All about the eve

Today is the day before the night that is Halloween. It is, as I said yesterday, one of my favourite festivals. One that I take seriously, for some strange reason. Or maybe it is that my memories of Halloween have always been coloured bright and happy, never mind that ghoulies and ghosties are out that night with spooks to spare wandering about in their wake. Somehow, for me, these have always been upbeat spirits, cheerful even as they yelled “BOO!” down the back of my neck and caused shivers to wiggle up and down my spine.

The first I remember of Halloween was when we lived in a small town in Germany. Our neighbours, a wonderfully mad American family who later became mine when I was in college in the USA, had three small children, with whom I was sent out. I was Pippi Longstocking, a favourite then, complete with tight braids and a short skirt. It was cold, and wet – which then became a recurring theme for Halloween ever after. We rang bells through the US army camp in the city and collected all sorts of candy, little of which I ate because I got the mumps soon after. But the outing meant that I could stay up late with my little friends, be outside in the dark and indulge in these minor pleasures that are such forbidden fruit at a time when you are too young to do very much else for sin.

My favourite Halloween celebration was perhaps when I was in college in Boulder, Colorado. It began fairly early in the day, unfortunately with class – which was in itself quite horrific – and then segued happily into the afternoon, when the party began. I lived in the coed dorm then, and everyone was yelling and giggling in the corridors, getting ready for the big bash at the cafeteria in the evening. I had just arrived on campus and, though I knew quite a few people, I had no idea what to wear or how to go about the whole event, especially since I was grown up and less uninhibited by then. So my very new friends got together, ransacked my wardrobe and dragged out what they thought would be the perfect disguise: I was an Indian princess. Clichéd as it sounds, it worked for them and I was too fascinated by the seriousness of the whole affair to object beyond a minor squeak or three.

So when the party began, I was the front-woman. I sat with the reception committee at the front desk, stamping hands with indelible ink and displaying no more than my own fingers, the rest of me carefully pinned under a swathe of sequinned and enveloping dupatta. People had to guess who I was, and if they did, they got some sort of prize – maybe a free drink, I don’t remember. The only person who did guess was the dorm Casanova, a man who later became a good friend and cohort in many crimes, and he said it was because no one else in the place had such carefully pale-painted fingernails.

Later that evening, more conventionally and warmly clad in jeans, sweater, thick socks and boots, I was dragged out to the famous Boulder Mall Crawl. Simply explained – downtown Boulder is run through by a pedestrians-only cobbled street, called the 16th Street Mall. Come Halloween evening, and people would parade solemnly up and down that stretch several times, getting progressively happier on copious doses of beer and whatever else was on offer at the various storefronts and tailgate parties along the way. There was inevitably a layer of early snow on the ground, which soon melted into a delightfully alcoholic slush that was incredibly dirty, and by the end of the second turn, you were – at least, I was – frozen solid from my ankles down and wishing plaintively for a warm bed and lots of hot chocolate to defrost every pore.

Later that night, I sadly contemplated my feet and sighed. It may have been a fun celebration, but my red ankle boots would never recover. The next year, I went as a bat and wore more sensible waterproof shoes.

Borrowing times

The title of this one may sound like a bad weepy movie, or a deliberate pun or even an abbreviated way of telling someone that I am taking her newspaper for a while. But, as I keep telling people who cannot stop trying to figure out whether there is a twist in my tale, take it literally – what you see is, almost always, just what you get. No more, no less, no different, no ulterior motives.

Be all that as it may, I am actually giggling gently at the actual reason for doing this particular piece. I was arguing with my boss whether Halloween was even recognised in this country. Then I saw the windows of a popular store, an institution in Mumbai. It was dotted with small orange pumpkins, with a couple of ghosts and a leering witch for company. “Of course Indians know about Halloween,” I squeaked indignantly in response to the Big Man’s scoffing. And with the barrage of television shows, newspaper features (mostly lifts from foreign publications) and scary movies at this time of year, who could not know about the spooky night that ends October? It may have been a very American concept, borrowed from ancient European culture and refined to a nicety of crass commercialism, but it works as a universal occasion to go out and party and eat lots of candy in the process.

Halloween is not the only occasion that us Indians have ‘borrowed’ willy-nilly from the West. Take Valentine’s Day, for instance. It may have started as a marketing gimmick for a certain jewellery company to sell really bad diamonds at really low prices, but it is now a lot more – retail jewellers are making massive profits, cashing in on the sentiment of February 14 without have very much clue what it is all about. Card-makers, ticky-tacky junk sellers, florists, balloon vendors, chocolatiers…they all cash it is happily during the season of love. And does Valentine and his day have anything to do with the Indian ethos? Does the festival even fit in with the way life works in the country? Is there not a huge cultural divide?

That apart, consider the two days on which parents are centre focus – Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. The traditional Indian way of life is all about not just loving your family, but revering your parents. Once upon a time (and perhaps even today, in some parts) a married couple prayed for sons to support them when they were old and infirm. Today, those same sons, adored and indulged, often mistreat their aged parents, sometimes going so far as to evict them from their own homes. So where does a father and a mother have the time and space to be celebrated? But people who think that there is a market are not too far off the mark – after all, they make millions of rupees selling cutesy-pie cards, stuffed toys, mushy pendants and more by telling customers that Mom and Dad would love being feted on one particular occasion.

And then there is Christmas – there will be adorable little Santa Claus figures all over the city, tinsel will decorate the fakest trees this side of the plastic factory and cellphones, car-horns, reverse gears and classified advertisements will sing carols to the occasion. I myself love Christmas, what with wonderful memories of sliding on the ice straight into the church door one midnight in Denver, eating huge amounts of turkey and dressing at a family dinner in Long Island, sitting through a very strange kalachakra prayer and vegetarian dinner in Boulder, gingerly chewing through a salad full of spiky nettles in Milan and watching I Love Lucy during a bad bout of mumps in Heidelberg…the presents were fabulous, the food divine, the affection always to be treasured.

And, when you actually look carefully at all the pap and sentiment, that is why there is always an occasion to celebrate – ours or theirs.

Hotline to god

It was just before dinner last night. The building supervisor called on the intercom and asked that we move our car from its home in front of the main entrance to our wing of the apartment block, to the back. Okay, my father agreed, but when? Four in the morning, he was told, much to his horror; the suddenly higher pitch in his voice made me demand details. It turned out that the Sikh family who lived upstairs had scheduled a prayer session in the courtyard and wanted clear space for it. Okay, so why at the crack of dawn, or even before dawn wakes up enough to crack? We were told that the puja would be held starting 4am, and that it would last an hour and not disturb anyone, really, truly. Rather astonished by it all, we had the car moved and made some faintly acerbic comments about the way people live their lives and then forgot about it.

A short while later, there was another call on the intercom. That was one of the young bahus of the Sikh clan who lived upstairs, asking if I would come for the puja. At 4am, she announced, and you should have a bath and then join us. And please bring your father, she added, saying that she would see me in the morning. I have never spoken to the girl before, though I may have smiled at her in passing as I rushed in and out of the apartment block on my way to somewhere or the other. But I was my well-brought-up, polite self, promised I would definitely remember the occasion and hung up, telling Papa that he should bathe and go downstairs at 4am. The look on his face was worth the giggle!

