Memories of Papa — The night is full of (t)errors

Don’t you have some memories, the kind that whenever you tell that story you always have a prolonged fit of laughter, no matter how many years may have passed?

This is one of those for me, and also for my family. We have to be careful when to bring this story up because once we do, we cannot stop laughing until our tear ducts revolt.

You have to know first, all three of us siblings are nocturnal students. Only in the most ungodly of hours would we let education in. If there ever was a world that didn’t have sundowns, our only options to sustain livelihood would either be underworld or politics.

It was common for mom and dad to go to sleep while we were up studying. What you also need to know is my dad was a snorer. And not just your regular snorer. A snorer that you’d hope to god doesn’t end up in your train compartment, a snorer that could make sleeping babies cry their way back to consciousness, a snorer that my mom would kick in the shin all night long until sunrise would yet again save an otherwise healthy marriage. So, for the love of snoring and his shins, he would sometimes choose to sleep in a different room than my mom.

This is what my home looks like and what the people were doing “that night”:

While mom was enjoying a snore-free sleep in her room, my dad had set up camp in our second bedroom for the night, something I was blissfully unaware of. I was studying in the living room and decided to go look for some late night munchies. I covered the journey from living room, through the hall and reached the kitchen. Since I was feeling kind towards the sleepers and maybe brave, I didn’t turn the hall lights on. Once in the kitchen, I had barely started fishing through the refrigerator shelves, when I heard some sounds and froze. I focussed in. In that awfully quiet night, I heard something shifting in the next room.

That was it, my soul was ready to leave my body. My brain though was still doing some last bits of thinking. It came up with a total of two possibilities, period. Best case scenario, it was a ghost. With ghosts I had a 50% survival chance, since half of them had to be good ghosts, like casper. Statistics. Or the worst case scenario — it was a burglar — who had now noticed that I heard him. You see, the problem with burglars is that they are too panicky, and you can’t reason with panic. I was ready to let him do his thing and take this to my grave, if only he lets me go back to the living room. But I didn’t see any way I could convince him. His panic would ruin everything.

So now the last resort, my body, comes to rescue. I bolted towards my parent’s bedroom. I thought if I ran fast enough to reach the bedroom, without getting killed, then maybe my parents would know how to convince this guy. I could now hear louder noises from bedroom 2, footsteps, if you will. Aha! Not a ghost! They don’t have footsteps, my brain concluded.

Just as I was approaching the bedroom door, I heard a deep baritone loud voice of a man “HOYYY!”. I stopped still and looked back, ready to raise my hands as a show of my complete and utter surrender. Papa was standing in front of that bedroom, both hands on his waist, eyebrows frowning fiercely and eyes red. He and I stood frozen and shell-shocked, looking at each other for a good two minutes, while trying to recognize where we know this person from. The brains had finally decided to give up at this moment.

The others came running to the hall panicked, my mom, the brother, the sister, the rats maybe— What do I know, it was an abnormal night. My brother decided to chime in, “Kya hua Papa? Srishti hai!” [Translation: What happened Papa? It’s srishti”].

The one night my dad’s loud snoring would’ve been useful to pre-warn me, he wasn’t snoring. I believe he wasn’t in deep sleep and what I heard was him changing sides. He in turn had woken up from the noises in the kitchen and thought it was maybe a stray cat, but a silhouette bolting across the room had made him reach the same conclusion as me, it was a burglar he would be facing that night.

Papa responded: “Saali! Goli ki tarah nikal ke satt se bhaagi hai. Humein lagga billi villi hai ya chor hai”, still reeling with anger. [Translation: Dumbass! She shot like a bullet across the hall, I was assuming it’s an animal or a thief].

At least it’s good to know that his brain had also offered a total of only two possibilities.

We heard his statement and we all burst into laughter. It took us many iterations, choking, tears to finally get through everybody’s version of the events that night.

I barely got through writing this blog trying to hold my laughter. It’s nice to know though, that some memories aren’t tainted, at all.