cousins Archives - Obsessivemom

22/06/202422/06/2024

Mangoes!

I got a call from my dad yesterday. Then again, today.

That’s unusual.

Not because we don’t talk much but because he isn’t a just-like-that-call person. He’s more of a say-hi-when-mom-has-called kind or ask-for-adhar-card-number-and-say-bye kind.

24/07/202324/07/2023

The Cream Heist

This post is dedicated to my sister and my mother, with due apologies to the former and a drum roll of honour for the latter.

29/07/201615/04/2017

Brothers and sisters and memories #CBF16

About a year back the twins had to make a family tree and while helping them I found my side of the family far outnumbering the Husband’s side – my five siblings to his two. It was only later that I realised I had included my cousins in my count of siblings. But then the Hindi language doesn’t really have an exact word for ‘cousin’ and that’s how it was with us.

We didn’t live together but the summer holidays would see the six us of in our hometown. Since we lived with our grandparents our home became the place where some fifteen to twenty of us would gather for one whole month of crazy celebration.

It was an old house, not too large. We wonder now, how we fitted in. What’s more we managed with a single washroom between the entire bunch of us. (We now have two washrooms and three people in the house, with the husband being away, and yet there’s constant squabbling).

Studies and work finally put an end to the tradition and almost a decade rolled by since we were together. We tried to meet up a few times but the magic half-a-dozen was never complete.

Then last month one of our cousins was in India for a couple of days and we decided to give it a serious shot. We realised how hard it is for six people to drop their responsibilities even for the space of a single weekend!

One had to postpone dropping off his daughter to boarding school, another one rushed back from a a holiday with his family, yet another one wrapped up a seminar she was organising.

The Husband flew down to look after the kids(and attend a PTM that had to crop up just that weekend), while I was away.

After much planning and coordination we were there, together, in my aunt’s house. Nothing seemed to have changed. Of course the figures were fuller and the hair was thinner but that was about it.

US: Then and now and that quote is one of my favourites

It was like we’d never been away. We sat around the dining table and talked. Then moved to the verandah and talked some more, then decided to take a siesta and ended up talking again.

It was two days of catching up, piecing together memories, one filling in details the other one left out, debating who’s fault it was in ‘that’ incident, digging out long-forgotten nicknames, laughing over incorrigible pranks, reminiscing about the time we smuggled cigarettes, got caught and got the blasting of our lifetimes.

And there was food —- enough to feed a garrison.

Those two pictures, taken at the same place, years apart, will remain one of my most cherished memories. Nothing can beat the warmth and affection built over years of togetherness and I shall forever be grateful for that. The memory of this trip will last a long long time but we’re not going to wait another decade to meet again.

This post is written for The Cherished BlogFest 2016, hosted by Dan Antion, Damyanti Biswas, Pete r Nena, Cheryl Pennington, Mary Giese and Sharukh Bamboat.

and also to

Linking up to Vidya’s Gratitude Circle Blog Hop.

Do click on the link and head on for a healthy dose of gratitude.

17/07/201615/04/2017

Have you played Uno cards?

Have any of you played Uno cards? I’ve always managed to make good my escape, pitting the kids against each other or passing the buck very gracefully to my mother or sister when they have been available. However this weekend I was well and truly caught.

Stuck as I was, I applied myself diligently to the game. ‘They’re just two ten-year-olds’, I thought, ‘how tough would it be to defeat them and get on with my chores?’

After about twenty minutes I was more than willing to eat my words (or even my thoughts). The game just refused to end. The idea is to get rid of all your cards but each time I thought I was almost there I’d be saddled with some more.

There is a whole big bunch of the most complex rules. (Or maybe is it just me with my terrible memory. I’ll never know). Sometimes I got the sneaking suspicion that the children kept changing the rules to suit themselves. I kept being made to skip chances or reverse the order of playing till I had no clue what was going on.

At the end of half hour I just wanted the game to end. I decided I’d try to lose and get over with it. However, that wasn’t happening in a hurry too.