Some time before dawn cracked, when I reached one lazy arm out to point the remote (wrong way around, as always at that hour) at the air-conditioner to turn it off, an unusual sound filtered through my cloudy blanket of sleep. Burrowing my nose deeper into my pile of pillows didn’t switch it off, and it was not a dream since I was not deeply enough asleep. And it slowly crept into my head, with a rhythmic clash-thump, backed by a chorus of voices in a wonderfully almost-Vedic drone. Irritably I shook my head, hugged my pillow more tightly and tried to sink back into darkness. But the sound persisted and I had to get up, feed the cat, blearily wander about doing morning chores and get ready to go to work to harass my long-suffering albeit mean and nasty boss (who has never read my blog, so I can safely say blatantly untrue things without him being vengeful about it).

But after I got up, managed to find my feet, tripped over the feline and steeped my green tea, I tottered over to the living room window and peered out over the bougainvillea into the courtyard. There, in the semi-gloom of 6am, sat a lot of Sikh men and women, reverent before a large yellow flag, the genders carefully separated by many feet of dhurrie. They all had their heads covered, eyes closed, and they swayed gently to the sounds of the kirtan they sang. There was an elderly gentleman in immaculate white, his turban darkly coloured in the half-light, serving up glasses of white liquid – either lassi or milk – and handing out small newsprint-wrapped packets to the women. I saw a couple of heads tilt upwards, and retreated fast into the house, kitten in tow, giggling as she peered up, licked my nose and squeaked.

And since then I have been wondering what the ritual had been all about. And couldn’t it have been done later in the day, when everyone was more prepared for the onslaught of sound and fire, signifying what seemed to be a great deal? Or is that the best time to get a clear line to the powers that be?

A New York state of mind

Many years ago, almost serendipitously, I decided that Mumbai and New York were sisters under the skin. And, for Mumbai, the skin could be seen and heard and felt and – ha ha! – smelled as one rich, complex, stunning experience. I flew into New York for the first time at some unearthly hour of the morning, jet lagged and blown out of my just-teenage mind with the exhaustion, the excitement and the endless inhalation of airline atomosphere tinged with air freshener and dirty diapers so characteristic of an Air India long-haul flight. But I knew I was on ground that I could like, very quickly, since it had that instant and unmistakeable feeling of home. Over the next few years, visit after visit, that impression was set in concrete and, today, grown up and blasé as I may be, I know that New York is, in some odd and un-explainable way, just like my own home: Mumbai.

The reverse journey, made another day, another time almost another life, assured me that first instincts never lie. I knew as I flew home, back into the city I was born in and that is mine for good now, that Mumbai was just like New York, in ways that went beyond the sights, sounds and smells that gave it its character. It shared a similarity of skyline, for one, with the high towers of Nariman Point or Bandra seeming, through sleep-swelled eyelids and the discombobulation of time zones, to be the sky-scrapers of the central business district in Manhattan. There was a lovely pong of fish nicely blended with the ordure of rotting garbage, the sharp twinge of chlorine, the sinus rattle of sulphur and the snap of human odours – sweat, frying in oil, detergent and, somehow, jasmine.

The sounds, too, are the same, varying only in intensity and pitch, determined by technology, zoning law and civic awareness. In Mumbai you have cars honking, engines buttering at different decibels and drivers impatiently revving as they wait at traffic signals and at the command waved by sweaty policemen. There are invariably children and their not-much-older minders at every street corner, whining for handouts and “Just two rupees, please, aunty!” There are the sellers of magazines and books, of sing-chana, of fly swatters, even of fluffy hand puppets that squeak when they are waggled, all importuning you at increasing volumes through the closed windows of your car. And everywhere there are the autorickshaws, putting in tones from the gently peevish to the aggressively strident, puffing out white or grey-black clouds of smoke from exhaust pipes in various stages of decrepitude.

And then there are the sights. You come into JFK airport in New York from a long swoop over the Atlantic, the coastline below striped with landing piers hosting beautifully sleek boats, some tiny and bright, some enormous and intrinsically upper-crustily snooty. Landing in Mumbai is about the same approach, but with a slight tweak in the execution – there is the sea, the coast with its fishing boat stripes, the buildings, the silver streaks of the main roads…and then there is Dharavi, the unending stretch of slums, undulating over a huge and somehow neatly arranged swathe of the city, its low makeshift roofs almost reaching up to the wheels of the plane as it drifts down onto the runway.

I am home.

What rubbish!

I hate Diwali. It is not because this is the first year without my mother, who always observed certain rituals that I knew and looked for even if I was not speaking to her. It is not because of the noise – which, mercifully, was rather less noisy this year! And it is not because of the gratuitous expenditure and the conspicuous consumption, since I am as capitalist and shopaholic as any. But I hate the day after the event, truly. I drove out of the gate of my apartment building yesterday morning, after two days away from work, and found the road totally and plushly carpeted in leftovers from the frenzy of firecracker bursting of the days before. There were sanitation department (or whatever it may be called here) workers diligently sweeping up, piling up the waste paper and burned fuses in a huge heap in one corner, while the dump truck collected it slowly from all down the street. I honked gently at one, as she stretched her broom out to snag some rubbish that was floating lazily down the fast lane and saw her face as I drove past – tired, bored, deprived, joyless.

And the crew was back this morning, after a prolonged blast of firecrackers last night, too. They had already accumulated teetering lots of debris in corners, and were sweeping up more from under cars, along gutters and around trees. Tomorrow morning, after Id is done celebrated, will there be more for them to clean up? And what do they get in return? Apart from a little baksheesh from every building - which is obliged to give, or else their garbage will not be collected for weeks afterwards – do they find a little pourboire in their pay packets at this time of year, or do they have to beg for it? But that is what they know and always do, isn’t it?

Indian festivals are startlingly messy affairs. There is always rubbish to clean up, especially when there is a communal celebration, and the aftermath is not just repellent, but wasteful as well. Consider Holi – it starts a few days before the actual date, and walking even just out of the apartment block is fraught with all kinds of peril. I have been hit by water bombs from the terrace nine floors above, I have been sprayed with coloured water from behind cars parked in our compound and I have been fogged by clouds of coloured powders that settled brightly and burningly into my clothes and sinuses and, worst of all, ears. And for days after Holi morning, which is a manic orgy of colour, water, paint and bhang, the roads are tinged with unnatural shades of red, pink, green and blue, stray dogs wear coats that could be Joseph’s and people have strangely tinted parts – ears, toes, scalps and fingernails.

Navratri is neater, but only in a manner of speaking. There are wilting and rotting flowers from pandals and home pujas thrown into running waters – the creek, the sea, even sewage canals – there are bamboo frames bridging over roads and blocking gateways and, over it all, there is the miasma of plant decay, spoiled milk and un-drying clothes. By the end of the nine-day festival, ears are ringing with the tinny electronic drone of dandiya music and tempers are running high with a lack of sleep and temporary deafness.

