Crash, Clang, Smile!

Woman sitting at her laptop, staring at a blank screen, searching for the right words with which to pen a serious article. An angelic looking boy, around five-years old is sitting in front of her with a set of crayons and a new colouring book. Every now and then, her eyes stray to the colouring book and widen in horror when she sees the pretty pictures being massacred by merciless rough-handling and furious scribbling. She sighs and bites her tongue. At least she has some peace and quiet from this corner, this hurricane with chocolate coloured eyes and cherub smile!

But, there's another little tornado running amok, leaving destruction and chaos in his wake. She shakes her head and sighs some more. She should really learn to get by on an hour's worth of sleep everyday so that she can work uninterrupted in the dead of night when the hurricane and tornado are tucked into bed, gathering their new gusts of wind for the next day. Suddenly peace and quiet. She smiles and sets to work.

Poor fool of a woman! You'd think she would have learnt by now that 'kiddie silences' mean anything but 'Mamma relax time'! Anything but! In fact, the exact opposite, It means 'worry, Mamma, worry' accompanied by generous dollops of evil maniacal laughter.

Suddenly, there's a crashing and clanging sound. The sound of a steel plate coming into contact with a cold, marble floor. She can hear the plate spinning, spinning, spinning like a dizzying top until it finally comes to a metallic sounding halt. She knows where the sound originated from and what transpired to bring it crashing down. She shakes her head and (yes, say it with me...) sighs, and gets up to investigate, although she knows the sight she will be met with.

She enters the pooja room of her mother's impeccably neat and clean house, and stops in her tracks at the sight of a curly-haired little boy, his mouth crammed with all the raisins that had been laid out for the Gods, chewing away fast and furious with his tiny set of teeth. On seeing his mother, the little charmer gives her a huge smile, revealing a mooshed-up, gooey goop of raisins spread over his teeth. The smile is a mess and yet it starts to dance and play upon her heartstrings. The woman's eyes search for the musically-inclined plate that had been dropped, giving the little kishmish-chor away. She finds that it has been picked up by those two, chubby, grubby hands that she loves to kiss, and laid out again in front of the Gods...empty of course!

Her heart clicks a picture and the woman comes away from there, having resisted the urge to rush to the twinkle-eyed moppet, pick him up and crush him into her very soul. She's smiling, a great big smile and she knows the raisin-deprived Gods are doing the same!