A Bowl of Elusive

For all the fans of romance out there, I am back with the fifth installment of the Angela & Eric saga. We go beyond the mushy and romantic in this one - into one of those testing moments that pave way for the time to come. For people who just landed on this page, here's the link to Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 & Part 4 . Go play catch up and come back to read this one. I know romance sells. I know that when you write romance, you write about the happy stuff, the relationship milestones, the first kiss, the first time they make love, the confession of undying love. Yet, in real life, the fights a couple has defines the mettle of their relationship. To reach the point in time that Eric and Angela are at, they had to navigate several serious fights which tested their intentions and eventually made them realize what they meant to each other. Angela and Eric loved to talk to each other. They could just sit there discussing this and that – their work lives, their life experiences, t

Towards the end of her life, my grandmother was barely the person I once knew. Years of suffering and pain, having lost her oldest son, followed by her husband and then her last son had left her a hollow shell of the person she was when I was five or six, when times were happier. So many things plagued her in the last of her days – she often asked herself why God had let her live for so long, while all her loved ones succumbed before her eyes. She not only had her own sorrow, but she had to live through the sorrows and pain of all her loved ones. Dementia started setting in towards the end and she barely recognized me the last time we met and maybe I was relieved. She deserved the much deserved detachment from her reality. You see when I look back at my folks and the people that they were, I often judge my grandmother  with the harshest set of ideals. She was deeply flawed, as compared to my grandfather or my father and uncle. She had a temper. The caste based biases were deeply ingrai

Some time back, I was hunting for slippers in UK size 12 in a north-eastern city. I searched through several shops in two to three markets but could not find sizes beyond UK 10. For the uninitiated, I should mention that most brands work on certain common sizes, be it footwear or apparels. These are the sizes that sell the most and most brands cater mainly to these sizes. But for someone like me, who has always been over-sized in clothes and footwear, this poses a problem. Finding shoes has been a challenge since ninth standard – that’s when my feet moved beyond UK size 9. Only high end brands like Nike or Skechers have my size, and even there it’s only available in select options and at select outlets. Being from Retail, I know the reason for it. Take for instance my slipper search – the north eastern population is generally smaller in size as compared to the rest of the country. So finding oversized anything is usually a problem there. When it comes to apparels, certain “plus size”