A city of same old

They call it the City of Gold. The city that never sleeps. The city of opportunity. El Dorado. But Mumbai is a city that is a lot more than that. It is a place where dreams can come true. But also where dreams can be easily shattered, where dreams can die too young. And it happens, too often to make life happy, fulfilling, on even keel, satisfying.

It’s happening again today, even as I write this. The city has started burning, once again, as it has done every few years…even months. This time, it all began with the desecration of a statue of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar in Kanpur yesterday. Last evening, local Dalits objected and started getting violent to express their displeasure. Traffic was stopped, the police came out in force and the mobs took what they fondly considered to be just revenge.

Today things have become even more tense. Roads are being blocked. The defense forces are out en masse, trying to protect the innocent. Vehicles are being stoned, buses burned, cars overturned, crowds lathi-charged and the deaths have begun to be listed. To appease the community, a new statue of the creator of the Indian Constitution has been installed in Kanpur. But, at last count, two young men have died in this city. The Deccan Queen, the well-known luxury train to Pune, has been set on fire and all rail traffic to that city has been stopped for the time being. And more violence is expected.

Why? How does something done in a city so many miles away matter to people here in Mumbai, a city so famous for its anonymity of people, its commercial attitude, its money-mindedness? The community as a whole wants its voice to be heard – that is a primary reason – and it cannot shout loud enough except through violence and destruction. The people who make up the community have been oppressed and discriminated against for so long that they crave any opportunity to make a noise, to be heard, to be seen, to be noticed. And there will be what the press fondly calls ‘vested interests’, just waiting to foment trouble, to make that voice louder and rougher than it really needs to be. Added to this, of course, is the incendiary nature of the noise – it doesn’t take much to stoke the fires and even less to keep them going once they are lit.

So what will happen next? The riot police will step in to control the mobs. More people will die, even more will be grievously injured. The government will claim that it is working on palliative measures and make sure that its voice is heard doing so. And everyone will settle down…but the undercurrents will continue, the anger will simmer, the voice will be temporarily quieted, until it is fuelled enough to make itself heard once again.

This is my home. This is our city. Yeh hain Mumbai, meri jaan!

When art barely attacks

I was at an art exhibition this afternoon. It was a strange experience, in that for a very long time now I have seen art in more refined, sophisticated circles, especially if it is a show featuring an established artist. This was more home-grown, more rustic, more (perhaps) gemutlich, rather more pathetic. Frightening, in the context of the media-hyped expositions by personalities like MF Husain, Paresh Maity, Sakti Burman and others, to name just a very few of the luminaries that have PR companies that send me alarming numbers of emails and press releases and, at some stage, images. And, after I just spoke to the artist involved, I realised just how primitive this form of exhibition actually was!

The works I saw were by JP Singhal, once known in Mumbai as a pre-eminent print maker, calendar creator and photographer of the stars. He was not there, but I spoke to him afterwards over the phone. Now 72 and sounding at the start alarmingly tottery, he soon warmed up over the phone to a man who spoke in poetic phrases, albeit rather old-fashioned verse. His voice swelled as he responded to my questions and my interest, and he told me his story with passion, with matter-of-fact practicality, with even gentle self-deprecating humour. He was at one time the biggest name in the calendar business, a man who kept time – days, months and years – for every company in the country and a few outside as well.

Then, he said, he was sidetracked into the film world, where fame – when it comes – is astounding, but oblivion quick, total and brutal. Those who came to him for a start in the movie business (his clients included the now-notorious Sanjay Dutt, Sunny Deol, Anil Kapoor, Mandakini, Zeenat Aman and others) soon turned their backs on him, relegating him to the ranks of has-beens with the cruelty of the here-and-now celebrity. The man who had given up his love for art, his painting, to cater to the demands of a host of filmstars, was now rejected by them.

But he was undaunted, knowing full well, he told me, that he had never gone to them asking for work; they had flocked to his studio, craving his talent and his favour. So he retreated and recouped, finding his inspiration, his creativity, his inner child, he calls it, again. And he started painting once more, portraying his favourite tribal women and children in the ways that he knew so well. Today, he is back in form, he insists, collecting works for a show that will be different and spectacular. When he holds it.

The exhibition I went to was held at an art college in the city. It is a heritage structure, with spiders and their webs that should be as old as the building itself. The walls have peeling paint, the cornices are home to unnamed insect skeletons and mud has created new and interesting mosaics on the cracked stone of the flooring. But the ancient beauty of the structure is no frame for the paintings on display in a hall that is walled with dark blue fabric and dim with bad lighting and clouds of dust. Singhals’s works hung, unlabelled, ever-so-slightly askew, somehow sad, on the cloth backdrop. Stragglers walked in and out, touched the canvas of one, peered at the alarmingly bare breasts of the woman in another and giggled furtively at the blatant display of femininity glaring out of the third. There was no curator to explain what anything meant, no brochure speaking of the artist and no artist to talk to, to find out more.

In today’s world, strange.

Acts of commission

Have you ever done something stupid? I do so all the time, whether it is buying a pair of spiky-heeled shoes I know I will never wear or whether I eat chutney that a friend makes so well, all the while sure that the dates it contains will make my throat swell and my breathing constrict with allergic reaction. I know I am doing something very stupid when I walk into a make-up store when I am feeling blue and I know I will do something even more stupid when I start day-dreaming of chocolate laden concoctions that I will one day conjure up in my kitchen when I get the right chocolate. Because that day will come soon, I will do the concocting soon after and my middle will out-measure my imagination, sooner rather than later.

That apart, the reason for this blog is the hot news of the day. Actor Sunjay Dutt has been given a five-year punishment for an act of what can only be described as stupidity. He got himself a couple of lethal weapons during a bad time in Mumbai’s fairly recent history and then found himself doing a stint in jail. From there, he emerged almost like a phoenix from the ashes, flying into stardom with films like Vaastav and Munnabhai. But, even as his career boomed, his personal life bombed, and he went through divorce, the death of his father and, finally, a re-opening of the case that incarcerated him for so many months. He has been exonerated from the tag of ‘terrorist’, but still have to face the consequences of his actions. Today he admits that he was stupid. A little too lost, too late?

The OJ Simpson case has similar undertones. While many believe that he did kill his wife, he was acquitted of the charges, even after the great chase scene involving the white SUV. But only last week he was back in the news for almost the same matter, discussing in a book how he would ‘theoretically’ have committed the murder. Had he done so, of course. Which he insists he didn’t. At this stage, does it matter? His stupidity in running away when he had to talk to the police and then to write about it, however hypothetically, can only rank with the best of them all!

