I'm nine, and Sharan is five. (I think.)

It's Christmas, we're in Solomon Mama and Prema aunty's house.

Mama still works in the Nuclear Medicine Department. Aunty taught social studies in our school. (In school, though, she was Solomon teacher - solemn, strict, slightly scary, but mighty good!)

One holiday afternoon, a friend and I didn't know the answer to a question in a quiz in a newspaper - name the river that runs through seven countries. We went straight to her house. She fetched this large coffee table book on Europe. She showed us the map and pointed out the Rhine and the Danube. Pretty pictures. I don't remember which one actually runs through seven countries, but I know that I learnt of these two rivers that afternoon.

Solomon Mama helped me decode electromagnetism for my tenth standard physics exam. But that's not the fun story. I once installed a theme on his computer by mistake, and each time he started his computer, a partly-see-through-bikini-clad Mariah Carey splashed water around instead of the stately "Windows 95" floating amidst blue clouds. He sent me an email about it (through this ancient form of email called zetainfotech - their server crashed when my cousin tried sending me a photo of Azhar!), and I still remember a sentence, "Please get Mariah Carey out of my life!"

The Solomons had a pomeranian, Scooby; a white, fluffy, jumpy variety. Sharan was petrified of him. Which is why I'm surprised he's even there at this Christmas party photo.

Christmases, for many years, meant a morning at their house. Mama would call my Appa on the previous day and request him to send us there for some cake, biscuits and juice. I would run excitedly, and Sharan would accompany me like he was being taken to be administered polio drops.

Look at him - staring into the camera, white-and-white-politician-kurta-pyjama, straight out of a fairness cream advertisement, a head too large for his body, clutching the biscuit as if it were a grenade, turning to the camera almost as if it allows him to take his mind off the biscuit.

And there I am. Oblivious to the camera. Wearing my Venkatesh shirt (it was the same shirt he wore in "Ammai muddu..." in Kshana Kshanam) and my Chermas jeans (I loved that shop only because the clothes fell through some tunnel from the packing people on the second floor to the delivery guys on the ground floor). Too engrossed in my plum cake to bother with the world.

Little has changed. Sharan is still a kurta-sporting diplomat, aware, alert and in touch with his surroundings.

And here I am, trying to come to terms with the world, only to be distracted by every plum cake that comes my way.