Budget Spa

Consider that feeling of utter relaxation you get when you visit a spa and have all your worldly cares whisked away for a few gorgeous hours. Or the sensations of pure peace and sanctity that come with the ambience and dead silence that a spa affords. Now consider the possibility of having all that stress-free bliss for free. Yes you heard me. FREE. No breaking the bank to feel good.

What if I told you that there is such a thing as the ‘spa experience’ that doesn’t cost a cent? What if I also told you that it’s just two minutes (or less) away from where you’re seated right now?

Didn’t think there’d ever be such a thing eh? Hah, I say.

Ladies and Gentlegerms, I give to you my very own domestic version of the ultimate relaxation hotspot (CUE DRUMROLL)– The Bathroom.

La toilette, to be precise and posh if you must.

Oh for heaven’s sake stop gasping like an asphyxiating chicken. What, you don’t think the toilet could ever measure up to the luxuries of the spa? You’re such a snob.

I, for one, proudly maintain that no spa in the world can give me a better feeling than my loo does. The absolute silence of no other presence in the room other than yourself and your thoughts, the sheer privacy and fact that no one will dare disturb you while you’re in there are just the surface of the spa-features that a solid toilet offers. And then there’s the release…

I dare you to tell me that the act of peeing or pooing doesn’t give you a sense of utopian satisfaction. Especially when you’ve had a particularly busy day with little time for visiting the john, and therefore have had to hold up for a whole. It doesn’t matter, really, whether you have day-old urine fermenting in your bladder or whether it’s a sudden urge that’s developed… the fabulous feeling of letting it go in the comfort of a secluded little toilet can match no other. I swear I could write a poem about it.

I usually like to take care of my physical business and then instead of rushing out like so many others do, I sit and dwell. Dwell in the serenity and privacy. Dwell in the few stolen moments I have to only myself, where I know I am safe from eyes or ears for as long as I like while I just steep myself in the meditational calm of it all. Of course I’d flush first, given that poo smell is anything but aromatherapy, unless you’re into that kind of thing. Sometimes if I feel like an extra bit of self-TLC I’ll sniff at a bar of soap that’s conveniently resting by the sink or spritz some jasmine air freshener around. Instant transcendence.

I know quite a few acquaintances in the ad industry who swear by the toilet when it comes to their work. No, I did not mean it as a witty metaphor to explain how shitty creative ideas can be, although come to think of it, I could have. But not right now. I meant the toilet being our best friend during brainstorming. It’s either to do with the fact that most of us are generally on our way to early mental retardation, or we’ve just hit on a secret that no one else knows about. I kid you not…some of my best ideas come when I’m sitting on the throne. I don’t know why that is… I’m guessing it’s the total, utter calm of the place that allows my thoughts to focus rather than stray to a number of distractions like how many paperclips I have in my desk drawer.

Ask anyone I work with who knows me well enough. LD can give you a clue about that. She knows that when she sees me whizzing past her towards the office loo, I’ll usually come out having had an epiphany in there. She’s usually the first person to hear my bathroom brainwaves, and she’ll tell you they’re good. Sometimes bordering on genius. And all because I took the time to pee on it.

I would go on, but I won’t, seeing as how I’m sure I’ve aroused your curiosity about this remarkable concept. I would suggest you give it a try, when you next feel stressed out with life and just need to give yourself a break – no pun intended. Go… find yourself a commoded cubicle. Close the door and in doing so, everything else out. Sit in it. Close your eyes. Let go. Breaaaathe. In no time you’ll forget you ever had a headache, or pain wherever else. You’ll smile. You will find yourself.
The best thing is… you didn’t have to open your wallet for the experience.

I need to take your leave now. I have a spa appointment. Await a happier me.

WOOF!!

So, this is a project I'm doing in partnership with the boyfwend, who's been sweet enough to pamper my whims. Why not give it a go?

Or visit this website.

So Have I.

Here, I also have done things, ah. Just because nobody officially asked me to share, doesn't mean I'm not going to.

Cue trumpet fanfare.

Have I ever...

• Eaten shit. I was too small to know, but I did. It was mine, which I suppose makes it slightly more justifiable. I am told that I looked fairly pleased too.