And then there are so many others who have done this sort of thing, from the burglar who went back to the scene of his crime to pay his lunch bill and the granny who killed her husband and then complained to the sanitation department about the smell that came out of the cellar. And there is, of course, me, who keeps doing what she should not with the blithe self-assurance that her crimes will never ever result in any kind of punishment. Except after she talks about it in her blog, that is!

One ka two ya four

There was this completely maddening Hindi film released some years ago, starring Juhi Chawla and Shah Rukh Khan, called One Two Ka Four. Maddening, because I never did manage to see it beyond a certain stage, and so never found out how it ended, except once, accidentally, when I realised it was that film long after it had ended, which kind of defeated the purpose of seeing the film as it was. Effectively, I never saw the start, never saw the end, and sat through one song and much dancing interminable times over.

But that is not the point of this blog, honestly.

What happened today had me thinking of the chaotic melange of scenes that is a Hindi film – any Hindi film - for me, as a sometimes-never kind of film watcher, mainly on cable television. I was at the Dollar Store, a cheap, oddly organised and strangely efficient chain that has sprung up all over the city (perhaps even the country, I don’t know) to sell inexpensive and casually branded American products, from sunglasses to eyeshadow to instant mashed potatoes to cat food. That last was why I was there, since our baby cat has developed a passion for the canned chicken (and other by-products) that flies in to our city at irregular intervals. I had one aim in hading purposefully for the mall: to buy “tender chicken slices in gravy” for our little furry monster.

But there was a problem. The store only had one solitary can. Fine. I wanted it, and put it in my carrier before anyone else could grab it. One of the busily buzzing crew that is omnipresent and superbly helpful popped up like a genie from one of the candles on the shelf and beamed delightedly at me. Rather taken aback by the flashing teeth, I demanded more cat food with a little less charm than I would normally display to get my way. the boy buzzed away busily. While he was gone, another little genie materialised, with the same consequences. She buzzed busily to behind the same closed door that the first has retreated to. Just as a third appeared, the first two came back, the girl beating the young man to the verdict – sorry, ma’am, there is only one.

Feeling a little extra possessive about my can, I headed for checkout and presented it to the girl in charge. She beamed fondly at me, as had the others, and buzzed busily at the cash register, trying to sell me everything from erasers to cartons of fruit juice to vast packets of pasta – three for 99, ma’am, she assured me. Now that was the crux of the problem. The cat food came three cans for Rs 99, and since I was taking only one, since there was only one to take, the ledger would go all wrong if I didn’t make up for the rest of the Rs99 that I needed to spend so that the busily buzzing crew could heave a sigh of satisfaction at a job well done and the girl at the cash counter could register the right amount without the computer system going into conniptions.

The buzzing genies were summoned from the various directions that they had scattered to. After some moments of confusion, where they all tried in different voices and many more accents to persuade me to buy pasta, three for 99, ma’am, I brought the proceedings (which were proceeding rapidly to a state of total mayhem) to a loud and abrupt halt and then smiled sweetly, even as smoke started trickling from my ears with suppressed irritation. A young male genie was delegated to take me on a guided tour of the three for 99 sections and did his best to tempt me with everything from some strangely shaped mugs to plastic and glass boxes – with a spoon included, ma’am! – to chocolate to…eventually, grabbing some disposable razors, I trotted homewards back to the cash register and managed to make my escape.

One ka, ya two ka, ya three ka. I even found soap that was seven for 99. One of these days I need to go explore that store again, more carefully, without attracting too much attention from the busily buzzing genies. Who knows what else I could find there, for what price! And maybe I would even get more cans of the right kind for the cat. At three for 99, ma’am, of course!

Chances and choices

It is going to be a very long Saturday, as always. But not as long as it could have been, given what had been planned for me before I knew that it was. To be fair, it was an offer rather than a mandate, and one I was quite willing to take on, in spite of the added stress to the already endless end-of-the-week load of stress that needed a Sunday cutting frantically into a pile of onions to defuse.

The long story made short is that contemporary dancer Pina Bausch was going to be in Mumbai for a brief few hours before flying out to wherever she was going next, and I was to catch her for an interview. After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing and third-party information, I finally managed to grab the person who was doing the liaison for interviews, reaching through the long arm of the mobile network to do so. No time, he said apologetically, it will not be possible during this trip. All articulated in a thick German accent over a long-distance line that crackled with what seemed to be the dry leaves of every coconut tree in Kerala.

But what I felt was not irritation, or frustration at having missed out on a story, but intense relief. I have watched the Pina Bausch troupe perform and, while it was not an incredibly aesthetic experience, I did enjoy it as a form of movement and expression I had not seen before. It was strangely moving, astonishingly evocative and extremely difficult to digest, a sort of bad dream mixed with a lot of rather hysterical laughter. There were chopped onions involved, some frantic running about and a certain degree of violence that made me colder than the air-conditioning that was, as always, too high. It would have been interesting to meet the person who had thought up that degree of disturbing chaos, but it was not written on my to-do list, fortunately or not.

But interviews tend to be of that ilk, especially today, when communication and travel are so easy and close to instant. And if timing does not go off track, something else inevitably will, I find. Consider my last such misadventure: Some months ago I went to the far end of Mumbai meet master-designer Ritu Kumar. It was not a first-time for me, but a must-do. The trains (those were the days I travelled in trains rather than by car) were on time, the auto-rickshaw took less time than I could possibly have anticipated and I was there an hour early. I sat in the foyer of the multi-star hotel and waited…and waited. The lady was busy, unfortunately, and came over herself to tell me we could speak on the phone if I preferred. I decided to wait.

During the wait, fortunately, my over-efficient instincts kicked in and I rooted around in my bag to check on the recording equipment that was at that time in my life attached to me, as it were, by the wires that it worked with. I had all the bits and pieces, new batteries included…but not a blank cassette. What I did have was a music tape, one I had been listening to on the journey there. So, at the end of all that waiting, I had to take notes in my execrable scrawl and probably missed a lot of what she had to say.

This is not new, not for any journalist. I remember when I was talking to Shashi Tharoor and the batteries of my recorder died. When I talked to Vikram Seth, my recorder was working over-efficiently and I got every single noise that reverberated through the hotel, from the splashes in the swimming pool downstairs to the buzz of the vacuum cleaner three floors above. And when I talked to a bigwig in the advertising business, he walked off with the recorder, as I have already written about in an earlier blog!

This is what makes a journalistic writing career so much fun. After all, you never can tell what will happen next!

Out in the cold

I was writing a snippet about life in Delhi when I started thinking about life in Delhi. Which is not as simplistic as it sounds, but actually refers to my life in Delhi when I lived there for a while. I often think that it was a bad time, but actually it taught me a lot about life and living it, so I will always look upon the entire experience, coloured like the curate’s egg, as a positive one.

