Aura Kasih

It's not that she can't sing. Everybody can sing. Whether they can sing WELL, is quite a different matter. But with legs like that, she's so forgiven.


And, oh, the pole is there for a reason, dear..

The Loss

Usually she greets me by jumping up and down, announcing to her mother that I’m home. I’m not gonna lie to you. It does make me feel like a rock-star when she does that. Last night, however, she just stood there tearfully crying. The way she cried, you’d think there has been a tragedy of biblical proportion. Tears were streaming down and the corners of her mouth curved downward. Steady rendition of mid-range weeping accentuated with occasional burst of high-pitched wailing.

When I asked her what happened, between her sobs she mentioned something about her ‘ngeng-ngeng’. That’s her best linguistic effort to describe her toy car. A plastic fire-truck big enough for her to ride around, Flintstone-style, and wreak havoc around the house. On fine afternoons, she would drag the contraption to the pavement in front of our house, since we don’t have any yard to speak of, to play with her wee friends. The toy car became something of a social tool because it enables her to mingle with other kids. Sometimes they traded rides too. She gets to try the fancy tricycle or whatever it is the other kids happen to bring along.

The missus explained that the ‘ngeng-ngeng’ went missing. She forgot to bring it in that afternoon. Somebody must have took it. So, yes, to her it’s a big, big loss. While not exactly a tragedy of biblical proportion, it wasn’t that far off.

At this point, I figured that the best course of action is to cheer her up. After meal, we told her that we were going to lapangan Mekarsari to check out the pasar malam, funfair. The change of emotion was stunning. She barely sat on the motorcycle when she started singing. Belting out ‘Hujan’ and ‘Balonku’ alternately at the top of her lungs. Moving her head sideways and raised her hands at the ‘dor!’. It’s like the whole ngeng-ngeng gone missing episode never happened.

At the funfair, I don’t think that she remembered owning a ngeng-ngeng in the first place. She asked me to buy her a pair of toy sunglasses and, of course, a big red balloon. Despite the fact that she already had seven sunglasses and the balloon wouldn’t last five minutes, in the light of what just happened, I couldn’t say no to both. I think most fathers in the world wouldn’t say no either. All in all, she was back to her old cheerful chatterbox self. And I feel rather good about my self for handling this quite well.

As we put her to bed, I commented to the missus that I wished all pain related to losing something we hold dear can be erased by pink sunglasses and big red balloons. As if on cue, my daughter began mumbling sadly about her missing toy car. “Nope.” the missus whispered,” the only cure is a NEW ngeng-ngeng”