“Radishes”, my mother exclaims, “You loved radishes, didn’t you? You there, how much are you selling those radishes for?”<\/p>\n
“Maaaaa, no radishes. Whoever said I like them?”, I reply. <\/p>\n
“Radishes 8 rupees a puwaa, baidew”, “Only 7 rupees a puwaa”. “The freshest ones right here, baidew”. A puwaa is 250 grams, and baidew is Axomiya for elder sister.<\/p>\n
“Alright, squashes then. Squashes are good for health.” She persists.<\/p>\n
I make my best windpipe-slit-by-samurai-sword-noise, a kind of wet gurgling that peeves her completely, as she looks at the radishes, and dismisses them, and prods at the cabbages. Cabbages are safe, she decides, because I do not react at all, and proceeds to buy two huge ones.<\/p>\n
The shopkeepers look resentfully at the radish-hater and his mother as they exit from the maze of shops. I try my best not to look guilty.<\/p>\n
* * *
\nI tell my parents I am buying a computer for them. My mother, who painstakingly writes out five copies of a question-paper for her tuition students every other day, could do with a printer – she even did an MS Office course thingie a couple of months back, just before my old computer decided to conk out for good. My father who warily circled the old computer until I showed him that it could play movies too, and how, was just getting used to it – I was kind of getting used myself to the phone calls asking me how to make the Windows Media Player fullscreen when a video was playing.<\/p>\n
So this time, I tell them I am buying a new computer, and also point out that an internet connection would be good, now that BSNL has these broadband schemes. Somehow my father detects that note of hesitation when I talk about the internet. “What is it?”, he asks me, “A lot of bother? Forget it then.” <\/p>\n
“Not really”, I tell him. “It’s just that if you aren’t careful enough, you might get viruses and I am a little worried about how you guys would handle it.”<\/p>\n
“No, no, we will be careful. I will make sure nobody’s wearing shoes inside the computer room.”<\/p>\n
I love these guys.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Radishes”, my mother exclaims, “You loved radishes, didn’t you? You there, how much are you selling those radishes for?” “Maaaaa, no radishes. Whoever said I like them?”, I reply. “Radishes 8 rupees a puwaa, baidew”, “Only 7 rupees a puwaa”. “The freshest ones right here, baidew”. A puwaa is 250 grams, and baidew is Axomiya […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[62,124],"class_list":["post-616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-guwahati","tag-heh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}