Twisted Places

Yesterday Rohaan turned around. Obviously the little tyke has been trying for the last couple of days. But his trials were blocked thanks to his fascination of his hands and fingers. He extends his hand and opens up his fingers and spends about an hour staring at how effectively he can move them. Or it might be that there is something moving and he bloody well is trying to figure out how they are doing it. So there he was gazing at his little digits and suddenly he decides that he has to try and catch it with his other hand. So off the left one goes towards the right, tries to hold it and pull it and obviously now all ten digits are locked. So then what does he do ? He just flips over. The shock is too much for him to suddenly see a plethora of colors on the floor after having stared at mundane white for a long time on the ceiling. The fingers are locked and the eyes are on the mattress, but now there is a big grin of having achieved success

Being the bad daddie that I am, I have finally managed to teach him to stick his tongue out. He so enjoys it when he sees the big pink plate wandering outside and making strange movements around him. But what grabs me most is the fact that he manages to get up on the right side of the bed every day and every time he wakes up. A big toothless grin and all of us are putty in his little fingers. And I guess he realizes that as whenever he wants anything the smile is back.

On another note, yesterday my friend showed me a house that they are building. It is still at a design phase and I got to see the plans that the contractor has done. The house looks like a palace, a bit sparse on walls and enclosed spaces and a lot of space wasted without much purpose. At least that is the feeling I got. At over two thousand square feet per person the place does give you a sense of opulence. And therefore my question on what is an ideal space for a person to live.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not a person who would end up trying to live on Rs32 just to prove that the poverty line shown by the government does not merit any standing in real life. But when I consider that one needs to live comfortably with a place to lounge, eat, sleep and do their ablutions I wonder what they would do with so much space. After all in the end, you end up working your butt of to build the house, which means you are not there more than half the time. And when you are there in the house, it is not like you go and sit in each room every two hours thereby making sure you have used up all the rooms. If only life were like that.

Having lived in a bungalow when I was young, while there was a lot of space, it just felt creepy when you left one room to move to the other. What if the ghosts of yesteryears where following you ?, what if the giant snake was slithering behind you ? and many more such thoughts does pass a child’s mind. And what of the parents ? One day the maintenance workers don’t come and you are left with a lot of square feet of shit to clean. And manning your kids across the football field of a house can be tiresome.  Having lived in a smaller apartment too, I just feel that its not about the house. Any one can build a house, but few can build a home out of it

What’s in a name

During the course of the pregnancy, we had this feeling that the child would be a girl and we gathered all kinds of name and shortlisted on one. No, you cannot have it. We fought with a lot of friends of ours to get patent over the name. In the fifth month, as we went for a scan, I tried to draw the sonographer into a conversation to identify the gender of the baby. I must have been a dunderhead as the lady looked at me credulously and said “Do you think I will actually tell you”. I wanted to say “Why not ?, I am decently dressed, have all the moral values that are laudable and am a very ethical person”, but ended up with a sheepish grin and hands scratching the back of my ear. I remembered one of the quiz shows with the rapid fire questions and decided to do the same to the sonographer. But the lady must have been a pro at the game coz she kept saying “the baby”, “the baby”. Anyways we were disappointed that we could not confirm the gender, but we bravely marched on

My wife told me in the next scan to keep watching the pelvic area and if you see any third limb then you would know what gender the baby is. So I keep glued on to the monitor and I found about 5 appendages instead of three. We reran the scans and finally we removed 2 of them, one I guess was the umbilical chord and one must have been a spider of some insect on the machine. That left us with three and finally we fixed on the fact that the baby is a boy.

Now that the baby is a boy, what do you name him ? The earlier name would not suit him for sure, unless both of us want to be murdered for causing mental trauma from the 2nd standard onwards. So we were off searching for names, but did not want to struggle too much. Multiple names on the table and none seemed unique enough. At last we managed one and although it was not unique, we made it unique. So now he is called Rohaan.