But what was perhaps the most notable in the hilarious sense of my initial few months in Delhi was the party scene. I was used to the way it is done in Mumbai, where friends and motley others get together, have fun and don’t care whether it makes it into the gossip rags. It was about meeting interesting people, talking, laughing, finding out something new with each conversation, with lots of bonhomie, much affection and some chemistry flying through the room. The food was usually pretty good, the people usually pretty interesting and the feeling usually pretty positive.

But in Delhi I learned a different lesson. Most parties that I was taken to were more about plastic than people – there were plastic smiles, plastic conversations and truly plastic food. Which is the part that was funny, to me. You couldn’t pop into your host’s kitchen and forage, chat up the cook and exchange jokes with the maid or small boy who was helping. You couldn’t tell the person serving that you had eaten these same kebabs the nights before at the mehfil where the music was wonderfully dance-worthy and the flirtations delightful. And you certainly could not just giggle happily at the mad repartee that the man in the silly shirt was spouting over a bowl of dal that he had stolen from the dinner menu.

In Delhi it was different. I was usually found huddled over a sigri as I shivered in the open air, the chill breeze whistling through my ears, bored silly with the inanities being voiced and fed up with the crowd of wannabes that gathered around the nearest bottle of bad whisky. A barely-living waiter, who looked annoyingly like the one I had seen at every do of this kind that I had ever been to by then, wandered languidly through the groups of people, offering up doily-lined tarnished metal trays holding the most droopily tired and stone cold kebabs, along with a pile of small paper napkins that threatened to blow away to where life was more lively and happening.

Meanwhile, the guests chatted brightly to each other, finding out bona fides before deigning to say more than banal niceties. As they talked beyond the where do you work and which part of the city do you live, they got either warmer or colder to the person they addressed, but always looked over their own and other shoulders to see who was there, watching, noting, listening. If anyone could be more useful or more influential or more valuable, they drifted in that direction. And they always watched what they said, how they reacted, who they laughed with and where they stood when the media flashbulbs started popping fro that perfect photo-op.

I often laughed, but only to myself, since I was a social disgrace in this milieu. And I always wondered what made these people so self-conscious, so inhibited, so deadly dull. Once I found out, I figured out how to deal with them. I also vowed that I would never be part of that sort of circle again, no matter how great the need or pressure was. So far, it had worked.

Rooms with a view

I live in a nice apartment in a nice part of the out-of-town suburb of Mumbai that I call ‘home’. The move from being a brat who grew up in the ritzy environs of posh Malabar Hill to the almost-as-ritzy surroundings of where I am based now was not difficult for me, in spite of the prolonged commute and the comparative inaccessibility of the familiar world that had been mine for so much of my life. I missed very little of that world, since I worked in town and still had fairly easy access to all that I knew so well, from bookstores to bakeries, my tailor and my grocer. What I did miss, most of all and still do even today, so many years later, was the view.

I was born – in a manner of speaking, of course, since my parents actually acquired me at the hospital (more on that in a later blog) – in part of a palace in the snob seclusion of Breach Candy, where my pet policeman found me parking spaces for years afterwards. Growing up there was fun, with an outsized lawn for all of us children who lived there romped in. Though we were on the ground floor, with the vast garden just beyond the hedge, the view from the palace grounds was truly magnificent – set right on the edge of the sea, you could sit on the wall (strictly forbidden ever since a girl was swept out by the waves) and watch the breakers crashing against the rocks, or as we played hide-and-seek in the seawater swimming pool (which was always empty), or as we carefully walked the straight chalk lines that marked the tennis courts.

Then we moved to the 13th floor of a 14-storey apartment block set on the highest point of Malabar Hill. The flat sprawled across the building, bordered by huge French doors on the two spacious balconies and dotted with enormous windows opening every room out into open space. On three sides we had a view that was spectacular, right over Marine Drive on one side, the open sea towards Bandra on the other and the vista that was Mumbai through the grills of the drying verandah (or open air laundry room) on the third. I would spend over-long minutes in my bathroom, watching speedboats on the small bay, the birds floating over the air currents and the smoke spiralling up from the kitchens of the Oberoi Hotel. Sitting en famille on the front balcony, we watched endless processions of Ganpatis heading for the annual immersion, the burning of Ravana during Dassehra and the end-of-monsoon regatta of fisherfolk on Nariyal Purnima.

When we moved to our own house, I missed all that, for a long while. There was no sign of the sea, except when I travelled over the long stretch of bridge connecting us to the mainland, and no whiff of the excitement and activity that had been so much an everyday sight all my life. I had no balconies to hang out of, vertigo nothwithstanding, and no vignettes of my city to enjoy as I watered plants or just sat on the windowsill to think about ‘stuff’. Today I watch the grandfather in the window of the apartment across the wall from our complex playing with his baby grandchild. I watch the stray cat downstairs prowling in search of food or amusement and I watch the traffic whiz past on the highway that streaks along just beyond our back gate.

And I wonder if I really do miss the sea. Or whether it was just the freedom of the open air with the protection of concrete wall and metal railing to enjoy it from.

The space around us

The concept of personal space is a difficult one for most Indians to understand, I am finding. People have no qualms about spreading themselves over your home, your room, your seat or even your self, pushing you into a corner that you may not really like being in. it happens on trains, in buses, on the street, at work, even over the Internet, email and text messaging on mobile phones. It is as if you are always watched, always surrounded, always hemmed in, your privacy invaded, your personal boundaries violated, your space impinged upon.

And sometimes the invasion is more difficult to handle, involving personal contact. This happened to me yesterday, when I was at work. I was in early, as I prefer to be, and at my desk, sipping my customary mug of hot water and wondering if I really wanted to be there – which is again something I do routinely. A friend dropped by, someone I have known for about 15 years, and with whom I have a fairly amicable hi-hello-how goes it kind of interaction. He sat, chatted, beamed fondly at me and told me about his need for change. And then, out of the blue, he did something that left me speechless, stunned, completely nonplussed. He reached out and ran his fingers through my hair which, unusually for me especially at work, was loose and swingy. I stopped what I was doing for that small instance that it took me to recover, then sat up, bunched my hair into its normal knot and continued the conversation, trying not to be affected, or show it.

But it came out of the blue and had me wondering where I was and what I was doing there. Not because of the touch itself – that was as casual as a first-time acquaintance admiring a new hairstyle. But because it came from someone that I had never allowed to get past my personal boundaries and who always had stayed beyond them with discretion and discipline, it was just too shocking. I am still not sure if something in the relationship was violated, but it certainly changed – I have become very wary of the man, unsure of what he will do next and unwilling to find out. When I can sort it out in my mind, I will deal with it better. For now, the state of major startlement prevails.

