The Double Decker Pencil box

My little cousins(Aged 6 and 7) almost rolled on the floor in a shopping mall asking my aunt for this double decker pencil box which looked hideously green and had a Donald Duck squawking all over. I guess they are in the phase of life, where their social status is determined by the coolness of the pencil box. The more decks it had, the higher you go up in the scale of respect.This double decker pencil box also had a hidden "half decker",if I may say , and guess what, a separate sharpener for crayons as well. There were four tiny buttons which when pressed made secret compartments to pop out. No wonder my cousins grovelled before my aunt to get them one as it would make them as popular and cool as Ajith Kumar and Ilyathalapathy Vijay in their respective classes.

Only in the bill counter, we found that each one was priced at Rs. 300 which was outrageous by any standard. Oh, yes, we had to get each one a separate box, because the concept of sharing would spell death knell to the pencil box. As it was impossible to remove the boxes from their iron clutches, we had to get them.

After toppling a couple of mannequins,my cousins were practically thrown out of this dress shop we went next. After a while we heard a sudden ear splitting scream, only then to realise that the kid had walked through the immaculate glass doors and had smashed his nose. Note that this nose had raised huge concerns in the womenfolk of my family who were desperately waiting for some kind of mass to emerge from his face while he was a baby. Our family is pretty nosy, literally; apart from the fact that we go out of our way to poke our rather big proboscises in all the things unconcerned to us, we also use it to smell food from a kitchens, miles away to fantasise how perfectly it should be cooked. Considering that the nose has played such a big part in our evolutionary adaptation through ages, no wonder a button nose raises a huge concern among the elders of the family. Coming back, the kid hadn't really broken it, but the impact had quite shaken him to remain silent and shocked for a good five minutes. And then, he went back to wailing for a packet of Jelly.

In just two days, my cousins had the double decker boxes; only difference was that the decks were dismantled in to parts. They claimed that the boxes had a little accident. They tried to reason that that they can still use the box, each deck of it, as a sort of open shelf, to store crayons and paper bits.

I simply love the feeling that these days I am not the one who gets the smacks in an outing and there is this pair of destructive siblings who can be instigated to go for each others' throat exclusively for my general entertainment.

I love my cousins; especially when their motto is collateral damage.