Break time!

And now for the great announcement in the blog that people may read, I don’t know, since no one comments. Which is as pointed a crack as I can possibly make without being downright rude. I am taking a break from the world for a few days. I and the blog will be back on Monday, September 4. And no, we have not found ourselves a new job, neither blog nor I. So no putting in papers of any kind. Not yet.

Quit while you’re ahead

A lot of people I know have decided to leave the company we all work for at the moment. The reasons for this departure varies with the individual, depending on mood, behaviour, level of contentment and, of course, alternative offers from other sources of income and occupation. One person I know will work from home; another is not happy with what she is doing at the moment at work; another says she has no clue what her next move will be, though we all know she just doesn’t want to talk about it for now. But they all do what has never failed to mystify me in its etymology: put in their papers. Put them in where? What papers? Why put papers anywhere? Why not hand in your resignation? Or just plain ‘QUIT’?

All that apart, I have always found it good policy to quit while I am ahead of whatever the game it is that I am playing at the time. Like an old-time movie star, I work to get on top and then walk away…or so I would like to believe. I have never and will never use a potential or threatened walk out to negotiate for more money or a better position or even a new job. Which a lot of the people who have put in papers are actually doing, or so I suspect. In fact, when I was interviewed for my current position, I promised the chappie who offered it to me that I would abide by a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ between us, not to use his offer to bargain for more of whatever I wanted at the place I would be leaving.

But leaving a job is easier said than done. Even if you have no intentions of finding a new one, your ego demands that you are offered at least one, if not four options. Then you demand, somewhere hidden in your psyche at a level even you do not easily admit to yourself, more money and a higher designation and status. If you do not get it, you say you are leaving to take a break, to find yourself, to decide what to do next, which you have no possible clue about for now. Then, when you are on your last day, hugs and presents and best wishes all around you, you triumphantly announce that you have a new job at such and such place and so and so salary in this or that position, with thus perks attached, etc, etc, hopefully making people not just envious, but regretful that you are going to be with them no longer. You hope.

And then you go, your papers put in by you and taken out by whoever has that particular job. You go through all the hassles of signing out of the job that you signed on for all that time ago. You argue with HR people and accounts people and people to whom you need to hand over your responsibilities. Other people you call ‘friends’ remember you for a few days, miss you at lunch time or near the water cooler or when it comes time to go shoe shopping, then they move on, as do you, in different directions. And then, you find new ones, new work, new status, new hassles and, one day, a new job. For which you start all over again with the putting in papers thing!

For sale!

You can sell anything these days. Consider the lady – or was she one – space on her own body to marketing whizkids! Or the boy who wanted to sell his baby sister for a new Beyblade! Or even the thousands of wannabe models, artists and assorted entrepreneurs who want to make a little money selling whatever they can, from a pen to a castle. And now there is the concept of selling – and so buying – art on the Internet. It goes from seller to buyer with little effort, no noise and very little room for the classic Bolly-Hollywood scenario of goons beating up the gallery owner to lower the price. But that is reel and not real life, I add hastily.

I have never been to an auction, though I have seen them on television and in movies and read about them in books. None of them reality, almost all with a denouement attached, lots of drama and, inevitably, a beautiful woman. In a very fun (albeit not funny) novel called a Calculated Risk, by Katherine Neville – who regrettably does not write as much and as fast as I wish she would! – two beautiful women, one old, white Russian and aristocratic, the other young, black and very modern American attend a very special auction. They are there to buy, of all things, an island, bang in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, consisting of little but a vast rock in the midst of scrub jungle. There are hot springs and orchids, fresh fish caught in the tiny village at the base of the rock and an ancient castle atop it. But the charm for the women and the furtherance of the plot is that the island, when owned, would be a tax haven on which to park illegally gained funds. There is drama, there is history, there is ulterior motive and adventure in the story, one that moves from the icy waters of the coast of New York to the chessboards of the world to the revolution that changed Russian history. The island is bought with money that is not theirs, but with a panache that carries the scene to its fascinating climax.

Of course, there is the dramatic auction of Phantom of the Opera, where the musical box with the figure of monkey goes under the hammer. It is orchestrated with tremendous bashings of the cymbals and the bass drum, with fire added by the sonorous voice of the auctioneer. As the opening scene of the Lloyd Webber production, it has flair, verve, noise and fury, setting the stage, as it were, for more, all culminating in the death of the Phantom and the success of the Christine-Raoul romance.

The auction scene in Hum Hai Rahi Pyar Ke ends the film with as much drama, but with lots of melo- prefixed to it. There is a collation of baddies gathered outside the house, who want to buy it from the beleaguered owner, Aamir Khan, who arrives at the proverbial nick of time with his cohorts in a tourist bus, all raring to save the day. An egg fight ensues that adds to the overall manic hilarity of the plot, and the villains are forced to retreat, egg-covered, admitting ignominious defeat. The house is saved, the hero wins, the heroine is won – after a short battle with her father – and the good guys live happily ever after, Japan-returned manager and all.

More recently there was an auction on the television soap I sometimes watch while I am getting ready for bed at night and dodging the resident kitten’s sharp claws and teeth. The house of the heroine was being sold, under her very feet, as the cliché says, and an anti-hero-ish character whom I have lost track of since then comes to the rescue. Just as the gavel went down on the final “SOLD!”, the saviour and his coverts of lawyers step in and save the day, the house and the izzat of the family. Drama indeed.

With these as examples, I wait for real-life drama when art goes up for bids over the next month or so. Whether my craving for a good adventure story will be satisfied, I don’t know, but I wait and hope…

Of elephants and idlis

It was Ganesh Chaturthi yesterday, our first without my mother telling us what and how to do the right things that need to be done to say ‘hi’ to the elephant god. With a few misgivings, many glitches and the sure knowledge that it was all wrong, we managed to bumble through the day and did, eventually, do the rights things, with a lot of digging through memory, some Internet research and the excuse of ‘modernising’ a classic to help us through the substitutions. We also had the excuse of full time jobs, a traditional mourning period and sheer ignorance to carry us through the day. But, all in all, it worked. Ganesha should be fairly pleased with us – A for effort, albeit perhaps not for convention.

It started out with the retrieval of Mum’s favourite little figurine of the god, carved into dark brown coral. It sat, wise and old, on a rupee coin that had been glued to its bottom to keep it from tipping over, as it had a distressing tendency to do. Of course, when I washed off the dust of the last year, the coin came unglued, which meant that there was much colourful language heard when I tried to sit it in its place in the simple puja that we installed. Adding a few beads and baubles and a jungle of jasmine from the bush that grows right outside my parents’ bedroom window made the small altar more familiar. A tray of fruit, coconut and sweetened milk (in lieu of payasam) started the naivedyam, or puja offerings. The silver lamp was made ready for lighting. The sandalwood agarbatti was placed in its ornate silver stand.

Then it went a little crazy. Upset that I had forgotten to get the makings ready for something that could have been our equivalent of idli, traditional fare for the Lord, I said more rude words, then was soothed by my father, who promised to go out and buy the stuff. Which upset me even more, and made me fill a panoply of small dishes that I vaguely remembered were part of the menu for the occasion. There were substitutions galore – rice, ghee and banana chips instead of rice and dal (where the connection is, I am still not sure, but it felt right at the time); sprouted mung beans in lieu of garbanzos with coconut; cashewnut modaks in place of the jaggery-laced coconut in rice flour envelope kozyakattais and more. It was, all in all, a satisfying spread, one that should have satiated the deity and certainly filled us up to our rather smaller noses. And the kitten partook, too, taking a tiny sip of the sweet milk and a small lick of the modak, watching with bug-eyes as the lamp was lit and the agarbatti spiralled smoke into the air.

After lunch came the analysis and the cleaning up. We argued about not making kozhakattais, buying the idlis from a nearby grocery store and not wearing new clothes for the festival. Between burps, we debated the virtues of sprouts versus chickpeas and the lack of the perfect payasam. We also crowed at how the miniature vadais looked just like the kozhakattais we had not made, perfect little pointy noses and all. And, as I washed all those many little glass dishes I had put goodies into, I worried that the Lord would not forgive my goofs and gaffes. But, like I said before, I should do well on the trying, right?

