“Moments like those bring charm to one’s life but I don’t have any to recall; maybe current day life doesn’t lend scope for any.”
“Why doubt that,” he said, “but there are moments in life that are bitter to experience and sweeter to recall. While the first of my sisters obediently sat at home, the second one always joined me at playtime. I wonder how in the thick of things her sixth sense would warn her about our father’s impending home-coming; well she used to alert me before leaving the field, but lost in the game, I was always caught on the wrong foot and faced his ire for late-coming. Oh how his intemperance turned demonic once; why he nearly split my head with a pounding staff. It happened in the small hours of that atlataddi when I pestered him to let me join my friends at the annual fete; even my grandmother’s pleadings didn’t deter him from bashing me up for my insistence. I shudder to think how a mishap then would’ve affected him forever; maybe, my skull is made of sterner stuff for I can take any beating at the champi that I came to love in later years.”
“It was child abuse and no less.”
“Being human, parents too can lose their temper on occasion and a little bashing that ensues can’t be deemed as child abuse,” he said. “Once when my son disturbed my sleep, having bashed him up in indignation, I realized that my nagging that atlataddi night would’ve been no less irritating to my father. But think of tel-maalish,andI recall a naayiof my hostel days; he was barely sixteen, and like most Biharis in those days, he was married for a year or more by then. Goading the students to get married early, he used to assert that the real ecstasy of tel-maalish lies in the crackling sound of the bangles as one’s woman was at it. How he used to pity us, the prospective engineers, for we would have a bride in her early twenties that is in our late twenties; of what avail are the girls out of their teens for they would have past their prime by then. But then, Gen. Yahya Khan of Pakistan never had anything to do with women below forty for he felt such wouldn’t be randy enough in bed; how perceptions about sexual pleasures vary really! Doesn’t that remind us of what Shakespeare said of Cleopatra – “Age cannot wither her / nor custom stale / her infinite variety. Other women cloy / the appetites they feed / but she makes hungry / where most she satisfies.”