The Punjabi Landlady

She is a cannon-ball, she is a torch ablaze; she is a hawk with her talons sharpened just now and her piercing, lazer-beam eyes evolved to spot anything remotely shady...
SHE IS THE PUNJABI LANDLADY!!

I had intended to write the whole post as a poem but my rather in-adept rhyming skills were killing the emotions oozing out, as pus does from a bad wound.

To be brutally honest, one of the reasons for my moving away from my Punjbai-centered North Indian hometowns was to get some breathing space away from my culture. Don’t get me wrong. I am a Punjbai to the core but our loud temperaments that only add fire to our mean, sarcastic hearts to everybody (yes, even people who are not family)gets tiresome sometimes.

So you can imagine the excessively-rude shock I got when I move into this incredibly beautiful place and open the door to the first person in my first every home and find out it’s my landlady, who adding injury to insult is a Punjabi.

I can still remember that day as if it were my last night’s nightmare. One would think that years of living in Maharashtra would have eroded the biting edge off the features that I will compile hereunder, but no Sir.

Your average Punjabi landlady will expect you to keep the house as clean and beautiful as if it were your own while at the same time expecting you to forget not in your deepest sleep that the mattress you are sprawled on is not your own.

She will make it so you see her face looming in front of you, teeth bared in-what she assumes is a smile- the moment you spill a drop of something as harmless as water; and the parched lips of the imaginary-bobbing head mouthing the words “it may be cold-drink or God-forbid chicken-curry the next time”. [shivers]

She has a knack of knowing, which would be the most ill-suited of times and will announce her presence then with the demand for biscuits or something that you do not have in your kitchen preceding her prodding feet. She will examine, during said visits, every inch of her precious house and pass rude comments on the bad choice of your bed-linen. Hey, everybody wants Egyptian cotton but it isn't your fault if, with your ungenerous pay the only place you can afford to purchase your bed-sheets from comprises a faded bed-sheet on a street-side topped haphazardly with other, faded bed-sheets in all colours and prints that wouldn’t want to wade through a drain in.

But enough crib. (Don't say it, I know)

Next. If you live in a society, do not be nice to the security guards or exchange trivial words with them for they are the harbingers of your daily routine, visitors you entertain and content of grocery-packets, to the landlady when she comes a’callin’. So if she asks you when you returned home last night, make not the foolish error of telling her anytime but the exact minute and second of the hour of your return for she knows. SHE ALREADY KNOWS.

Life, my children, is tough. And after my first experience in a rented house, why we would want to shove it down even more deplorable pits by living in the cursed home of a Punjabi is beyond my below-human-average-intelligence. A word of advice: go for the seepage in the Parsi’s house. Leave the large windows and marble-flooring in the Punjabi’s house.