The light of sheer beauty appears before you
Before your eyes adjust, it vanishes…

No science can capture it glow
For it was not meant to be harnessed

This beauty’s light is not a candle flame
That you could trap in a lantern to dispel your soul’s shadows

This beauty’s light is a firefly
That owes its glow to a larger landscape than yours…

Ah, but who will teach man to accept
The limitations of his fate…

Will he not always strive to capture
Beauty as though it existed for him alone?

Ashish Debolkar is not his real name, and this overweight disgrace to my neighborhood could thank me for my discretion in keeping him anonymous.

The man takes his morning walk an hour later than I do. This means that he’s just starting off on his perambulations when I’m on my way back. He’s a regular, just like I am, but I never paid him much attention over the years. You know how it is – we see people, yet their existence registers as more of an abstract concept than an actual fact.

I’ve never so much as exchanged cricket scores with him, and the only thought I ever spared him was an idle wondering…. how can a man walk like that for years and never lose an ounce of that gross flab? And why, if these nominal saunters have proved so utterly futile, has the oozy blighter not done something more constructive about his improbable girth? I mean, he has surely got a clear title deed for a 3BHK flat in Heart Attack Country and he’s bound to take up residence there anytime. Doesn’t that BOTHER him?

Anyway, three days ago the fact that he does figure on the landscape was driven jarringly home to me. The realization came in the form of a loud, agonized canine yelp. Jerked from my pleasant dawn reverie, I cast about for the source of the sound. A weathered doggie was making tracks for the opposite side of the road as fast as three legs would allow it. Three, because the other one was drawn up against its belly in a tortured spasm of muscle and bone.

Ashish Debolkar threw me a brief grin of vicious triumph as he took after the injured animal, brandishing the heavy stick he has picked up to launch the morning’s festivities.

“Saala kidela _____ (worm-raddled %#@>),” he cursed, enjoying every second of it. “Come sniffing at me once more and I’ll……”

He emphasized this sentiment by chasing the dog and giving it another lash of the stick, which caught the hobbled beast squarely on the back. The dog was out of its mind with pain now and was squalling like a bagful of BEST bus brakes during the peak hour crunch.

I was stunned into complete, impotent inaction. Debolkar delivered three more blows to the animal before a window flew open above us and an irate woman leaned out.

“Oye, stop this immediately. My husband can’t sleep!” she screeched in hellish accompaniment to the dog’s vocal efforts. The dog in question used the lull to crawl beneath a paan shop and cower there for dear life.

Debolkar flashed a spitless grin at her, favored me with a fading version of the same and discarded the stick. Then he waddled off, his mind obviously already switching gears to the stock market or some other good-time stuff. The beleaguered mutt crawled out from under the paan shop, scanned the surrounding topography and found it fortuitously bereft of fat middle-management prototypes headed for Stroke City.

Fade to black…

No, of COURSE Ashish Debolkar bears no resemblance to any of us. WE wouldn’t kick a defenseless street dog just because we feel so hugely superior to it. Nor would we tell a street urchin to scram when he or she sucks up for a spare coin just because the sight reminds of too uncomfortably of how our own kids would look if the Powers That Be had not somehow transpired to set them above such a lot. OTHER folks do such stuff. Sick folks. Folks like Ashish Debolkar.

But hey, what circumstances spawn such moral bottom-feeders in the first place? A desire to rid the city of unsanitary elements such as stray dogs? The trauma of having been bitten in the butt by just such a cur back in childhood? I don’t think so.

I close my eyes and see a different scenario – one littered with bugs that squirm and scamper for the shadows when sunlight hits them. Behind my closed eyes, I see a Ashish Debolkar who is not as secure in his precariously overloaded skin as he pretends.

The economy is see-sawing wildly, inflation has eaten into his once unassailable bank accounts and he may just have to pull his bounder son out of that fancy ‘international’ school next year. His wife, no less bloated on excesses than he is, treats him like the last dirt on earth – just like his dad did before him.