Wait and watch

Everyone is talking about Karan Johar’s new film, Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna, starring Shah Rukh Khan, Rani Mukherjee, Preity Zinta and Abhishek Bachchan. The greatest praise goes to the young Bachchan as an actor worth watching, while the greatest critique (and there are many of them) is all to Karan Johar’s credit – a film too long, a theme too trite, albeit new and rather improved for the Indian movie-going-public’s psyche, lead actors too deadpan, et al. And various friends of mine agree or disagree, depending on their mood, their general level of interest and their thresholds of boredom. All in all a watchable film, they concur, as long as you leave your mind at home and put the rest of your life on hold for over three hours. Would I watch it? Probably, at some stage, when it finally gets to television, which is where I watch most of the Hindi movies I may have seen through my life.

But with my usual cynical, ennui-laden perspective on life, I do enjoy the occasional Hindi movie, the more pot-boiler, the better. My mother and I, cohorts in the late-night TV-watching biz, sat through many repeats of the same film, never seeing the whole in one go. So while we know what happens to the various stars, we usually have no idea what the name of the film is, or who which actor may be. It’s not as complicated or messy as it sounds, it is just that we couldn’t manage to sit through the entire movie at one go, so caught bits of it every time it re-ran, which meant that we saw different parts at different times.

Perhaps it all began with the eternal favourite, Amar Akbar Anthony, starring Vinod Khanna, Rishi Kapoor and Amitach Bachchan. We watched Amitabh pop out of an egg and tell his audience that his name was Anthony Gonsalves, romance Parveen Babi with his youthful (in those days) charm and flapping bellbottoms, and then fight the baddies in inimitable style with deadpan hilarity and white priestly robes. Vinod Khanna, in contrast, was the straight man in the game, in his policeman’s uniform and his ladylove in the shape of a slim and unusually masala-ish Shabana Azmi. And then there was Rishi Kapoor, the baby of the lot, playing a quawwali singing Mulsim tailor’s adopted son, who ducks the punches and still manages to get his girl, the nicely rounded Neetu Singh. They find that they are brothers, manage to reunite with their long-lost mother and live, one presumes, happily ever after. But how and when they are all separated is still a mystery. I wait for a re-telecast during the nostalgia festival to find out more.

And then there was Hum Hai Rahi Pyar Ke, a sweet, funny, madcap romance between Juhi Chawla and Aamir Khan, made even more chaotic by a motley crew of totally over-the-top characters who ham it up, bad accents and all, and have a wild time complicating matters with misunderstandings and mess-ups. Three cute children – who actually do not overstep the limits of cuteness to the state called ‘irritating’ – add fun to the plot, which takes some wild turns that are amazingly improbable. And the lunacy, which it is, ends with a wonderful egg fight, where all the villains and their supporters are part of the yolk! Juhi became our favourite heroine with Bol Radha Bol, more madness with absolutely no sanity. She and Rishi Kapoor romped it up with dogs, doppelgangers and dreadful villainy, coloured with insane costumes, good music and a story that took such sharp turns away from any sense that it made good sense.

In that way, in bits and many pieces, we watched Sholay, Lagaan, Kaho Naa Pyar Hai, Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham and a host of movies starring Shah Rukh Khan, Govinda, Madhuri Dixit, Sridevi and various icons of their times. And there were, indeed, many times. And will be many more. And the turn of Karan Johar and his latest opus will also come.

Reading right

My friend Karen was responsible for at least two bad habits I have developed over the many years of my life. One of them is chocolate, the other is Asprin. Robert Asprin, writer of the Myth and Phule books; also Thieves World and various other such stories, but those I am not a fan of. Chocolate has been a fairly easily managed addiction – regular doses are always available and I am generally within range of a bite or three when I direly need it. And you can always go out and buy some dreadful version of it at the corner paan-beedi shop to keep the craving from consuming you past the point of concentration on more important issues that need to be dealt with, like work, dinner and small cats who demand food.

The other habit is less easy to foster. It all began many years ago, in a college co-ed dorm, when books were, for some indiscernible reason, more interesting than the men who were part of everyday life. For one, books were far more dishy to look at and, for another, perhaps more relevant, books had some substance, some mental challenge, some stimulative value. Having devoured all that I had brought with me and being too skint to buy more at the rate I read them, I leaned heavily on the college library and my various classmates and friends for more. I had gone through everything I found, from trashy bodice-rippers to dreary classics, and wanted something new and unpredictable when I met someone who so wonderfully fit just that description that we became close friends and still are. She cemented my initial curiosity at hearing her talking to herself (I wrote about that before) with her costume for Halloween – she went as a cutlery drawer, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt with the contents of her mother’s silverware cabinet stapled to her clothes.

Be that as it may (I always wanted to use that expression in something I wrote, but editors tend to very wisely cut it out), she introduced me to Robert Asprin, creator of Skeeve and his group of strange creatures. I read one, with a certain caution, since sci-fi/fantasy was not really to my taste. It was called Another Fine Myth, and starred a wannabe practitioner of magik, who gathered together, mainly serendipitously, a group of odd-bods who stuck it out with him through even more strange adventures. By the time he had met the Pervect, Aahz, I was hooked. It didn’t take long for me to get caught up in the activities, nefarious and otherwise, of the greens-skinned Tananda, the stone-bodied Gus, the keen-eyed Ajax and, of course, the unicorn Buttercup and the loyal baby dragon, Gleep. Before she knew what a monster she had unleashed, I had slurped down all her ‘Myth’ collection, forayed into various other realms, like Terry Pratchett, Frank Herbert, Douglas Adams, Robert Jordan, Anne McCaffrey, Barbara Hambley and more.

And I had developed not just a habit, but a serious problem. By the time I had read and then gradually collected all the Asprins I was interested in, which was the Myth series, my father found me a couple from his Phule list. I was re-hooked. I had friends and father scour the shelves of bookstores from London to Denver, to little avail. Asprin was on hiatus and I was deprived. When he started writing again, my book-hunting was revived, only to find that it was not easy to find him here, in India, and I had to depend on nice people to send me some from the US or UK, where he could be located after a little searching, driven by my nagging from halfway around the world. Now I find, doing research in the course of this blog, that he has rushed past me with at least two more books. Whom shall I attack now for my fix?

Cat laps

Last evening I stopped by the pet store on the way home to buy some cat litter for our new baby. Not yet two months old, and the furry devil who adopted us less than three weeks ago has taken over our home and our lives, along with my bathroom, my bed, the newspapers, my father’s study and his skin. She seems to be teething, and hones her needle sharp canines and almost-invisible baby teeth on ankles, wrists, fingers and, on one very painful occasion, my nose. Like all very young felines, she is also practicing her instinctive hunting skills, becoming quite the expert at the stalk, ambush and pounce routine you can see lions and tigers do in the wild on Animal Planet or Discovery. In between all this frantic activity, where she chases balls of plastic, paper and aluminium foil with kittenly enthusiasm, she eats vast amounts of food, swigs milk daintily after every fourth bite and then falls into a deep sleep, on her back, her fat pink tummy indelicately exposed, her four little feet curled upwards in the air.

As a natural consequence of this package of overwhelming cuteness, we have succumbed totally to her baby wiles. All she needs to do is hop into our laps for a snuggle, purring like a little helicopter the whole time, or else sit neatly at our feet and look up at us with her huge green eyes, her little head with its enormous ears cocked slightly to one side, and we are reduced to warm puddles that she can lap up with her tiny pink tongue. Now well on the way to being a very spoiled brat, she already has a big paper bag full of toys – her favourite is a long piece of elasticised string with a knotted plastic bag at one end and a wad of paper at the other. She also has a bright red scrunchie she wore rakishly on her head one morning after picking it up from my bed where I had placed it moments before when I was getting ready to leave for work. Another hot favourite is a long pink hair-tie with bells at the ends – they make a delightful tinkling noise as she winds the string around her stout middle. And then there is the small ball of twine that my father fashioned for her, round and brown and very biteable, with the most intriguing loose end that can be gnawed on most edifyingly.

