Week Of The Visitor

Ruth sitting next to Asha a bit of whose arm you see in the pic

This evening we're off to have dinner with Veronika who is visiting from Frankfurt. It's been the week of the visitor. Jyotsna was here from Pune a few days back, to get a couple of visas done and a day after she left Ruth returned from Goa, on her way back to Germany. Ruth, with her rainbow coloured dresses and shock of gold hair flowing down her back. She was to have flown out of Bombay on the 9th of March but decided to prolong her stay in Goa by two weeks, giving me the job of getting her ticket extended.

Air India might have been okay to fly with but getting changes of any sort made is a royal pain. Poor J. who was anyway headed for town the other day agreed to take Ruth's ticket along, to get the new date endorsed. When she reached the AI office she was told that she would have to wait 2 hours in the queue. There were about 50 people already there before her. Why should it take so long for AI to service their customers? Who knows? Like all good government employees maybe they break frequently for tea or intercept their work with long telephone exchanges or friendly chats with their colleagues like the sales people at Cottage Industries do when you're hanging around the counter waiting for them to finish writing out your bill. Anyway good old J. achieved the impossible and returned home triumphantly with the new date endorsed on Ruth's ticket.

Otherwise life's pretty much the same. Am slowly getting back to climbing stairs and now and then I toy with the idea of going for a haircut but still haven't got down to it. I look more and more like Sai Baba. Maybe the day someone actually mistakes me for him I'll call up my hairdresser and go over. Or maybe I'll just play along and pretend to be him. It will be a new and interesting occupation.