Fabrics of Fantasy – III

 “I woke up to the excruciating pain in my shoulder.
My eyes still closed, i groped for the gun.
Nothing !
With some effort, i opened my eyes to see a dull yellow bulb, dangling from the ceiling,
when a huge shadow fell over me …”

“What are you doing, sitting there staring at the paper ? Come over and do your homework! “.

I tore my eyes away and looked over my cousin’s shoulder into the hall. My mom was cutting vegetables, standing at the kitchen counter overlooking my bedroom, glaring at me with disgust.  My cousin giggled. Silly girl, who wanted to pore over the homework of a five year old, giggling, picking-her-nose kid anyway? I had to, no choice. And I had to also complete my homework. Aaaargh! Life disgusted me, well, more than I disgusted my mom.

“Writing my diary, ma. Updating my day’s….” She did not want to hear the rest of it. “Get up, Rishi. Write your chemistry record. I know, you did not yet complete it. Draw up those diagrams that you had to in your physics one. Do your math then, I know you have your exams round the corner and you don’t seem to mind. I don’t want your average scoring in this term, at least. Try to rank within the top five. If Hari can do it, so can my son….”

I fled the room and ran up the stairs to the attic. I would never hear the end of it, and did not want to hear anything. I had my books bag with me, my pens, some pencils and well, my diary that I had sneaked out. My parents were the typical my-child-should-be-the-best typos. As conforming to the standards as they went. They compared me with any child they could come across, including my five year old cousin, compared me with children who had grown up and achieved, including Dr. Kalam, they compared me with the unborns too, including the still unborn cousin, who was supposedly giving no carrying pains to my aunt, unlike the torture I had been to my mother. They got disgusted with my marks, my looks, my slow physical growth, my handwriting, my non-existent sports life, my penchant for getting into tiffs with classmates and the skill with which I brought on that more-than-disgusted looks on my teachers.

I was proud of all these.

Which other kid who had lived or will live will ever live in such a beautiful world of imagination and pro-creation that I live in? Who will experience the magic of a million magics? The worlds I live in are far far exciting than the world that my parents thrust on me. No, my worlds were out-of-usual-imagination scales.

I took out my pen. It was a beautiful golden green fountain pen, that I had received as a gift from my father before my tenth standard board exams. It had been instant love with the idea of creating words with that beauty. Who wanted to waste the majestic gleen of the pen and nib by writing all those harrowing exams?

I sat down to regurge the happenings since this day morning. I had woken upto the pain in my shoulders. Effect of the huge thump that my uncle had ‘very affectionately’ given me. I groped for the water-gun next to me that I always slept with, fully refilled. It was meant to be ‘pichkooed’ out on the person who woke me up every morning. Heard of reverse effect? It was a revenge mechanism with respect to what had been tried on me – waking me up with water sprinkled on my face. And well, my uncle had removed it from my side this dawn. Oh! they learn from experience.

And the dull yellow light? It was for some added effect in my record of events. Unless you could count the sunlight streaming in from the windows as any light effect. But a huge shadow did loom over. My uncle’s. He was the kind of man who woke up early in the mornings, and set about gardening. He gardened and gardened and gardened. My aunt was the kind who even now, I suspected, was at some horticultural display or sale. They prided on being people with green fingers. Green fingers? More like stubby short ones with soil and dirt under the nails. Yuck! I know, I know. They disgust me.

Their son was an achiever. Engineering at IIT and MBA at IIT. I was secretly happy over the fact that he had tried IIM and missed it. “Only by a few decimal points, ” he pointed out to all those who stopped by to awe. He was even proud that he had missed by just a few points than a out of shot value. I would have been struck with frustration if it was that way. Not that I have any regard for the degrees, but just that to have so desire something and miss it so closely?

The rest of today had passed by without any worse events. I had stood humiliated before the family as I lost in the chess game that my 5 year old pest of a cousin had challenged me to. But, that is hardly a matter to be written in to a diary, isn’t it? When all you want to remember are the things that were glorious, or the things that might have been glorious. Who cares whether it happened or not.

My people wanted me to become an engineer. And then a MBA. They plan the same course for everyone of my generation, just like the previous consisted of CA’s. My father was a CA. And so was my uncle. They were willing to pay my way through any successful university for the degree. Money had never been a problem at home. The family would somehow manage to find ways to earn and share. I had so many various uncles and aunts and cousins that I did not bother trying to remember names and details. They prided on being a family with strings so attached that they were a mini Indian Mafia, in terms of family affection and protection. Mafia indeed! Silly …..

All I wanted to was to dream on. Do journalism and English studies. Write, write and dream. But who bothered about personal preferences when clan attitudes were bred from infancy? I was the white sheep in a black goat family. Naturally, they wanted to goad me into believing that I was, after all a goat. No, not after all, I was a superior goat that could keep goating and gloating, whatever that felt like.

So here was I, in my eleventh standard, in the computer stream. Been subjected to hawk eyed supervision to check if I was on the right track, which am normally not on, and then subjecting me to mass critiscism that had me wishing I could get swallowed into a different world in front of their sly eyes and drawn away into magic. Whoever gave second-cousin-removed-third-cousins and a distant-uncle’s-grand-aunt’s-niece’s-son’s-wife’s-brother rights to chide me? In my family nothing is given, including freedom. Everything is grabbed hold of, including a meek 15 year old’s right to dream and try to live the dream.

“Rishi?”

‘Yes, dad.” My dad was this short stout man, who fitted most pictures of the ideal family man. My mom was the short, thin woman who fitted the perfect mould of a self-sacrificing housewife. But the similarities stopped there. In all manner, the person who managed the household and the out-of-household was my mom. Dad was just a perfect foil to the world.

“Finished homework? ” Why could they not get out of calling assignments as homework? I felt like I was a 5 year old chalk-eating, nose-picking, drooling-while-sleeping kid !

“Yes dad…er…almost”

“Finish it, but do it downstairs. “

“Okay”

“And Rishi, today your grandfather and your granduncle are going to drop in. Try to appear smart. That uncle is the registrar in the Goverment University and he has promised to clinch a seat for you in Computer Engineering. Don’t lose the chance.”

I paled. “Dad, Engineering….”

“Yes, of course we want our only son to be the man of our dreams right? Do engineering. It will place you above everything else. Everyone else”

Like maybe place me on top of, say, the university, and make me take the plumment down to commit suicide?

“Okay, dad”

He climbed down. So did I. My diary lay forcibly forgotten in the attic. Record books in hand, I sat down to write. My dreams lay scheduled to nights. I was already doing it. Turning into a mundane machine. The stuff of which engineers are made.

 

[ On the lines on Manoj. Manny, you gave me the lines in quotes, so I used it that way, to symbolize words, either written or spoken . Thanks, Manny ]