Land of Lilliputians

It is about a donkey who decides to reinvent himself. Just when his master writes him off as too old and good-for-nothing, the donkey plans a career change,” I tell the Lilliputians who ask me what I find so interesting about a particular Grimm’s fairy tale. The expressions on their faces tell me I haven’t been able to convincingly convey my immense admiration for the story. I try again. “It is about a donkey with high self esteem and the courage of his convictions. It is about friendship. It is about how our own fears can transform shadows into hideous goblins, so a cat becomes a witch, a dog  becomes a man with a knife, a donkey becomes a black monster, a good old rooster becomes a devil whose simple crowing is heard as ‘throw the rascal up there’ and so on.” Very intelligent listeners that they are, they manage to cull out a few useful words from my largely unintelligible account of ‘The Travelling Musicians.’ “So it’s about a donkey, a cat, a dog, and a rooste...

“Again my yellow bowl! Why you always take my bowl, and you are always eating cereal,” says Omar in a voice that’s higher and shriller with both anger and exasperation. “I like your bowl. Cereal is my comfort food.” Omar is not interested in knowing how I deal with my emotional and spiritual lows. And he is possessive about his cereal bowl. “Can’t you eat in another bowl? Take the green one.” “Eating in your bowl makes me feel like Goldilocks,” I tell him. My penchant for occasionally living out my life in fairy tales never fails to evoke Omar’s admiration. And now I have his attention. “And I am the baby bear,” he laughs with a flash of recognition in eyes.   “Yes. But we are friends. Goldilocks ran away in the end instead of making friends with the baby bear. They could have had so much fun together,” I voice my primordial issues with Goldilocks. Omar thinks for a while and nods his head in agreement. “But why did she run away? Why didn’t she ask t...

Roseee is a whimsical cat. For some reason, she has decided to adopt the land of Lilliputians as her home. Roseee was wooed the way stray cats ought to be befriended: with milk and butter. It was her skeletal look that made us want to fatten her up. Real fast. Perhaps all our milk-butter maneuvers touched a chord in her heart, perhaps she really likes us. The rather unimaginative name, Roseee, stuck to her because Roshan's Baba uttered the word and she lifted her green eyes, looked at us disarmingly. Writing her name with three eee is my way of making the name extra special. But in my hyperbolic imaginative way, I also like to think that the name, Roseee, has a deeper meaning. The etymology of Roseee can be traced back to the word rose, the rose scent is elusive, roseee the cat is elusive, too. We can’t hold on to her, she likes her independence.  There is also something royal about the name. It was Nur Jehan the queen who accidentally discovered rose essence when sh...