Gender Finder – 1: My dad used to always refer to certain fried
sweets/snacks as “gender finders” if they turned out to be too hard to
bite into and thus if they could be broken with the teeth they had
found out that the gender of the eater is masculine gender. This was when I
was a little kid and had extremely strong teeth till the age of 19-20
at which time, sadly, I had to go in for braces and my teeth lost all
their strength. My teeth were indeed the strongest and like little
babies who are teething, I always had a craving for something or the
other to nibble at. I always chose, hard nuts, hard snacks, flat puris
which didn’t puff up and were discarded by all others in the house, and
hard, sagging tandoori rotis which give me great pleasure in the
challenge of breaking them apart. With my teeth of course, what elseJ!
I still love to nibble but the weakened teeth have reduced the range of
hard foods that I can manage to break. In fact, it was because of this
nibbling habit of mine that I earned the name of rat/squirrel/monkey in
school. Thus, I always used to be considered a boy by my dad because of
this and my general tomboyish qualities of playing all the boys’ games
along with my two younger brothers. Those two were just a couple of
years younger to me so we were pretty close.
