It's sprayback time!

Once upon a time, someone sent me a forward with the picture of a baby whose entire face was covered with baby food. It was cute, but unlikely to happen, I thought. How on earth a small baby could get all that food all over her face was beyond me.

Till the day I watched my sister try to shove some gooey mushy stuff into Aish's mouth.

Aish is just getting started on semi-solids, and she makes no qualms about expressing how much she hates it. Her mealtimes have become family affairs, often spanning a few hours, and involving not just her immediate family, but second and third cousins of ours and the domestic helpers too. Everyone tries their hand to get her to eat, but she has all sorts of strategies to counter the situation.

You'd think it's an easy task. Just take some of the gooey mushy stuff in the carefully manufactured plastic spoon with rounded edges and gently place it in the little one's mouth, and she'll just gobble it up, right?

Wrong.

Then I decided to take matters (and the spoon) in my own hands, proclaiming, "Give me that, tum logon ko kuchh nahin aata hai!" What I did not expect were the miniature Karate moves that Aish had somehow mastered. A left hook to the spoon and a right uppercut to my elbow, and suddenly all the food that was once in the spoon had neatly landed on her forehead. Five spoonfuls later, she has food everywhere on her face except her mouth, closely resembling the baby in the forward I had received. This is actually a very funny sight, and everyone except my sister is amused.

After pleading and cajoling yielded no results, my sister came up with smarter tactics. She looked at Aish very very sternly and suddenly yelled in capital letters, "EAT OR I'LL GET VERY ANGRY!" I think she scared me more than she scared baby Aish.

"What's wrong with you?? Why are you yelling at the baby???" I yelled.

"Shhh... if I yell, it will scare her. If I scare her, she will cry. The moment she opens her mouth to cry, I will put the food in her mouth." She whispered, still maintaining the stern look.

Ah, clever.

"Arre wah! Tum toh uski hi nahin, hum sabki maa ho!" I proclaimed.

Meanwhile, Aish was looking a bit surprised, trying to figure out what the hell had happened to make her usually quiet mother scream like that.

"I'M REALLY VERY ANGRY, AISH!" My sister yelled again.

Bingo.

"Waaaaaaaaaa" went a visibly shaken Aish, and in went the spoon with the gooey mushy stuff.

For a second, Aish looked extremely surprised. Then in what was to become one of her trademark moves, "phooooooooooooooshh!" she sprayed all the food back at my sister, sending me into fits of laughter. Aish leaned back in her stroller with a smug look. And now her mother was the one resembling the baby in the forward.

My exasperated sister looked at me helplessly and asked (this time in lowercase letters), "Sayesha, why doesn't she eat???"

Erm... it was of course a rhetorical question, wasn't it? Surely she didn't expect me to know why baby Aish refused to eat, right?

But I looked at my sister guiltily. Cos deep in my heart, I knew. That I was kinda responsible for Aish's disagreement with food in general.

Damn I should never have pointed out babe Aish's hot bod in Dhoom 2 to baby Aish.

The sum of all fears

"So are you gonna bungy jump??" Many people asked us when they found out we were going on a holiday to New Zealand.

My reply to them would be one of my many views on bungy jumping.

"What?? Bungy jump?? Are you crazy??"

"Oh I can't jump because of a medical condition. It's called 'I dun wanna bungy jump!'"

"Why would anyone in their right minds carry out such a suicidal act?? Why why why??"

"Why on earth would I want to plummet headfirst 30-40 metres down a canyon suspended only by a rubber cord??"

"I don't think people consciously take the bungy plunge. It's more like -- when they stand up there and look down, they faint at the sight, slip and fall down, and are brought back to consciousness when their heads get dunked in the water."

"Only people who are completely out of their minds would do something as crazy as bungy jumping."

Hmmm... I guess that last sentence just about explains us in the picture below.

Camera-dearie

Bhai's whereabouts: Bhai's left Mumbai after chomping on gazillions of pani puris and is now on a road trip somewhere in New Zealand.

I've been wanting to upgrade my digital camera for quite some time. And finally I did it. Errrmm... not in the way I intended to, but I did it nevertheless.

