Short accounts of everyday excellence

1: Uma Thekkeparambil has blocked 153 seats in her lifetime with just six handbags, four plastic packets and two starched hankies.

2: Moin occupies exactly 35% of his blanket every night. His partner has never known cold toes.

3: Jooni carries an entire language in her ‘hmms.’ Tempered as they are to soothe, acknowledge, question, mock, and even titillate if the situation demanded it.

4: Parvati knows when to leave.

And she exits right after a good joke, at the fading end of a great song and at the peak of an intriguing story, when the height of good feeling has just begun to settle down and the dullness that follows such feelings it is yet to fully arrive. She leaves her company flushed with joy but also, with the soft sadness of missing her.

5: Ryan has a library of memes, a catalogue of gifs for this, that, everything and an aunt whose dog has just died.

6: There’s a guy in Bandra whose artful small talk once permeated the cloudy glass panels of Canara Bank and squeezed a smile out of the face of a Teller who had almost left for lunch.

I think everyone applauded but I can’t be sure.

7: Each time a stomach rumbles, a banana grows in Manu’s handbag.

8: Charu’s honest and earnest TripAdvisor reviews saved a family from gastroenteritis and two women travellers from ‘dirty sheets, maybe bed bugs?’ And there was that time when her bullet points led Norbert from Munich to see the fag end of a sunset from the window of his pool facing room. Charu had mentioned it was ‘spectacular,’ and it was.

9:There’s a book for that thing you’re feeling. Just ask Arati Rao at GoodFellows Lending Library in Santa Cruz East.

10: In the middle of a secondhand copy of Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’ is a yellowing letter addressed to ‘you’ that says, ‘you’re forgiven.’ It is said that the book is found only by those need it on the day they need it.