• Had a pet monkey. By the name of 'Kiri', thanks to her albino persona i.e. fully white fur. (Not captured or ever caged, please note. She turned up one day and ended up sticking around till she died of old but satisfied age) She hated my guts coz I got tasty treats and all she had were the same old fruits. She'd wait for mum to leave the room before stealing my food and pulling my hair on her way back to unreachable heights with her loot.

• Had the flesh of my back bitten off by my (then small) brother and had that followed by the flesh on my foot being chomped off by his pet deranged demon dog ten years later. Both times because I changed the channel while sibling was watching TV. We're a one-of-a-kind family.

• Written letters to the tooth fairy and Santa, begging for enough money to help me rule the world, and flying powder to escape the hands of the CID and my parents.

• Had my leotard rip and expose my (then wrinkle-free) ass to the audience while performing on public stage.

• Had the zip of a very tight skirt rip open and expose my thonged bottom as I bent down to pick up a fallen phone card in the middle of Pettah, and then had the same thing happen as I demonstrated the incident to my colleagues back in the office lunchroom. Much mirth was shared, except by me. Both at Pettah and in office.
  

• Got piss drunk at a company cocktail and told the Chairman of a large conglomerate that I love him and I'm sleepy, whilst clinging onto his coat sleeve.

• Farted loud and long in front of a Chairman of a large bank in the middle of photographing him for the bank's Annual Report. To smartly cover it up, I looked out of a nearby window at the Colombo harbour and serenely said " Oh look... ships." The only other person in the room was the photographer who managed, in between shaking himself and his tripod in fits of laughter, to capture the Chairman's facial reaction to my flatulence.
  

• Had the two previous incidents happen with two brothers who happened to be the Chairmen in question. It must have been the luck of their family.

• Farted loud and long in the middle of an intimate moment with my boyfriend. My innards are the stuff of legends, I tell you.
  

• Been dumped and left on a roadside, crying my heart out and then having hailed a trishaw to take me home, wailed and aired my grievances to the poor trishaw guy without telling him where home was. We rode around the streets of Colombo for quite some time, with me bawling piteously and asking Trishaw Dude why all men are scum, and poor TD looking perplexed at not being able to get a word in edgewise and ask for venue instructions or what 'scum' was.

• Performed a comic impersonation of my grandmother's celebrity neighbour outside my grandparents house, only to realize that my family was not laughing at my fine display of talent and wit, but at the fact that the neighbour was actually standing right behind me with a stony expression on her face. Ahem.

• Haughtily delivered an hour-long presentation, showing off my business sense to a board of leering men who I presumed were chauvinists and thought I was not up to the task, only to sit down snootily at the end of the presentation and have a Director shyly lean over and inform me that my trouser zip was down through the entire thing.
  

• Not been able to control my bladder and peed in the middle of performance on public stage and had little rivulets of urine run merrily down my stockinged legs. But apparently nobody had seen it, so SHHHH...

• Found a bunch of boys throwing stones at a poor little calf who was tied to a fence, and stoned the boys back until their mothers came out to scream at me. I, of course, did the ladylike thing and screamed back and threw stones at them too. And then ran away from an approaching police officer.

• Fallen into an 8-foot manhole in the night during a power-cut, not been discovered for a while till I waved my credit card in the air (or the street above me, as the case would seem), been hauled out by some passing trishaw men and needed 12 stitches to sew back my exposed chin and jaw that I hit on the way down the hole.

• Had a bad allergic reaction to some food during a wedding, been rushed to the Durdens ER and been drunk enough to hit on the doctor while he injected me with medication and then thrown up on him.

• Had a talking cat. She'd say 'aiyyo', 'aney', 'no', 'me' and 'mummy'.

• Had too many 'have I ever' stories to put down here. But I have to do the considerate thing and stop for the sake of preserving my readership and my good name.... if I have one left.

If you haven't already been a part of this, then I tag YOU.

Nevah Evah

I’ve tagged myself. Pathetic, yes, but Lady D was feeling magnanimous and diplomatic, so she went and put up an ‘open tag ‘ policy, so here goes.

I have never :

Told my parents I love them without squirming in embarrassment and wanting to heave afterwards. It’s also pretty darn strange AND comforting to know I’m not the only one on the blogosphere to have never done this.

