For children: The monkey monster has returned and Moin’s life is bananas again

The bananas were the problem.

It was almost two weeks since the monster had disappeared, and things had changed a lot.

Moin was happy that he didn’t have to hear the monster’s horrible songs. They made his ears hurt.

And he didn’t have to keep cleaning the mess in his room.

He also didn’t have to pretend to sing so that his parents wouldn’t realize that it was the monster shrieking.

All that was good.

But the bananas made Moin sick. Ever since the monster had turned up, Moin had taken great pains to pretend that he loved bananas. He didn’t dislike them – he could eat two a day, maybe three at a pinch. But the monster’s demands for bananas were never-ending, so Moin had had to pretend he wanted to eat them all the time.

Now his parents kept buying bananas and telling him to finish them before they got spoilt. He’d taken to hiding them in his bag and chucking them in the bin at school. But all his books had begun to smell like rotten bananas.

Moin’s maths teacher had refused to mark his last test, saying the smell made her retch. And he had been so sure he’d get full marks.

So, he had to stop the bananas.

But how?

If he said his stomach was upset, his mother would rush him to the bald doctor. Moin was convinced the doctor hated him. It could be because of the spit bubble he had burst the last time he had visited the doctor, or it could just be that he hated children. Moin strongly suspected that he had become a paediatrician just to torture small children and make them cry.

If he said he had stopped liking bananas, he would get a lecture on children in some country called Somasila. No wait, that was a village in Andhra Pradesh. Or maybe Telangana. If they kept changing states so rapidly, how was he to keep up?

Somalia! That’s the country he would be lectured about. What the children in Somasila or Somalia had to do with him liking food was something that puzzled Moin endlessly. But if he ever said ‘I don’t like karela’ or ‘I don’t like beetroot’, he’d get an earful about starving children in different parts of the world.

“We can’t send the karela to them, so how does it matter?” he had asked once.

He was made to eat karela for a week after that. It wasn’t that his parents were cruel or anything. Actually, he suspected that his father had bought too much karela at the market. The seller must have told him a sad story of some sort. But his father pretended that it was a punishment for Moin. Convenient! Moin was beginning to see through his parents’ devious methods.

“The only way the bananas will stop is if they are replaced by something else,” Moin said to his friends at school the next day, having given the matter a lot of thought.

“Chocolates?” asked his best friend Tony, always optimistic.

“Huh. That’ll never work,” said Parvati, his other best friend. “They’ll never buy dozens of chocolates. It’ll have to be a fruit or a vegetable.”

“It has to be something I like,” said Moin, “because I’ll have to eat a lot of it.”

“I know what!” said Parvati. “Ask for something really expensive. Then they can’t get you too much of it.”

“Or seasonal,” said Tony. “Like mangosteen! That’s costly and seasonal.”

Moin had never heard of a mangosteen. He guessed it was something like a mango.

He loved mangoes! So that evening, he told his father, “I wish I could eat some mangosteen.”

“It’s out of season. Have a banana,” said Mr Kaif.

Moin went to his room, muttering about stupid banana-eating monsters and insensitive fathers.

The next morning there were more bananas on the table. Moin ate his breakfast quickly.

“I got you some more bananas,” his mother said.

Moin groaned.

“What is it?” his mother asked anxiously. “Does your stomach hurt? Does your head ache?”

“I don’t want any more bananas,” Moin said grumpily. “I’m sick of them. I don’t care if I never see another banana in my life.”

“Oh god, we’re going to get banana pulao again!” groaned Mrs Kaif.

The last time they had a lot of uneaten bananas in the house, Mr Kaif had scoured the internet for recipes and made all sorts of banana things. Moin and his mother agreed that the banana pulao was the worst of the lot.

While Mr Kaif had eaten it valiantly, Mrs Kaif and Moin had nibbled at it. They would have picked out the bananas, but the rice was banana-flavoured too!

Late that night, when Mr Kaif had been sleeping, Mrs Kaif had thrown away the rest of the pulao, and Moin and she had eaten a whole loaf of bread with butter.

Moin shuddered at the memory.

“We have to get rid of the bananas,” he said to his mother.

Unfortunately, Mr Kaif walked in at that moment.

“What about the bananas? If you don’t want to eat them, I have this really interesting recipe that—”

“No, no!” said Mrs Kaif, immediately.

“I’ll eat them!” said Moin, just as quickly.

He took the bananas to his room. He had to figure out a way to get rid of them, but he was late for school, so he shoved them under his bed and left.

That evening, when he came back, Moin got a terrible shock.

The bananas were gone.