Imaginch in hinterland 3 - the su do ku solution

Nobody in the right sense will understand that Imaginch means well but puts across badly. The other day a neighbour brought hot “vadas” and his daughter served it in gravy, all to make him taste the good thing, in style. Imaginch saw the proffered dish in a porcelain cup. As he ladled it up with a spoon, a thought struck him. Thinking that it will sound funny, he blurted out aloud “the vadas look like a pair of buffaloes floating in a pond” . It did not occur to him that this wisecrack might be audible up to the house of the neighbour. Worried about the neighbourly relation, his wife and daughter took cudgels against him with a sermon on etiquette and civil nicety. Secretly he cursed himself for the lack of ‘timing’.

The very next day the daughter came under the scanner of Imaginch’s wife. It happened because of a phone call alerting them to watch an episode on cooking and the daughter dutifully passed on that important information.  In the meanwhile, a burning smell emanated from the kitchen and must have reached her before Imaginch’s blocked nostrils could get to work on identifying the cause for that strange smell. Looking over the laptop and in a hurried voice cautioned her mother that something is cooking on the gas range.

Though, he was a standing joke in the house as a person with perennial cold and selective deafness, this epithet acted a shield from adding any addendum to his daughter’s comment.  At other times the same epithet had landed him in verbal duels with almost all the family members who never failed to exhibit unity to find a fault to a fight.  He had this axe to grind with the wife – “When others come under her scanner why single out me for the hammer and tongs?”  At these times, he nostalgically recalled the many ‘episode’ battles he had fought with his daughter or daughter-in-law to wriggle out of the present he-made-mess. May be one day this nagging question might slip out, as always at the wrong time, inviting further wrath.

Wanting to become a crossword buff, Imaginch spent his spare time (idle time  as per the family) in solving the clues, every day. Never in the habit of allowing others to teach or guide him, he patiently tried to unlock the clues all by himself. At the end of the attempt, the finished grid looked  like a patch on the bald man’s pate – a word here and there and no more. He became to be called sarcastically ‘the Vikramaditya of daily crossword” for his unflinching attempts. Disturbances at these times annoyed him and he usually came out with oblique statements only to get stung, like a person putting his hands in the beehive searching for honey. Only he forgot about the honey bees whose store he was to get at.

As it happens many times he missed the obvious – the number game su do ku appearing alongside the daily crossword. His wife has been using this to ward off afternoon beauty sleeps.  At these times even the usual bickering took the back seat. Slowly, the daughters also picked up this format to spend time in contemplation on which number should come where. The casual manner in which they slipped in to silence and peace suddenly appeared to be the viable solution and strategy to raise one more white flag in the house.  Imaginch plunged headlong, literally, in to the number game not before causing a disturbance in the household – a reason to fight over the newspapers and the su do ku appearing in them. He turned to a star power column to see what the stars are predicting and regretted reading “more of the same in the week to follow”.

Hand drawn squares were used and pencils and erasers had a field day, as three or four of the members vied with one another to complete their su do ku assignment first.  Light hearted banter, which once was the nucleus for starting a small scale battle, found willing persons to be the butt of a joke.  Even Imaginch could get away, after evoking a good laugh, with his witty ‘one liners’, timed to perfection, during these times. It helped to lift the veils on pent-up emotions. The family members started looking at Imaginch in a new light as a humorous person.

But for him it was different – he had to conjure up witty remarks and at the same time compete with them in solving a set of papers. Every day it was the same Vikramaditya story but he was determined to conquer the magic square at least once in his life time without extensively resorting to the “redo” routine.  He found time, while doing his paper work, to offer valuable suggestions on how to solve a particular diagram. More often than not, it ended up in the same number staring at each other from top & bottom and left & right of a column and row respectively. The withering looks of irate members of the family did not deter him in making another attempt on another day!

In this process he even came out with philosophical jottings:

“Thinking on behalf of others, without thinking about the consequences, would be dangerous and liable to attract blame in case of a failure because it needs a scape-goat”.

“The best example for selfless sacrifice is not the candle anymore. It has been replaced by a better candidate, in fact, candidates. The paper, pencil and eraser! By simultaneously sharing the burden of sacrifice are they not hinting at the benefits of spreading the joy of sacrifice? Are they not pointing it out that liberation is a co-operative affair and penance in isolation is intimidating?”

In the end,    he was happy to have found a novel method to keep the flag of peace flying – vive la su do ku. At this stage,  his  imaginative mind  took over and found a simple trick to keep the family members engrossed in su do ku as long as possible in a day – he created new 9 X 9 from already solved puzzles with the help of old newspapers. He added enough twist such that the puzzles were tougher than the toughest. How he did? It is a secret which he never allowed the family’s su do ku lovers to know. He knew he had an ironclad insurance policy as long as the secret remained so!

Imaginch in hinterland - part 2 : nOTHING WORKS

That scientific minded friend might have managed to rub some inquisitiveness on to Imaginch’s grey cells. He too started to look at things differently with the eyes of a quick fix mechanic. Eager to get his skills flowing, he raided in to the junk boxes of son, daughter and whatever bits and pieces of broken toys left behind by the grandchildren, after their periodic visits. The specially labelled carton box, actually the one that came along with the new microwave oven, got filled to the brim in no time.

