when santa won't behave

Today was Neel’s first ever big school Annual Day, and he had ONE whole line to say on stage. For that, his father took half day leave from office, (this is a man who took his laptop into hospital for his own disc surgery) and his mother (me, for the uninitiated) almost collapsed.

I was assigned a vegetable carving of Santa Claus, for which I spent the last 3 months searching for a piece of ginger shaped like a reindeer. Every veggie vendor in town thinks I’m trying to hit on him, the time I’ve spent.

Finally, my friend Goury found 1 ginger reindeer which kept swooning, and needed critical care bandaging with cello tape to stay up. The other reindeer, because of condensation, stood in a puddle of water, which looked like it had peed on the school project. Santa – a brinjal painted red (and try painting a slimy brinjal red – it looks like you've stabbed Santa and he's bleeding!) kept falling off his sleigh, which was a pear balanced on 2 drunk green beans. To add to the Christmas debacle, there were cauliflower florets supposed to act like snow, which sadly lacked these acting talents, and oblivious of their great role in the Annual Day, rolled all over the school steps.

The teacher, thankfully, was very nice, and took in the tired vegetables, and the exhausted mom, with a smile.

Neel’s one line went off brilliantly. He saw us off stage, and smiled and waved from on stage. I smiled back, though I was so tired, my eyes criss-crossed, and I might have waved at the vegetable display instead. But it still beat my Santa brinjal, whose eyes had fallen into his sleigh by then.