By popular demand: Some More Chacha

Now it seems to me that the faint trickle of readers I had managed to bring to my excellent blog shut up if I write about anything and anybody else. And though I am not very happy about it, I will treat you, reader as the king/queen and dive back to the topic that you all seem to enjoy so much: Chacha. But you should know this is at the expense of my Chachi and I. See by the time Friday arrives and I still don't have anything to write about, I start tailing Chacha around, everywhere he goes. He is such a भंडार of weird that by the end of the day I have a nice juicy story to upload here. But tailing Chacha is not a task for the faint-hearted my friends. So anybody who reads this and laughs, I will say to you Marlon Brando style "Some day, and that day may never come, I'll call upon you to do a service for me".

So there is this side to Chacha that almost everybody knows about- he is a bit of borderline paranoid. Did I say a bit? Na-ah. Make that a lot of borderline paranoid. Like he heard of a case of robbery in a house far far away from where we live one time many years back and the next day, we had all these cool CCTV cameras around the house. The only things we ever caught on camera was a limelight-hungry cat who would sit on our wall and mew at the lens for hours and a couple of couples trying to take advantage of the dark and of the private space that the dead-end outside our house provides. So instead of warding off thieves as he imagined he would do, the man of our house would spend his evenings shooing away cats and hormone-driven teens.

And you should really see him driving a two-wheeler. It is all the entertainment you will ever need in this life. At turns, he will not only blink the indicator about 15 minutes in advance so that the traffic behind him keeps guessing if it is this turn or the next or the one after that until they assume it has been left blinking by error, but he also keeps flailing his arm much like a drunk bird flapping its wing. Ironically, he also refuses to wear a helmet even after being in an accident or two but there his obsession with his hair takes precedence over his paranoia.

So when Chacha began to read of dairy farmers adding urea to milk, he could not just sit and do nothing. He hunted the neighbourhood for a dairy, found one and ever since then he personally goes to get milk from this establishment everyday. Now over the years- and a lot of our relative and friends will tell you this- this pure, creamy, beautiful buffalo milk has become a source of pride for Chacha. We don't get any milk product from any shop. Paneer, curd, ghee everything is made from the precious milk that he gets.

I mentioned at the beginning that you enjoy the posts on Chacha at the expense of Chachi and I. See while boiling the milk every morning, Chacha stands guard to ensure that it does not boil over. Oh yes, he will waste electricity, he will waste water and with almost no effort he wastes and incredible amount of time but he will NEVER waste any milk. There are days, however when he is compelled to leave his dearest task to go to office for something or the other and expects his way-better half Chachi to obsess over the milk in his absence. Now Chachi is not one to obsess so as she goes about her daily chores, the milk obviously boils over and then the poor woman has to clean every bit of the stove to ensure that no traces of her heinous crime remain.

Such is the old man's obsession that guests are told and re-told about the marvellous discovery of Chacha's and a thousand other residents in the vicinity and here I can call in Rads' husband Vicky to vouch. About one year back I was coming back to Dehradun with Rads and Vicky and told my brother-in-law that he must praise the dairy products if he wanted to get into Chacha's good books. And sure enough, halfway through dinner Chacha started his all-too familiar conversation with the words "Vicky आपको पनीर कैसा लगा?" Then before my eyes he began to literally swell with pride as a prepared Vicky began to sing his well-rehearsed praises. Later that night, when everybody returned home and we were cleaning up, Chacha smiled with a faraway look and said "सोणा मुंडा है विवेक".

So though these observations of mine may seem fruitless and you may think that they serve only as writing material for a crap blog, the above episode will show they actually help bond the family stronger!