{"id":657,"date":"2016-07-17T13:59:30","date_gmt":"2016-07-17T13:59:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=657"},"modified":"2016-07-17T13:59:30","modified_gmt":"2016-07-17T13:59:30","slug":"india-bandra-mumbai-mother-mothers-day-maggi-sholay-caning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=657","title":{"rendered":"My Mother, Citizen Cane"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cI<\/span><\/p><\/div>

have a cane. I have a daughter. I have a brat. I have a daughter. Cane daughter brat cane.\u201d\n\nIf the ridiculously annoying pen-pineapple song had released when I was a kid, I\u2019m sure this would have been the version my mother sang. My fondest memory of my mother is the one where she\u2019s chasing me around our building compound with a fresh cane (read: sticker intact) in her hand and I\u2019m running around in circles, trying to save my ass from a walloping. Or maybe it\u2019s the one where she\u2019s standing below a wild almond tree, cane in tow, and I\u2019m threatening to jump off the tree a l\u0101 Dharmendra from Sholay if she beat me in public. My friends had scurried off at the sight of her of course. Jump, she dared me. Of course I didn\u2019t. I sneaked out later, knowing full well I\u2019d meet my nemesis when I\u2019d get back home.\n\nMy mother\u2019s fascination with the cane started when I was about 11 years old. She first laid her hands on one courtesy a generous Catholic neighbour aunty who seemed to have found a solution to all of her son\u2019s antics in the cane. \u201cArre, just give them a whack of the cane, men. All their masti will go in one minute. See Dominic na. Go to the Bandra Fair, nice ones they have re,\u201d she had told my mother. Suddenly, the fair didn\u2019t seem as much fun.\n\nBandra Fair was a ritual we had come to love. Our four-hour vacation would start with us lighting candles at Mount Mary church. Then we would gorge on\u00a0guava cheese and kadio bodio along the steps, and finally queue up for the various rides. While our father would accompany us on our ritual giant wheel (sit down hipsters, there\u2019s no such thing as a ferris wheel at Bandra Fair) ride, the mother would wait for us with bowls of Maggi and cups of hot coffee.\n\nThat year, every bit of the Bandra Fair was the same, except that this time, my mother had a different ending planned. Little did us fools in paradise know that we were going to be brought down from cloud nine at our last pit-stop. She found the young man who sold those magical canes that had transformed Dominic, and right there, as the three of us stood with mouths full of guava cheese, she jumped upon him with glee. The young man slid into his sales pitch, and cane after cane was presented to his eager customer. Her method of testing was both efficient and terrifying. She would whip the cane in the air to check its worth. The louder and sharper the sound, the better it was.\n\n\u201cAunty ek naya patla variety aaya hai. Dikhau aapko?\u201d the young man asked, presenting a whip thin cane with aplomb. My mother is no Lalita Pawar. She\u2019s every bit the Nirupa Roy, more so when it comes to her children. But I think she found her expression in the cane. As we watched her pay the cane seller, our guava cheese got stuck in our throats, refusing to move either up or down.\n\n

As we grew older, we found our way around the cane. We hid it in outrageous places and watched as our mother spent days frantically searching for it.<\/p><\/blockquote> \n\nThat whip-like cane became her version of having a nanny to take care of her children when she and my father were at work. When one of our neighbours complained about me destroying her custard apple tree, I got a good pasting. When my brother decided to bunk school to loaf around on Carter Road, the cane came to her rescue. And so it went.\n\nThe cane and us. Us and the cane.\n\nAs we grew older, we found our way around the cane. We hid it in outrageous places and watched as our mother spent days frantically searching for it. The last cane our mother bought was found lodged behind the parents\u2019 wardrobe and discovered the night our house was being painted about five years ago. That night my mother sat with the cane on her lap at the dinner table. There was a twinkle in her eye as she thrust it in our now grown-up faces. When we protested that we were too old for her to use it now, she burst into peals of laughter. After she\u2019d stopped giggling, her face became pensive. \u201cYes, what\u2019s the use now? My children have grown up,\u201d she said with moist eyes.\n\nModern parenting frowns upon caning and encourages a healthy discussion, where you patiently teach a child to say \u201cNo\u201d as he throws a tantrum in the middle aisle of the supermarket while his hapless maid\/nanny watches from the sidelines. My mother was 19 when she had my elder sister and 21 when she had me. Three kids (two of whom would constantly channel Dennis-The-Menace), no help, and a full-time job didn\u2019t provide her with many modern parenting options. She worked her ass off, both at home and outside, to ensure there was food on the table and that we got a decent education. And we\u2019d reward her every evening with a book full of complaints from the neighbours. In her place, I\u2019d probably have used three canes instead of one.\n\nIt\u2019s been seven years since I last met the cane but I think she still has it hidden somewhere in memory of the children she raised.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s been seven years since I last met the cane but I think my mother still has it hidden somewhere in memory of the children she raised.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":658,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-people"],"yoast_head":"\nMy Mother, Citizen Cane<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It\u2019s been seven years since I last met the cane but I think my mother still has it hidden somewhere in memory of the children she raised.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.arre.co.in\/?p=657\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" 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