I don’t believe in routine gift-giving. My relatives and friends are probably surprised and possibly offended that I don’t bring along gifts when I visit them, or neglect to give them gifts on their birthdays or anniversaries or whatnot.

That is not to say that I don’t believe in gifts. I do give a gift when I feel that I have found the right gift for the right person at the right time. I think this is partly because although I have received lots of gifts, coming from a culture that prizes gift-giving, some gifts were truly memorable and had an enormous impact on me.

Gifts don’t have to be something tangible, made of atoms. Experiences, advice, companionship, and just showing-by-example can also turn out to be truly priceless gifts. Often, I think, the gift giver may not realize the profound impact their gift would have on the recipient. What might be a simple token of goodwill might have far-reaching influence in shaping the life of the receiver.

My mother had six siblings. Growing up, I was very close to them. I think I was special to them because I was the first nephew for all of them. For each of them, I remember a truly memorable gift they gave me.

My mother was the eldest child in her family. The next in line is my āsai ammā. Āsai is an enterprising woman who had a reputation for taking initiative and getting things done. Whenever I had to be in her city, I stayed in her house. One such occasion was my 12th birthday. Āsai gave me a tiny blue English dictionary (“New Gem Dictionary” by Collins). In addition to words, it also has a list of common acronyms, and a list of classical and foreign words and phrases. The 12-year old me couldn’t have afforded to buy this dictionary. Even if I had been able to, I wouldn’t have had the discernment to choose this particular one — I would probably have picked up a cheaper, lower quality dictionary. As it turned out, I used this dictionary extensively all through my teens and 20s. I carried it with me everywhere I went, through three continents and six countries. Now, it is tattered, with a missing spine, and separated from its back cover. But it played a monumental role in my being able to confidently read and write English fluently. Having grown up in a provincial town in a country where the medium of instruction was not English, acquiring fluency in English was a huge struggle for me.

My mother had another sister, my citti. I lived with my grandmother for the better part of my first 13 years. Citti had finished highschool and stayed at home helping her mother. So I probably spent the most time with citti among all my mother’s siblings. Citti is the unofficial keeper of the family lore. She told endless stories about family members and I devoured every bit. My grandfather died when my mother was just 21, and her youngest sibling was just two. The loss of their father left an indelible impression on the children. In citti’s stories, my grandfather was the perfect gentleman, and my mother was the embodiment of patience. She also told me stories about her maternal great grandfather who was so rich that he could pay to have the train stop in front of their house to load the cigars made in his little cigar factory, but whose innumeracy meant that eventually he ended up losing all of his fortune. I owe my knowledge of the family lore to citti.

After the three women in the family came the four men. The eldest among them is my periyamāmā. He went abroad to study when I was 6. So I only knew him via letters and photos until he returned several years later. By that time I was a teenager. Once, when I was about 17, he visited us. He had his expensive camera with him which he had brought back from abroad. I was very curious about photography. Forty years ago, photography was an expensive and difficult hobby. No one had the point-and-shoot smartphone cameras that are so ubiquitous today. Cameras had to be loaded with film. Loading a film correctly is an art that required care and precision. If you made a mistake, you might not realize that you had, until you finished shooting the entire film (24 or 36 shots typically), took the film to a studio to have it developed and printed, only to discover that the film wasn’t loaded correctly. Furthermore, there was no auto-focus. One had to carefully adjust the camera aperture and focus properly to get a crisp photo. Messing up one or the other will result in a hazy, overexposed, or underexposed photos. Periyamāmā saw my interest, showed me the basics of photography, let me try a few shots, and to my utter surprise, offered to leave the camera with me! You can imagine how empowering this was to an inquisitive 17-year old eager to try his hand at photography. I think I spent all the money I had that summer on buying rolls of film, and trying my hand at all kinds of photography, sometimes nagging my sisters to be reluctant models, sometimes making my classmates extremely happy by taking “action photos” of them riding past in their motorcycles. It was a truly exciting experience for me.

The next in line is bālāmāmā. He was a government official and was posted to all sorts of exciting places, in the middle of jungles. He is also a natural storyteller. If citti regaled me with family lore, bālāmāmā told me stories about the exotic: about hunts in the forest (I doubt if he ever went on one himself! It is likely that he interacted with hunters who sold him game meat and told him some stories. But that didn’t matter. His stories were vivid and exciting!), about encounters with the indigenous people, and so on. Remarkably, for someone who didn’t study science beyond high school, he also had an innate sense of scientific curiosity. I remember how we would lie on the railway track in front of grandmother’s house, under a starlit sky, and he would discuss what would happen if there was no friction — that we could get on top of a wooden crate, and with one push to generate momentum, we could reach all the way to the other end of the country. A thought experiment like this is much more likely to trigger the imagination of a curious 10-year old than any amount of boring classroom science lessons could.

