hold him down, hold him down. bring the girl.

now for some details. my mom's elder sister, smart as a whip and with a tongue that can carve a turkey if she was in the mood. and when it comes to family get-togethers she's often in the mood. her husband used to be in the government, quite senior, and a faint smell of curruption hangs around him like a slightly grimy cup. it's more a feeling you get when you talk to him than anything he says. their children are all grown up and have lives of their own. but i get the feeling that they control their son's life by remote control. he has a daughter who'll be a teen soon but he calls in almost everyday to report on what's happening at work. after a few hours with them my mom starts getting muchos concerned about my laid back attitude towards career advancement, my spendthrift ways and my marriage - or rather, the lack of one.


my mom and her sister are constantly on the youngest brother's case telling him what to do with his life and his career. he's a pretty smart guy, he got his start in a bank started by an ancestor, works for another bank now. he spends most of his day schmoozing with people trying to get them to transfer their deposits from some other bank into his own. he's a case study in phychoses, paranoid about his boss, sure that the competition is out to 'get him' and quite confused about everything else in life. his wife is an amazingly sweet and competent woman who holds his excesses in check with a velvet glove. his kids, my cousins are still in school. one of them is in the 12th grade, pretending to work hard at his studies. he's the perfect man about the house, he actually blushes when my aunts tell him that he should be in the movies. he sings most of the time and has malayalam movie dialogues down pat. his younger brother is so overshadowed that he's become the shy silent type. but it's obvious that the real power lies in the tail.


so that was the cast gathered in trivandrum. the morning after we got there was a ceremony for my grandfather, we stuck a new plaque on his grave. an immensely vivid life, marked with some insipid inscriptions on a slab of granite. we headed back after that for another big lunch at home. the afternoon saw us sitting in the living room on ornate furniture that's about a century old with a slowly spinning ancient ceiling fan struggling to keep pace with the stacatto conversation that darted across the room.


and that's when the aunts did the unthinkable, they cornered me with a classic pincer manuevour. i was pinned to the couch and they closed in for the kill. the opening salvo was so innocent - "so, what is it like in the us? aren't you lonely by now?" and then it got progressively fiendish.