When I was a child, our family received a wonderful present every year from Dad’s sister in London, an aunt we children had never met. A week or two before Christmas, something remarkable would happen. A box full of luscious Belgian chocolates would travel all the way across the ocean, the same ocean, I was assured, that we’d go swimming in each summer, and that box would magically land at our door in NE Baltimore. Somehow, my dad’s sister had access to the world’s best chocolates. These chocolates were related to the Milky Way and Three Musketeer bars on our drug store shelves, in the same way that Baltimore’s jumbo lump crab cakes are related to the frozen hockey puck-like objects that Mrs. Paul sells---that is, in name only. Aunt Money’s boxes included orange flavored bars, and strawberry flavored bars, white chocolates and dark chocolates, chocolates shaped like seashells and chocolates shaped like tiny pyramids.
The fact that our benefactress was named “Aunt Money,” only added to her mystique. I had never met anyone named Money before or since (or then for that matter). I pieced together the bits of information I had about this mystery woman and concluded that people named Money could get hold of the world’s finest chocolates whenever they wished and lavish them on children they had never met. The only other thing I was sure of about Aunt Money was that, based on my dad’s favorite adage, she most definitely did not grow on trees, or presumably, on any particular tree.
I was about 10 or 11 and we had moved to rural Harford County, north of Baltimore, when Dad announced that his sister was coming for a visit. By this time, I had learned that Aunt Money actually spelled her name Mani. This made no sense to me. If you are named after the most common word for currency, why not spell it correctly? When Aunt Mani arrived, I found her not at all what I expected. For all her prominence in the chocolate world, she was no imposing figure, but quite the opposite. Dad was relatively short, but she was downright tiny. You might call her Mini-Mani. I would say she was well under five feet in height, and despite her unprecedented access to the best chocolate, she probably weighed no more than a hundred pounds. She had short dark hair, nicely styled (I later learned she was a hairdresser) and a lilting voice with an indeterminate accent that you might expect from someone with Persian origins born and raised in India and now living in England. Most importantly for our story, she was also what you might call genteel, perhaps as a result of a proper boarding school upbringing. The problem was, whatever adjective you might choose to describe the five children of Darius and Mildred Sukhia, unruly, undisciplined, unmannered, uncooperative, unkempt (any word with the prefix “un” seems to work), one word you would never consider would be genteel.
