G-dad

We drifted apart once my brothers and I grew older. From seeing each other every week to once every fortnight and then once a month.

For a big part of our lives, we never saw you because you were still working as a cab driver and sometimes when we visited you, you were never there.

Till later when you fell ill and couldn’t drive anymore. We made a point to visit you more often, to remind the stubborn you to eat healthy and take your medicine. But you were never going to give up your favourite food were you? Which was pretty much a wide range of unhealthy foods.

As your health deteriorated, I was puzzled with one thing. Your wife, who has been complaining to us about you since the age we were old enough to understand her. Yet she always stood by you, always.

Brothers

In a recipe, ingredients can be carefully chosen and steps be carefully replicated to produce a desired outcome of a dish, but the same can’t be said about raising children. This important phase in Life involves more than hand picked ingredients and steps. The worse part is, unlike cooking there’s no classes to prepare you for the real thing. No Tv Shows like “Yan can’t cook, so can you!”

Amazingly, some do it like they have done it before. Without practice and some coaching, some have managed to do it quite well. Albeit using unorthodox methods.

Guess you could call my family, a semi transformational modern family. English speaking, traditional, yet with a little mix of the West.

Brought up by a Mother with rich maternal instincts with a lack of words and a Chauvinistic yet humble Father who constantly stress on family ties, three brothers manage to grow up to become three very different people yet deeply rooted to our teachings. Though close, never the family who would spout words of affection to one another. Poor mom has to suffer in the hands of insensitive chauvinistic men and plead for the occasion goodbye kiss or hug.

Scars

If collecting stamps is a hobby, is collecting scars one too? While not exactly a hobby you would want to list down in your resume, or share with your date I can guarantee it to be an interesting lifelong affair.

Scars are a permanent imprint on your body to remind you of a certain time when you couldn’t control an itch, were careless, didn’t listen to advice or was just plain mad.

I don’t know about you, but I seem to remember the origin of most of my scars. Good thing about that is I don’t have to stick a post-it on every scar to help me recall and it doesn’t bug me as much when I can’t recall where it came from, unlike a song that you can’t remember the title of.