Paapi
‘Our
house is infested by females’, as per Baba. ‘House is infested by bugs, bees
and lizards’, as per us. Mummy fought to keep the house as clean as she could. An occasional sighting of a mini or a mega cockroach could be handled by
hitting it with full force with a tinkai
walla jharoo.
We
rarely bothered Baba with these issues. But a random sighting of a bug as
beautiful as a moth would have all of us running around like headless chickens:
same was true about wasps that were a plenty in our Jamshoro place. On such
occasions, Mummy would sit expressionless and mum. Baba would try to ignore the
four of us for the longest time and only on our persistent cries for help would he budge and try to show the bug a way out. Baba obviously detested this task but
he would do it so that sanity would prevail again.
Ours
was a quiet house - only girls, all students, and a mother and a father engrossed in
teaching and writing respectively. In such a house, entry of a creature that had to be killed
by Baba used to bring on an upheaval. We would be traumatized and Baba would grudgingly
squash the bug with our instructions about how to go about it. On such
occasions, he would revert back to the language of his childhood and call us paapi. In our trauma on encounter with
the bug, we would start laughing at Baba’s constant grumbling about our paap.
To
date, right after taking care of a bug, I loudly call myself paapi.
Romana Shaikh (Brohi)
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