My Father's Egg-ventures

First written with a cohort of the Ochre Sky community.

My father was your man in a crisis. He was the one you would want to call if you needed to get out of a soup asap. He would arrive, read the situation and immediately start unravelling the knots to sort you out. He seemed to thrive on troubles big and small. And if none existed, he went looking for them. Every year when I was little, he would pack family and friends into his trusty Ambassador and drive off into the wildest jungles of Bihar and Orissa. Every day he and his friend Uncle B would lead sorties into the jungle in search of wildlife, literally courting danger, us little kids in tow. Sometimes we would park the cars in a clearing and climb up a narrow, steep, iron staircase to the top of a watchtower - a vantage point for animal viewing. I remember sitting in one of these, watching huge red ants crawling in a line next to me on a concrete bench. I remember eating bread and baked beans from a paper plate and peering out at the dense jungle all around us and the red earth down below, a small watering hole a little distance away, where a herd of elephants might appear any minute.

As he advanced in years and slowed down, he started looking for adventures inside the house. In little details in his own and other people’s lives that he would ponder over at length. Little changes that he could make or problems that he could solve. He would sit in his recliner in his bedroom in Pune and organize home renovations for a relative in Kolkata. He would phone friends or cousins and advise them on their lives in general. He would stand at the front door to catch neighbours going about their day and warn them about possible water shortages, a rise in the price of onions or a storm approaching over the Arabian Sea. He would call my brother up in the US and warn him about criticizing the government on social media.

Ever since Covid took him in 2022, I think this is what I miss the most about him – his excitement over little things. The house-help’s child getting admission into nursery school. The neighbour buying a new car. A young friend getting a good job. And when there was nothing to mull over, he created adventures with eggs! “How many eggs do we have in the fridge??!!” he would call out excitedly in the middle of a quiet morning, totally out of context. "Many," my mother would reply, "more than many!" But still he would make her count, and how many ever there were, he would want at least six more and then my mother must make him either a double egg omelette or a nice, spicy bhurji with lots of green chillies. And there must be at least a dozen eggs left over, sitting and waiting in the fridge for the next time the mood came upon him - for the next time he ran out of little things to put right in the world!

Photo by Cara Beth Buie on Unsplash