I don’t know if I’ve ever told you about Gopal’s before. Gopal Sweets is about two or three kilometres down the road from college. It’s a cross between Nirula’s and Evergreen- it’s a sweet and chaat shop on the ground floor, and a (vegetarian) fast food place on the first. For the benefit of my non-Delhi readers, Evergreen is a sweet shop (Indian sweets, that is- for the benefit of my international readers), and Nirula’s is a local fast food chain renowned more for its ice cream than for anything else.
That dispenses with the introduction. Moving along.
Gopal’s first floor is manned mostly by Nepalians, but during lunchtime, a lady handles the cash register. When paying for lunch at Gopal’s I call tis lady aunty, meaning, of course, nothing more than to show respect for someone so obviously more aged than me.
But today she called me uncleji.
I’m a bit flabbergasted. My father was called uncle by a twenty year old when he was twenty-five, and this sparked off a chain of circumstances that eventually led to him getting married- the most important outcome of which, of course, was that I was born, and you are now reading the W-Fillets. I’m twenty, and I’ve been called uncleji by a woman in her thirties. I cannot even imagine the eventual outcome of this.
Then again, this incident could be completely meaningless.