Navrathri Gollu in Mylapore

It's Navrathri in Mylapore. And even if you didn't know what that means, you must have surely noted the silk sari clad women with loads of flowers carrying heavy bags (reads gifts).  Keeping gollu is definitely an art but keeping raks away from it, is a challenge of the highest form. 

They say every doll has a story behind it. But ours have many stories and not all are mythological...

Take this Krishna for instance. He came to us three years ago, straight from my husband's ad shooting and he landed on raks's hands. And for the next two days, we pleaded with her to hand him over. After many internal meetings about how to save the hostage, we managed to take it from her but not before she broke his legs.

Here is another one, and in this instance it was a bigger krishna.  Raks declared that she would be the one who would arrange the dolls. So we did a covert operation and kept them all before she came from school. And she came home and accused us of keeping them all wrong and went about setting it right, whenever our back was turned. And while she was trying to arrange the baby krishna in the first step, the poor guy's rear broke. But she astutely enlisted her foremost supporter of the house to her side (grandfather) and managed to hide it behind two warring bullocks to escape my wrath!

And this Lakshmi got an extra layer of make up on her person, thanks to our midget beautician!

And this unjal pillaiyarset is intact thanks to a mega dive that I made, when raks dropped it! (we could train the Indian cricket team together!)

And this marriage party was kidnapped by a cute bandit who insisted on displaying it from under the cot. But I rescued them braving batting eyelids, tantrums and threats.

Phew! Do come to our gollu. We have many other stories to narrate...