Family get together over snacks of the champions!! “Aloor chop”, “vegetable chop” (potato and vegetable fritters) with red wine!!!

(Sharmila Ghose, for the record, no more scaling of water tanks on the terrace to drink wine 🙂 )

My brother and I sat in the sun to get some office work done. Seeing us, he came over with his book and quietly started reading it!!

… till a few kids showed up with a soccer ball. As you can see, two more kids joined them for some street soccer in decidedly unsoccer like uniforms…

Running from pillar to post – or rather LIC office to Post office to straighten out some paperwork for our parents. To be fair, we are not making it easy on them. My dad is living but cannot physically be present or even sign any paperwork. My mom’s fingerprints never come out well (for whatever reason, Sharmila has the same issue) to match identity and none of the iris systems work in Kalyani.

All that said, we were able to get everything squared away after quite some
patience and running around..

Everybody is all smiles!
Well, somebody might be laughing aloud!!

I used to visit this guy almost everyday if I was in Durgapur. I really liked him. Or was it his sister? I forget now.
But it is true that he and I used to be pretty close at one point of time. Marrying his sister fixed that problem!!
Like clockwork, I would show up at his house in my dilapidated Vijay Deluxe scooter on winter mornings and he would still be in his sleeping clothes. He would just put a couple of layers on and we would sit out in the sun outside their house and talk about – whatever it is that we used to talk about in our twenties. Till his mom would declare that his sister had finished cooking noodles for us.
We did EXACTLY that today. Admittedly, I did not have my scooter with me. And I have gotten tired of his sister… errrrr… I mean noodles 🙂 But the rest of the stuff was as much fun… if not more…