Whenever we were banned from using the toilet for fear of dirtying it up, or kept outside the kitchen and its sumptuous aroma, it only meant a single thing: company was coming.
It wasn’t just any company this time around, it was the transatlantic variety. A family of four from England, and my cousins to be exact.
I wasn’t much help to my mother in the kitchen (and even now I have to wonder just how curry goes from A to B), nor was I a Cinderella house-maid (not until much later anyway). So I cleaned and prepared however my age would let me. I focused on the wax in my inner ears, a condition that was starting to annoy. After digging around in the darkened holes for a bit, I had myself a respectable pile of wax; not enough to start a museum, but enough to build a tiny wax society (where a voluptuous waxed-up Romi was the leader of the lowly wax peasants).
Just as I was finishing up the draw bridge for my wax castle, the front door opened (the real one not the wax one), and there they were:
-The mysterious relatives from England
The aunt and uncle passed right through my radar, but the cousins were the ones that moved me. They were surrounded by a certain aura, something that screamed out “cool”. But then again, what else would you expect from teenagers sporting wind-blown hair, reflective shades, and shiny nylon shorts?
If that wasn’t cool enough, these fellers even had an accent too!
I had never heard such a tone before; it was intriguing and intimidating all at once…I needed to find out more.
And so I followed the teenage cousins around, trying to absorb as much as I possibly could. They spoke of a peculiar land with a Queen and a castle and a lot of giant buses. The more they told us of their fabled land, the more they seemed to tire of ours.
This became even more apparent when they flat out said “We’re bored”. It happened on a Friday night, as my teenage brother was warming up Nintendo and setting up a game of pool. Now I would happily pay a cover-charge for video games and pool, but the cousins were looking for something more…like a reckless night on the town. My brother knew little of the after-dark scene, so he did what any sheltered child would do: he looked up “night clubs” in the Yellow Pages.
After finding an appropriate option (based on the “hottest club in town” self-assessment in the tag-line), my brother showed the ad to my father. He simply laughed it off (though trembling at the thought of any one of us “living it up”), but promised us a trip to the water park the following day.
So the English cousins were trapped, which meant that they were searching for trouble. Trouble came in the form of the older cousin, who grabbed my fish from the tank, and dangled it over his gaping mouth. He kept on pretending it would fall into his mouth, until I began to cry. At that point he plopped it back in the tank, but I was already steaming mad.
But then something funny happened. The cousin calmed me down with his well-delivered English words, and it sort of kind of…lulled me. For the rest of the trip, no matter how obnoxious the cousins’s behaviour became, I was instantly soothed by their English tone of voice. I’m not quite sure if the beginnings of incestual lust was afoot, or if I actually wanted to be them.
Or maybe it was their accents, their sweet luscious English accents (I can finally see how my accent-fetish began). The accent was almost like an iron shield, protecting them from judgment, and excusing them from doing things the Indian way. ‘Cause how can you badger your sons to marry Indian girls when they sound like Mr. Darcy? No you cannot, which is probably why they both ended up with white chicks.
And those were my cousins, the antithesis of my siblings and I, and the ones that were easy to loathe as the years went on (and as the memory of their accent faded out). It’s actually been ages since I heard from either one of them, but I can only hope that they’re somewhat fat, with receding hair and a hungry disposition. That would be a great thing to know, as I have carefully honed an accent of my very own (“Canadian with a valley girl twist”…excuse me while I have the last laugh…)
