Banggggg …! I was
shuddering to hear a deafening sound and saw the antique clock, a precious link
to a glorious lineage, lying in state, shattered in bits and pieces. The two musketeers
nonchalantly examined its broken needles. They were at it again … at their
chivalry act after twelve long months.
Over beaten and virtually
turned upside down, my house now looked like a site after a bomb blast. Freshly
painted walls were disfigured overnight. The two little terrorists, making the
walls their easels, drew on them a riot of portraits, doodles, cartoons and caricatures—all
with pieces of charcoal.
It was Ganesh [my brother’s
son] who would always start sowing wild oats. His caricature of Deena [my
sister’s daughter]—with a big, swelled head, pigtails and flat nose—would
provoke the little Joan of Arc to retaliate with all her feminine power. Ganesh
would thus be shown standing in a puddle with a footnote telling us that he
used to wet his bed at night and get slapped by his mother.
Let the walls wail in
silence for their lost gleam. But, no good was the drawing room, which, to my
horror, resembled like a vessel shop having had a herd of elephants for
visitors. Contraption at home were either dismantled or displaced. Thus the DVD
player took refuge in the kitchen and the Wet Grinder had a new home in the
hall.
The book rack looked bare.
The kids had since shifted the books in the drawing room and littered them on
the floor. Lying down on the heaps of books, Deena would be reading ‘The Oxford
Thesaurus’. Not to get beaten by her, Ganesh would immerse himself in the holy
‘Mahabharata’. On his nose was my pince-nez.
Sometimes, there broke out
a fierce battle between the kids over trifle matters like, who would watch Pogo
on the TV or who would play games in my lappy. What started as a war of words
would end in violence; the two would be found either exchanging blows or
throwing missiles at each other—missiles like, combs, hair brushes, spoons--
and they would always miss their target and hit either Kala, my wife, or me. At
times Kala would broker peace between the two warriors but to no avail.
Gosh! We were in the midst of
the summer riots again gleefully sparked off by the kids the moment they came
down to our house from their country homes to spend their summer vacation. They
were so enterprising and industrious that their no-holds-barred antics always
put us on tender hooks for a month or two.
It was on a summer evening,
I went berserk. It was now my turn to ransack the house and make it a virtual
hell. I had misplaced the fine print of the ‘Blah Blah’, one of my writes, and
that made me disoriented. I had to send it to a Weekly magazine and the
deadline was fast approaching. The tyrants, as was their wont, had deleted this
piece from my Desktop.
Moved by my predicament,
Kala too joined my ‘operation-search-blah-blah’. We rummaged through the house
not leaving the wardrobe and laundry, but drew blank. Missing out the ‘Blah
Blah’ became mystery and I was upset over its sudden disappearance.
A new ‘Blah Blah’ came to
life with unbearable birth pangs. I sat through the whole of the night and
reconstructed it in the morning. It looked pedestrian; lacked in its original
josh. I was then distracted by the tumultuous thunder claps and boisterous
laughter coming out of the drawing room. I raced over there, Kala in tow.
I saw half-a-dozen
neighborhood children sitting on the floor and clamoring for attention. Deena
was standing beside a table stacked with some of my books. She draped herself
in a shawl, brandishing a wooden scale at the children to keep them quiet.
‘Deena, why, what the hell
is going on here?’ I flared.
‘Easwar, I’m not Deena, but
your class Miss. Come and sit here. I’m distributing all your exam papers.’ She
shot back, eyes serious, voice commanding.
‘Kala’, Deena turned her
head to my wife.
‘Yes, Miss’, Kala spoke respectfully;
her hands were submissively folded across her chest.
‘Kala’ Deena now smiled and
spoke softly. ‘This is your exam paper. Well done. You got 98 out of 100.’
OMG! That’s my grocery
list’, Kala screamed. ‘Been searching for it for days on end.’
‘Shush’, Deena put her
finger on her lips. Kala became quiet. She was happy since she got back her
grocery list.
Deena stopped me when I
tried to move out of the classroom. She told me to get my paper and then go
out. I stopped abruptly, smiled sheepishly at her. She then flipped through the
pages of a heavy bound dictionary and took out a set of papers.
‘Good heavens.’ I screamed as Kala did a few minutes back.
‘Look. Kala, that’s my ‘Blah Blah’. My eyes gleamed as if I accidentally
stumbled upon a long lost treasure trove.
‘Easwar,’ Deena snarled.
‘Your ‘Blah Blah’ is all rubbish; full of grammar mistakes. I’m sorry. You
failed in English. You got only 30 out of 100.’ Kala laughed aloud seeing my
discomfiture. The whole class looked at me contemptuously. I saw my write was
hit with green pencil and disfigured beyond recognition.
The summer had gone and the
kids too. My house now falls back to its usual, intriguing silence and
somnolence. Though every room remains clean and clutter free, I find sort
emptiness and void surrounds them. Kala and I are now waiting for another summer
… longing to have the kids in our midst. For, we know only where children
gather is there a real chance of fun.
My composition abruptly
stopped. The adamant pen, giggling at my verbose, refused to move further on
the A4 sheet. Hmmm, even a pen knows about a grain form the chaff; knows the
worth of a write better than the writer. Thus my attempt to write a prescription
for how to live on and how to sing a song of peace through a poem ended in a
fiasco. However, W.H. Davies came to my rescue. His poem ‘Leisure’, which I
present here, reflects my thoughts of how to walk through the debris of the
modern life. Amen.]