Making dates

Today, three years ago, I had to put my cat to sleep. So it is not surprising that I am not in a mood that makes me write anything funny and glib and frivolous, as I am wont to do. But while even three years is not long enough to obliterate the nightmare that those few days of my baby being ill and then having to die, signed off by my own hand, literally. I hate November 20, but cannot avoid it, so I now do my best to forget it. Which is not yet easy.

Dates are significant in many ways. For a close friend, a birthday is perhaps the most important day of the year. She does not demand a present, which would be easier to manage, but wants to be called and wished. Which means I cannot use my usual excuses about knowing when the big day is but not being able to see her to hand over the goodies, but will have to remember when it is and speak to her, or else face a prolonged spell of the sulks. Which occasional recriminatory swipes at me about my bad memory, especially for dates.

Another fairly close friend is more like me. He specialises in forgetting birthdays, especially mine. Two years in a row he missed the day, but has still not been forgiven, no matter how many huge boxes of chocolates arrive by courier from out of town, where he lives. The first year, I sent him a fairly rude message and he called, full of major self-recrimination and apologies. And then he forgot again, the next year. More recriminations and an even bigger box of chocolates followed. This year, he knew, he plugged it into his mobile phone and he remembered and called. But no chocolates came my way. I am still wondering what I preferred!

For me, a date is just a date, except for a couple that have intense feeling attached. Like when my cat died. And my mother left us. Which explains the mood today. And my total lack of inspiration and enthusiasm for this blog.

A shade-y story

For many years now, our house has been the setting for drama. Much of it involves the humans living in it – my parents and myself, now my father and me, with an occasional feline thrown in for good measure. And sometimes there will be an external factor who is adopted into our family, but seen only transiently. They come, sleep, eat, sightsee and bond, then go back to wherever they came from, motley experiences under their rather tighter belts to tell the folks at home about.

Thus it was with my Soul Sister, aka SS, who was on a fairly long visit to us a few years ago. She had always participated, albeit occasionally with some trepidation, in whatever crimes I was wont to commit and had been a good friend, wonderful cohort and about the closest I had to a sibling at the time. She and I did many things to collectively and singly annoy, confound, amuse and amaze my parents, and a lot that they never discovered. But that’s what friends are for, aren’t they?

An explanation: A high point of our décor in the living room wherever we lived has always been the arrangement of two Chinese rice paper globe-shaped lampshades, one very large, the other smaller, sort of like a planetary satellite. They hung, one higher than the other, on one side of an antique Persian carpet, and served to not just illuminate, but be a Zen statement of serenity and neutrality in a fairly vibrantly hued space. They attracted a great deal of attention, since the large one was unusually large, and always were the focus of all eyes, and so much nazar, or the evil eye. One night, sprawled in the oversized revolving chair placed below the shades, SS stretched her preternaturally long arms and made violent contact with the bigger globe. In simple terms, she punched a great big hole right through its side.

The conclusion of that story was happy – she managed to find a shade of the same size and shape and we were back to status quo, quad erat, etc.

But history, as Santayana didn’t quite say, has a way of repeating itself, even when fondly remembered. This time, it was a cat of the feline species wot dunnit. Our kitten, funny, obstreperous, playful, affectionate, curious little beast that she is, decided that there was something about the lampshade that needed closer examination. For weeks, ever since she was big and brave enough to climb on the top of the back of the chair that is now placed under it in the apartment that is now ours, she has perched there and gazed up at the globe – which is (or was, as the case actually is now) old and battered and needing replacement, as are all of us. She chirps hopefully at it, communing with whatever shade may dwell within the rice paper confines of the lampshade, seemingly planning a visit. We usually watch her carefully when this happens, knowing that she will, soon enough, want to explore further.

That ‘soon enough’ arrived a few days ago. My father had retired for the night and was reading in bed. I had retreated to my room to get set for the night. Teeth brushed, face washed, I was doing my usual careful search for a new wrinkle that I was sure I had, when I heard a louder than normal ripping-of-paper sound - the kitten has a large and noisy paper bag that she plays in and on, so crackling paper is not unheard in our house, but this was unprecedented. I waited a tiny moment, then ran to scope the situation. There, where it always hung, was the large Chinese rice paper lampshade. But there was only half of it suspended from its almost-invisible wire. The rest trailed in a long extended spiral across the carpet on the living room floor, ending somewhere under the armchair. The kitten was sitting under the dining table, her ears laid back against her little head, her eyes wide, her tail fluffed into a bottle brush and standing straight up. I reached down and grabbed her, to find that she had a bamboo-wire ring around her neck, frilled with torn rice paper.

The giggles welled, but I managed to summon up enough self-control to call my father out in a sober and unmoved voice. When he shot out of his room, wondering what the new crisis was, he found me staring at the carnage, not sure what to say or do. His expression broke the dam; I started giggling, unable to stop. My father laughed, exclaiming at the damage. The kitten, held securely under my arm, squeaked indignantly, protesting the provocation from the shade inside the shade that had made her finally crack and leap upwards for a direct confrontation with the spirit. Once de-frilled, the debris cleared, she crawled under the sheets on my father’s bed and stayed there all night, sobered by what she had done and scared by how the shade had reacted.

Today I went in search of and found a new shade to replace the old. It is smaller and will be hung higher, which should keep it safe…until the kitten is old and big enough to reach out to the new shade inside, that is!

Girl talk

Driving in to work every day I see more than I did when I commuted by train, often more than I really need or want to see. But it makes me supremely glad that I am who I am, what I am and where I am, given that position by parents, hard work, life and circumstances. What if I had been the woman who begged at the intersection, or the girl who lived under the bridge, or even the child who tried to sell very battered lemons outside the grocery store? What would I be then? Who would I be?

My thoughts during this hour-long drive haven’t always been like this. There was a time not too long ago when I preferred to fade into my own mind, dazed with sleep, boredom and grief. Then it became an interested, often amused survey of the hoardings and signposts along the roads, from the latest television soap teaser to bank services that sounded even less tempting than an overdraft. Gradually I started looking into other cars, in a sort of invasion of privacy that I would normally abhor, especially if it was directed at me, and watched people sleep, read newspapers, talk on their cellphones or argue with their wives. All the while, at the traffic lights, I watched beggars swarm, pleading for a rupee, for a handout, for attention. Most were shooed away, some were given a tiny something, others ignored.

Then, one day, very recently, I looked into the eyes of a little girl who clutched a clothes-less, one-armed Barbie doll. The child was tiny, underfed, dirty and probably unwell and hurt. She gazed at me through the glass of my window, not asking for anything but obviously needing plenty. All the while, her grimy paw stroked the improbably golden hair of the doll with the love every child needs. I was not sure how to react – how does one react to a situation of this kind? Offer the child money? Smile at her and make gentle conversation? Storm out militantly and demand to see the parents who had brought her into her cruel world? Or imperiously gesture for her to step back and go away? The signal changed to green; I was spared the need to make a decision.