Had surgery, which I find highly unfair because I think lying on bed for weeks and having people wait on you and bring you flowers is kinda cool.

Maintained my calm at an animal’s death. I can outdo Shakespearean tragedy with my wails and weeps when it happens.

Been really, truly, couldn’t-wish-for-more happy. Bloody elusive bugger, this Joy fellow….

Thought I was normal. Or even close to it.

Been able to figure out which one of my many faces and personas is the real me. And my loved ones think THEY’RE confused…

Stuck to one thing. I think that has something to do with the previous point.

Found my true passion. I envy those who know what they were meant to do and go on to make it the career of a lifetime. I haven’t quite clinched that one yet….

Done drugs. But maybe that’s because I’m naturally quite high.

Believed in the governments of Sri Lanka.

Mastered the art of keeping my mouth shut. You probably already know this. It’s a painful experience.

Liked my neck. It looks like the kind you find on a plucked chicken, all wrinkly and thin. You didn’t need to know this.

Cheated on or dumped anyone. Wait… no… there was that one time that I broke off with my first boyfriend when I was 14 coz he tried to kiss me and I thought that was sick. Does that count?

Gone through a week without a dramatic event worth telling my future grandchildren about. If I have future grandchildren.

Eaten dragon-fruit. But I’m tempted.

Been able to control my bladder at the most inconvenient times.

Been able to tread water. You should see me…. like a drowning rat, huffing and puffing to keep my head above water without sinking like the Titanic.

Understood women.

Okay, okay. I’ll stop before you change sites. Jeez.
I am tagging The Doc and Gutterflower. And anyone else who wants to give it a go.

A Friendly Blog

I haven’t been blogging for a while. I suppose you’ve noticed. Or am I just not that important enough… sniff?

Anyhoos, hallo hallo. Been some time no? Sorry child. I have been so busy no meya…. with the show and all. (Sound of Music… did you watch it? You didn’t? Bastard.) Now that it’s over, I am suffering the most heinous case of withdrawal syndrome. Didn’t think I would, given that the whole experience involved…dare I say it… children. But I have to admit they grew on me. Shockingly. As did the wonderfully quirky bunch of girls I had the pleasure of sharing a dressing room with. Aiyo I miss the excited babble and drama in that room, men. I’ve never been in a production that has had this much unity and camaraderie across the entire cast… there’s always been the ‘clique’ factor happening… until now. It was quite nice to get along with everyone for a change and have nothing but laughs with each other. Look ma, I made new friends.

Which brings me to the post of the day. The Pal Factor. And this one's gonna be long, so brace yourselves darlings.

Everybody and their next door neighbour has one. Big ones, small ones, clingy ones, weird ones, ones who live to please you, ones you live to please… what’s life without a friend? They know you at your very worst and they still believe in you.

Me…. I’ve never been one for having many friends. Never did. In school I was always the odd nut job who skulked around in the recesses of a classroom while the others compared boyfriends and nail polish colours. I didn’t see the point, and preferred the company of my multiple personalities to the superficial ninny-talk I often eavesdropped into. I still can’t do the socialite thing and smooch every face I see and bump hips like I see it done around me. I’m not into that kind of friendship… the shallow variety that competes for the best outfit and shrieks ‘hey gurlfriend’ one second and ‘bitch’ the next. I prefer the brand of friend that I can share whatever silly notion of the day I have with, and the kind that I can not see for a decade and still be able to pick up where we left off without any signs of awkwardness. I like the kind of people who don’t balk when I speak my mind, and who appreciate me for who I am. Obviously, that means I don’t have that big a bunch of homies. Just a choice few, each more eccentric than the other, but who I’d happily give my life for should they ever need me. I can count them with my ten fingers, but each of them makes up for a whole army of people. I'm dedicating this post to the human pals in my life. The four-legged ones deserve an entire post to themselves, which I will save for later.

