Help! My mom's out to make me a model!

I’m just into my second mug of coffee; my mom’s eyes follow the coffee jar to my nervous hand pouring it. “Look at that color; you want your skin to become black like that coffee?” I hate Baba Ramdev for instilling that notion in her mind.
Ardent fan of Baba Ramdev and his yoga treatment; my mom wakes up each morning twitching her tummy with the loud inhaling and exhaling of her breath. I wonder how she could see my coffee mug with her fingers covering almost everything near her nose and eyes area.
Silently I pick my coffee and head out on the verandah. “Did you put on your sunscreen?” she shouts over her respiration exercises. I head out turning deaf ear. What would few minutes in the early morning sun do to my skin?
I return inside to find her sitting cross-legged and with her lanky limbs flapping like a helpless bird. I pull my laptop, wanting to just look at the pictures of my daughter. She gets up instantly. Baba Ramdev’s asans do work I think, look at the vigor with which my mom got up. “Don’t you dare open that thing!” she warns. I pout and crease my forehead but do not reply.
“You people are turning into lazy pigs with those gadgets keeping you hooked for hours!” I don’t know if she is more angry with me for spending hours with the laptop or angry with the people who designed laptops making people using it ‘lazy’ as she calls it. I shove it away and look at her, a look that says, “you are busy with your breathing, what am I supposed to do?”
“Let’s go out for a walk,” she pulls me up from the corner of the bed, where I’ve made my niche. “Walk?” I almost spit out the last dreg of coffee I had just put in my mouth. “What’s wrong in taking a walk?” she snaps. Reluctantly I drag myself to cover my face with sunscreen lest she find another verbal missile to attack me with.
The dirty, smelly lane is filled with bovines she is too pleased to see. “Cow’s milk!” she smiles happily. “I think we get a lot of cow’s milk around here, look at all these cows.” Before she replaces my early morning coffee with her milk, I stop to talk to a lady groped in front of her doorstep making a design of a sort. I ask the lady the meaning of her design but inside my head I hear my mom telling me, “Milk will make your skin healthy while your black coffee is making you dark, just like this lady here.” I chuckle at the last phrase. Indeed the lady in front of is as dark as the moonless night but I know for sure that coffee has nothing to do with her color.
“Ama, lok dekhey,” I plead. My bowels longing for the hot seat back in our room. I find her eyeing the coconut vendor. “Bhiaya, two coconuts,” she hands over thirty rupees. “Drink this instead, this is healthy.” There she goes again.
Finally after consuming much dust and dirt she decides it’s time for our return but not before venturing into a shop nearby. “Let’s buy a toner and bleach.” I follow her in without any argument. “Maybe we should also take this coconut oil to massage our hair.” She has already picked it out of the shelf. I raise my eyebrows to ask the shopkeeper the amount. I dread the ordeal I’ve to go through with these products.
Oil massage, cleansing, toning we do all after a drink of the coconut milk. “Are we preparing for a modeling project?” I laugh at my own joke while my mom just stares blankly at me. She doesn’t find it funny. “The more we age; the more we have to do all these,” she reasons out.
“Let’s go to that Punjabi dhaba we saw yesterday,” I suggest my mouth watering at the thought of sarson ka saag with makhe di roti. “You want to look like a pig with all that dripping ghee?” Another attack. I silently go out to buy the cucumber she had planned for the healthy salad for lunch.

Me, My daughter and the Moon.

“I wish we could sleep the whole day long,” my daughter says near my ears. I gaze in her eyes about to rebuke her for turning into a lazy fox wanting to sleep the whole day long. But before I can open my mouth, she points towards the full moon peeping through the partly open curtains. “…so that we can watch the beautiful moon throughout the night,” she says dreamily.
I gaze in her eyes for yet another time. But the second time I look at her, it’s with unbelievable surprise. Never knew she had the fascination for moon, just like her mom. “Mama, I just love the full moon and the twinkling stars,” she says as if reaffirming what my heart is feeling.
Never knew a daughter could inherit a mother’s love for objects too. I got up, discarding the tiny emerging sleepiness in my eyes. I opened the curtain a wee bit more and we sat silently staring at the moon.
I looked at my daughter and saw her lost in the moon. I wondered what she could be thinking of; looking at the moon like that. I took her tiny hands in mine and wanted to tell her about all the times I have had secret rendezvous with the moon. The moon had been my close confidant when the complexity of a teenager’s life riddled me. But I skipped that for it’s too early to have her on that plane.
So the mother and daughter duo looked at the moon and I wondered, could there be a father son duo somewhere on the face of the planet Earth sharing such close moments like me and my daughter?

How does baby get into mommy's tummy?

“Mama, how did I get in your tummy?” my li’l one questions me showing me the video clip of my pregnancy days I’ve in my phone. “Let me see,” is all I can mutter feeling my cheeks burning under the gaze of my in-laws sitting beside me. Had it been just me and my kids I would have explained in detail, wait a second! How does one explain to three years old about babies and how they end up in their mommy’s tummy?
I know my li’l one has reached the WHY STAGE and she is bound to have a lot of queries but I wasn’t prepared for this particular question; especially not at dinner time when everybody in the family is gathered together.
“God plants seed in mommy’s tummy,” my all-knowing ten years old Niece comes to my rescue. She always has answer for every query and all her responses revolve around God, saints and ghosts. I scold her for bringing in Gods and ghosts in our conversation most of the times. But I was happy that she at least had that ready answer to fill the awkward silence I offered to my li’l one.
“Akhai, it’s not God!” an angry retort from my elder daughter leaves me dumb founded. I turn my attention to the bukhari as if hoping the crackling fire to help me provide me a reasonable response. I truly wish they would forget the talk or at least go to another movie clip. I have a lot of other interesting movie clips they can watch rather than the one they are stuck on.
“Mama eats a lot of food and her tummy gets bloated, “my elder daughter gives her reasoning. She looks at me to seek my approval and not finding any hint of it in my abashed face, she meekly adds,”…and out comes baby!”
But my li’l one doesn’t buy her elder sisters wise cracks. She further probes,” mam…ma…” I pull her closer and snatch the phone and show her the movie clip of her sister singing hindi songs. “Ana gi chuma yekcha gothcho na,” I add a forced laughter to get my li’l one’s attention.” ong ni ong ni,” she adds and quickly gets engrossed in it.
Baby and how they get into the tummy is forgotten. Thank God for giving kids short attention span.