Pens and Pages

Published in the February 2013 issue of  Good Times of the North-East As if raising a four-year-old kid alone was not enough, little Nikki had begun asking questions to her dad for which he had no answers. “Daddy, everyone in school has two parents, why do I have only one?” As a response, Ravi would pass the bowl of cereals, on the wooden dining table that doubles as a table for ironing the clothes of his customers, to his daughter and snap. “Eat your breakfast”. The laundryman would be furious at his daughter for being so questioning, and partly because he could not answer it, or rather because he had been asking the same questions to himself for three years. After he would drop her off at school, Ravi would realize that none of this was the little girl’s fault and his anger would change into compunction and sometimes, self-pity.  While his daughter would be in the school, pestered by the fact that her father forgot to pack her lunch box again, Rav...

Having spent almost 90 percent of my allowance in food (and the rest 10percent in travelling to and fro the food courts) and having being quite “famous” (or rather infamous) among my chums for my “appetite” I finally decide to share an important-to-me and may-be-funny-to-you lesson I have learnt in my years spent in harmony with my appetite. No matter how many mood swings I have had in my life, my “food-life” has never been boring. I have been to almost all the restaurants of Guwahati. I have even been to all the food courts near my area during my one-month stay at Delhi. At home, I open the door of the refrigerator every hour hoping for a miracle to occur and more food to appear, even after emptying the fridge of it. At times, I have had the amount of food that two adults can together have (and sometimes three). Well, that explains why I am so “healthy” (read: rotund). Gone are those days, when I used to tell my friends that calling someone “healthy” is a polite way of tell...