Interesting asides

Interesting asides

When we were in Mauritus, Valerie took us to her house.Her mom had this funny habit of adding extra bits of information in every sentence. For example when someone asked her how many children she had she would say :"I have 6 children. Didier, who is not here but lives in paris; Valerie, who is your friend and looks like you; Felicite who teaches at the school..." and so on...She was of french origin. So when I asked how long her family had lived in Mauritius, she said "About 100 years ago, a nun who got accidentally pregnant was sent away to this island. And that nun was my grandmother." Very entertaining but her responses always sounded like a paraphrase of her lifestory. She was that kind of a person too, very open, very warm and very frank. You felt that you had known her for a long time after just one meeting.

I suppose we reveal or betray more about ourselves through these extra bits of information that sneak into our conversations as an aside. It is like we keep them in reserve to be inserted at the appropriate moment - in order to make the right impression or as a cue for the conversation to develop in the direction we would like it to go. "The other day I told this to Mr.Shetty during our round of Golf- we are both members of the same club, you know." Very clever! In the right circles, this would have scored many many points.( I did that cleverly at the beginning of this post too...in case you hadn't noticed!!)

In many cases these also spring out of our insecurities,like this rich relative of ours who , whenever she had splurged on something obscenely expensive would always tell us how it was on offer at a discount which she could not let pass. As if she owed the universe an explanation for her expenses. Well actually, it was more to soften the shock that such enormous expense would have on us, the poorer relatives whose monthly income was equivalent of her one day expenses at times.

And then there is my elderly neighbour who told me this morning : "I got up around 5 for urination and that is when I noticed that the power was not there." I am not sure that the reason why he got up added much to the value of the coversation to me. But I guess he felt relieved(!!) after giving me the information!!