In spite of it all, there is a joy that comes from celebration. There is the food, the family togetherness, the bonding with friends and neighbours and a special feeling of virtue in excess. Does that balance the negatives? I think so!

Behind the wheel…again!

I took full advantage of the fact that it is festival week and told my driver, well meaning though he may be, to take a holiday. So for two days, two whole gloriously independent days, I will be driving myself to work. Which means that I do not have to sit through the man’s sighs and his wiggles in his seat, and his furtive glances at the clock and his glowers at other drivers who may have violated his personal code of driving conduct or even his be-thou-ever-so-’umble mien with me, especially after I have told him to watch how he navigates through the every-increasing and temperamental traffic. I do not have to sit through an hour-long journey feeling like I could have driven it better. And I do not have to, at the end of it, feel terribly guilty at having kept the man longer than the hours that he has become used to with me.

So today, after many warnings from my fond parent and a tiny twinge of trepidation (after all, I had never driven this stretch alone and had not driven anything for too long), I set out. First off, a stop at the gas station to tank up the little chariot. While there, I beamed happily at the attendants, who all lined up to wish me Happy Diwali and clean various parts of my car without expecting more than another smile in return (they said so when I offered), and watched the metre ticking upwards as the boosted petrol filled in. Sitting under the cash counter was a small black and white striped cat, dozing in a little catly bundle in the warmth and fume-laden air. We exchanged a couple of polite comments and I tickled the kitten’s ears and it looked up sleepily and purred gently.

I coasted out of the place and on to the main road, dodging a large, dirty and very battered bus. It growled its horn at me and I hooted derisively back, knowing that I was well out of range. There was little traffic, and most of it was going slowly enough for me to zip past – well within speed and safety limits, Papa! – and make it to work at my usual time, even though I had left half an hour later and did a pit stop for the car en route. Now I wait for a good stopping point so that I can leave the office and head homewards. Perhaps there will be more people driving along on the way there; maybe the journey will take longer; maybe I will be tired enough to sleep the sleep of the clear conscience when I finally get to bed tonight. And maybe, just maybe, I will enjoy the freedom of another day by myself on the road again tomorrow with the same lightness and joy that I felt today.

Into the night

After a long week at work and a good dinner of pasta and wine and dessert, I was exhausted. But most of my work is more or less mindless, tiring of the body and sapping of the soul, but hardly challenging for the mind. And, yes, for some strange reason, perhaps genetics, I happen to have one of those: a mind, that is. So even though my calf muscles were twitching (I wear heels to much, I am told, but refuse to accept it) and my shoulders were sagging and my eyes were feeling rather more bleary than they looked, I was wide awake and bored. Which invariably leads to consequences that should be avoided, but who thinks about these things before one does them?

No, I did not race down the highway at 150 kmph. Neither did I decide to polish of the bottle of plonk we had opened at dinner. And I did not do a mad nude dance in front of the open window either. What I did do, I regretted all yesterday, when I clomped around the house with a sore head, blurred vision, an aching neck and dark rings around my eyes that could have had geneticists testing me for raccoon DNA. I watched Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna on cable.

Big mistake. As I have said before, weep and this blogger weeps with you. And that is practically all that the actors did for the so-many hours that they were framed in all their glory by candy-floss director Karan Johar. There was Rani Mukherjee, who wept more than she smiled, the rest of the time looking grim and very unhappy about everything in her screen life. There was Shah Rukh Khan, who was nasty and curmudgeonly and looking and sounding very unhappy about everything in his screen life. There was Abhishek Bachchan, who actually wasn’t too dreadful, more because he had little to do except dance and maul Rani around and, in one not-bad scene, throw a wonderful tantrum where he got to break things, which he did very well. And there was Preity Zinta, who tried very hard, but was all that an actor of her experience and calibre should not be – wooden, artificial and self-conscious. Of course, there was Amitabh Bachchan, who was his usual fabulous self in parts, though for most other parts he should have been edited out. And there was Kirron Kher, who did not much, but wore the loveliest brocades.

Which sort of sums up the movie. Critics and KJo fans alike say that it was a radical departure from most of his sweetly romantic work, and that infidelity, divorce and mistakes are not usually shown so candidly in Bollywood productions. But it makes sense - to me, at least - that after so many years and so many films, some even original and not ‘inspired’, that filmmakers in this country should come up with themes and screenplays that actually reflect reality, even if they need to be packaged with frills, furbelows and lots of fluff. To show how two couples break up because one half of each is deeply unhappy and wants out, to show how those two unhappy halves come together and, after much weeping and melodrama, head off into the sunset (or to catch a train) is hardly brave; it is hat so old that one wonders whether it is back ‘in’ again, sort of like retro in fashion.

Did Johar really do something so novel and brave? I am not sure. But he certainly wrapped it all up very nicely in beautiful clothes, wonderful houses, superb photography and a city that will never lose its glamorous charm, no matter who does what to it on celluloid. I am not sure why I wept through it – yes, because everyone on screen was crying their hearts out, but perhaps more because it was such a waste of the time I should have spent reading the growing pile of books stacked in my bedroom, or out with friends or even asleep. I swore I would watch KANK, as it is pop-called, only on TV. Now I wonder why I did.

The great Bombay food bazaar

It feels like a very long time ago that I came back to my own city from various parts of the world. At that time, I was delicately nurtured on Big Macs, salads, enchiladas, lasagne and whatever else I and my roomie Karen conjured up in the small kitchen of our tiny two-bedroom apartment. It was, of course, bolstered by occasional jaunts to restaurants that we could afford on our rather meagre allowances, which was not fancy but quite healthy. And Karen, in her infinite wisdom, believed that her daily recommended allowance of veggies came from the ketchup on her burger, even as I fought her prejudices and force-fed her with eggplant, celery, yellow peppers (the green ones are still avoidable for both of us) and – very rarely after a protracted battle – broccoli.

It was when I was in college that street food became a sort of cred. Of a kind, that is. It meant pizza, bagels, hot dogs (but only in New York city), baked chestnuts and French fries, but disallowed tacos, burritos, peanuts and cotton candy that was not blue, since I had a grumbly tummy and Karen was astonishingly calorie conscious. It was not that I had never eaten food outside the house or a restaurant with tablecloths before. In Geneva, where we lived for a while, my mother and I would eat a crepe or two on the pavement outside the main department store in the shopping enclave and in Lyon, we devoured the most wonderful rolls stuffed with Brie (for her) and ‘le ’ot dog’ and sinus-jarring mustard for me. We also chomped out way through various other street-sold foods, from pain au chocolat to chocolate covered almonds from the candy counter outside C&A in Heidelberg when I was a much younger child.

In Mumbai, food eaten from a streetside stall was a whole different proposition. I could rarely stomach it, being rather allergic (in a manner of speaking) to anything beyond the level of perhaps 0.5 on the chilli scale. Perhaps the only time I really tried it was when I had just started my brief stint in college and my friends insisted that I get down and dirty with them and snack from the stall just outside the campus gate. It was a form of exotica called ragda pattice and burned as it went in and even more as it went out. To me, it consisted of a small round patty composed mainly of potatoes and chilli, swimming in a gravy that consisted of lentils and more chilli, and topped with various sauces that had tamarind, yoghurt and even more chilli. I wept pathetically, so much so that my friends vowed never ever to feed me the stuff again.

