How Plants beat the Zombies… And my pain

It’s been two long weeks since my ailing back is compulsively obsessed with living-in with me forcing me to –  as I jovially tell my friends – admire the ceiling from end to end, drinking in all things that aren’t at the eye level and escape our everyday scrutiny. Docs had diagnosed me with a slipped disc 5-6 years back. “Lumbar 4-5,” an ageing neurosurgeon, who I was introduced to “as the best in Asia”, had then spoken over my MRI reports referring to my lower back with a frown burrowing into the bridge of the nose. I remember him because he had then prescribed me painkillers that my family doctor took time to assure were not just meant to sedate the mentally ill.

Education makes us skeptical and Google fires it up to a whole new level of insanity. The feeling is something I can nail with the example of driving. You drive around with any Tom, Dick and Harry without batting an eyelid, until you learn to drive. And, then you trust no more. My wife and I had checked up the salts to understand the horrific import of the “strong dose” before our doctor calmed us. I never took those pain killers then. I didn't take them now. Irrespective of who the doctor is, I try as much to absorb pain even if it means a prolonged recovery curve for me. So, now I am horizontally confined for most part of the day, painfully reminded of Bryan Adams’ Here I am, this is me… as a far cry upon my own predicament.

The beginning...

An extended healing phase robs you of involvement in the smallest of indulgences, prying open a can of disappointments in turn. As I am limping back to normal, literally, the thing I miss the most is lifting my daughter in air in an instinctive response to her elfish presence. Oh! How terribly I miss holding her in my arms when I ask her to get up on the glass table or a dining chair for a jadu ki jhappi (a magical, healing embrace made popular by a cult of a movie Munnabhai MBBS in India). 

The other is gardening: The latest infatuation that has grown on her.

Now, gardening has always come packaged with family. My ageing dad has been doing this all his life I can remember. As kids, every summer we would be in New Delhi for vacations, we would return to find the brahma sthal (open porch in the centre of a house) on the first floor covered under a canopy of creepers and lettuce while a beard grew unattended on his sun-tanned face; and my mother-in-law who’s his age, has the only space of green in entire colony lost in an abominable admiration for concrete. Her house, a small dwelling with two bedrooms neatly tucked on the ground floor is just half a mile from ours. It has this huge spread of lawn, which has inevitably become the landmark for strangers who ask for one before arriving at her place. “Number 17; the house with a lawn,” is how we guide them. And, no. Not all people are Google-friendly to map their path to precision in this part of the world. 

This is where irony sets about to kill itself in a fit of murderous rage. In spite, of such a legacy, I owe the germ of gardening sprouting in my kid to – let me take deep breath – the smart phone. Yes. Of all things! There’s this addictive game, Plant vs Zombies, shipped by Hewlett-Packard with their all-in-one desktop, which essentially is like a flat TV minus the boxy CPU. The game itself is built around this bunch of “cutie plants”, a garden and a house. Then, there are zombies that leap towards the plants to enter your home beyond, which you must prevent because they would eat your brains. It’s devoid of any cutting edge graphics and is actually an arcade tower game that tells a story in simple detail. One of the film critics I read on the IMDb hailed the original Paranormal Activity as a basement film that went on to shame the Hollywood biggies at the box office. Plants vs Zombies is essentially the basement game that has gone viral and has since reproduced more successful, but inconsolably tiring versions. Pretty soon it leaped from our desktop to the Google Playstore from where it made its way into our smart phones and infected our minds. 

3 weeks later. The Colin bottle is on the extreme left!

I don’t recollect when it caught my daughter by her imagination, but she is now adept enough to beat me in the initial levels of this strategy game.  In one of our many playtimes, she was a little perturbed to see the zombies chipping away at human brains without remorse. These were hard times, when we lost the war; our plants failing to defend their territory leading to an abysmal fate. In one of these somber moments, my daughter asked if zombies were for real. “Will they eat us too?” she asked. I wasn’t stumped at all, as I had been waiting for some time to find this query lobbed my way. “Never,” I calmed her, “Remember? Zombies aren’t for real.” The six-yr-old wasn’t convinced yet. I could make it out from her big eyes trained on me, looking for more. “Like your Winx Club girls and their monsters, and Doraemon. Are they around?” Her head went sideways in a calibrated motion and then those lips stretched up to the cheeks in the wondrous realization.  

She still fears the zombies and kills me with that Eh-Tu-Brutus look every time one of these brain-eating dead-heads wins the round. But the “cutie plants”, she carried them from the digital world to ours, in her head without notifying us. Somewhere, she realized that plants are friends to grow as she did in the game: Planting them, caring for them, giving enough suns for them to grow their special powers and fight those lousy meat-bags. But her actual rendezvous with a plant in real would have to wait. 

A week before I hit the bed, my friend from Delhi visited me with his parents. It was an overnight stay when his mother – a gregarious woman with an appetite for caring at the risk of self-neglect – was in a chance banter introduced to my kid’s fancy for plants. We didn’t have any in our apartment. She did. Before leaving the next day, she lavished her with a generous parting gift – some green, to buy some greenery. 

