Deliver me from reasons why...

Perhaps. Is there a reason for every season?

I look at myself in the mirror after running an eye pencil over my eyes. It seems like my face has changed. I observe the contours closely. I am growing older, the thought struck me. Going by a normal life span... how much longer? Another 30-35 years?

Enough time for anything that I may want to do, to achieve, to live the way I want. I take my mind back to the past few decades. Some bit is blank, some memories shine. A particular childhood thought springs. I wanted to grow up and live with a horse and a dog in a little house on the hills. I smile thinking how far I am from that. I don’t even think I will survive if someone were to grant me this childhood wish.

There is much that is common between my growing up years and now. I enjoy my own company. I don't make any particular effort to touch base with people and don't think about it much. It's like I am walking down a path and seeking freshness in the familiarity. I meet others crossing my path and am glad to see them. I also see others taking other parallel roads. I may wave out to them if they look my way but I will not go over and chat up with them.

I know it's not the right attitude. But this was how I was as a child and this is how I am afraid I am becoming. Sometimes I alienate myself from the family, the husband too. With him there is so much I have to talk, narrate, discuss but I don't get down to it because comfort lies in the silence. I get used to it. There was a word my friends used for me. Moody. I don't know if it's to do with moods. It's much more. For I am not unhappy or upset. I am just silent and it's beautiful. I have enough conversations inside my head.

And when the time comes, will I be wondering if I should have done anything differently? Perhaps.

Parellel lives

My new office is in an industrial area. It's an old mill compound so the dilapidated buildings all around have a lot of history stored in every brick and blackened wall and roots and trees bursting out of every crack. They say you get used to things you use everyday, see everyday and grow fond of them too. When I first started coming here, I got lost every night trying to find my way out of the maze of alleys. No more. I have got used to this place and walk about confidently.

Inside the buildings the ceilings are very high and the passages dark. Walking along a passage gives a glimpse of the insides of offices. Swanky, snazzy places, some conservatively done offices, some of them are huge spaces where rows and rows of seamstresses work round the clock, huge spaces when shirts and other garments are packaged and neatly packed into cartons ready to be dispatched. So this is where our steeply priced branded clothes come from!

But outside, along the passage, it's dark, it's humid and like a furnace with the compressors of all the air conditioners hanging overhead. We walk along it swiftly to get into the cool confines of the office. In this very passage sits a lady everyday outside a closed door. I wondered if she was an unstable woman or have some problems to be sitting on the floor in that unhealthy and unhygienic place the whole day.

Bringing this up with my colleague revealed that this lady works in the office outside which she sits. She is a cleaning lady and no, they don't have space for her inside the office. So she sits outside and goes in to clean etc whenever the need arises.

How inhuman is that!! I was shell shocked. What can I do? I can't tell her to quit, she obviously needs the job and the money badly. I can't get her into my office and let her sit there. I can't go fight with her boss and tell him not to treat her the way he does. He will tell me to mind my own business and may fire her.

What can I do??