  Once upon a time,  just the other day,  a baby girl was born to a couple.  The father,  upon finishing school in Chennai,  had taken the SAT exam and gone on to the United State of America in order to graduate,
 post- graduate,  doctorate and post- doctorate in computer sciences exactly as the mother had done,  the two having become engaged to each other at birth through an understanding between their respective sets of parents,  the idea being that together they would make as many dollars in California in as little time as possible,
 this being the right thing to do for all good families.  Mummy and Daddy,  who were very keen on ethnic identity and national culture,  which was also the rule among all good families,  scoured the Bigmarole Vedas on the Internet in order to find for their new born baby a properly Sanskritic name that could be properly anglicised in a stylish contraction.  After much effort they lovingly settled on Aishmita,
 which as a mathematician would put it,  is a convex combination of the names of two National Goddesses of Beauty.  At home and at school,  little Aishmita came to be called Ata.  ( This,
 of course,  had nothing to do with her pale,  pudgy,  floury complexion)  Mummy and Daddy loved little Ata dearly,  but they didn't have an awful lot of time for her,
 seeing as how they were so tirelessly preoccupied with discovering their national identity,  making lots of transnational money,  helping to build a temple in San Jose,  and assisting with raising dollars to demolish a place of religious worship belonging to another community back home in India.  So they got their old widowered grandfather,  Thatha to come and live with them and look after Ata.
 Now Thatha was barely functionally literate,  having had some sort of education with an accent on solid geometry and hydrostatics,  which had equipped him to retire as a postmaster,  but otherwise left him utterly incapacitated when it came,  for example,  to making anything of television advertisements.
 The consequence of all of this was calamitous,  as we shall immediately see.  In this muddled and fuzzy way,  Thatha was hopeless when it came to dealing with the consumer products of an advanced industrialised economy.  This was too bad in an era of globalisation.  In the cause of little Ata's personal hygiene,
 what do you think he went and did?  Why,  he brushed her teeth with hair- dye and washed her hair with a bleacher.  The outcome is there for you to see in the accompanying pictures ( being self-
portraits,  they were drawn by Ata herself who,  as you can see,  allowing for some smudging,  was a gifted child and,  like other diasporadic children,
 attended a special shcool)  little Ata acquired shiny black teeth and sparkling white hair.  Mummy and Daddy flew into a rage.  They diced up Thatha into little bits in the shredder and concealed the outcome( s)  in the refrigerator.
 This is why this is a true,  but chilling,  story.
