Thought Overflow

The last few days have been rather warm for this time of the year. I would stand in front of my “closet” with 2 thoughts in my mind…

• I wore this T-shirt only 2 days ago.
• Chuck it. It’s going to be hot and I’d rather wear something I sweat least in.

Day before yesterday, that started changing… the evening was definitely cooler than the past few evenings. Yesterday morning, I could sense the coolness in the air, and a slight irritation in my nose told me that a change was coming. Making light of it and expecting the sun to return like the hot devil it is and bake me in a few hours (as it normally happens here), I simply wore a thin cotton T-shirt and went to college. My feeling in the morning, however, was proven right. It was a cooler day, the clouds barely left the sky, successfully hiding most of the sun for most of the time… lovely… Needless to say, I caught a cold.

And the fact of the matter is that I hate having a cold (it’s right up there on my list of most unwanted illnesses, along with fever). I can’t smell most things, I can’t have cold water, and if my luck is feeling particularly hurtful, I even get a bad cough at the end of it, which lasts a month or more… a bitter reminder that I once had a cold, for a couple of days, a month ago… yay. Immediate precautions needed to be taken. So, instead of changing clothes, washing my face, and switching on the TV (which is what I normally do within the first 10 minutes of reaching home), I swallowed a few homoeopathy pills… within 10 minutes, I took some more from another bottle (apparently, these 2 work best when taken like this… even homoeo pills look for diversity in their companions, apparently). Heck, I even ordered and drank some nice, hot chicken soup, and drank a glass of haldi ka doodh (milk with sugar and a little bit of turmeric powder, which does have medicinal properties, I assure you), and went to sleep covered to the chin in my blanket, and with hope in my heart.

Hope springs eternal, but life plays spoilsport. So I wake up in the morning, heavy-headed, with one nostril blocked, and… sneeze. Damn it, the cold survived my assault of chicken coup, turmeric-milk and a nightful of rest. However, the true irony is that today was even more lovelier than yesterday. There was no sun in the sky to speak of, the grey clouds hovered about all day, a rather cool breeze has been blowing, and it’s already quite dark (at just 6pm), and I can’t lay back and sit on the balcony, enjoying the cool breeze. Instead I’ve had to wear a pair of warm tracks which I’ve rarely ever worn (and now am wondering why I haven’t worn them that much, considering they’re so comfortable)*, sneezing about, eating homoeopathy pills, drinking even more chicken soup… sigh… irony.

*By the way, that just goes to show that there’s a bit of good in every bad