Column

Tales From The Locker Room

According to my wife who is the supreme legal body in the family ( not to say other bodies are illegal.) Law 47 article II, paragraph four, clearly states that all fathers on all Sundays between May and June—never mind their medical condition, never mind the 27 vodkas the night before—must take their kids swimming early morning.

Proof of the last night’s flagrant activities furnished in the form of a medical certificate or even a best friend’s vainglorious account about performances at the nocturnal Olympics, will be deemed null and void.

This powerful family law was set in stone by the first regal, alpha female Margaret Thatcher hundreds of years ago, somewhere between Brontosaurus Rex and Sanjaya Malakar.

In short, this means I have to take my four-year-old, who now weighs more like a 14-year-old and sulks more often than a married man, into the hot cauldron, which under no circumstances may be called a swimming pool every Sunday morning.

At a temperature, in which most life forms expire, forget perspire; I have to play the ridiculously complicated sport of the diving board. This sport is modelled on the modern springboard diving competition with one crucial difference. I am the diving board.

My son Mikhaail followed by his good friends Anant and Raghav proceed to then treat me like a common trampoline. Believe me, I’ve been treated shabbily before but not as a human trampoline doomed to a slow death at 44 degrees under the ruthless Mumbai sun.

Fallouts of the human trampoline are foot in the face, fist in the eye and worst of all the ‘coup-de-grace’—knees in the groin. Under these sizzling and boiling conditions Mumbai is to have a power cut. Let me tell you if you’re a father, you’ve lost your power a long, long, time ago.