Upping the ‘ante’ with a full house of uncles

Gaston de Rosayro

Ah, the Asian concept of an Uncle .That ever present honorific relating to an older relative or someone quite unrelated. Close friends of your mum and dad are your beloved aunts and uncles .And many Asians love them more than the very blood relatives they are supposed to love. In Sri Lanka Uncle or Auntie, is pretty much used in place of Sir or Ma’am. It is after all a show of respect for your elders.

Now for certain your parents’ best friends are your uncles, unless of course they are your aunts .But they are without a trace of any blood connections, not even second cousins three times removed or profess any such relationship. So they are simplified to uncle or aunt . It is very much an Asian figure of speech, as most East Asians and Southeast Asians call any elder stranger ‘Uncle’ or ‘Aunt’ as a sign of respect. This extends to family friends and close acquaintances, even without any blood ties.

Conversely, if you are very young, your true companion’s uncles and aunts are likely to be yours as well, through contagion, and their parents may be uncle and aunt to you.In tradition-bound Sri Lanka, Confucian attributes, such as filial devotion, border on the reverential. And many of these features such as deferential affection towards parents, elders and strong family relationships still do exist among the majority of the population.

In the north of Sri Lanka I am called Ungle, which carries a slightly different inflexion from the young southerners’ Uncal . They are both a far cry from the lower-middle class Brit who would distinctly address his mother’s brother as Ankkil .Theoretically, any male is an ‘uncle’ to anyone younger than him.

Some of the uncles are so far removed from your family tree that you have to go all the way to Adam to establish a relationship. Your next door neighbour, your father’s colleague, a passer-by on the street who happens to wear a watch just when you needed to know what time it is, and of course your blood-uncles. So you see, relatively speaking, it should be easy to understand that kinship or no kinship each one of them is a bona-fide uncle in his own right.

Sri Lanka probably has the largest number of uncles per capita in the world. That is why ethno-sociologists have a field day studying this institution. However, it confuses the hell out of them as to why a Sri Lankan uncle is ‘adverbed.’ For instance it is always Gaston Uncle, never Uncle Gaston. Also, uncle-ness is not associative, mathematically speaking. Your uncle’s uncle could be your own father. Figure that one out yourself!

I have worked and lived in several southeast Asian nations including Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong and have done a couple of shorter stints in a some neighbouring countries too. I do not profess insight into every Asian culture, but I am guessing the trend is pretty common, if not universal, across the region.

Chinese and Indonesians do it. Malaysians and Filipinos do it. Indians and Sri Lankans do it. Now if you are reading this and lived or grew up in an Asian country this will not be news to you. But it is quite radically different to the norm in the Anglo-Saxon world. To most Westerners the titles refer to the brother of one’s father or mother or the husband of one’s aunt.

Of course, there are limits on who you can confer these titles to. Once you get that dream position at that blue-chip company, calling your CEO Uncle would be unlikely to go down as a stellar career move. And make sure that the person is substantially older than you before you start calling them this. No one likes to be reminded that they are getting old, so 30 something women are often less than pleased to be called auntie by 20 something Bimbos.

Most younger Sri Lankans would hold back from calling their friends’ parents Mr and Mrs as a bit too business- like. But calling them by their first names would be overly familiar. Perhaps it is part of our cultural perspective emerging here, because Sri Lankans in similarity to many other Asians, are and always have been overly status-conscious. They would not address an older person by their first name without prefacing it with a respectful signifier of their status.

I remember the look on the faces of two British couples visiting my grandparent’s estate when my younger brother and sister addressed them as Auntie and Uncle .I do recall that their faces expressed equal parts surprise and delight. Naturally I am quite used to it and find it rather endearing myself. Although I harboured fears when I was around 30 something that I was getting old enough to have the title applied to myself.

Most Sri Lankan kids have this weird concept that their Gaston Uncle is a super hero who wears his under pants underneath his pants. And that Hollywood got it all wrong with Superman. They accept the other similarities such as Clark Kent and their Uncal Gaston being in the same profession.

The most harrowing experience of growing up is when you realise one day that you too have suddenly become an uncle or a grand-uncle to Cuckoo or Pipu. At first you try to deny it. But ours is a small universe and the way Sri Lankans copulate and populate no one is immune to this. Once you become an uncle, your lifestyle changes and now you have to be more responsible and ‘uncly.’

Uncles of the opposite sex are called Aunties or Anties in Sinhala parlance. They are usually appendices to the uncles. They smile a lot, talk a lot and spend most of their useful lives in preparing copious amounts of yummy food. No, they are not called Anties because they are anti-uncle. Poker-playing women’s libbers will ‘anti-cipate’ upping the ante with a full house of uncles. But don’t ever dare mention the ‘gey’ names of uncles, because the Western world might then imagine they are all aunts!

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