His boss has chuckled forlornly every time Ashish has hinted at that promotion. Ashish smells his essential powerlessness over the world he inhabits with every wheezy breath he pulls into his blubber-cased lungs.

He does not like this smell, and he needs to rid himself of it.

What old Ashish therefore does is treat each waking hour as another opportunity to bolster his sagging pride by taking pot-shots at the various hapless targets that the world has placed at his disposal. Therefore, the beggar on the road is cursed and waved away like a leper who has dared to cross the Holy Temple’s threshold. The street kid is treated to a look and words of utter loathing and revulsion. The maid is threatened with sudden unemployment every time she goofs up. And the street doggie gets a kick in his scrawny backside if he is presumptuous enough to make an appearance during Ashish’s fruitless morning waddles.

He does not have what it takes to tell his wife what HE thinks of HER. He doesn’t have the courage to tell his boss to shove his job up the old waste-pipe and look for a better prospects. His dad died of an apocalyptic, ghee-induced stroke years ago and is unavailable for settling scores with.

He is the overgrown schoolyard bully, even now desperately trying to salvage his self-esteem by preying on those who seem weak enough not to put up a fight.

Between jobs a few years ago, I happened to chat with a friend in another town. I mean, I didn’t KNOW I was between jobs then – I merely knew that I’d chucked my old one and was looking for alternatives.

The state of being jobless is a spiritual experience – it is like looking down from the edge of Hell’s chasm, smelling the sulphur fumes and hearing the screams of the tortured while the heat from below singes the hair in your nostrils. Extremely unpleasant, but we tend to remember such times in a moronically sanitized manner in later years. Sometimes we fondly call them ‘the turning point of my life’ or ‘the time when I experienced the spirituality of helplessness.’ We are a dumb race, to be sure, or we’d have been smart enough to extinct ourselves long ago.

The days where one job hunted by wearing out shoe leather are over, of course. What you do today is put out ten bucks, hit the nearest cyber café and wear out your fingers instead, keeping your mobile within grabbing distance the moment you see the words ‘walk-in interview’ on the monitor.

My friend is like me – he can’t stop working. I compared notes with him many years ago, and we’re fairly sure that workaholism is not in our genes. In other words, something has happened to us along the way. The result – we are the first to profess that work is not everything in life, but our lives to do not epitomize that homily. We work as though our lives depend on it, defining Hell as any day on which we don’t have enough work to occupy every spare moment.

“So how’s life?” he asked

“Life sucks,” I replied, only paying marginal attention as I scanned yet another job site. “Am jobless. Am doomed.”

“Why are you doomed?” he asked, his gentle curiosity infuriating me. It seemed to imply that I had missed the point here; that a job is NOT as important as I was making it out to be… that I was some poor ignoramus in the Kingdom of the Enlightened, and that he was here to show me the Way. That, coming from him, was nothing but a joke.

“Am doomed ‘coz am jobless,” I replied, wondering how anyone could question such logic. The jobs portal had great listings for people with 7+ years experience – I had 2.5, and that was pushing it. I was doomed for sure.

“So what’s the big deal about being jobless?” he asked.

Was he sick? Had he got Jesus or Coelho? How can one even THINK of dragging such an important aspect of life down to the level of mere philosophy? I mean, you can probably do that if you have a working wife, which passes off for being gainfully employed in India. Me, I was single and still an adherent of the obsolete school of thought that believes that a man must pull his own freight in life. I know how old fashioned that sounds, but there you are…

My fingers slithered restlessly across the keyboard. My ten bucks in the cyber café were almost used up and I STILL hadn’t found a job. www.jobsforall.com stated that there was an opening for assistant bank clerk for someone of my experience, if I wanted it. I was partly willing to consider it by then.

I was about to hit the ‘end chat’ icon when he threw a simple question my way.

“Why do we make such a big deal out of work, the likes of you and me?”

I mean, what kind of question is that? Work? Big deal? Work is GOD!! Work is all there IS!! All hail the Holy Workload!!!

