The Death and Rebirth of a Neem Tree

Neem is not a tree that I’m particularly fond of. As I’ve doubtless mentioned before, I like me some bright, colourful flowering trees. All these fruit trees and these beneficial herbal, pesticide type trees are for these crazy environmentalist fellows like Amit.

The trouble is, when we went to the nursery to get some trees, they didn’t have any of the jacaranda, laburnum, or gulmohar that I wanted. All they had was neem, which Amit wanted. So we got neem. And of course, Amit not being one to do things in halves (or even in ones) we got two.

We planted these saplings in the front of our lawn, where they could roast in bright sunlight for most of the day. The plan was to shift them to the pavement outside the gate when they grew up a little (and then my laburnum would get pride of place in the garden). As so often happens, things didn’t go quite according to plan.

While they were building our house, the workmen had used the front part of what is now our lawn to mix cement. They were supposed to clean the site thoroughly when they laid the lawn and planted the grass. But, several months on, we saw that grass did not flourish in the front part of the lawn and whenever we scraped the surface with a view to planting something – even when we planted our neem saplings – we uncovered not rich brown or black earth, but hard, dry, white cement in either a powder, or in solid blocks and slabs.

There was only one thing to do. We told the contractor – in great anger, I might mention – to rip up the front part of the lawn, grass and all, and to excavate down to below the layer of cement, and then to lay fresh soil and plant the grass afresh.

You really must be careful what you ask for. One sunny Saturday morning, when Amit had taken Tara out for her table class and I was trying to get a handle on the mountains of housework (as usual), they attacked the lawn with an army of able bodied men and women and an armory of spades and pick-axes. By the time I realized what was going on, grass, both lush and dried, had been uprooted along with… the two neem saplings!

I did a stupid thing – I frantically called Amit and waited for him to come rushing home and take over. Well, actually, I did tell them to cease and desist before that, and it had the effect of slowing them down for a moment and leaving my two bougs unharmed, but… I didn’t have the heart to go down and hunt for my two neem trees. I should have, but I didn’t. I thought they would have just cut them off at the base, and I really didn’t want to see that.

The thing is, I’m not terribly fond of neem, and I have no compunction about swatting and killing repugnant creatures like cockroaches with my chappals, but I really hate to see a plant being wantonly destroyed. And after all, this was my plant. It wasn’t a creature I had wanted, but having agreed to have it in my home, I was the one who had planted it, not very tenderly but all the same. I had dug the pits myself, had laid the saplings in them, covered them up, and after that, for weeks on end, I was the one who was responsible for watering them, or ensuring that they were watered. I was the one who inspected them – sometimes twice a day – for signs of health. I had, oddly enough, been thrilled at the way one of them had just sprung up, doubling in height and in the footprint of its leaves under my rather surprised eyes. The other sapling, though it grew and stayed green, remained puny by comparison. I watered it as well, a little more if anything, but it was clearly the runt of the litter.

Anyway, Amit came home and glowered at the army and shouted at them till they stopped, looking mutinous. Then we got an interpreter and started to communicate with them. They seemed quite bemused with our concern over the neem trees. You told us to rip it all up, so what’s the problem?

Well, we found the neem saplings chucked somewhere at the back of the lawn. The runt of the litter still had its root ball intact, so I left it till later. The bigger one, though… its roots were completely exposed! I quickly threw some earth into a plastic pot and thrust the plant into it, but I wasn’t optimistic. I don’t know much about plants or gardening – a few months ago, I didn’t know anything, and I haven’t really progressed much since then – but I do know that the main root of a plant should not be exposed to air. It’s supposed to be in the ground, at all times.

Well, one of the army that had butchered our lawn, was commandeered to dig a hole for the permanent resting place of the neem. He was a grizzled old man and he seemed, at this point, to have a bit of genuine concern for the doomed tree – though he clearly also thought that our level of concern was way over the top. I don’t blame him – from his perspective, he’s right. It is only a tree, and a pretty small little thing, too. It cost only 30 bucks, we could always get another one. I could see all that, but still. It was our baby after all, even if it was just a tree.

Anyway, we put the tree into its final resting place, me, Amit and the grizzly old man sweating it out in the sun. It looked pretty clear to me that the tree was not going to survive. It was already beginning to droop. Amit and I kept checking on it the rest of the day and the rest of the army kept laughing at us, but what do they know? By the evening, the contractor had actually sent someone over who rigged up a tripod-style barrier around it. When we left for our trip to Delhi several days later, the tree looked all but dead.

