Mitali Saran: The power of the raspberry

It's much better than yelling 'makkhimakkhimakkhi'

My five-year-old niece is visiting from overseas, along with her Californian-English-via-Mandarin accent. The second she wakes up, shortly before sunrise, she demands to step outside to look at the parrots, which she calls “toh-daaz”. They’re fast asleep with their beaks tucked under their wings, like the rest of us, but anyone who has spent any time around a five-year-old knows that the gentlest whisper from such a creature is like being shot into wakefulness. The parrots bolt straight off the trees, eyes wide and hearts hammering, pooping with fear. She likes this a lot. It puts a smile on her face that would gladden your heart if it were actually daylight and you could actually see it.

Her relationship with insects, chronicled in a previous edition of this column, has been rather more fraught, but it is developing. From initial terrified disbelief when she first encountered flies, mosquitoes, ants and other creepy-crawlies (she thought they ate people), she has grown more cynical. The pests are still her enemies, but her distaste is tempered by the fact that she is more secure about her military advantage. She has evolved a sort of long-haul siege mentality, with the option of counterattack. She launches the occasional sortie, windmilling her arms and yelling “Makkhimakkhimakkhi!” like a kamikaze pilot descending into Pearl Harbor, as if each iteration strikes a couple of bugs dead. It’s bigotry and bravery and last-ditch mission, all wrapped up in one conflicted package.

The other morning we had breakfast on the porch, successfully waking up several neighbourhoods in the National Capital Region in the process. Since the weather has changed in Delhi and we’ve gone from cool spring straight to mosquito- and fly-infested summer, she had a lot of competition for her egg and toast from a cloud of insects. There were so many that she realised that shouting makkhimakkhimakkhi was not going to accomplish anything. She retreated and reconsidered, and then came back with a new tactic: instead of trying to fight them, she just walked into the middle of them and blew a mighty, saliva-laced raspberry. It said all kinds of things at once — that she was unimpressed by their fearsome numbers, that their pomposity was just so much rubbish, and that while they had the floor for the moment, they could never have her respect.

And I realised that this simple device is what I’ve been searching for, without knowing that I was searching for it, to perfectly communicate the precise shade of my feelings these days. Sticking out your tongue and making a flatulent noise remains relevant whether you’re 5, or almost 45. It conveys a derision that neutralises your de facto impotence; you can’t do anything about the country, but the act of expression itself is deeply satisfying.

The BJP tries to impose President’s rule on Uttarakhand without waiting for a floor test. * Raspberry *

The Congress decides to compete for most nationalist idiot in Maharashtra. * Raspberry *

The contractor in Kolkata calls the horrendous collapse of its flyover “an act of God”. * Raspberry *

People on social media believe that India is going great guns and that the world respects us madly. * Raspberry *

Torrents of abuse, ranging from the assumption that you’re trying to get free tickets to international conferences, to the assumption that you’re actually being paid by “political masters” for your opinion. * Raspb-- *--no, actually that’s just extremely funny and makes me giggle.

Anyway, I highly recommend the raspberry. It has a deeply cathartic effect, and while you inexorably age with every passing day, making a farty noise with your mouth just never gets old.

Mitali Saran is a Delhi-based writer mitali.saran@gmail.com