"Phopo, who is your best friend at university?"
Saying university in her own cute style, her own-created pronunciation, she utters the word like it's a very big word for her to say, which by the way it is, she is only three after all. Okay, back to the topic.
So I didn't know what to reply to this innocent question, so I decided to evade it by saying:
"Aap ho na phopo ke best friend."
At that she broached another question:
"Acha yeh bataein aap ko apni university mein sab se zada kaun pasand aata hai?"
At that I just laughed. Thankfully I was saved by the 'van wala mama'.
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At dinner, I was narrating this story to my family (in my niece's absence). As they all laughed at the story, my brother (my niece's father) pointed out that she was actually defining what for her is the meaning of best friend when she asked me the second question.
After hearing my reply to the first question, she realized that I wasn't answering her truthfully, she realized that it wasn't the answer she demanded, she must have thought I was that dumb, so she rephrased the question for my benefit. For her,
"Best Friend" means "a person you like the most".:) Which is not a very incorrect definition. Though this is not the way we adults define it, for us best friends would mean not the people we like the most, but the people who would give up everything for us.... well that's another discussion all together.
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To confirm my brother's theory, I asked my niece the same two questions she had asked me in the morning. I asked her
"Who is your best friend?"
She gave me three names.
Then I asked her
"Who do you like the most in your school?"
She gave the same three names.
Definition confirmed:
Best Friend is a person you like the most. :) A simple and cute way to define the concept.