“We have to keep body and soul together!” I replied. “I don’t know about you, but nobody’s hanging around with a perpetually stocked fridge in MY part of town!”

“I don’t think so,” he replied. “We’re not homeless urchins. We all know enough people who would throw two square meals our way till we die if that was the only criterion.”

“Speak for yourself,” I replied curtly. “I don’t.”

“No? What about your dad back in Hicksville? You telling me he wouldn’t feed you, expecting nothing but a willing ear for his geriatric drivel in return?”

He had a point there. There’s always someone we can suck up to if it comes to safeguarding mere physical existence. The REAL point here, however, was that I would’ve rather DIED than subject myself to such ignominy. Been there, done that, can’t never do it again.

I cannot speak for everyone, of course. Some otherwise virile men seem to be content with mooching off their wives’ earnings, but I think the global standard is that they’d rather NOT be known as doing that. In other words, mere survival is not a real reason for why we work.

“We overwork because we feel that as long as we’re working harder than anyone else, we won’t die,” I hazarded, getting sucked into the discussion despite clearly having better things to do. The job search page for www.getemployedNOW.com jittered suspiciously when I pasted in my threadbare CV. I think it was laughing at me.

“Hmm, there may be some truth there,” he replied. “But we’re all smart enough to know that we’ll die anyway, work overload or no work overload.”

I had no proof to the contrary to offer, but I still had a good answer left.

“We overwork to get away from our overbearing spouses, dictatorial parents, demanding brats or whoever else we have been fuckbrained enough not to jettison from our lives long ago,” I said.

“Does it work?” he asked. “Those chickens always come home to roost anyway, no matter how we try to avoid them.”

Damn him.

“We overwork because our egos demand it,” I shot back. “Because we need to prove to the world that we’re capable of living life on life’s terms.”

“I don’t think so. We may believe during the day that the whole world is watching and evaluating what we do with out lives, but at 2.00 in the morning, everyone of us knows that nobody’s watching at all. Everyone is too tied up in their own shit to give doodly squat about anyone else.”

I was getting pretty hassled about it all by then.

“For the money!” I replied vehemently. “FOR THE GODDAMN MONEY!!! We overwork because we LOVE MONEY!!”

There was a long pause. Then….

“Oh, yeah? Well, how is that you always end up in loser jobs working harder and making much less on it than anyone else?” he asked.

I didn’t reply. He was being unreasonable, and I don’t argue with unreasonable men. Also, he was right.

Finally, he sent me this –

“I think we kill ourselves with work to fight off that dreadful feeling of futility and shame.”

Then the monitor switched to a hideous shade of aquamarine and a ‘gimme more money’ screen came up. My hour of cyber café time was up. I walked out. I didn’t HAVE more money.

He was right. We overwork because we feel our lives are futile if we don’t. We can’t stay away from wrestling with the company’s annual report on a weekend because the company is the only entity on earth that makes us feel validated. We can’t stop working while others are relaxing because if we do we feel like the eunuch in the harem. That explains the ‘Busman’s Holiday’ that Eric Berne outlines in his book ‘The Games People Play’ – (sic) ‘using skills learned in one’s profession to help others without pay while on vacation - for example, Joining the Peace Corps (nominally paid).’

But we also overwork because we fear the Hereafter, where the complete depth of the meaninglessness of our lives will surely be exposed. Sure, the simple fear of death comes in there somewhere, but it goes deeper than that. Even the most die-hard atheist in the lot instinctively works to store up brownie points in the very Heaven that he says he doesn’t believe in. I know of the futility of worldly treasures, titles and adulation – but I’m not sure what waits on the other side of the grave and I don’t want to think about it, either.

What we workaholics do all our lives is work hard enough to feel that we deserve some indulgence in guilty pleasures, snarf up those pleasures, work hard yet again, feel worthy enough for more guilty pleasures, then work even harder. On and on it goes.

