The dance of Dad

Most people who know my dad, know him through his creations. One of
which is me. And like all of his other creations, I am in no way perfect.
Perfect! Forget that. I am in no way, functional. Besides being all knobby
kneed, and armed, I have a nose that looks like the front part of a boat.
On the whole I am ungaily, lumpy and look extremely odd, besides being
useless around the house. Perfectly normal, you think. In fact all boys do
resemble the above description to a large degree. Unfortunately so do most
pillows in my house.

Yes! My dad, one day in a fit of hubris, decided he could make
better pillows for all the household, than anything you could purchase in a
shop and made pillows. I had no idea about this till one day, I walked in
to the flat, and all round me floating in the air, getting into my
nostrils, sticking to me, were feathers. My conversation with my dad went
something like this:

Me: Dad, what did you do?

Dad: Nothing.

Me: then why does it look like some kind of poultry farms.

Dad: Nothing. don't lose your head.

Me: Me! Lose my head. It looks like a lot of chickens have. Don't tell me
you skinned them or turned them invisible. Even then why are they shedding
so many feathers.

Dad: Go away and bathe your head you @##!@#!@. You always blabber.

Me: O.K. Don't tell me. Mom's gonna come home in 5 minutes you can explain
it all to her.

At this point Dad panicked. Till now the thought had never crossed his mind
that the lady of the house could return and question his activities for the
day. As a side note, Mom didn't object to any of dad's activites provided
he cleaned up the mess he made. She wouldn't even mind if Dad slitted the
heads of a thousand chickens. What she objected to, was his habit of
slitting their throats and bleeding them all over the floor (speaking
metaphorically of course), dicing them throwing them all over the place,
making a sticky mess, and then reading the papers calmly as she came in,
and announcing- "Oh! I made a little mess on the floor today. Can you clean
it up?".

Mom was inclined to be a bit shirty about all this, since dad even
in the normal course of cutting up a carrot deemed it necessary to grease
the knife, set the table top right, level the floor, and would in the
execution of all this would leave a huge mess that would simply not be
worth the carrot that had been simply split into two. "Cut", had a
different meaning with my dad, then it had with the rest of the world. An
apocryphal tale around the house is of when mom asked him to "cut" a head
of cabbage, and 20 minutes later came back to find an equally divided
cabbage sitting on the table top.

Well of course, returning back to the pillows, I persuaded dad to
show me these new members of the gang of 'extremely useless household
articles that should have been buried at night, but are still being proudly
displayed by dad, as he is too bloddy minded to let anybody take it down'.
And there they were, standing 3 feet tall a piece, two huge beasts of
pillows.

Well. Yes! That was/is their defining characteristic. Three feet
tall. I mean that they were 2 foot long, 1 foot wide, and BLODDY 3 FEET
TALL. I felt a cold shudder pass through my body. My dad, would now ask me
to use one.

"See.", said Dad, his voice a mixture of raw pride at his his awesome
handiwork and thill at having done this without my mom knowing it. The
ground benath my feet, looked like the slaying grounds for a large scale
genocide of chickens. There was enough fluff there. Plus he had turned on
the fan, so churning around and around in ever greater swirls, and
uncannily resembling snow drifts were mounds of feathers, that had also
been as a temporary measure also doused with chilled water. All around me
was thread, thread, thread, and sprinkled underfoot, amongst the thistles
as they were, was a battery of needles, and thimbles. My dad had pricked
himself in a fashion quite reminiscent of aborginal birthmarks. And there,
sitting there, announcing their entry to the entire world, were the
pillows. Three of them.

One for papa bear, mama bear, and little bear. I gently lifted one, and
found myself staggering at the sheer weight out of it. Just out of
curiosity, I asked my dad what he had stuffed into it.

Casually came back the reply, "About 3 kgs/ of all that packing material
your mom packs those dolls in". Great! And to top it all of, the covers for
these were made out of guess. Guess, Guess, Guess.

CANVAS.

Yes! lying there was an old time canvas raincoat of mine.

