Mirror Magazine

Mirror Magazine

The search for the yellow letter
By Dilini Algama
The evening had had all the signs of being pleasant. Bro-Boy, for starters, was engaged, or rather imprisoned, in the nasty business of cleaning up his room under the strict supervision of Mother-Dear, and for once, was out of my way. I was stretched out luxuriously on the bed indulging myself in the marvellous feeling of knowing that Bro-Boy was not going to spring up from nowhere to spoil my daydreams.

So the phrase “a wet blanket” was strongly reminiscent when Daddy-Boy’s voice thundered throughout the house lifting the roof a few centimetres off its original position. “Has anyone seen my yellow letter?”

If you have a father like mine you probably know that it is never a good idea to say “What letter?” when he’s looking for yellow letters with the air of a thousand bees whose hive has been intruded by a stray cricket ball.

The best option was to silently creep under the bed. But as the usual complaints of burning up important documents for recreation started to come across, I decided that defending myself by finding it would be better than giving myself up for the mosquitoes’ dinner under the bed.

By the time I entered his room to prove that one doesn’t burn up yellow letters for the want of something better to do, he had already pulled out all his files to form, unintentionally of course, a mosaic.

Now here’s the thing. Probably, no research has been done on this, but all men seem to be fitted with a certain mechanism which prevents them from finding whatever they happen to be looking for (“whatever” may range from socks to blueprints for space crafts). In fact, if an award was given to the person who doesn’t manage to find a lost item, it would inevitably go to a man.

Still, I got down on my hands and knees and tried to make a decent looking pile out of the botchy mess at my feet. I looked up to find a red faced Daddy-Boy (with faint streams of smoke coming out of his ears) herding in Mother-Dear and Bro-Boy.

“Did you look in your diary,” asked Mother-Dear. “I did not put it there! I left it in a file here and you probably used it to mop the kitchen.” “Dear, how you exaggerate!” sighed Mother-Dear as she turned out drawers.

So we searched and searched only to have Daddy-Boy coming in at intervals to say, “It’s with the garbage, I know. Never mind now, I’ll try and get another copy. It won’t be easy, but I’ll try,” with the air of a martyr.

It was when we all trooped out to tell him we couldn’t find it, that we saw him reading - a yellow letter! Before him was - his diary! He was grinning like my niece does when she hears the word “ice cream.”

“Hmph!” said Mother-Dear.
“Thaththa!” grumbled Bro-Boy.
“Really!” said I.
And he continued to grin. Men!

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