It’s been close to a month now. Every noon, after her school, I would find my beavering girl besides the seven trophies baked out of mud. Two of the pots have a bushy growth of tomato plants, two others have the orca sprouting, one of them has onions teasing us with their green antenna, while two others have the roses. I remember overcoming my anxiety at the complete soiling of my car’s boot with the mud from the pots the day they were brought home. I had arranged them and seeded them, watered and shaded them. Not anymore. I can’t bend over to feel the pots, nor can I water them. Ah! The casualty of little indulgences. But, when I see my daughter taking a used-up Colin bottle to water the plants and asking me if it’s enough, my pain is far better reasoned into submission than any of the pain killers would ever manage to.     

When Barbie died at our home

First, there were those spam mails. Then, came the calls. Became a part of our everyday chore as we learnt to live with them. Evolution, I guess. We adapt. Since the past two days, however, my satellite TV execs have displayed a terrifying over-zealousness in pushing me to renew my subscription, which, incidentally, expires today. They littered my inbox, spammed my television with alerts and then tested my patience with calls from multiple landlines, which of course my phone identified as spam for me to block them in time. Bloody smart phones, these! 

Remains of the day: Barbie dinner plate

As in most homes with kids my daughter’s age – couple of more months and she would be six – television has mostly been a highly solicited, but equally muted alibi to quick-fix parenthood. The TV comes alive every morning when she is getting ready for school. It counsels her into having her lunch on return, and is a merry accompaniment while she is at her schoolwork towards the evenings. This is where it gets interesting. Her engagement with the TV is close to being a nil. It’s like her granny who she loves unequivocally, but chooses to ignore her high-decibel references to mannerisms every time she flirts with uncouthness.  

Today, first thing in the morning, she asked if the TV would be available? “Available? No my child”, I chided and reminded her of the Doraemon pulling off his antics to an uninterested audience or Winx Club girls fighting their own epic battles as the beholder lay busy with the mundane outside of the 30-inch glass panel.  The decision was deliberate. No one was watching TV at home, just switching it on only for its sake. Occasionally, I would pamper my appetite for movies in the late night shows, when cable guys would mischievously slot the junk or the reruns to exact revenge on the hopeless viewer. Worst (Or the best) my daughter, too, had outgrown the stupid box. So, I decided to not have TV for sometime. Let’s find out, I told myself.  

“But why?” she asked her eyebrows losing their linear position to arch into a bushy angry-bird frown. “Winx girls have received new powers. They will use it against the monsters,” she persuaded her case. The effect wasn’t obligatory. “But didn’t you say they were replaying old episodes, my dear?” I reminded her gently wishing she would continue to engage with her sparring partner. She didn’t. Yet, she didn’t seem disappointed. She immediately guided me to fighting the next wave of zombies in the Plant vs Zombies game. “Let’s play the endless game. Ok?” she asked. I declined. The mobile battery had discharged substantially and needed an electrical boost. So, she understood. She was convinced without much persuasion or connivance. I was convinced she had grown up.

Not long back, she wouldn’t leave her bevy of Barbie dolls for anything. The TV was still there, playing out her favourite toons. I have even written a blog on how she identified her mom with Doraemon as Dorae-mom – the giver of all things good. But her eyes were only for these unreal, mannequin-ish blondes that are packaged as a girl’s best friend. She is still left with more than a dozen, I believe, of these dolls. Some of them continue to remain in a single piece. The unfortunate others, were mutilated, de-robed and left to sulk in isolation. She would bathe them, take them out for shopping and recreate her own Winx Club stories to snuggle in the Barbies into different roles of her pick.  She brought every version of the doll. A solitary Barbie did not suffice the span of her imagination at play. So, she had me invest in her wardrobe, bathroom, mall and kitchen. She even got me to colour her doll’s hair. Then, she had Barbie bag, bottle, stationery and even her dinner plate; all of course in Pink.

The first signs of Barbie fatigue started setting in when she was around 5. She started to venture into puzzles and board games. Mind you, they were still Barbie puzzles and Barbie games, but she was merrily distracted. Slowly, my wife and I veered her more towards the games and crafts in a deliberate attempt to rid her of the obsessive fetish for the lifeless doll. We didn’t have to push hard. Just a gentle nudge was enough to reason her into seeing a whole new world of toys that were equally, if not more, engaging and rewarding.   

That fascination is now all gone. Poof! I remember having dad-daughter fights on those rare occasions when she would insist on taking more barbies off the shelf than she could handle and I could pay for without flinching. The dolls, now, lie in an old school bag in a far corner of the lowest shelf of her wardrobe. Buried! When I look at the money spent – Oh! These dolls have a price tag, trust me – I vacillate between the failing thought of what a waste and the genial nag of worth the investment.

My daughter doesn’t ask for Barbie any more. In fact, every time she drags me into a toy store she makes it a point to tell me, “Baba, I don’t need a Barbie,” and furthers her argument with a definitive, “Trust me.”  

I can hear the “Trust me” echo in our TV talk aleady. The distraction has already set in. TV is the mute spectator. Laptop is her new cake and Frozen (the Disney film) is its icing. I can’t even come to imagine giving away those dolls to some child when we have given away so much of her childhood to others. Too many memories, I guess. I didn’t have a colour television till I was in college. She’s already lived that experience and moved on!