearing into the large sea of the sweetened frothy fluid. The center was boiling softly and sending small translucent bubbles tothe edges of the vessle. The egde gradually was accumulating a delicate looking lace of milk cream froth. The lean man stirring the pot intermittently flattened the mass of the froth against the edge of the cauldron. Gradually as the milk thickened and reduced the accumulation of the cream at the edges grew to coat the inner edge in a pale yellow layered satin of milk cream. It looked like the most heavenly sweet on earth.

Once the milk was all on the edge of the cauldron in the form of malai, by the evening, the lean man took the cauldron off the flame and rested it inclined against an old empty oil tin. The shop was now twinkling with small bare bulbs and the air was heavy with smoke from heavy inscence burning in almost every shop. The halwai then took am old lid of some can, about the size of a CD, and began cutting circles in the malai. This, he deftly scraped off the inner edge and served it to eager customers with a generous sprinkling of kesar and pista.

A disc of mellow sweet ivory and riotous streaks of saffron with pecks of green pista......a treat for the eyes and the palate.



A treat at the end of the day long wait ....a slow ardous process yeilding the very best.............