- Grace
When they said the topic was ‘disaster’, they might as well have said, “It’s a 4x2 wall and Amma wants to put a 2x1 original hand-painted family tree papyrus from Greece on it,” because that is exactly what is happening at home. An infernal disaster.
First of all, the thing is not even all that good to look at. It’s huge and old, sure, but you don’t see me trying to nail Paati to the wall (and, for the record, she is really cute to look at). It has all these glittery birds on a cartoonish tree, with our family names in hieroglyphs around it and artfully scattered glitter marks. Which brings me to my second contention: for an ancient, ‘original’ papyrus, this thing has way too much glitter. Is there something I don’t know? Don’t tell me the one history class I bunked in high school was the one in which they taught Ancient Grecian nightlife.
Now, before this extends into some huge paper on why I believe Achilles had drinking problems (come on, soaking in some powerful liquid because he had stuff he couldn’t heal? Classic alcoholic), I’m going to get back to the disaster at hand.
Remember how I told you our names were written around the tree? Well, that is a horror all on its own. Apparently, they priced the papyrus based on the number of names to be written on it and my brilliant family decided to concatenate my parents’ names into one huge name and my sister’s and mine into another. Poor Greek shopkeeper thought he was milking gullible tourists with his ‘original’ glitter scroll and here he was getting conned, or should I say, con-catenated. Now, thanks to my family, all of Greece thinks Indians have freakishly long names.
Shouldn’t a family tree represent family values, sobriety, and love? The only thing this one proves is that we are a cheap family that conned a country which just got out of an economic crisis.
By the time I had finished writing this, the thing was hammered onto the wall. The only positive thing about this whole situation is that, even if I were to disappoint the family so badly that they’d want to burn me off the family tree (like Sirius Black), they still wouldn’t be able to figure out which part of the gigantic name-collage it is.