My "family"

There are nine people in my family. They are Mr Gomathanyagam and his wife, his two sons Jeeva and Nallithambi, their wives Maheswari and Uma, and last but not least the grandchildren - Bharathi (15), Nithya (9) and little Yudesh (2). They are a very traditional Indian family as they all live together in the same house. When Indian men marry, their wives have to go and live with the in-laws (quite a hellish prospect for most English people I'm sure!). Each family has one room where they sleep together on the floor, on a "mattress" made of old sarees. Within the house there is also a small living room and a larger kitchen. The sons work on their father's farm and they start the day early at 4.30am to attend to the cows. Mr G is an avid supporter of organic farming and natural practices, and is in many ways ahead of his time. He works hard to change the views of locals and to clean up the town. He also plants thousands of saplings to one day provide shade on the parched streets. He's quite a gem and it's easy to forget that he's in his 70s until he starts getting a little repetitive, like all good grandads! He speaks excellent English (as he used to teach it) so we've enjoyed many long debates about how to put the world to rights. Occasionally we've had the odd misunderstanding, normally related to pronunciation. My favourite being a discussion about criminals and their "terrible rapping". It was a good ten minutes before I realised that it wasn't their musical abilities that he was criticising, he was talking about raping! Mr G's wife cannot speak a word of English but will happily feed me until I pop. She gives me a huge grin when I agree to 2nds, 3rds, 10ths! My First Tamil words were "poordum, nandri" which means "enough, ta". Soon to follow were "small", "rat" and "toilet"! Bharathi has been like a little sister to me. She also speaks English and has on many an occasion acted as translator. She really enjoys having people to stay as it adds a little light relief to her hard schedule of tuition, school and then more tuition. Girls here definitely seem to get a worse deal than the menfolk. Yudesh, as the only male grandchild, gets spoilt rotten. I regularly have to bite my tongue as he never gets disciplined for throwing the most ear-splitting tantrums and often gets a treat instead to distract him. Whilst he's very sweet now I hate to think what he'll turn out like. I find it very difficult to adjust to men taking priority over women. It's simple things like I'll be in full flow talking to someone but if a man wants to speak to me he won't wait, he'll just barge on in there. Same as if I'm talking to a man and another man appears on the scene, I'll cease to exist.