Morning Masala

My dad has a penchant for repairs.

By penchant I mean that he likes solving problems.

His success in such endeavours is a different matter altogether. Life to
him is a succession of feature starved gadgets and interesting puzzles that
he must piece together or take apart in order to understand, and make
better the quality of his life.

I would like to emphasize the 'his' here. Rarely has his tinkering improved
the quality of life of anyone else concerned. The rare exception was when
he used to drop any implement on his foot thereby enriching my vocabulory
with the choiciest of Tamil phrases and thereby improving the quality of my
life.

There was a British poet who wrote a book called 'Daedaleus Removed'. Well
Daedaleus was the Greek inventor who was immortalized by his son Icarus who
was immortalized for flying too close to the sun. My mom having read the
entire story decided to make it into a tale of morals and cut out the time
i played in the afternoon. Well my dad couldn't be compared to Daedaleus
but more to a reticent and pugnacious Calvin, ready to go to battle with
any household implement that catches his eye.

If there is one lasting image of my dad, that i would pass onto my
grandchildren it is of him, stripped to his undies, and busily wrestling
with the water pipe and trying to replace a washer. He looked a splendid
workman, and had manfully succeeded in extracting the washer when Mom
opened the valve, and flooded him.
He walked out of the bathroom, dripping water, looking like Neptune, and as
angry as him.

Which reminds me. For a sufficient part of the day, our house is under
water. Living in Chennai, plumbing is strictly uneccesary. Since water
never comes in any tap except one, and that too for a matter of an hour,
most of the taps and the showers are showpieces. Do not attempt to wrench
those taps they may fall of and hit you on the head.

Early in the morning, when all is calm and life looks peaceful, and the sun
is just shining over the tree tops, and the little birds have gone to catch
their little breakfast, and all is well with the world, my family is busy
jumping up and around, scurrying around with a rubber hose and trying to
fill every single bucket, tumbler with water.

We leave the tap open when we go to sleep, so that at the sound of running
water we may jump to action posts and catch the water. Many an elderly
relative, has been frowned upon, when due to the exigencies of his age, he
was forced to errrrr.... pass in the morning and we would all rush up with
our hoses, and my dad would bellow in his rather large voice. "False Alarm!
False Alarm! It is only the bloddy so and so using the bloddy toilet. And
Ramesh you #@#$#!@!@ how many times do I have to tell you not to leave the
mike in the toilet!".

And so the day begins here, with Mom rushing about with a hose pipe and Dad
rushing about with buckets and accidentally tripping each other up. Must
say that these early morning sessions have contributed a lot to my
vocabulory.

One of the primary differences between my mom and my dad is the fact that
dad is flustered by the details while mom enjoys them. Mom in fact is
meticulous and has the nasty habit of being a cleanliness freak. My dad's
idea of clean is rather skewed even by my standards (remind me to tell you
about the cake and the two dhotis one day).

Well, one day i remember that we had this special water crunch.

How special?

well one of my neighbours, ( a college kid and his chum who live right
above our flat), rushed out of the house with a Bisleri can while his
friend was crying out loud for all the world to hear "Bring the water! I
can't hold it in any longer!".

Sufficient to say, that Mom was harried. She was rushing about. Plus this
was one of the special days when Mom wouldn't allow any of us to touch her.
Whenever she gets frentically religious like this she would wander about
and not touch any of us. (Dad and I solve this problem by hugging her and
planting big wet kisses on her cheek.) So things were rather tense as
orders were shot off left and right to make us fill the water and all of a
sudden that fountain of happiness ( that single tap) choked and stopped
short.

Pandemonium.

Mom was running about like a chicken, and dad was well being dad, cursing
Vajpayee, to the watchman and being of no use whatsoever.

All of a sudden he had the brainwave that well, the only thing to do was to
replace that tap.

Well there he did his famous comic changeover to superman, and pulled out
the tap, with a mighty heave of his wrench. Good! All was fine and dandy. I
had closed the valve and so, no water issued through. Dad now set to right
the tap. He pulled out it's innards, changed the grip, the valve, the
washer, the gooblecol, till what we had was a fresh new tap. In doing this
he was liberally spewing about dirt. I mean good solid dirt. And grease.
And oil. All over the place. All over mom's nice kitchen which she would
only cook in if it resembled PC chip making facilities. Mom was looking
more and more miserable, and the time was like 8.30 and today she had to go
to office and well, things weren't very pleasant...

All of a sudden he is like done. He flourishes the tap about, and is like,
well my boy. here is the way to do it. There you have it, a perfectly new
tap, all ready to get you more and more water.

He then fixed the tap back and made mother cry by putting his monkey wrench
bang right into the container which housed the rice, and tipping over the
sambar onto the floor.

Then he turned triumphantly to Mom and said the exact following words. "see
padma. all finished. the devil's in the details you know. now go along and
check how the water flows into the tub". My mom muttering black thoughts to
herself, left to go check whether the water was flowing into the tubs, when
all of a sudden dad and I were surprised by a startled squeak from Mom,
followed by a rather large thud, and the slosh of water.

Dad was joviallity himself.

"Go and check wether she has fallen into the tub", he said with a rather
fetching grin on his face.

I hadn't moved very far to the bathroom, just opened my bedroom door, when
I saw that the entire floor of my bedroom was about ankle deep in 3 inches
of water, mom had skidded and was wallowing about at the bottom of it all,
her neat silk saree all wet, hair bedraggled, and any number of lizards,
trying to vainly swim their way to safety, and regarding mom as the general
Noah's ark.

In all the enthusiasm of doing stuff, my dad had managed to sever the
rubber tube we used to fill water, with the result that all the water that
was supposed to be in the tub had neatly spurted away unbeknowst and had
innundated my room. In fact, the tap was not to blame it was working
perfectly well. We had absolutely no chance of sweeping away all that
water, in the next 10 minutes flat, and Mom was looking like Medusa herself
and balefully glaring away at Dad.

A man of extraordinary spirit, my dad offered to clean the room and "dove"
in, scrubbing away the floor under the watchful eye of my mother.

Daedaleus may have been saved while his son drowned in the Aegean Sea, but
not my dad! He would rather follow me.