Chiu and I…

Chiu?? What kind of name is that?

Chiu (means Sparrow in English) is a nickname of my niece who is of same age as mine.
Now how is that possible? Ummmm She is my father’s eldest sister’s eldest granddaughter… phewww!

We were in the same school but different classes. She used to call me ‘AUNTY!!’ in school, whenever and wherever she saw me.
One day in private I told her ‘Aunty mat kaho na’ (don’t call me aunty). She agreed to it and she still abides by it. All these years we have been best of the friends.

Everybody who has stayed in Pune, India is usually familiar with the places where youngsters hangout…that is Fergusson college road popularly known as FC road. Once I saw her standing near the place called ‘Sagar Arcade’ (where a lot of smart guys were standing). I was standing on the opposite side of the road and I got excited and screamed out loud ‘Chiuuuuuuu’.
In our next meeting she said ‘Don’t call me Chiu, call me by my real name especially in front of ‘CAT’ boys’.

CAT?? Huh? What does it mean by ‘CAT’ boys…? That’s the term she uses for smart boys. Though I never understood in what way boys resemble cats, it became my habit to call smart boys’ as ‘cats’ and the term is popular in my friend circle. FYI, ‘mad cat’ bears a higher degree of beauty than just a ‘cat’.
(In the US, CAT stands for Casual American teenager)

We started going to guitar classes together but due to some illogical reason like the class being too far from my place I quit. She still continued going there and then once I saw her with ‘cats’ from her guitar class and then I lamented for leaving the class. She is a very good guitar player now.

Chiu joined some boxing classes and she could lift any person within 80kgs. That was the time when even I was thrilled by the idea of weight lifting. We had competition on whose biceps are bigger! (I should probably stop dreaming about it because I can never compete with her)

One more interesting thing about her is that she drives motorcycles. It was always fun to sit on the back sit and see the reaction of people. They were amazed, surprised, shocked! As women driving bikes is not so common in India. Young boys were open mouthed to see a pretty pretty face driving a bike. Once I was waiting for my company bus with a friend Radhika and I saw a girl wearing tight jeans, tight top driving a bike, she went with the speed of light. I told Radhika “look at today’s girls… Aah… they are too trendy”. And within 5 seconds I realized OH that was Chiu!

We share a lot of common interests like:
She has got certificates in painting exams… you can say she is a ‘certified painter’. She has made a lot of colorful paintings on the walls of her room … hey that means she knows one more type of painting than I do and that is wall painting. On a serious note, she is a far better painter than I am and is also very good at calligraphy.
She is an amazing singer … I don’t know why she left it at an early age.
Both being avid readers, we talked for hours on books.
Both liked to meet our relatives, yeah we visited them after every 2 years!!

How many movies can you see one after the other?
Well, we have made a record here; 4 movies in a row (usually we saw 3 movies one after the other). That didn’t take much time, just 7pm to 4am. (Mannnn I miss all those days and nights)

One more important thing we did together was ‘bird watching’ (I hope you know the meaning of bird watching – or else you will think we were ‘real bird’ lovers – nah… I don’t know any birds except sparrow and crow). ‘Bird watching’ means ‘watching boys’.
I feel it must have been first ‘aunt - niece pair’ in the world who talked about anything and everything, from recent crushes and heart breaks to professional and personal problems.

Though unachievable she had strong crushes on ‘Sonu Nigam’, ‘Rahul Dravid’ and ‘Bryan Adams’ respectively (yeah this girl’s taste was refined over the years). Her passions are photography and listening to English songs. She is a psychologist by profession and speaks excellent French. Her dream is to visit France at least once in her life. I admire her a lot because she is well versed with so many things.

She has juvenile diabetes and has to take 3 injections per day. A lot of times I have seen her staying up all night due to ‘hypo’ (low concentration of sugar in the blood). I empathized with her. I have never ever seen her grudging about it or then making it an issue for not doing things. In fact she has done much more quality things in life than a perfectly healthy girl would have done.

In 2 months she is getting married to a ‘Mad Cat’ in India. I am going to miss the wedding. So I am wishing her all the very best and a great married life.