I’ve learnt along the way by clique-watching that a true friend is a rare thing to find. Everyone bonds for reasons beyond just liking each other’s personalities and the value they add to yours. Think about it… if you were to lose your job, you house, your family and be sent to jail, which one of your ‘friends’ would come bail you out or even come visit? Would YOU go visit a chum who’s been convicted of murder? It’s tough innit… suddenly the person we thought was good for us and complimented our social status no longer plays by the same rules, and is automatically a good candidate for the almighty boot. More often than not we tend to keep friends for more convenient purposes, such as getting something out of them. Don’t ‘tsk’ at me… you know you do it too. We’re all quite excited to have the odd contact in our lives that we go out of our way to get close to, just because later on, should we ever need their pull, we play the ‘connections’ trump card. If they can be of no help or emotional support to us, then they’re not worth our time, and they belong to the ‘acquaintance’ category and not the friend one. I hate that.

Honestly. It feels like I’m taking advantage of someone and for that reason even when I do need help, I don’t like asking my friends for it. Not that they wouldn’t come rushing to my aid if I ever called for it, but I usually like to take the hard route and call up general suppliers off the yellow pages and follow the rules instead of use someone I know and care for. It’s not pride or anything, so don’t get me wrong. I appreciate help just as much as the beggar on the street does when you give him your wallet, but I don’t like requesting it from people I call my friends, unless it comes voluntarily. I have the same issues with family too. Lord knows my family is pretty much like the mafia – everybody is someone and the connections I have could humble a politician, but I categorically refuse to ever go to them for assistance on things I should be doing myself. Call it obstinacy, but I just don’t, can’t and won’t go to the people I care about for anything more than their company.

And what company it is. The tiny bunch of people I am honoured to call my true pals are individually some of the craziest, most intriguing people you could ever meet, with life-stories that could inspire the next Harry Potter collection. They’re scattered all over the place, so there’re very few times in an year that we do meet each other, but when we do…. boy oh boy… All it takes is a coffee and a chair and I end up having the time of my life.

It’s not always fun and games either. There’s something inexplicably amazing about the emotional connections you feel with true friends, that can propel you sky high when you feel at your lowest. It’s a nice feeling… to know someone truly cares and you don’t have to feel obligated in return. I’ve had the luck of experiencing it first hand, when I bawled my brains out over a break-up to a male friend I’m especially fond of, and within minutes an entire troupe of guy buddies had arrived from far and wide on his call just to hold my hand and watch me cry. They even drove me around town endlessly with no venue goal until I’d calmed down enough to go home and rest. These are the very friends who now live all over the world and who I know I’ll get a call at 3 am from if I so much as change my FaceBook status message, just to find out what’s up. That sort of attention and concern is rather nice, to say the least.

I have another extension to that bunch, who is my sounding board at any given time. The intellectual genius that she is (and I know she’s reading this because she said she likes my blog. :P), she always makes me feel like I make splendid sense, even when I know I don’t. She’s heard the worst confessions and shared the most horrible thoughts back, and we still manage to understand each other and giggle over it. To her special magic I add another two females who make it their duty to speak their minds, no matter how harsh the opinion. They won’t so much as blink between tongue lashings when they feel I am deserving of it. Only true friends would be that honest and not make me hate them for it.

Then there’s my retarded group of compatriots from the old office. A more united, crazier, lovelier bunch I have yet to meet. We knew nothing about each other when we first met, and it’s only been a couple of years at most but it seems like a lifetime… like we were there at each other’s birth. Granted, they’re closer to each other than they are to me since I was their ‘boss’, but it didn’t stop us from sharing the wildest times with each other and laughing together till we peed. So much so that I have become oddly, even possessively, fond of that crowd… almost feeling maternal and responsible for their lives. I need to see them happy, or I feel I’ve failed them. Even with the age differences, designation differences and professional relationships, I know I’d swim the seven seas for them and they for me should the time come. I managed to bring one of them over to the current office too (and I know SHE’S reading this as well. ;))… if I hadn’t I’d have died by now in the doldrums of the present office culture. I do enjoy the opportunity to often articulate the most horrible thoughts out to her and have her do the same, and not be judged for it. It’s a nice thing to know someone has your back through thick and thin. Even though you’re a first class weirdo.

