These two are Kedar 5 and Sarang 3, my grand nephews. Behind them reading, is my sister in law Shanta. The photographer is my brother Arvind.
The boys were completely engrossed in a film clip being shown to them by their very indulgent grand father.
Can any of my readers recall being indulged with anything like this at that age?
Arvind had this to say about the little fellows.
“I have not had the pleasure of seeing two boys growing up together, for a long time. Though, Rukki has two boys, Raghav is a mild fellow. (Ruki is Arvind’s daughter who lives in Bengaluru and Raghav is her son.) But these two rascals remind me of my childhood days with my two brothers.(Implying either that the two others were rascals or all three were!)
The other day, the older fellow hid all his miniature toy cars under my easy chair cushion, so that the younger fellow wouldn’t have access to them. Unfortunately, I happened to sit on the chair and felt all those little cars poking everywhere under me. I yelled at him and the secret hiding place was blown,
Then he hid them inside my pillow cover. The younger fellow was searching for them and in the process stuck his head inside the the pillow cover. He could not extricate himself and started yelling. The mother came and started yelling at them both, and couldn’t get their names straight. Regular Ara.Bara,Ramana, repeating. (Our mother inevitably used all the three names to call one of us.)
Yesterday, Kedar and Sarang pulled out the pillow cases and used them for a sack race. One more yelling from the mother and a few curses; the modern version of “kaattailey poravangalaa”. (Kattayiley Poravangala, is Tamil to call some one a corpse. One that is scheduled to lie on a pile of wood to be cremated.) This is a curse used particularly by the Tambrams. (Tamil Brahmins. No kin to the Boston variety, this is the real McCoy.)
