Monthly Archives: May 2017

Secondary 2 Week 20 Update

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This was the penultimate week of school before they break for the mid-year holidays and other than paper checking, the children had some fun in school. 

GG went for a two day coding workshop. Initially she was very resistant to the idea of coding, even after I explained how it was a life skill these days. Her reasoning was that she was planning to major in humanities so coding which was a science subject was of no use to her. But she enjoyed the workshop so much that she was super excited to go back to school for the next day’s session. She also did a geography investigation where they interviewed residents near their school on their take on the amenities found there and what they liked/disliked about the neighbourhood. They now have to do a report and present it to their class. 

BB was the big surprise this week. His school’s lifelong learning programme is music and arts and as part of this, they had a music fest in school where students had to make groups and perform like a band where they have one or two students singing and the others playing instruments.  Now although BB was in his school choir in primary school, after his voice broke almost two years back, he has refused to sing at all, being very self-conscious about his half childish and half adult voice. So when he told me he was going to sing, I was actually surprised and GG and I landed up at his school to listen to him. We were pleasantly surprised. He did a great job of singing One Direction’s Night Changes and they were the only group who got calls of encore and one more song from the audience which mostly comprised his cohort and some parents. After the concert and the next day, many students came up to him to tell him he had sung well. The best accolade for him came from his principal. He met her in the corridor and she stopped and told him he sang very well. BB was so happy when he came home that day!

This week is the parent teacher meeting in both schools and then they break for almost a month. Both have activities the first 10 days of the holidays and then it’s play time for them. 

In My Hands Today…

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The Leaving – Tara Altebrando

26073074Six were taken. Eleven years later, five come back – with no idea of where they’ve been.

Eleven years ago, six kindergarteners went missing without a trace. After all that time, the people left behind moved on, or tried to.

Until today. Today five of those kids return. They’re sixteen, and they are . . . fine. Scarlett comes home and finds a mom she barely recognizes, and doesn’t really recognize the person she’s supposed to be, either. But she thinks she remembers Lucas. Lucas remembers Scarlett, too, except they’re entirely unable to recall where they’ve been or what happened to them. Neither of them remember the sixth victim, Max. He doesn’t come back. Everyone wants answers. Most of all Max’s sister Avery, who needs to find her brother – dead or alive – and isn’t buying this whole memory-loss story.

Recipes: Ginger Pepper Rasam

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GG had been on this Hallyu craze recently and wanted to eat Bingsu at a newly opened shop at the food court near our home. I accompanied her and BB. All I did was take a few bites from them but came down with a sore throat almost immediately! My solution was to make a traditional pepper rasam to which I added some ginger, both which are good for throats. You can also have this as a soothing soup when you are sick or when it is cold and rainy outside.

Ginger Pepper Rasam

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup Toor dal, washed and cooked till it is soft and mushy
  • 1 small lime sized tamarind, soaked in hot water for 20-30 minutes and then the juice extracted
  • 2 tomatoes
  • 1 tsp black peppercorns
  • 2 tsp cumin seeds
  • 1 tsp mustard seeds
  • 2-3 dried red chillies
  • 1-inch piece of ginger
  • 1 tbsp ghee
  • 4-5 curry leaves
  • 1/4 tsp asafoetida
  • 1/4 tsp jaggery (optional)
  • Salt to taste
  • Coriander leaves to garnish

Method:

  • Blend together the peppercorns, dried red chillies, ginger and 1 tsp cumin seeds with 1 tomato into a smooth paste and keep aside.
  • Smoosh the tamarind and drain the water into a pot along with the cooked dal.
  • Chop the other tomato into quarters or eights and drop it into the pan.
  • Boil for a while till the raw smell of the tamarind goes away, around 5-7 minutes.
  • Now add the blended paste along with salt and jaggery and let it boil till the tomatoes are completely cooked. Switch off the gas and start the tempering.
  • In a smaller pan, heat the ghee and when hot, add the mustard and balance cumin seeds. When they pop, add the curry leaves and asafoetida and stir before pouring it into the rasam.
  • Garnish with chopped coriander leaves and serve hot as an accompaniment to rice or as a soup

Notes:

  1. If you don’t have jaggery, you can use sugar instead or even omit it completely.
  2. If you don’t have tamarind, you can either use 1 tbsp tamarind paste (which you can get at any Indian store) or use lemon juice. If using lemon juice, add it according to taste at the very end, just before serving.
  3. If you are planning to have this as a soup, omit the dal and follow the rest of the recipe.

