My son’s been a worried young man these past weeks, and though he’s reluctant to share his personal life with his fuddy-duddy parents — yes, me included! — when the other day he sighed dramatically and popped down on the sofa beside me, I couldn’t help but ask if anything was wrong. “Dad,” said my son, “how do you cope with women?” Since I didn’t know if he was asking a question, or merely expressing rhetoric, I kept my own counsel. “Why are they,” he appeared to be speaking more to himself, “so inflexible? Why do they say one thing when they mean another thing? Why do they” — and this I suspect was the crux of his immediate concern — “talk so much?”
Every father carries the burden that he knows he must pass on to his son, which includes knowledge about the fickleness of women’s temperament, the many ways in which they can reduce a well-brought up young man to a dithering fool, but nothing comes close to the seeming impossibility of escape when a woman starts talking, and talking, and talking… So I sighed with my son too and said, “A time will come when the young woman who cannot stop talking to you will shift her attention to talk to others, only remember, she will never, ever stop talking, so you must get used to the sound of her voice.”
These days I consider myself blessed for though they too talk all the time, neither my mother-in-law, nor my wife, not even my daughter consider it prudent to waste their energy on me, yet I can hear them drone on forever as they converse with each other, or on the phone with their friends or family. So my heart reached out to my son whose very special friend, I was aware, could easily compete with the family yak-yak club. Whenever she calls, and she calls often, it is as though a stream of static emanates from the speaker on the mobile phone. My son, I have noticed, turns pale and holds the phone away, the seemingly endless torrent pouring continuously forth as the voice on the other end goes into auto-speak mode. Once in a while he will agree with the voice, almost as though any disagreement will result in a further rise in pitch and scale, but of late he has taken to going about his life irrespective of the cadences on the phone that rise and fall but never seem to cease. The other day he placed the mobile on a table before going to the bathroom to shave, and still the voice on the phone neither paused, nor stammered for all the time he was away. “What do you talk about?” I asked him then. “I don’t know, Dad,” he whined, “I just don’t know.”
Weighed in balance, I saw soon enough that my son’s young lady was a talker to out-talk my old lady, and that’s saying something. Since I have met his charming friend, even spoken with her, it was clear she didn’t waste her breath on just anybody but, as was soon apparent, reserved her speech exclusively for my son. Or maybe, added my daughter, impressed by the gab-fest, she wasn’t a person at all but an alien, which view I dismissed outright but have since been veering around to. Okay, if not an alien, it’s becoming clear that she is, at the least, a zoozoo, that eminently likeable being that carried Vodafone’s message for the duration of the IPL. Now it seems that the zoozoo might not be a creature of somebody’s imagination but actually modelled on the person my son is dating, and whose gibberish might just be her native tongue.
