Lullaby

Things I'm going to miss loving

4. Getting my gear on

Know what it’s like to dress up as a grape? An orange? A lime? What it’s like to wear your pyjamas to work every day? How it feels walking into a meeting with conservative VIPs in thongs? What it’s like to not have a fat day? I do, I do, I do!

For a whole year I’ve been spared the strict rules and regulations that are the dress codes of living in a cosmopolitan city like Sydney. The good bits about this are multiple. I haven’t been caught lying in bed thinking, ‘nothing’s ironed!’, or ‘how dressed up should I be?’, or ‘am I having a fat day or a thin day?’ I haven’t had to worry about matching my shoes to my outfits, about wearing makeup, or doing my hair, or about whether my daytime dress will carry me through to evening. All this while having an office job would have seemed like some far out feminist-breakout utopia to me a few years ago.

That is the wonder of the salwar kameez.


I'll play the grape in today's fruit cocktail

Sure, there are days when I don’t feel like featuring as one of the colours of the rainbow. When I feel tired and frumpy and sexless and the last thing I want to put on is the equivalent of a potato-sack-does-gay-mardi-gras. I worry about what my waist line is doing, and curse the ever expanding capabilities of the draw string. Most of all I miss wearing dresses and skirts and feeling feminine. But, on reflection, the positives of such liberation far outweigh the negatives.

Seriously, I haven’t had to ‘suck in’ for twelve months. What an opportunity! (PS, if anyone knows a good pilates instructor, I’ll be on the look out in March…)

When all is said and done, I know I’m going to really miss the freedom of dressing ‘deshi style. Being the kind of girl who isn’t known for my love of washing and ironing, or shopping, I’ve spent a lot of time in my life lamenting the piles of dirty, unwearable, unfashionable, out of date, and downright unsuitable outfits I have had to choose from. To be given a year reprieve from this was more than a girl like me could ever ask for. Not only has it been okay for me to be all crumpled and mismatched – it has been expected! Here there are no colour rules. It’s as simple as Long top/pants/scarf, every single day. The brighter the better!

All this talk has made me ask myself just how I’m going to feel once I get back into the camp of consumerism, where I will have to check size tags and relegate lime back to the fruit aisle (where it rightly belongs, I might add). Bring it on, I say. A year off is proving to be just about enough. I mean, I’m not even sure if I have legs at this point. Those two ghastly white things I catch quick glimpses of every now and then can’t actually belong to me…

Things I'm going to love missing

4. This means WAR

“Telapoka” is one of those words which sounds so much better than what it means. Go on, say it aloud. Tel-a-pok-a. It’s cute, got good rhythm, punchy, all sharp because of the ‘t’ and the ‘k,’ and snappy thanks to the short ‘a’ sounds. Next to ‘tik tik’ (the word for gecko), it could be my favourite Bangla word. It’s such a shame it is the word for something I have come to loathe so very much over the past 12 months. A real shame. But cockroaches, while you’ve never been loved exactly, the time has come for you all to DIE!

Cockroaches in the kitchen. Cockroaches crawling out of the plug holes in the bathroom. Cockroaches crawling on my toothbrush, over my clean plates in the cupboard, or flying across the room in the middle of the night? GROSS!

In fact, I am not at all going to miss the general encroachment into my life of pests in general. I’ve had serious rat issues too. First huge rats in my kitchen, eating through plastic containers to get to flour, running off with onions, leaving trails of shit (and fear) in their wake. Then rats in my office at work. Rats so big they tore huge pieces out of my curtain to nest with. So strong they ripped chunks of wood off the inside of my desk draws. So annoying they turned my notebooks and paperwork into shredded paper, and left trails of destruction over everything I dared touch. Not content with doing all this at night, the bastards ran over my feet or were found in the middle of the day chewing on my pen. Brazen bastards.



Exhibit 1: Rodent destruction in the workplace

All of this and I haven’t even mentioned the spiders. Being somewhat of an arachnophobe, I once would have thought these hairy creatures would always feature at number one of my dreaded creepy crawlies, so only making number three is a big step forward. But I still don’t like them. I don’t like them so much that I spent over an hour stuck on the squat toilet in my home, trapped by the hairy huntsman parked between me and the door. What to do? What to do? The arrival of monsoon sent more of the beastly things inside, and turning every corner in my place became an exercise in testing my somewhat frayed nerves.

How did I cope? Let’s just say I would make a terrible Buddhist, because I did what many before me have done and went on the offensive. The weaponry in my arsenal ranged from surface poisons to aerosol sprays. I built barriers out of water bottles, sticky tape and metal grates. I gave up desk drawers to the cause and moved my things higher, out into the open, into the light, or in extreme cases into the fridge. I only crossed the territory from one room to the other armed with cans of bug spray, ready to go onto the attack. And I killed. I squashed, I squirted, I smashed and I sprayed the buggers into submission.

While I have had a few wins and regained some territory, the war is never ending. Until now, that is, because “I’m leaving on a jet plane….” Ahhhhh. How’s the serenity?