Having escaped that experience fairly unscathed, I dived much later into the great Indian paani puri. It was interesting, texturally and gustatorily, and controllable in that I didn’t have to be drowned by chillies at every gulp. Instead, I was made totally greenly bilious by the sweetness of the various liquids that I was given in my puri and managed to colour coordinate with my clothes with some difficulty. Which ruled out future contact with the stuff.

Perhaps the food that captured my culinary senses was alu chaat. I found it in Delhi, as the mildest and most innocuous of a vast panoply of chilli-laden snacky foods, very similar to hash browns, albeit with a dash of spice that seared through my system with happy fire. I would eat it only at restaurants where the waiters wiped down the tables with a semi-clean cloth and only in the company of my buddy Nina, and with the accompaniment of enormous quantities of yoghurt to soothe my lips and tongue. But I loved it. And I will devour it again when I find it. Chillies and all!

Food fadding

I was idly watching television last night after a day that stretched endlessly through miles of heat, traffic, pollution and blazing sunshine. My legs twitched, my head ached and my tummy did somersaults – like the kitten was doing around my feet, chasing her tail. And I switched channels, wavering between a wonderfully weepy soap and a more comprehensible travel-food show by maverick chef Anthony Bourdain. I am not sure which made me laugh more, but sitting on the carpet gazing at the tube managed to make me feel better about life in general and the day in particular.

Bourdain has a wonderful mania about him. He wanders the world at will – or as per the will of the sponsor who funds his shows, one presumes – and eats and cooks up the strangest of foods. His two books that I have read and now own (Kitchen Confidential and A Cook’s Tour) described a person who has been through, almost literally, the underbelly of the food world, and the lowest possible in any life, with drugs, sex, rock and roll and seedy backstreet dives where cooking is a shortcut to disease and come out triumphant, ready to show off not just culinary expertise, but chutzpah and a supreme confidence that anything can be faced and won over without too much trouble or effort.

Yesterday I was watching the man eat street food, first in Kolkata and then in Mumbai. Even just seeing in on the small screen, knowing that it was not, in some existential way, real in my own life, the episode was alive, vivid, full of flavour and colour and the sheer joy of a new adventure. While my rather turbulent tummy did more flips and flops than the kitten, who was now rooting about near my knees with a single-minded determination that had me giggling and wincing as her claws dug into a tender part of my thigh, I saw him eat jhal-muri, bheja fry, kebabs of various kinds and, eventually, the great Bombay burger – vada pav.

Much to my regret and oftentimes shame, I have rarely, if ever, eaten street food. I was fed paani puri twice, once in Kailash Parbat at the end of Colaba Causeway in Mumbai and once at Haldiram’s in Lajpat Nagar in Delhi, but both were made with mineral water and neither had the authenticity of the real thing eaten at a street corner or on Chowpatty Beach or, as my friend swore, the stuff of Bengali Market (also Delhi) fame. I have maybe once or twice eaten bhelpuri on the beach, followed up with wonderfully cold and delicious malai kulfi, a burning bottom and many regrets. I did, once, eat something called ragda pattice outside the college I briefly attended (or was supposed to) in Mumbai, but cannot remember much more than the fact that it as incredibly spicy and not worth the pain.

But they tell me that street food is to die for. I will examine that issue tomorrow, I promise. For now, I will stick with what comes out of my own kitchen and watch the kitten do roll-overs on the carpet with steely persistence.

Different folks, different strokes

One of my closest friends will not get online using a chat program, which would be so much more convenient and easier to manage than phone calls and emails and letters and packages that float over the myriad oceans between us. According to her, if she signs up for one of the mail accounts that she will need to log into an instant messenger, she will be flooded with mail from everyone and every-firm that sends out spam of various kinds. There is no way I can convince her otherwise, and so we continue with emails, an occasional phone call and the annual package…

Is she right? Is the whole thing worth it? Let me count the ways how!

Many years ago, I signed in to what was known as ICQ – it still is, I am told. It worked fine for that time and place, and I managed to not just communicate with family and friends without needing to spend time and money I did not have then, but to get a whole lot more work done than I would have otherwise – instant messenger tends to shortcut the whole formality of correspondence and saves time when you need an answer to a minor question that may, nevertheless, hold up an interview or a story you may be writing. Which is the kind of sentence you cannot create on a messenger, it bogs up that give and take which is almost like talking in person!

From there, I soon graduated to MSN, which was fabulous, down to the cute little faces that you could make when you were talking to someone. It was closer to being there, as someone told me, and I loved it. From there, YAHOO was a short hop, used with those people who did not believe in hotmail. There were a few, yes. And soon after, I picked up on GOOGLETALK, which is fabulous but non-iconic, if you know what I mean; no funny faces, no cute pictures, no extras, just plain chat. But workplaces soon caught on to the chat culture and disapproved. Most instant messengers were blocked, which meant that you went bewilderingly on and off line arbitrarily, puzzling whoever you were talking to at the time. There is always a way around the firewalls that company techies install, but shhhhhhhhh….don’t tell them which one you choose!

Today I do chat with friends, family and even sometimes kitten online, even as I hop madly between windows in the course of my work. I write in one, check mail in another, surf for snippets in a third and, of course, collect background information for a story in a last. More than that, and my computer starts grumbling madly at me and my editor makes dirty cracks in an acerbic voice coloured by his envy at not being able to manage all that and more at the same time. In fact, even as I write this, I am looking at layouts for a book project, talking to a buddy, looking for mail that has not arrived and trying to figure out just what is happening in the world outside my little one.

So now back to concentrate on the most important matter of life – living it!

Paper chase

My editor is always telling me that I don’t read the papers. He is, I must admit, right. I frankly don’t have the time in the mornings, my time spent in chasing the maid to see that she manages to reach every corner of the house with her arbitrary broom, closing doors and drawers behind my father, holding a dish of milk and following the kitten on her crazy skitter and, somewhere, somehow, in between, brushing my teeth, restoring some order to my recalcitrant hair, putting on my face and finding clothes that will stay respectably neat through the working day. Besides, even when I can put my feet up and concentrate a bit in the evenings after dinner, who wants to read about blood, gore and more angst?

But it is a battle, one that I am afraid I am not on the winning side of. For me, reading is pleasure, a habit that I was inculcated into long before I could even speak. Soon after My Big Picture ABC came everything from Enid Blyton to Henry Miller, Scott Fitzgerald to Edgar Wallace and far and beyond to places and characters I often saw just once, but sometimes kept to cherish and savour for as long as I could read.

But then I started working for a newspaper…and that kinda messed it all up, as my friend Karen would say. I read because I had to read, not because I wanted to read, and that made it surprisingly difficult to read. So I cursorily glanced at headlines, wandered through pages that had news that attracted me and then cruised on to the comics and the crossword, which were rather more fun than murders, coups and earthquakes. People dying did not appeal to me; giggling over the capers of Hagar and co, did.

