Saturday, May 17, 2008

No Kidding

Many years back when I was pretty much a kid myself I recollect walking out of my mom’s friend’s house with tears in my eyes. Mom was following me way behind. The cause of such an emotion was, believe it or not, because my mom’s friend’s daughter who must have been about 2 years old or so wanted to apply a tikka on my forehead and I didn’t want to get something like that done. One reason was because I was really shy about the entire thing & two felt completely uneasy with kids then. Not quite sure if these two were the only reasons or if there were others. But I feel these were pretty much it.

Cut now to today. I have a nephew who is about 2 years old & who is presently at home. Everytime this fellow leaves home with the maid may be, he calls out for me, “bunteee” of course in his typical way, has this huge smile on his face & is waving his hand doing a bye to me. I smile & wave back.

If some years back I was uncomfortable with kids & didn’t like them to a certain level, today I feel I am more at ease with them, definitely some level of comfort is there at least. And although I am not very showy about the entire emotion thing, I just love some of his antics & how he manages to find just about anything interesting.

I also feel this is the best part of a kids growing up phase. This is the time they are beginning to learn to speak. So listening to them speak in the little way that they know is very amusing. And it does sound very nice & very special when a two year old responds in a broken language, “nothing much” to the query “What’s up?” And it does sound very funny when he says, “rama, Krishna” & sits down after he has done a lot of work or walking about or picked up something slightly heavy.

Apparently I was a pain when I was a kid. There was one occasion when dad so tired of my screeching in the middle of the night, that he just picked me up & put me outside the main door of the house & locked it up. And one of my cousin’s favorites is this incident. Apparently I created such a ruckus on the road once because mom would not buy me what I had just seen. And guess what I had just seen & badly wanted. Rat poison. Yes, rat poison of all things. Even today in Bangalore there are these guys who carry a bag on their shoulders & push a nice big poster that has the pictures & some description of the product.

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