We don’t know why we do this, but what we hope without knowing that we hope is that the Someone Upstairs whose existence we don’t think about at all while we’re still alive and in control of things will sigh, throw away the damning tally sheet when we come face to face with Him and say, “Well, you were a totally louse all your life. Look at this – you are a prime candidate for damnation. Hmm, but you sure worked hard. Okay, come in…”

The other day, I met Hemant Shutterkhalikar. A chronic Mumbaikar and Saffron Brigade fanatic, he lives in Dadar and takes that fact very seriously. Dadar is to Mumbai’s Hindus what Jerusalem is to the Jews – you can strut your stuff anywhere, but this is simply the best place from where to do it. I’ve never been able to figure out why.

Anyway, you’d be hard put to find a more typical example of the illustrious Manus Marathicus genus than Hemant Shutterkhalikar… the man literally chews green and spits saffron. He hasn’t had much of an education – his father pulled him out of school after he flunked the seventh standard so that his precious male spawn would have more time to go and wave wooden poles at Shivaji Park.

No thoroughbred Brahmin male is considered worthy of the saffron flag if he hasn’t done this for an extended period of time. It has something to do with expressing one’s hypothetical willingness to do war against the ill-defined oppressive forces that would usurp the Maharashtrian Hindu from his rightful place on the top of the heap. (The top of the heap in Maharashtra, that is. Die-hard or not, this lot is realistic enough to know that they cannot trot that stuff beyond those sugar-caned borders.)

Hemant Shutterkhalikar spends most of his time hanging around the local barber’s shop, where he and his compatriots talk of their day’s ethnic purging exploits and slap each other on the backs. There is no shortage of non-Maharashtrian self-esteem to shatter in Dadar, so Hemant & Co. always have plenty of cannon fodder.

You’d think that Mumbai’s Gujaratis and North Indians would have savvied up by now and shifted their act to more convivial locations, but no – humans have this tendency to make their homes in the war zone. Maybe they feel that living so close to the source of infection stimulates their immune system into higher protection levels. The Jews didn’t shift out of Germany even when they could practically smell the Nazi concentration camp fire, either.

In the evenings, Hemant engages in the traditional neighborhood extortion game called ‘pygmy collection’ and repairs with the proceeds to the local hooch dive. There he and his pals drink deep of Government-approved rotgut and watch the sun go down over the slums of ‘Amchi’ Mumbai. He was there that evening when he saw me attempt to evade him and his sozzled cronies by crossing the road. He shot up drunkenly and hailed me.

“Oye! Where you going, yaar? Come here, come here. I am wanting to share with you somet’ing.”

There was no way out. Telling an inebriated saffronite that you have better things to do than listen to his self-aggrandizing frog-in-the-pond rantings is not on. You may not actually wind up battered and smeared with dogshit in the nearest gutter, but you can bet your last modak that your bike tires will be just about as flat and perforated as a rava dosa the next morning.

I walked over and sat down beside him on the barber’s hospitality bench. From the smell of it, Hemant already had at least a quarter of arrack under his belt.

“I saw de movie your told me to watch. ‘Borat’,” he said. “About dat Afghani asshole who goes to America?”

He was talking about the outrageously spoofy film ‘Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.’ In this film, the fictitious character Borat Sagdiyev uses his assumed Third World ignorance to poke fun at the American mindset. He is portrayed as a total bigot and MCP who hates Jews and considers women as only slightly better than cattle.

“Kazakhi,” I corrected. “Borat is supposed to be from Kazakhstan, but he’s actually an American Jew.

“Ya, ya, whatever,” said Hemant dismissively. “Anyway, he funny – but he also right, you know. I know how he feel about de Jews. We have so many same problems here in Mumbai wit’ people who not from Mumbai.”

I chose not to comment. I’m not an inbred Mumbaikar myself and therefore walk a tightrope every time I sully this Sacred City’s pavements with my contaminated footsteps.

“But I think he not right about women, yaar,” he continued. “Women are not good only just for the sex. Dey also needed for cleaning and washing de laundry. Dey also take good care of the kids. We (he flapped his sweaty saffron neckerchief) treat de women wit’ respec’.”