It got worse as more newspapers clambered on to the Internet. Now I read once more, but prefer the New York Times, Daily Telegraph, Washington Post, Midday and whatever else may grab the habit, to the Indian Express, Afternoon Dispatch and Courier and whatever else is on newsstands everywhere, as the saying goes. And at home, there is a pile waiting – DNA, the Times of India, Hindustan Times, Hindu…goodness knows what else we will take a fancy to because of good packaging, invitation pricing and the presence of bylines of people we know and love.

In all this, I don’t read any more. I plough through this enormous pile of newsprint every evening, having reduced it slightly in the morning if possible, and see the same stories everywhere, which decreases the charm quotient considerably. Why would I want to know more about a shootout in South Mumbai that I have already seen and heard on television? Will HT give me more insight into the happenings of that dramatic afternoon outside the art gallery than, say, TOI, or even DNA? Of course, the Hindu has its own special cachet, since it comes to us from Chennai one day later, which gives it all an incredibly funny sense of déjà vu!

Unfortunately, with the kind of madness I live within these days, I cannot read anything, really. Pre-kitten, I did the daily newspaper crossword and managed to get through a few pages at least of the crime novel I actually fought to acquire. Now that the little orange furball is bouncing all over the house and the people who live in it, crosswords are consigned to the old-paper pile before I even look at the page that houses one, unless of course, the baby cat has shredded it before then.

I have no complaints. My editor does. Perhaps he should come spend a day at our house!

Getting personal

I was talking to someone on the phone recently and they said that in all that they have read and so learned about me, they know nothing of my social life. They knew about my family, our kitten, the food I have eaten, the places I like going to, the shoes I buy, but nothing about what I do after work, when I am not home, out with friends, whatever. I never write about that part of my life, they say. And they speak verily, forsooth! Simply because I do not have a social life at the moment!

Why? You may ask and you deserve an answer, especially after I take you through so many very private compartments of my life and work with no self-consciousness or hesitation of any kind. It could be a very simple answer: I choose not to have one. Or it could be complicated: I choose not to have one because….Or, as is usually the case with everything human, it could be a nice albeit tangled mess of both, making the sorting out and the whys and wherefores more difficult to comprehend than just the usual very simple excuse of “I don’t have the time.”

For me, complicated works best. For some years, I did the social thing and was seen and heard and made quite a bit of at various dos in various parts of the world. I was at the jazz concert, at the opening of the new gallery, at the book launch, at the restaurant, at the film premiere….wherever there was a soupcon of culture and very little of the usual gossip circle except by invitation only. Then I found out about the joys of working via multitasking and was often cloistered with a computer, making money, getting bylines, thoroughly enjoying myself, even as I did the rounds of events and parties. But it was always discretionary, subject to mood swings, interest levels and free time. I also travelled to – for me - new cities, seeing San Francisco, exploring Santa Fe, wandering through Madrid, hopping around Beijing, racing around Tunbridge Wells in a pancake shaped sports car…it was a hoot and I relished every experience.

But then the reality of life caught up with me. I lived in Delhi for a while and learned to hate being social, seeing more artifice and faux friendships than my stomach could handle for too long. After a while, I stopped going anywhere after work, preferring the company of the cat, the computer, the TV and the few close friends who could enter my well-guarded sanctum with prior permission. It helped me drain the toxins of a bad time out of my system, and it gave me time to re-find my centre and get back into a comparatively serene state of being.

But then life overtook me again and I came back to Mumbai, went through two immeasurable losses – first my cat, then my mother – and turned completely hermit. Today I come to work, go home, write/edit/scramble and then cook/clean/scramble some more, depending on where I am and what needs to be done most urgently. While I am now feeling the need to go out with people my age and my degree of madness and just have an evening of laughter, fun, light-hearted flirtation and food that I have had no hand in making, I am hogtied by the responsibilities I myself have taken on as my own, with house, father and kitten being the least of the burden. There is more – a feeling of not doing enough to keep life happy and moving forward, a guilt at not being as good a housekeeper as I should, a knowledge that Mother would have done it not just differently, but better, and much more that may be silly, but clogs the mind, soul and get-up-and-go quite effectively.

Once I grow out of it, I may be brave enough to step out of the rut I have settled into. If I grow out of it, that is.

Crime and punishment

It was a long time ago in what now seems like another world, that I read Dostoyevsky. It was not a voluntary act; it was forced upon me by a syllabus designed by people who had nice ideas but no sense of time and absorption quotient – of the teenaged brain, that is. We lived in a neat apartment in Geneva, Switzerland, at the time, the small living room chock-full of heavy dark brown-leather upholstered furniture complete with nicely covered flat buttons which were nice to twist and wiggle in moments of any kind of stress, especially because they didn’t come off easily.

I tucked myself almost upside down in a winged armchair and started reading soon after a bath one Saturday morning, with a large glass of Evian for company. Some hours later I was disinterred by a fond parent and fed, then allowed to go back to my book. I stopped when I was done, painfully untangled myself from the chair, tenderly rubbed all the dents caused by the buttons and yawned widely, stretched all my kinked muscles and wandered towards dinner. Raskolnikov and his adventures had kept me rapt for hours. And I was done with my assignment for the dishiest English teacher that side of the Danube!

Today, after growing up and having read and seen and heard and reacted to a lot more than just a book that was part of a school curriculum, crime and its punishment means something quite different, not the angst faced by an accidental murderer after his crime has been committed and covered up, albeit not terribly successfully. Even as I write this, there are protests being clamoured all over the country to free Mohammed Afzal, a man who masterminded an attack on the Indian Parliament in Delhi, when many were killed and many more injured. There have been letter campaigns, protest marches, sit-ins, even riots, just because the man has been sentenced severely for his crime. He is to hang at the end of the year, the courts have decided. The people want otherwise. Even politicians, who should know better than to get involved in such matters, want otherwise.

How harsh should punishment for a crime that has resulted in a number of deaths be? Is it a story of like begets like? Or should it be all about equal and opposite reactions? Murder deserves more than a jail term, doesn’t it? Or have we all become so hardened to crime that we are willing to forget and forgive and forego the punishment that should follow?

Therapeutic value

For the past couple of days I have been rather upset, with no real reason to be except perhaps a slight twinge of the ego. It happens to spoiled brats like me when they don’t get what they want, which is sometimes the case – not often, but enough to make the mien peevish and childishly bad-tempered. The mood soon passes, but while it is present, coloured somewhat by external issues such as PMS, boredom and the inability to vent satisfactorily (throw a vase, slug a man, write a viciously rude editorial), the urge is to be totally non-productive, yell at your best friend and, more often than not, shop.

When my pet died a few years ago I went through many months of retail therapy, stocking up relentlessly and unthinkingly on clothes, bags and assorted rubbish that had no earthly use or reason to be in my life, but I never managed to forget how his little heart stopped as I held him. When my mother died, it was a burning need to refurbish the house, adding all the bits and pieces that she never got around to doing but had always said she would like as part of the apartment and its decor. And when dreams come to a sudden and strident halt, I have usually found myself looking for chocolate, for shoes, for diamonds…for whatever will give me the feeling that I have the power to acquire for myself what someone else has been unable or unwilling to give me.

