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.