'Maya's duck'

Awanti Seth Rabenhoej

My family has known Maya and her family for ages. Sort of like that song, my grand-dad and your grand-dad, sitting by the fire, just that they were all in Bombay and the thought of a fire in a living room in Bombay is horrible.

I got to know Maya, by myself, after having resisted the usual 'you must meet Maya and Amarnath and their children, they are your age and are lovely people' order from my parents when I moved to Bangalore in May 1999. I obviously refused to go meet Maya, Amarnath and their lovely kids, mainly because parents say this about people their children's age when they want to set an example and I was sure I would totally not get along with these wonderful kids.

Eventually I met the Kamath family, when my parents visited Tue, me and Odin, then our 5-month old son in Bangalore, and took us to visit Maya, Amarnath and the wonderful kids. We had a wonderful time, over tea and watching the 9/11 twin tower disaster on TV as we discussed why news channels had begun showing fiction film type footage! Like with most disasters it only brings one closer, so the three of us and the 4 Kamaths suddenly became quite close and began dropping by at each others houses for no real reason at all.

It was a horrible shock to get a call from my mum in Poona at 5:30 on the 27th of October, totally unbelievable for Tue and me, since we had just popped in to meet Maya 3 or 4 days ago and were planning another visit in a day or two!! Totally soaked in disbelief we turned up at the house hoping it was a 'chinese whisper' type of call my mother had got from Boston. We went for a few hours and ended up staying nearly till we left Bangalore at the end of the year.

Today I have 2 kids and strangely miss Maya and can't seem to be able to find a way to ask her what Amarnath and she did to bring up such wonderful people. I see so much of her in both Deepa and Nandan that I have to - like a well written thriller - work backwards to find out what she must have done then, to make them like they are today. I miss Maya, so does Tue and even Odin, the soft yellow duck she had given him is still called 'Maya's duck' or 'the duck that Deeps' mum gave me when I was a tiny baby'. Maya obviously lives on.