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I was born in a conservative but strange family.
A family of one mom, one step dad, one step brother and me.
They all believed in a diarrhea of long prayers.
The diarrhea lasted twice a day.
Long sessions of diarrhea.
And longer the session
More the gods, the saints, the angels and the arch-angels would be pleased
And more favors would be granted
And the more sleepier I felt.
My family believed that
On Thursday I could watch extra TV
And sleep 3 hours late
That is after watching the family weekend movie
At home that is –
Those days you see theatre was not invented
At least in my family circles.
Friday was day to do our family duties.
Go to church and then to the supermarket
Go visit our stingy back-biting aunts or uncles
And act as if you felt the joy of heaven when you met them.
And yes my favorite
Purchase a parota (Indian bread) from my cheap ‘near-the-house’ restaurant
And eat with some restaurant fried chicken
As I hated home made food
And I loved outside food.
And the reason my family was strange
Was because they also believed in studies
They believed a LOT in studies
In fact they believed so much in studies
All our outing to other families
Had one thing in common.
The identification of your child
Versus how many marks he or she managed to score in every subject
Greater the marks
Greater the family pride.
And greater the stock value of that family on the family stock market.
It seems
If you wanted to succeed in life
If you were worth anything
If you were fit to be a good person
You had to be good in studies.
And with that everything was good.
They also believed in something even more stranger
They believed that money should not be wasted on purchasing
Any thing else
Other than ONLY school books
So we were a medium class family
Who had strong beliefs
With cheap soap
Cheap shampoo
Cheap perfumes which were used once a year to smell nice
(adults would use it once a day)
And yes, everything in our house was cost effective
And yes, cheap.
And the best part of all these strange beliefs
They had the 10.4 commandments
Of how ‘me’ should ‘be’
They believed that a good boy
Must look like this
Act like this
Behave like this
Smell like this
Bend like this
And so on and so forth.
The tragedy of the whole thing was
I was born
As I can consider it today
The other way around.
I hated school
To me school was the time to meet friends
I loved playing – anything
I always wanted to meet new friends
And I hated everything they loved.
There was however one bigger problem.
Much bigger.
They felt if you are a good boy
You must NEVER talk too much.
Now that might not be a problem to many.
But to me
And that was my biggest problem
I love talking.
I love talking too much.
I honestly loved talking WAY too much!
At home I would love to talk – they would tell me shut up
At school I would love to talk – they would tell me shut up
In the Chuch when I would talk – the priest in the chuch would tell ‘Shut that devil up!’
Since both my parents would go to work
I was left alone at home most of the time
I would talk to myself
But the minute I was off to school
I would talk everyone I met to death.
And looking at me
Everyone would be alert
And they all would run off.
I would talk so much
That even the teachers would get fed up
They would get so fed up
They would throw me out of class
For any and every reason.
In fact I have the record of being the ONLY student in the history of my school
Who was thrown out of every class
The maximum number of times
So much so
The headmaster whenever he would walk down the corridors
He would look at me
Nod his head in disbelief
And just walk off
And if I was not out of class
As he would pass by
He would come into my class
And wonder how comes I was not thrown out.
However
Life was not that cruel.
The only guy who wouldn’t mind me talking
Was the bus conductor
When I would talk to the bus conductor
He would never tell me to shut up
He would listen and encourage me
It was only years later
That I found out
He didn’t know a word of English
But that didn’t matter to me
I just wanted to talk
And anyone to listen
As long as they listened
Didn’t matter if they understood or not.
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