Aunt H's bath salts did not suit Edvard's delicate constitution.
A few days ago, while watching the news on TV with my Dad and nephew:
Nephew: "Please. Can we watch Cartoon Network? Pleeeaase?" Me: "Sorry buddy. You know what Grandpa's like if he doesn't get his hourly news fix. Look, an explosion!"
Nephew: "Whoa! What is that?" Me: "Oh, some terrorist somewhere basically strapped a bomb to his chest and then let it go off in the middle of the day in a shopping mall."
Nephew: "O.K. What was that?" Me: "Pretty cool huh? It's called an earthquake. The earth just kind of starts shaking, like that building in Italy, see? The shakes get so bad, buildings start tumbling down."
Me: "Oh come on, Dad! Why do you always turn it off when the sports bit comes on?" Dad: "I don't want your nephew to grow up thinking winning is everything. Sports is too competitive." Nephew: "Yeah, I want to play a video game." Dad: "No more video games for you. Too much violence."
Dad and I step out on the veranda to look at the moon, grunt at each other and say things like "looks like rain, oh she's 'bout to come down hard" though we know nothing about such matters. It helps us feel manly. That's when we hear the strains of the most terrifying music known to man.
We run back inside, but it's too late. The lights have been turned off, but the TV is on as we know only too well. The opening credits roll to a halt, and the screen is ablaze in the fiery reality of Junior MasterChef.
Looming out of the wasteland between couch and TV is the silhouette of what was once my little nephew, wielding remote control in hand. I stifle a 120 million dollar scream.
"Get the power drill," says Dad, "we have to finish him before he turns, or he'll infect the others."
Icy Highs's Music Recco: "The Dope Show" from Mechanical Animals (1998), by Marilyn Manson
There comes a time in everybody's life when you finally just shrug, shake your head and mutter, "I'm too old for this shit." As made famous by Danny Glover as Roger Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon. And later, paid homage to by Ted in How I Met Your Mother. The idea being, once hit by this profound realization, you drop whatever time travelling device you're holding, and immediately start acting your age. That's right; step away from the Ed Hardy tee shirt rack, old man. There's no excuse for Ed Hardy tee shirts, not even on young people.
Unfortunately, my Dad didn't get the brief. What makes it more painful is that he's one of those people who were never that young to begin with. I don't mean he was boring; just that his interests were always more serious than other kids' Dads'. So while my friends dozed off in school after staying up all night watching the World Cup play offs with their Dads, I'd scribble furiously into my journal my impressions of Tolstoy and Dickens because they were the nominated topics of dinner conversation that week.
Since I moved back in, my Dad has asked thrice that I accompany him to the barber shop. I obliged once. Throughout his haircut, he made the barber stop repeatedly in the middle of his craft to ask me if he should maybe keep a portion long, or part it in a different way, or adopt a quiff. He once wondered aloud if the barber could do anything about the grey hairs on his body.
My Dad also decided that I would be his conduit to the E-niverse. In the last couple of months, I have introduced him to the computer, created his email account and set up a webcam so he can Skype with my sister's kids. He is still unable to fully grasp the concept of googling stuff -he thinks all things have allotted residences of their own on the web, and keeps asking me for the "address" for this and that. I think he's worried that it's somehow impolite to access a website through a search engine, and not directly by typing in the web address. I can't convince him that it's not the same as Uncle Chaz dropping in unannounced.
On the whole though, he has made steady progress. The other day, he asked me if he should change his shirt in preparation for a bout of Skyping with Legs Gracy, an old friend of my parents'. Legs had a bit of a reputation in their college for wearing short skirts. I figured any reason was good enough to rid him off the shirt he was wearing- it was fluorescent green and tight, and clung to his paunch like a drowning man to floatsam. He promptly strutted back in wearing a Che Guevera teeshirt and a beret. Mom spilled her coffee on my knee, but the court is yet to prove intentional harm.
Happy as I am to help Dad through whatever issues are leading him to buy CDs of One Direction -I haven't gotten round to teaching him about file sharing yet- I determined to save him and my niblings any embarrassment by warning them about his propensity to midlife. It was a phase, and it would probably be over soon, but it would do no harm for the niblings to be prepared. I survived the first one on my own; I would guide them through the second coming. I was Uncle Cool, and I would have The Chat with them. Their parents could thank me later.
