Whenever Amma went on one of her cleaning sprees, I used to make excuses to get out of it. And even if I couldn't get out of it, I never had to do any real work.. Krishna, Murthy or Devaki had all the tough work; I just had to supervise in my area and most of the time, this just involved yelling "No No No, Don't thow away that Tinkle Digest. I know I have'nt read it in a decade but I might want to read it sometime", and Amma would anyway override me in everything. So, no big deal. I could just vegetate in front of the TV when other people did all the hard work and got the house shiney and looking good as new.

 

Unfortunately, things have taken a 360 degree shift in my life. I worked all saturday, got home, and crashed. On sunday, I wake up to my roommate telling me that it is 10.30 and I have slept for more than 12 hours. So what. That is what sundays are for. So I said 10 minutes and turned over. She sat down next to my bed and proceeded to prattle on about what she had done on saturday. I cracked an eye open and asked her if she had decided that I had had enough sleep. She said, "yes and you can lie down for 10 minutes". How kind. I got out of bed, did the dailies and had coffee.

 

By then, I had a vague recollection of the two of us deciding to "clean the house this weekend", sometime during the week. It sounds so easy when it is "later". Later was now and there was no getting out of it. So we started. First job, washing machine balcony. So much garbage!! 2 bags of garbage later, we moved to the kitchen. Much more garbage!! We had bags of all kinds - laundry bags, food world bags, paper bags from fabindia, cloth bags from god knows where and more. So we took all these bags and put them all in a large bag. Then we started on old plastic bottles - pepsi, coke, mineral water, medicines and one bottle of some weird semi-solid brownish sticky substance. We didn't have a bag big enough to take all of this, so we dragged out a large cardboard box and put all of this in that. This was followed by old pressure cooker, and newspapers. We had about a hundred newspapers, still rolled up. We broke some stuff we were planning on keeping and with heavy hearts, we threw those away too. Now, we had no junk in the house but how were we going to take this unbelievably huge and heavy cardboard box out of the house? We tried picking it up but it was torn on one side everything started falling out. Not good. So we used the pai. We put the box on the pai and manouvered it out of the house and to the place street where the garbage guy collects the stuff from every midday.

 

Now that all the crap was out of the house, we swept and mopped. The house is divided into two between us. D cleans her room, the dining area and the kitchen; I clean the entrance, the living room and my room. My area is bigger but hers is more cluttered. So more or less even split, I thought. Then I started sweeping the entrance and SO MANY SHOES! Mine, hers, the earlier roommates. About a hundred. Pick then up, sweep under, put them back. The rest of the house was easy. Then D mopped. Just as I was about to breathe a sigh of relief and go bathe, D said, "Now that we have done so much, why don't we clean the windows too?"... Why don't we indeed. So 6 windows and one cut finger later, I finally bathed. Phew.

 

Bathed, ate and slept. Got up, ate and went right back to sleep.

 

How was your weekend?

 

Oh yeah, I totally forgot, we cleaned the fridge out too.. There was a really bad smell coming so we threw everything out and cleaned it from top to bottom with Pril. now it smells nice and lemony. And clean.