Ms FOI

We named her “ FOI”- Flight of ideas. She had them frequently. Funniest part was that she never realised it. We would be talking about someone and she would talk about something incoherent. Those of us who knew her would understand it’s related to something she spoke earlier that day or perhaps that week. She would begin her sentences like “ He is mean”… now it’s for us to decipher who the ‘he’ is and why he was ‘mean’. Or maybe she would suddenly mimic her nephew. Sudden sight of something her nephew liked or asked her to get would take her there. Then it would be recounting her previous experiences home, but in between she would sing a song and then her conversation would trail of to her first experience of singing that in turn to some movie… that would lead to the name of some movie and some actor and mostly it would turn out like the actor had nothing to do with the movie. She would then come back to her nephew when we all would be stuck wondering about the movie she referred to. That was her, full of life like a butterfly flying from one place to another.
Her sorrow, her fears, her joy were all unhidden impulses, easy to identify, easy to relate to. She could never hide anything not to people she loved. But yet at times I find her alien, she could alienate herself. If she was full of life, she also lived life to her terms, she had conditioned herself with her lifestyle to be alone, she enjoyed moving alone but wanted us to watch her from a distance. If we alienated ourselves she would be crest fallen though she never realised how it affected us when she did the same.
She had timing for humour intentional or unintentional I never could know. Everything about her was comical her expressions, her FOI effect, her laughter, her tone of all. She had a flat base voice, more or less a dead voice when she said something and the melodramatic expression of a worn out warrior.
She was often lost in herself, but thanks to her FOI effect she would forget her fears in a second because she could escape by flying to the next topic , her mind was like a discontented viewer surfing channels , the moment discontentment crept in her mind switched channels.
She believed she had few problems; firstly she is colour blind not the technical colour blindness this was an advanced case . So if she told us purple for instance, we knew it’s blue. She had difficulty comprehending stories that meant if we watched the same movie she claims she didn’t understand half of it- no she is normal she could answer anything scientific , but you know you could say she is aesthetically challenged :) . She cannot relate tune to words.she hears them totally messed , well she got her genre of music , trust me she could make rock music sound like lullabies and threatens us saying she would marry a musician to compensate her musical loss . Same discordant relation she had with her room, she could not place things as it was maintained the result was, we could see her rummaging for basic things under her bed and her room is a certified archaeological museum .

But to us she is the coolest, the joker, the tragedy queen, who would in great adversities remark in her dead tone “ oh is that all, why bother” and in silliest situation scream “ Tell me what to do”… That’s her our dear FOI who would talk about Einstein and APJ and her nephew and Surya's Vel , and sing varanam ayiram and talk about Panchathantra all in one sequence.