REHANA BLOGS

Did I mention that I was a Murph? Well, what happened this weekend merely seems to enhance the fact that I am, in fact, a Murph. As in, I’m a person who is the living, breathing true-to-life proof that Murphy’s Law persists. Since my sister was in a wedding, I volunteered to baby-sit her daughter Alishba, in the process giving up my social life for three days. Three whole days, each of which was exactly twenty four hours; seventy two hours which were more than enough to make me take a firm stand in what I now call the Motherhood is the Toughest Job in the World Cause. How was I ever so ignorant as to think that taking care of babies is a breeze? How did one small baby manage to create in me an exhaustion that is on par with jetlag? And after the whole weekend, I’ve come to the conclusion that Like Aunt, Like Daughter. She seems to be a Murph too. Which I a pity. This world surely doesn’t need more of us. Alishba is ten months old. She’s a fast crawler, and her favorite place is her...

Ever since we’ve moved into this house; which is apparently in a residential area even though its half jungle, we’ve been surrounded by all sorts of animals, mostly of the normal domestic variety such as the goats that wander around eating off most of the lawn outside the walled garden, to the cats that try to get into the kitchen from atop the walls thereby getting themselves electrocuted, to the strange mongrel breeds of dogs that sometimes see fit to keep our security man on the alert. To a family that has never seen the use of pets of the animal sort in the house, apart from a rat-catcher in the early nineties, which was thrown out for having kittens and eating them; the concept of being an animal magnet is a strange one. When one observes the types of fauna to be found in the vicinity of man, one is almost certain to discount the presence of camels and monkeys. And yet, these are the very animals that seem to have found a home in us. When we first moved to the new house, it...