Balls and more...

The summer holidays are at their fag end. I am looking forward to the schools starting. It has been a long two months of sweltering heat, a rowdy boy, a passive-aggressive girl and almost no 'me-time'. 

I am sharing a scene that needed to be captured. Yesterday morning after breakfast, when the kids were being assigned their chores for the day and Max was waiting eagerly for his set of instructions, there broke out a fight between my kids. They do not need an excuse. A look from my son, can cause a wave of emotions in my daughter, all negative, mind you. The look is then retaliated by words, which are seen as blows and felt by my son with almost Tsunami like strength. There is now a motivation and a license to hit, he feels, and before I can say "S-T-O-P" a full blown battle is on. These battles have found a great cheerleader in Max now. Nothing out of the ordinary, what I so far described. But then it happened.. amidst the blows, Bond (now nine, to be ten this October) tells Toshali, "I will kick you where it hurts real bad!" ...

T: "And where do you think that is? Huh? Where?"
Bond: "Your balls, of course!"
T looks at him, looks at me and says: "You should talk to him, he doesn't know anything, he is so dumb, I just don't believe it!"
Me: "Mind your language when you talk to your sister. Also for your knowledge, girls don't have "balls" though that is not the correct word and should not be used."
Bond (incredulously): "What are you saying? Everybody has balls. Me, you, Baba, Didi, even Max. The most important part of the body is the balls, it is more important than the brain or the heart. Everybody has it."
T: "I am out of this place, and Ma dont laugh, it is not at all funny."

I don't know what came over me, but I could not stop myself from laughing, I knew that I had to explain to Bond the facts of life, and also tell him that saying the B-word out like that is not allowed. But for the moment all I could do was roll on the floor holding my tummy. Toshali was livid and Bond thought I was in some kind of pain, because he could not comprehend that what he had said in such earnest was remotely funny.

I gathered my wits and made him sit next to me.

Me (Starting again): "Girls dont have testicles, that is the word to be used, if you want to refer to balls."
Bond: "Of course they do, everybody has them, Max just has one, I even know what the Vet said. She said she will operate and bring out the other one."
Me: "Max is a male, so his organs are like yours. T is a female and her body parts are different."
Bond: " She has it Ma, just doesn't know where it is. She is dumb."
Me: "I am not dumb, if I had them, I would know exactly where they were in my body, but, just like I said before, females don't have them. We have something similar called ovaries and they are inside our bodies."
Bond: " You are just giving fancy names that I cannot pronounce. It is all the same. Didi's are inside? Ma, you know what, that is why she is so stupid, her balls are inside." Take her to a doctor, they need to bring it out."

I knew by then that Bond understood that he was wrong about the human anatomy, but he was enjoying irritating his sister and so continued. It might seem stretched out here, but all of this happened within a framework of 15 minutes or so. The fight continued and then lost steam and topics were changed and the day flowed on.

Maybe I should have taped this, to be used on a later date when either of them is being gutless about life issues. By then they would also know that 'Balls' has a literary meaning too. And in the literary sense women have as many balls as the men and yes, they are not covered up either.

T and Bond as in 2006