And incidentally it is all thanks to Lord of the Rings I guess. Riders of Rohaan

Twist in the tale

My sister in law decided very early in the pregnancy that she would call the little one “Spicy Mouse”. Strangely enough Ron has lived up to his reputation of being a real spicy one if you were to consider Spicy as a synonym for a real rouge. He now has developed this strange habit while being put to sleep. My mother in law cradles him, pats him a bit and then holds him till he drops to sleep. Unfortunately for her, he pretends to sleep by closing his eyes and when she slows down a bit, opens his eyes wide, looks at her and gives a very interesting lopsided grin as if telling her “Hey old lady, you keep trying but I am never gonna do it. I will have it my way”

Ron also has managed to contort himself quite well. Looks like he is going to be a practitioner of yoga before he is one year old. He ends up putting his feet to the left, his body straight and head to the right, but hold on, his head goes upwards to the right. I tried copying him and sure enough woke up with a crick in the neck. Sometimes it is a wonder how children begin their life being so flexible and as they grow they end up rigid both in body and in mind

Looks are indeed deceptive

My sister came yesterday with her sister in law and husband in tow with her better half and my nephew to visit Ron. Being the silly boy that he is, he slept through most of their visit. In hindsight I think he is smarter than all of us think he is. He managed to overcome social visits the easy way, rather than being passed around, subject to knobby fingers and a load of unintelligible words he just winked away the time in his baby wrap. Kids these age do have eternal wisdom

The usual question of all parents and grand parents to the extended family on a baby pilgrimage is whom does the baby resemble. Not to be left out of this coterie, we promptly opened up the floor for debate. My sister being a political diplomat like Narasimha Rao managed to mumble that he looked a bit like me last week and like my wife this week and next week he would look like someone else in the family. The others were not to be left out and spoke their pretended hearts out and caused a huge dose of sugary feeling in the house. I felt like part of the Hansel & Gretel clan. My nephew of course knew nothing about diplomacy. At 10 years your dad teaches you to be honest and straightforward and that is what the boy did. “He does not look like both of you or your parents” was his proclamation and that put us in our place

We ended up the next few hours with our little tyke and a few pictures trying to figure out some faint resemblance to any of our kith and kin. And that was how Sunday went.

12–01–12: A New Beginning

Rohaan came out on 12th of January, 2012. My mother in law was with us and when the nurse wrote his date of birth on paper, she remarked, “Oh ! its 12-01-12, that’s so nice”. And there started the good omen trail from everybody in the family. His star it seems is something called “Magham” which is supposedly strange as very few boys are born in that star. So one more point in Rohaan’s kitty. Some of my relatives landed a few days later and when informed of his name, they started calling him Rohan (spoken as Rowhun) instead of stressing on the “a” at the end. We had chosen the spelling so that he did sound different from the typical Hindi film hero names, but then my sister told me, with a new baby nothing ever goes as per plan. So another one for the little one

Its now been three weeks and we are all still trying to get into a rhythm and get to settle down with each other. But Rohaan (henceforth for now, we shall call him Ron) is proving to be a madcap. There are days wherein he wails for food and other days wherein he wails for a bath and still more days wherein he wails for having had a bath. Life is strange with Ron

One thing we managed to make him like or adapt at least is to listen to good old English rock. Ron has managed to become contend with Floyd or Purple or even Ac/Dc. I guess its all about what one listens to in the previous 40 weeks.More later. It is time to wipe some arse.

Day of Reckoning

It all started with a bloody earthquake near my house. All was silent one moment and suddenly everything started moving. There were a number of us who were at home and all of us were caught unawares. We were pushed around here and there gently at first and beyond a level of discomfort we felt nothing. However, all that changed and within a few minutes everything was in a state of frenzy. We were engulfed by a rather large wave.We stepped out, opened the doors and were caught up in a flood that ravaged the streets. The day had been calm till then. Everything was quiet, there was a soft silence around and I was quiet, in bed trying to finish the duel between Roark and …well, by now I had forgotten all about it. The game plan was to figure out what was causing us to get caught in these rapids and how could I escape this inevitable flow.

