Veena, my niece was telling me that she was working very late. Her office bus drops her off two kilometres from her apartment and she had to hire an auto, to cover the remaining short distance. I can still remember the days when I worked late. It was over fifteen years back and in our small town, it was not the norm for ladies to move about late alone.
From 6pm numbness would come over me, whenever I tried to think about how I would get home. I couldn’t walk that late, I had to take an auto back home.

There were power cuts then too. This is the prime time for criminals. To take a different auto every day and pray that it is a good and sober person, who drives you home.
A wet day makes your prospects of getting home safe, gloomy. For a start, you cannot see the face of the driver clearly when you wave him to stop, because of the tarpaulin covers. Once you wave him down it is not easy to dismiss him, because you do not trust his face. At times you have no choice, as he is the only one around.

The Gulls had a super start to their day, at the empty Gosi car park early in the morning. I could see a huge flock of about two hundred of them swirling around, landing and taking off in batches and generally seeming to stretch themselves, before a day of work at sea. A workout before serious work!
The sea must be a short flying hop for them from here, as the road to the marina has no obstructions for them, down to the sea. While for us humans, it is a walk and a climb over the lonely pedestrian bridge.

I just did not use the gas oven here because I didn’t have the baking trays. Finally, I decided, I would improvise with our steel dinner plates as oven dishes. I started off one late evening around 9pm, with some all purpose flour, which was the substitute we got for wheat flour in the nearest supermarket.
The yeast was good and the dough rose up fast and I baked buns till 11pm. Krishna was surprised to see buns for breakfast. He had seen me struggling with a huge mound of flour and a pot of frothing yeast the previous evening.

The washing machine did a few loud thuds in its spin circle and I stopped it immediately. This is one machine I cannot do without and any malfunctioning puts some dullness into my day. Any call for the servicing agency, has to be followed up diligently.
To my surprise the mechanic turned up as told and cleaned the blocked filter within minutes. He was from my neighbouring state in India and I could speak in Tamil to him. Till now all the service people who have turned up have been Indian. All except a Filipino, who set the cable connection.

I was a voracious reader and when in Nigeria the lack of access to reading material, was a problem. The next time I came to India, I returned with a suitcase of books. Nowadays, my reading has slowed down.
I do not know if it the glare from the bright sunshine or if age has caught up with me, it takes me a few seconds to focus properly on the written word. I started from India, after an eye test and my short sight power had stabilised two decades ago. A visit to the eye doctor is on my schedule.

I sat with my mug of coffee at the window this morning. I could see the top of a multi storied construction with a huge tower crane standing over it. The steel rods rising from the top of the building, like the quills of some giant porcupine. The arm of the tower crane stretching long and at night it is well lit, its greenish glow standing out in the darkness.
There is a lot of construction going on. Everywhere you go you see buildings in different stages of construction. And the labourers from the poorer nations of Asia toil on.

Chandra likes to eat traditional meals but for Krishna I have to innovate. And since he eats only one whole meal everyday at 4pm, I like it to be a balanced one. Being vegetarians, we have to be sure he gets some protein in the form of dals and sometimes I substitute the dal with soy chunks.
Today I cooked some soy chunks and bean sprouts in a mix of water and tomato paste with half a sliced open green chilli for ten minutes. Then turned off the stove and added some lemon juice to it. Served it with rice.

In Nigeria, I had access to a lot of recipes from the collection of friends’ who were also into cooking and baking. We innovated with the local produce such as garri and corn. And with dinner parties for every possible occasion, there was an outlet to creative cooking.
When I find time, I try out some of the recipes I had copied down and try to add local flavours in it. Today I made some cardamom flavoured walnut cookies and they turned out delicious. Krishna stopped eating his lunch to munch on them, as I put them out to cool.

