Overkill

When you like someone or a thing, don’t like it too much. It will be overkill. Hold back. Not my belief. Ponnu’s advice.

I don’t quite understand what Ponnu is saying. When you like someone or a thing, you just go on liking, or don’t you? You like and you make that liking apparent. Hold back? Whatever for?! Ponnu says, “To make that liking last.” Sounded like the echo of an oh-so-long-ago lecture from the economics professor in college on diminishing returns.

I don’t want to dwell on whether Ponnu is right or I am right. I like to make my liking apparent -- to a book, a piece of music, a person and even food. If I want to eat a particular chocolate now; I indulge it. No nibbling on a small piece and then craving for it later. Or better still, no nibbling and being satiated with that.

I ask Ponnu to download songs that are my favourite and I listen to them on my iPod. After a few minutes of seeing me hear it, she will call out,`Which song are you listening to?” I say, “The same one you downloaded now.” She will go, “Oho! You are going to kill the desire for that song soon by listening to it so many times.” I say, “Better to kill it if it has to be, and move on to other things. Why go back to the same thing again and again, if you think it will be killed on that account alone?”

But I haven’t told Ponnu that no matter how many times I have told her, `I love you’ in a day or in the few years that she has been with me, I have never tired of saying it. I have never felt diminished love seeing her sleep curled up or on her back, or at times shaking her blanket-bound body and thinking it is her feet, only to find it is her shoulder for she turned 360 degrees in the night – and then waking her up saying, `Good Morning Princess. Wake up, it is morning already’. I look forward to doing this every day. It has not become a chore.

I have admonished her countless times and at others sulked, when she has refused to eat her breakfast and run off to college; and still continue doing that without giving up on my efforts or letting her `no time to eat now Ma,’ stop me from trying to get her to eat something.

The best time of the day is when we sit and talk of things that she likes or has caught her eye – be it a wooden earring that she bought from a vendor in the train to the coffee at her favourite roadside stall opposite her college – `You know Ma, that’s the best coffee in the world. You must try it once’. Then she will look at me again and say, `Don’t think just because Vishnu (the coffee guy) is selling it from a tapri (never heard that word before), it is no good’. I look forward to our conversations, even on those busy days when we just manage to have a few words in the night.

The dreams she weaves and lets me in on them –‘One day I will open a book shop and call it Serendipity. Hey Ma, what do you think of that name?’ Or that she wants to live on her own in the part of the city where the British architecture in the old buildings is `beautiful’. “Imagine Ma, living in an area steeped with history of that kind? What do you think; dad will let me stay there away from home on my own?” Countless conversations on the same topic with no definite answers, for these are her dreams, likes and loves. I haven’t got tired of hearing them.

Most days I am asked about my day and she remembers the details. Then on another day in the future when a name or a thing is mentioned, she will go, “But that person or thing was not nice to you, right?” I have to say, “I’ve changed my opinion now, or Things change, you know.” She nods then.

When I say I don’t agree with what she says, I am told, “You should not be judgmental.” We have our time-outs when we have diverse opinions on some matters and tell the other that this cannot be a point of conversation to continue just then.

Yet, I hear this oft-repeated line to me, “You should learn to hold back. Or it will be overkill”.

I will follow my heart. I love to like for the span that sustains itself. When it dies down, it will. It is meant to be, perhaps. I want to tell Ponnu that I have liked liking her, loving her since she was an idea in my thoughts without a gender. The feeling has remained; sometimes overwhelming and at others, grateful for this opportunity to be her mother. I know what will be her reply. “That’s because I am your child.” Aha! As if that alone is a reason for the intensity to sustain itself. On just this one occasion, I am tempted to say, “I know better, Ponnu’.