It was a hot summer afternoon.
Sticky , and warm .
Like all mad geniuses, she sat at the dining table without having switched on the fan , or the cooler. Cooler , she said , was very noisy; the fan distracted her from her thinking process, and the sweat dripping down her chin helped her concentrate !! That way, she continued, she could feel the occasional breeze ("From God's own fan" )waft into the room, which she would have never appreciated. otherwise. Okay, so she was weird.
But she kept to herself , and her messy ways rarely interfered with others . She would sit at the table , calculating equations and figuring out solutions to godawful maths sums.They exercised her grey cells , she said. Calculus , crossword puzzles and the like .
She would dress like an alien sooth sayer. In beads, sequins , huge long brocade skirts and strange turbans . Once she wore a dress made of ostrich feathers. She said she could communicate with the dead ostrich , whose feathers adorned her.
No one believed her, but all nodded politely.
For deep down , all were envious of her. Envious of her phenomenal capacity to learn , assimilate and memorise . She was like a walking encyclopaedia . She had solutions to all problems , mathematical, scientific, academic , even marital angst.
She listened patiently, humphing occasionally, with a genuinely faraway look in her eyes. My father says , she doesn't listen, she just pretends to , and all the fools go flocking to her. But therein lay her genius. She knew no one needed to hear solutions , all they needed was a shoulder to cry on . She was the right shoulder to cry on and spill one's beans to one's hearts' content, for she was incapable of gossip.
She was sought out by budding mathematicians , and scientists , administrators . Heck , even the prim and the proper folk met her , if only to be lectured on black holes .She had no pretensions about being a genius. She was one .
So , when she had gone on a long holiday , and mother passed away due to sudden illness, we were startled to come back from school one day to find father sobbing behind closed door of the study, his head on her knee, and she mechanically moving her silver and jade laden fingers over and over his head , muttering incoherently, with the same faraway look in her eyes.
She had finally acquired the last , most difficult entrant to her fan -club. The infidel had been christened .
Sticky , and warm .
Like all mad geniuses, she sat at the dining table without having switched on the fan , or the cooler. Cooler , she said , was very noisy; the fan distracted her from her thinking process, and the sweat dripping down her chin helped her concentrate !! That way, she continued, she could feel the occasional breeze ("From God's own fan" )waft into the room, which she would have never appreciated. otherwise. Okay, so she was weird.
But she kept to herself , and her messy ways rarely interfered with others . She would sit at the table , calculating equations and figuring out solutions to godawful maths sums.They exercised her grey cells , she said. Calculus , crossword puzzles and the like .
She would dress like an alien sooth sayer. In beads, sequins , huge long brocade skirts and strange turbans . Once she wore a dress made of ostrich feathers. She said she could communicate with the dead ostrich , whose feathers adorned her.
No one believed her, but all nodded politely.
For deep down , all were envious of her. Envious of her phenomenal capacity to learn , assimilate and memorise . She was like a walking encyclopaedia . She had solutions to all problems , mathematical, scientific, academic , even marital angst.
She listened patiently, humphing occasionally, with a genuinely faraway look in her eyes. My father says , she doesn't listen, she just pretends to , and all the fools go flocking to her. But therein lay her genius. She knew no one needed to hear solutions , all they needed was a shoulder to cry on . She was the right shoulder to cry on and spill one's beans to one's hearts' content, for she was incapable of gossip.
She was sought out by budding mathematicians , and scientists , administrators . Heck , even the prim and the proper folk met her , if only to be lectured on black holes .She had no pretensions about being a genius. She was one .
So , when she had gone on a long holiday , and mother passed away due to sudden illness, we were startled to come back from school one day to find father sobbing behind closed door of the study, his head on her knee, and she mechanically moving her silver and jade laden fingers over and over his head , muttering incoherently, with the same faraway look in her eyes.
She had finally acquired the last , most difficult entrant to her fan -club. The infidel had been christened .
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