The stinks

Every time I look at RRJ and every time  I look at my parents I am so tangibly aware of time that I can almost feel it, elbowing past in the most reckless manner as if there is no tomorrow. I wish I could hold on to the present, it is a good place and a good time and I love it this way, but no, it seems that is not allowed.

One of the noticeable changes from RRJ's younger days is the number of conversations that we have now which are centered about his hair. A couple of months ago:
Amma: When are you going to the barber?
RRJ: Not anytime soon.
Amma: Why do you want to grow your hair long? I thought Christiano Ronaldo doesn't have it long....
RRJ: And I thought you didn't want me to copy anyone.
Amma: That is true, very true, I have said that. So no need to copy but still it is hard to keep it clean, you know, you sweat so much and your shower lasts no longer than a sneeze...... I am sure it stinks.
RRJ: I just took a shower, it is very very clean.
Amma [lovingly leaned over]: Haha... let me smell....Ooooh [gasps for air]  Oh my god, it stinks......very much like wet socks.  What have you been doing? [The stink was so bad that it was impossible not to laugh]
RRJ [feeling as if he is missing out on something]: I also want to smell... please please.
[Amma, still laughing hysterically, rubbed his hand on his scalp and offered it for smelling.]
RRJ [shocked by the stink, started laughing himself]: I know this smell.... it is exactly like my friend SN's football boots.
Amma [not laughing anymore]: SN's boots? And how do you know?
RRJ: We had sort a competition...... who can smell SN's boots longer?
Amma [thinking 'WHAAAT!!']: Oh, hmmmm.... and how many competitors were there?
RRJ: We started three and then one pulled out so only two...
Amma [knowing the answer fully well]: And don't tell me you were the winner?!!!!!

 I am sure he will outgrow being silly and cute and perhaps I will outgrow finding it silly and cute. But till then I must dig my heels a little deeper...... and slow time down.

To life .....

Somewhere deep down I think it has finally sunk in that the glass is rarely ever empty. There is much happening in life that can keep one engaged positively. And this positive engagement is what I believe ensures that the glass is never totally empty. In my viewfinder is the little patch of green next to one of our favourite restaurants. It was lunch time, the weather perfect, cool blue sky in the backdrop. That little water body that you see behind the trees, on its day, can stink you out of your mind but luckily  even the wind was blowing the right direction!

Closure

Sometime you are forced to choose
   to let it go
and see the ends remain loose
  just so.

Damaging it may seem to others
  friend or foe
holding on could make it only worse
  you know

The time, the energy, the soul
  invested
infuriating it was, the whole 
  appeared wasted

Path of reason was to detach
  not falter
taking that path was so much
  though harder

The job remained undone
  years passed by
bitterness was never a solution
  in my eye

Difficult people also meet difficulties
  and get wise
they may not plan so but life can be a tease
  they realise
 
Satisfaction of completion
  had to wait for that moment
closure to that chapter did happen
  so late that a non-event

Sartorial therapy

Some experiences are more rattling than others in that they require desperate measures to get out of the funk. To infuse some crispness to my sulking soul, I wore a saree today.

Serves us right

Our entry, last year, into the tennis playing group in our neighborhood was a bit like baptism by fire. As neither of us (RRS or I) were as good and unlike in a team game where you could choose to hide in the background when you were a bit off color and pretend to be part of the game without being where the action is,  in tennis our shortcomings stood fully-exposed between double faults and unforced errors. The only thing we were good at then was turning up everyday, our game had no choice but to improve. It has been a fantastic addition to our life style. Apart from being a lot of fun learning to play the game and having a great bunch of people to hang out with, it has just seamlessly fit into our schedule. Largely because the court is a two minute walk from home and it is therefore easy for RRJ to join us once he is done with playing with his friends from the next block.

RRJ of course has his own set of reasons to like the whole tennis thing as:

• he gets to watch us play and take the parental role of nagging and giving expert comments like "why is your service so mokka (= bad)" and then proceed on to giving tips on how we could improve it, like "you need to do regular shadow practice"etc.!
• he is not told off for being late in coming back from play.
• he gets to play some more in the park adjacent to the tennis court.
• he gets to play a few shots at the end of our game in a proper tennis court meant for grown ups.
• and the aspect he perhaps loves the most is that without him needing to argue for it, he gets most of the days off from studying as by the time we are done and reach home, the scheduled study hour has elapsed by and there is only time for the bare essentials like food and sleep. He often hops around the house with that look of disbelief that all this is happening for real. 

Thankfully I am in that phase in life where I am getting the hang of how to observe my parental guilt with some detachment and not follow it up with a session of self-flagellation. Unfortunately though, I am yet to reach that phase when this detachment is sustainable even when exams are in sight. I pause my philosophies and tennis for those days and operate on damage-control mode and go through his notebooks, textbooks and worksheets as if it is my parenting that is due for assessment. My beastly avataar had a lump in her throat, when she read the sentence that RRJ had made in his class notes with 'greatest of ease':

Handle with care

The only way I am able to understand the world is that by and large most people care, it is just how they show that they care is not necessarily very caring.

Blissful times

"Having the Korean soup that you made for me when I was ill, I realised you may not be the best cook but you are the best man for me" said the pretty bride. Listening to her vows it was hard to miss the sight of groom's family glowing with pride and unanimously voting her to be the best person for their much loved son/brother/brother-in-law/mama.

So there we were in Korea, far away from home, much happy celebrating a beautiful event very close to our heart, totally floored by the warmth of our Korean family, enjoying the awesome Korean food between sips of sweet Soju.

If complete happiness exists its soul was in Seoul last week.

