Two…One…(Zero)...Smoke the Ganesha

My son made me a blogger in 2006. Being a new mother felt so marvelous, that I couldn’t help but start blogging. In summer 2009, my ego has made me a micro-blogger.

Micro-blogging at Twitter (and Facebook) has made me lazy enough that I haven’t been blogging at all lately, while my number of tweets is speeding towards century, and friends have been noticing the spike in the frequency of my Facebook status updates. I knew this would happen. I even wrote a blog when I signed up for my new Twitter account, speculating whether I would blog less (and micro-blog more) down the line. Sadly, my speculation proved to be true. And, what seems to be a collateral damage, I have become a more narcissistic writer than I ever was! When I used to solely blog, I felt conscious blogging about myself all the time. Thus, I used to intersperse the “me-blogs” with blogs on more universal topics or short stories. But micro-blogging and other social networking tools inherently stoke narcissism, and somewhere in that apparently innocuous ego-driven journey, I ignored my original muse—my son, who has been appearing less and less in my creative output.

Well, I have finally decided not to resort to the lure and convenience of micro-blogging before I finish this long overdue ode to my son.

Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t been any less fascinated by my son than I used to be when he was a baby. In many ways, his current 4-year-old persona is much more interesting than his babyhood, as he now possesses the skills to express himself in so many different ways. But a few things have sure changed. Firstly, I now take my son as a constant in my life, so that I don’t feel the need to chronicle every experience and emotion associated with him, as if they are evanescent treasures. Secondly, I have gradually felt more comfortable writing about things other than my son, when I realized that I reach wider audience that way. Again, ego takes over at times, but even a mom is allowed to have an ego, right? However, honestly, a kid has so much more potential to create a ‘writable moment’ for you, just because their world is so unpolluted. Let me just try to illustrate.

My son is totally into the idea of recycling. Every Thursday morning, he would accompany me to the big recycle bin in the backyard to dump the co-mingled recyclable trash in the house. Now, we are talking about empty glass bottles and metallic cans here, which do make a lot of noise when you dump them all together. It was a little too much for my son, and one day told me, “Mamma, can I do the paper recycling only, because the bottles yell at my ear.” I couldn’t have come up with that expression “yelling at my ear” to describe the clank myself!

Then there were One and Two. These are the two tiny little goldfishes that are always busy swimming in a glass bowl in my son’s room. They are fairly new acquisitions. I took my son with me for my ‘homecoming’ trip to East coast in September to enjoy my two weeks off between my old job and new job. One of our East coast friends’ son had a goldfish named “Zero.” My son was so inspired by Zero, the goldfish, that he ordered his dad over the phone to buy him goldfishes even before he would go back home from his East coast trip. The Dad obliged. My son obsessed over what to name the goldfishes the whole time we were inside the plane on our return flight. “How about I name them ‘For Here’ and ‘To Go’?” He asked. I thought they were pretty good innovative names. But before I could nod my approval, he said, “How about, ‘Jack’ and ‘Jill’?” By that time, I knew there will be a deluge of suggested names that usually come in pairs. (What’s next? ‘Prosecution’ and ‘Litigation’? Pardon my job-speak.) But he suddenly stopped toying with the names, and said, “I will name them One and Two. They will be the brother and sister of Zero.” The definitive tone in his voice told me that he was done with his exercise in nomenclature, and found the idea of bi-coastal goldfish siblings pretty darn satisfying. So we now address our goldfishes as One and Two. Sometimes my son also calls them “Ekta” and “Duto”—literal Bengali translation of One and Two. He practices his Bengali-speaking skills with his goldfishes when he is in a good mood.

Another time, it was “the poor kid” incidence. We frequently tell our son that he should not buy any more new toys, because he already has too many of them, and he should think about the poor kids who don’t have any toys. After the lecture in socialism, we went to see a newborn at a very close friend’s place, and my son declares, “This must be a poor kid, because I am not seeing too many toys here.” I seriously hope my friend didn’t hear him! But, to tell the truth, I sometime wish we could go back to his newborn days, where the number of toys were under control!

The latest quotable quote that came from my son is, “Let’s smoke the Ganesha.” Now this asks for a little bit of context for the uninitiated. Late September to mid October is the season of religious festivals in India, and the diaspora celebrates those with equal enthusiasm. My husband and I are not remarkably religious persons, but we love the celebrations. Our son may turn out to be a more spiritual being than either of us, as he is plain fascinated by the colorful and gorgeous action and paraphernalia of deity worship. He has managed to put up a shrine under a rhododendron shrub in our backyard, and borrowed a decorative metal “Ganesha” (The Hindu Elephant God) figurine from the fireplace mantle to grace the shrine. He puts fresh flowers there whenever he remembers, and asks Ganesha to keep everyone in his family safe and healthy. He even prayed for his best friend on his birthday. Now he wants us to invite all our friends, and have a full-fledged puja and celebration in our backyard. Yesterday he picked up some fragrant incense sticks from an Indian store when his dad took him there for grocery shopping. He has seen his grandma motion the smoking incense sticks in circles while serenading the deities in India. He asked me, “Mamma, can you light these sticks, because I want to smoke the Ganesha.” I obliged and he ‘smoked’ his Ganesha with the “smokers,” the term that he has coined to describe the sticks.

I can not finish this piece without sharing his most famous quote: “It takes a teamwork to make a baby.” I am sure he learnt it from his teachers, but when delivered by a precocious 4-year-old kid, it gets a special dimension.

I am glad I finally got to write my tribute to my constant source of inspiration. Now can I go back to being lazy and narcissistic again? :)