The runt of the litter, meanwhile, had been planted in the back garden. That, by all means, cannot be its final resting place – a neem grows to be too big to be kept in that cluttered space – but we kept it there just for the time being. It perked up by the end of the day and soon it was growing faster than it had in its former bed of cement, looking happy enough in its new home.

As far as the big brother neem tree goes, we came back expecting to find nothing more than a dried up twig, and that’s pretty much what we did find. But for one thing. On the dried up twig that was the main trunk, a few dried-up-twig-like branches still had droopy green leaves. And there was one particular dried-up-twig-like branch with a few dried up brown leaves hanging from it that had, most unexpectedly, an almost-invisible cluster of tiny green leaves emerging from the tip of it.

It lives! How can it be!

It’s a far cry from its former picture of health and glory, but it’s not fully dead yet. And that’s just amazing. I like that – that’s persistence for you. I still don’t really like neem trees, mind you. But I’ll look at them with a bit more respect from now on.

The little neem – this one wasn’t doing so well on a foundation of cement, but now that its surrounded by compost, rubbish, and iron rods, it’s flourishing. Still, its big brother, in its prime, looked even larger, healthier, and more vigorous.

And this is what the poor fellow looks like now. No health, no vigour, and it’s in a cage that’s too small for it, but it’s not dead yet.

Remember Me?

“You remember these guys, don’t you?”

I hate that question.

Facing me are three cool, handsome, smiling, stud guys, who must be all of 18 years old. They are wearing shorts and t-shirts displaying hairy legs and rounded biceps. One of them is wearing a cap and, joy of all joys, he’s wearing it the right way round!

I’m at the tennis court, it’s 7 a.m., I’m pretty disgruntled with my game, I’m sweating, my hair is plastered to my skull, and tennis sir is waiting for me to go all, oh-yeah-how-could-I-forget-these-handsome-hunks. I struggle to get the appropriate expression on my face while my brain hunts for the words. In the end, I look bewildered and mutter something like, huh-who-what-where? Yeah, sure.

“Well, at least you remember me,” challenges the handsomest of the three. He’s the one wearing the cap. And he, apparently, remembers me!

Grateful to be able to focus on just one handsome face at a time, I turn my full attention to him and guess what – under the charming smile, the right-way-round cap and the rather appealing one-day stubble is a guy I vaguely remember. I used to play with him. He used to be quite good in fact. And of course, he used to be about 12.

Sigh. I’m not sure whether this makes me feel young or old or lucky or not, but it sure makes me feel lost. How come he grew up and became the cool dude, the stud boy, and I’m still fuddy-duddy old me, getting fuddier and duddier by the minute?

The JBFV Syndrome*

Man, I really need a break.

You know why, don’t you? Yes, you’re right, we just got back from holiday. And everyone knows there’s nothing more tiring than getting back from holiday.
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*The JBFV Syndrome = Just Back From Vacation (and now I need a holiday) Syndrome
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The holiday itself wasn’t tiring. All we did was:

• Get up by 6.30 a.m. every day (except yesterday, when we indulged ourselves and slept till 7)
• Play tennis – four hour-long sessions, one by floodlight
• Go swimming – eight hour-long sessions, much of the time spent in trying to teach the kids not to drown
• Read – only two books, but that’s more than I normally get through even when I’m on holiday
• Eat – 14 meals out, the rest at home, but rich enough and varied enough to be counted as eating out
• Drink – On ten different occasions! Mostly beer, with little bits of wine and vodka from time to time
• And make merry – We met his father, my parents, his brother, sister-in-law, and niece, my sister and brother-in-law, his uncle and aunt, and my aunt

Aside from that, we spent about 40+ hours in plane and train, and a good bit in automobile.

We spent two nights away from the kids, to allow them to spend two whole days of unfettered, unsupervised time with Amit’s dad. It’s the first time we’ve done such a thing. The kids haven’t even done a sleepover at a friend’s house till now.

