A Successful Failure

It was a nice warm summer evening and I was sitting quietly in my house’s veranda. It had been a long day with little activity but now it was more than an hour that I had been sitting here and working on this old specimen still present in my house. Though my work was a bit engrossing but I couldn’t keep myself from seeing all sort of beautiful colours of spectrum presented by the nature. The sky had turned from blue to orange to pinkish red and was now slowly getting a purple tinge to its shade. The fiery sun was done with his wrath and was now running out of his fuel for the day, so the people had now started coming out of their homes. Otherwise it had been very quiet except for the sweet melodious chirruping of birds often harmonized by the cooing of pigeons and also the occasional, though now getting more frequent, cool breezes with leaves waving as if dancing after the whole day austere ascesis. When suddenly my mother came with a completely pale terrified face. Her eyes had a queer familiar fear, her expressions were frozen and her lips trembled as she screamed “murder! Another innocent cold bloodedly murdered”. Screw driver slipped from my hand as I drew off my eyes from the victim machine that I had opened. I have been in this habit right from my childhood when I used to sever my toys, if not by mechanical tools then by brute force, and many other small things like torch and clocks, and now that I had been in the engineering college, this hobby of mine was getting a mania with my recent few major victims being a calculator, an old tape-recorder, computer monitor and the kitchen grinder and this time it was a CD player. My mother calls it a ‘cold blooded murder’, of course it might be to her but it was definitely not innocent. First it had stopped working properly it was only then that I destroyed, err opened it up in order to treat it but often after my treatments it becomes almost impossible for even a mechanic to treat these gadgets. I tried to calm down and console my mother after all being in IIT for all these years had taught me how to properly say ‘just chill’. I also told her that now being a half engineer I could easily treat this CD player but she being aware and confident of my failure rate with these machines didn’t settle. In fact earlier she used to call me engineer though I was not and used to wreck these machines more severely but now despite of my being into a technical college, she had restrained herself from calling me even a mechanic and now calls me, as I have already told, a ‘murderer’ and that too cold blooded.

Well, when everything fails, it’s the knowledge that dominates. Knowing that it was difficult to calm her down, I started a vulgar show of my technical knowledge from engineering terminology to various physical laws that may not have even a remotest connection with this poor CD player. I told her Newton’s law of gravitation, Darwin’s theory of evolution and even didn’t hesitate in stating Einstein’s E=mC² (God may know the connection). The sari clad simple serene lady who left her studies some twenty five years back and had a little knowledge about science and technology had to surrender in front of these complex abstruse jumble of words. But she was not disarmed. She had something that could change everything; she had a question that I couldn’t answer. She asked me about where was the lighter with which I was playing the last night. The kitchen lighter was out of tune for the last few days and the night before when everybody had slept I silently ransacked it from the kitchen and brought it to my room and just like today had planned to return it back to its position unnoticed. But God knows how did she sense it or was it just her guess. I didn’t know, nor did I have courage to confirm it. But anyway she knew it as she always knows but she never complained to my father, though we had little to spare. She loved me and I knew that.

This reality about the lighter was a shock to me and I knew that the lighter was not in a shape to be returned back but I still had the strength to maintain my sophistication. I shouted “Eureka! See that’s the problem in the CD player, but now I have corrected it” and to my surprise I succeeded at least in driving her attention away from that traitor lighter and finally she had some settlement on her face as she looked hopefully towards me as I repack the CD player. It reminded me of one of my tutorial professor who knowing that we can’t solve the problems and ultimately he himself would have to solve them, looked at us with hope as we drew some cartoons in our register. I wonder where does all this hope come from. Whatever be the source, I was satisfied that she still had at least some faith left in my caliber and that there may be a chance to convince her even the next time. When I was done, I inserted a CD into the player and pressed the play button as she silently waited for the music. But before the CD player could produce some music, I broke the silence and said “mummy, lets buy an iPod”.