Laughing Buddha, My Dad!

As a child I used to visit my (paternal) aunts place a lot. The motives of these visits were solely to gang up with my cousin and do as many pranks as possible in a single day. In those days it was trends in every household to own a showcase in the living room were all sorts of things were displayed to the entire guest who visits. But the only interest that attracted me towards it were the doll that can shut it eyes when in a sleeping position, the miniature whiskey bottles which your gulf return relatives bring for you (well what can I say I started early :D), the cheap plastic flower in the vase, the hot wheel cars, Barbie dolls, soft toys and during Christmas the nativity idols. Seriously I found this showcase idea totally silly then and even today. The idea of keeping the Barbie doll safely locked behind the glass case never appealed to me. In my house luckily we dint own a showcase but nevertheless we were never spared. All expensive toys were arrested and locked behind steel Godrej cupboards after a few days (say one maximum two) play.

Now back to the showcase in my aunt’s house now. Apparently that was the same house where my dad had lived a good part of his bachelorhood. Hence very often while cleaning some old trunk or a dusty cardboard box, my aunt would show me some of dad’s old retro clothes or some stained black and white photograph of a handsome man with a punk sort of hairstyle and never even slightly looked like my dad. It was difficult to digest that my dad has so much of hair (yeah he was slightly losing some hair) and was so style conscious (his style mantra was simple and practically comfortable). The only thing that closely resembled my dad was the laughing Buddha in the showcase. And to add to it my aunt used to go along with the joke by agreeing that he is in fact my dad actually. I continued to believe so until I was about 11 or 12 yrs old.