~~The Sofa Ride~~

I told them it was a bad idea. I emphasized about 10 times. They didn’t listen. They said the same thing again and again “Children do not talk when adults are deciding on something!” But I already knew what they were deciding. They were going to move the sofa-cum bed (a convertible sofa that can be used as a bed as well). My grandparents and my uncle and aunt were visiting us for a week and on the first night we needed to set up a place for my uncle and aunt to sleep. We had the sofa-cum bed but let’s say instead of using it just where it was like I suggested they wanted to move it to another room. Namely the TV room. Now let me warn you beforehand. It’s a really pitiful and tragic story.

So, we started the process of moving the sofa. First, we cleared all the stuff such as the table lamps, the small decorations, etc that my mom kept in the lobby. Then, me, my dad, my uncle and my granddad all went to one corner each of the sofa and got ready to lift while my mom stood nearby instructing us what to do. She gave us the signal and we began to lift. I expected the sofa to stay down. How wrong I was! We picked it up like it was made of plastic and started carrying it. But even if it was light it didn’t mean it was easy to balance and carry it. It just means one out of 5 billion problems in carrying it had been cleared. We moved not more than 5 steps and the balance went hay wire, we swinging with the sofa from left to right and from right to left. We made the worlds first Sofa Pendulum! That’s when the first loss of the day occurred.

My mom had a beautiful sculpture of a man and woman holding their child together and looking down at him. It was made out of marble. It was so beautiful that mom was always worried it would break. Now that happened. I lost a bit of my balance being the shortest one in the group and knocked the statue over.

Poor marble child. Whenever my mom gets angry at me about that I tell her the same thing “Relax! I just reduced your worries. Now you wont be worried about the statue falling and breaking anymore!” She always replied with that nasty glare. It was etched into my mind. Ughhh. Anyway, what is to be expected when you are carrying a sofa from the lobby into a room. I was anyway against this idea of moving it so I was not to blame for the statue.

Miraculously we went through the next 10 meters without breaking anything. But that doesn’t mean it was smooth. We didn’t break anything. But we sure did hurt my father. It was not much but a little bang from the wall had given him a slight bruise. But he glared at me for that. Come on! Just because I was the youngest one in the group doesn’t mean I was to be blamed for everything! No wonder children around my age are always grumpy. Anyway we finally reached the room where the sofa was to be kept. This was known as “The TV Room” because this room was mainly used when someone wanted to watch the television. We had just got a new television and my dad really loved it.

Anyway as we entered the room suddenly because of the sharp turn we lost our balance and let’s say to avoid the gruesome details, the life of the television in our home was short but very much not sweet. Now the television was on the floor, parts of its screen everywhere. My dad cried out and left the sofa. Let’s say if it was not bad enough that only three people were holding the sofa, the worst thing yet happened. We finally got to know why the sofa was so light. As me, my uncle and my grand dad put in every effort to hold the sofa, a humungous group of termites fell to the floor. And let me say it was like in a cartoon, loads and loads of termites just being poured out. And I am not even exaggerating.

Me being deathly afraid of all insects left the sofa. Now this sofa was light but heavy enough that two people could not hold it and it felt with a great CRASH! It was done. The sofa was broken. The handle, the seat the everything was broken. The 3 crashes (the statue, the TV and the Sofa) was enough to bring the whole family of our neighbors who lived downstairs to come to our house to see whether we were being burgled. We were not. But seeing the enormous mess, and us around the broken sofa, somehow they joined the pieces. The very small, seemingly impossible to join pieces. After all who would take a whole sofa from the lobby to another room? My family would.