Calamity Jane, that's me!

It's not that I am especially clumsy or especially inept. Not more than most, at least. But I do have some very strange accidents that, in retrospect, are very funny. This time, it is no better or worse than it normally is. I dropped a pakad, that tong-thing used in every Indian kitchen, right on the most tender part of my foot. It would normally not have been so bad, but for the fact that I had already hurt that foot and had just gone through the arduous and painful process of having it checked and X-rayed and more. So this was, in a way, adding not just insult, but aggravated assault to injury and causing me more anguish than was worth it for me. And when that darn thing fell, it impacted the only unbruised part of a blue-tinged foot with the sharpest part of the metal instrument, pulling an agonised yowl out of me, enough to wake Small Cat from her morning nap, startle the maid who was cleaning under the cabinets in the living room and grab Father's attention away from whatever he was doing. I sat on a chair near the kitchen, holding a piece of ice against my foot and thinking up the most blue-tinged words that I could think of - unfortunately, 'Heck!' was the best that my traumatized mind could come up with at that moment, even though I know lots of far more interesting noises.

My former irascible boss called me Calamity Jane. And, in my own way, I suppose I am. I do things with a certain panache that is not easily beaten. Like the time I cracked a wrist bone while making popcorn - I did it by bashing it against the microwave overn I was using, but that part of the story somehow gets second billing. And once I was put in a splint to support aforementioned wrist bone, I gave myself a mind concussion by bashing myself on the forehead with it as I turned over in bed while waking up the next morning. Don't even go there. The next time I got concussion was in Delhi, when I was leaving to go to work, and the cleaning lady emerged unexpectedly from the bushes to give me a fright and I knocked myself out with a very hard contact between my temple and the corner of the car door...

And, of course, there was the time I hurt my foot - not this one, the other one; like most people, I do have two - by falling up the stairs walking into a boutique I frequently shop at. It was only three steps, but I fell twice, first landing rather hard on my knee and then sliding onto the wrong side of my foot and bending the toe and ankle rather unnaturally. Perhaps the most painful part of that particular story was having to sit at my table in a tony restaurant about an hour later with my rapidly swelling and darkening foot and ankle in a dish of ice.

So the saga of the pakad is not unusual for me. It all goes with the general territory of being ME. I only wish I wasn't such a pain-full person to have around!