Ladies and gentlemen, presenting Smart Sayesha's 7-step camera upgrade plan:

Step 1: Plan trip to Puri beach with family and friends.
Step 2: Place digital camera in purse.
Step 3: Smartly place bottle of sunscreen too into aforementioned purse.
Step 4: In car on the way back, ensure sunscreen bottle magically opens/cracks and sunscreen spills out such that every nook and corner of digital camera, including battery compartment and USB port, is filled with a gooey white liquid. If necessary, sit on purse to carry this out effectively.
Step 5: Examine camera to check that it is indeed permanently damaged. Express shock. Attempt to hold back tears.
Step 6: Between tears, show camera to Viv and let him examine it. When he shakes his head and hands the camera back, yell "What kind of an engineer are you??? You can't even repair a digicam???" Remember to conveniently forget that you are an engineer too. Electronics at that. Wince as he takes revenge by gleefully relating to her friends the story of "How Sayesha ruined her digicam".
Step 7: Bid tearful goodbye to old cam and buy new cam for NZ trip.

Shabash Sayesha, kya dimaag dikhaya! Sheesh! :/

On the brighter side, with 2 GBs of memory in the new camera, Hopscotch's gonna be hopping real high when I return to Singapore in end Feb! :)

Khare pani re

Note: I've been getting a lot of emails and comments asking me when my wedding is. Errr... well... the wedding's kinda over. If you're shocked, it's great news, cos it just proves Bhai hasn't changed. Muahahaha! :D
(Errrm... perhaps I should wait a few more days before going muahaha. Bhai's gotta maintain the bridal demure behaviour for a few days at least. Ahem.)

So my parents and mamaji were discussing the menu for the wedding reception dinner when they called me.

"Sayesha, would you like to add anything to the menu?" They asked me.

"Err... can we have pani puri?" I asked. Two of my friends were coming from Singapore to attend my wedding, and I really really wanted them to try pani puri. The problem was that unlike Indians who have lived amidst pollution and germs, foreigners' stomachs don't quite take to roadside pani puri the way ours' do. So my plan was - mineral water pani puri at the wedding! Muahahaha! :D Oops.

"You want pani puri?? Really??" They looked serious.

"Errr... yeah, is it possible?" I asked hesitatingly, not quite sure if the bride-to-be could provide input for the reception dinner.

They burst out laughing.

"Of course we're including a pani puri stall. It's your wedding, after all!"

Phew.

So at the reception, as I tried my best to look demure in the 35-kg sari and an equal mass of gold jewellery on me, smiling and greeting hundreds of people I'd never seen in my life, I got kinda hungry. Hungry for pani puri actually. But the guests kept arriving and I could not move beyond a 2-feet radius from the royal throne-like things on the stage on which Viv and I were supposed to sit. As the crowd started thinning, I started to look more and more radiant at the thought of the pani puris that were waiting for me. I'd been hearing rave reviews about how spicy and yummy they were.

Suddenly, Dad and Mom walked towards the stage. They looked kinda distraught.

"Sayesha..."

"What? What? What happened?"

"The pani puris..."

"What? What? What happened to the pani puris??"

"They kinda got over..."

"Got over????? The pani puris got over???"

I'm fortunate that the cameraman was not around to capture my expression.

"Yeah, apparently they were very popular..."

"There are no pani puris for me????" I was aghast.

And now I know why Indian brides cry at their weddings.

A domestic fright

Bhai's whereabouts: Bhai's moved out of Cuttack and is now enjoying South Indian culture in Chennai. She is headed to Bombay tomorrow and is looking forward to staple meals of pani puri.

Update: Bhai was elated to meet bloggers Jane, Kini and Iday at the second wedding reception last night. Bhai has issued supari for Virdi and family for not turning up.

Bhai apologises to all readers for not having replied to their comments on the previous posts for fear of her bratty cousins discovering her blog. She promises to reply to all of them when she gets back to Singapore.

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I hadn't taken a domestic flight in so long that when I took the flight from Kolkata to go to Cuttack along with my sister and my niece baby Aish, it felt like a new experience. Even the feel of the airport was different. Also, I'd never travelled with a baby before, but this time I was armed with baby Aish.

Usually, whenever I'm with my sister, she's the one who gets the admiring looks from lafungas while I give them my bhai-type 'Don't you dare stare at my sis' glares. However, this time around, it was baby Aish who was getting all the admiring glances. Even the lafungas forgot their lafunga-giri and went 'Coochie coochie cutie cutie' around her stroller. It was hilarious.

After we boarded the plane, a thought struck me.

"Do you think they will give us food on such a short flight?" I asked my sister.

She grinned and pointed at the back of the seat in front of me. The first few letters of the 'FASTEN SEAT BELT WHILE SEATED' sign had worn out and what was left gave me the perfect answer to my question.

EAT BELT WHILE SEATED.