I felt a bit tired by noon, so sat down with a cup of hot tea to write.
Bahrain being an Islamic country, women and girls are seen outside wearing the black Abaya (most of them). At first this didn’t bother me much. But later, I realised wearing bright colours made you stand out and get noticed. Gradually, I have put away the reds and bright pinks. Now the black, grey and the brown rule the day.
There was a time in India, when I loved to put strands of fragrant Jasmine in my hair. No more! Not here anyway!

It dawned bright and clear, but soon a dust storm blocked out the world around us. The minaret of the mosque was barely visible in the swirled up dust. We could make out the cars passing, by their red and yellow lights shining through the haze.
Krishna had a nasty dry cough and couldn’t go to school. After breakfast and a dose of cough syrup and vitamins, he went back to bed to sleep it out. The dust had blocked out sunlight and the apartment turned dark by 10am. I switched on the lights and went back to my chores.

When I sit down to jot my hundred words, I see a message in Google talk from my niece, Veena. This is in reply to my message sent the previous day. I am sending a message to her now. We share a bit of our day online.
The dust is everywhere. Today the storm is less intensive. But the one of yesterday, left us with a lot of cleaning to do. The car cleaners at the parking lot had a tough day. They had just wiped the cars clean and the wind carried another load of dust, spoiling their effort.

Thursday evening is a relaxed time for everyone. The children have two days of leave and for some working folk, Thursdays are half days. For Krishna and his friends’ it is get together time. They sit at his study table as he plays a game on his computer. One sits playing on his Nintendo-DS and another with a small motor connected to pencil cells making a whirring noise as it rotates. And the chatter goes on above the irritating noise of the motor. Chandra sits with the newspaper and the TV drones on above the din the boys are making.

There is always the issue of putting aside some time for study. For Krishna, the study time is homework time and putting away all other subject issues into the sack, called the school bag. And to find a good book to read or some game issues to be sorted out.
The school bag itself becomes an issue sometimes. We nag him to put away some of the books which are not required that particular day, to lessen the weight of the bag. But every book is needed it seems, and the school bag is as heavy as a rice sack.

It is worrying when you sit down to put your one hundred words for the day and the computer refuses to function normally. I try all tricks to coax it to work for me. Sometimes shutting down and restarting helps and this worked today.
Anyway it wasn’t as bad as that day in India, when a truck passed by the road and pulled down the internet cable hanging across the road. And some nice passer by, had tied the cut wire to a roadside tree. I missed out the batch as I did not have internet connection for two days.

The early morning hours here as I view it, in Bahrain are revealing. The people moving around on the roads are almost totally Indian. I could easily forget I was not in India.
The car cleaners come chatting in Tamil. The security men of the shopping mall arrive next to change shifts and it is purely a Keralite group. Then the office of the car park is opened by a middle aged Indian, who it seems, is soon leaving Bahrain, after a couple of decades here. There are a lot of Indians who have spent their entire working life here.

My sister reported that some annoying mail was coming from my e-mail id and promptly forwarded one mail item to me. I was shocked, because I hadn’t sent it at all.
Then I remembered a friend (I thought it was a friend) inviting me to view her photos on some friends’ site for which I had to register before viewing. I had to give my e-mail id and password to register. I thought what harm could that do, yahoo had my password too. The site stole my address list! I told my sister to block me in her university mail.

After the morning rush of preparing breakfast and packing snacks it is writing time. I see a message on G-talk from another niece of mine. She was still up late night in the US working on her master’s thesis, while I was up and about in the next morning, almost at the end of my morning activities. She is getting ready to sleep and I wish her a very good night and continue with my writing.
The car park trees are being trimmed. I ask Chandra to go through Gosi, not around it because of the dust and falling branches.

The back entrance of Gosi is across the road, below the window of one of our rooms. Usually the window is shut and the curtains pulled across to block out the noise and safe guard our privacy.
I open the window to let in some cool breeze and the din of sparrows chirping, was refreshing. Soon the traffic would take over and any blockage would be met with honking horns and disturbing human voices.
The flags above the Gosi flutter in the early morning breeze. The gulls have finished their early morning rendezvous around our buildings and have moved on.

