Of Pancakes. Corpses. And Ciphers.

This morning, we at the Bear household were too lazy to wake up and go run (mostly because Baba bear’s been having late nights and he is unable to wake up in time; we wonder if it’s a new girlfriend or a new project, or perhaps a bit of both), and so, we lolled in bed till six, before showering and leaving for our favourite haunt, The Yogi Tree, in Lane A, North Main Road, Koregaon Park, where we love to order the honey-lemon-cinnamon pancakes. There was a time when we used to have the Nutella-banana ones before our tastes became more ‘sophisticated’ and bananas were seen as gauche monkey-food, while Nutella was discarded as ‘not chocolate’. Baba bear, of course, tells us that despite our newfound distaste for the banana, it is rather nutritious, safe, and filling. Also that we are all monkeys anyway. So…

Of course, as usual, when it is our alone time with Baba bear, we get to ask a lot of questions and learn a lot of new stuff.

And it’s not just us. Late last night, our 6yo cousin, Shamsher, called him and asked him to explain what happens to buried animal corpses (he was told there’s a dog buried on the nearby tekdi, which is a small hill, where he goes for his morning walks along with his mum, and he was curious to know what was going on under the ground), which prompted an explanation about biogeochemical cycles that lasted into the night (and Baba bear missed tucking us in, because, by the time he came to bed, we were deep in slumberland), as the conversation with Shammu had veered towards the little one’s newly acquired knowledge of magnetism and how like poles repel and unlike attract, which he wanted to explain in some detail to his maternal uncle, Kedar Mama.

Be that as it may, this morning at The Yogi Tree, we wanted Baba bear to tell us about spies. He said he’d teach us about secret languages used by spies and other secret agents to send messages to each other and to others in the know. And that is how we came to learn about codes, also called ciphers.

He showed us how we could use mathematics to create a ‘Key’, which can then be used to code a regular-sounding message into something totally garbled and unintelligible to a layperson who does not have the Key. He taught us a couple of different ones and told us how we could invent our own. This is so much fun!

And now that we know the basics, we shall be making up our own ciphers and writing emails in them. Baba bear claims he can break any code we make. Ha! We’ll see about that.

P.S.: Did you notice the new white kurta with pink embroidered flowers on the yoke? Well, Aji made that for us! Isn’t it pretty-pretty?

P.P.S.: Also, did you see we made a new code, where you take the first letter of each word and make up another word? Like Kittens You Meet Are In Antarctica, means KYMAIA! Aren’t we clever?