The seasons have finally shifted, after what has felt like a summer that would never arrive. It is here, loud and clear.
Some define the change of seasons with the birds — after their departure in the winter, they find their way back home and sing each morning; their “chee-cheeing” as my Bibiji (paternal grandmother) would describe the noise.
She would also describe the sounds of giggles, gossip and gabbing that come when all her granddaughters flock together in the same way.
Meri chiriya: myself, my sister, my four cousins and, the newest member, our bhabi (sister-in-law).
On my mom’s side of the family, she is the only daughter, and my sister and I are the only grandaughters. Our mom always emphasized the importance of sisterhood — not having a sister herself, she holds a special bond with all her cousins.
My Naniji (maternal grandmother) and Nanji (maternal grandfather) were never the types to place a higher importance on their son or grandsons. I grew up knowing the significance of being a girl and holding space for my relationships with other girls.
My dad is a middle child with an older sister and a younger one. His older sister, my Badhi Bhua (older paternal aunt) has a son and two daughters.
Growing up, these cousins were the epitome of cool to me and my siblings. Despite the 15 year age gap between my little brother and the eldest and only male cousin on this side of the family, they share quite the bromance.
My Badhi Bhua’s daughters, my other two cousins, are nine and six years older than me. They were the one-stop shop for me and my sister — who is only two years older than me — on everything we needed to know about how to be a teen girl. Anything they said about how to part hair or the cultural significance of jeggings became the law.
My dad’s younger sister, my Choti Bhua (younger paternal aunt), has two daughters as well. The older one is the same age as me — although as children, I prided myself on being her senior by five months. Her other daughter, who is three years younger than me, is the same age as my brother.
This dynamic is the epitome of ‘we were girls together.’
We’d have free reign while Choti Bhua and Phuphard (my paternal aunt’s husband), were out in the blueberry fields during their busy days. The four of us would rewatch Matilda, Om Shanti Om or Krrish, as many times as we wanted. If we got bored, we’d put on a Selena Gomez CD and play house, giving Oscar award-winning performances — we acted out a world where we married our favourite One Direction members (I always had dibs on Zayn).
Our sleepovers with all us cousins were also iconic in their own right.
We’d sleep in Badhi Phua and Phuphard’s Surrey basement because it was the coolest room in the house during the summer. After a day of playing Rock Band, watching movies and eating a large pepperoni pizza, we’d snuggle up for the night. Mattresses lined up, with mismatched pillowcases and blankets, Phuphard’s Gurdas Maan paraphernalia would watch over us.
Fast forward a few years — and a couple of weddings that gave us a Jeeja (brother-in-law) and Bhabi — later, all our families have moved out of the homes where these childhood memories live.
And here we are. All adults.
The ages of the Chiriya range from 18 to 30, which is a time of immense change.
Where the topics of dating, drinking and our uncertain futures may have been shunned by the women before us, we have created a safe space to discuss everything — to dump out the thoughts lurking in the backs of our brains for the girls to discuss and reflect on.
My elder cousins who once felt like these indestructible, ultra-cool girls, have let us younger chiriya into the circle. We get chirps of advice from them every once in a while, hear candid stories we only heard rumblings about as kids. They have finally let us fly over the wall of previous awkward age gaps and distrust. It’s a level of equilibrium that still blows my 8-year-old mind.
Calling girls chiriya in Punjabi and many other South Asian languages is representative of the belief that we raise our girls with care, love and admiration, but ultimately their fate is decided for them — the girls will be married off to other families, officially ‘belonging to them,’ thus leaving their own families and their childhoods behind.
Just like a chiri — flying away.
This logic is flawed with the concept of women as property, but I really do feel like it holds true. One of us has gotten married and we have been lucky to gain a new chiri in the flock (and the WhatsApp group) through marriage.
This is something my Bibiji has engrained in us all.
I have countless memories of her correcting the way I cleaned a pot, cut a salad or pronounced a word in my anglicized Punjabi. Her logic always goes back to how she is the only person who would correct us, that once we were married into another home, we had to stand on our own two feet.
In the past few years, my Bibiji’s sharp wit and ability to correct my mistakes has dulled due to dementia. She is no longer the woman she once was, and in part neither are any of us chiriya.
The woman who once knitted a blanket for each of her grandchildren, can no longer name all the chiriya in one go when looking at pictures. She remembers the faces and does eventually remember the names she’d once sing happy birthday into the phone to.
I think we all know, without explicitly saying it to one another, that losing parts of her is losing a part of our family dynamic.
Bibiji was the one that insisted we call our oldest cousins Didi (elder sister) and Paji (elder brother). She would drive my sister and I in her 2005 Honda Civic out to Abbotsford so we could put on pretend Summer Olympics on my cousin's trampoline.
As all us chiriya have been migrating into adulthood, the matriarch, our ‘mother goose,’ for a lack of better words, is no longer leading the way.
I used to think adulthood just meant I finally had access to an exclusive club where I could wear lipstick any day, not just on Halloween. Where I could stay up past midnight, not just on New Year’s, and could buy a lottery ticket.
The thing I didn’t realize was that getting access to adulthood means you unwillingly let your childhood expire.
You watch your grandparents slow down. I am privileged to still have four grandparents in my life, but with that privilege comes the reality of watching these consistent pillars of my life weaken both mentally and physically.
At 21, I know that I have a lot more growing up to do, with even more change to come. I just can’t help but feel nostalgic about a less serious time in my life. A time where my cousins and I were all off for summer or spring breaks, where our relationships didn’t need to be worked on. They just were.
The chiriya are all trying to figure out who we want to be, and where we want to go. Other than marriage questions haunting the second eldest chiri, the culture has progressed. As young women with parents understanding of this shift and change, we are trying to take flight and make our own way into the world.
This piece was published under The Ubyssey's Creative Non-fiction Corner. Want to submit a personal essay, short story or poem? Subscribe to our features newsletter for monthly writing prompts under this column.
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