Cousin Brother

In case it isn't clear yet, I love my family. They are generous, good looking, compassionate and down right hilarious. Like charming Setrawa, my house is a matriarch run by the food preparing goddess, Pushpa. Her husband is a strikingly good looking man with salt and pepper hair.

Their eldest children are teenage boys, one a slightly smaller version of the other. Pushpa and her sons spend much time talking and smiling together. The next oldest is my lifeline, Rakhi. She is beautifully mature for her age (13 years) and her household responsibilities suggest she is next in line to run the family. Her laugh is internationally contagious and often stimulated by the youngest child, Soonu. At ten years of age, Soonu is a bit of a runt but her small size suits her mischief making. Always sucking or chewing on a treat she is a tremendously happy girl.

Family is extremely important to Indians and they're typically eager to explain how they are related to one another, no matter how complicated. In Hindi, there's twice as many words for describing relatives to assist in such explanations. 

When my host parents left for twelve days to the other side of the subcontinent to attend a ceremony of dying, it was for a cousin brother. The children honored him by fasting. When I expressed my surprise in honoring such a distant relative, not even a cousin, but a brother of a cousin, I was assured it was a close cousin brother.

I remained confused about how close a cousin brother living 3 days away can be until I met two young girls at a wedding in Jodhpur. They were identical and inseparable. When I asked if they were sisters they laughed and replied in perfect Indian-English that they were cousin sisters. It turns out one uses the term to describe a friend who is also a relative.

Some of our cousins live in the lean-to of our house and the next house over. Pushpa is a foster parent to the three motherless children in the lean-to. The first will follow her older siblings with an arranged marriage set for the fall. The second is stunning (and tall) enough to be a model. She is my best Indian friend. The youngest is a marvelously affectionate boy of 10 years. 

The cousins in the next house over are the proud keepers of baby Kuishy and her two older brothers. The youngest of which is a definitional brat and the elder is my dear Hindi tutor. I see most of them everyday and watch them share everything from food to the responsibility of parenting. The treat each other ambiguous of which home they are from and I'm not sure they would even draw the line at sharing breast milk as I saw my mum teasingly bring out her nipple to entertain hungry Kuishy.

Old Dog; New Tricks

It's interesting to consider the Human Race. We are running in a direction as fast as we can, but all the while running from what someone else wants. We seek health and relaxation by meditation, whole ingredients, local food, yoga, and a host of new age strategies. Meanwhile, rural India is saving up it's moneys for a big TV, grumbling about making flour from grains, and desiring imported packaged goods like the irresistible 20-20 cookies. Westerners savour 'homemade' bread even if it's just pouring ingredients from store-bought packages into a bread-maker with water from the tap. A month here has taught me to live with very little, which means the only garbage I regretfully discard in shrubs are 20-20 wrappers. Toilet paper, hot water, eggs, meat, and beds all seem like frivolous luxuries to me now.

Through my friendship with potty untrained Kuishy it has become evident to me that diapers are also surprisingly unnecessary. Given one lives on a smooth marble floor where animals freely do their business the added contributions of an infant are negligible. A naked baby is also free from diaper rash. Now, for reasons of hygiene, poop catching, and appearances, one may wish to cloth their baby's bottom. This can be done simply with any pair of pants or shorts. When soiled, remove, replace, and clean. A variation on the cloth diaper, I suppose, but the trick is to have enough bottoms to keep your tumbler fresh until the next laundry, a daily event in every Setrawa home.

Today a 10 year old showed me how to remove oil based paints from my hand. The trick is to get your hands wet and rub them in sand. I'm not sure how exportable this knowledge is, given the absence of sand in my front lawn, but it has given me a new way of looking at things

Without internet I have lost access to news. Instead I heard about the Japanese tsunami from my Indian dad who used very complicated gestures punctuated with the word Japan. I insisted my country was Canada, not Japan, thinking he was confused. It wasn't until he tied 'Japan' to one of his few other English words, 'finished,' that I clued in. When realization hit, Jen and many locals joined me in trying to decipher from the TV the of the situation.