Mid afternoon around 3pm, I decided to rush to the nearest supermarket, for a few essentials. The supermarket is across the road to the mosque. There were hardly a dozen people about and the female population was not to be seen at all. A few small boys were looking up at the gulls swirling in the cool breeze. One or two cars whizzed by. The supermarket was almost empty and I could rush back soon.
I caught the eye of a lady in a traditional abaya who had appeared and was walking near the mosque. We quietly passed each other.

Thursday morning Krishna called from school to say he was injured in the play ground and we had to collect him from school. It is a bit worrying, when you are not very sure of what happened and it takes time to find out.
Krishna was in the playground when one of the more boisterous boys slapped him on the lower back. Caught off guard and from the rear, it took some ice and soothing gel to relieve the pain. He had found it difficult to sit down properly and had called home. The culprit didn’t understand this wasn’t funny!

After the ban on certain web content, there is talk to ban alcohol and other non Islamic foods like pork products. This is creating a spate of letter writing in the local papers. Bahrain is a haven for expats and visiting ones from the neighbouring kingdoms.
One expat column writer voiced his feelings over the loss of free rights and stated that intolerance was not right. The next column of his was a pacifier. According to his revised views, the locals had tolerated too much and it was right to go back to their old ways.
Don’t we understand survival!

Sunday evening as G-talk was in progress with my sister in another continent, some recent family wedding pictures came across the web from India. There were a lot of cousins in the group pictures with whom we had lost contact. A wedding brings together a lot of familiar faces now older and different looking. Having stayed longer in India than my sister, I could recognise almost all of them. I guided her through the family groups and there were a faces that challenged me too. Mailed immediately, asking about the family in between familiar faces, whom I could not identify.

I like to see Krishna in the bus stop, before the bus arrives. The bus waits for about ten minutes to pick up stragglers, at least most times. But the late comers hold up the bus, denying the early birds, some time of play, before the start of school.
Yesterday was one of those rare days, when the bus arrived at the stop before Krishna. He saw it arrive from the entrance of the building and ran across the two roads and the car park to get to it. Not safe! He was still ten minutes ahead of the stragglers.

I wanted to catch a good night’s rest, so went to bed early. The garbage truck came first at 2am and though I valiantly fought to shut out its din, I was wide awake. The garbage man and his trash can arrived at 4am and I decided to give up the effort, to get any more sleep. I do appreciate these early birds and their sense of duty and know how crucial their jobs are to our well being. But not at 2am!
I wish they would choose a more earthly hour to do their jobs. And god bless them!

I do not spend too much time at the computer. No dawdling over unnecessary stuff and to regret the time wasted. Short and productive stints are strictly followed, except for a few games of Solitaire, as an indulgence.
Weekends are spent away from the computer as the family takes over the machine. It is the end of Thursday and I am just getting down to complete the one hundred words of the day. Krishna and his friends were crowding the computer for a few hours and have just left it for me to take over. I must write earlier, tomorrow.

There are times here, when I feel I am not far away from home, in India. For a start, I see more Indians here in a day, than I saw, maybe in all of my nine year stay in Nigeria. Then it is just a couple of hours by air to the home country and the airport is just a twenty minute drive from the apartment. It takes me double the time to get to the airport in Coimbatore. And from busy metropolitan cities in India, getting to the airport seems sometimes, more than the flying time to another country.

It is past 8pm as I sit down to complete the batch of this month. Delaying breakfast till mid morning, I got some time to dawdle over my cereal sitting at the window.
The students’ of the university at the Gosi are a noisy lot. Even the demure looking girls in their black Abayas, take you by surprise at the noise they generate when in a group. One winter evening I saw a small group, one girl sitting on the bonnet of a big car chatting and laughing loudly oblivious of the stares of passers’ by. Bahrain, an Islamic country!!!