Operation Barbarossa - 6

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After retrieving the sharp blade, father inserted it gently into his 7 O'clock razor. The handle had to be screwed out, blade inserted into its groove squarely, and the handle screwed back in, neither too tight nor too loose...just so...

And he went about shaving his tough beard.

(That his beard was tough I got to know during his last days on this good earth. He was bedridden and no barber was willing to come home...they got lazy. Mandal took over and their daughters got cushy government as well as software jobs and their fathers turned truant...like me now...happily).

After taking his razor in his hands father pursed his lips and went about his job. 

And it was time to replace the blade into its butter paper. 

But not before drying it on his gamcha gently gently.

Of course the blade was prone to rusting...and father must have reused it till cows came home.

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This business of rusting of iron I got to see for myself at a tender age.

With all my elephantine memory for useless things, I just can't remember in what sort of plate I ate my grub in my childhood.

I recall that, when I was a toddler roaming around our home and its front and backyards, mother would follow me holding mashed rice mixed with dal in a silver bowl I must have got as a gift from my maternal uncle on my first birthday.

But thereafter my memory goes blank.

Father himself ate his food in a silver plate with flowery designs and a blob of fake gold at its center...he got it as part of his dowry.

And then when we grew to a school-going age he bought his kids half a dozen iron plates with ceramic coating and flowery designs...Nellore District had its own "Glass & Ceramics Factory" at Gudur.

We simply loved those massive plates....till, within a few months, the ceramic chipped off here and there exposing iron (which we didn't mind). But they were washed in water and the exposed iron flakes got rusted.

This meant that they had to be discarded and new ones bought. 

Till stainless steel plates arrived in the market and were called, charmingly, 'Ever Silver'.

It was much later that I learned that iron won't rust if it were kept dipped wholly in water for even millennia. It rusts only when wet and exposed to air.

Much like our minds are happy and rustless in deep sleep or samadhi...they take worldly impressions and go blogging nonsense only after emerging from their bliss.

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And then father would take out his tiny scissors to clip his moustache.

He kept his mustache till he retired (to display his manhood to the students and teachers of his school).

Retirement is indeed a watershed.

We throw away many of our pretensions as so much chaff, keeping the grain.

I myself threw away ALL my physics books. And felt relieved of a load that I had to carry on my head unwillingly for all of half a century.

Also my shoes....as well as sweaters...there is no winter in Hyderabad. I kept my socks though...winter chill climbs up the feet.

And during the recent lockdown I discarded my pressed pants and shirts as well.

Nothing now to show off to the world save my genius, as Oscar Wilde said,..online.

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I could never trim my own mustache (that I sported for a few months).

The problem was that I could never master what our high school text books called "lateral inversion in a plane mirror"

That nomenclature is nonsense and misleading.

There is NO lateral or longitudinal inversion.

We read that the pinhole camera inverted our images (with ray diagrams as simplified as these blogs).

And that a convex lens produced inverted images often.

But a plane mirror does nothing of the kind. It doesn't invert. It doesn't rotate. It doesn't magnify. It doesn't glorify. It doesn't beautify. It doesn't change left and right.

Left hand with its wrist watch remains on our left side. Right hand with its comb remains on our right side. Top remains top and bottom bottom...unlike Nehruji's Shirshasan. 

All that the mirror does is scoop us front and back...so we can face ourselves...warts and all.

The so-called 'lateral inversion' is not even an optical illusion...it is just a psychological delusion.

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To be continued

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