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thirteen

"Well, even Gran, cat-hater that she apparently was, couldn't deny the fact that the kitten was simply too little to be on his own and obviously the Yamada's couldn't care for him with Mrs. Yamada's allergy. So a tentative compromise was reached. It was decided that he would be allowed to stay in the back den of our side of the house, the point furthest away from Gran's room, until we could find somewhere to take him. And of course, we were under the strictest orders not to let him out of that room under any circumstance - but, there were no restrictions about us being in there with him, which we were, at nearly every opportunity we had.

As I said, Reema and I had been spending practically every waking moment immersed in our movie so, by the time the kitten arrived, we knew almost the entire thing word for word, jumping into the characters and dialog at the slightest provocation.

One of the bits we did constantly, I'm sure to the point of making everyone else in the household sick of it, was our version of an exchange between the two second leads, Lucky and Sanjana. Lucky is the heart throb slacker dude who is a legend in the school for having failed his exams a record number of times and Sanjana is his tomboyish best friend who all the guys like but is secretly in love with Lucky - who's completely oblivious to her feelings. Lucky also fancies himself as something of a martial artist, which he's not, but when he thinks the situation calls for it he goes into his attack pose and battle cry which are something like a defective crane stance and the sound of a tortured chicken.

Anyway, through out the movie when one would ask the other about something they didn't want to deal with, the response would be 'Avoid Lucky' or 'Avoid Sanju', back and forth. Our take on it was a little different in that we tacked on Lucky's crane bit at the end regardless of which character had initiated the exchange - which rapidly digressed to our doing the crane thing in unison at the end."  She smiles.  "Like I said, we did this all the time.  I'm sure my dad regretted buying us that movie on more that one occasion after being witness to the Sanju – Lucky – wounded crane bit countless times. Obsessive little preteen girls can be, without a doubt, one of the most annoying things on the planet."

She laughs and Lucky joins her, fondly recalling some of his earliest memories of when he joined the household and the two vibrant little girls in their own little Bollywood world. Annoying? He had thought they were simply amazing, and that estimation of Rika had never once faltered over the ensuing years. He sighs, smiling contentedly as she goes on with the story.

"So one afternoon, about four days after the kitten arrived, Reema and I were in the den with him while we attempted to do our homework. It was some math thing that I don't remember now and neither of us got very well at the time. So the afternoon was progressing something like this:

'Rika did you get number four?'

Avoid Lucky.

'Avoid Sanju.'

Waah..." In accompaniment to the pained sounding battle cry, she extends her arms out to the sides in a seated rendition of the infamous 'wounded crane'  move she and Reema did so often as children.

Lucky laughs.

"All afternoon it was like that back and forth - like I said, we didn't get whatever that lesson was very well. So after the umpteenth repetition, we realized that the kitten was acting weird when we did it, so we started just repeating it and watching him. What it was, was that every time one of us said 'Avoid, Lucky' the kitten would puff up, arch his back then toddle on his hind legs for a couple steps while making this weird high pitched growling sound.  We realized he was trying to imitate us. It was absolutely hilarious. We also found that he only did it with the Lucky part, not the Sanju part, so naturally we decided that that must be his name. To test our theory, we tried just calling 'Lucky' not as part of the dialog, and his reaction was completely different; he would start purring, run over to which ever one of us had said it, and rub on our ankles to be picked up.