Last Sunday I am at home, helping my maternal aunt with her packing as she prepares to return back to Bhopal (where she is normally resident) after spending more than a month at Kerala with us. Among her luggage are two baby tortoises caught from the flooded fields behind our home. Her young grandson is an animal lover and wants to have these as pets at Bhopal. Apparently it would cost you 750 bucks to buy one at Bhopal.
I am packing a carton with all kinds of eatables when my niece Divya comes to me and asks, "Biju-uncle, what is the spelling of Giraffe?". I am amused at the question which I find to be trivial, given that it is an easy to spell the word, but I still answer, "G-I-R-A-F-F-E".
"Then why did you write it as G-I-R-A-F" on the puzzle pieces ?", she asks, while laughing.
I am quickly jolted to the context she is referring to. Some months ago I had bought Aman a set of 4 animal-based jigsaw puzzles, consisting of a camel, tiger, giraffe & hippopotamus. Aman is only learning to solve the easier puzzle and since the tougher ones (having more pieces) are a strain even for adults, I decided to mark the correct order of all 4 puzzles on the reverse of each piece as "TIGER 1 of 8"..... to "TIGER 8 of 8".
It seems Divya noticed this marking on the reverse and that is when she saw that I had spelt it as GIRAF. Now that she mentioned this, I tried to think back as to why I wrote the spelling wrong. But could not see any reason behind the spelling mistake. Being a person who is bothered about spelling/grammar even when sending an SMS, this seemed too silly a mistake to make.
Or, can it be written off as a mistake / oversight ? I hope this is not any indication of memory loss or even worse Alzheimers, like depicted in the 2005 Malayalam movie Thanmathra (meaning Molecule). This is a movie to be watched, given the awesome direction and superb acting by all involved, including Mohanlal who plays the pateint so convincingly. Get a DVD when you have couple of hours to spare. Subtitles would help those that dont know Malayalam.