Last but never the least there is the ultimate top spot in the friend’s list – the best friend. The usual norm is to have a bestie who’s been with you from the school ages and who’s giggled with you over sharing knickers and handbags. I do have one or two of those (close friends from school, not mutual panties and bags), but I took them out of the best friend section some time ago. Not that they’re not the coolest girls around and the comfort factor with them is glorious, ESPECIALLY when we giggle over common undies, but the definition of a TRUE best friend has changed drastically as of late. It’s an entirely different thing altogether from the usual close friend. It’s a mate you share more than common interests and war stories with, or even a history for that matter. To me, a best friend has become someone you just cannot imagine life without, and someone who’s become such an integral part of your life that without that person, you feel incomplete and useless. Someone you can feel elated about simply breathing at.

As my luck may have it, the one person I now do class as my best friend also happens to be the guy I date. I don’t know if that complicates things because if one fails, then the other surely will too. I know, I know… true love and friendship are both unconditional, but you have to accept the fact that one affects the other, however much you deny it. He has seen me at my very worst, and allowed himself to be used and taken for granted when any other man would have told me to go fly that kite that ol’ uncle Charlie built.… and he has held my hand through it all without flinching. He knows me at times that I don’t know myself and can read my thoughts long before I think them. In the few years I’ve known him he has willingly become my rock, my comfort zone, my punching bag, my comic relief, my point of pleasure, both my cause for nightmare as well as my dream and my hope.

I’m so gooey today. But that’s what friends do to you. Real friends.

And there it is, if you’ve managed to read this far. A snapshot of the nutters I am proud to call my one constant and link to sanity in this disastrous world we live in.

Friends are such a good thing, no?

In Memory of my Ugly Duckling

This rather (extremely) long post is dedicated to a very special life that touched every other one that crossed its path.

People who know me well enough are also as familiar with my grandmother’s dog Soththi; better known by her full name – Soththi Upalilaage Monalisa Katuballi. Don’t laugh. Both she and my grandmother took the name very seriously.

My very first meeting with Soththi was quite accidental and completely unceremonious. I was on my way to school when I saw a van in front go over a tiny shivering brown blob on the road. The blob was so small and still that it managed to escape the van’s tyres by being fortunately positioned right in the centre of the lane. I would have dismissed it for a piece of cloth, had not I suddenly spied two ears peeking up from somewhere on its moving surface.

Needless to say I had to shriek, stop the car and cause the panicked squealing of several tyres behind me. Just inches away from the quivering mass on the road, that turned out to be some sort of enlarged rat. On closer inspection, the mass turned out to be an actual DOG… still in puppy mode, albeit a rather ugly one. It was a bit uncomfortable to behold. Puppies are by default cute furry lumps of happy tails and drooly pink tongues. This one was…well…

The first thing you saw was its ribcage, which was causing all the shaking and shivering. With each feeble breath heaved, those ribs would stick out to allow counting. The rest of it was just as emaciated and covered in mange. Like a CSR advertisement for Somalia. A gnarly rat-like tail stuck out of one end of this little bag of bones, whilst on the other end panted the most hideous face you ever saw on any creature, let alone a pup. Sunken cheeks, sunken eyes and a black raisin nose. But the one feature that took the cake (or put you off the cake, as the case seemed) was its pair of ears. Huge cavernous bat ears that stuck straight up out of the top of a nearly-bald thimble head, invoking thoughts of vampires and demons.

See what I mean? Ugly as sin. But ugly never deters me, especially (no…wait… ONLY) when it comes to animals. A pup is a pup, and one that had just narrowly escaped death warranted my concern. There was no way I was going to leave this blob to die. I had to pick it up.
Picking up a half-dead, really horrible looking, diseased animal off the streets is one thing. Taking it to school is a complete other, because there was no where else I COULD take it at that point. I had to stuff the creature into my schoolbag to sneak it past the old but always-suspicious security guard at the gate, and then figure out where to PUT it for an entire school day. Keeping it in the bag wouldn’t do at all, given how piss smell never completely leaves books and a dog never stays still. My solution came in the form of my classroom desk. Quite conveniently, school desks are produced with a circular hole on their top-left surface… no doubt an innovation designed to provide ventilation to puppies being kept inside. I lined the cavity of my desk with sheets of paper and gingerly placed the now whimpering pup inside. It immediately blessed the desk with a puddle of pee before curling up and sleeping on the piss. Lovely.

