an itinerant observer

“Noori! You cannot keep watching YouTube videos on my cell phone”. I must have screamed a hundred times that day. “Okay Baba , can I look at pictures on your facebook?” I came really close to losing it again, but exactly at that moment I had a facebook status-like epiphany. “Noori, is facebook a good thing or a bad thing?” I asked of my 5-year-old kindergartner. The conversation that it generated led to interesting realizations. “FB is good Baba , because you can see photos on it”, said Noori. I was not oblivious to the emphasis that my kindergartner was placing on the acronym. Rayaan, my 10-year-old son happened to be present then. One might have very easily overlooked him, as is the norm [he prefers being in the background]. This time around, although it appeared that he was deep into his book, he was listening in. “FB is bad because people spend too much time on it”, was the comment from the ‘wise old man’. “No Bhai , it’s fun because you can find out what’s happening in peop...

Ms. Primrose, the possum, had kept us guessing as to her real identity. Noori had thought that she was some mysterious person in her backyard that was digging up the grass in a frenzy, looking for buried treasure. At night time, the movement in the backyard would activate the motion-detector lights. These inexplicable happenings in her own backyard were driving the excitable kindergartener’s imagination wild. One day, while pottering around in her backyard, Noori thought she had finally figured out who this really was. She came up to me excitedly and pointed to the fence and screamed: “ Biloongra !” (Biloongra is a kitten in the Urdu / Punjabi language). I was amazed to see the creature that resembled quite an unusual Biloongra - certainly could have been a mutant one. Unlike a regular cat or kitten this one happened to have a snout and a long hairless tail. While it scaled the fence it occurred to me that this was not a Biloongra at all. It happened to be a possum. And...

Noori woke me up first thing in the morning and wished me a happy anniversary. “What’s that Noori?” was all I could mumble. After realization sunk in I knew I was in for the doghouse—again. It was poetic justice that just a few weeks ago I had written how I was given to forgetting Love Demonstration Situations (LDSs): birthdays, anniversaries, and the like. That post in itself could have been a potent reminder, but here I was forgetting my own anniversary AGAIN! The horror of doing so last year crossed my mind: let alone remember, I had happily driven away with Noori’s Aman Chachoo to San Marcos, almost 200 miles away, on a jaunt, presumably to buy furniture for his townhouse. I had returned close to midnight; kids were fast asleep, and Ayesha was past reason—rightly so. Redemption was not in reasoning with her that I was merely helping a good friend move around bulky furniture. Nor was it in the Coach handbag that I got for her as peace initiative. As all the above rattled aro...