They say only when you lose something, you realize how important it was to you. Yesterday morning was nothing short of a nightmare. I was planning to send pasta for school lunch. As soon as I woke up, I switched on the kettle to boil the water. It takes a lot longer to boil the water on stove top, so I always use the kettle. Then I remembered, Yaya killed my kettle. I took a deep breath.
I really wanted a cup of tea..then I remembered.. yup, you got the drift.
I always send hot chocolate during winter time..then I remembered…
I also realized, I really don’t have any suitable container to boil the water in the microwave..So I used my soup bowl..It only holds enough water for one thermos..by the time I managed to transfer boiling water from a wide mouth soup bowl to narrow mouth thermos, I lost half of the water!
I thought of telling the kids.. they are all taking upvas ..My entire routine was gone..all because my daughter killed the kettle..and then she casually walked in to the kitchen to ask me..”What is for lunch today?” and I told her “nintey ammayi appante thala” Sometimes it is really good that my children don’t understand Malayalam..Yaya knows a bit, but Ammayiappan and pure tharuthala is beyond her level of understanding.
“You are still mad at me, aren’t you? she asked.
How do you get angry with a natural born walking disaster?
I shook my head. “Nah, I am not angry with you.. It is just that I never realized how important a kettle was until now”.
“I am so sorry Mom” She said. I kissed her head and told her, “it is ok”. ( I also noticed that I had to stand on my tippy toes to reach the top of her head..few more months, she will be taller than me..her life long ambition is to be taller than me!)
So, in the evening, I decided to check the local coles supermarket, if they have a kettle. After the basket ball game, I took the youngest two and we went to Coles.
As we were walking in to the shop, I heard my son say “that is odd, I didn’t know guys wear sarees”
“What?” I asked.
“Look, he is wearing a saree” my son pointed the saree clad mallu achayan to me.. He wasn’t wearing a saree, but a lungi, which my son thought was a male version of saree.
I have never laughed this much for a very long time.
It occurred to me that neither my son or baby has ever seen a guy wearing lungi in real life. All my male cousins who live outside India don’t wear lungi ..
Years ago, when my sister younger to me was in 4th standard and my youngest sister was in kindergarten, one evening after school, they came home howling.. They were really a sight..they looked frightened, panting after running all the way from school, faces flushed with tears and sweat. I can still hear my mom’s voice quivering when she asked them “entho patti mone” ( what happened?)
It turns out that, as they walked home, they saw two white people ( Caucasians), one had long hair ( dread locks probably) and someone told them, the white people are pillare piduthakkar ( baby/kids snatchers) and my sisters ran all the way to escape from the white people.
Caucasians were a rarity when I was growing up, but I never thought a mallu achayan in his lungi would be a rarity for my children..
🙂
true. We hardly saw any foreigners growing up. Caucasians, I have still seen, though once in a blue moon. But Koreans, Japanese, Chinese,… Never!
‘Pilleru piduthakkar’ were always there. Anyone who looked different came under this category – i think, including beggars, mentally disturbed people, gypsies etc. Elders forgot to teach kids about nicely dressed, respectable looking ‘abusers’, but warned about the odd looking ‘pilleru piduthakkar’ – how do we judge people?
Swathi: Indians, especially Mallu’s have a lot to learn about protecting their children..like you said, I was taught not to accept sweets/candies from strangers, not to follow anyone even if they said “your amma had an accident” and not to open the door to anyone.. Yet no one thought of the peadophiles that are also called relatives..somehow everyone knows they are around, but no one is willing to accept that it is our own..
I remember when I was in school, for a while, we were scared of white ambassador cars. Allegedly, the pilleru piduthakkar came in those. If we were in the grounds for PT (which we never did by the way, we were set free to play) and saw a white ambassador, we ran back to our classrooms. Never mind that in those days, late eighties, the most common car was the ambassador or that they were coming to school to pick up their kids.. Ripper Jack was also mentioned…..
Reading ur blog brings back so many things I’d forgotten. Cutex was one (never even thought to google it)and so was speaking in Malayalam. I was in an English medium school so the logic was if u wanted to speak in Malayalam, u shd have gone to a Malayalam medium school. We kids spoke in Malayalam and switched to English only when there was a teacher nearby. I don’t remember what the punishment was though.
Nee: If you saw a white Ambi, then it brought good luck.. we also had a term for cars with single digit number plate, but I can’t remember what it was called then..something like orakkam vandi..but that wasn’t the word..The there was double pinch,,the first one to see two cars of the same colour got to pinch her friends..some of them were really mean and pinched really hard making me all the more determined to spot the next double car..( pandey, vayum nottam sthiram thozhil ayirunnu nnu churukkam)