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"I ’ve got the whole world in my hand,” goes the Bo Carter song. It took my half-Bengali, Copenhagen-based nephew’s visit home to get my Bombay Saraswat daughter-in-law to Calcutta where her Parsi husband spent his childhood. His brother, my number one son, lives in Atlanta, USA, with his Gujju-Georgia wife. If they’d come too, it would have been a first-time fam jam of my Kanga clan. At GenZ, ours has become a melting pot. Or Scandinavian smorgasbord, courtesy aforesaid nephew’s Danish wife. The mix began with his mum, my mid-sister Yasmin, who married her State Bank of India colleague Sudev Das. Their number one son’s wife is a Chandigarh Jain; they are both Silicon-Valley techies, so, I guess, their two kids are chholé (chickpeas) burgers spiked with dhansak masala, and dipped in tomayto khejur chaatni (date and tomato chutney). 

My youngest-by-far sister, Persis, travelled farthest, to New Zealand. Her husband Baji is fully Parsi but their daughters too have chosen off-lineage partners, Australian and Sicilian. Khorshed, being closer in age, was more my sister than a cousin. She married WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) Phil; their son Darius’s wife is Chinese, which makes their two poppets a patiyo-spiced American chop suey. 

Thus, my half-bawa, half-Saraswat, fully SoBo (south Bombay) grandsons have a chequerboard of cousins from four continents and five countries. Great, but, alas, not for kinship! My number two daughter-in-law Akshata initiated the trip last weekend to meet her cousin-in-law and his family because "bonds don’t happen by magic. They have to be worked at.” 

Sudev worked at it harder. Our Bangla banker wrote a delightful family history because, he said, "My far-off grandchildren will otherwise have no idea of their heritage.” The photocopied tome is called "Vanishing Ink,” not "Das (the) Kanga.” Half-Danish Milan is still too young to read his dada’s (grandfather’s) book, but he sucked on his first mangos like a pucca aam admi (proper son of the soil). My New Zealand niece is making her own family tree so that her half-Australian boys too will know their InDNA. 

 Our Parsi com (community) will damn the iniquity (outiquity?) perpetrated by all three Kanga sisters, but I revelled in the choices of both my sons. They’d unintentionally used the system to beat the system: their boys have propped up the declining Zoroastrian population since only the children of Parsi fathers are considered Parsi. In this day and age, still on the MCP (male chauvinist pig) argument that the seed is the father’s, the mother is merely the soil. All the more astonishing in a community where as much, if not more, effort is invested in the education of daughters, is the natak (theatrical) cliche of battle-axe wives. We need reminding that this regressive practice was institutionalized only as late as 1908, with the Beaman-Davar (Petit vs Jejeebhoy) judgment. Illogically, die-hards are getting harder the faster we’re dying out. "Exemplary minority” won’t be much of an example from the museum. 

Our venerable vishwaguru (global teacher) spreads the message of the world as one family. But, hey, I’m thrilled to have a whole vasudhaiva kutumbakam (the world is one family) in my own kutumbakam (family).