"So what I'm basically saying," I say, "is that Grandpa might do things that embarrass you and make the other kids give you hurtful nicknames that scar you for life, but it's only because he's old and mental."
They look nonplussed. The poor things haven't grasped the seriousness of the situation. They don't know about "your Dad smells like old socks." They were born after the Sideburns, and the Vespa; long after the disappointment of the Seventies passing him by in his youth had been atoned for during mine in the Nineties.
"Guys, this is serious," I tell them, "he will reference movies that you should never admit you like. He will frame participation certificates from cricket camp in the living room. He will crush your spirit, and bulldoze your self-respect, but don't let him see you cry. Ok? Cry only when you're alone, not in front of him. Don't let him win."
My nephew looks up from his iPad. I'm finally getting through. "Rita says you embarrass her all the time," he says, pointing at his sister. I laugh. I'll let Rita take this one; tell the little fella he's mistaken. "It's not all the time," says a flushed little Rita.
My world comes tumbling down; folding in on itself. Their words echo off my eardrums as though from a great distance.
"Yesterday," says a voice that sounds a lot like my Rita's, "you liked your own status update on Facebook."
"Shelley's mother," says the voice, "told my teacher you send her strange texts at night."
"You lifted me up by the ankles in the car park and all the boys saw my underpants," says the voice. Oh God, there's more. She's only getting warmed up.
"You keep retweeting your own tweets," she says.
"And you're always cheating at Uno," adds a lower tenor. Et tu, nephew?
Later that evening at the barbershop, Dad and I are seated in adjacent chairs, hair being tended to while we watch the news.
"So what made you come with me to the hairdresser's?" my Dad wants to know.
""You promised to call it "barbershop"," I remonstrate, "and I needed a haircut."
"Right. Did you know," says Dad, "they have this thing where they put your feet in a tank full of fish that are trained to give you a footjob?"
"Don't gay this up," I tell him, "and it's called a pedicure."
"Sorry," he says, "can you hand me the remote? Sick of the news."
"Doesn't bother me," I say, "Can't see a damn thing with these cucumber slices over my eyes."
More than an all-knowing God, or medicine, or Metallica or marriage, I believe in sport. Sport is salvation, and sport will break your heart. Sport will polarize, and come together. In fact, religious devotion to a sports team throughout one's life will put you through the paces -and then some- of a classical romance, or star-crossed love: agony, ecstasy, faith, loss of faith, joy, despair, terrible tattoos, denial, depression, annoying nicknames, addiction, betrayal, those ridiculous couple tee shirts, abuse, violence, self-destruction, euphoria and -in these times- a few hundred gigabytes of memories captured on the digital retinae of assorted electronic devices.
While sport fandom, like any parallel universe, is populated with villains and heroes and average Joes alike, India is, on the whole, a nation of mild-mannered sport obsessives. "Mild-mannered", save for the rare occasions of setting cricket grounds on fire or hurling stones at the home of the captain of the national team, but these instances are few and far between. Unlike my experiences on the football terraces of England and Scotland, watching the game from the stands at cricket grounds in India will invoke neither fear for life or lust for blood. Indian sports fans are masters of compartmentalization; the joys and sorrows of sport are rarely allowed inside the uncompromising walls of real life.
Or so I thought till a few days ago. The family home was still a place of hope and order and warmth as I hurried back from the beach in the dying daylight last Sabbath. I swerved, sped, braked, honked, out-maneuvered, cursed. I was in no mood to let something as pedestrian as traffic laws slow down my march towards our living room to watch two-time winner and serial finalist Chennai Super Kings bash it out against the young pretender Kolkatta Knight Riders in the final of the Indian Premier Leage 2012. The whole family was rooting for the underdog, KKR, and we had even come up with some chants and celebrations for the event.
Dad is waiting outside. One look at his ashen face, and I know there's a giant meteor headed our way, or maybe our worlds have already collided and he's waiting outside to ease me in.
"What's wrong, Dad?" I ask.
"It's Grammy," he can barely say the words. Of course. Well, she's nearly ninety. She's had a good run, the old bird.
"What happened?" I decide the questions still need to be asked.
"Must have been all the hype in the media. She's fallen off the wagon."
Of course. A tumble off a speeding wagon would certainly kill a lady her age. Horses do what, 60 an hour? Definitely enough to...wait. Where the fuck would she find a horse in this town? Grammy may be old, but this is 2012.