Imaginch categorised them as metal & plastic - toys, curios, sprayers and defunct measuring & musical instruments. To these items, he added plastic & metal wheels, tubes, washers, thin metal strips, screws and other cannibalised parts - out of his own secret cache.  He spent a little time to assess the condition of toys and type of repairs needed.  To set up his one-stop repair shop, he decided that only the adhesives that are capable of bonding anything to everything was the solution. That was when he heard the serious objections from the home front. Objections – yes, he could take them at any time but not the riders - ‘are you good at anything?’, ‘anybody wants these things now?’ etc that came along.

Really he had no answers to the riders but if he had ventured to reply that he was trying to learn the art of mending broken things, his enthusiasm to breathe new life in to these crippled inanimate objects would have died then and there. He opted to remain silent, waiting for the home office to retreat in to her enclave. Like ships finding a safe harbour to ride out a storm, the carton box got pushed under the bed, for the day! For company he shoved his tool kit also along with it.

When the bug bites, Imaginch goes on an overdrive. The next morning, he held a closed door meeting with the items requiring band-aids, splints and surgery. Though averse to anything even remotely connected with the word ‘medicine’, he enjoyed naming levels of his repair programme as 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree – the medical speak to describe the severity of burn injury. He did not hesitate to borrow these medical terms as they did not demand a consulting fee.

Choosing a car with two missing wheels, he laid it on the table to get in to its character. He looked at it from different angles as a painter would inspect the canvas on the easel. The replacement he had in mind was actually discarded caps from a shampoo and hair oil container and that did not deter him at all. They resembled like wheels and that was good enough for him and the substitutes had a very good plus points going in their favour - the cannibalised caps were identical in dimensions to the missing wheels. The catch was that the plastic caps did not have an orifice hole at the center to receive the axle rod.

Though he has heard about computerised wheel alignment process, how to circumvent this technical snag, of non-existing wheel center, raced in his mind for a solution.  He knew the success or failure of repair depended on one ingenious idea. He rummaged in his collections and came up with plastic inserts, which slid inside the inner hollow space of the caps exactly like a cylinder and piston. And each of them had a central hole, solving his problem! Imaginch was overwhelmed by these lucky breaks, in the beginning stages of his maiden attempt.He positioned the car on its side, over the mouth of glass bottles, as wheels to be fixed were on opposite sides and ends of the chassis. As nearly as possible he ensured the axle center coincided with wheel center and completed bonding of the wheel at the top side. Repeating the process he fixed the other wheel at the bottom side of the car. To keep these wheels undisturbed, he built a stable platform by placing a plastic scale atop a bottle, under each wheel.

The manufacturer of the glue had prescribed “24 hours to full bond strength” and he muttered to himself, “Am prepared to wait a little longer too”! And in the same breath, he thanked his hobby for collecting bottles of different sizes and shapes. A wave of pride rose and congratulated him on the homely improvisation - a makeshift hydraulic platform to rest the automobile during its convalescence after repair. He built a barricade around the car to prevent someone from accidentally knocking it down from its lofty perch.

Imaginch felt elated at the thought that his ‘fixing operations’ could be completed without spilling the glue on any of the utility furniture. He was only well aware of the repercussions which would have engulfed him like tsunami waves – initiated by his better half and ably assisted by her sister, who was on a sojourn. With a loving final glance for the day, Imaginch closed the doors and retired to bed hoping to see in his `dreams, the joyous faces of the grand children who were expected to descend on the house any time the next day!

With the morning sun, he rose and went straight away to inspect the repaired toy. After spending a few thoughtful minutes, he gingerly took it in his hands and gently set it on the table. The first check revealed that the bonded wheels had some reservation to roll over the table top. At certain part of the revolution, they appeared to stand on their toes, as if to decide what to do next. Even this ‘goose stepping’ was not done in unison. Each one did it twice in a revolution at different a different interval. He realised his fault in assuming that the caps he had used must be cylindrical in shape. But for some reason the designer had fancied an elliptical shape at the closing end of the caps. Swallowing his disappointment and pride, he proceeded to take the car through its normal routines it had been performing before its imprisonment in the junk box.

The children and grandchildren arrived. Disappointing him, they all trooped in to the kitchen to enquire about the waiting menu. The home front, exuding warmth and smiles all around, started dishing out the delicacies with some homilies. He could not understand - when he dished out such homilies, why all of them fled the scene?  The feast on the taste buds made everyone to forget about Imaginch. The loud discussion about “who was on whatsApp and face book and what recent videos they have shared” interested him in the least. With people having nothing substantive to share around, he thought it would be better to do a vanishing act. He seriously thought about taking a walk in the park or drop in to a friend’s house. Instead, he strode in to the bedroom feeling like a giant bird with sparrow’s wings.

A good three hours elapsed before the grandchildren came to say ‘a hello’ to him. Normally, Imaginch would have ignored them for the indifference they have shown but what came in between them and the wall of anger was his eagerness to present the repaired toy in working condition. Without waiting for a green signal from them, he proceeded with a live demonstration.  At the end of the road show, he expected words of appreciation mixed with a little admiration and awe. He misread their silence as attempts to search for suitable expressions to describe their ‘live’ experience!


The number one said, “Oh, no. You have changed our car in to a reptile. Instead of racing, it is lifting the left front wheel and then the right rear wheel sequentially, like a chameleon!”

The number two was little imaginative and said, “If only you had the front wheels missing, we might have had the pleasure of watching a frog race!”

The numbers three and four were more direct in their approach; they walked out without uttering even a murmur.

Sitting by the side of the orphaned toy, Imaginch concluded: in his land nothing works to his satisfaction or for that matter to anybody’s satisfaction. At this moment he is preoccupied with the thought: “when to roll down the shutters?”