Games elder sisters play

Almost all the furniture in our house is ancient.We didn't have the money to buy new stuff,but we also love old stuff so on all counts it turned out fine.
The first to arrive was a two seater settee and two chairs accompanied by a lovely hexagonal teapoy,all in dark burnished rosewood.(very typical furniture in most mallu households)This set is 57 years old and was the first piece of furniture that my parents bought after their wedding.Nothing romantic about that,my parents like true blood mallus are not romantic by any stretch of imagination.Like average Syrian Christian parents,they were pretty shocked when I picked up the old stuff in favour of the newer ones,but therein lies a tale.

Two elder sisters left in charge of a helpless child when the mother was taking an afternoon nap,is a recipe for disaster(i mean disaster for the poor child).My sisters had this game called "third class compartment".With the father being in the railways,we spent many hours on railway platforms(my fathers idea of being on time was to arrive at least an hour ahead of schedule) soaking in the sights and sounds and smells of the grand central.In the process we watched with great interest the scramble for seats in the unreserved third class compartment(it doesn't exist anymore).My sisters came home to the settee at home and converted this into the unreserved compartment,hence the name of the game.

My elder sister has a great imagination and everything has to look as real as possible,so jostling for space in a compartment can only be replicated if one has baggage to store.They would look around for baggage and they would find me.The elder sister would then take one of our mothers sarees,make a little sack out of it,dump me in and swing me across her shoulder.I had become baggage.The other sister would run across the room(their substitute for railway platform) and jump onto the settee,and with one big shove my elder sis and her baggage would have to struggle for balance.The settee creaked and shuddered while they threw abuses at each other(imitation of everything they heard while on the railway platform).They would settle down after much grumbling with poor me squashed into the back of the settee.They would them imagine and swing to imaginary movement of trains and when they had gotten tired of all this,the baggage would be dumped on the ground and I would have returned to being an useless child until the next game.

My second sister is a hairdresser who never made it (she had these aspirations as long as i was a willing Guinea pig.On afternoons when the railways game had been don't to death,they would convert the settee into a beauty shop (their name for it).I would be dumped on the chair,towel wrapped around me like a bib and they would get to work.They started by teasing my hair (their term for it)so a comb would run half way through the hair and they would tangle up all my baby curls to make me look like a birds best gone horribly wrong.The our mothers red max factor lipstick would come out and my mouth would turn into a big red gash.The lipstick would them be rubbed into my cheeks as rouge .Not satisfied,they would take an eye pencil and draw dark eyebrows and darken my eyes.I dare not make a sound (mother was taking a nap and I was at the mercy of the two).When all was done they would flourish a looking glass with great style in front of me and I had to smile and scrape the ground in eternal gratefulness for the masterpiece they had created.The before our mother woke up my elder sister(in this game is is assistant) would wash my face clean ,wipe it dry and look like angles before the poor mother got wise to any of the happenings of the afternoon
How could I possibly not take this little piece of history to my own flat.Its filled with a hundred memories and no new sofa however stylish would ever replace it.