“Yes,” I agreed readily enough. “Women have their uses.”

“But he right about dis ‘sexual consent’ business, yaar,” he said, looking drunkenly wistful. “What bullshit, consent?”

I said nothing, but did wonder just how long this guy would be able to run from a lynch mob of Californian women libbers if some unfortunate twist of Fate would ever land him in Yankeeland.

“Women are good, but what is use of asking dem about de man business?” asked disgustedly. “Sex is de man business - they not enjoy anyway. Do dey take consent of de man before de cooking or de cleaning house? No! Dat is de woman business, and dey enjoy and we don’t enjoy. Do dey ask for our consent when dey are washing de laundry or cleaning de baby kaka? No! Dey much better at it and we give dem respec’ for it! Mother is like Goddess, no?”

It was a tricky moment. Did I agree with a “no” or a “yes”? Indian English can be complicated.

“Dere as so many things where de man just shut up and let woman do. Same way, why can’t woman just shut up and let de man do de sex? Anyways, dis Borat he good man. He actually Kazakh Maharashtrian,” concluded Hemant. “I spoken to de Boss and he say we should ask him to join our party. We can use him in de Mahim ward. So many non-Mumbaikars dere.”

He look out an oversized cell phone that had what looked like old chicken grease smeared all over the display window. “You have Borat’s mobile number in de Kazakhstan?”

Shootout At “I’m O.K. – You’re Not O.K.” Corral

My valued friend, I am complete
Don’t add to me, or take away
You, who sit in judgment’s seat
On behalf of the moral elite
And think you know a better way.

There’ve been a thousand instances
I’ve faced the Critic’s Crew
I’ve heard each kind of remonstrance
And faced each disapproving glance
Now show me something new…

Don’t ask me what I think of you
I’d only spoil your day
It’s sad, of course - your hot wind blew
When I was trying to stay cool
But hot wind finally blows away.

Hell is full of folks like you
Each one has cursed and died
Go on and curse - there’re blessings too
Maybe you should learn a few
Invest a bit on Heaven’s side……

Let’s thank God for each point of view
This world would be a bore
If we resolved our differences
And united in our nothingness
To agree for evermore…

“Ashutosh, please change Smiti’s diaper. Ashutosh? Ashutosh? Oh, there you are. Get out from under that bed and be a man.”

“That’s precisely what I’m trying to me, dear. Men don’t change diapers. That is completely the woman’s domain.”

“Oh, really? And what do men do once they’ve had their fun and the result hollers for attention a few months later?”

“I’m glad you asked, dear. Men are hunter-gatherers. They go out and kill bison to bring meat on the table, and fight off barbarian intruders into the territory who want to ravish their women and steal their offspring. They prowl the steppes and prairie in times of famine and forage for water and food so that the family does not starve. They do NOT change diapers.”

Brief silence, rudely broken by another outburst of squalling from the cradle.

“That is a real eye-opener”

“It should be.”

“I’m trying to see my own husband in this light.”

“You should. It is the order that Nature has designed. You can’t fight it.”

“I’m trying to see my accountant husband as a hunter-gatherer.”

“Now you’re getting personal. It’s not my fault that my father insisted that I…”

“I’m trying to equate his being picked up by an air conditioned company car, and going to his air conditioned office to pore over registers, with hitting the hunting grounds and killing bison to feed his family.”

“You have a very poor sense of metaphor, dear. Rather than my exact words, you should focus on the SPIRIT of…. “

“I’m trying to equate his calling up the credit card and pleading for more time, so that the debt collector, who’s bothering his wife every morning after he leaves, doesn’t repossess the fridge, with fighting off barbarian intruders.”

“As I said…”

“I’m trying to equate his disgruntled face as he trudges off to replenish our exhausted milk supply at the corner store, with the valorous demeanor of the primeval provider who leaves the cave determined to find water for his parched mate and brood in time of drought.”

“You are missing the point here, dear. The details of the mandate have obviously been modified in the modern context, but the essential role is still the same.”

“Do tell.”

