“I hope we have something to talk about or something in common,” I told my husband while we waited at the Mumbai airport for his colleague’s family to arrive for their first trip to India from Ivory Coast, Africa.

His colleague spoke in heavily accented English and could communicate with me. My husband by now was used to his accent since they were working together for three years. The challenge for me was to connect with his wife and two children who could speak very little English. Here’s where I hoped I brushed up on my high school French. I could barely pronounce Bonjour correctly for them to understand I was trying. But thank you Google for Google Translate I could ask them about their meal, travel and shopping preferences. To make them comfortable, I played a playlist of French Love Songs, the only one I could find on Apple music on our way to the hotel. The minute the teenage daughter took her airpods out and the wife started humming the tunes I knew they were warming up to us. The only challenge was the 7-year-old who was busy on his iPad, playing. I knew he was a hard nut to crack.

The next day we were to spend shopping and site seeing while the husbands worked. The wife and I spoke about our cultures, our marriage. The daughter and I followed each other on Instagram. They were mesmerised by the kurta and salwar suits women wore on the streets. So, I took them to FabIndia at Colaba. While the ladies were entertained by the saleswomen there, I ended up babysitting the 7-year-old boy. What do we have in common you ask apart from the fact that both of us were awkward? Zilch. To my dismay, the iPad he carried along was discharged, and like any 30-year old’s phone, I had no games. Yikes! So, after a few scary glances we exchanged I just pretended to shoot him by pointing my index finger and middle finger at him. He immediately ducked and copied what I did. I bent too. What eventuated after that was a series of shooting, running around and dodging by the aisles of clothes for 2 hours. The ladies were happy with their choices, we cleared the bill and sat in the car. This time the boy made sure he sat next to me, I had made a new friend. Swiftly as the driver was making his way through the narrow lanes of Colaba to reach our place of lunch, this boy yelled at me, “Pouvez-vous jouer un deux trois?” I didn’t know what he meant exactly but knew jouer is play and un deux trois will be one two three. I wasn’t sure what he was asking me if I can play one two three? I started counting one two three in the French I remembered. “Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq….” He interrupted me by grabbing my right hand by his four fingers and holding the thumb up. After a minute, I understood what he meant by un deux trois. He wanted us to have a thumb fight. Once you can squeeze your opponent’s thumb below yours, you count to three and get the point. So that’s un deux trois. Voila! So, after some zillion games of un deux trois where I made sure he won as many games as I did, we reached Pizza by the bay.  By now I knew he liked poulet as much as he liked his iPad. I ordered a chicken pizza, he shared it with me and did not allow the sister or the mother to take a piece from “notre pizza.”  After befriending me, he smartly asked for my phone by enacting me using a phone. I gave it to him after unlocking it with my fingerprint. The next thing the boy did was go into settings and add his fingerprint for him to unlock the phone when he needed to. He downloaded all the games on his iPad and played on my phone till we reached their hotel.

The husbands were done with their work visits so the next day we had planned to send the family to a resort to enjoy the rest of their vacation from where they were to travel back to Ivory Coast. We decided on a two day hang out with them considering we had nothing in common. But these two days went by like a breeze and both the families were longing for more time together. So, barriers to our communication and bonding were by the textbook; language, culture and age. But just connecting on an emotional level debunked the myth. The family left with fond memories of their time in India, my husband had a stronger professional relationship, and I had the seven-year-old boy’s fingerprint on my iPhone.