The other students were enthralled. In the history of their schooling, no one had put a dog into a desk before. I was an instant hit as the weird kid. They kept lifting the lid of the desk every two seconds to gape and say ‘anaaaa’ in those hateful shrieky voices that only girls are capable of, and to feed the animal a host of goodies, including highland packeted chocolate milk. Puppy and I were both rather overwhelmed, but happy that we were getting sufficient attention. A few hours into the day and my Biology teacher decided to give us a test. This meant total silence, save the droning whir of the ceiling fan as we all bit our lips and tried not to cheat. Suddenly in the midst of the almost meditational calm of the exam, a long, high-pitched howl emanated from somewhere at the back of the classroom. My desk, to be exact. My feeble attempts to convince the Bio teacher that I was the howler were useless. She swept up to me and demanded I open the desk and show her its contents. Her admonishing glare turned into a stare, which then turned into something akin of a coronary attack. Puppy and I were immediately banished, despite the cacophony of ‘aney miss… pau miss’ coming from all the other desks around me. She told me I could only come back once I’d gotten rid of ‘that disgusting thing’. And so we trudged off into the horizon of the school complex, slighted… me struggling not to retort loudly on animal rights and the puppy struggling to piss out the overdose of chocolate milk.

I’ve always been proud of my PR skills and now I’m convinced that my schooling days honed that talent. Never more so than that afternoon when I debated, beseeched and extorted my way into getting the school’s hostel mistress to allow me the temporary use of her facilities for the pup. She was a cat-mad lady, and housed several of her pregnant and newly-birthed rescuees in a row of wooden kennels she’d built behind one of the hostel buildings as a ‘feline maternity ward’ of sorts. If there’s one place a weakened dog should never be kept, it’s in the immediate vicinity of a group of hormonal female cats. But the place would have to do for the time being, and puppy was successfully installed in a vacant cage, under the promise that it would be taken away by end of day. That whole day, I spent my time in class like a panicked mother on her kid’s first day in school. Every yelp, howl and whine sent me running back to the cage in distress, convinced that the fellow was about to meet its maker at the claws of a fellow patient. I soon learnt that puppy had cunningly figured this out and was using its vocal skills to its advantage.
By end of day I still hadn’t figured out what to do with the dog. No one in class or in any other was willing to take it home. My mother, I knew, would kick me out of the house if I took it back with me. I HAD to find it a home. Luckily, at the very last second before absolute helplessness set in, a younger student said she’d gladly take it home, but only if I gave her a ride. I gladly agreed, and we put puppy in a box and proceeded to her house.

One hour later Puppy and I were on our way back, with the girl having been grounded by her mother for even THINKING of bringing a creature that ugly into the house. Even I got a shout for putting nonsense into her daughter’s head. We now truly had nowhere to go. In absolute desperation we turned to the one couple I figured we’d stand a chance with – my grandparents. I knew they didn’t have the heart to say no to something like this.
…

“No”, bellowed my grandfather. “Absolutely NOT”. He was as black as thunder and refusing to consider any of my pleas. “What IS that? Is that a DOG?” asked a bewildered grandmother. It took me a good few hours to convince them to house the pup temporarily… until I find it a permanent home. After some time they reluctantly agreed. “Only for three days. You can please take it away then”, said the thunder.

Three days later, like a prayer, there was a furious voice on my phone receiver that had to be kept a foot away from my ear lest I go deaf. The dog would be OUT on the streets if it wasn’t collected immediately. A foster family had been found, I lied. They would be able to accommodate doggy only in a week’s time because they were in the middle of shifting, I said. Man, I thought…. I should go into writing fiction. In a week, the dog and its stinky poo would be out of my grandparents’ hair, I promised.

I avoided them like the plague for the next three weeks. The phone calls and verbal abuse became less and less frequent, progressively replaced by daily chats on what funny little canine stunt had been performed that day. It was a she, I found out. She now had a name. Soththi Upalilaage Monalisa Katubelli a.k.a Soththi. The more ironic thing was that she’d been christened so by my grandfather, who was also suddenly waking up at 6 am every morning to warm her milk and boil her breakfast beef.

