Musings about family

It’s funny to listen to my parents/ Indian relatives talk about anyone who is dating. They always use the words “going around” or “involved.” It makes me think of couples arm-in-arm, promenading around a circle.
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I especially love listening to my aunt talk about some Indian girl or the other who’s dating someone. “She’s involved with XYZ– god knows how they’ve been going around.”

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Aside from the tone, it’s interesting to note the ambivalence– they’re not quite sure whether they disapprove of girls who find husbands on their own, but they’d accept any choice that we would make, but if you could marry someone at least Indian that would be great, Kthnxbai.

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Which brings me to this article about middle-class Indians who use text-messaging to flirt.

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I’ve always wondered what people call their parents–I call my parents “Mummy” and “Daddy” because we’re Victorian like that.

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Their terms of endearment for me, and/or my sister vary widely. Most of it sounds circa World-War II– darling, sweetheart, doll, etc. Occasionally my mother goes north Indian on us and calls my sister or me “munni” which means “little girl” (according to Google U).

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For my grandparents, terms of endearment were the words “aaana” and “amma” which oddly enough, are what people would call their father or mother. I know a lot of other grandparents used the same terms of endearment.

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But my favorite has to be the way my granddad used to say darling– stretching out the first syllable. “No, Daaaa-ling, you can’t hit your sister, because that’s not nice.”

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Heh.