So there were these pillows, canvas, stuffed, looking like a trio of
recalcitrant ducks, which were ready for the butcher shop, and the whole
house looking simply like some Texas Chainsaw Massacre scene, when Mom
walked in.

There she stood looking like some ancient queen viewing the remains of her
capital city sacked by barbarian hordes. In her very polite way she looked
at my father and said:

Mom: what did you do?

Dad: absolutely nothing. why don't you sit down here and have some tea?

Mom: Sit? on what?

Dad:Here on the sofa.

He regretted having said that. Mom took a look at our sofa and jumped to
the wrong conclusions.

Mom: Don't tell me you ripped the stuffing out of the sofa.

Dad: Nothing of that sort whatsoever. But I do have a surprise for you.

Mom: What! one more. Don't you think this is quite enough.

Dad: oh! DO wait a second. (He goes and fetches the things and was
standing there with one of the pillows in each hand, dressed only in his
undies, and looking like some kind of village wrestler/muscleman, a little
beyond his prime.)

Mom: what! dumbbells?

Dad: dumbbells. Dimwit. Here this is a whacking big pillow that I made.

Mom: Well the only thing that is correct about it is whacking big.

Dad: but see, here is a pillow

Mom: I do see the pillow. What I don't see is how I am going to rest my
head on it. You don't expect me to clamber onto it do you.

Dad: that's it. I refuse to help you people at all. You have no sense you
asses. Here I am, making perfectly good pillows and if you refuse to go and
sleep on it what can I do.

Well he was muttering about it quite a lot, and the house went into one of
those silences. Mom refused to speak to him, citing an extraordinary lack
of commonsense in him for refusing to see that you cannot sleep on a 6 foot
pillow.

Dad refused to talk to mom, citing her lack of courage in adapting to
anything new.

All would have been well, if Mom hadn't pricked dad about setting the thing
right. And boy did he set it right...


It was late in the night and mom and I were sleeping in my room
with the AC on when we heard a slight thump outside. I woke up, since my
bedroom door was closed, it meant that the thump was actually pretty loud.
Mom also woke up and heard that thump. We had slept at about 1.30 in the
night that day, since cleaning all the feathers had been, a most
distasteful job. Suddenly the thumping increased in intensity and frequency
and well this is what we could hear.

thump, thump,thump,thump,thump....

silence....

then again....

thump, thump,thump,thump,thump....

terrified, Mom and I inched towards our bedroom door. We were scared about
burglars, mauraders, and worse my grannie, who could be raiding the
medicine cabinet at any time of day or night.

All of a sudden Mom hissed into my ear, "Dad. Dad's missing. they are
beating him up."

My dad's always been a light sleeper, so the first thought that came to me
was that he had been woken up by a possible burgulary gone to investigate
and was now being battered by a bevy of burgulars.

I told my mom: "grab the flashlight. I will throw open the door, and charge
them and you shine the light. It will blind them. At the same time start
shouting police. police or robbers very loudly."

So, proud of my master plan, I flung open the door, mom stepped out and
snapped on the flashlight, and what do we see.

There was my dad, beating, pumelling and dancing on the three pillows, in
order to thin them. Plus due to the extreme heat of Chennai, and the active
amount of work he was doing, clad as usual in his undies. We caught him one
leg raised about to administer a great kick to the pillow and caught in my
memory like Siva with one leg raised.

And mom in all her nervousness, couldn't figure out if those three life
sized lumps on the floor were pillows or robbers, yelled out for all the
world to hear "Police, Police, Robbers, Murder, Fire". Certainlly an
eclectic mix.

Our neighbours immediately turned on their lights and came rushing to the
balcony to be faced with the sight of my dad, all sweaty with a large stick
in his hand, three pillows on the ground, fluttering feathers here and
there. Mom bearing a beacon of light, and doing her best imitation of a
light house, and me mouth agape, staring with a look of disbelief at the
scene.

I have had many embarassing moments in my life, but that was certainlly the
best.