Before we could finish the revolution of a complete breath, he would spin us around, leaving us in puddles of laughter. It was not the kind of laughter that just randomly exited from a person. Rather, it was a kind that started, soft and almost unconsciously. It rose from the very core, warming from the inside out before it bursts out in colours of happiness. The motions of his legs were the funniest; the different ways he artfully jiggled them to mime the beat of whatever oldie he had played.

It wasn’t just the undiluted fun, there were to-do lists to be checked and cross-checked, cooking to be done and tons of errands to be run, all the while implementing creative ways to circumvent the ‘banga’-throwing boys and girls actively sniffing out victim material.

My nuclear family isn’t a large one. But there was always an abundance of human bodies on the 31st of every December. There were friends turned family, people whose realities had somehow become intertwined with ours to the extent we had multiple parents, and our parents had multiple children.

This life we’re given was a tabula rasa at its inception. As the tides of time take us on its journey through space, our experiences will, to an extent, shape the persons that we will become. Each of us, wayfarers on planet Earth, will experience life in most of the varying forms that make up its fabric; the good, the bad and the ugly.