“Anyway, men do more than hunt, provide and protect. They also sit in councils that meet to confer on how to keep the community safe. THAT is definitely a man’s job – no man would expect his woman to assume such a weighty responsibility.”

“They do, do they?”

“Yes, they do. Can you imagine the burden of having to stand up and giving voice to words that can impact the well-being of the entire community? What if his judgment fails him? He would be at least partly responsible for plunging countless families into penury.”

“God forbid that he fails at this momentous task, then.”

“Absolutely! Imagine the focus it calls for. The sharpness of wit. The steeliness of nerves. The determination to prevail…”

“For some reason, I’m tempted to mention the fact that you haven’t shown up at any of the building society meetings ever since we took this flat.”

“Oh. Er…”

“I go each time, but the all-male panel refuses to acknowledge anyone but the legal flat owner – you.”

“Dear, you know how it has been at the office. All those accounts we inherited from Mr. Mehta, when he had a stroke two years ago have….”

“Had you shown up for at least the last two, you may have been able to prevent them from turning our legally allotted parking space into a gymnasium.”

“They did WHAT?!?”

“Turned it into a gymnasium.”

“How could they do that?”

“Oh, with about ten bags of cement, another ten of sand, twenty gallons of water and some workers – in two days flat. Some goondas from Grant Road supervised the process to make sure that the woman screaming her protests – me – doesn’t prove to be too much of a disruption.”

Silence. Renewed squalling from the cradle.

“But we were going to buy a car this year….”

No response.

“A Maruti 800 AC.”

Stony silence.

“Okay, where are the diapers?”

“In the cupboard next to Smiti’s cradle.”

Finally, I could see the sheer cliff-wall give way to thunderous skies above me.

There was no doubt that I was an intruder here - the elements had made no bones about it ever since I had begun this climb. The wind had now redoubled its howling, freezing reproach, lashing at me with frost-laden whips as I dug in my gloved fingers and spiked boots to tackle the last ten meters to the top of the mountain.

x x x

How far will a parent go to find the answers that plague us every step of father/motherhood? Is the yen to be the perfect parent not a quest that beggars that of the Knights of the Round Table for the Holy Grail?

Back in my hometown on the other side of the globe, the surface of my study table had long since succumbed to the avalanche of ‘be-a-better-parent’ books. Instructional CDs on how to become the perfect dad/mom had ousted Chopin, Mozart and John Lennon from their rightful places of honor on our music rack, relegating them to dusty lower shelves.

Linda, always a die-hard seeker for new self-improvement avenues, had blown the budget for our Mauritius vacation on parenting workshops (bringing home more even printed research material) and long, rambling telephonic discussions with the other confounded parents she met there.

My bachelor friends had marked off my home on their weekend-visit maps in red Gothic letters that read ‘Here There Be Dragons’. This was definitely no place to drop in on if you wanted to discuss anything but advanced diaper management, the fine art of bonding with your kid and parent-induced trauma syndromes. Unsuspecting visitors to 10/4, Mapleville Drive were subjected to inquisitional inquiries into their parenting styles, berated for their lack of awareness of the latest techniques of wholesome child-rearing, and forced to look at every single photo in a three-foot stack of baby albums (with a running commentary on genesis and circumstantial background).

We had lost a lot of friends since little Brian had arrived four months ago.

However, there were some positive outcomes too. Watching Linda and me tackle our new roles as parents the way that Oxford toppers tackle their final exams, my parents had disengaged their stranglehold on our affairs, removed themselves from the landscape and begun serious work on their own marriage. They seemed to be having a lot of fun for the first time in thirty years…

x x x

“How’s little Brian?” asked my boss on that fateful day last week. Little had I suspected that this seemingly innocuous question would have me clinging to the sleet-covered side of a mountain three hundred and fifty feet above the Tibetan plains five days later.

My boss was one of the few people who could ask me the above question without endangering the next two hours of his life with a new father’s agonized monologue on the pitfalls of effective parenting. After all, he had asked it while I was on company time – and company (which he heads) takes a jaundiced view of employees frittering away potentially productive hours on such stuff.