And we also got around to visiting two of the houses where I’d grown up, one in Chandigarh, one in Delhi. Both these houses are special to me. The one in Delhi is where I got married from – in a simple civil ceremony in the front garden with all of thirty people attending. The one in Chandigarh is the one I associate with the halcyon days of my childhood, where I lived from the age of six or so, till about ten. (You’ve probably read this post already, maybe even several times over, since I keep referring to it. Well, this is the house that post refers to.) We were extremely fortunate to find this house currently unoccupied, so we went in and walked around the front and back garden. It’s all a little different – many of the fruit trees I remember are gone – but it wasn’t different enough to be disappointing, as these trips down memory lane sometimes can be.

All in all it was a highly satisfactory and relaxing (!!) holiday, ten days well spent. We came back several kilos heavier than we left – and that’s only the luggage I’m talking about!

So why am I complaining?

Well, we got home at 2 p.m. on Monday. Then all we had to do the rest of the day was to:

• Clean the whole damn house – including wiping all horizontal surfaces with a damp cloth.
• Get groceries. Thankfully, I didn’t have to cook, since our cook did turn up, so that was one thing less to worry about.
• Unpack – because otherwise we wouldn’t have anything from shoes to toothbrushes in the places where we need them to be. We had two big bags and two small bags full of stuff.
• Figure out how to turn on the gas (which had been turned off). There are three separate knobs that control this and we weren’t sure how many or which of them had been turned off, so this was a nontrivial exercise, especially since we couldn’t even have a cup of coffee till we got this done.
• Drag out half a dozen palm fronds that had fallen off our neighbours’ coconut trees and then pick up at least twenty rotten mangoes that littered the lawn. The palm fronds are pretty heavy, not to mention unwieldy, and the rotten mangoes are squishy and yucky and I have a thing about worms crawling out of them like you see in horror movies (usually coming out of people’s eyes or mouth, dead or alive) so it wasn’t all that much fun.
• Water the lawn. The flowers died (three small pots of verbena – the others were dead already), of course, but the grass, and almost all the other plants survived. The boug thrived. The grass didn’t look as bad as I’d expected.
• Get our living room furniture and set it in place and then sit around and admire it and then expend a large volume of energy exhorting the kids not to stand, jump, or bounce on it and preferably not to even sit on it or touch it. Phew!
• Turn on the broadband, to find it’s not working. Turn on the backup broadband, to have the modem’s power supply blow up in our faces. File a complaint for the former and go out and procure a new power supply for the latter.
• Get and consume a small bottle of white wine in celebration of the above (and accomplish this without staining the shiny-new upholstery).
• Get the kids fed and watered (well, bathed) and to bed.
• Get ourselves to bed.

As long as we were on holiday, I was so well rested that even if I got to bed at 11.30, I still wanted to read for half an hour before falling asleep. You know the holiday’s over when you get into bed at 10.15 and can’t stay awake long enough to turn off the light.

Our Living Room – Before…

…And After

Hey, Where’s the Coffee Machine?

Now that I’m married to an upcoming entrepreneur, I have genuine inside insight into the entrepreneurial life. And with all the accumulated wisdom of more than a year, allow me to list for you ten good reasons not to be an entrepreneur.

1. There’s no central airconditioning. In the kind of weather Bangalore is having now, you don’t need any other reason. If you are in a room without aircon during the day, it’s not an office, it’s a sauna.
2. You get to work for the worst boss in the world; one who sets unrealistic expectations, is impossible to please, and won’t take no for an answer.
3. Working flexitime means working all the time, even during dinner.
4. Having a home-office means you sleep in the office, every night. And so does your wife, and so do your kids. There is no home.
5. You get no paid vacation. Wait, let’s rephrase that. You get no pay and you get no vacation.
6. No benefits either.
7. No appraisals, which is good, but no increments either, which is not so good.
8. The stock options are great, if only they were worth the paper they aren’t even printed on.
9. When the internet connection goes down (which it frequently does), you can’t put your feet up and wait for someone else to fix it.
10. After lunch you have to wash the dishes. If you want coffee, you have to make it, and then you still have to wash the dishes. If you don’t – no more coffee!

Need I say more?

Better Late Than Never

Yes, it’s been more than two years since my first and only book (yet) was published. There have been many demands for photos and a few of those have been met by way of a real, physical photo album – which is the best way, really.

However, not everyone is so fortunate. For those of you who haven’t or can’t see the real mccoy, here’s another feeble attempt to convey the beauty and majesty of the Himalayas, as I saw it in that memorable excursion.

