I am afraid this post is not much of a suggestion. It is a list of essentials that I hold on very dearly to. My mobile, TV remote and everything Batman, now are my inanimate earthly possessions that I cling on to and protect fiercely. From who, you ask? I protect them from my bonsai-man, my son.
He, now, is a man trapped in a toddler’s body. He reaches everything between one and a half feet to two. That would, technically, need me to have everything hitched up two feet into air – my sofa, TV cabinet, book shelves, kitchen cabinets, photo albums, canvases, bamboos, candles, shoes. God forbid, if you forget anything that is left on the floor, my hoover-boy will find it and will pop it into his mouth to test. Everything now, runs by the test of drool!
He wants everything that is either mine or my wife’s (including us two). He will forsake his food for that spicy something on our plates. Who wants oats when you can have noodles! And that applies to all that he plays with. So, who wants fake mobiles when you can play with the real thing! He owns my wife’s BlackBerry. In fact, it looks less than a BlackBerry and more like a fake. It has been put to every test possible (maybe BB should hire my son for their latest, but alas, they are bought over now). I cannot hear her clearly when she uses that tool that was once meant to be a phone. He has speed-dialled the local grocery store, desi restaurant and relatives in the UK. And so, after his conquest of his mother’s phone, he has set his sight on his father’s mobile and since then, I have been working overtime as a magician to make it disappear. My mobile, lives on, till date.
He loves remotes. In fact, I bought him a remote; and a real thing it was! But it met a sad end, thrown away in cruel negligence in a few days. It was because when he pressed the buttons, nothing happened on the TV. His next attack was on the remote that his papa wielded. Till date I have successfully managed to keep his goldfish attention span fed on other things whenever he cranked up his cries for the remote.
And the third and very important thing is all my Batman stuff. Right from Batman earplugs to Batman figurines and mugs, cubby-cat wants to have a go at. And like it happens in Hollywood flicks, I have travelled ahead in a time-warp to see my Batman dolls ears gnawed and chewed, his cape torn from his body suit and the incriminating teeth marks across his Kevlar armour. So now, everything Bruce and Bat is kept 2 feet upwards.
I have done my share of sacrifices – play his music when I want to listen to mine, allowed him to lounge on me just after I’ve had dinner, drooled like Niagara falls on the left shoulder, discoloured most of my t-shirts and shirts with his drool, discover flattened cereal on my jeans butt, my wedding ring dropped inside the master-bed cabinet, wristbands shoved under washing machines, laptop keys mauled and violated, and many more. But I cannot bear to part with my mobile, remote and Batman.
I continue, relentlessly. Much like the Dark Knight himself.
Fatherhood 