The day it all stopped....

The other night on my way back from office I slowly drifted off to my good old childhood, thinking about the bygone days, events bitter and sweet when a particularly relevant incident in my life came tumbling out of the closet. Heres goes;
My father has never been one of those parents who never hesitate to hit their kids everytime the smallest of things go wrong, nevertheless I have had my share of beatings. Now that I get bashed up a lot less relatively, I realise that it actually took a lot to get my dad to lose his temper completely and believe me, getting up at five in the morning back in the days and dragging me out of bed to hammer Math or Bengali into my skull could even get the Dalai Lama screaming abuses and throwing his arms and legs about in the air.
I have always had this dangerous habit of inventing my own Math formulas, putting random 'x's and 'y's here and there just for the heck of it!! The bit that made it dangerous was that I did it on the examination papers too. It so happened that none of my teachers shared my sense of humour. So in the simplest of terms I always failed in Math. Bengali is another day's story.

One fine evening my report card came home and dad was in a particularly nasty mood, my life is all about such wonderful co-incidences, nevertheless, the minute he saw the bright red zero next to 'Math' he was baying for my blood.

I quietly sat in a corner playing with my Gi-Joes and pretending nothing had happened when dad showed up from behind and twisted my ear with what felt like all his physical strength. For the first half of the twist I was seeing rotating planetary bodies and chirping birds before my eyes and the second half was followed by awe....
There was an audible 'crunch' when dad twisted the ear and alarmingly enough, my ear, the damn thing, remained twisted! it just would not get back to its original shape! Within minutes panicky set in. I sat there Gi-Joe in hand, with a twisted ear, bawling as my parents ran around trying to call doctors. Fuelled by the guilt that he had possibly deformed his son's ear forever dad ran around the most.
Finally came the part where dad, tired of waiting for the doctor to show up, marched upto me, grabbed the ear and twisted it back to position again!
This time it was not only planetary bodies and chirping birds but flashes of light, bells and sparks!
Well, later that night I earned two more Gi-Joes so all was forgiven!

The actual good that came out of the entire episode was that, that day on dad swore never to even think of physically punishing me for my Mathematical misadventures again and he's held on till date.