‘A Sunday well spent brings a week of content.’
We were in third or fourth standard when we read this poem in our English textbook. The theme of the poem was a question. A little child asks his grandmother why Sunday comes so late while Monday comes rushing. The grandmother gives an ingenious reply, “Monday is young and flashy and has a car of his own because of which he zooms in as soon as the week starts. Sunday is a poor old man who has to come walking wherefore it takes him so long to reach.”
Sunday is a day of lazy beginnings, bed tea actually in bed, newspaper reading instead of skimming, relaxed brunches instead of rushed breakfasts and packed lunches, tranquil symphonies floating from the music box instead of blaring horns and jarring traffic noises, languorous evenings in the company of loved ones instead of hasty grocery shopping or hurried visits to the nearby green grocer and fruit seller, and a day well spent.
Sundays are for reading
And sleeping in till noon.
Walk all day in PJs
Sing your favorite tune. (Natalia Crow)
Only if wishes were horses!
For an average working woman Sundays are perhaps the busiest days of her entire working schedule. Unlike the rest of her family members, she cannot afford leisure for it is this day when she’ll peel off all the bed linen and set her washing machine to numerous rounds of laundry. It is on Sundays that she’ll sort the shelves of her refrigerator clearing out the unnecessary and the unwarranted things off them. It is on Sunday mornings she will churn the cream into butter, diligently collected over the week from the milk. The butter, if required, would be boiled to prepare ghee and this shall be done on Sundays, too. I remember Sunday mornings of my childhood when I would wake up to the suffocating fumes of freshly prepared ghee wafting through the household. I often complained to my mother, “Why can’t you do this on any other day? Why does it have to be on a Sunday?” Now when my kids complain about it, I give the same reply my mother used to give, “Sunday is the only day I have to do these chores.”
Breakfasts are an elaborate affair on Sundays and the first thing you hear when you ask for the choice is, “Breakfast is a rushed affair every day. Aaj to kuchh achha sa banao na…” And you become guilt-ridden as to how you cannot even provide them with a good breakfast in the morning. So you don the Chef’s hat and dish out a sumptuous breakfast of stuffed paranthas topped with dollops of fresh butter, curd along with assorted items like pickle and chutneys. You cannot say no if the family is in the mood to savour a South-Indian breakfast. You dole out a batch of fluffy idlis, crisp vadas and flat dosas to satisfy the gastronomic pangs of one and all.
Sundays are also the days, rather the only days, when you get to meet your support system- your ‘calmwali baai’, your ‘maid of honour’. You follow her around the house as if she was your love interest whom you had to woo within the given hour and she would make sure to bring to naught all your efforts. Sometimes you end up surrendering your precious Sunday ‘calm’ to enter into ‘choppy waters’ with her. I have found an excellent way to avoid a ‘Sunday Altercation’ with the maid. I tell her to take her day off. “I can’t let you disturb my calm because of your ‘kaam’.”
By the time it’s evening, you realize you have worked much harder than your regular weekday and so, you look forward to Monday when you could take a designated tea or lunch break!!!
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