So when I was at the pet shop, stuck in there by a sudden burst of rain, I found much that the baby would enjoy playing with. First off was a set of the smallest and softest chewy sticks I could lay my hands on. It would, I fondly hoped, save our fingers and toes from the agony of the teething process. Did it? Well, in a way - she loved the smell and the taste of the one stick I gave her and did her best to try and get it in her mouth, with not much luck. So she licked it and occasionally nibbled at one end and – oh merciful heaven! – hasn’t sunk her teeth into us too much since then. I also found her a small ball, made of fairly light and flexible rubber in different colours, with lots of projections she can chew on, and an extraordinarily loud bell inside that catches her attention whenever it rolls past. Still a little big for Her Royal Tininess, it is being inspected at intervals, but has not caught on as well as I hope it will when she grows up.

Soon the furry beastie will get her share of restraints, will a little less spoiling and a little more discipline. A belled collar will follow the “NO!” that she is already starting to understand, and her silent assaults will be preceded by at least a minimal degree of warning, letting us duck when we need to instead of losing more blood. And she will, I know, grow into all the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed super-intelligence that a cat who is part of our family can possibly have!

Red alert

I like red. For years I have always worn something red, even if it was only something not generally seen by anyone who didn’t know me intimately, perhaps not even then. It made me more energised, happy, positive and productive, even as it tended to blind people who saw me walking towards them. Perhaps my favourite outfit through college was a fashion faux pas – red mini, red tights, red boots, red sweater, red coat – but it did what I wanted it to do: make me happy. When I finally grew up and started working, I found that I had a temper to match most of my wardrobe, and I had no qualms about using it the way I was used to at home, where I was the family baby. So when I displayed my mean side, it came as a startling contrast to my round baby face and normally sunny demeanour. It so happened that I was wearing red jeans and T-shirt that day and I was instantly nicknamed: mirchi, aka chilli in Hindi.

While the temper is now cooled and the nickname has changed, the colour preference remains. My clothes designer stands there with a forbidding glower on her pretty face as I instinctively reach for any fabric that is red. My father laughs when I choose a car that I want to buy (in my dreams, more often than not) because it is red – I once picked a Beetle over a BMW for that very reason and have never lived it down since then. And somewhere along the way I suspected that I was not a person who likes peace and quiet, which is why I like red, which is why my life is always so full of drama and upheaval. In liking red, it is not that I do not like any other colour. Anything strong and sure, never soft and wimpy, is what I tend to gravitate to, with brilliant hues of green, yellow, orange and pink leading the way to my wardrobe, my shoe cupboard, my furnishings and, of course, my mood.

My preferences could be why I choose cats over dogs. Dogs are good creatures, which will be there when you want them to, obey, roll over, sit, stay and generally live for you, their master (note we do not specify any sexual domination here!). Cats, on the other hand, do what they want to do, because they want to do it, not because you have, as owner (or owned) any opinion on the matter. They play with as much fervour as they fight, love you as much as they will turn around and bite the hand that feeds them, just like our little orange furball at home does. Cats are sure of what they want and they are as sure of the fact that they will get it, when they want it. A strong personality shines from every whisker on a cat. A dog may be a force to reckon with, but usually only when it is allowed to. Which makes all the difference to me. It is not the I do not like dogs – any creature big or small but not human just has to cock its head slightly to the side and gaze at me with melting eyes and I crumble – but I have my bias, justifiably so.

Our little feline is a delightful shade of orange, with stripes along the sides of her eyes that make her look like a neatly made up Egyptian princess. And she is as spoiled a brat as a baby princess of whatever persuasion, with her vast collection of toys and gourmet cat-nibbles. She matches the décor of our home, merging into the orange and gold and cream upholstery with élan – if she sat still for a moment, she would be nigh invisible! Which means that, in my book, she is the prefect little kitten – she is almost red!

Water ways

Mumbai has been, over the past few days, rocked with sensational news. The waters around what could be one of the most polluted regions of the coastline, the Mahim Creek, were late one evening found to be sweet. Which does not mean that they tasted like sugar water or lemonade or sherbet, but that the salt levels were so low due to heavy rain that the water was sweet in contrast. Now if you saw that water, you would probably keel over with six kinds of gastro-problems. It is a melange of a particular dirty yellow-brown hue, with ‘things’ afloat in it. What ‘things? Don’t even ask. That section of the creek, just where it enters the sea, is about as polluted as the word will define. It contains waters from the tanneries close by, along with animal carcasses, blood, debris and assorted associated products of the business. It is mixed with vari-coloured chemical sludge from factories in the area, and further clouded by inflow from the infamous Mithi river, known for its non-water content and as a headline-maker for its overflow and silting that was partially accounted as contributing to the unprecedented flooding of the city in July 2005.

So, with this as the background, it was not surprising that people went crazy as soon as word came in, reportedly from a little girl, that the water tasted good. They ran to the sea in droves, sort of like penguins or, from another point of view, lemmings. And they dived in, all ready to drink their mouthful of heaven, albeit a very strangely coloured one. They came in hordes, with wives, husbands, in-laws, grandchildren and neighbours, all clutching bottles to fill to take back home, all joyous with the euphoria of a miracle. But was it one? While the city’s mayor certainly seemed to think so, local scientists and the BMC didn’t. They warned the enthusiastic swiggers of slush to beware, to be watchful, to wait. But, no, everyone wanted some manna, even though it looked rather suspicious. And, to be extra cautious and pre-empt a possible problem, the BMC got a whole lot of beds ready at nearby hospitals, preparing for the epidemic that would surely follow.

But, so far, nothing untoward has happened. For which the Lord – of whatever persuasion – will be given credit in due time. The sea has gone back to its normal level of salinity and everyone is back to behaving as they did before the ‘miracle’. And homes across the country, from Mumbai to Madanapalle, have a little bit of the magic water tucked away for when a bit of extra blessing is needed.

It is not new, this kind of phenomenon and response. It has happened for years with the waters of the Ganges, called the holiest river in the world by believers. And to believe, it had to be seen. Crystal clean, cold and clipping along at good speed in Hrishikesh, it is a river that earns its name as being the purifier of all, worthy of being enshrined in little copper vessels in shrines and home-altars all over the world. But it soon becomes a nastily turbid stretch of sluggish water, finally widening to its massive proportions by the time it gets to Benares, the city of a millions temples. There, at the ghats, partially burned bodies are tipped into the waters, to join myriad debris of puja and purification, leaving the mother river little more than a gutter full of ordure. Attempts to clean the watercourse were, in part, successful, with everything from water hyacinth and lotus plants used to suck up the muck with their persistent roots to flesh-eating turtles to vacuum the water clear of body parts. The last time I was in Benares, the Ganges was getting closer to being clear and pure, but had a way to travel before it could be fitting with the title ‘holy’.

But, all the while, Ganges water was drunk, bathed in and revered, as embodying the godly spirit and personifying all that was good. It cured, it healed, it soothed, it calmed. And it was taken home in bottles, sold in markets, given status as a mother in Indian tradition would be.

Like all water accessible to the public should be.

Art attacks

I stood in front of the painting, taken there by fond parents who had seen it before, wondering what the fuss was all about. It was not very big (30 by 20 inches), not in the light of its international image, at least, and hardly impressive either, with its rather po-faced model stolidly posed and solidly shaped, gazing out at the adoring crowds through a thick slab of bullet proof glass. Around me, people jostled for the best camera angle, while unsmiling gun-hefting guards looked grimly on, holding back the next wave even as the first lingered in front of the work. It was perhaps the best known of Leonardo da Vinci’s creations: the Mona Lisa, or La Giaconda, the lady with that enigmatic smile that has been suggested to be because of unknown secrets or just plain gas by researchers the world over, for centuries now.

