The other day I got a call from my niece whose ecstatic voice over the wire made me eager for some hearty bit of news. “Uncle”, she said, “At last I have conceived after all these seven years of marriage and you must come to my baby shower”. It was a great relief for all of us since she had visited most of the doctors in town and none of them could assure her of bearing a child.

However, as I was very close to her right from her childhood days and she considered me to be her ‘most nearest relation', I literally organized a search for some exclusive baby gifts for the baby shower. I was sure that both my niece and her husband must have bought all the gifts that were available locally, so my gifts must have some novelty and freshness about them.

But the local department stores and the shopping malls turned out to be most disappointing as they were full of age-old gift items that neither appealed to me nor my wife, who refused to have anything to do with them. On further enquiries at a different shopping arcade it was revealed that down another floor one section dealt with newborn baby gift items and we rushed there.

The sales person was a young girl and she was enthusiastic about some personalized products that came with the baby's name embroidered on it. There were various kind of bibs brightly embroidered with the baby's name; soft woolen baby blankets that not only had the names but date of birth, weight and dimensions at birth, etc. In short, we liked the innovative idea but were disenchanted since the shower was arranged prior to the child- birth and, therefore, no names could be provided instantly.

But as dark clouds do have silver linings on the western sky, we ‘discovered' a small store that specialized in baby gifts that suited our purpose. Here they offered similar personalized items like the baby's name engraved on the gifts with a big difference. They had the seamstress on the premises that could do the engraving in about a day at a nominal charge, to be paid in advance.

This was quite satisfactory as the store provided a call card bearing the name of the shop, postal address and telephone number to be filled in by the purchaser or anyone else on his or her behalf. A telephonic communication, they assured us, would be enough to do the job. Happy at being able to locate the right place, we bought several of the special baby gifts that included a baby blanket that could have the baby's personal information embroidered on it, a sparkling photo frame that had room to engrave the baby's name and a niche to frame the birth certificate.

I was sure when we got back home that both my niece and her husband would admire the novelty of our gifts and my niece could phone the shop as soon as the naming was over.