Multiple uses of incense sticks

As I had blogged earlier, I grew up in a family with sisters and we had no brothers. Typical to Indian families or families in general, there was absolutely no cussing in my parent’s home or around us. When I was about five or six, I was walking home from my school bus stop with my servant and I heard some random person on the street call out his friend’s name and they greeted each other by saying “Hey Mother*****” in Marathi. A child’s memory is like a sponge so I picked up the word and I tried it out by greeting my older sister “Hey Mother******, without realizing what it meant. My older sister was around eleven years old at that time and although she didn’t know what that word meant….she was old enough to know that the word was taboo. So she did what any self-respecting older sibling would do, by telling my parents what I had uttered. My parents called my name in a very stern voice which spelled trouble and asked me where I had heard the word. I told them where I did and they told me to never repeat it again.

My mother also threatened that if she ever heard me say this again she would burn holes in my tongue with incense sticks. Now before you call child service let me tell you that my parent’s are all talk and they are in fact very gentle and incapable of any violence. Of course we sisters were too timid to challenge them! They would sometimes threaten, “Do your homework or else?” Sometimes as a child I was tempted to ask what the “else” would entail. Since I am a strong believer in the proverb discretion is the better part of valor, I never implemented my thoughts into action.

This morning I accidentally slipped on the kitchen floor and banged my head against the cabinets. My forehead sustained a bruise and a cut. My reaction was an involuntary f-word, when the pain caused my brain to explode. Ironically at that time I was getting ready to do my morning prayers, which are certain chants in Sanskrit, and was just about to light incense. I wondered how my mother would react today, were she to hear me say this.

Anyway that reminded me of the time I heard the F-word for the first time. Namita Gokhale had published her novel “Paro: dreams of passion,” when I was probably in the sixth grade. I read her interview in one of the magazines where she said that she didn’t think what the deal was about using the F-word in her book or something to that effect. I was curious and looked it up in the Oxford Dictionary and didn’t find an entry. So I asked one of my wise classmates if she knew what it meant and she replied that it was slang for the word “Gender.”