Of mothers and sons

Today was just one of those weird days. My mind was mostly at another place where a person whom I absolutely adore was getting operated, but I had these bunch of evaluations (12 of them) to conduct in which the time had to be maintained, questions had to be asked, some quick judgement on the performance had to be passed etc. etc. The hardest part was watching my own students make a really sorry presentation of their decently good work. At the end of it I was sitting in my office feeling so dejected when the sms came from her son that she was out of the operation theater and everything seemed to have gone alright. It was a big relief to see that and I immediately felt incredibly guilty to be thinking about anything else.

Back at daycare RRJ was least interested in being picked up for a drop to cricket because through some clever scheme he and 3 others had managed to get the permission from the rather strict principal to play cricket right in front of the daycare. He wanted to finish the game before heading to the other place. The principal teased him, "what have you got in your body, look like a skeleton, haan?" "I have got cricket in my body, maam." The kid shows sparks of brilliance at times. He lights up my darkest of moods effortlessly even if 90 percent of the times he is the primary cause of the dark mood.

Letting it go

When is a good time to accept that your child is very far from being that little blob of mass with an alien face who needed every minute of your time but more of a grown up individual with a mind of his own? And if anything he needs from you, it is to stop breathing down his neck about every single thing. About TV, about food, about sleep, about studies, about time to leave home, about time to return home, the language…. oh the list is too long.

While RRJ takes  my (our) nagging quite sportingly and continues to be our good friend, I am a little tired of myself being this person who is not able to respect the notion of independence that RRJ seems to be developing at a rapid rate.

About ten days back during his exam week, RRS was traveling, that particular day it was already dark outside, time was well past seven, RRJ was nowhere to be seen and I was wandering in the street telling myself, "he has had it." After a few minutes I decided to check his friend's home in the next block. There I got to know he didn't come back with them. Walking back towards home I saw two thin legs and yellow bat walking up the stairs. I decided to wait and see what would mr. grown up do when he finds the house empty. I heard him opening the bolted door, "hello……. hello, Amma?" then there was silence. Trring… my cell phone rang in my hand, I had no choice but to pick up. "I am back. Where are you?" The guts! Where am I? Anyway as I walked up the stairs with each step I regained my cool and in the most mild manner possible told him that it was too late and I was worried and perhaps in the next hour he should bathe, eat and study for the exam next day. He didn't argue that there was no need to take bath or study. Later in the night while going through the grammar book I learnt a few things, like colours are actually adjectives and not nouns! And in the last page of the book I learnt a few more things:

D. Write five sentences about your mother.

1. my mother will cook nicely
2. my mother tells me the right things when I have fever
3. my mother tells me the right things when I have my exams
4. my mother works in IIT Madras
5. my mother is a 'nise' mother.

I was just so happy to read those sentences. Each of those, I know exactly what he means by them. Collectively, don't they seem to be talking about a sensible, calm and collected person. Perhaps from some angle I do appear like that. Or perhaps my son is indeed so grown up that he knows where what not to write.

Mush-journal entry

It was during a summer visit to Kerala, they had just come out of his parent's colony and crossed the main road. Walking carefully over the foot path which was more like an obstacle path they were chit-chatting about nothings while minding their steps. Early evening, the traffic on the road was much more than usual, in fact there was a small jam. Suddenly he nudged her saying he will be back and rushed into the jam heading straight to the city bus held up in the traffic. Bewildered by this sudden distraction she looked on, as he reached near the bus and poked at the elbow of this lady in mid-fifties who looked like she had had a long day. Irritated by the intrusion in her private space she turned to look at the irritant with an expression of extreme annoyance. She couldn't hold on to that for too long though as a split second later one could see her straining to recall where had she seen this man before and then 'click' the final jigsaw piece fitted in place and a huge grin spread over her face. The traffic started to move as he headed back to the footpath. She waved at her favourite student from primary class and he waved back.

A Song for the Occasion

When I am doing some mundane thing on my own like walking from one place to another or chopping vegetables in the kitchen and I hear myself humming, it baffles me that how often the song is just so right for the mood I am in. It doesn’t require any conscious thought and yet it is bang on. Mostly the RJ cells of the brain use the limited and oft repeated selection but can sometimes pull up a few surprises too. Like a very long time ago, mid-way my summer internship in Bangalore I moved out of an oppressive environment to a PG, the next day in the factory, in a very filmy way I just burst into ‘aaj phir jeene kee tamanna hai’ with all the cigarette cutting machinery and assembly lines making the back ground score. It was not quite a cinematic or operatic performance but the spontaneity was a manifestation of the huge relief I felt within. I was surprised myself. The song was never my favourite and I don’t remember ever singing it before or after but being a regular ‘chitrahaar’ watcher perhaps I didn’t miss the euphoria Waheeda Rehman felt liberating her aanchal from all the kantas of her life.

Apparently the significance of my humming is not lost on RR senior either, as he has indicated in so many words that he is pretty terrified of my involuntary renditions of “yahi voh jagah hai, yahi voh fizaen, yaheen par kabhee aap hum se mile the”. According to him the tune spells nothing but trouble as he seems to find strong correlation between the specific tune and an impending fight. While I find it difficult to accept that people can read my mind that easily, I do have regard for strong experimental data. RR senior himself is one of those people who consider letting people know his emotions rather beneath himself, humming tunes most certainly ranks even lower. But sitting quietly with long calculations, papers strewn all around and a laptop for company even dignified people have momentary lapses when the results of the calculations seem to match the simulation of the laptop. At such moments RJ cells of his brain play the repeat of literally one and only, that too an original composition. Given the genetic history and we both being educationists, we are trying our best not to read too much into the frequent singing of “we don’t need no education” by the kid.

On a final note, until my “favourite” student does the honour of graduating, my anthem climbing down the steps from office after any meeting will remain“I have a dream, a song to sing, to help me cope, with everything” with emphasis on “cope with everything”.