I have never liked her. She looks like she needs a good whack upside the head and told what is what, as they would say. Her smugness irks, her smile irritates. And I just cannot see what the fuss is about. Now we all know and I unreservedly accept that Leonardo was a genius. His inventions and drawings are superb, perfect for even modern science classrooms and works of real art in themselves. For such a complex man, he was able to put things in such a beautifully simple and straightforward manner that it delighted my coldly analytical little mind and heart. And he matched the genius of Michelangelo and his ilk without effort, blending seamlessly with all the rest of Europe’s intricate history. But this strange woman with a silly smile? HA!

A few years later, I was wandering about Madrid with my parents and bumped into another old acquaintance of theirs: Picasso’s Guernica. It was in a niche in a small room, dimly lit and sort of grey in ambience. I stood in front of the work and something within me shrivelled. My mind recoiled at the sheer violence and pain in the painting, the way in which even the distortions of cubism and the unreal-ness of Picasso’s creativity could bring such violence and anger into a small space. In shades of black and white, there was agony in a mother cradling her dead child, horror in the impaled horse screaming in its tortured dying. A dead soldier lay at the base of the work, limbs scattered, daggers stabbed, women staggered. And, for some reason the worst of these disturbing images is a small bird, standing on a shelf at the top of the painting. While Picasso is rarely serene, this was totally unsettling.

I shivered. Let’s go, I insisted to my mother, who I knew would be as upset by the vibes from the artwork. My father ushered us out fairly quickly, himself not as cheery as normal. It was not an unusual response to the painting. Picasso did it to express his horror at the Nazi bombing of the Basque village of Guernica, in Spain. Over 1,600 people were killed, the town decimated. It “clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death,” Picasso is reported to have said. A reproduction in tapestry hangs in the United Nations building in New York. The very name – apart from the painting itself – now symbolises the horrors of war. To me, it is a nightmare I would rather not remember.

In total contrast is a charming piece of sculpture that I would love to own, though I know it can never be mine. Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi has a huge fan in me, for just one piece of his, though all the others (like the Bird series) that I have seen are also fabulous. It is the golden head of a girl, Mademoiselle Pogany, her ponytail sleek over her neck. It begs to be touched, stroked, gazed at with admiration of a woman with the lines of a thoroughbred racehorse. It also helped that my mother said she saw me in it! Along with Henri Moore, Alexander Calder and Georgia O’Keeffe, the works of Brancusi are about joy, positive feeling, sunshine and flowers. And those, for me, are what make art worth seeing.

Hole in one

I bounced to work this morning, as I do six days every week. But over the past few months there has been a discernible difference in the bounce factor – the reason for its existence, more relevantly. I am not bouncing because I am happy and eager to get to work. It is not an attitude thing. It is literal. I am tossed around the back seat of my little car, my driver in the front alternatively apologising and cursing as our wheels dipped low on one side and then swung up on the other. There are patches of straight, when we breathe easy, soothe our bruised bottoms against soft upholstery and press down the occasional bubble of biliousness that the bumps bring on. It is the story all over Mumbai city, even more so outside it, we read. The main lead: the pothole.

A recent news report tells us that the Mumbai High Court had mandated that all potholes on the city’s roads be filled by August 30 by the authorities in charge. But it is not as easy as all that. Many of the craters are dug out by a combination of factors, from the gouging rain pounding down on the geriatric, over-travelled surface to the roughly finished and excessively overloaded retreads on trucks driven by maniacs, to the traverse of cow-carts and handcarts, auto-rickshaws, speeding state buses and bicycles, pedestrians and private cars alike. These holes are roughly patched with gravel mixed with old oil from tired automobile engines, my driver tells an astonished me, which obviously does not last through even the briefest burst of strong monsoon downpour. What needs to be done, he says with native knowledge, is for a proper tar surface to be created, by people who know how, and allowed to set for the requisite time. Which is never possible, not in this city, especially since roads stretch north-south across the long island.

So how does one avoid a pothole? Dodge? In the rush hour that seems to be a permanent feature of the metropolis’ roads, that is impossible to do without endangering life and limb of car and passenger alike. Hold your breath and slide in and out v-e-r-y slowly to minimise impact and its consequent damage? Nope, not at the speed the traffic flow demands. Go gung-ho for the crater and hope for the best? Well…that seems to be the only way to go, only lay in the supplies of painkiller and ice-packs to alleviate the ouches. Actually, a judicious combination of the three could do the trick, especially if you are not too old or too stiff and don’t mind a dent or two in your car and your cranium. Meanwhile, I have to admit that you do get used to being tossed like a salad of shaken like a slush after the first few trips, and almost miss it when you are driving on a smooth patch.

The other day someone was complaining about the potholing expedition she went on during a shopping trip to the western suburbs. “I went up and down and in and out and it was so bad that by the end of it I had a severe headache and the mugs that I had bought were shattered!” she wailed. My strongest grouch has been at my poor driver, who never fails to go into a prolonged bout of the giggles when I demand to know why he wanted to make a milkshake of me even before I was properly awake in the mornings. By evening, my mind has switched off any voice that could protest, since any grey cell has been bumped around to the point of exhaustion and nothing registers any more. I sleep, perchance to dream of a ride without waves of the concrete kind!

The lunch of the eggplant

It was one of our last meals in China. Soon we would leave for Hong Kong, to reverse our route back to Mumbai, with a brief stop in Thailand – just because we were that close to it, we decided. So this lunch, sort of like the last wish of prisoners just before that walk to the end of execution lane, was exactly what hit the spot, perfectly and deliciously.

The day began, as all days in China began, with a cup of hot green tea, made fresh from the steaming water in the thermos poured over a few leaves in the bottom of a large bowl. It freshened the mind and mouth and pushed you right into the bathroom, from where you emerged, cleansed inside and out, feeling like a new person. Dressed, made up, shod, ready to go, we collected the lobby of the hotel and set out on our final adventure. First stop, the Chinese pharmacy, where I was to be examined and my tummy woes attended to (my doctor back in Mumbai later diagnosed it as a resident amoeba, but at least it was a Chinese one!), my spots managed and my general state of glowing being restored. The pharmacist held my wrist to feel my pulse and read my chakras (if that was what he told me in many very long paragraphs of gabble) as I stared totally fascinated at the array of bottles and glass-fronted cupboards around the vast room. And we left the store with a huge number of cardboard boxes, each filled with 12 round ‘pills’, each the size of a ping-pong ball and with the consistency of smooth plasticine. Stacking them in our spare suitcase, grumbling mildly at the extra baggage, my father wondered whether I would ever last out the course.

I would, I promised him as much as I did myself and, just to prove the point, popped one ‘pill’ into my mouth just before we got out at the restaurant we were to have lunch in. It was the consistency of what I imagined well-blended cow dung to be, with a nasty, bitter-clay taste and the enduring flavour of something that should have been declared rotten not just in Denmark, but all over the world as well. It clung with the persistence of smooth peanut butter and stuck to my teeth and tongue and palate with the insistence of superglue. When we walked into the restaurant, I was the pale green of boiled cabbage, working hard to get the lingering traces of the gunk off my tastebuds. Hot water was followed by cold water, in swigs and gulps that would have put a thirsty horse to shame. Finally, feeling a little less assailed by ancient Chinese curative techniques, I settled down to lunch.

It was a spread to die for. Typically Muslim in flavour – which was perfect, since we had just come out of a beautiful little mosque where the Koran was being read in Chinese – it combined smells and tastes that had the hint of the mysterious East blended divinely with those of the deserts of the Arabian peninsula. A deep dish held a melange of eggplant cooked with enough garlic to make a Greek chef proud, dripping with olive oil and blushed with a rosy haze of red chilli. Another was home to a huge expanse of pilaf, studded with nuts and raisins and redolent with saffron. Chicken was cooked with apricots and scented with a special sweetness that was almost caramel. Fish floated in a spicy gravy spotted with deep orange bubbles of spice. And fresh, crisp green leaves of lettuce, spinach and who knows what else tempted with its coolth, soothing an inflamed mouth. To end, a wonderfully flaky, sweet, terrifically nutty baklava, one that coated the throat with a soft layer of honey and butter.

