COPY-KITTEN

My younger daughter lives in hand-me-downs and hope. Hoping that she will soon be as big as her elder sibling. The word ‘small’ is absent from her vocabulary (she pronounces it as ‘malls’ – a fallout of living in mall-infested Mumbai).

She is always frantically imitating her sister (when she is not fighting with her):
sitting like her(often with a book which she flips through importantly),
studying like her (she’s put all her elder sister’s old school-books in an old school bag, which she takes to ‘school’ daily and does her scribbly-homework in),
talking like her (like an echoing-miniature, sometimes with hilarious results),
dressing like her (or insisting to – to keep peace I try to buy co-ordinated clothing),
playing like her (this begins well but ends badly, usually in a fight, because toys not shared are snatched),

having her hair cut like her (they recently had matching mushroom-haircuts, though they look as different as ebony and ivory),
…even sometimes sleeping like her.

We call her copy-kitten, a sobriquet which suits her purr-fectly.