TOP

TOP

In my childhood, the rainy season brought many Hindu festivals esp. in the month of Saawan in the Hindu calendar.  I always enjoyed the outings with the family, many of them on the bicycles, to various places of worship, best of all to the river Narmada for a holy bath. Sometimes the ladies sat in a cycle rickshaw and I had the choice of riding the bicycle with my dad or sitting in the cycle rickshaw with mom and granny. Due to the Spartan seating arrangements on offer on the bike (with possibility of serious damage to one’s posterior), as compared to the soft lap of granny, I normally opted for the three wheeler ride. My dad’s vigorous peddling however posed a serious threat of facing the ignominy of being overtaken by him and my other equally enthusiastic uncles on their bikes. It was a tricky choice which one should not be required to make at such a tender age.

          Of course, apart from the swim in the river, I was more interested in the various goodies available at these festive gatherings. My favourite item was a pair of goggles made from coloured cellophane papers fitted into the rings of hard paper with a rubber band for tying it around the head. Obviously, due to the fragility of the material used and the rough treatment it got from me and my cousin Parag, the goggles never came back intact. Then there were cheap plastic mouth organs which were normally vetoed by the senior members of the family, due to the serious threat posed to the noise level of the universe.  

          During one of these outings, I was introduced to the magical world of the ‘top’, a simple wooden item, conical in shape, with an iron nail at the bottom and a rounded head. The colour of the top was a bright red or green which became indistinguishable after weathering some usage.  There were ribs on the slanting middle of the top where one had to wind a thread, first around the nail and then around the rest of the body. The whole routine was quite complicated.  Then the thread had to be pulled up with a jerk while flinging the top down, to give a spin to the top.

          The thread had to be of a special quality. It resembled the wick used in oil lamps, hence, was quite expensive. Dad gamely offered to make a homemade substitute which he expertly made by rolling old rags across his thigh. But somehow it was not the same. I had to challenge him to make the top spin with his homemade thread, to force him to buy me the real thing.

Initially, the entire rigmarole appeared too tough to master. I kept staring wistfully at the big boys who could not only spin the top effortlessly but also, make it do many tricks like picking it up while still spinning, on their palms, throwing it up and down etc. Sometimes, if they were in a good mood, they would put the spinning top on my tiny palm. The tickling sensation of a whirling top on the palm and the thrill of holding it made me ecstatic. Later, after hours and hours of frustrating attempts, the top suddenly started responding to my command and actually spun majestically before slowing down and eventually rolling away on its side. When spinning the top became easy, I moved towards more esoteric tricks and the culmination of the entire experience was throwing the top down and flicking the thread expertly before it lands on the ground and voila you have a spinning top on your palm.

          Boys played many games with the tops, but once the thrill of making it spin in various expert ways was over, I soon lost interest in it. Then on, it was a forgotten art practised only occasionally to train the younger boys or impress the girls who always swooned when I demonstrated my special tricks.

          Then I discovered marbles. But that is another story.   

Unkempt

UNKEMPT

Unkempt was the word to describe him. He was all of 5 feet tall, was built like a wrestler i. e. muscular, stocky and thick necked; wore dirty, smelly clothes and had a thick mop of unruly hair, resembling an inverted wicker basket matted with grime and dirt. He had a thick moustache which completely covered his upper lip and often carried a giveaway evidence of his last meal. He had a loud, booming voice which was put to good use in the late night shouting matches we occasionally had with the hall next door, Lala Lajpatrai hall (Lallu in IIT Kharagpur parlance, no disrespect to the great man). He could yell the choicest Punjabi curse words with great gusto. He walked with a peculiar shuffle dragging his feet on the ground.

          Folklore has it that he was a really wild kid in his childhood. After his day’s romp with the other brats in the village, he used to often return home with so much dust and dirt in his hair that finally his parents decided to chop off his locks and make him mona i.e. a sikh who has decided to sport a shorter hair style. He was named Amrik Singh, as his parents like many others in rural Punjab those days, wanted their son to grow up and go to Amreeka, the Promised Land.

          He was a man of few words but he could shout “Shanta!” at the top of his voice every time he saw the buxom lass, who was the secret fantasy of all male iitkgpians,  passing by. (The word stalking had not entered the social parlance in that era and it was considered perfectly all right for hot blooded jocks to shout their appreciation of a girl’s beauty and the girls took it in good spirit). He was, however, a staunch supporter of the hall and always cheered the hall team lustily in whichever activity we participated including chess and bridge tournaments. When I won the chess tournament, in spite of being a foot shorter and at least 10 kgs lighter, he easily lifted me up and shouted “Oye Pande! You did it.”

