The day she baked a cake....

The overwhelming response to my last story has inspired me to write and post some more.

Unlike An Evening Visit, which was a complete figment of my imagination, this one is inspired from real events! Hope you enjoy reading this as much as i enjoyed writing it!

J
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I was fast asleep in my room, when I was very rudely woken up by my dog who was trying to take refuge under my bed. Now he was a big guy, and my bed was low. So he decided that if he could not get under it, he might as well try to get on top of it. So what if I was sleeping there? According to him, I was wasting my life, and if he could, he would personally take the cot and throw it out of my house. He might actually have done that too, only he did not know that my father supported his ideas (thankfully for me!).

Anyway, I was so “overwhelmed” by his affection that I just had to get up and see what the matter was (he would give his life for me, and expected me to give mine for him). Now then. I dragged myself out of the cot, walked into the hall, looked disbelievingly at the scene for what seemed like an eternity, turned around, and marched right back into my room.

To describe to what I saw in those moments is an enormous task, but since you  so badly want to know it, I’ll try. First I saw what seemed like an apparition. It was part white, hair all over the place, a darkish dress smudged with some sort of gooey substance and a pair of spectacles on the face. I think it was a woman. Next I remember noticing the hall. The table was there, but it most certainly did not seem like the one I had eaten my dinner at! Then there was our maid, who was moving around the apparition so animatedly that I could hardly notice where one began and the other ended. Hands flapping, mouth opening and closing like a fish, legs darting out from under her to avoid obstacles and that weird look on her face, she was a sight.

It took me a while to understand what I had seen. 

I finally gathered that the apparition was my sister and that the whole scene was that of my sister attempting to bake a cake. I set out to test this hypothesis. By now my dog was also pretty excited thinking that his master was finally doing something for him. This time I was not so stunned as before as I was expecting to see what I saw. And yes. My hypothesis was correct!

What was happening was that my sister had her holidays on, and wanted to do something useful to prevent time from killing her. So she set out to do what seemed like a very easy task of baking a cake.

First she had got the proportions all messed up, and when she figured them out, she had not enough flour. So she sent our watchman to the end of the street to buy some more. In the meantime she decided to make some popcorn for her entertainment while she worked. The flour arrived sooner than expected (by now the whole household was involved I guess), and as she negotiated with it, the popcorn popped! She rushed to the popcorn, leaving the watchman holding the flour, who in turn had to rush to the gate as chota saab had returned from his round of squash. So the flour was in the wet hands of the maid, and when my sister noticed this she shrieked. That sound was followed instantaneously by a dull plop sound, indicating that the flour had landed safely on mom’s new sofa!

So that was how the room had looked so hazy the first time around. The popcorn, by this time, had popped all around the room, and the plug was pulled out of the socket in a vain attempt to turn off the machine. What actually happened was that the machine flew off the table and splattered even more popcorns all over the room. The eggs just could not manage to find their way into the mixing bowl, and having a mind of themselves, decided to go after the popcorn. The butter meanwhile had melted and was trickling into the open mouth of my dog who was relishing every bit of it.

This was when she decided to give up the whole exercise and spare the household of any more torture.

The best part of the whole episode was that in the end, we did eat some very good cake for dinner (it was parents wedding anniversary).

From there I moved on...