I’ve created a whole new page for these photos. Enjoy. And leave some comments, please.

A Love/Hate Affair

As a kid, I loved summer holidays. Mind you, I loved school too. All the same – sleep till 7.30, then spend the rest of the day reading books, sleeping, meeting friends, and, if one was very lucky, going swimming – what’s not to love?

So in a sense, I don’t get what the hullabaloo is about these days? Why all the stress over keeping the kids “busy”? When I was a kid, kids kept themselves busy. These things don’t change – why do we fret over it so much these days?

I’ll tell you why. When I was a kid, my mother wasn’t working. She worked for a short time as a teacher, but even then, she was home when I was. So, though she didn’t have to do much to keep me busy (at least, that’s my version of the truth), she also didn’t have to worry about having someone reliable around to watch over us, she was right there. After all, even six or seven is too young to trust. I couldn’t dream of keeping kids that age at home all day long unsupervised. All sorts of crises might ensue.

When you’re the mom who’s working outside of the home, it’s a different story. Keeping kids at home all day means having a reliable someone around to watch over them. Sending them out means having a reliable someone at hand to ferry them around from swimming pool to friends’ homes to tennis class (or whatever) and back. And this reliable someone might need to know how to drive too – at least in our case, neither swimming pool nor tennis court is walking distance from home. Most of the activities aren’t walking distance, unless you choose activities entirely based on distance from home.

This year, we had a choice of two summer camps. One at the current daycare, one lane away from home and very easily walkable. The other, at the old daycare, a good long drive 10-km each way through dramatic traffic jams. Guess which one we chose? The far away one, of course. Why? Well, the activities looked more interesting. While convenience is important, it’s also important that the kids do something at least remotely interesting and meaningful at summer camp. The nearby summer camp looked as if it was designed for 3-5 year olds and nothing had been done to enhance the program for the older kids. Spending an extra 3k per head for drawing and crafts for almost seven-year-olds just didn’t make sense.

And, of course, we love their old daycare.

So we undertook to do the long drive each way, one of us dropping them, the other picking them up.

All very well and good. Then their tennis coach announced that the weekend tennis batch they’d been part of for the last two-and-a-half years had disbanded itself for the duration of the summer holidays, so could we please put them into the evening tennis batch? Our options were 3.30-4.30 (not an option) or 5.30-6.30 (siiiiiiigh). So now not only do I have to do the long drive to the old daycare right after work five days a week, I also have to do it early enough to do the even longer drive to the tennis court and make it by 5.20 or so, three days a week. I have been offered the option of shifting my own tennis session to the same slot so that both things get done at the same time (and it saves me quite a bit of driving too) but I don’t like it. 5.30 p.m. is not my time for tennis. I’ve been going for tennis 6 – 7 a.m. three days a week for about seven years now. Evenings are for office work, or for time with family, or for housework. It’s too big a mental shift for me. So I ferry them to tennis in the evening and ferry myself to tennis the next morning, regularly, every other day.

If you think I’m having a hard time of it, don’t think Amit is getting off lightly either. It’s his job to take the kids swimming at least twice a week. He’s doing it in the early morning hours, dropping them with their breakfast at daycare by 9 a.m.

And then, of course, since our weekends, which have been booked for tennis for the last 30 months or so, both Saturday and Sunday morning, have now been unexpectedly freed up, we had to go and fill them up with other activities, didn’t we? Couldn’t just grab the opportunity to lay back and take it easy for a bit, could we? No – not in the summer holidays, no way. So now we have tabla class for Tara 9.30 – 11.30 on Saturday and Sunday, and a drawing class for Mrini – just to keep things interesting – on Saturday afternoon, 3-6 p.m.

Phew! I don’t know about keeping the kids busy – this summer holiday is sure keeping the parents busy!

But on the other hand – if they don’t go for all these things during the holidays, when else will they ever get to do it? School days, it’s a struggle just getting through the day plain vanilla without any toppings. When school reopens, swimming is going to go out the window for sure, and I really doubt that tennis, tabla, and drawing classes can all continue as per the current schedule. One or more of those activities is going to have to be dropped, or else I have to give up work and spend at least half my day managing my kids’ timetable. Choices, choices.

