A can of letters

At the outset, I must say that I cannot spell. Not too well anyway. I am reasonably alright under the aegis of Microsoft Word, but I am careful to write handwritten letters only to those who are obliged to love me unconditionally.

If you’ve lived in the same world that I have, you must have encountered those superbot parents who will spell out half their conversation when they have a kid in tow. Now those people are my worst nightmare. Visual assemblage of a string of data which has been received through auditory means is one of those tasks that turn my knees instantly to jelly. I think the stress of having to decode all that before the suddenly interested-looking child does, mulches already shaky faculties. But the result is that from a reasonably interesting conversationalist I turn into a blank-eyed zombie who is drawing figures in the air and asks when the joke’s punch line has arrived, “What was that again? W-H-O....”

Now random acquaintances can be acquitted of a desire to torture me. But what is to be made of a mother who after a lifetime of knowing me chooses to spell to me under the most trying circumstances? Let me explain-

The father has been out of town for a bit. His duties, amongst which is the nightly securing of the house, have fallen to me. One night, some nights ago, I was awoken by prodding on my shoulder and a hissed, “Shwetaa!” I opened my eyes to my mother’s insistent, “Did you lock all the doors?” I had, so I said sleepy-righteous, “Yes”. At which point, I think she mentioned that there was something in the house. She also said a few other things about doors and noises that I did not make perfect sense of. Now, my mother is ailurophobic so I assumed it was a cat, or not, and said so, preparing to get up and shout it away with the unflappable courage of the newly awakened, when she chose to start communicating via spelling. She threw a string of letters at me. My mind achieved a complete blank. I think I may have tried to repeat after her in a bit of a shriek because she was soon hushing me and repeating what she said. The fact that she hushed me seemed to register; my mind made the connection that she suspected that the intruder was in fact a human person. I settled down to decoding the Letter-Puzzle in peace because she was evidently getting irritated by my murmuring out loud. After a while I hazarded a guess, “Naake?” I whispered. Having decided there was no help for it my mother articulated in a piercing whisper, “Mace!” I got that. Oh! It was an M and not an N. I was happy to have that mystery cleared up. I was beginning to relax when she said, “Go and get it from your bag”. It occurred to me at that point to ask her why she thought four letters made less sound that one word, but my mother is not a nice person to rile at certain times.

I shimmied noiselessly off the bed to a corner where my hand-bags were. (I was rather pleased with my presence of mind in remembering which one to get and identifying it with a single touch!) I got out the can, opened the lid and waited, arm braced at the door. Once she had got me into this somewhat ludicrous position my mother seemed to think better of the situation. She repeated her question about the doors. I was perfectly sure they were locked, so what? It was just that she had heard a door swing softly and then swing again after about five minutes. I don’t quite know what she thought at that point (perhaps that if there was in fact a thief, he could not have withstood the allure of so much midnight conversation) because she left blithely to go use the bathroom, leaving me sitting at the edge of the bed with a can of pepper spray in a hand held aloft.

By the time she came back I had realised to my indignation that she had probably been misled by a certain window-door which has lately taken to pretending it is a real door with creaky noises and all. I tried telling her this in varying tones and verbiage lest the point escaped her, at which she only wondered why I was getting bothered and wouldn’t it be better for me to try and catch a little sleep?

It is difficult to capture sleep when you are feeling misused but it is one of the charming things about me that sleep can rarely evade me for long. I woke up rested and happy that morning and that midnight’s ordeal only came back to me just now because we are having a power cut and I could do with a little excitement.

Moral of the story: There is no thing so bad that a little spelling cannot make worse.