It was not the most exotic meal we ate in China, but certainly the most appreciated. For weird, we dotted the country with pins. More on that another time…

Cry, freedom

Today is the 59th anniversary of India’s independence. All those years ago, the tryst with destiny gave us the right to be free of Britain and the Raj, but what else did it do? We bungled through our decades and now find that perhaps, just maybe, we didn’t quite get things right, not the way that we planned to, at least.

Think about our cities – we have a metropolis like Mumbai, which I call home, oozing problems from every pore. Consider our transport system, which is riddled with holes, in more ways than one. Drive in to work and you take about an hour longer than you need, because you have to navigate vast stretches of potholes that could be training ground for a Moon vehicle. Ride the commuter trains, the city’s deserved pride and joy, and you find delays, over-crowding and, recently, disastrously, a callous lack of attentiveness from the commuters that can result in tragedies like what hit our city on July 11 this year. Walk and you have to use the middle of the road, since the sidewalks are home to vagrants, shops and thriving entrepreneurship of various kinds.

Think about the truly rural regions of India, which are most of the country and its wealth. You find farmers dying from despair, killing themselves because of bad growing seasons, mounting debts and no help from the government. And that in itself if one of India’s biggest problems: the government. Spare a thought for our politicians and our political system and what comes to mind is dissension, strife, corruption and scams. While a few good men and women battle to keep things clean and transparent, the majority have a reputation that would make a Gotti blush. Whether you want a telephone connection, a ticket to Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna or a home loan, it all gets easier if the wheels…or the palms…are greased a little.

Think about money. India is an incredibly rich country, one that has natural resources in abundance, intelligence to compete and beat the rest of the world intellectually and an endless fund of courage, determination and ambition. But where are we, in any kind of competition? The brightest brains have, for the most part, gone West, to countries like the USA and the UK, where they get the encouragement, facilities and, most of all, the money that they crave. In India, those who remain are either so wealthy that they do not know what to do with their money, or so poor that they wouldn’t know what to do with it if they had it. The rest, the teeming middle class masses, work harder as they get older, pushing themselves and their limits to get what they would consider a decent wage, a decent home, a decent life.

So that is India, as we know it. And I, for one, salute the freedom that I have because I am Indian. I can travel to almost any part of the world I choose to visit, I can live, eat, drive, work and dress the way I want, because a brave generation of people gave me that right by virtue of my nationality. And I am seen as someone from a country that is going places, problems and all, at a good clip. The rest of the world respects India. I do, too.

Writing it right

Over the past couple of weeks I have been reading and occasionally rewriting the Letters to the Editor column in the newspaper I work with. It has been, on the whole, an interesting and novel experience, a turnaround change from the usual beat of glamour and lifestyle that I have been part of for almost all my working life. And people have a lot to say, often about very little. There are also professional letter writers, who respond to any thought they may read of in almost any of the many papers they do read. And they never hesitate to write in, expressing themselves sometimes succinctly and in comprehensible English, other times in words that, put together, spell o-b-s-c-u-r-e. There are rants, too, railings against the state of the nation, the city, the community, the newspaper and, of course, the individual.

In all this, I wonder sometimes what happened to what people call the ‘art of letter writing’. It is, indeed, an art. Today very few people, grandpas ‘talking’ to their granddaughters away in America in college included, use a pen and paper to express themselves. We all just click into our email accounts and start zipping away or, even more easily, log into a chat programme or messenger and type away at a thousand thoughts per minute. Somewhere along the way we forgot how to write, metaphorically and literally. Today, in fact, I can barely sign my name on a check – ask me to write using a pen or pencil on paper, and my already-barely-legible scrawl degenerates into something a drunk ant wandering through an inkwell would refuse to acknowledge as writing.

Once upon a time I wrote long and often profound letters to various friends. In school, when we were asked to write an ‘autobiography’, having lived long and hard all the way to the age of 11 or 12, I did mine as a letter to someone, I forget whom. An even more articulate piece of fiction came later, when I was about 15, and wrote a fabulous epistle to my then-best friend in the USA; I told Judy, a wonderfully warm and funny person and, like me, a sinker rather than a floater in a swimming pool (another story, another blog, another day), how I went to school on an elephant and played with the tigers that lived in my back garden, avoiding the snake charmers and rope-trick magicians en route to the tent cinema on special days. I never did find out whether she had read that one with any degree of her usual good humour, but we did stay friends.

One of the more exciting letters I got was from my buddy of many years, of whom I have written in an earlier blog. She announced coyly from somewhere in the centre of rural India that she would soon be making an aunty of me. Immediately, a long note full of exclamation marks and lots of excited expostulations was sent off to her, with many exhortations to take care, don’t travel and come home immediately attached. It must have been the silliest and most incoherent letter I ever wrote, but one that expressed my feelings of the moment with no self-censorship or second thoughts.

I once collected letters, along with the enclosures they came with. From flowers to pieces of ribbon, chocolates to photographs, they all piled up first in an envelope, then in a manila folder, finally in a large plastic bag. But whenever I moved to a new country, with or without parents, a massive clean-up would be organised. When I first had to make this kind of transition, I read every letter before I tore it up and threw it away. Soon, I learned to keep only a very carefully selected few. The burdens of kilos of paper gave way to a ruthless practicality. And, I knew well, the memories can never be thrown away.

Say ‘Boom!’

It happened many years ago, long before 9/11 and assorted such horrors. We were en route from Mumbai to London when we had a transit stop at Frankfurt airport, having chosen to go the long way around to our destination. Sitting in an airport lounge is perhaps the most boring activity, or inactivity, that I can conceivably think of. There is nothing to do except watch people or read and, since you are almost just off a plane and waiting to get on another and have lost track of which time zone you may be in, you cannot possibly stay awake for too long to do either. And so it was with us. Fortunately for our collective sanity, we had dealt with this sort of situation before and were using all our learned and cultivated strategies to manage it this time, too.

First off, to wander about looking at all the shops. We peeped in at Hermes, stopped briefly at Swarovski, spent a while in the bookstore and pottered through an array of chocolates, but bought nothing, since it was the start of a longish vacation and loading up was not on the current schedule. Just outside a store that we looked at but couldn’t muster up enough enthusiasm to visit, was a small black bag. I saw it, ignored it and went on. My father wondered with minimal interest whether it was lost luggage or maybe, he chuckled, a bomb. We had all been watching reruns of Peter Sellers as a fabulously accented Inspector Clouseau and were still giggling at his vowels.

Just then, chaos erupted around us. A posse of armed and heavily flak jacketed men with mean-looking weapons rushed in and cordoned off a largish area around the bag. A cart full of equipment was rolled in and various wire-trailing devices unpacked. Two men in heavy body-protective wear approached the small piece of luggage with understandable caution. Around the security tape holding back the crowds, people gathered, speculating, worrying, avidly waiting. We stood further back, too tired to be too active about our curiosity, but wondering what would happen with a certain apprehension and not only a bad situation, but also what the aftermath of the turmoil would be. For us, as for many others, there were planes to catch, places to be, lives to lead.

Soon after the experts arrived, the bag was placed under a heavy cover and everyone moved back. Counting began – 1…2…3… and there was a brief but intense flash and a muffled BANG. People involuntarily stepped back a few paces, then crowded back in to see what had happened. Relieved that it had been nothing but a few forgotten toiletries - a bottle of shampoo, a tube of toothpaste, some deoderant, some other bits and pieces - We heard the initial announcements for the departure of our flight and gathered ourselves together, heading for the gate. London was expecting us.

Middling eastwards

We were still in China, but off the conventionally beaten path. Being shepherded around by a sort-of-English speaking guide was fun, though not when he insisted we try out Beijing’s latest gourmet rage: Kentucky fried chicken (more on that another day). In Xian we were less obviously confined, allowed to sample some of the local foods without getting too worried about their touristic value.

