My Word! (Part II)

My ad hoc role continued with mum's hair. Peeking greys with surmountable audacity to call on my eye. A quarterly regime for mum and her azure box of DIY hair colour, framed with the familiar face of an attractive brunette, both waiting expectantly for me.

Calling on my sister - nobody did that - was homicidal backlash, and on my brother, it was as good as the question could get: Could you do mum's hair? ceased continuation. Sometimes, he concluded with a trail of feigned merry singsong and the odd fart to further prove his point.

A few weeks ago, my siblings were all housed in the living room. They orbited mum and I when my hands started to work on her hair; using cheap plastic gloves which chafed my crinkly palms. The appendage, a mini hairbrush which was attached to the bottle of hair colour was as useful as forking melted butter.

The brother snickered and did countless monologues. Incoherent and wilful, in words and actions. His irreverent take on middle-aged woman's coiffure extended to the fungal shape -rotundly convexed - of mushrooms. Mum heard him but she couldn't care less as I worked on a new section of greying patc.

The sister remarked that my colouring skills was exquisitely painful to watch. It burlesqued my dad's dogged grace; to remove his recalcitrant bunion with a dainty clipper. Mum looked on without a word, probably on a prairie bemoaning why she couldn't look as chic as women with salt and pepper hair, like Diane Keaton. Or, our next door neighbour, who didn't look like Diane Keaton, but who had the self-assurance not to do something to her greying crown. Mum had the self-assurance too, but she just needed a little bit more, like hair paint.

My Word! (Part I)

Dad signed a no-holds barred agreement with Old Nick to contrive a plot on his daughter: Yield to my verbose requests lest you be cut off from my inheritance - coffee beans to last you a lifetime.


Dad has always been a man of words. Limpid, concise and sometimes under unforeseen development, the archaic ones. Dad's insatiable digging of words implicate me. I become his ad hoc tutor.

Dad wants his newly collected words - via the exalted news anchor folks on telly - to be attended, specifically by me, to diagnose and prescribe.

Cruelly, under his fancy request, I have to try my best to translate word for word in my mother tongue. Dad is marginally Anglophilia (linguistically). My manageable mother tongue is unable to yield the optimal result for dad. I always suspect him giving me mistrustful side looks, whenever I failed to deliver his routine wide-eyed requests.

Armed with a pen and an array of Post It sized scraps/bared backs of lottery receipts/old school jotter books (curled on the sides worked to a sallow brown), dad is so aptly supplied.

Tritely, I am the family's mobile-dictionary. Albeit my maladroitness at times, I have to rise to the occasion for the word-guests, conjured through dad's brimming hospitality. Bundled under his eager tongue, the scary word/sentence crowd somersault, mangle and spit their way out.

There is no fire escape from dad and his unforeseeable guests. Wiggling through wit and cunningness, my attempted run-offs are often ferreted by mum's feral instincts. Mum rarely interfered unless she senses my threading on thin ice with dad: Feigned taciturnity. Dad would know, when he has been cold-shouldered - analogous to a driver cutting across your lane laced with the finger. I am that driver in this case.

To be continued......