But she stayed with me, her dirty little face etched in my mind for at least the whole day. Would she have been better off in an orphanage? If I had been able to take her home, would I have ever regretted it? Would she? Or would she have grown up to be like her parents and the rest of what seemed to be her vast family – all living in a filthy corner of a pavement, their scant possessions spread on a hearty growth of mould and vermin droppings, their lives and livelihood at stake from teeming traffic, money-hungry police and those who wanted that little patch of land and were willing to kill for it? I could have picked her up, cleaned her up and brought her into my world to be a little princess, bright, pretty and well-bred. But then, how many little girls could I make mine? And would I really be ‘saving’ her? Maybe she, like me, was better off with our lives meeting only through the glass of a car window.

My thought processes were interrupted when, a few blocks further along my route, a little girl dressed in oversized but carefully altered trousers and a T-shirt begged me to buy a tabloid newspaper. She was older than the one before, maybe eight or nine, and scrupulously clean and neat except for a few rebellious hairs escaping her tightly wound braids, their ends tied into enormous bows of zari-striped red ribbon. She looked at me, beamed a wonderfully toothless grin and told me that the paper she held was three rupees. Would I buy it? It was a good read, she promised. I wound down my window a little. She smiled, still keeping a safe distance from my car. Can you read, I asked her. She told me, with intense pride, that she went to school and was learning how to read and write and she could say a few words in English, too – good morning, madam; it is raining today; what is your name; what is the time. I told her that she should do well in school and that though I did not want a paper, I would see her again and we could talk more. She grinned her sunshine grin and ran to the pavement, from where she waved as we drove past.

Two little girls, two very different lives, two individuals who would grow up to face two different worlds. Which would be better? Which could I have been, in another time and another reality?

Searching for space

(Again, I cheat - though I promise not to make a habit of it. My paper published this today, but spelled my name wrong. Which, in a strange way, makes it new and unused, right!)

I spent a few days between drivers driving myself between work and home and discovered that perhaps the best thing about being driven, rather than driving, is to have someone else to worry about the parking. Which my new driver does, admirably. He managed to find a nicely shaded spot in the middle of very crowded Kemps Corner with no difficulty, making friendly conversation with the traffic policeman, chuffing the traffic warden and endearing himself to the other drivers jostling for space all the while – I saw them all give him friendly waves and grin at him as we drove off a couple of hours later.

Today, that is nothing short of a small miracle. I remember the days when I had just started to drive myself around town. I was a South Mumbai brat then, and tooled about in my own little car, one that could be nicely squeezed into the smallest spaces that scorned the egress of larger and much-coveted cars like the then-new Mercedes or one of Bhogilal’s antique treasures that occasionally cruised down Scandal Point and Walkeshwar. I also had a pet policeman in Breach Candy, one who beamed fondly at me when I drove past him on the home-college route, one who always managed to find me a parking space right outside Amarsons without my having to do innumerable passes and U-turns and the eventual automobile quick-step to get in almost before someone got out and before someone else got in.

But those days are long gone. Today, finding space outside, say, Crawford Market, is well-nigh impossible. A few weeks ago, I had to do just that, just there. I wanted to do some essential shopping at the vast complex within the rotunda and needed to have the car close by since I had a lot to carry out. The driver dropped me off, was instructed where to be waiting for me and I trotted in. a short while later, I trotted out again, burdened with broccoli, beans, baskets and more and did a little chukker of the parking lot. No car; no driver. Rather irate and sweaty, I traipsed around the lot again. No sign of chariot or navigator. Standing stewing in the sun, I waited. Sure enough, the car arrived, the driver apologetic. He was on his seventh pass of the circle, unable to find space to stop, pushed on by the vigilante policemen on the make and with no way to let me know what was going on.

The situation is no better in an office complex of any sort these days. Where I work, if you drive in after about noon, you need to double or triple or even, in some instances, quadruple park, in a kind of tier effect, where no car except that in the first row can move without causing a lemming-like disturbance of all the others. Which means that drivers need to be in constant attendance, know how to drive various makes and models in order to save time and adjust space, and owners have to control their language, blood pressure and choler when they find themselves hemmed in with no way to get out but like a Harrier taking off from a battleship platform.

And it is almost the same in apartment buildings, too. Where I live, people tend to accumulate vehicles, owning two or three or four cars, one for each member of the family. Which means that the one-per-flat-plus-a-few-spare-for-visitors parking allotment is inevitably full long before everyone who lives there has bedded their autos for the night. An enterprising home-owner in the complex has a solution to this problem, one that he read about or saw on television, we are not quite sure which. Get the parking lifts, he suggests, one for each parking space. Which means that when one car is in, it is lofted up high, and the next parked underneath. What happens when the topmost car is needed first? Or if the struts collapse and the whole shebang comes down in a pile of mangled metal? I wonder what my friendly policeman in Breach Candy thinks of the idea!

Ire fire

What do you do when you are angry?

Many years ago, I wrote. Today, I still write, but as a life, not merely as a way to defuse my black mood. And where and when I could, I wrote for people who asked for it, starting with four words they gave me that somehow got linked in a tale that wandered through realms real, imagined and totally inconceivable. I now write more with words that are taken from real life and then stretched to their limits to weave new horizons and worlds that I explore as I create them.

Once upon a time I wrote for a little girl I knew, who believed in fairies and magic and chocolate chip muffins and lacy pink negligee sets and roller skates and Aunty, the transient being who brought her all of those things and more. I wrote her stories about a little elf with blonde hair and blue eyes who lived with her family, but only she could see her and talk to her and have fun with her, especially when everyone else was asleep or out. The little girl and the elf played house and made sugar drops and ran after the cat who was actually another fairy that no one except they could see, but the three of them were real to each other. And, in a way, to me, too, because they were all my doing – even the little girl who was my pet and playmate, the daughter of an adopted big sister. They told me, in different voices, what they wanted to do and I made sure that they could do it and did.

But the writer in me was not just about children and their dreams. I needed to have some of my own grown up fantasies expressed in words and I wrote for my then roommate, a close friend and soul sister. Karen got stories about a purple hippo called Charlotte who was longing to visit India and who had long blue eyelashes and more adventures than she could shake her hips at. The last time I met Charlie, she was trying to retrieve her make-up bag from a plane crash, because her left-top-last eyelash was losing its glue and without it, she would look like an absolute hag, darling! Charlotte was a femme fatale who had many of the felinely feminine characteristics both me and my friend longed for, but could never actually sustain, and had a wonderfully wicked time with it all.