We did not know where we were going and what was going to happen to us. It took us a few moments to get our bearings right and set a course of action. All of us moved forward slowly at first and soon enough at a speed that was a bit more than comfortable. I could see many of my companions coming from different sections, caught in a tumult, moving towards a common point. The town square, downtown, the pillar box, the post office, whatever you want to call it; all of us were moving with one thought in mind. To beat the odds and to reach wherever it was, quickly. As we rushed forward to the light at the end of the road, some of us started jostling each other pushing each other out of the way. Squabbles erupted on the way and soon enough some of us were caught with entwined limbs pulling each other back for gaining an unfair advantage.

I never looked back, never turned my head to the side. All I wanted to do was to get out of the maelstrom and into a safe space where I could rest. The heat was unbearable and the crowd now was pushing harder than ever. I thanked my lucky stars for having been an able athlete and a good swimmer. As I plunged deeper into the water, I wiggled around and stroked hard. The initial resistance was broken and as I moved forward the numbers seem to dwindle. Soon enough there were just a few of us and the currents picked up and we stopped expending energy. A gentle push here, a prod there, a straightening out here and there to keep the direction and we were on our way to reach our destination. As we moved forward, we realized that the numbers had actually fallen down and we were but a few. We were moving together, but strangely we were competing with each other. It felt weird as each of us pushed the other person forward, and again to the side and kept our line of travel open

As I pushed myself forward, I saw behind me the masses slowing down. Some did not have the energy to move forward and stood still. Others pushed forward but the strength was lost in them and all they ended up doing was waste whatever was left in a non conclusive effort. I moved relentlessly and reached a cave of sorts. There was a small bubble within the cave which exuded warmth and set my heart racing. Was it for this that I had struggled so much. I moved forward, pushed my head into the bubble. It was quiet, but not eerie. It was a pleasant silence that I was ensconced in. I moved my whole body into the bubble. As I sat inside the warmth spread through me and soon it was quite hot. The air inside was warm and humid but not tropical. I basked in the slow warmth and spent a few minutes enjoying the bubble.

Suddenly I felt a searing thrust of heat and before I could move something happened. A flash of light and a surge of immense white heat and I could feel my insides melt. I wondered to myself,
“is this the end that all of us were talking about. After all the perils that I have been through, was it to succumb to this unknown”
As I began melting away I realized that while the initial heat was definitely unbearable it did not feel bad at all. Soon something strange happened, the bubble began melting from the inside too. As both the bubble and myself began melting something else happened and a solid mass appeared where we were in contact. This definitely was a good feeling and I wanted to wrap my arms around the matter forming within the bubble. In no time, my body disintegrated and joined the bubble. The bubble become harder on the outside. A few of my friends moved towards the bubble as they felt the warmth attract them. However hard they tried they could not pass the outer covering of the bubble. It seemed that the covering was removed just for me to enter in.

As I lay there inside the bubble, becoming entwined with the bubble it suddenly dawned on me. The entire episode right from the time I was awakened till now had happened in a span of a few minutes. The bubble broke its silence and from within a voice whispered to me. As I joined the apparition that came out of the bubble, I realized that this was beyond spectacular. This was definitely worthy of being called supernatural. I melted into the apparition bit by bit and over the next few hours I began shedding my individuality. It was not that I was losing myself, it was more of the bubble and myself becoming one. As they say it was probably a union of both the flesh and the soul that took place

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This is a recounting of the story of creation. Obviously the protagonist in the story are what you make of them.

Custom Coffee at the office

Friday special at the office and I dint know about it. So there it was the coffee was kept on the table and the office boy said a big happy smiling “Good Morning” and walked away to serve the next set of customers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Strangely enough this was not designed by any of the twenty thousand espresso machines, but more handcrafted by a low skill worker tending to a filter coffee machine. Its amazing to see such hidden skills in these people which never come up and we end up praising the innumerable MF Hussain wannabes.