Dear G

Congrats and welcome to the family. We may seem a bit weird at first, but as you will soon find, we can be fun in our own way. Especially the one you are getting hitched to, my little cousin M (ok, not so little since she's only six months younger, and we'll drop the cousin since I treat her as my own sister). She has a talent of making friends of any random person before you can say 'Dale Carnegie'. I remember her visiting our place when she was 7-8 years old and suddenly, I started to know people whom I hadn't even realized lived in the same neighbourhood. And, even though she left after a stay of hardly 2 weeks, they kept asking about her for years.

As her brother, and your future friend, I have some stuff to tell you. If you ever gift her chocolates and see her gobbling it all up in one go, don't blame me. It so happenned that her dad had bought us 3 Cadbury Dairy-Milk chocolates, and while me and S (her brother) ate ours at once, M decided to eat one small square piece and kept the rest in the fridge to enjoy it at leisure. Well, all I can say is when she came back after an hour outside, the chocolates were nowhere to be found. I am not saying we ate them, I am not saying we didn't, they may have 'evaporated' in the fridge, but all I know is that we got a firing and she decided to adopt a policy that valued immediate consumption over saving up for the future, which probably helped her understand the Americans when she went there.

Btw, while we are on the matter of gifts, don't get her any dolls either. She had an enviable collection of pretty Barbies (am ashamed as a guy to even say this) and one slightly mean looking large doll. Well, when we were kids, we had rented a video cassette of the movie 'Child's Play', watched it late into the night, and then went to sleep with our minds full of terrifying images. Again, I am not saying I picked up her doll and placed it next to her, I am not saying I didn't, but all I know is the she woke up next morning, turned and saw a doll next to her first thing, screamed loud enough to wake up the entire apartment complex, and the next thing I know, all the dolls she had were being donated to charity. The poor kids were very happy since they had obviously not seen Child's Play.

She tells me you sing very well, and you know what, she could have been a good singer too. She had a good voice, she had the enthusiasm to learn and for once, I decide to accept some blame. Every time she returned from 'paatu class' to practice, she found one more unearthly accompanying voice grating along "Saaa Reee Gaaaa Maaaa" till she decided that she'd rather sacrifice the possibility of becoming a good singer in the interests of the sanity of the everyone concerned. But then, I did ensure that you will be the undisputed singing champion in your family, and you can thank my wonderful foresight for that.

There are so many memories to recount, and I don't want to bore you with all of them. Besides, if I tell you all the stories now itself, we won't have much to talk about over the beer that you have promised me.

Take good care of her. To borrow a line from that stupid sitcom, "You guys are getting married and I couldn’t be more thrilled for both of you, but as M’s older brother I have to tell you this. If you ever hurt my little sister, if you ever cause her any unhappiness of any kind, I will hunt you down, and kick your ass!"

Regards
SRK
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PS1: G, I had partially drafted this post before I came down for the engagement, now that I have met you and found that you are a nice guy (and not because I realized I couldn't kick your ass), you can ignore the last para. But I was serious when I wrote it.

PS2: To the rest of you who are scratching their heads wondering what on earth I am blabbering about, well, my little sister got engaged to G and I am sort of excited. Or at least was, till she made me sit through a whole day of saree selection, debating the merits of 'copper sulphate blue' versus 'mazhil kazhuthu (peacock neck) blue' versus 'maroon with gold border'. The very tragedy of it all cannot be described in words even by the best of the writers, forget about yours truly.