Chapter 29 Grand father’s brother and his wife

Right from my child hood, children have loved me unconditionally. My father being the youngest in his family, all my cousins are many years elder to me. So instead of playing with my cousins, I grew up playing with my nephews and nieces. My eldest niece is just one year younger to me and my youngest nephew was born 18 days ago. So now you know what I mean, it is a large family too.

All of them call me chitta which means aunty. Some of them play with me even now, some of them have vague memories of playing with me, some of them gets surprised by the way I play with my other nieces and nephews. But there is one nephew of mine whom I have never seen.

He was born and brought up in London. So I never really got a chance to meet him. Recently he came to my house for the first time. But I was away in college so I couldn’t meet him. But something he said as quoted by my mother impressed me.

When he saw my mom and dad he recognized them and said in English. “Grand pa, isn’t this your brother and his wife?”

I thought that line was one of the most innocent lines I ever heard. When I came to think of it I have heard a couple of other ones as well from my nieces and nephews which are equally innocent or more so.

My young niece was telling my young nephew one day

“Adi, do you know something? Our ammumma (grand mother) is our appoppan’s (grand father’s) wife!

To which adi replied

“hey stop telling such fat lies!”

My little nephew who is born and brought up in the states came to my home. We had a plastic bird at home which would fly in a circle with battery. He was fascinated by the bird and asked me immediately where is its battery.

I was totally impressed. He was just 3 years old and he realized it runs on battery on first sight itself. Another nephew of mine who has been in Kerala all his life had actually gotten so surprised and asked me if the bird is alive when I had showed it to him. So while I was musing on the higher intellectual level of my US born nephew, he asked his next question.

Chiita, does the birds in the sky also run on batteries?

The question touched me. And then I wished he had never seen the US