I guess I will note down stray memories as they find me.
I remember being in Hyderabad as a child. We would go every year. Most years to attend a wedding. My mom has nine brothers. If all of them got married each year, that’d be nine years. This wasn’t the case, but a lot of our visits were related to an uncle getting married.
We were in a car. I don’t remember where we were going, nor where we had left. This was the children’s car. Full of my cousins.
We were passing by this Hindu man riding his bicycle. One of my cousins stuck his head out and yelled, “anna, tyre puncture!” in a Telgu accent (anna means brother). There was no tire puncture. It was a prank. The man started to worry and look at the tires on his cycle. Noticing that everything was fine, he yelled back some angry words. I don’t remember what he said.
I do remember being very upset about this. We were on the road. What if this man had lost control of his cycle being worried about the tire? I felt like it could have caused some real harm. I wondered why my cousin would do such a thing. Maybe we had seen a similar prank in a movie and he was trying it out on the road.
I didn’t have the courage to bring it up with my cousin.