          His sense of hygiene was wackier than that of Lalit Bhanot (of CWG fame). His room was full of dust and you could clearly see the foot marks made in the dust where he found his way to the bed from the door. There was a permanent pile of dirty shirts lying in one corner. Whenever I went to his room calling him to come to the mess, he would pick up shirts from that pile one by one, sniff them and chose the one that smelled the least. He had put up a poster of Katy Mirza on the roof just above his bed so that he could look at her as soon as he woke up. Despite his outward appearance of being an uncouth yokel, he happened to top his class in aeronautical engineering. When and how he studied remained a mystery to all of us.

          I met him 15 years later in a venture capitalists’ conference at ISB Hyderabad. Had it not been for his trademark shuffle, I could have easily missed him. He had lost some weight and gained some sophistication. He wore a black Armani suit and his hair was short and well groomed. He had got rid of the bush over his upper lip. He reeked of expensive French perfume. He looked the quintessential investment banker. I tapped him on the back; he turned back, politely extended his hand and said Hi! I am Mikey from JJM Capital. I said, “Oye Amreek, don’t you recognise me? I am Pande, your hallmate from VS?”

          He picked me up easily, although I had become 10 kgs heavier since we met last, and said “Oye Pande, b*&%$#d! How are you?

Virtuous Cycle

VIRTUOUS CYCLE

We go through life with a complex relationship with our parents, which is always evolving and changing, comprising different shades varying from wide eyed adulation to resigned acceptance to embarrassed dismay.

When we enter the world, we are totally dependent on them for feeding us, changing our nappies, putting us to sleep and for making our existence as comfortable as it can be, while lying helplessly on our backs in control of neither ourselves nor our environment. Whenever we get hungry/wet/crappy we holler for help and keep howling till we get it. Most of us get over this simple symbiotic relationship as we grow older. But some of us get stuck in this habit of shouting mummy/daddy whenever in trouble, may it be career planning, relationship snarls, marital discord or parental responsibilities.

The next phase is “My daddy the strongest man / My mommy the most beautiful woman (the best cook) on the planet“. This phase lasts till the teen years (maybe only tween years now) when it becomes “My dad the most rigid and stuck up miser / My mom the stupidest dinosaur with no inkling of the current fashion trends“. They embarrass us. Again, some people go through their entire lives thinking their dad the smartest / mom the best cook syndrome whereas some others continue to think that their dad is too stuck up and mum is too uncouth. The vilest vituperation of the genx ‘uncool’ is permanently branded on their nonexistent facebook profiles.

When travails of parenthood assail us in the early middle age, we suddenly wake up with a jolt and it dawns on us that mom and dad couldn’t have been so bad after all if they successfully coped with our teething phase, dysentery, measles, several bouts of flu, numerous exams, tests, quizzes, interviews, school projects, stalkers and horror of horrors “pimples“. They also managed to play Frisbee/cricket with us occasionally, take us on picnics/camping, prepare us for the fancy dress parade/school play and ferry us to painting classes. And here I am stuck with this tyke who starts howling the moment I want to sleep and doesn’t shut up even when I am being so calm and reasonable.

This renewed respect and appreciation for the progenitors sometimes remains till they depart for their heavenly abode. But it can also evaporate quickly when as doting grandparents they start spoiling the children rotten. -“Dad! Put him down. Or he will expect to be picked up every time he cries.” “Ma! no chocolates, I told you.” “Mom! don’t interrupt when I am scolding her.”

Finally, when the parents grow real old and feeble; and become clumsy, sloppy, forgetful, garrulous and repetitive, we tend to get impatient and dismissive. -“Mom! You already told him that joke 17 times.” ‘Dad! don’t spill your soup again.”

To our utter and complete bewilderment, while our own parents are slipping into senility and being generally a pain in the neck, we are already graduating from “My daddy strongest” to the “My daddy dumbest” stage. “What me uncool??” “ Hello! You must be mad.” What does this chit of a girl think of herself? Doesn’t she know I was the princess of the year in Saint Joans Convent, Ludhiana? And the boys used to make a beeline at the gate to have a glimpse of me? Wake up princess. Smell the roses. This is life.

And the cycle goes on.