Anyway, there’s one thing I love about summer holidays. The kids don’t have to be in a school bus by 7.15, which means I don’t have to get up at 5.45 a.m. I’ve been sleeping till 6.30 and on Sunday, due to the change in their tennis class, I slept till 7! And not only that, after dragging myself off to get dosas for breakfast, I went back to bed from 9 – 9.30! Amazing. Three days a week I still get up at 5 a.m. to go for tennis, but now, four days a week, I can sleep till past 6. Since I make a determined effort to get to bed around 10-10.15 p.m. on most days (and it really does require a determined effort) that means that for the entire duration of the summer holidays so far, I’ve been getting close to eight hours of sleep four times a week (and seven hours the other three days). I hate to admit it, but it has made a huge difference to my energy level during the day. I used to feel sleepy while driving to work at 8.30 a.m. Now I’m awake even when I get to bed at 10.15 p.m. Of course, I completely agree that sleeping that much is nothing short of slothful and excessively lazy and a complete waste of time. Who can afford to spend eight hours a day sleeping when there’s so much to do? In fact, it’s one reason that I absolutely refuse to consider moving my tennis session to the evening. I’ll only spend the morning hours sleeping, making it eight hours a day all seven days of the week, which is nothing short of criminal. True, I need the sleep, but still – one can’t give in to every single thing the body demands. Look at the number of people who regularly get by on five or six hours of sleep, after all. Or less. Seriously, they have so much more time to get things done.

So no – this state of bliss can’t last long. But that’s not to say that I’m not enjoying it while it lasts. After all, a summer holiday comes around only once a year, so we might as well make the most of it. Or at least stop complaining about all the driving.

C’mon Kids, Let’s Do Homework

Wait a minute. Homework? What homework? Exams are over and school is closed. Report cards, even, have been delivered. Who does homework at this time?

Well, I do.

Ok, first, the exam thing. For a long time, I’ve been of the opinion that studying for the purpose of passing exams is just the wrong way round. One must study to learn. Passing exams is a fringe benefit, of little utility in the important task of learning. Yes, I know it’s a crazy point of view in today’s competitive world, but that’s the way I’ve approached education since I was 18 and though I haven’t acquired a string of letters after my name to show how educated I am, I have studied literature, psychology, German, and archaeology and been very involved in each as I studied it. I can’t say something as definitive as that I’ve learnt more or better than I would have with a more test-centric approach, but I do believe that I enjoyed studying more than I would have otherwise, and that I remember and carry forward more of that education than I would otherwise have. (It’s also true, of course, that by this time I was studying only subjects that I was genuinely interested in, which probably helped too.)

Also, when I was in school, at which point I still was stuck with horribly boring subjects like history, geography, and particularly civics, I even then had a long(ish) term view of learning. I tried to keep up to date with my work during the year, and didn’t break much of a sweat when exams rolled around. I did revise, of course, not saying I didn’t, but I didn’t swot, I never stayed up all night, and I never, ever carried my books to school.

One thing I’ve always felt. If you swot like crazy the day before the exam, you spew it all out and the next day, it’s gone, wiped clean as though it never was. If you study over a longer period of time, it stays for longer. I’m fairly confident there should be some studies and statistics supporting this theory.

So with my kids, too, I want them to study around the year, to understand concepts for the sake of understanding, to work for the sake of work and to be ready and able to take a test on any given day. A test is fine as a tool to evaluate their understanding. I don’t see it as an end in itself.

Having said all that, I never intended to be the homework kind of mom. Homework is the student’s headache. In fact, it should be the school’s headache. Why do schools give homework to six year olds anyway? Education, in its entirety, is the school’s job. My job is to have fun with my kids and to teach them the kind of extracurricular things that you can’t leave to the school.

So for the first couple of years, I told my kids to do their homework, but for the most part, I kept myself out of it. I’m a lousy teacher anyway, simply not cut out to handle young kids, not even my own.

But what to do? Last October I was summoned to school and given a talking to. If I didn’t get involved and soon, at least one of the kids was going to be hopelessly overwhelmed by numbers in a confusion she might never recover from.

Well, I couldn’t have that, could I? Not me, I was a math genius in school, I loved numbers, they delighted me with their magical ways. So I ground my teeth and settled down to the task of being the homework mom.