This time, for a dream that was, rationally speaking, not really what I wanted, I felt a dip of my generally happy and positive mood that was, to me, more upsetting because of its irrationality than because of the cause of it. I had wanted something for its prestige value, not the satisfaction it would have given me, or the joy I would have found in doing whatever it entailed. Which was a good reason not to get it, I tell myself, even as my black mood fades into a more lively and bright silver. This time, my therapy came not from buying, which is easy to do and impossible to store, but from the logic that it was ego that was hurt, not my career or my face value. My image of myself as bright, good-to-look-at and capable was slightly dented, for a short while, and has now almost been smoothed back to happy sanity.

But the urge to go out there and shop has not faded. I want to buy shoes – but is that unusual for me? I always want to buy shoes because, like almost every woman and many men that I know, I have a lot, but nothing is just right for that particular outfit that I want so much to wear for that particular occasion! I want to buy the new line of designer towels that I have been seeing advertised all over – but then, every time I do a large load of laundry on Sunday, I grouch about towels that are getting thready and linen that should have been consigned to the quilting bee histories ago. I want to buy chocolate – but I always do, since I can never have enough of the sweet brown stuff!

So why do I want to indulge in some retail therapy now? Or do I? If I do shop, it will probably be for groceries, cat food, T-shirts to replace my father’s admittedly disgraceful collection, carpets, towels, home accessories….none of which will kill that niggling peeve that I have in me. But hang on a wee moment – where did it go? It was here just this morning….!

Song sung true

Sometimes I revert to type. Which means that I multitask with a vengeance, doing everything from listening to music to chatting with a close buddy about our assorted angsts while I am working and, with all honesty and sincerity, doing it all happily and efficiently! In fact, as I write this, I am plugged into Queen, Radio Ga-Ga for the moment, enjoying every beat of the mix, even as I wonder about the Parsi boy who changed his name to Freddie Mercury and made good, beyond the wildest dreams of anyone else I can think of! In between changing windows when I take a break from the convolutions of my favourite sentences, I may hammer out a review of an art show, pontificate on necklines and hem-lengths or even read through the New York Times’s editorial POV on the crisis focussing on the North Korean nuclear explosion! In between all this work and not work, the song changes with mood and task to be done. I could be tuned into the Pet Shop Boys or L Subramanium or even a staunch companion through many assignments, Manhattan Transfer’s Ray’s Rockhouse.

Perhaps the first real piece of rock I listened to was Pink Floyd’s Pigs on the wing. It was part of a collection belonging to a much older brother of a close friend, who also had me meet The Who, Cream and classic Clapton, and assorted other musicalities like the Beatles, Abba and, in strange counterpoint, Vivaldi. Added to that was classical Indian music, both Carnatic and Hindustani, jazz and be-bop courtesy my parents, and so many other genres that friends all over the world introduced me to.

Perhaps my favourite songsters are people I met through my friend Karen, the girl who was primary in showing me what sci-fi-fantasy is all about. She played all sorts of interesting music in her car, where we spent a lot of time running between Boulder, Denver and various airports. She started me off gently, with the Transfer’s more happy pieces, from Twilight Zone to Java Jive, and then slid me gradually towards KD Lang, Alan Parsons Project, Supertramp (Logical song became a sort of anthem for me, who is quite devoid of logic of the comprehensible kind), Dave Brubeck and stuff I can’t even remember hearing once, leave lone adding to my collection, but I did, because I still have it. These play on my various devices every now and then, some at volume high enough to shatter my computer screen even through my headphones and others so muted that I can hear my neighbours breathe.

In all this wandering through various scales, one set of songs has always been special to me, a symbol, almost of growing up in my house, with my rather eccentric family. Tom Lehrer, mathematician-musician who spent many years at Harvard not getting a PhD, did fabulous satires like Fight fiercely Harvard, Poisoning pigeons in the park, Lobachevsky and the rather madder Be prepared, all of which was fodder for my very young mind, which grabbed it and ran, giggling wildly the whole time. I have very old LPs that my parents bought in the US another lifetime ago, which I wish could be found easily on CD, listened to again and again and chortled happily over, as I did for so long when we still had a record player that worked!

Some day I will find more of that ilk. Until then, aapro Freddie will do it for me, thank you!

Auto mated

Over the past few months I have been looking for the perfect car. While I know that just does not exist, I do want one that is stylish and makes some sort of statement, even if it whispers it only into my ears and no one else’s. I may just have found it – a leisurely prowl around its sleek, Starship Enterprise shape, a test drive and a discussion, presumably erudite, where I do not sound terribly bimboish, with the mechanics and some minor argument with my father and, presumably, the kitten, and I may just have a new car, once my check has cleared, that is. It will be bigger than anything I have owned and perhaps a little too large for comfort on Mumbai’s congested roads, but it will be comfortable and, hopefully, easily accommodate the whole family, feline and her vast luggage included.

But that is still a while away from happening. For now, I look back fondly at all the various cars I have driven and wonder how I could have kept them all in my limited parking space. After all, each one has a special history that is unforgettable, special.

The first car I remember driving is my parents’ Fiat. It was a zippy little thing and I was all of 13, wavering along the road in the cantonement area in Pune. Once I got legal, I was less unsteady, and drove a little too fast for the comfort of the various cohorts in assorted crimes who happened to be foolhardy enough to want a ride to wherever we were going. By then, I was working and having little disasters that, thankfully, my father had taught me to deal with a long time before I could steer straight, like flat tires, silenced horns and, one drizzly, slippery, scary afternoon, a broken headlight – I decided to get a little too intimate with a taxi that stopped suddenly, and the slick road objected to my braking without notice.

But long before that I had been driving a neat little VW Golf in Geneva, Switzerland. I would cautiously inch my way through the early morning traffic from the house to the tram station, where I would get off, and Papa would take the car back home. Once I got my license, I drove whatever I could get my hands…and feet…on – my soul sister’s Toyota, a dear friend’s Ford Nova (which gave me recurring tendonitis of the shoulder), a Dodge station wagon that was closely related to the QEII, a wonderfully pancaked sports model that was born in Malaysia but tooled through the streets of England with élan, a Jeep Cherokee with dreadful automatic transmission, even a minibus along the fog-dimmed motorway across Long Island!

Perhaps my favourite car was a small gold Zen that I drove in Delhi. It was a pet, since it was my first ‘office car’, and I loved it dearly. Every scratch was touched up almost as it was acquired (and in Delhi, you acquire them just by breathing in the car), with gold nailpolish if the auto-paint was not available or not affordable. When I came back to Mumbai, it had to be sold for various excellent reasons, but it broke my heart to watch it being driven away by the buyer, who promised to give it a good home. Once in a while I pull out a picture of that little chariot and sigh – it was a symbol, in a way, of triumph, of a bad period in my life that I managed to make good.

Perhaps a new car will have new memories built around it. A history that is all good, all laughter and sunshine, all positivity and optimism. Apart from which, it should take us where we need to go in infinite and absolute comfort. Now to schedule the test drive…!

