Another Mr. Perfectionist (Father) - Story 6

The father-son duo currently residing was an exact copy of each other. Too pedantic. Too perfect.

It was an awesome Saturday morning – well until then. The Puja Vacations had just befallen and there was very little work for me to do. My father suddenly came up to me, looking as if he had just been fired for no reason and whispered to me in a sinister undertone, “Clean up the room, boy.” I looked up at him lazily. Then, his actual borrowed from a lion, roar-like voice spoke to me, “No storybooks must be kept in the study room. Stationeries must be kept separate from the books. All your gadgets must be kept out of the room.” And on and on and on……………………………….

Finally, when he finished reading or rather reciting his rules – I was practically dead. Well, not practically but literally. So, to re-peace myself, I went up to the refrigerator and poured myself a nice glass of Getorade. When I again felt like myself, I asked him boldly, “Can you repeat?”

He did repeat, only this time with some proverbs – which were maybe to gain my concentration but nonetheless I didn’t understand.  So, I started cleaning up my books. Arranging them and stuff. And that’s when – bang! There was I arranging the books with a Oxford Mini Dictionary at the bottom of the pile and a class 8 Maths book at the top. Obviously, there were hazardous results, well not that hazardous – I had to suffer a bookslide . Finally, after arranging all the books, I went to breakfast thinking – how much longer I have to work like a POW (prisoner of war) for this great duo.

Mr. Perfectionist (Grandfather) - Story 5

It was one of those rare occasions when my grandfather came to visit us. He was a kind of ultra-happy guy who had nothing to do on any day, except maybe going for a doctor’s checkup. He used to smoke regularly but after his sudden brain hemorrhage, he reduced it to 1 cigarette. And more or less, he used to have paan everyday. But as the world goes – everybody has their own uniqueness. He was too pedantic, as you call it. And often this character of him befell on me as a great calamity. Like one day, I wrote my Bengali essay in the best of moods so it was actually ‘kinda’ awesome. But my grandfather’s eyes didn’t search for all that. His eyes went up to the level of the misspelling and his face became a scowl.  His eyes seemed to be telling, “Hey! What the heck are you doing? Can’t you be just perfect? You are too imprudent.” I couldn’t stay there anymore. I just took my chance and blazed out of the room. There were so many of these events. But that’s nothing bad. He’s a nice grandfather and used to love me dearly.

I asked him, “Grandfather. Why are you so pedantic?”

“What does pedantic mean?” he questioned back.

But before I could answer, he had already gone up to the bookshelf and chosen a somewhat large dictionary to search for the word. Finally, he found it and continued the conversation.

“Well, yes I am, my dear boy. You see I always liked to be perfect. Call me, Mr. Perfectionist if you want. That’s how I could journey through and reach this stage of life. Extreme discipline and perfection, that’s what I believed in. Now, let’s go and have dinner. We’re getting late. Enough talk for today.”

I gave a lot of thought to what my grandfather said – and finally deduced that he was somewhat right.

The Varun - Story 4

It was a nice, average morning school period.  When suddenly, the kinda ‘geek’ of our class, Aadipta went in fits of laughter. Obviously, some of the guys needed to comment. So, they did.

Most of the faces in the class spelt the same question, “What happened?” Aadipta spoke with a weird broken voice, mixed with smirks, grins, smiles and whatnot, “Varun.  Just see Varun. His pants are torn. And even his shirt. Such a big hole. Whoa! Seems like leopard spots.”

By the time, I concluded that the ‘leopard spots’ joke was lame, the whole class was laughing including the teacher.

Finally, the teacher intervened and restored silence in the class with ultra-loud bangs of the duster on somebody’s desk (it was Pritam’s desk and as per his character he still kept laughing). So, this gala period is to be remembered by me, atleast for some days – after all this rocks.