Lunch one dull grey afternoon was at a small restaurant in the centre of the not-too-large city. We were escorted ceremoniously to a little room, where we were shut in, along with dishes of fresh green snow peas, huge white pinwheels of lotus root, enormously long soya bean sprouts and a huge clump of leafy parsley. We sat down and stared at each other, then at the food, then at each other, then at the food, completely bewildered. This was the speciality eatery? Then the action started…in a strange way. First peeking apprehensively around a cracked open door, then slowly emerging into the room, sort of like the Cheshire Cat arriving at a tea party, a timid waitress brought with her three plates, each holding a large white mass of dough that looked like a steamed bun. Placing one in front of each of us, she fled, seemingly stunned by our thank-yous and smiles. A few moments later, the manager came in, beamed fondly at us and went into a flood of Chinese that had us looking at him wide eyed and open mouthed. The interpreter, who rushed in to save us from complete non compos mentis, explained. We had to pinch off tiny pieces of the enormous white loaf, he showed us, and the bits had to be just so, this size. Then we were left to our own devices.

We pinched and pinched and pinched. And went on pinching. It seemed endless, exhausting, especially since we were ravenous and had no clue what we were doing and why. Bites of the raw veggies we had been provided with filled us up, but with gas rather than a happy satiety. Burping sadly and in chorus and counterpoint, we pinched some more. Then, when our fingertips and patience were whittled down to almost non-existent, the frightened lady slid in again, this time to collect our bowls, each with a little scrap of paper placed on top of the crumbs of white bun. I tried another ‘Thank you’, but she popped out as rapidly as she had before. About half an hour later, when our stomachs echoed through the room, rumbling painfully with a mixture of gas and hunger, she tiptoed back in, her tray holding our three bowls, this time steaming gently and smelling totally ambrosial. It was a rich broth of meat and vegetables and, of course, the crumbs we had so painstakingly shredded, now melted into a soft and delicious layer of heaven. Shorba, the manager told us, and we nodded enthusiastically, our mouths too full for politeness and our minds drowning in pleasure.

A few days later we drove far into the foggy, soggy countryside to look at the terracotta soldiers, the Qing tombs and the Silk Route. En route, we stopped at a small country restaurant that seemed well equipped to handle tourists, even those as inarticulate and exotic as we were in the throng of American twang and Australian drawl. Various unnamed foods came our way, from soup to fish to fowl, each with a wonderful flavour and aroma. A bird came my way and I sampled, then again, finding it was pigeon; meat was placed on my plate, explained as rabbit. After a while I stopped asking, feeling with each answer that I was a murderer of cute and innocent creatures, but enjoying every bite.

And there was more to eat our way through. After all, we were in China, where every mouthful had a rainbow of tasty tales to tell!

The crying game

There is a lot to cry about these days, especially in today’s world of death, destruction and devastation. And there can be tears in extreme joy, too. It takes someone either very strong or very insensitive to not cry when they see pictures of a baby dead in its weeping father’s hands, an old woman pleading for municipal workers not to destroy her shanty, a child begging to be spared from another beating…or even a mother sobbing at being reunited with a lost daughter, a father being given his newborn baby, a beauty queen winning her international title (however trivial that may sound in contrast).

For me, the working principle is, weep and I weep with you. It has never failed to happen. If someone in front of me, be it on television, film, real life or even just a book starts crying, pressure builds behind my eyes, them wells and flows over my face as salty tears. It is inevitable that, when I watch a news clip on television, where people are mourning, I mourn, too. A few nights ago I was watching a wildlife show when the host found the body of a grown tiger he had been tracking since it was a cub; he cried, his team cried and, of course, I cried. It was a magnificent beast and deserved to live because of its beauty, if nothing else. Last week, an office colleague lost her dog to sudden and severe illness and, as she wept, my eyes filled, too.

And sometimes the tears are for myself, not merely resonant. Two nights ago I was watching a television serial, one of those that helped me decide my career ambition of being a ‘bad lady’. The woman who was last seen, in my memory, shooting her son, who later died in what is now known not to be an accident, was killed when paid assassins shot at the man who was not her son but looked like him and even briefly impersonated him in the family. There was no blood this time, but a cliffhanger last week when bullets flew in slow motion towards the lady and her not-son…then cut to the credits. This week, she managed her nine-minute deathbed sequence – refined to a veritable art in Hindi movies of some years ago – and much weeping ensued. Even as her family bawled, so did I; as her daughter-in-law wept her anguish, I did mine, missing my mother, wanting her back with me. And, as her other son and the non-son together lit her funeral pyre, I relived that numbing morning when I saw my mother’s body go up in flames.

And I wept.

Meanwhile, our new kitten played at my feet, rolling on her back on the carpet, her fat little tummy up and out in the air for me to tickle and her tiny bottle brush tail puffed and raised in excitement. She bounced on all four of her tiny feet, running in circles around the clear plastic pouf, squeaking and growling in her madcat joie de vivre. Every now and then she clambered into my lap, using it as a kind of fortress from which to strategise and then attack the length of satin ribbon that was her tormentor and target. She explored my toes, pounced on the ball of newspaper she chased and then shot under my long skirts to roll on my feet to take a brief nap. As she played, her fur ruffled, her eyes wide, her ears alert, her pleasure was all mine. She had me rolling on the carpet with her, my giggles matching her chirps and rumblings. And there were tears in my eyes, this time of laughter, of fun, of the sheer joy that the little orange furball was bringing into our house.

Which is a good way to cry.

The great dimsum race

We were in China. The real thing, too, not just somewhere that tourists thronged to. Coming to Canton had been a nightmarish ride in a large bus. When we finally got to the hotel, a giant, sanitised, plush western franchise, I was lurching, down the steps, across the pavement, into the lobby. The ground under my feet was waving, the air shimmered in sparkly green and grey spots, my sinuses shrieked with the onslaught of air-freshener they had been subjected to. Propping me up and guiding my tottering self to my bed, my parents laughed, without any sympathetic feeling for my sorry state of semi-existence. But sleep, like Will Shakespeare said, had the habit of ravelling the sleeve of care - or, in my case, dispelling the biliousness. After a brief nap and wash up, I had confirmed that I was still alive.

The coffee shop was like all large luxury hotel coffee shops - anonymous, coldly air-conditioned, vast, almost empty and comfortingly familiar. The menu arrived and I read through it all, shuddering faintly at any mention of anything exotic. Fresh rock shrimp was passed over, sushi was scorned and King Pao anything unexamined. What appealed was good old stodge, something that would soothe my stomach and my frazzled nerves. Pizza yelled for attention. "Pizza," I stated firmly, ignoring all suggestions for eating in China as the Chinese do as mere bits of frivolity. But persuasion is nine-tenths of the appetite and I compromised, settling for an Oriental-sounding topping of Chinese sausage. When the pizza arrived, it was steaming hot, molten cheese blanketing the whole, delicate rounds of rose-gold meat scattered over the top. By colour and configuration, the discs were not pepperoni. A nibble confirmed something more exotic, a vague sweetness sparked with a touch of ginger and a whiff of pepper. It went down smoothly, softening my serrated synapses with gentle flavours and mellow textures.

But by the next morning, I was ready to go wild, gastronomically speaking. After another protracted battle with the airlines trying to get tickets into Wuhan, where we needed to be, we found ourselves back at the hotel, exhausted and hungry. In the lobby stood a large signboard, inviting visitors to a dimsum festival at the main restaurant. We followed out tummies and found ourselves in a huge room, tastefully decorated with streamers and flyers, all proclaiming what we guessed was "Greetings for Moon Festival". We were guided to a table and sat down, wondering what to do next. We sat and sat...and sat. No one came anywhere near us, though waiters pushing carts loaded with cane baskets rushed past us on all sides. I smiled tentatively at one or two and got harassed looks in return. Finally, after much more of this, along with a few near misses, when we got set to welcome some food to our table only to find it destined for someone else, we found a nice lady who spoke some vestige of English.

