Funny Families

You can’t pick your relatives—but you can choose to laugh at them.

As that paragon of fatherhood Homer Simpson once told his brood, “Remember, as far as anyone knows, we’re a nice, normal family.” Then again, we’ve never met a normal family. With that in mind, we invited readers to share hilarious stories about their kith and kin—snoopy aunties, oddball uncles and cheeky parents. After sifting through the many anecdotes, we can honestly say each family is uniquely eccentric.

AMMANNI KNOWS BEST!

When Ammanni or my grandmother read about Neil Armstrong and his first step on the moon, she scanned the newspaper photo and nodded disdainfully, “How these people fool the masses. Even educated people fall for it. If Armstrong is the first man to be on the moon, who was the photographer who took his photo?”

DR ALI KHWAJA, Bengaluru

A LITTLE TOO SWEET

We lived in a joint family of 22 people in our ancestral home in Calcutta. My great aunt, the matriarch, ruled the household with an iron fist. A younger great aunt resented her dictatorial ways and often paid her back in kind, quietly but fiercely.

One of her duties was to serve her eldest sister-in-law tea every evening. The brew had to be just right before it was poured into a fine china cup with two spoonfuls of sugar. However, the matriarch always found fault, sending it back to be prepared all over again. Finally, tired of the older woman’s tantrums, my great aunt decided to teach her a lesson. She boiled the tea for 10 minutes, added seven spoons of sugar, stirred it well and presented it to her sister-in-law with a flourish. As expected, all hell broke loose, but much to her delight, the trickster was thereafter banished from the kitchen forever.

NANDITA DHAR, Kolkata