We have been planning to go on a family trip to Tirupati for quite some time now. Finally now that my nephew's exams are over and my sister is free ( pls note that it is SHE who is free after HIS exams!!!), we are finally able to fix on a date.
We found that online booking should ideally have been thought of some 3-5 months back, and that package tours might prove to be a bit too strenuous, especially for my Mom. So we had to find an alternate source of getting darshan tickets alone, so that we could plan our journey independently of tour operators.
Finally I managed to find a friend this week, who reverted within a day(!) and asked me for exact dates. Now here was the problem.
My sister stays in a sprawling old ancestral house.
Her FIL is aged and will not be accompanying us, but neither can he be left alone in the sprawling house.
So arrangements have to be made.
BIL is of the type who doesn't really care about this trip, but is coming along to indulge his wife and SIL.
Sis is of the type who will fret and fume, but can't/won't open her mouth for nuts, and leave alone rant and rave, won't even mumble at the people responsible for the fumes. ( I am diametrically opposite to my sister! She was good and no trouble; and I was bad and only trouble, in our growing up years)
Neither of them want to request BIL's siblings who land up every year at the ancestral house for the summer hols, to hold fort for two days while they pay their obeisances to the Lord and come back.
So it was left to the bad ol' me to get both Bil and Sis to buck up and get everybody else to buck up too, and decide on a date when the fort would be held secure while we were away. Buck up, because my friend had requested me for the dates urgently, and him being a pal I knew only through our ramblings on the net, I didn't want to be a bother to him to the extent that he might never again visit my blogs. Aaaaah! he was a valued friend.
So I called up my Sis and gave her the picture and asked her to revert back with a date by nightfall. This after Sis had been 'planning' for the better part of 3 weeks on how to go and when to go... Till the next morn' no news from my BIL and Sis. I shared my feelings with my significant other. Told him how I was worried that my friend might think me a pain in the whatever.. That I wished the the couple would revert...
Which is when he told me that I never come to the point, but ramble. !!!! ?????
He told me that both me and my Sis laugh over every single thing under the sun when on a call, and beat every bush in sight, and bitch and backbite and gossip about this and that, (isn't that generally what all women in the family do?) and generally NEVER, EVER straightaway come to the point.
And when finally, we do condescend to discuss the reason the call was made in the first place, we again, are never very clear about what it is that we want.
That we go on to discuss how, if this was not to be, and that was not to be, it would be very bad indeed. And how if only it could be like this, or like that, it would be very nice indeed.
Still not coming clean about what it is that we DO want.
And then at the end of it all, we complain that the other person is not doing anything or not doing what we want!
Amazes me that my significant other knows me and my Sis so well, when he hardly is bothered to listen to our conversations.
9 months ago