ANIMAL BITES

Another beautiful, chilly morning. The kind Bangalore is famous for and the kind I can stand for about a week before I start feeling depressed. Instead of putting his feet up and enjoying a cup of tea with the newspaper as I was doing, Hubby Dear decided to tackle a long pending chore-that of getting his car back to looking like a car.

The said chore is taken care of in the summer holidays by hordes of neighborhood kids-all wanting to wash “uncle’s” car-for a tidy sum- no doubt-but hubby dear believes in rewarding industriousness and will willingly shell out anything for the privilege.

Two full buckets and an old t-shirt in hand, he marched off to the car, with the air of a gladiator all ready to engage in combat with an unseen adversary. Two minutes into a most vigorous scrubbing, it happened-two decorated oxen-(the kind that stop at houses and are led about by perfectly healthy men preying on religious sentiments of gullible folk), decided to make a pit stop. They dipped their heads into the brimming buckets of water and sipped and sipped till it was all gone!! The incredulous look on hubby dear’s face was one that sent me off the sofa rolling with laughter.

Dignity in tatters, hubby dear marched back into the house declaring-did you know that those oxen only stop at some houses? Some additional questioning revealed that the said oxen (bearing religious pictures more often than not) would stop only at a few houses (ok, now what technique do those men use?) and the people in those houses were compelled to give cash to the men leading the oxen. Which brought me to my next question, “Well , they did stop in front of our house, how did they let you get away scot free?” To which Hubby Dear indignantly replied, “Well I gave them water didn’t I?”

Needless to say, the car remains unwashed….and I am curiouser than ever-is that tale really true???