My father casually walked into the house. After knocking down the contents of the newspaper superficially and making a quick assessment of the garden, his eyes turned to kitchen chores.
He is 90-plus and robustly meticulous always in attending to those chores, in a sequence unparalleled. While walking through the hall he had symbolically run his eyes over a pile of papers and magazines that were stacked into aesthetically designed units, not revealing much on the exterior.
His thoughts turned to their disposal and he started sending out signals to me and his daughter-in-law. He knew it would find a response more through the latter. On many occasions he would question me on the lined-up business newspapers and unopened magazines with an interrogative quirk, asking without asking whether I ever read them at all. He was right because the accumulations were meaningless to me beyond a point and got tucked away in the designated units with religious periodicity.
And he also understood that my wife was ever keen to at least rapidly run through the unread periodicals at least to do some justice to the cost, the possible thought of an interesting missed out content notwithstanding, and always preferred a private stacking, which was guaranteed most of the time.
Can I sort these papers and magazines, he queried. He wanted to consign the lot to its logical end and even suggested that he had lined up the immediate past week’s newspapers besides a two-month pile of weekly magazines and fortnightlies and rebundled the rest.
Having got the nod, he swung into action and completed the process. Later at the noon, soon after his nap, he could faintly hear the figure ₹320, wading through his hearing aid. He quickly made his way to the gate to find the sorted lot finding its way to a tricycle. The old newspaper agent had arrived.
He heaved a sigh of relief, though temporarily. And calmly moved on to the next item on his agenda…
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