"Your Son Is Just Like You!"

My baby boy scorns all toys that are not noisy. Also, he refuses to reach for anything apart from his diapers, wipes, the remote control and my phone. I'm hoping this is temporary.

His other favorite plaything - noses. Other peoples' noses. He's developed this sudden fascination and squeals and giggles as he reaches for the biggest, shiniest nose he can find. We were at a wedding yesterday and as we stepped up to the happy couple to congratulate them, my son shrieked and lunged for the groom's nose. When he saw that his Amma was about to play spoilsport he held on with both hands and screamed delightedly at the top of his all too impressive lungs. This soon developed into a free for all that included a highly thrilled baby, a polite but not-thrilled groom (who I have never seen before and will be avoiding for a very long time) and a very embarrassed, blathering me. I managed to pry my baby's hands away by bribing him with my ponytail, and hastily made my apologies as he happily tugged my hair out with both his pudgy hands.

My own Amma was watching all this happily from the audience. And as I huffed up to her she beamed, "Serves you right!" And I knew exactly what she was talking about.

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Circa 1989 : Amma was not pet-friendly. In fact she absolutely refused to believe that a 6 yr old girl could be completely responsible for a puppy, despite what Enid Blyton had to say on the subject. So I just had to work around that, didn't I? I did, by collecting head lice in a little plastic bowl. My great plan was to breed them, and thus prove to Amma that I can definitely take care of pets, several of them, in fact. So I sat down one afternoon and combed a whole lot of lice (oh I had plenty to spare) into a round plastic jar.... and promptly forgot all about them. Some time later Amma walked in to find lice crawling all over the dressing table. Fireworks exploded all around, and I walked around with a sore bum for a week.

Circa 1993:  Still working on convincing Amma to get that puppy. By now we had moved to a house on the banks of a river, which opened up a whole new world of possibilities. This time I talked some fishermen into giving me a handful of mussels. Pets, you see. I had the bright idea of hiding them in the wardrobe. And then I went off to have lunch, and forgot all about them. A week later Amma followed the stench to the wardrobe and found a pile of green, stinky, worm infested mussels among her silk saris. I was done for.

Circa 2008 : I was working in Bangalore at the time. Amma called up one afternoon, panicking over the bomb blasts that were ripping the city. "I can't talk now! Apparently a bomb went off near my bus stand, I'm going off to explore! Oh and my phone will die any minute. Don't worry ma, I'll call from a booth. Sometime".

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Over the years I have attempted to run away with beggars, caught trains headed in the wrong direction, made a long list of dubious friendships, earned a reputation for being chronically accident prone, and generally tried my very best to get my Amma to strangle me. She never did.

Now she's sitting back and waiting to for the show to start.

"He's going to be just like you", she smiles.