A few weeks hence and Soththi had been securely (and victoriously) installed in the household and one couldn’t dare to even think of taking her away. It had been discovered that she had black birthmarks on her tongue and inside the padding of her paws. According to local belief, they were signs of luck; and you couldn’t find a luckier pup than Soththi. The constant cooing and cuddling she got at the hands of my animal-mad grandmother resulted in quite a spoilt pup. She was fed the best cuts of meat… ice creams for dessert… biscuits and milk at the smallest of whimpers. She had a ‘magic carpet’- the rubber mat in front of the kitchen fridge, where she’d sit and woof out snack orders. As if by magic, these would instantly appear at her paws. All of a sudden, the floor was no place for such a pweshuss darling, and my grandfather’s side of the bed was hastily evacuated for her sake. He’d have to sleep elsewhere or learn to share the pillow. In no time she’d fattened out considerably and her ratty-bat looks were soon replaced by quite a good looking silky golden coat, gentle warm brown eyes and a constant smile. That tail of hers couldn’t stop wagging. By all rights, with the kind of upbringing she had, Soththi should have grown into one of those Colombo 7 pampered pooches that did nothing but sigh all day. By all rights. But she wasn’t one of those dogs. She was mad.

By mad I mean completely, utterly, totally batty to the bone… a nutcase of a dog on a permanent sugar high. This was a dog to which one never merely threw a ball. Rather, the ball would be thrown up in the air, and she’d jump beside it… the game was to see who could go higher- dog or ball. She also had a routine demonstration of lunacy. Visitors to the house were treated to about fifteen minutes of being pounced on from every angle by a ridiculously thrilled dog, followed by another 15 minute display of ‘running in circles’ around the living room. Then she’d leap onto EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF FURNITURE in the hall like a computer game and end up on the one nearest to you, before offering her stomach for scratching. Woe betide he who scratcheth Soththi… he’d be stuck doing it until the end of the visit, with a bit of rump scratching added as bonus. When she was sterilized, the vet advised my grandparents to be gentle when handling her and to allow her the comfortable rest she needed, for she would be in too much pain to be moved for a couple of days. An hour after they’d brought her home and ever-so carefully laid her out on pillows to sleep on, they found her scaling the garden walls trying to catch squirrels. That was Soththi.

Her madness never receded one bit through the 12 years that she lit up that household. She hadn’t a care in the world and she made damn sure you didn’t either when you were with her. The gloomiest of days would brighten up instantly with one goofy smile and a pounce-hug from her. That dog knew just how lucky she was, and she made sure she showed her gratitude to us every single moment. She was more than a dog – she was a child. She had her own bed custom made, her collection of collars – one for every occasion and a myriad of treats at any given time. She was referred to as ‘my little Kella’ by my grandfather, the very man who objected to her existence at the beginning. He’d submit to her every whim at the drop of a hat, or a paw as the case would seem. He spent the last two years travelling to and from veterinary clinics, having Soththi treated for cataracts and lumps. But that still didn’t deter her from going happy-berserk whenever someone so much as smiled in her direction. No family gathering would end without at least half an hour’s reports on the dog’s latest activity. Through the years, she’d almost as good as become my grandparents’ reason to live.

A week ago, Soththi pounced across the universe to doggy heaven, leaving heavy hearts and an empty miniature bed behind. It will be some time before her foster parents get over her demise… I doubt they ever actually will. You couldn’t, if you knew the wonderful, funny little ugly duckling that was Soththi Upalilaage Monalisa Katubelli.

I shall miss her.

Afraid? Me?

Aney now see what that Divine woman has gone and done...inspired me with a post subject and made me feel all guilty for stealing her original idea. Never mind... I'm Sri Lankan and I watch Sirasa. Plagiarism is in my blood. But for what its worth:

Disclaimer - the topic of this post was somebody else's idea.

And now, on to all those little things that spook me out. I'm afraid...

... of being boring.

... of the high possibility of never being completely independent and free of obligation.

... of waking up one morning and realizing I made a mistake. A big one.

... of never feeling truly happy.

... of material poverty.

... of my own paranoia.

... of the ocean. (Bet ya didn't know that, eh?)

... of losing my ability to dance.

... of the dark.

... to trust.

... of not finding my passion in life.

... of losing my passion FOR life.

... of facing this judgmental world as the real me.

... of turning into my mother.

... of dying before the world sees me or I see the world.