And then there was the play I wrote while sitting in a bathtub in an unpretentious but luxurious hotel in Lyon, France. I sat there in four inches of rapidly cooling water, a dish of Vietnamese spring rolls close at hand, writing with my favourite ballpoint pen in a red-covered notebook that was, I think, printed for musical notation rather than my well-rounded, scrawly script. Having incorporated all the people I knew, liked and hated in the school I went to in Geneva, Switzerland, I had them go through the most trying of circumstances that my 17 year old mind could conceive of and then proceeded to get them either married, extremely happy (which is not necessarily mutually exclusive) or dead in a fabulously, satisfyingly gory manner.

When I was about 13, I wrote what would today amount to half a romance novel. I had only a very hazy idea of the mushy bits, had no clue about any kind of intimacy, over-characterised everyone, all of whom had utterly romantic names, looks and behaviour, and had so much fun that I wish I could find it today – it would probably be published as a farce on the lines of that marvellous soap opera spoof called Soap that I watched when I was a teenager. At regular intervals, and as my general knowledge base of all things adult expanded, I wrote various other romantic vignettes, always meaning to string them together to make a full-length book, but never quite managing to add the staying power to get it done in one fell swoop.

Having gone through the various genres, even writing a couple of fantasies and one rather juvenile but funny sci-fi story, I settled into a career that allows for – nay, mandates – writing. For some reason, that has not taken any of the fun out of playing with words, but it has taken away the time I would like for writing because I want to. For anger management, I now cook or I imagine stories in my head. Or I shop for shoes, which is a whole new story in itself!

The breakfast club

(I actually wrote this for an already-published Sunday edit page anchor for the paper I work with. But I kinda liked it enough to want other people to read it!)

After many years of being told that I need to eat breakfast - something that is not included in family tradition – I finally succumbed. So, muttering direly about force-feeding and the like, I went to the grocery store to shop for breakfast foods. I had read about them, watched them being eaten on television by bubbly kids and a slew of vari-aged robustly healthy personages who all seemed to have a rollicking good time.

Having rejected the idea of making something for myself every morning, I settled on stuff out of a box, any box, as long as the food was fast, easy to make and had the basic minimum requirement of fibre, natural goodness and lack of sugar that my psyche and my digestive system thrives on.

So there I was, staring glumly at a panoply of brightly coloured boxes arranged on a long stretch of shelves, inviting me to pick them up. Each one invited me in for a taste, but only if I bought what looked like an alarmingly large amount of its contents. Some had ferocious animals on them, some promised the joys of chocolate and still others were no-nonsense plain foods which would turn me into a sprinting athlete in one helping. So much choice — to the novice breakfast eater, it was all too confusing.

I zeroed in on a neat little box of ‘new and improved’ muesli that had the goodness of fresh fruit in it, very little of the preservatives and additives that I abhor and no added sugar—that is what the label insisted. Best of all, it came with a little attachment - and any freebie is my idea of fun – a quarter kilo box of wheat bran which, I assured my rather doubtful father, would be great for adding fibre to our collective diet. Of course, I dignifiedly ignored his growls that if he needed more fibre he could chew on the ropes that he used to tie up the old newspapers.

The smile lasted right through until breakfast the next morning. The first spoonful of cereal with milk was novel, with the oat and wheat flakes still crunchy, the bran still crisp, the milk fresh and cool sliding down the throat. The second bite snagged a bit of apple, which felt a little like hard-set chewing gum and, in the company of a raisin, stuck itself determinedly to the back teeth. The third was rather less charming – the flakes had coalesced to the consistency of wet cement, the fruit had swelled but could never regain its natural form and the milk was thick with sediment and tasted vaguely of dust. And the fourth was abandoned altogether.

As for the bran – it made a fabulous bath scrub. I have never had such soft and exfoliated feet.

Finding me

I have a friend who is busy at the moment finding herself. I could, of course, have told her that she is right here, right now, but I figure that levity would not be taken in the right (or left) spirit, not right now, when she is what she is and how she feels. You see, she is a nice girl, a friendly girl, a girl who laughs and jokes and, a lot of the time, eats her way happily through life and its various shenanigans, but at the moment, right here, right now, she is a fairly unhappy girl and it is not fair that I should be making silly puns, jokes and other giggly statements about her.

Why is she unhappy? Oh, the usual female angst at dumping a boyfriend who doesn’t really deserve the angst that she is wasting on him but, try telling her that, right here, right now. It is not the time or my place and, at some detached level, I should not get involved except to stand by her because she is my friend, colleague and space sharer at work. But one tends to absorb the angst, the unhappiness and the afraid-ness that she is feeling at being suddenly single, suddenly alone and suddenly embarrassed at being part of a world that she no longer feels comfortable within.

That, I think happens to anyone, everyone, who is unexpectedly cut adrift from a familiar routine of belonging and being. In a way, a strange and occasionally unnerving kind of way, I have escaped that. For some reason I have always been able to maintain a core of privacy, of aloneness, of self, that no one, however close to me physically, emotionally and intellectually, has been able to touch. Perhaps, like Fred, a man I once met when I was in college and not as stable as I am now, I have found myself…at last.

Fred was an odd kind of bird. Much older, greyer and more battered than all us chickens who flocked fascinatedly at his feet, but still in search of the elusive psyche that was him. He had to ‘find’ himself, he insisted, and had travelled all over the world looking. At the time I met him, he touted himself as a Vietnam vet and was going off to the Far East with the Foreign Legion. Of course, that instantly alarmed my mother when I told her about the encounter, because she knew that something like the Foreign Legion, familiar only through Beau Peep (the comic strip) and the romantic air to the name of the organisation.

But in spite of his travels, Fred never found himself. Not in the short time I came across him through my college counsellor and occasionally in the campus store or at the mall. He always stopped to say hello and ask how I was doing, and I always was nice to him, looking forward to hearing more stories about the war, about his travels and about his cooking – he was a good cook I was told, but an even better teller of tales about food. Many years later I asked about him and was told that he had gone out of the country. Maybe he did find that ‘self’ that he was looking for, who knows!

Book marks

My new friend J is a Bengali. Which could conceivably translate, on a good day, to being somewhat mad, somewhat eccentric and totally, completely and wholly (I bet you that means different things in legalese, which is what I will be reading reams of if he sues me after he reads this) passionate about everything that he says he does, has done, will do and wants to do, now and whenever he gets around to doing it. And he talks, like a Bong – as the Bengali community collectively and individually is called – with fervour, with involvement, with – best of all – laughter. Of course, if he didn’t do it at the dead of night, I could be awake and aware enough the next day to concentrate on work, but that is an occupational hazard that one deals with when one is making friends. Or, at least, I do.