"Dad," I soothe, "you're still in shock. There's no wagon."
"No," he's in tears now, "it's like old times. She's fallen off the wagon. She's inside raising hell right now."
It hits me like a ton of bricks. I'd heard about it before - Grammy's infamous past as a cricket hooligan. The last cricket match she watched was in 1983: the final of the ICC Cricket World Cup which India won against West Indies by a whopping 43 runs. That was over a year before I was born. Legend has it that world cup resulted in the destruction of nearly three dozen chicken coops, eight uncommissioned murals on the church spire of dancing phalluses that refuse to come off to this day, and six ritualistic beheadings of oxen- one for each Indian victory in the cup- in Grammy's village. An immigrant farmhand, and the postman, who both reported sightings of a woman stumbling around in the dark holding an axe in one hand and (what looked like) an ox's head in the other on different nights, died in their sleep within hours of the final, their faces scrunched up in vicious mimes of delirium. Grammy disappeared the same night. A week and four moons after the final, an axe was discovered clogging the municipal water tank, it's contents a bloody mix of ox nerve and muscle. Still seven nights later, Grammy re-appeared. She never watched a cricket match again. The village would have to wait another year for a new postman.
I can hear the pre-match analysis on the TV before I even step into the living room. Uncle Psy is in my seat, nursing a whisky. Cousin Chaz, his wife Flora and Aunt Florence are all spread out around the living room, suitably uncomfortable at having crashed a party only to find out it blows. Mom sits in the corner, sobbing into the Knight Riders scarf she ordered over the internet. The atmosphere is funeral, but sporty. Grammy is on the recliner, her hands cuffed on either side to the armrests. I reach over, and gently pull the sock out of her mouth.
Grammy swears like a parrot in a Judd Apatow movie. Most of her insults are quaint in an old world kind of way. Between overs, she rocks back and forth, alternating periods of calm with resounding screeches and wails. I hold her hand through the game, holding her mug for her as she sips her Ovaltine through a straw. At the end of the first inning, I wink and silently uncuff one of her hands. Grammy may have resurrected her inner badass, but I wasn't going to rob her off her dignity. She hurls her mug at the TV, but her throwing arm's not what it used to be. It clutters limply on the floor next to her feet. We laugh, relieved.
KKR overcomes a poor start to their inning to seemingly take control of the match. Then they lose another wicket. And another. In our living room too, things take a bad turn. Grammy, who has been silent for a while now, starts cussing again. As Yusuf Pathan walks in to bat, she yells: "oh great, it's the ugly sister." She has a point. I suppose Yusuf is somewhat uneasy on the eyes, especially in comparison to his brother Irfan who plays for Delhi Daredevils. He's got this mullah beard thing going, and he looks a bit like a gnome. But her words have somehow gotten under my skin. I sat through a barrage of Grammy's spitballs, I calmed my Dad down when she called him a little girl, I let it go when she poked me in the eye for holding her too tight. But this feels unpardonable somehow. Grammy has crossed a line.
The Brothers Pathan: Irfan and Yusuf
"Oh, you're one to talk about looks," I sneer, "you don't even have teeth."
When I come to, I'm on the floor. The family, with the exception of Grammy, lean over me, their faces a mixture of mirth and concern. "What the hell happened?" I ask.
"Grammy headbutted you," says Uncle Chaz, struggling to contain a chuckle.
I rub my forehead where it hurts.
"That seems to have let the wind out of her sails," says Dad, "she's been quiet as a baby since."
I sit up and smile. Grammy looks more herself now, half asleep on her recliner.
We watch the rest of the game like normal families do, cheering and cracking jokes. Dad wakes Grammy up for the last over, and we see out a tense victory for the Knight Riders. Gammy pecks me on the forehead, and retires early to bed.
Much later, after the drinks and snacks are cleared away, I decide to make sure Grammy is alright. Light seeps out from under her door. I knock softly, and enter. Grammy stands by the window, her back to me. She has been waiting. "Grammy," I say, "I'm sorry about earlier." But she has other plans. She lifts up her dress in one last hooray, and clearly visible on sagging butt cheek, is a tattoo of the face of Kapil Dev, independent India's first real hero and world cup winning captain. It's a pity Grammy didn't blind me when she had the chance.
Icy Highs's Video Recco: Poem from "So I Married An Axe Murderer" (Desert Island Top Five)
