Playing with mumi and reading Chesterton

Minal and Vikram (thanks again!) gave a pack of cards and we have since played with them enough to ensure that most of them (other than the jokers) are pale avatars of their original self. That was the evening cards and games kind of made a re-entry in life. 

Games

Cards I used to play in younger days and they had an association with summer holidays. This association was akin to one which today walking has with rains – both when independent are welcome but when together they, for some reason, increase the fun many fold. Games played alone, in teams and those like ‘Judgement’ where one played independently and kept track of the points. 

"Jenga distorted" by Guma89 - Own work. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jenga_distorted.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Jenga_distorted.jpg

Jenga was fresh for me when I saw it at Minal and Vikram’s place, that very evening. What I recall from that evening is what had appeared impossible or near impossible was achieved after some minutes and in most cases by the youngest one present! That feel of playing with wood as opposed to plastic and the sound the pieces made as they fell one over other was like drinking fresh limbu paani as opposed to you know what. Talking of Jenga with friends did not help, there were nods which I did not comprehend. After a few months saw it by chance at a shop (don’t recall why we went there) and picked it up. All good things in life, as a friend says, happen by chance.

Connect Four has memories of lovely evenings with dadi. Learning from her during initial days and later on winning with regularity; and the fun of chatting in either phase. I got it, some time back, for a young member of a friend’s family and realized that I need to pick one for me as well. This happened a few months back and Connect Four followed the other 2 ‘games’.

Playing with mumi

During past couple of years have indulged in these games, with mumi, with a fervour that one reserves for ‘playing’.  This has helped me put in time with mumi. Time I did not get as I was based at and loitering in Meghalaya and Mizoram. Time to play silently (with or without music), time to be away from the dreadful television characters (and advertisements) and time to talk.

As we play together we chat nonsense, talk of days we shared, of those – near and dear - we lost together, of joys in simple actions, of food we would like to have the next day, of walks we could go for in the evening, books we are then reading or articles we enjoyed, of nothing and anything.

These games at times are the actions we take up together or the activity what we look forward to; with tea, after dinner and any other time. The more I play I realize that joy perhaps is these moments and life is simpler than we – many a time - make it out to be. And wonder why did I stop playing these in the first place?

Chesterton

Have been catching up on reading and G K Chesterton it was last month. Few essays from school text books leave such a mark as did Chesteron’s ‘A Piece of Chalk’. It’s amazing take on white is still fresh in one’s mind “that white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so to speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows white-hot, it draws stars.” 

Years later his collections of essays on Father Brown took me to the inns in Europe - wet from outside and spooky from inside – as I lay on my bed in cloudy and wet Saiha (Mizoram), many a time with beauty of a candle trying to peep into the pages with me. Till I read and re read Father Brown I was of the opinion that in the realm of short stories, of the detective kind, Arthur Conan Doyle was the moon and others stars and that it was only O Henry when it came to creating a scene, a world within a short story that had pages less than fingers on ones hand.

In his essay ‘The Toy Theatre’ (Selected Essays, G K Chesterton (Complete and Unabridged), Wilco Publishing House, 2011) Chesterton talks of playing with toys like only he could. His ability to draw analogies that appear uncommon but smell of common sense, to put in place a combination of words that bring out the starkness which amazes one page after page, to laugh at himself and his relevance today are apparent in these lines. Some lines (unconnected) from the essay follow.

There is only one reason why all grown up people do not play with toys: and it is a fair reason. The reason is that playing with toys takes up so very much more time and trouble and anything else. Playing as children mean playing is the most serious thing in the world.

We have enough strength for politics and commerce and art and philosophy – we have not enough strength for play.

The point is that the man writing on motherhood is merely an educationalist; the child playing with a doll is a mother. Take the case of soldiers. A man writing an article on military strategy is simply a man writing an article; a horrid sight. But a boy making a campaign with tin soldiers is like a general making a campaign with live soldiers.

Broadly then, what keeps adults from joining in children’s games is, generally speaking, not that they have no pleasure in them; it is simply that they have no leisure for them. It is that they cannot afford the expenditure of toil and time and consideration for so grand and grave a scheme.