My daughter Piyuh

She is 1 year 3 months and three week old today.
At this tender age she has started to amaze us all by her brilliant adaptability to surroundings, and her infinite detail for observation baffles us.
She calls me Baba one of her first words she learnt as a toddler. The first one was mumma, which she uses to call her mom, her grandmother and every lady that seems a little plum around the waist and round in the face.
My friends say she is learning fast. Picking up things from our daily chores. It is a wonderful feeling but, instills a creepy sense of insecurity within. The more she learns, the more she loses her innocence!
I am learning how woman as a species matures so fast.
She is by nature a mumma's daughter. Except for her attitude which hugely resembles mine and I can see the seeds of self-destruction of Bose khandan already flowering in her.
But, her zest for life, heavily borrowed from her mother's insatiable lust for everyday mundane, completely and happily overshadows my brooding sentiments. She loves to engage. Whether it’s a conversation with her grandma, who 70 years older to her, or cooing at the housemaid to draw her attention to her new discovery, it is a joy like no other.
She loves outing. In fact, she could give up anything for a walk outdoors, even her Dhaka (the ubiquitous cap which for some unwarranted, unexplained reason has triggered a fascination so huge for her that she always wants a hold on anything that opens and closes in the tiny grasp of her tender fingers). A drive by car is even better received and removes any trace of inconsistency in her merry disposition.
Her outing is incomplete without her shoes which she insists on wearing even while she is asleep. The kiddo is almost nurturing a fetish for shoes. She already has half-a-dozen of them, all of different colours. It is one of the few things she can spot and spell clearly in both English and Bengali. In English it is Shooj. In Bengali it becomes Jutto. I reflect and laugh on myself at her latest hook-up. Sometimes things come back to you in the most unusual way. Since my marriage I have been pampering and condoning my wife's obsessive urge to buy shoes. She has two cabinets full of shoes and more spilling out on the floor for lack of space. Now, our daughter has picked up her trait so casually and effortlessly that I am thinking of the space that would be required to put up with the collection of shoes of both the ladies in the years to come.
Like her mother, she is a die-hard foodie. She can already pronounce chicken with an alarming clarity and can smell it from a mile. Apple is her staple diet and pomegranate juice, her favourite drink. She has a pint of the iron-rich juice every day which her grandma hand-grinds and cloth-filters with painstaking effort. A single strain of the fibre can clog the nipple of her sipper and test her patience.
She loves potato fries which she fondly calls Ayoo as in Aloo. She has the McDonalds French fries. But she likes the fresh-boiled and stir-fried potatoes sprinkled with a generous dose of salt and pepper, even better.
She is my daughter. Piyuh.