My daughter has just started in grade nought. That has not stopped her from causing chaos all over the known world.
All this week other parents (and grandparents, for that matter, because many of them are the ones who insist on taking the wee darlings to school) have been looking at me strangely.
One parent finally broached the question that had been itching the rest of Auckland Park, Melville, Westdene and places as far flung as Parktown, Parkview and Parkhurst for almost a week.
‘Are you alright?” she asked, keeping a safe distance and looking me up and down, while still trying to give the appearance of being friendly.
‘I’m fine,” I lied, immediately taking racial offence and wondering what business of hers it was anyway. The woman, you see, is herself of uncertain racial pedigree.
Black people tend to react like terriers to a snake when seemingly white people ask them how they are. Like I say, it’s none of their business.
Anyway, after a couple of days of being looked up and down like this, and wondering whether to join the Azanian People’s Organisation and take up the armed struggle once again, I began to shrug my shoulders and just let it all ride.
Until this morning. Finally everything became clear.
Out of the mouths of babes, they say. My daughter’s wannabe best friend came and confronted me without any qualms. She wanted to know the truth and, unlike her mom and the rest of the parents and grandparents who keep the school ticking over, she had nothing to lose by coming straight to the point.
‘Is it true that you had chicken flu last week?” she asked.
‘If I had, I would have been dead by now,” I wanted to reply. But there was no point in beginning to engage in a dialogue with a six-year-old about the vagaries of mysterious Eastern diseases.
Not only was it a non-starter. It was a no-brainer.
We talk endlessly about the perils of allowing our children unrestricted access to television. In the average, middle-class homes that we now live in all over the world, we engage in almost physical fights with our children about whether they should be allowed to watch Scooby-doo, The Flintstones, and Bugs Bunny, or whether they should be improving their minds with Animal Planet and the wonders of National Geographic Television instead. Usually the parents lose out, and the cartoons from Hollywood take over.
In our case (liberal, free-thinking, struggle-orientated parents that we are), we encourage our children to watch the news and get a handle on what is going on in the real world.
So our almost-six-year-old daughter, striding into grade nought with all the confidence that she takes as a right in this brave, new country that has put apartheid and the Cold War behind its back, checked out what was happening on television news and decided to tell the whole school that her father was at the centre of one of the great dramas that was playing out on the world stage.
‘My father has chicken flu from Hong Kong,” she told the astonished and highly impressed members of her class. And as you now know, the news spread like wildfire through the rest of the school within minutes.
And in not much more time, all the parents, from grade nought to grade seven, had been informed of the shocking truth, too.
Housewives rock up in their 4x4s to collect their children at lunchtime. Scandal stalks the placid, tree-lined streets. Carefully plucked eyebrows shoot up uncontrollably into the air around Auckland Park. Chicken business suddenly becomes a topic of conversation. And I, unknowingly, am at the centre of it.
Things couldn’t have got worse. But they did. I retired to a coffee house in Melville to recover from the shock of discovering what my child had done to my already fragile reputation. I had hardly sat down and ordered the usual beverage when an Indian yogi in a yellow turban and long, waxed whiskers approached me and offered to tell me my fortune. He was obviously not from Durban but from India itself. The look in his eye implied that I had better accept his offer or else. So I handed over the money he demanded and tried to sit back and listen to him.
‘Your life is not right,” he said to me. ‘You are a kind man, but there are too many people taking advantage of your generous disposition. You have to change your lifestyle.”
There are only two things you can do when confronted with a yogi. One is to hit him and walk away. The other is not to hit him and take what is coming to you.
Regular readers of this column will know that I inevitably acted true to form and took the cowardly option. I didn’t hit him. Instead, I took what was coming.
‘You’re a good guy,” he said to me in surprisingly good English. ‘Why do you allow people to do these things to you?” It was, frankly, a rhetorical question. But my mind was ranging over the chicken flu thing and wondering how to make sense of the fact that someone as close as your own child can undermine you so easily, and with such devastating effect.
The yogi read my palm. He asked me to write some random words on a piece of paper and then crunch it up and blow on it. When I opened the piece of paper, under his instruction, my whole life was written out in front of me. Including the fact that I would live to the ripe old age of 89. So at least chicken flu won’t get me.
Minister of Education Kader Asmal (an Indian himself) has forbidden me to box my children’s ears when they get out of line. But once in a while, a random yogi will pop up to save the day.