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......