The relative summer: The trouble with twins 

When all the guests had finally left, Nikita and Nikhil were in for a revelation.

The story so far:Nikita and Nikhil hate guests because they will have to share a room again. But things change when their cousin Abhishek comes to stay!  

Narrated by Nikita

The trouble with twins is that there are two of them  — to run around, jump on the stairs, touch things they aren’t supposed to, keep an eye on...

Nikhil and I had been looking forward to seeing the K twins though it meant that I would have to share Nikhil’s room. The last time we had met them, the twins had been cute babies. Since then, they had grown into determined five-year-olds, eager to explore the world.

When you have twins around, you need two sets of eyes. As we were both watching them, I stopped Kiran drawing in Nikhil’s notebooks. Nikhil rescued my favourite book just as Karan was getting ready to chew it up. And my quick thinking saved Nikhil’s Lego and Amma’s vases.

Things worked because Nikhil and I laid our plans at night and shared our duties. There was always something to keep the twins busy. We ran with them, became horses and galloped about, made noisy trains with the chairs, turned tables into tents and carpets into ships. And we made the five days with the twins so much fun.

When the twins left, waving happily, we walked into the house and sank tiredly into chairs. A little later, Nikhil sat up creakily and asked, “Who’s our next guest?”