It got a little easier after that. While we still had no clue what she was telling us a lot of the time, we did understand that we would be fed soon and it had taken so long since we had not given the waiters a ticket which would allow us to be served. "Ah, so!" we all exclaimed, parents, myself, the lady and a few neighbouring tables. Ticket acquired and submitted, we were being served, in as much of a rush as the organised chaos that we had been watching all that time. There were little rice-paper pockets of vegetables, tiny envelopes of spiced meat, fragile fried wrappers stuffed with shrimp and who would guess what else. Every one had a special shape and filling - and significance, our helpful lady managed to tell us - and each was delicious. Having eaten our way through a panoply of bamboo baskets containing steaming yummies, we thanked the nice lady, all the now-beaming waiters and the hotel manager, who had finally come to everyone's rescue, when our lunch was almost over. Tummies leading, we trooped out, genteel burps orchestrating our exit, about four hours after we had gone in.

And we agreed, for once without argument, that eating dimsum in China was a very special experience.

Stray cat style

Many many years ago, the Stray Cats came up with a very catchy song called Stray cat strut. I would listen to it over and over again, enjoying the rhythm and the attitude of the words and the tune, smiling as the hook-line thumped its way into my head. Then I heard the soundtrack of the Andrew Lloyd Webber production Cats and, while Memories made me feel vaguely bilious, other songs like McGavity the mystery cat were played endlessly because they were so charming and detailed the wonderful obstreperousness of cathood. Over time, I made friends with two of my best friend’s cats – both marmalade-haired, like their owner – and learned something of the feline mystique. Then I found love with my own hunk of catly maleness, who gave me a huge helping of joy and many scars but, heart-wrenchingly, left me too soon.

Two days ago, I renewed my relationship with the species. We now have a new addition to our small family. She arrived on Friday, even as my father and the house were slowly recovering from the multi-pronged onslaught of masons, carpenters, computer technicians, gardeners and men and women of all work. And it was Papa, the man who thinks dogs are far superior to cats, who played the starring role in the little drama. He was at lunch when he heard a loud yowling just outside the front door. He opened it, and a tiny orange blur skittered in, squeaking madly. Realising that it was a very young kitten, he fed it a saucer of milk and then tried to send it back to where it could have come from. To no avail. For the miniature furball, su casa was mi casa and it was going to stay.

In a bit of a panic, especially considering the roving population of our apartment, my father called and I sped homewards, alerting vet, driver and nutritionist en route. I got back to find the wee scrap perched on a chair in the study, while my father fluttered about and a strange man worked stolidly on the computer. Order was soon restored. The baby was soothed, the technician was sent on his way, his work done. The vet arrived and checked our new guest – female, about five weeks old, probably injured by a rat but otherwise in decent health, he pronounced, as she wiggled and mewed as she was being cleaned up. At the clinic, she behaved impeccably, just as she had in the car going there, struggling while she was washed with debugging solution, but nestling close to me right after it. Once home, she quickly learned where her catbox was, where the milk and catfood were placed and where to get a cuddle when she needed one.

Our new baby is a very vocal creature. She mews and squeaks, growls and grunts in a range of tones as she converses with us and herself. Each sound takes on a new meaning, especially when she cocks her head to one side and stares with her big leaf green eyes. At night, under the sheets on my bed, she chatters and mutters for hours, alternating that with loud purrs as she gets an occasional spasm of insecurity and has to sit on my chest or chew on my fingers to feel better. And, when she gets scared or is having a madcat attack – which all cats are wont to do – she roars like a wild tiger, bouncing about the carpets with her fur on end and her bottle-brush tail held sharply vertical. Come medicine time and I play villain of the story, grabbing her and battling to get drops of possibly nasty-tasting liquids into her. And she forgives me right after, running to me when I call her, demanding an extra-special snuggle.

The little catlet does not yet have a name, though endearments abound. She has already started accumulating toys and has a willing partner (Papa) to play with, for hours – minutes, really, since every now and then she will stop, climb into the nearest lap and take a blissful nap, sacked out on her back with her vast tummy heaving. And you can see that mighty feline brain at work as you tantalise her with a string or a paper ball; if it is going around this way, there is where it will appear next, she seems to be working out as you tease her with a length of satin ribbon, and she waits, with all the intellectual strategising and deep thought of a rocket scientist! And we learn, even as we watch over and care for this little orange gremlin who has taken over our lives. As for my father, he now has a new girl in his world and seems to be enjoying every minute of it

Chinese checkers

It had been a long flight from Mumbai to Hong Kong and we were tired, nauseous and fed up. The small but exclusive hotel in the middle of the elite shopping district was nice enough, but its environs were dubious, with sex shops in a nearby alley and touts peddling everything from children to strangely configured gadgets to local currency. But it was like that almost everywhere in the city, I found, and had learned not to look too hard within an hour of being there. Our explorations were limited, since we were battling the local airlines for a mysteriously cancelled flight into China on that most crowded of holidays – the Moon festival. Eventually, we had perforce to take a bus for much of the journey, which in itself was fairly exciting – or would have been if I was a less intense shade of green around the gills.

Travel arrangements sorted out, we went in search of food. The local foodshops are the best for authentic cuisine, we were advised; and that is just what we wanted. At a small eatery close by, we found huge bowls of steaming, fresh and delicious soup. Slurping into a delectable melange of broth, noodles, veggies, chicken, prawns, ginger and cilantro, we felt almost instantly soothed after the frazzle of the morning. Behind us, in a shallow plastic tub, live crabs clacked and quarrelled all through our quick meal. The waitress, as bewildered by our English as we were by her Cantonese, beamed fondly at us and urged various delicacies upon our hapless stomachs. If we knew what they were, we may have eaten more.

Early the next morning we were ushered on to the ferry that would take us from Hong Kong to Shenzen, across an expanse of water that roiled and rocked the boat until all of us were a delicate pea green and the American gentleman in front of me got an attack of hiccups that punctuated his diving into a little plastic bag at intervals. Once on dry land, we stood in the chill breeze for a while to clear our collective and individual heads and breathe in air that was untainted by diesel exhaust while standing on firm ground that did not sway precariously underfoot. Our next form of transport loomed over us and I quailed. “I will not,” I stated. “NOT!” I was shoved mercilessly onto a large and very air-conditioned tourist bus – the very genre makes me bilious – and pushed into a window seat and told to breathe deep. Calm, said my mother, my father and anyone else who could speak in a language that I even vaguely understood.

For a while, I lived. So much so that I even started believing that I would survive the entire journey, making it to Canton alive. We stopped en route to see some sights (a kindergarten with its nicely programmed babies helped allay any nausea for a while) and were soon treated to a vast and wonderful lunch. Feeling completely normal and looking healthily brown all around, I partook with some heartiness. Peking duck went down a treat, the crisp-skinned slivers of well done meat, crunchy green onion, tangy plum sauce and soft pancakes endlessly addictive. Clear broth helped settle everything and I went back to the bus in a deliciously sated stupor, ready for even the drive further north.

But I was happy too soon. A few hours later, I was decanted at the huge Canadian-run hotel in Canton a wonderfully deep viridian, my knees wobbling and my head whirling like the dervishes I never wanted to meet, not with my vertigo. Staggering up to my room, followed closely by concerned but amused parents, I collapsed on the bed and slept. This kind of introduction to China was not what I had hoped for or wanted. It was, for me, hardly auspicious a beginning. But, oh boy! It certainly did get better!

Out with the old…

Most people I know, myself included, resist change. They do not want to work on a new job, do not want to try a new kind of food, do not want to move to a new city and do not want to throw away old photographs. And there are some I know who cling to their old clothes like they were precious possessions. Which they often are, with much sentimental value attached, but perhaps usability should be a stronger motivating factor? Try telling someone who likes his T-shirts old, ratty and faded that!

No, this is not directed wholly at dear Daddy, who prefers his shirts in a precarious state and his womenfolk far away from them. It is, in fact, a take off on a dear buddy of mine, with whom I now work and exchange insults, compliments, gossip and oblique comments. Sid has daughters, who despair as much as I do my father’s wardrobe, of his saggy, baggy, past-sell-by-date T-shirts. He revels in them, he says. And I think he revels, equally, in irritating his girls. His daughters are at that stage in their lives when they want to change Daddy for a new and improved model, preferably one wearing spiffy, clean, un-holed, un-battered, un-faded clothing. Do they succeed? Not at all. Sid, like my very own Papa, has his standards and beliefs and will not change them or his T-shirts for anything…or anyone.

