not a good day for the roses

Ever since I read Heidi (about a dozen times as a child) I've wanted a magical window - like her round one in the loft with its views of a starry night. I've been quite lucky to have a room with a view wherever I've lived. Even Baghdad where there was a panorama of the river Tigris (and the orange akak against a slatey dawn sky when the Iraninian Phantom planes raided). I struggled for a while with the balcony in PMGP, making a little seat there, but the shortage of space meant it was always getting used as a storage ground and was sat in very little. In this house the window sills are big enough to sit on. My dad, the only time he visited here, used to sit on the window sill and trim his moustache, read the paper, chill - the only time in my life I ever saw him so lazy and relaxed. He too reacted with childlike pleasure to the hidey hole feeling, that unexpected extra space the window sill yielded up and would like to put things there, neatly, as was his way.

Then one time when Samina and Imran came, Imran used to sit and play there, and make drawings. 

I've not been using it all that much because first I had put a chair there but it felt ridiculous. I felt like Naseerudin Shah with his gramophone in the desert, like some clueless overseer sitting on a chair on a window sill, drinking coffee. Plus there's my fear of heights which would come and go in waves. But the coming of Oberoi Mall and a Lifestyle store has (yeah yeah I shopped there, castigate me so I may be absolved!) resulted in me acquiring the correct height ka stool.

Once the stool came then it seemed like two plants (of which one is a lemongrass plant!) was definitely insufficient, so the family has been expanded to include - double jaswanti, mogra and (my favourite) chinese roses (they did not have tibetan, sorry, I tried).



This has resulted in new visitors, whose names I do not know, but whose songs are sweet. Pappu can sing sala.



And then, the rains came and blew the tops of the flowers off :( decimated the roses and turned the mogra flowers the colour of apples sliced a while ago.




I bloody hope some new ones grow soon or I am boycotting Lifestyle store. >:-|