keeping up appearances, our new year, phagwa and the basuri...

yesterday, spring break started for another group of schools. now the bookstore i work at mainly supplies books for the community college students so that would mean that this week, when all the university students were back at school, it would be slow in the bookstore. the boss called me and told me that i had the day off and i didnt need to come to work in the evening yesterday. i guess i grabbed the opportunity and i went off to the mall instead. got all dressed up...earrings and heels and all and i was having a good time when the other boss (my boss's boss) called me and told me that i needed to come to work. got there just in time for him to reach the bank while it was open.
after work, i went to the mall again with ami. he found out that there would have been a sale and he needed working clothes so we came back. i guess with ami and me, it's reversed. i hate shopping and he absolutely loves it. we spent an hour in the macy's men store and when we left, ami had four pairs of pants and a jacket. i spent an hour in the macy's women's store and didn't see one thing that was worth buying. it is so aggravating to go shopping for yourself! so when i go shopping, i usually stand and let ami do the looking and then i get whatever he says will look good. the only problem is that ami likes a bunch of dresses...and dresses aren't very practical at all. i like jeans and shoes....and it shows because i have the most of those. oh and earrings too but i like bargains more=0) in the sale, i got a really nice shirt for my dad and a pair of pants that goes well with it. i like buying more for other people than shopping for myself. the sales clerk even went looking for the same thing after.
so there's a customer that wants me to tutor his son in math. i said that i would tutor the kid but there's always been a mixup every saturday since he first spoke to me about it. i need to form a strategy to deal with the problems that the kid is having in his math. hopefully, it will go well. if ami learnt, i know that the kid can too. ami has got to be the most difficult person to tutor.
laila told me today that her husband wants to move back to their country in june. if she leaves that soon, i will be so lonely there! the thing about laila is that she is one of the people i truly like being around. her company is worth being there for the other three days that i do not work with her. but i know that she can do better and she will have the opportunity to work in her career without any language barriers if she moves back. her life will be better off there and i suppose that if your friendship matters like that, you will always want what is best for your friend.
today she brought me a chocolate orange. it's one of the coolest inventions of chocolate ever created. i first learnt about it from mandy, a little girl i used to babysit over the summer. see, the chocolate looks like an orange with the pegs and all. you have to whack it really hard inorder to sufficiently break the pegs apart. the whacking is almost as fun as the chocolate. mandy used to have fun whacking away...so laila, who is also a chocoholic, admitted to me that if she had only known that the orange was that good, it would not have survived in her home for as long as it did. i hid it in a cooler at work so we can enjoy it there. yeah, and boy was this orange good. when chocolate is good, you don't need to eat a lot of it....one little piece usually gets the happy hormones going.
i guess i ate a lot of sweet things today. had apple pie, chocolate, icecream, and a smoothie. jeez! oh well! this is an exception...it's our new year. we are in 2060-something today. for us, the festival started sometime tonight and will continue until sometime tomorrow. i went ahead and bought the powder and the abeer to mix so i can play holi with my family tomorrow. it was only after i got nandini to smear a whole bunch of red powder on my mom's face that she told us she wasn't celebrating because of my uncle's death. i felt bad about it but i know she wouldn't stop us from playing. it's my favorite festival. here, it's a bit lonely. the relatives here do not really do many religious things but when we were in trinidad, we had a lot of fun times with phagwa. the last holi we spent in trinidad, we got so colored that the only thing recognizable on us were our eyes and our teeth! my dad made us walk up the bus route to the family house, about a 3/4 mile away because we would have stained his car. it was fun though......all of my cousins were with me and we were joking all the way.
today i was telling ami about the maha sabha and their celebrations....maha sabha is the hindu organization in trinidad. sometimes, i am a little disappointed with the way that they run the organization but i will give them credit...they have been instrumental in keeping the culture really strong in trinidad. so we went to the hindu schools and when we were little, we would learn the songs and perform on stage with all the other maha sabha schools and the visiting groups. the music is distinct and the minute you hear these songs, they take you back to a time and place...for me, it was performing with my friends and getting sprayed from a pichakari with the abeer and then feeling the cold air from the mountain after. my guru used to live right behind the maha sabha headquarters so we used to visit him while we were playing just to get his blessing.
oh, ami bought a flute today at the indian store when i was getting the abir. well, there's a flute and then there's the basuri...so i guess he got a basuri. he took a while to figure out how to get the air right but i guess music runs in his veins. this evening when i saw him, he had already gotten from sa to sa and he was starting to play a raaga. he didn't think i would recognize what he was doing so he was really surprised when i sang the notes he was playing then sang a few lines of the song he was thinking of. the song is a religous filmi one, a bhajan...'darshan do ganashyam' done in raaga kedar. hopefully, he'll be playing more songs soon. he keeps the basuri in his car so everytime he stops at a traffic light, he takes it up and starts playing. people like ami have an ear for music. when they play, or when they listen to music, the instruments "speak" to them in a language that they can understand. what may sound like a small mistake to me, will sound like a horrible flaw to him and it will be amplified too. today, when ami played his raaga, and i understood the individual notes; finally, i understand.