abu & rabad

“What shall I do now, Pappa?” asked Abu.

In our house, this is usually code for, “Can I watch TV, Pappa.” Of course, he knows that watching too much TV is frowned upon, so he will not directly ask the question. Rather, he asks “What shall I do now.” And if I suggest any thing other than TV, he will say, “No, I don’t want to do that.”

In turn, we keep suggesting more and more non-TV / non-computer things for him to do, in the hope that he will will say “Yes” to one of them.

Anyway, today we started this ritual again:

“What shall I do now, Pappa?” asked Abu.

I definitely did not want to allow him to watch TV, so I asked,

“Do you want to play Monopoly?”

Even he must have gotten bored of saying “No” over and over again, so he got creative this time.

“Pappa,” he said, “in my mind, there is a game, with a circle around it, and a slanting line.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, so I asked him to explain. So, he said,

“Pappa, see. In my mind, there is the game Monopoly” – at this point he gestured in the air with his hands, drawing a square, and continued, “and around that game, there is a circle.” And he drew a big circle around the imaginary Monopoly he had just drawn. “And then there is a slash,” and he slashed the air, pretty much smashing the imaginary monopoly.

I believe, what he had in his mind, was this:

“That means, no Monopoly,” he explained.

So instead of playing Monopoly, or watching TV, we sat together, photoshopped the above image, and composed this blog post. Problem solved!

(By the way, the title of this post has been suggested by Abu. Also, he corrected some of the dialogue, “That’s not what I said, Pappa. I said … etc.“)