The holidays had started and I was bored. Totally, completely bored. At some points I was so bored that looked at from an outsider’s perspective it seemed fascinating….. At such points I just slept to ward off the boredom…. Including the time when I am at my keen, alert, creative best…… midnight.
I am by habit a nocturnal creature… with my day starting at somewhere around 10 p.m. but I had to change all that. I had just finished my exams. Though exams don’t bother me much they are a little straining on the mind… so i came home with a mind full of holiday plans...
Then came the rain……. never ending, ever heavy rain. The rain was a dampener both literally and abstractly. A wide, endless stretch of nothingness…… I came home thinking I couldn’t do enough and I ended up in the worst possible situation, I couldn’t do anything.
At the risk of sounding immodest, I believe that I am usually helpful around the house. Though I do a lot of chores, being a little lazy (genetically), I do them slowly, taking my time to start… but this time things were different. I literally flew from the word go. I did everything I was told and more. There couldn’t have been enough jobs to keep me busy and happy and guess what.....there wasn’t!!
This stifling freedom was getting to me and I had to find a way to keep the boredom at bay. So I grew into this habit of spending my lazy afternoons talking with my mother. We talked and talked and I couldn’t have enough of it. We talked about anything and everything… politics, history, love, the world at large, me, my brother….
Well this particular day we were fresh from a visit to my aunt’s place. My aunt has a 4 year old kid and like all kids of today he was hyper. His antics were quiet amusing, especially to my activity deficient brain. But my aunt was getting irritated… but fortunately she was an old hand at this game and chose to ignore him. She went on to tell us a joke, saying that when her friend’s kid behaved oddly in public, the friend would exclaim loudly,” Sumathi (my aunt), why is your kid behaving so oddly? ” But by this time I was only maintaining a polite façade of listening, while actually deep in thought…….
My thought process was as to how I behaved when I was a child. Except for some standout incidents (which usually involved getting slapped, or being in an exceptionally uncomfortable situation) I don’t exactly remember my childhood. So that day, during our interaction hour I began enthusiastically bombarding my mom with questions… But my mom wasn’t in a really talkative mood and just gave me a lazy smile. So I started asking her specific questions… When I asked her whether I did odd things like the kids of today, she gave me a tolerant smile that said I had. To my question on how she had tolerated my fibs towards escapism she gave me an angry smile that said,” try it now!!” To questions on my innocence and sweetness, she gave me a sad smile that said I ‘had been’ both sweet and innocent. And finally to my question on whether I was better behaved than my brother she gave me a radiant smile that lied that I was. She probably would have given my brother the same smile…..
Looking back one might think “boy, he must have been real bored to find these things interesting.” But on second thought I feel that even if I were very busy and couldn’t stop to look up…. I wouldn’t have missed these moments for the world. These talks with my mother were very interesting and shaped my character, leading me to think on how I could be a better son to a most wonderful mother.
