Being Outstanding

My father was really bad at telling us jokes - he would begin laughing even before he finished with the joke and all the drama that should add effect was absent. End result: he was the only one who ended up laughing at his own jokes! 

The reason I give that as a backdrop to what I share in the post is because it brings to mind one of the jokes he told us when we were children. My father’s education was tinged with the British ‘hangover’ - they left alright, but in the South of India speaking the Queen’s English was very important. It, therefore, became important for us to speak good English, read good literature in the language and write as if we were, what is referred to today rather jokingly as, ‘grammar Nazis’. 

So, dad had told us this joke once: a boy was punished in school once and sent to stand out of the class. This was at the time when corporal punishment wasn’t yet banned in schools. A teacher asked a class fellow where the boy was to which he said he was “outstanding”! Ha, I know, this was dad’s kinda joke.

The last few days have taken a toll on me. I was playing with Spooky when a wrong step caused a severe pain in the mid-left area of the back. I staggered into the house and requested the domestic help to get me a hot water bottle. In her desire and enthusiasm to please me by doing better than I'd asked for, or expected, she filled it with boiling hot water and didn’t notice a leak in it. I sat down and placed the bottle behind my back and in a second I felt a gush of steam followed by spurting boiling water on the right side of my back. Ofcourse, my reflexes worked well, but some damage had been done. I found myself in a strange situation where I couldn’t sleep on my back and neither could I sit resting my back; turning from one side to another, or even onto my stomach, caused excruciating pain. I found myself standing during much of the day - reading, writing, making myself that cup of comfort masala chai, learning about quantum entanglement and listening to music. I even contemplated sleep walking!

At the end of one such day, my mother asked me how my day was, and I simply said, “outstanding!”. Yeah, I’ve got my father’s sense-of-humour genes!