Friday, I’m in love!

Day 7, Friday 25th September, 2009
Location: Miami
A girl lying in a comfortable bed in a hotel room wakes up. She reaches for the mobile phone and gets sulky. Its 5 am and she doesn’t want to be up so early. She tries to sleep, but she is tempted to check her email. She reaches for the phone and opens gmail. Her inbox is full of social networking news. Facebook, twitter etc. and then her eyes stop at a name. She grits her teeth and opens the email. You can tell from her face that she’s expecting good news.
Subject: Book Proposal
The slow wifi loads the email and the smile disappears from her face. Shock. She magnifies the email, rubs her eyes and reads it again and drops the phone. *cut to the phone screen* “We’re sorry to inform you that though we enjoyed reading your book, it does not fit into our current plans,” and the cell-phone screen blacks out. She winces… She wants to cry but she holds her ground. She can’t call her best friend. She can’t talk to anyone, because her little sister is asleep in the bed next to her.
She tweets, to keep herself sane. But she can’t stop feeling terrible. She realises she can’t handle rejections. So she opens her suitcases and repacks everything. She showers elaborately, spending extra time cleaning between toes and fingers. She dresses herself. Shorts and a t-shirt, perfect attire to comfortably handle big suitcases that she has to move into her sister’s newly found apartment. She wakes her younger sister up and helps the sister pack.
“I don’t want to spoil your morning. But I need to tell you something,”
The sister looks up at her, taking her attention away from the suitcase she’s stuffing some clothes into.
“My book. The editors from the publishing house emailed. They rejected it.”
“Damn!”
And then the sister gives a calculated response. “Its ok, yaa, happens to everyone.”
The sister didn’t make a big deal about it and went back to packing, retelling random family anecdotes.
*cut to the breakfast table*
The two sisters are spreading cream cheese on their toasted bagels as they sip raspberry juice.  The phone rings. The girls answer. They talk to their family. She doesn’t tell them about the email, but almost chokes up when the grandfather says to her, ‘write something every day, without fail!’
“They have some instinct of identifying what’s going on and fixing it, don’t they?” the sister asks as she bites into her bagel. The older sister nods and let a tear slip out.
“I don’t know why you are so cranky about it. Feel bad about it and do something to fix it. Crying or being cranky won’t help, you know,”
She looks at her younger sister and wonders… When did she become so big, when did she become so matured? And the realisation strikes, she’s always been like this. Myabe she should have been the younger sister… Her younger sister was full on older sister material.
—

Yeah, these posts are supposed to be about Nani, but I couldn’t help but wallow in some self-pity. As usual, Nani gave me the much needed kick on the backside and got me up and about. We cheated a cabbie into believing we were going to the airport by loading our 6 suitcases and imagine his horror when we told him to drive us four blocks. His world crashed, but we got our job done.

Unpacking and stacking things in the bare room, Nani gave it her touch. By evening, the room looked spiffy, still strewn with suitcases but you know what I mean. We celebrated with a doner kebab sandwich and headed straight to the Apple Store.

Nani gets a MacBook Pro! Whoa! Of course, as usual, the big sister tried to take charge and talk to Amil, the specialist at the Apple store, but Nani got the hang of things, picked her MacBook Pro, picked the software she needed and viola, she owned her very first Lappy! Congrats, little sister. You’re never going back to a PC again.

So today could have been the day I got rejected by a publisher. But I decided to make it the day Nani got her own apartment and her very first MacBook Pro. Tomorrow? Tomorrow will be a brand new day! Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!