Someone asked me just the other day why it was that when people could not have something they wanted it and then when they had it, they no longer wanted it. My antenna went Boing! I just knew she (okay the someone was a she) was talking about a man. And because I know her very well, I also knew the ‘some people’ she was referring to – that’s why my antenna went up. Aha! Now I know just what is going on!
However, purposely making my features very bland – I’ve had lots of practise at this – I answered in the same abstract fashion. “Oh, you know,” I said. “Human beings are like that. We tend to want what we can’t have and never realize the value of what we actually do have.” Then I added the kicker. “That’s why,” I said, “it’s unwise to give people everything they want.” And I walked away.
But for some reason, the conversation set me thinking about my childhood. My grandmother used to call children who acted like that “bad name pickney”. I have never quite understood the ‘bad name’ part. It couldn’t be because their parent/s named them badly that they were programmed to misbehave. Maybe it was because their misbehaviour would be blamed on their upbringing; because by their behaviour they were giving their parent/s a bad name. But why not just say so? Why such a convoluted way of saying it? Maybe it was just a grandmother thing.
And right then, smack dab in the middle of my musings, my daughter has a question that she absolutely must ask me right away. It’s so urgent and exciting that she’s hopping from one leg to the next. She wants to go and ‘play Phagwah’ tomorrow. I check to see if she has a fever but she is fine. She understands that it will involve being drenched with water from a hose attached to a tap; soaked with coloured water from a bucket drawn from a tap; powdered until she’s almost unrecognizable. She really wants to go. And this is a child who will not bathe with any water that is not noticeably warm. What does this make her? A mini-me.
I recall ‘playing Phagwah’ with gusto as a child. What is it with children and water? Even children who don’t normally like to bathe will walk in the rain, or soak themselves while fully clothed ‘playing Phagwah’. But they will stand shivering in the bathroom, as far away from the shower as they can possibly get, because “the water is too cold”.
I was just like that. None of my mother’s stern or dire warnings got through to me. It was just too much fun to give up being soaked with water and abeer in the morning and well powdered in the afternoon; and stuffing my face with parsad and other sweetmeats. Oh, the good old days.
Ask me today to ‘play Phagwah’ and I will turn my most seriously dread face to you; my eyebrows lifted about a mile high and ask back, “Who me?” You might even be able to see the ice dripping from my voice, because I want to be sure you really get that I am most definitely not interested. However, if properly tempted, I just might nibble on those scrumptious sweetmeats.
Strange, isn’t it? Wild horses couldn’t keep me away as a child, but they can’t drag me back now. You might think that now as an adult, who can do whatever I want, I would want to do the things I might have been prevented from doing as a child. Not me. The wet hair, bedraggled look is so not me. And these days I don’t even use powder anymore – it makes me sneeze. (thescene@stabroeknews.com)
