He paused for a while as though to recover from the shock of his recollection.
“I told you that after the grief of the garden, for a hobby, I turned to the collection of cinema handbills distributed to announce new releases,” he continued. “What a pleasure it was to gather more of the same on the sly and how we used to prize the booty though it was of poor quality with an occasional color pamphlet being a bonus; but that Bhookailash one on a craft paper was a dream come true. That Sunday, as my father was in siesta, I was at rejoicing my collection before I lost myself to the Bhookailash thing. Can you imagine what followed? I was rudely jolted when my father snatched it from me accusing me of a premature interest in the female form for he mistook that I was fantasizing about the heroine. Sharing his discovery with my mother, he tore it into pieces and began thrashing me as if to drive the devil of sex out of my head; well I was not even twelve then and apparently he had seen it all through his adult eyes. Whatever, I cried more for the pain of its ruin than the plight of my back that bore the brunt of his beatings; and with that loss, I lost interest in the rest, and gave up the hobby itself.”
“Some psychology of sex should help today’s boys who become tomorrow’s fathers.”
“You have a point there,” he said. “Maybe sensing the propensity of my destiny, disappointment chose me to be its abiding partner. As life would have it, in time, one of my uncles came close to marrying the Bhookailashheroine, whom my dad thought I had been ogling that noon; could he have ever imagined such a turn of events then? It’s another matter that my maternal grandfather’s view that ‘once an actress always an actress’ made my uncle give up on her. Maybe, he was right that with an actress wife, as he felt, one would never know when she was genuinely affectionate or righteously indignant for she can affect either emotion with consummate ease. Better it’s left for men who marry actresses, nay actors as is the norm, though without casting aspersions on their sexual straightness, to say whether life for them becomes make-believe or not.”
“If all carry their character to the office, may be the actors bring home their professional skills.”
“I would’ve known about it had not my uncle backtracked but to my dad’s jaundiced eye, the genuineness of one my sisters seemed to him as a put on one occasion.”