An Ode to Lavender

There she sits, pretty and purple on my over-cluttered table. Lifeless now, but still not displaced from her position. She's no nightingale, but i still love her voice! She's managed to hold her fort, secure her place on my table, no mean achievement i can assure u.

I still remember the day she was bought, a few days after we moved into our own home in Bangalore and my school van came to pick my sis and me at an outrageously early time.. 6:30 a.m that is! and that's really early even for an over enthu school kid like me who loved school, assignments, tests and the before-school-began lagori and basketball games. I assure u, I've changed a LOT now! I missed my van a couple of days, having woken up only when the driver sounded his horn and resulting in my disgruntled dad having to drop us off to school! Then, she arrived.. to make lives simpler for us... a beauty in purple and white! Her hands so slender and the numbers so beautifully carved. She was surely a thing of beauty! It was love at first sight for me!

Traditional households usually wake up to the strains of the Suprabhatha, but not us, no! We woke up to her melodious notes! Well, they weren't exactly melodious, but we got to school by van without our dad having to drop us off, while looking at his wristwatch a thousand times and cursing all and sundry, Bangalore's traffic included! We were all happy and life in school went on!

Come college, and like every other "above average" student in our country, i was enrolled into IIT-JEE coaching classes from 6 to 9 in the morning! EVERYDAY!! This meant that i had to be up by 4:30 a.m to catch the 5:15 bus! Impossible i thought, but not for long! Lavender (that's what i called her then), kept me company and saw me through those tumultuous years of 11th and 12th.

JEE turned out to be a fiasco like no other, but AIEEE somehow clicked, and here i landed. In NITK. Lavender came along of course, but i stopped calling her that cos i felt it sounded stupid. But i continued to rely on her and she never let me down even once. She saw me through all the first hour classes @ 7:55! I never missed a single first hour class cos i never woke up late ( all my friends will vouch for that) ! And when i decided to get up at 4:45 for yoga, she made sure i did.

Come second and third year, and i became a fitness freak . Well, it didn't exactly yield the desired results, but hey, atleast i made an attempt! She woke me up at sharp 6 every morning and i would go jogging... with the wind in my hair, coming back sweating like a mad pig but exhilarated! Engineering exams involve a lot of last minute work... in fact, almost all of it is last minute work! But she was there to make sure i had those last minutes on the mornings of the exams to read up on hitherto unread photocopied material! She made sure i attended all the classes inspite of an "almost" nightout where i would run to bed at 4 in the morning after a looooooooong movie session or project report writing or submissions! She never once let me down!

And then final year came... she saw me through the frenetic placement season when i tried to unravel Kernighan and Ritchie's gift the the world - the eternal "C" and i managed to pull it off! And now, here i was, with a job in hand and in final year where attending classes had almost become a thing of the past. Her snooze button which had hardly been used before became the button i used the most, apart from the keypad buttons on my phone, and thus she drained out. Died a slow and quiet death while her battery ran out. I made no effort to replace it as i needed her no more. The least i could do to honor the services she had rendered to me was to keep her on my table.

And here she is... on my table. She looks so demure in death too, so beautiful and so perfect... purple and pretty, my sweet little clock Lavender.