Maid in India

For the last ten days or so, we have had maid trouble. Like all domestic help, the woman who worked in our house was intensely inventive, creating all sorts of stories that I, as a novice in these matters, had no clue about where veracity was concerned. But over the last ten months or so since I took over house-keeping and dealing with the aforementioned maid, I have learned a great deal.

Lesson 1: Be very clear what the bai, aka the maid, was employed to do. It is obvious that she washes dishes, sweeps and swabs the floor and ‘does’ the bathrooms, but to what extent do these duties stretch? Our bai would rush in like a miniature whirlwind around 7:30 am every morning, clatter the dishes (with a wonderful Stella Gibbonsish fervour), whiz around the house wielding broom and then swab-cloth and get terribly in the way of all three residents – self, father and kitten. The entire apartment would be redolent of soap and eucalyptus oil by the time she left, but we would be edgy, jumpy and very irritated with any noise or movement at the end of the short half hour.
But look closely and you see what is not done. The floor of the lobby outside the front door would be swept and swabbed, but around the large footmat. The bucket used for water used for swabbing would be empty, but with dirt and grease clinging around like a watermark. The garbage bins would be empty…of not only rubbish, but the bin liners as well. And the air-conditioning units would be inch-thick in dust and plant debris because she, in her infinite wisdom and confidence of the long-term employed, would insist that it was not the work she was hired to do.

Lesson 2: Never believe the bai, aka the maid. Ours came up with the most ingenious excuses to avoid work, or take a day off. She killed a series of her relatives at regular intervals – while a couple may have been true, the rest, my friends and the building supervisor assure me, were stories that I should have been able to see through – they all tell tales like this, I was assured; you have to be more strict. At last count, she had no family left and her aunt’s husband had died twice over. But who keeps count of sob stories, especially when the woman sobs as she tells the story?
But there have been other esoteric disasters that have inflicted her and her family. Her son fell in the gutter, her husband would do an occasional spectacular drunk, her niece had chikungunya, she had dengue, her mother-in-law had malaria and her pet hen, if she had one, had a nervous breakdown. The monotony of illness and death was broken occasionally by bouts of flooding, no electricity, autorickshaw strikes, bandhs and riots, just to spice up the week.

Lesson 3: Never allow the bai, aka the maid, to get friendly with the cat. I encouraged it. The cat watched the maid. The maid cooed to the cat. And I accepted one more excuse that the maid made, because she was so positive where the cat was concerned. The sympathy wave got me nowhere. She still left me maidless for longer than I could tolerate.

So one day, after the umpteenth death in the maid’s family and the umpteenth tine she had taken leave without keeping to her promise of coming back on a certain day, I sacked her. Which left us with a house that was not properly cleaned for over a week and dishpan hands from washing up after meals. Now that we finally have someone new to help with maidly duties, I have decided that perhaps the first lesson I should have learned is Lesson 4: Never sack a maid without having an immediate alternative!

To forgive is…impossible?

My friend Rocky once suggested to me, “Forgive and forget”, since ‘to err is human; to forgive, divine’. The point was moot; there was nothing to forgive, since what needed to be forgiven was forgotten and divinity, irrelevant. But it raised an issue worth thinking about – what can be forgiven and what lingers as ‘unforgivable’, like a festering wound?

A child (assume it is a girl) inevitably makes mistakes, breaks rules and so torments her caregivers, particularly her mother. There are almost always subsequent moments of stress so intense that they find expression in a scolding, even a slap or two, a time of mutually antagonistic silence. The mother forgives her daughter; the girl takes a little longer to get over it, but the incident passes into oblivion, to the realm where it doesn’t matter.

As the child grows up, she starts understanding what is forgiven easily, what needs a little more work and what can never be pardoned. She learns her rules, exploring, discovering and testing her limits, foreseeing what her mother will accept. And in that, she develops her own wisdom, in the process creating a framework within which she will judge herself and other people, lifelong. As she matures, she finds herself in a position to watch, experience, adjust and adjudicate, deciding whether she will forgive, whom and for what.

By the time the woman is in a position to pass on her rules to the next generation, she has her own ideas of what forgiveness means. She knows, for instance, that violation of her emotional privacy, shattering of the trust that is the basic element in any relationship and deliberate deafness to her expressed needs of love, support and companionship are not easy to get past. And, while she may be willing to forgive once, twice, even three times, beyond that, she finds it more healthy to forget.

Forget what? That those who broke the rules gave her existence? That they once were more than mere seatmates on the flight called ‘life’? That they allowed her the power to judge? That they were human and she, hardly divine?

Work ethic

Working in an office of any great size is a fascinating experience. You find a lot of different people to look at, to watch, to make fun of, even to talk to, without really getting too involved or interested. For me, it was good to work out of various places, being consultant to publishers, newspapers, magazines, websites or whatever I did. Perhaps the most fun of all my assignments was when I wrote fortunes for the fortune cookies that my friendly neighbourhood baker in Mumbai suddenly decided to make. Even more fun was finding those same cookies with those same fortunes in a swish restaurant in Delhi, so far away, in a different space, time and context!

That apart, ever since I walked into the office that houses this paper, which is, in essence, a huge hall teeming with people all clacking busily away on keyboards (though whether they are working, chatting or playing games is up for debate), I have been meeting people that I may never have come across otherwise. There is the business editor, a shy man with a sweet smile and an iron grasp of his team and his pages. And there is the man in charge of the Sunday edition, a silver-haired gent with a wicked twinkle in his eye who wanders about yelling at his reporters, flirting with the pretty girls who populate the place in abundance and getting his paper out on time to the best everyone can create.

And there are so many others special to me in some way. There is the lady who sits ensconced in her cabin at one far end, sniffing with the fresh paint on the walls and driving her team to higher levels of achievement. There is the lady who sat, for a year or so, at a table on my route between my desk and the coffee machine; stop and she would give you updates on the state of her larder, the pages she worked on and the politics in the establishment. There is the venerable editor who beams over his beard and tells the most scurrilous stories, the gleam in his eye negating all the avuncularity of his everall mien. And there is the lady who runs the women’s magazine, all stern business and fashionable wardrobe, but a warm, friendly, knowledgeable person under all the starch and frosty eyes.

For me, it is the people I do not work with who make the day more fun. The canteen boy, who bounces up to me every morning with a cheery smile and a list of the day’s culinary offerings. That I rarely ask him for anything never deters that routine; he is always ready with a grin and a tray of sustenance should it be needed. The man who walks up and down the room just to smile at me, his glasses reflecting a light that makes me consider being friends. The accounts lady, as I call her, who always scolds me not just for being late in claiming payments, but for being single and happy about it. The boy of all and sundry work, who never fails to have the chill of the air-conditioner lowered when I start growing frost around my mouth. And the receptionist, who always, but always, greets me with a giggle and tells me she loves my shoes.

It all goes into making working here fun. There the parts that are not fun, but those come into a different blog. For today, the sun shineth, the day gloweth and life is full of laughter.

Hang on, there!