It wasn’t easy. The kids were distracted, disinterested, lazy, stupid, bored, and everything in between. Having two of them to handle didn’t help. When one finally settled down and started to work, the other would start up some new form of distraction. It took many sessions, and much lung power in the form of shouting on my part and wailing on theirs before we got some kind of a truce agreed upon.

It also took me a while to figure out how to go about it. Some concepts they were being taught in school were just too tough for their age, or so I felt. Other concepts were within their grasp, but needed a lot more work than their school had time for (hence the need for homework and the homework mom).

I dumbed it down and dumbed it down. One exercise, for example, had kids do two-digit addition, like say 23+5. Then, after they did that, they had to write two “subtraction facts” based on that addition. A subtraction fact is: 28-5=23; or 28-23=5. So basically, they are trying to get at: a+b=c; therefore c-a=b and c-b=a. Even when I spell that out to the kids, they get a glazed look in their eyes.

These kids enjoyed a Montessori environment for the first three years of school. So I took objects and tried to work it out with them. Guess what? They didn’t even get, for quite a long time, that if 3+4=7, then, necessarily, 4+3 is also = 7. They still had to work it out each time, again and again. They could not intuitively just “see” that adding two sets of things either this one first or that one first, would always give the same result. If you don’t get a+b = b+a, what hope is there of getting a+b=c, therefore, c-b=a? None.

Well, I kept at it. I worked with numbers from 1 through about 12 and did it written, with objects, and with mental math. Eventually, after many days of work, Mrini just “got” it. Tara, I’m still not sure.

So then I started to set them sums. Very easy sums of the a+b=c variety with one number usually single-digit and the other either single-digit or two digits. On the other half of the page, I wrote out the corresponding “subtraction facts” for them. After many days of doing these sums, finally, today, Mrini realized that she didn’t need to really add the numbers. By looking at the other side of the page, she could write the answer. And then, by looking at the addition, she could write out the subtraction facts, without really needing to work it out. (Example: 23 + 5 + ?; 28 – 5 = ?; 28 – 23 = ?) She looked at me to see if I would mind her taking these shortcuts, but I was all like, wow, finally!

Hallelujah!

I can see, now, the occasional joy of teaching young kids. When they get it, it’s like a major breakthrough, like the sun shining through the clouds. I also realize that it’s not something you can point out to the child. Point it out as many times as you like, you just get a puzzled look in response. You have to just let them work at it and work at it and work at it, until suddenly they see it themselves.

Tara, now. When we went to school to get report cards, the kids came with us. Now here’s one of the little things that make me love this school. They had a small set of desks and chairs and papers and a couple of teachers and the kids who had come were invited (not mandatorily made) to go and do some work. The work Tara was given, or chose to do, was division. She got a bunch of stones and was given a set of questions of the 12 / 4 type. They aren’t into fractions yet, so whatever doesn’t go exactly gets counted as Remainder (or, if you prefer, reminder). It was amazing how quickly she picked it up. As far as I know, they hadn’t done this in class before that.

So after we came home, she’s been working on division. Never mind that she’s just about got her addition straight, not very sure about subtraction, and is relatively unconcerned with multiplication. Division, with stones and groups and reminders, she can do. And she will do it till her hands fall off, her pencil breaks, or she runs out of paper.

The best part is, after doing sums for a good long time, Tara insists that I give her “expand” and “number names” to wrap up the session. Both of these are really easy things that she doesn’t need to be doing anymore, but for her it’s like dessert. I did all the other stuff, so now give me Expand and Number Names. (Expand is like, 236 = 200 + 30 + 6; Number Names is like 236 = two hundred and thirty six)

Initially when their teacher started sending them home without any homework other than “revise” I was all like, oh, we’re done with homework, let’s go play badminton. After a week or so I realized, hey, maybe there’s worksheets or something coming up, we’d better do some homework. Then, the kids told me, Worksheet? No, we’re done with those. I was like, when? They were like, oh, last week. Math was first. Then Hindi.

Great.

So then I said, ok, but we’re going to do homework anyway. And, freed from the restrictions of homework and worksheets, we made up our agenda to suit ourselves. And I intend to keep at it throughout the holidays. Or so I hope.

Homework, after all, is not for the school and not for exams. It’s for learning – and learning must go on.

At least for now – before the kids grow up enough to say, what, homework? During the summer holidays? Surely you’re joking, mom – and go off to climb the mango tree.