Annual report cards didn’t bother me in school. I did well in the subjects I liked, and the rest did not matter. As long as I was somewhere nicely hidden at the center instead of standing out due to good or bad reasons, I didn’t care.
Growing old, of late, has brought annual report
cards of a different kind with newfound anxieties. My annual health report card
didn’t look so good last year. It didn’t look terrible either, but I wanted to
avoid being on the newspaper for suddenly dying under mysterious circumstances
while, say, climbing up the stairs or sweeping and mopping the floor. If my
mother could write one self-help book, it would be named, “Getting things done
by nagging!” She nagged me into working on my numbers. She had high
expectations of me waking up at 5 am every day and working out, which never
happened. But I said goodbye to mutton, biryani, and mutton biryani (kinda!).
The pandemic worked wonders too. I lost adipose with minimal effort, mostly by
eating at home.
It was time for my annual report card. I found
myself sweating as my mother frowned at the numbers from my bloodwork. I left
it to her, I didn’t have the heart to look at the numbers myself. Looks like
the undesirable higher numbers have gone down and the undesirable lower numbers
have gone up. I still wonder how someone living in all-year-sunny India can
have insufficient Vitamin D levels. But overall, the numbers look better than
last year.
I celebrated the good numbers with mutton
biryani from Arsalan and loved every grain of it!
sunshine