But in all the chatter, his and mine, histories exchanged, compared and analysed, there is a wonderful commonality that has convinced me to add this man to my list of almost-friends. “Almost”, since I have seen him for all of 30 seconds, if that, and have no clue whether he has onion breath, his feet are cracked or he burps wrenchingly after he eats, which would sort of make any further and future acquaintance rather strained. He tells me about his life, he reads about mine from this blog, and we hope to do some work together at some time when we both have our lives sorted out in our different worlds.

J is a collector – of art, of artefacts his father left him, of people as oddball as he sounds to be and of books. It is that last that is most interesting to me, since I have met few people that I can not just talk to, but talk to about stuff that I like, a certain genre of books most relevant in this melee of words and punctuation. J collects books on food, which does not necessarily mean recipe or cookery books. It means books on food, just like it says. I do, too, and have done for a few years now, though not too intensely or passionately, for various reasons I do not need to go into at this time.

My collection started with the Penguin Cookbook, which my parents had bought years ago. I used it often to find out how to make mayonnaise and jumbles and Christmas pudding, but never really read it until I was bored out of my little mind one long weekend many years ago. Then I whooshed my way through all the family collection, from the Mediterranean Cookbook to Fannie Farmer, Cakes and Cookies to Meenakshi Ammal’s Samaithu Paar. Then I started rooting around in bookstores and collected everything from Larousse Gastronomique (which roosted on my bedside table most of the time I lived in Delhi) to Achaya on Vedic food. But perhaps the treasure of my collection, with my interest in science and cooking, is Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, which taught me why an egg cooks the way it does when it boils and how not to cry when you cut onions.

J spends a lot more time on his collecting of books on food than I do or can do. A few days ago he told me that he had acquired the biography of Mrs Beeton, the lady who wrote the bible of household management. I am not sure if I want to be envious of this one, because I have a few names up my nicely shaped sleeve that he won’t know of, let alone find too easily. Until he catches up, I can keep hassling him with these swipes taken via my blog!

Phone-y bones

I was having a very long and convoluted chat with J, a new friend, over a long distance line last night. It went on for much longer than I normally use a telephone, but we talked about everything from a parent’s death to the latest food book he bought to the reason I stopped being anything that could even remotely be defined as a ‘social animal’. For someone I have met in person for perhaps all of two minutes, on a day that I had deadlines breathing down my neck and giving me the shivers, he was amazingly easy to talk to, comfortable to spend time with, interesting to know. But in all the verbiage and the laughter, he said something that made me stop and think – my blogs have been getting serious, angry and, startlingly for me, discontented. He did not say that in so many words, but the tone is there, now that I read what I have been writing over the last could of weeks.

I cannot figure out why, but I do know it needs to change. There is no way my blog can be a reflection of me if it is any way un-sunny. Something will have to be done and I am the only one who can do it. But thanx for the feedback, J, I will start the quick-fix asap. One route to take is to go back to what I started out with – light, funny, non-topical stuff that hides no sign of any current news or issue of any import beyond my little world. Since I work in a newspaper, avoiding anything current is nigh-impossible, but there is always a take on it. And I reach out to take it, happily and relievedly.

What is making headlines right now, braying (literally) its way to the forefront of the average Mumbaikar’s attention is the recent Sharad Pawar-versus-the-Australians incident. When the folks from Down Under won the Champion’s Trophy a few days ago, they were jubilant, holding the ornate cup high above their heads and pushing and shoving to get the group hug into the group picture. Now, unfortunately, Mr Pawar happened to be there, handing over the award to the triumphant team. He, not being Australian and not being a cricket player in the just-finished match, was definitely out of place. So, in the melee, he was shoved aside by the rambunctions and did get out of the way, smiling broadly all the while – it was on television, for all to see. Unfortunately, it was on television for all to see (and no, that is not an editing goof there). And the rabid nationalists, Pawar-supporters, India-lovers and local bokels latched on to that onle tiny scene and ran with it, all the way to the headlines.

Now it is a huge controversy. There is even a highly painted donkey involved, making a bigger ass of the protestors than they may have made of themselves, by themselves. There are protest marches and sit-ins planned, apologies demanded and violence threatened. And the captain of the Australian team has now offered to apologise. Pawar himself has laughed it off as nothing serious, nothing at all to be all worked up about. But the general public refuses to be mollified, never mind that none of those people who make up that section of society is involved. Who pushed whom and why and how and when and what happened to the pushers and the pushee seems to have become irrelevant in the whole story of India being insulted by a foreign country that was, in actual fact, composed of a group of deported convicts.

What will happen next? Maybe the donkey knows better than anyone else!

Plastic passion

I got my first credit card when I was on my second job. It was not a matter of prestige or kicks, but a need – I was, after all, far from my usual beaten track and was never sure when I would need money for what. I also hated – and still do – carrying cash around, ATMs were not as common as they are now and rushing over to the bank waving a check was not exactly my thing. So, against all wisdom, I got myself a credit card, a neat plastic strip that tucked nicely into my wallet and was rarely, if ever, used. I was inordinately proud of it, perhaps because it was new and shiny and novel.

But this was not my first stab at plastic. Many years ago, when I had just got my first job, I went into the very plush office of a well known credit card company and asked for details about how I could get one. They effectively threw me out, saying snootily that I needed to be invited to apply for their card, I couldn’t just ask for one. I left, mightily annoyed. Today, so long after that stopped rankling, I still refuse to talk to callers from that particular company and will never ask for their card or agree to be sent the appropriate forms!

Today, I have more plastic than I want in my purse. There are my various bank cards – credit, debit and whatever else I am sent that I rarely examine too closely, but dutifully keep until they expire and can be used as bookmarks – and cards from various stores who expect me to be a regular and loyal customer. If they come for free, which they usually do, I fall for the sales bumpf and accept whatever I am given without too much argument, unless of course the eager-beaver salesperson is being really painful on a day that I have an attack of niggling conscience, PMS or no chocolate. In the last few years, I have accumulated ‘privilege’ cards from two bookstores (which I use often), a clothing store, my clothes designer a lifestyle store and…I seem to have lost count there.

A fairly new and very funny friend decided not too long ago to destroy all her credit cards. She works either with cash or with her debit card, shopping only when she has the money readily available for it. There is no anticipation of bills to be paid or payments to be made at some later date when she may just be flush enough to make them. Makes sense to be that way, to me. Maybe I should burn those danged bits of plastic bogging up my wallet and follow my friend’s example!

In harm’s way

I often hear various very strange stories about how people get the various very strange injuries that they have to suffer through. A close family friend told us a tale many years ago that, even today, tops the very strange list: He dislocated his jaw as he guffawed at a bad joke. He did tell us not to tell anyone else about it, but since I figure that he will probably never read this and has probably forgotten what he told us all those years ago. He would also fall of his scooter at regular intervals, breaking sundry parts of his irascible self, but recovered quickly with many stories about the incident and its fallout, all of which had us – collectively as a family and as separate individuals with degrees of wickedness in our senses of humour- in inevitable giggles.

