Thar she cuckooes...

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Tick, tock...went the cuckoo clock. She (why ever do we think of cuckoo clocks as females?!!) reminded me of sandy muttams, wraparound verandahs, sprawling mango trees dotted with misty green mangoes and silence...utter silence, broken only by the gentle tick tocks of old grandfather clocks (there we go again...why not grandmother clocks?) From the daily hassles of the tread of city life, I got transported to some corner of my memories, to some long forgotten tharavadu in some long forgotten corner of Kerala.

Anyways, once she had been assembled and comfortably perched high up on the wall, she was well on her way to her first cuckoo in our home. All of us waited eagerly, five mouths a tad open, five pairs of peepers a tad too open and thar she cuckooed! The cuckoo was in her home and all was well with the world...until day two.

She started falling behind by just a teeny weeny half hour...what's half an hour in the great Indian journey of life anyway? We remembered the clock-maker's advice of 'adjust the clock back and forth till you get the right time.' Thus started a game of adjustment. My spouse was in charge and diligently kept 'adjusting'...for a week or so. But all of his mechanical engineering skills was wasted on the dear cuckoo who seemed to have decided to cuckoo only whenever she felt like it!

As with all good endings, we decided to look at the bright side of things. Now she brings a quiet smile to our faces whenever we hear an earnest cuckoo, while we resolutely ignore whatever the digital clock displays, as though mocking his hopelessly clueless cousin from the Black Forest. Our son has been insisting that we junk it and get a more reliable battery operated one, but somehow we just can't...we seem to have fallen in love with lovingly and slowly winding her up and listening to her totally out of time cuckooes:)

In a land where everything ticks like clockwork, our cuckoo clock transports us to a land of sheer romance...of sandy muttams, wraparound verandahs, sprawling mango trees dotted with misty green mangoes and silence...utter silence, broken only by the gentle tick tocks of old grandfather clocks...