This game of cards is U.N.E.N.D.I.N.G!
(Quite like the Game of Thrones, which I am also ploughing through these days.)

After much hard work N finally won and I celebrated harder than she did. Come Monday I will begin work on a strategy to circumvent more Uno card encounters.

Teen Do Paanch and Kot Piece were easier

Did you play cards when you were young? We did. It was’t considered the most respectable of past-times but when six of us cousins got together each summer, card games were a favourite.

Not for us these Unos. We played Teen, Do, Paanch and Kot Piece (or is it Court Piece or Coat Pees, I need to google that). Then there was Bluff which was played with multiple suits and Gun which needed six players. There were also Rummy and Flash which were considered too grown up for us. Even though I did manage to finally officially grow up I never got a hang of those two.

We spent many long afternoons over hotly contested games cooled down by tall glasses of nimbu paani and the fragrant breeze from khas khas mats. Allegations of cheating flew back and forth (Cousin no 2 was a pro at it) and cards would be thrown down with promises of ‘I’ll never play with you again’ (that would be our oldest, Cousin no 1). Many a sad tear was spilt followed by hours of ‘I’m not talking to you’ only to be forgotten in favour of yet another good game.

That’s the way we played cards.

This time when I was home, my father just back from China, got these beautiful dinosaur playing cards. (He’s a Palaeontologist, hence). After we’d admired them enough, I thought it was time to initiate the kids into my kind of game. And so I explained the whole thing about declaring trumps and making hands.

To their credit they took to it way better than I took to their Uno and were soon yelling ‘I trumpeted you’ with great vigour filling me with hope that we’ll stick to these. At least our card games have an end to them.

All in all a weekend well spent.

So what did you do over the weekend. Do you remember any childhood games? Or those that you’ve shared with your kids? I’d love to hear from you.

Linking up with Mackenzie at Reflections from Me

12/05/201622/06/2024

How do you eat your mangoes?

The other day I was watching my kids eating mangoes. The fruit is peeled, stones discarded, then diced into neat little cubes or slices (if I’m feeling lazy). I then leave it in the refrigerator to cool till we get on with lunch. Later, the kids pick the fruit off the plate with fruit forks or toothpicks.

Mangoes in Lucknow have always been plentiful. I had once stumbled upon this quote by Ghalib, Aam meethe hon aur bahut saare hon.

That’s exactly how they always are here.

During the summer our cousins would come to stay with us. Each afternoon all six of us aged 4 to 10, would sit around a tub of mangoes out in the aangan. The tub would be full of water to keep the mangoes cool. We’d be dressed in the barest minimum – vests and slips – as we fished out the mangoes, oblivious to the heat, and competed at amassing the largest pile of guthlis. We’d peel the fruit tooth and nail, quite literally, and bite right into the pulp, delicious juice dripping from our hands, running down our chins and smearing our faces.

One of our favourite mangoes was the Lucknow Safeda.

If you know anything about this particular variety you’ll know it isn’t meant to be pealed and cut at all. It is more juice than pulp and has to be sucked on, not eaten. There’s a whole art to eating a Lucknowa Safeda. I’m not sure I’m equipped to explain. Let it suffice that it has to be handled with all the Lakhnawi nazakat you can muster. No, I’m not being a snob – the nazakat is crucial. The thing is the fruit has an exceptionally fragile skin. A little inelegant impatience and you’ll have the guthli shooting right out from the wrong end (of the fruit, of course) splattering you with juice and pulp.

Each time that would happen the expression on the face of the callous offender would be priceless, giving us hours of laughter. What’s worse, he would get an earful from his/her mum because mango stains are the devil’s own work when it comes to getting them off.

Anyway, once you’ve got down to the guthli without accident you scrape it off with your teeth and discard it. Finally you slurp off the remaining juice.

I am sure we weren’t the most sightly of sights, yet it was the perfect way to form strong bonds of shared memories. Perhaps that’s why even though we don’t meet, sometimes for years together, we can take up from right where we left off, the sweetness never varying quite like that of the dussehris, langadas and safeda.

Aam will always remain a very khaas part of my childhood memories.