Blankety Blankets and more...

Guess what? Orange is my blanket today. I mean my blanket has orange stripes over brown base and I noticed it the first thing after waking today morning. Nothing dramatic! What were you expecting? A poem about orange stripes on brown base? Or a seemingly profound but in reality a boring message?

I don’t think blankets are the stuff art or poetry is made of. Warm blankets, soft blankets, mink blankets even the cool, summerish, cotton blankets, I have owned one or the other kind in one or the other color at all times in life.
My first blanket was red. It had satin linings at the corner. I loved that blanket from nursery standard till 5th standard and then it was passed on to a newly-born cousin. I think I too had grown taller and fatter than it’s length and width.
That blanket was the cause of much excitement in my life. From the moment I learnt to say, ‘this is mine’, I carried it everywhere I chose to play – on my grandparent’s bed, then on the patient’s chair in my Grand dad’s dental clinic, and then in my Dad’s lap. My brothers would try to snatch it from me and I would howl till I would have my blanket back with me. Once my eldest brother managed to take it and wrapped it around him, probably, expecting some sort of excitement that he thought I must be getting by keeping myself with the blanket all the time. He threw it back in a minute when no crackers burst anywhere. Or maybe it was the dirty, filthy texture and smell of the blanket. I would put it on floor and sit on it to eat. I would fold it and make sofa for my dolls.
But I guess the filthy smell came from it’s hiding place. I was so scared to lose it that when I would go on the terrace to play boys’ games for a while, I would hide it behind the dustbin under the kitchen sink or behind the dustbin that we used to keep in the balcony.
I like to think that blanket had life and it loved me too. But I guess the blanket knew better than that. It conveniently got itself washed and ironed and went to make my cousin’s life warm.
My next blanket wasn’t really a blanket but a quilt of almost 4 ft in length. It had two layers of cloth with warm, soft cotton inside these two layers. One layer was blue and green with feather-shaped like printed patterns on it. Other side of the quilt, and the one that I wrapped on me was made of orange satin. I could lie on it, I could lie inside it and I could wrap it around me just like that. I didn’t necessarily have to sleep to wrap it around me. Did I?
In fact, I hate the utilitarian concept around blankets and quilts. If I just want to lie in a blanket then why am I labeled as lazy? A blanket is a pleasure, an adventure, a historical lesson of the kinds Sushmita Sen taught the world in the Miss Universe Contest. A blanket shows the world what giving warmth without asking for a heating device is all about. Uh! Oh! What? Do you have to heat the blanket with a hot water bottle or an electronic heater before you can get warm and snug in it?
And most of all, a blanket is just a blanket and it does what a blanket should do. No questions asked, no answers expected. What kind of people in their right mind would hate a blanket? Off course I am assuming a little cold weather here before you jump to point it out to me. Remember Munna Bhai’s ‘jaadu ki jhappi’, that’s how a blanket is to me.

After my very own orange satin quilt, the tragedy of the grown-up world struck and I went blanketrupt and quiltrupt. I crossed the height of 5ft by a few inches and entered the world of grown-ups. Now I had a quilt with a white cover like everyone else had and the worst part was that they all got mixed up. Every morning, before going to school, we would wrap our quilt and keep it in a common storeroom. Every night, we would take our quilt from there to our beds. Sometimes, I would lie wide awake, feeling miserable with the fear that I maybe in someone else’s quilt and one of my brothers (I was damn sure of this!) must be sleeping in my quilt. Initially I would count the number of quilts beneath mine in the heap to get to mine at night, only to fight with my brothers who insisted on theirs being at the same number from the bottom. Well, who knows who made a mistake? They all looked the same anyways. So, you could easily count two for one or the same one twice.

Then, I started chewing the corner of my quilt to make it look distinct than the others. I don’t know whether the one I began to chew was mine. I just decided one night that it must be mine. So, I chewed the same corner every night for three nights while lying in it. I would lie inside, pull it over my head and then pull one corner into my mouth and chew it before I fell asleep. On the fourth night, I was happily chewing when my Dad discovered me and the chewed on quilt.
Now, Dad was scared as hell of only one thing when it came to his kids. He was scared of any of us catching the disease of ‘wrong habits’. He had hit me on my knuckles while I was chewing my nails. My eldest brother was hit on the ankles while walking on his toes, and my younger brother too must have been hit to protect him from the malaise of ‘bad habits’. He was not perfect but I don’t remember anything right now.

Anyways, here I was happily chewing my quilt’s corner. Here I was happily making way to the glorious warmth of my very own quilt night after night, and poof, the lights shone brightly over my closed eyes. My Dad pulled the quilt from the other corner and I woke from my dreams with a start. The thing with Dad also was that he was a man of few words but a lot of angry glares for me and slaps and sticks for my brothers. This time, he didn’t even look at me. He started sniffing the corner that I was chewing. Then he touched it with his tongue and looked disappointed. Next I knew, he had put it into his mouth and was chewing it!
I was reprimanded to sleep with my Mom for the whole winter after that. Not that I minded. Chewing a quilt isn’t a very yummy habit.

These days, I have one mink blanket, three soft and thick woolen blankets and one thin but very soft blanket. My brother told me that he bought a 6ft by 5 ft quilt from Jaipur. For anyone who knows about Jaipur Quilts, that’s a great possession to have! I have been asking him to courier it to me but he hasn’t budged till now.
My Mom too bought me a double-bed mink blanket some four years back. This one is two-layered, with soft woolen fur on both sides. It’s a cool silver-gray color. She only let me touch it once. She has kept it aside to give to me for my marriage. Every winter after she bought that blanket, I try to convince her to let me use it. But she just does not listen to me. I think for me too, that blanket has become a symbol of the return of my own kingdom of warmth. I just hope that I get married and live in a place that gets winters or has ACs powerful enough to create artificial winters so that I can get my blanket and sleep in it.

I tag my friend and fellow blogger, the girl in the brown ring to this post. Warm, snug writing for all!