“Fine, sir,” I replied, stifling the usual avalanche of angsty moaning about how I’m certain my uninformed Daddying approach is turning the four-month old blighter into a mass murderer or, even worse, condemning him to a call centre career.

“And how are you and Linda managing?” he asked. I was getting worried about this unprecedented level of interest. Had word gone round in the office about how ineptly we were bringing up our kid?

“Uh… we’re on top of it, sir,” I answered with an egg-sucking grin. My faux confidence wouldn’t have fooled a retarded donkey with Alzheimer’s.

He nodded good-naturedly, indicating that he had either not heard me, or that he had but was not swallowing it.

“You know, I met up with my brother the other day – he’d just returned from Tibet. He told me of a wise man who sits on some godforsaken mountaintop over there.”

I wondered what this had to do with Dr. Seuss, parenting-oriented rational emotive therapy, or the ‘quality time’ school of thought.

“This wise man has apparently got the Ultimate Handle on parenting,” he said. “My brother was a physical, emotional and mental wreck after his daughter was born… you know, he wanted to get everything right on the parenting front. He says that this wise dude had to say to him pulled him back from the brink of suicide.”

“I see you’ve lost about twenty pounds since Brian was born. Your efficiency levels have also dropped – I attribute this to loss of sleep and appetite.”

My heart sank – here came the pink slip.

“I’ve also heard that you and Linda are buying every parenting book and DVD in sight at the local bookstore. I want to you to go see this wise man in Tibet and see what he has to say. The company will pay for this. I hate to see a good employee kill himself this young.”

x x x

At last I reached the top of the mountain. The wind screamed its protest and tried to yank me over the edge again, but I was here to ask The Question and get The Answer and wasn’t about to let it do that.

I looked around, wondering how anyone could survive the numbing cold up here. At last I spotted him.

He was a shriveled, ancient and extremely weathered specimen, sitting cross-legged on a tacky prayer mat under a sturdy bamboo-thatch roof that did nothing to keep the elements out. The old party was bundled up in one of those fancy Nepali coats that they try to sell to you at every street-corner in Khatmandu. He was about eighty years old and maybe five feet in height, with a few stray wisps of hair still sticking to his otherwise wind-bleached scalp. He was reading something and paid no attention at all to me.

I stumbled across to where he sat and fell to my knees on the cold mountain rock before him.

“Master! I have come to seek The Answer.” I cried abjectly.

He looked up from what I was startled to see was a fairly dated copy of Playboy.

“Another one,” he said, sounding quite disgruntled. “What’s wrong with you people anyway?”

“Master, I am the father of a four-month-old boy,” I continued. “He’s…”

“… the sweetest, smartest, most promising child in the whole, wide world,” he finished for me. I was amazed. This man was truly gifted – he had read my mind!!

“Yes!!” I said, “Yes!! And I…”

“… want to be the perfect father to him, and your wife wants to be the perfect mother. You do not want to take a single wrong step, because you will get only one chance at bringing him up right and you don’t want to goof up. Goofing up will mean traumatizing him, and that would mean a warped child, and it would all be your fault,” he finished for me, perusing the Playboy’s centerfold with a gleam of approval in his eyes. “So, we go on to The Question that haunts every new father and mother – How Can I Be The Perfect Parent?”

I fell silent. There was nothing more to be said. Playboy or not, this dried-up relic had just said it all.

He put the magazine aside and looked at me through the weary eyes of aged wisdom. It was a compassionate look, but there was also impatience in it.

“Here’s the answer, son,” he said. “Get a life and LEAVE YOUR KID ALONE.”

x x x

“WHAT?!?” I gasped. “Leave… leave him alone? But he depends on us for nurturing, for guidance, for the right values in life. We have to show him how much we love him by….”

“… giving him what he really needs, not what your guilt makes you BELIEVE he needs,” he finished for me. “What he needs from you is the basic essentialities of life – food, shelter, education and undemanding affection. Damn it, every animal knows better than to follow their offspring around, catering to every imagined need and being a pain in the neck. Why can’t humans learn to do the same?”

