a day's work

If I've learnt anything by now, its that the multiverse does not allow me to stay despondent for long.

The day I wrote about the mahseer and how I felt incompetent at work, I experienced little victories in two other challenges I am working at.
Firstly, my little girl and I had a breakthrough. After realising that she still did not know the meaning of 'up' and 'down', I had written down a set of basic words she ought to know and asked her to both translate them and make up sentences using those words. That was an absolute hit with both of us. After that, she wrote a small note on her playtime that day. She enjoyed the opportunity to write whatever she liked, and I understood finally how to explain concepts. With trying to craft sentences by herself, she understood the idea of splitting verbs, and transposing the subject, and other such things. The sentence structures are still pretty random, but now we have the key. She was so happy that evening, she danced around me all the way home,'You are happy with today's work, na?I made you happy na?'

At the risk of sounding condescending, I told her 'you always make me happy.' And I did mean it..she is a wonderful child who teaches me a lot more than I do her- and gives me gifts besides. Like Ssarp in the photograph above. She made him at Latika Vihar and gifted him to me.He is actually a Very Ferocious Guardian. The pie-eyed look is just a disguise.

And that wasn't the end of the day either. I had started off a bread that morning- a recipe I have been trying repeatedly but never quite 'getting'. And that night, I did. The bread sang to me throughout its making, and finally all the things I had read about made sense- how the the tension in the loaf is evident while scoring, how it peaks during the final rise, how the crust audibly crackles as it cools. And so that night after I sent my crust-and-crumb photos to Mian, it was my turn to clap my hands and dance around the computer. 'You are happy with today's work, na?I made you happy, na teacher?'