Things haven’t been easy lately. For reasons unknown, my patience is wearing thin. The patriarchal practices that I let pass usually have me irritated now. REM dreams have made a comeback. For all the ‘why are we interested in the private lives of actors? No, I shall not watch Koffee with Karan ew’ My dreams are held underwater and are frequented by Boman Irani and Kumar Sanu. While mildly amusing, they are frustrating.

This is probably just an indication that my mental health medicines need to be relooked at or that periods are coming. While I wait on my doctor to fix things, I think of the following quarantine practices before going to sleep in the hope to influence my dreams with better worlds:

  • Every night when Goldie is ready to sleep, he goes to my parents’ room and barks at the door. Papa opens the door for him and talks to him while he slowly enters the room with his teddy. “Aao, sir. How are we doing today?” “You are a little late! Did you have dinner?” I see this in the mirror in my room that is opposite their door. No love is purer than the love fathers have for puppies they said they didn’t want.
  • Papa is a mumma’s boy. So is my uncle. R and I laugh at the sight of these patriarchs running to their mother in slight confusion. Last week, they stood on the balcony discussing the health of aloe vera in our compound.
  • Babyr’s friend called. Apparently, she saw her elder brother call his friends and decided to call all the 3-year-olds she knew.
    “Hi r, how are you? I miss you.”
    “I am okay only. You should come to see me if you miss me”
    “I would have, lekin hamare yaha Corona hai na (but we’ve got corona at our house) so mumma won’t let me go anywhere”
  • Dadi is an entertainer. Dadi and babyr interact like equals. Baby r may be seen scolding dadi more often than dadi is seen scolding the baby. I don’t have it in my heart to stop that. When people grow up or become patriarchs there are such few people who can scold or tease them.
    Every time babyr scolds dadi, dadi fake cries, very dramatically, very realistically, and hilariously. She screws up her face, makes sobbing sounds, and then starts wiping fake tears and nose boogers with the end of her saree. To this babyr parrots that crying will not help her get her way. One night, to keep baby r from washing the breakable utensils, dadi very theatrically put a virtual insect in the washbasin. holding it with tongs, making uui uui uui noises all the while, dropping it like it must have tried to wriggle out. Babyr, too smart for such tricks still did not wish to go to the basin now.
  • I am sick of home food. Papa is a compulsive healthy eater and I am a “you think I am a goat?” about eating methi and palak more than once a week. So when I found out that my aunt had been cooking fancy street food at her house, I started making adoption papers for myself. I may have sounded like a beggar too. So now dadi is enviously cooking a fancy breakfast for me every morning.
  • My energy to spending energy equilibrium has gone askew. So often I can be found troubling Goldie/R. Till now I have fed Goldie a lemon, and grapes while mummy scolds me, hidden his ball, and run behind him with a horn. His go-to reaction after losing his cool is to complain to papa, who in turn scolds me. I was never papa’s favorite child, but now I see I have lost to a child he said he didn’t want!

In all of these, I need you to imagine me laughing with tears rolling down my eyes like a lunatic.

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