This obduracy is characteristic of all humans. Take me, for instance. Tell me to change my life and I will resist, kicking, screaming and scratching. I will not move my favourite chair one inch to the right, feng shui or no, if someone says I should. But suggest it, with nice chocolate frosting on top, with logic of my kind attached and the chair will not only be moved that requisite inch, I will also change the whole room to fit with any advice that is directed at improving my environment and existence.

There are people who swing with the tide, however, and change at the drop of the proverbial hat if someone moots it. My friend Vinnie, for one. Ask him for an opinion, he has one. Give him five minutes with someone else with another opinion and Vinnie will change his in that direction. Tell him that he is wrong and the earth really is flat, and that is what he will believe, whole-heartedly and happily. And he will not hesitate to say so, knowing by then that it was all his idea in the first place. Which does not make him any less of a friend, just a more amusing one to watch.

I have been trying to change another friend of mine for many, many years, almost as long as I know her. She holds herself in very low esteem and is, sadly enough, prone to hysterical tears about too much to detail, all connected to her sense of self – or lack of it. For all that she runs herself down, I work to build her up, usually to only temporary avail. Through my eyes and brain, she is amazingly bright, pretty, talented, funny…all together a wonderful soul and a huge heart that I am lucky to know and be friends with. Tell her that – you think she will accept? Can you change a marmalade cat into a black one? Maybe after reading this, she will know what she is all about, really, truly. This one’s for you, SS!

Delhi in the belly

A few days ago someone offered me a job. It sounded like great fun, albeit not something I had ever done before, which is probably why it could have been that aforementioned great fun, I think. It had nice money attached, which sweetened the pie a bit. And it had the status that I, in my advanced stage of life, would have done well with tagging to my name. So are you interested, the friend who had set it all up asked me. Yes, I replied. Is the money what you want, he wanted to know. Yes, I replied. Did you like the idea, he demanded. Yes, I replied. Will you take it, he pushed. No, I replied.

My reasons for refusing were simple and in the singular. This new assignment would mandate my moving to Delhi, which I refused to do. I have done it once, survived and even enjoyed my almost-four years in the Indian capital, but the memories of my share of trauma in that city are more than enough to keep me going – going far away from it, that is. My time in Delhi had its high points and many very low ones. But the aspect that will always be something I can dine out on is the driving. The city is not friendly to those who do not know its roads. In fact, it hardly endeared itself to me when I first started driving its streets. It began traumatically – my first foray was from where I worked to where I lived. The normally 20-minute drive took almost three hours. And left me in tears, my family worried and my car’s clutch plate feeling the strain.

I took off when it was still light – a wise move, especially since it was winter, when the sun goes home early and astonishingly quickly. I had clear instructions, down to which right turn I needed to navigate and at what angle. But everyone giving me those instructions forgot that I was a Mumbaikar with Mumbai-ishtyle logic. Traffic being what it was, I was in the wrong lane and couldn’t quite make the right (as in correct) right (as in direction) turn. If I had been a native Delhi-ite, I would have swung across the three lanes that blocked me and turned right when I had been asked to, which would have made life incredibly easy for everyone involved in this little saga.

That done, I go into a stream of vehicles big and small and endless. I couldn’t turn around without breaking about 12 traffic laws and I was too nervous to even try. So I went on trucking and finally found a policeman directing cars around a cow taking a nap en route. When I stopped, honked and asked him how to get to where I wanted to go, sounding probably most pathetic and little-girl-lost-ish (genuine, not contrived), he raised his bushy eyebrows, stared incredulously at me and my car and spat copiously, mercifully in the opposite direction. “Madam, you are in wrong place only,” he said in his terribly fluent idiolect. “You must be going to wrong way.”

Well, yes, I realised that, I argued, but if he would be so good, he could tell me which the right place only was and how I could go not-wrong way to get there. More spitting ensued, and a long description of the lefts and rights I needed to get where I wanted to go. By which time I had no clue where that actually was. Still not yet daunted by the whole drama, I thanked the man in khaki and did a quick U and fled in the direction I had come from. Unfortunately for me and my Mumbaiyya logic, my place of origin seemed to have moved elsewhere by the time I got there, leaving me totally lost and not making good time, unlike Marvin the Paranoid Android who could hitchhike his way around the galaxy if only he had got the right instructions.

It took me about six months of tearfully winding around the circles and blundering about the streets of Delhi to figure out how to get anywhere. Suddenly, once day, it all came into place – the right place – sort of in the way telling time and skipping rope happened to me. Today, I can, without too much trauma to myself, my car and the general populace, find my way around the metropolis that was once home to me. And today, thank fate, I don’t need to!

Bringing in baby

My friends seem to get pregnant a lot. Not the same friend each time, but the baby bug is biting its way through the small group that I call mine. Not that long ago, it was Fish Face, as we lovingly called her – or should I say ‘name changed on request’ – who told me in a rather coy paragraph in a letter (where she was living at the time, letters by snail mail were the only way to communicate) that I would be an aunt (turned out that I was actually Godmama) in a few months. From then on, the story took on proportions of a comic melodrama (yes, I know, it is a bit of a contradiction in terms, but it describes the situation perfectly) of epic and exhausting proportions.

It really began for me when my friend came back to Mumbai from the fondly-titled ‘hinterland’. She was enormous by then, and I got an armful of bulging middle that kicked me smartly when I gave her (and it) a hello hug. And I was appointed (by myself and her mother) her bodyguard. When she wandered about the city, tummy leading, to find just that perfect crib, that perfect set of booties or that perfect nursing bra, I followed close behind, gathering up packages and saying rude words under my breath as she galloped from counter to counter, store to store and suburb or urbs prima.

My vocabulary took on a whole new dimension on one very hot and sunny afternoon when Fish Face, eight months pregnant, suddenly and with no indication whatsoever dived across three lanes of traffic to balance precariously on the divider of the dangerously crowded road to peek into a shop window that had a ‘nice pair of jeans I could wear after the baby is born’, she explained as I stood in front of her like Medusa, forbidding glare, flying hair and all, demanding to know just what in all heck she was trying to do. My blood pressure and choler hit the roof when Fish Face stuck her lower lip out and whined that all she wanted to do was to be less fat and hot and uncomfortable. Still incoherently sputtering, I shoved her into a cab for the drive home and called her mother to say that I quit. The job was just too much for me to handle!

And then it came time for the baby to happen. Confined at home because of her size, swollen ankles and sheer bad-temperedness at not being able to move the way she normally did, quick and agile, she grouched at everyone who said anything to her. I called a few times a day (or was it an hour) to check that all was well. The due date for the baby came and went. With the doctor’s connivance, we fed Fish Face bananas, castor oil, prunes…all that was guaranteed by tradition and folklore to push her into the delivery room. Finally, some days after she should have popped, she was popped – into hospital, with an epidural shot to induce labour. I am told that she screamed words no one had heard before and no one wanted to hear again, as she brought into the world the little red noisemaker that was my goddaughter. Of course, we fought about the fact that I saw the infant only a week later, but that is a whole different story.

Now I am told that my buddy Belachameli (yes, another name changed) is pregnant. A very pretty young woman, she took her time to get to that state, but has made whoever knows about it very happy. For now, she is keeping all of us busy complaining about her lack of appetite, nausea, aversion to medicines and more, adding all her delightful tendencies to paranoia and delusion to possible (and probable, she will insist, I know) ailments, from the insignificantly minor to the amazingly fatal. But we all excuse every single one of her grouches. After all, she is in a ‘delicate state’ and must be allowed to be temperamental. I shudder to think what she will do and say when her tummy swells and her ankles do, too. At least I am far enough away to be out of reach when she starts throwing things, tantrums, vases, plates and more! And I will have, at the end of it all, a new playmate.