My Father's Nose

Inheritance is an accident - I always believed. Lineage chose to infuse me with all the negatives there could possibly be from both sides of my family, especially because of one thing - a boulder called my nose.The culprit that stemmed this belief and which also feebly accepted the role of a victim with time. 

Letting my imagination go wild and maybe haywire, I think when the genetic pool (filled with mom genes and papa genes) was sending genes to frame my nose, the nose bridge would have started with my mother's genes and thats when my father's genes waged a war out of entitlement - Patriarchy cannot be ignored you see - ever - even today! My father's genes would have rushed to be a part of the greatest and biggest nose there could ever be on a female from the Kattiyattu Panicker family. All of them jostling and pushing each other to secure a place in this great moment of history, which gave rise to a nice roundish bump at the end of the nose bridge that allowed a spread of the nose - as wide as the breadth of Russia whenever the female (me) smiled or god forbid - laughed. Sigh! Putting a stop to my imagination there, don't want it to poke it's nose anymore.

The pain and agony that I went through because of this great monument on my face. I remember that as a teenager, you know when we start getting a little conscious of how we look and how we are - that ridiculous ugly phase, whenever I saw myself in the mirror, my first glance would be at my nose - my biggest enemy. I pinched it in every way to see what I could possibly be and I guess hint at my future to what I wanted to see. I pinched it so often that my nose developed a sense of its own, it could imitate the pinching action on its own, with no help (you see, brilliance also runs in our family :-)). I secretly termed it 'In-Pin' - an acronym for Inward Pinching. Yes I had an acronym! Other girls pouted their lips to get a good picture of themselves, I mastered the trick of 'In-Pin'ing my nose to make it seem narrow - my illusionary path of attaining 'the sexy in me'. It also led some people to believe that I was in bad company - snorting away things. My eccentric behaviour at times did add much to cement their beliefs. I remember a friend in school joking once - ' How do you know if Pallavi is entering a room? - Simple, her nose enters 10 minutes before her body does.' Funny, I know, I laughed at it too while muttering all the expletives under my breath.  In my idle time, when time was also bored with me, if there was a shadow of my profile falling anywhere, I always tried to keep my face straight and sheepishly moved my eyes to see how far my nose went, hoping against hope that maybe the brilliance that ran in the family, ran in my nose too and it mysteriously and magically shortened itself. That god damn nose!

Today I look in the mirror - again at the god damn nose! That nose that I inherited from my father - my father's nose. So much alike and yet so different in my view now. I don't feel like complaining anymore for some reason because it is  like my FATHER's nose. I've lost my dearest papa to the heavens but I still have that peculiar nose.   I don't see anything wrong with it anymore, it is the biggest connection that I have with him. I breathe through it after all, I should be nothing less than thankful. So I proudly present - The greatest and biggest nose there could ever be on a female from the Kattiyatu Panicker family. 

Well, and inheritance as an accident? I see it as an emerging serendipity.