My third uncle is nēsāmāmā. He is a dashing man, and is (at least, was) brave and fearless to the point of recklessness. I remember two instances when his thoughtfulness and generosity touched me more than perhaps he himself realized at the time.

First, as a child, I loved to write. I wanted to become a writer when I grew up. I wrote all the time. Inspired by the name of a character in a historical novel, kaṇṇukkiṉiyāḷ (meaning “[she who is] sweet on the eyes”), I chose myself a pen name, eḻuttukkiṉiyavaṉ (meaning “[he who is] sweet to writing”). My writings were rather mediocre, having had no training and no real role models. They didn’t rise to the level of being published. But I truly loved to write. Nēsāmāmā saw this. He was working at a printing press at the time. He offered to print me a letter pad with my pen name on it. He also offered to print some of my writings. You can imagine how overjoyed I was. Fortunately, nēsāmāmā had the sense to ask permission from my parents, and they promptly refused on the grounds that it would distract me even further from my academic performance which was already dismal (this was at the end of my Grade 8, when I got 28% for science and 36% for mathematics, and my parents were in panic mode). Nevertheless, the realization that an adult was willing to take my writing seriously was an enormous validation and confidence booster.

Second, as the country descended into a civil war, I decided to leave for India. At the time, the only way to go to India (affordable to a middle-class family like mine) was via a 3-hour ferry trip from Thalaimannar. It was a grueling 6–7 hour bus ride to go from Jaffna to Thalaimannar. My father bid me goodbye in Jaffna itself. Nēsāmāmā who was working in Vavuniya at the time, which is halfway between Jaffna and Thalaimannar, came to see me off when our bus stopped in Vavuniya. I was traveling with my friend and his father, who was a postmaster. We spent the night at the house of the local postmaster in Thalaimannar before catching the ferry early next morning. At around 3 am, there was some commotion outside. It turned out that Nēsāmāmā and a friend of his had decided to travel to Thalaimannar to see me off. Not knowing where I was staying overnight, they had checked many places where travelers spend the night, and somehow ended up at the postmaster’s house (to this day, I don’t quite understand how he was able to figure out where I was). In 1984, Northern Sri Lanka was highly militarized. There were soldiers and checkpoints everywhere. Soldiers were jittery because they could be ambushed by the Tamil militants at any time. Their jumpiness made them quick on the trigger. Sensible young Tamil men avoided putting themselves in situations where a nervous soldier might shoot them. Nēsāmāmā was 33 years old. It was sheer madness for him to travel through the night to Thalaimannar. It was even crazier to go from place to place in the middle of the night looking for someone. But he did. And he stood on the shore until our ferry passed out of sight. Despite its recklessness, his gesture touched me deeply. I was a 20-year old, leaving my country for the first time, going into an unknown country where I knew no one, and didn’t know whether or when I would ever come back.

The youngest in the family is my ravimāmā. He is just a decade older than I am and therefore in this ambiguous zone of being neither an elder nor a contemporary. When my parents wanted to build a house in Jaffna, and had no one to supervise the day-to-day building, they asked our next door neighbor, who was my mother’s uncle (technically, uncle-once-removed, but he was closer to her than any uncle would ever be). He was in his late fifties, and had his own big family to take care of. So the actual day-to-day management of the house-building project fell on the shoulders of ravimāmā who was barely into his twenties. I watched him rise to the occasion, carrying heavy cement bags to the site on his bicycle every morning, fighting with the old mason and the crafty old carpenter who assumed that they could pull the wool over the eyes of the inexperienced twenty-something. He was inexperienced, but savvy enough to notice when the builders were cutting corners, and had enough gumption to push back against them even though they were twice his age. It taught me that when someone underestimates you, you can use it to your advantage. The house itself is now no more, a victim of Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war. But my impressions have stayed with me.

Don’t bother with routine or expensive gifts. But if you have a chance to give a meaningful gift to a youngster, don’t miss that chance! The trouble of course is knowing what might turn out to be meaningful.

N. Asokan, aka eḻuttukkiṉiyavaṉ, from Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, is a technologist passionate about writing, language, and literature. He is an amateur literary translator. Some of his translations of Tamil stories have appeared in the free online magazine Jaffna Monitor. One has been selected for future publication in Copper Nickel. His Tamil translation of a story by the Nebula Award winner Vajra Chandrasekara appeared in the literary magazine, kālaccuvaṭu. Occasionally he also writes his own stories, essays, and poetry but is yet to publish them! In this piece, he fondly recalls childhood gifts from his aunts and uncles that left an indelible impression on him.

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