In My Hands Today…

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The Great Blue Yonder – Alex Shearer

Q826_sch_cvr_0.tifPeople seem to think it’s an easy life when you’re dead. But you can take it from Harry, it’s no such thing.

After finding himself dead from a bike accident, Harry emerges on the Other Side, a strange land where the sun is always setting but never quite disappears, and dead people wander about, waiting to move on to the Great Blue Yonder. Harry’s not sure exactly what the Great Blue Yonder is, but he doesn’t want to go there until he’s found some way to let his sister know that he’s sorry for the mean things he said to her just before the accident.

To do that, he’ll have to return to Earth as a ghost–and face what life there is like without him.

Family Stories: Family Adoptions

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Following my last post, I started thinking more about what makes a woman a mum. I have also been watching this drama where a woman is forced to give up her five-year-old daughter to her sister-in-law (husband’s sister) who is childless. She has another, older daughter and is pregnant with her third child, which also happens to be a girl. Her husband had taken loans from his sister’s husband who also pressurises the couple for the adoption. The woman’s mother-in-law also forces the issue as she wants her daughter to be happy since the daughter’s mother-in-law is forcing her son to divorce her since she is childless. The only person who is on her side is the woman’s brother-in-law (husband’s brother), but he is silenced by the others in the family. At this point in the drama, the child has been handed over, but everyone is miserable. I am sure the ending will be positive, as it happens in all dramas, but this got me thinking about something that has happened in my own family.

My mum is the oldest of four girls, and when my grandmother was pregnant with her fourth child (maybe in the hope of having a boy), her sister-in-law (my grandfather’s sister) who was married, but childless offered to adopt the child if it was another girl. My aunt was born and was informally adopted by her aunt. Why informally you may ask? This was because she was betrothed at birth to a cousin who happened to have the same gotra as her aunt. Now because marriage within a gotra was prohibited, the aunt could never formally adopt her or even have her call her mum. She lived with my mum’s aunt all her life, a mere 10-minute walk from her mum’s place and used to meet her sisters often. She always knew who her parents were and used to call them mum and dad and her adopted mum and dad as aunt and uncle, but she didn’t go to the same school as her sisters and perhaps in a small way resented the hold her sisters had over her.

When she got married, it was my grandparents who gave her away and this rankled my grandaunt all her life. She was incredibly jealous of my grandmother and my mum and her sisters and would resent anytime my aunt spent with them. This went on for around 60 odd years until the grand aunt died last year.

She was a mother to my aunt in all ways that mattered but never heard her adopted daughter call her mum, while she had to hear her sister-in-law being called mum all the time. I would think the resentment she had within herself was completely justified.

Then I started thinking about my grandmother. How would she have felt, having to hand over her child to someone else, even though she was her own sister-in-law? Would she have felt pressurised by her family to give her up? Or did she do it with full consciousness?

The person who was most stressed was my aunt according to me. She was constantly under pressure between her mum and adoptive mum and had to play a balancing game all her life. It is only now, when she is past 60 and her adoptive mum has passed on, that she is planning a holiday to stay with her birth mum for a month. How sad is that! She had to always watch her thoughts, words and actions in case her adoptive mum took offence in something she said or did, especially when it related to her birth family.

This situation was something I’d lived with my whole life and was not something I really thought about till now because this was normal in my family. But watching the drama and then relating it to what happened/is happening in my own family made me see it in a different light, one that is more emphatic, I hope.

I hope sharing this family story helps you see adoptive families, especially those who have been adopted by their own family a little differently. Life is never black or white and this is one situation where the shades of grey are more prominent.