“Because… because humans are DEEP!” I said. “We are intelligent. Our offspring has a broader spectrum of needs, and…”

“You, my dear misguided friend, are just another victim of so-called progressive thought,” he said disdainfully. “You can’t leave good enough alone. You HAVE to fix what isn’t broken. No – you have to BREAK what isn’t broken and then try to put it together in a way that your insane feelings of inadequacy tell you is the RIGHT way! Your son is doomed.”

I was beginning to have enough of his primitive outlook on life’s realities.

“Listen, Monk Man – children aren’t animals. They are extremely sensitive beings,” I said.

“You mean animals aren’t?” he spat at me. “Fellow, beasts don’t write book on parenting, have all-night discussion sessions on the subject or tear themselves up over a wrong move here or there – but they do a really fine job of bringing up their offspring. They are there for their little ones when they are needed – not when they need to be there. They feed them, protect them from predators, house them till they’re old enough to strike out on their own, and let them go. It works!! Have you ever heard of a yak, cockatoo or antelope traumatized by anything other than human mischief?”

I shut up.

“Have you ever heard of an Australian aborigine child who felt he didn’t get enough approval from Dad? Or of a maladjusted Sioux papoose turned juvenile delinquent because Mommy didn’t spend enough quality time with him?” he asked me, a bit more kindly now. “Have you ever heard of an Eskimo child who can’t take the peer pressure? Fellow – in Nature, everything finds its own perfect level. It is when you screw around with the natural order of things that you have problems.”

He got up and handed me the Playboy. I accepted it with cold-numbed hands, not really knowing what I was doing.

“Go home,” he said. “You and your wife must have fun in your lives, and you must let your son have it too. There are only so many years each of us has to experience the gift of life. How many of them do you want to waste on trying to find some mythical Right Equation? The Right Equation is whatever existed before humans decided they are smarter, more compassionate or more innovative than the very Nature according to whose rules they were born in the first place.”

Resentfully, I realized that I had nothing further to ask him. In less than ten minutes, this man had reduced the whole issue from exquisite complexity to grassroots simplicity. If what he said was true, then Linda and I had to excuse left for twisting ourselves into worried, frustrated wrecks. There would be no further expeditions to the Non Fiction section of the local bookstore to get our next fix of parenting acumen.

Then I realized I had one last ace in the hole to play! One last question that would surely flummox him and cause him to dissolve into a helpless pile of confused grey cells – just like it did everybody else on earth!!

x x x

“Before I go, please answer one last question,” I said with forced humility.

He grunted dustily, rummaged under his prayer mat and produced a fairly recent issue of Penthouse.

“Ask your question,” he said, going straight for the centerfold.

I drew in a trembling breath, stunned as always by the magnitude and sheer magnificence of The Final Parenting Question as I geared up to utter it.

“What is Quality Time?” I asked, my eyes filling up with tears of awed reverence. Never mind dumb animals – only intelligent humans were capable of asking such a profound question. In fact, our ability to ask it literally PROVED the existence of God…

He guffawed toothlessly. “Quality time, you dolt, is the time you spend with your child in which you:

• DON’T tweak your own or your child’s sensibilities
• DON’T try to find meaning in every nuance of body language
• DON’T adjust to the moment while nevertheless praying that you’ll somehow get it right
• DON’T anticipate favourable or unfavourable present or future reactions
• DON’T either compensate for or further build on your own or your own parents’ inadequacies

Quality Time is time you spend with your child without any kind of agenda, forgetting that you’re a parent. You throw away the rule book. You become human, not superhuman. You let your hair down, relax and let your child do the same. Quality time is whenever you don’t try to be the Perfect Parent.”

He pointed to the edge of the cliff and waved me to it.

“Now get out of here,” he said. “I have more interesting stuff than this to occupy myself with. Mind your step on the way down – there’s sleet on the slope at this time of the day….”