Lately I have been thinking about my dad. He was a cerebral sort, and while my mother actively pursues local and global news, watches talk shows and various kinds of tv, my dad preferred Nature, preferably old episodes he had seen before. But my dad and shared a love for silly British comedy, and nothing made us laugh more than Mr Bean. The show had us on the floor, loudly guffawing at poor Mr. Bean’s antics, at his attempts to fit in with society, and abjectly, completely failing. Maybe my dad and I saw ourselves in Mr. Bean, hapless in our environment, trying to imitate as best we could social mores that were beyond us. My dad came to this country as a graduate student with twenty dollars hidden in his sock. He was assigned a blind man as his roommate at university, who duly taught him how to operate a coke machine. I imagine the university must have had a laugh, the blind man leading the super-shy Asian mathematician, but they probably never looked past the set-up, and saw the humanity. Later my dad had a fellow Indian as a housemate who blithely vacuumed up the cockroaches in their apartment, never understanding why they kept returning to the kitchen. There were many adventures in my father’s life, including the tattoo he acquired in Calcutta, the first of many defiances against the rules in a Tam-Bram’s life, the tattoo we were never allowed to ask about. In my life, too, I defied many rules, but probably not enough of them. And when we were pretty much tired of fighting the world, and each other, my father and I bonded as adults, laughing uproariously at the misadventures of Mr. Bean, the indefatigable misfits.