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!