There is a big noise being made in this country about the sentence passed on the man who planned the terror attack on the Indian parliament a few years ago, a gentleman (or was he one?) called Mohammed Afzal. He is to hang soon, as per the judgement, but could find himself a live man, if not a free one, if those who are pushing for a mitigation of the verdict actually get their way. These well-meaning folk include politicians who should know better, activists who ought to know better and some ordinary folk who need to know better. After all, planning to kill, maim and disrupt is, in almost anyone’s book, deserving of a like punishment, no? I am not usually too bloodthirsty. But deliberately killing anything, be it a man or a mosquito, is not a good thing in my little book. I do relax that rule a little where cockroaches are concerned, but even those I do not do in myself – I close my eyes and yell for my father or the maid, whoever is closest at the time.

But then, to get back to the original point, I find, in our great and glorious country, a big noise is made about anything and everything. It is sort of expected at any and every stage of anything in progress that someone somewhere will get up and shout in protest, be it for renaming a road or for putting a suffering leopard to sleep. People like standing for hours in a huge and treeless maidan, baking in the relentless sun and not knowing at all why they are doing it. People like walking in slow, winding lines through rush hour traffic, getting cursed by drivers and honked at by their cars, threatened by pedestrians and heckled by gawkers, even though they may not hear what is being said. And people like getting the small sums of money that they are paid for doing all this for the local bigwig who has arranged to have them all there for that particular protest, even if he has no clue who they are and where they came from.

Oh, yes, that is a small secret that someone more knowing than me once revealed. I listened, my eyes and mouth round in wonder and startlement, as I was told how crowds are hired for these rallies and marches and morchas, trucked in by the hundreds from the villages in the state and beyond, paid a few rupees and given a boxed lunch and a bottle of sweet drink for their effort. I also found out, much to my pained surprise, that you should never, unless allowed by those who control these processions, try and squeeze through this crocodile of sweating, shouting folk, never mind how urgent the deadline or need to use the loo. I once did, in the company of a friend more aggressive than I was, and suffered for it – one of the marchers took grave objection to our passage and slapped at us with a hard, calloused hand. My friend ducked, I didn’t. I had the bruise on my back for days afterwards.

But why protest inevitabilities, I always wonder. If you know a dam will be built, if you know that a tree will be chopped down, if you know a terrorist will be hanged, why not consider the ifs, buts and whys of the situation and then rationally and logically go about trying to correct it? Will rabble and rousing it, help?

A different god

It was Dassehra yesterday and Bijoya started today. For the Muslims, like my driver, the month of Ramzan is on, and the day is one about fasting and prayer. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are at this time of year, too. So must a lot of festivals be, all over the world. As long as the celebrations are about giving thanks and being happy and well fed, who really cares which lord is being praised?

All through my growing up, religion has been about worship of a way of thought rather than a deity or even a string of words recited with a special cadence. My parents took me to churches, to mosques, to temples and to Gurudwaras. I even went to a synagogue or two and to a bewildering series of Taoist shrines in strange places. And found peace in the most unexpected of all these, whenever I wanted and needed it. In that search, I came across pain, too, the agony of a bloody history and the anguish of generations who had seen it happen.

Perhaps the most disturbing images came to mind from the cathedral at Coventry, which is really a museum complex as well. On one side of a wide aisle is a brand new, modern chapel, soaring into a complex structure of blindingly modern, hard, coldly spiritual beauty. On the other, piles of bricks and stone, the devastation of Luftwaffe bombs still starkly evident so many years after the war. There is pain in the bricks, something that makes me want to walk faster and leave the site, go anywhere else, even into the icy new church that chills my bones and my spirit.

In contrast is the serene hull-shaped chapel of Notre Dame de la Haut, at Ronchamp, in the mountains of France. Built of concrete and designed by Le Corbusier, it is perched on a hill, shaded by cherry trees and velvet lawns. Inside, it is stark, simple, monastic, with brilliant light streaming in through tall and narrow coloured glass windows. It is a prayer to the Virgin Mary and her child, who nestle into a niche high up above the altar table, watching over worshippers with gentle, all-knowing, always-forgiving smiles.

When I was in college in Colorado, life was hardly easy or peaceful. Stress relief came through exercise of the vaguely masochistic kind and, when I was tired to the point of physical collapse, in a small chapel halfway down the hill between the dorms and the shopping complex. It was a clean, neat, sparse little room, with a cross at one end and candle stands lining one side. The chapel was always open, always tidy, but I never saw anyone in there. Except once – the pastor of the local parish dropped in after a meeting in the area and found me sitting there, eyes closed, hands huddled into the warm pockets of my anorak.

I was not upset, just tired. I needed to rest, alone, and it was snowing outside, so too cold to walk, as I normally would. So I had come in and, well trained in the process, said a prayer that confused some of my Hindu scripture with the traditional Our Father, with a general chat with the power that could be. The pastor sat at the other end of my bench and waited for me to open my eyes. When I did, looking sideways at him, he smiled. We started talking.

It was not about religion or god or prayer or even why I was there. It was about being Indian, eating chicken tikka masala and watching the dance programme in Denver during Diwali time. It was about acceptance and non-questioning open-heartedness. About feeling warm and safe and comfortable. And that, to me, is what god is all about.

All win-win

It is Dassehra today, signaling the victory of Lord Rama and his re-entry into his kingdom, the defeat of Ravana, the classic triumph of good over evil. Many battles have been fought on that premise, that the good guys always come first, but life, real life, doesn’t always work that way. Take the zillions of wars that have been won by the wrong people – be they on a huge and international scale or in relatively insignificant personal levels. But, at some stage, at some time in your life, if you are good, and you have done all that your duty is said to be, you do come out the winner…or so goes the Indian way of thought.

In the past few months that I have been working on the section of the newspaper that I call ‘home’, I have been looking for and often finding just this sort of sentiment for the spirituality column that we publish. Most of it is connected to some scripture or the other, some has been written by a guru of some note. But I find interesting bits and pieces that come from odd places that I cannot explain but do understand. The extracts I use are perfectly in context, wonderfully timed and just what I need for that moment, from Mark Twain on criminal justice to Margaret Noble (also known as Sister Nivedita) on Durga puja. Neither is a ‘spiritual’ writer, but both talk of a philosophy so necessary in today’s rather disturbed and disturbing world.

For me, triumph comes from persistence, from inner strength, from determination not to let go of values learned young and stuck to, no matter what the temptation. It is about looking yourself in the eye (in a mirror or metaphorically) and knowing that you can, without blushing or feeling furtive in some way. Do right, do wrong, do dubiousness, but do it in a way that you respect, is what I was taught and what I live by. But my version, linked to my so-called ‘career’ is more simple – it is my byline on the piece. Can I read it without flinching?

That is a question I often wonder about. Whether I am involved in editing a book I do not wholly support, or whether I am credited with saying something that I would never have if I wasn’t pushed (by someone, by emotion, by mood of the moment) into it, I rarely deny the fact that it is my signature at the bottom. In most cases, almost all, I can gaze at my own face and claim ownership. And, for me, that is what triumph is all about.