Imaginations. Or Not.

My parents sorely lack imagination. Their thoughts are centred on facts and their dreams are rooted in reality.

Funny they made me.

In one of his in-service trainings, my dad was asked to close his eyes and imagine a completely different life for himself. One of those irritating, time-consuming HR soft skills classes that are designed to throw you for a loop, sure, but he was at a loss. He did not know how to do it. So he closed his eyes and slept. He came back and said: we had a nap today. The story only came out when we pressed for more details because it seemed unlikely that a bunch of senior IPS officers would be gathered in a room mid-day and asked to take a nap.

My mother is no different. She hates people who play dead persons onscreen or onstage. Other than this aversion to playing dead people, she is a terror to watch movies with. She makes nasty side comments all throughout movies. God forbid if the actors cried. She gets really pissed when people act like they were sad when they were probably not. Or vice versa. Acting! she’d exclaim; all lies!

Last year, one quiet afternoon at home in Aizawl, I told them a story about stars and demons. They listened in captive silence for length. Then they asked me where this happened. I said I had not come up with the details concerning locations. They understood then that it was fiction that I had personally made up. They stared at me. I stared at them. We blinked once or twice. Wordlessly, they returned to their chores.

This is by no means an isolated event. One time, dad joined me for my morning walk along the North Khawbung road in Champhai. We reached a beautiful clearing from where we could see a jungle thicket. I remarked how very like a giant broccoli it looked. He stayed politely silent. He did not see it. Talk about failure to launch!

Or there was that time the pair of them saw an old, almost-dead jackfruit tree by the river Siang in Arunachal Pradesh. They made the driver stop the car. Together, they mused about how lonely the tree looked, how much joy it must surely have given so many people in its time, and now it was dilapidated and standing where only the sun would see it. They tried to weave poetic around it and compose a song. They failed. They just got back to the car and left.

I make a big deal out of this because the both of them are deeply religious and spiritual. Whatever difference between the two you want there to be. It is paradoxical to me that someone operating with that kind of faith system should lack imagination to this degree! Or maybe they just don’t want to indulge. Maybe the latter.

I think about myself in respect to them a lot. I live my life in my head and only return to reality when I must. Even so, even operating on such different systems, they’ve supported me swimming in fantasies and helped me build my library of fiction. Only last week they saw my moonwater and were baffled but they simply accepted it as a me thing. I think I still have a lot to learn from them.