But, in all that, I grew up to better him in many ways, perhaps because I was well trained, since he was, for all purposes, an ‘Uncle’, perhaps closer in the non-blood relationship to us than blood was. So, even as I fell out of a tree (perhaps the only time I ever climbed into one) and out of window onto some shards of broken glass, got bit by a small friend and crawled over the pieces of my shattered milk-bottle – all at different ages, I hastily add – I learned that a scar or two adds character, and a certain knowledge that to be hurt means to suffer pain and that, in turn, means a certain curtailment of activity, forcibly by one parent or both, and by the injury itself.

But it was only when I was in college that I did things in spectacular style, a style that has now become almost a signature. I rarely got hurt, but when I did, the world sat up and took notice. Perhaps the most interesting even was when I cracked a bone in my hand on the microwave, a story that I think I have told before. But there have been other equally esoteric ways of inflicting damage on myself that could use some re-telling and re-living.

Consider the time I fell down the stairs. I was in college in Long Island, New York, lived on the first floor up steep and sharp iron stairs. It was winter. I wore three-inch spike heeled suede boots. It was the freeze after a snowstorm had been melted by rain. I was in a hurry. Add all that up and the outcome is totally predictable – I slid on a patch of black ice, down a couple of stairs, managed to clutch precariously to the railing and my dignity, stood upright for a brief moment, then lost my feet, landed painfully upon my fundament, my back slamming against a stair edge, my head connecting rather violently with another. I lay there, sprawled, while the friend I was rushing to meet ran up, slid balletically close to me and over my head and managed to retain the dignity that I had lost, haul me up and keep us both standing at the same time. I was shouted at, driven post-haste to the infirmary and examined for bruises (a-plenty), concussion (very slight) and sanity (doubtful), all the while with my ears ringing from shock and pain and the combined lectures of my friend, the nurse and the lady who played the role of my local mother who was called on the phone as a back-up. Of course, I never wore those boots again.

And then there was the time I stabbed myself in the hand with a broken Petri dish. I was at home making Sunday dinner, having exiled both parents from the kitchen. I needed a small round flat plate – the best we had was a large size Petri dish. I was taking it out of the cupboard where it was stored when my phone rang. Determined not to have anyone else bothered, I jerked upright, miscalculated the trajectory of the route from cupboard to counter-top, managed to slam the dish against the top of the shelf, watched it shatter and then ran to catch the phone. It was only when I saw a small red puddle form near my foot that I realised that there was a fairly large piece of glass sticking straight up from my palm, with many other slivers keeping it company alongside. I picked out as much as I could and spent the next few months feeling nasty prickings through my hand. It was some time later that a doctor friend of mine dug into my palm with a needle and scalpel and found tiny shards that had stayed with me as a sort of macabre souvenir.

These days I am more careful. And slower. After all, though my physiotherapist loved telling me that there was “no pain, no gain”, I have learned that pain has no gain. And I rather live avoiding it.

A big bazaar

I sped out in the afternoon today after dashing madly through a story and its various crises, major and minor, lots of editing, some page-making and a whole lot of strategising and panicking. I was headed for the local supermarket, in search of interesting veggies, some sundry groceries and some lunch, a situation that had become dire only because the food in the office cafeteria was so dreadfully bad that my stomach threatened mutiny every time I put some of the vittles available downstairs into it. So I hailed myself a cab, glowered with steely eyes at the driver who leered at me in his carefully adjusted rear-view mirror and chatted with the friend who came with me.

We got there and found the supermarket mercifully not too crowded. We could walk through the aisles comfortably enough, managing to swing our baskets without emasculating any of the helpers standing around chatting about life, the cricket score and the cost of living index. I trotted purposefully around, collecting bits and pieces in my basket, knowing what I wanted, what I should want and what I should never ever consider looking at, leave alone buying. The first included cheese, the second, greens, the third, chocolate cookies.

My stop at the vegetables counter was the longest. I browsed bovinely through the leafy greens, examining methi, looking at spinach, gazing longingly at a leek (which was gazing meanly back at me from its shelf out of my reach), peered into a mass of curly lettuce and backed rapidly away from a turnip leaf that seemed to be moving of its own volition. Crying craven, I loaded my basket with cut and processed veggies – corn, bitter gourd, cauliflower, beans and more – and then gathered up bean sprouts, mushrooms, brightly coloured peppers and carrots. I did look long and hard at a zucchini, but it was so convoluted that it awed me into retreat.

Finding my friend in the slowly increasing crowds was not easy, but we managed to make contact. The lines at checkout were mercifully short and the service surprisingly quick and efficient. We grabbed a cart, loaded on our packages and headed for a cab. En route, I found myself a salad, talked my buddy out of heading for the sweet shop across the path and bundled her into a taxi for the office. Protesting wildly, she lectured me bitterly all the way back, saying that it was her last chance to binge before she started a rather stringent diet and that she would never forgive me for making her forego a treat she well deserved and would now dream about and crave for the rest of the day…week….month?

So today I drive myself back home with a carload of groceries. Well….veggies anyway. Tomorrow, who knows, the new driver who presented himself to my father this morning could take over my life.

Drama queen

A friend of mine calls me a drama queen and knows that I revel in it. It is so much fun making a scene about a chipped fingernail or a wrongly spelled word that I try and milk situations of this ilk to the max, if you know what I mean through all the fluffy verbiage.

Yesterday, however, drama took a nasty turn. For some time now I have been deeply unhappy with my driver, the one who seemed to be okay when he started out driving me into work every day. He drove on the clutch, shredded the leather of the steering wheel, slammed the brakes unmercifully and did his best to annoy, aggravate and irritate me in every way possible, mainly by mauling our car around and then complaining sotto voce about it. I was giving him one more chance…each time, since he had a wife and three children to look after on his fairly small salary. And then, finally, he managed to drop that crucial last straw on the load on my mind that was him and his nakhras – the only word that covers his very odd temperament.

It began badly, yesterday. The driver arrived earlier than his usual time, demanding the keys to the car, since he had to buy the toll-bridge pass that would take us over the creek to the island city twice a day. Why, I wanted to know, did he need the car for that? Especially since all this while he had done the needful without? His tone was distinctly combative, when he retorted that since he was not being given auto-rickshaw fare to and fro, he would have to drive there. Which, after a month of this kind of insolence and frankly dreadful driving from him, pushed that button in my mind and made me blow up. Being aware that it was rather unwise to start the altercation first thing in the morning, I fled to my bathroom, leaving my father to handle it. When I emerged, the car was back but the driver’s days were definitely numbered, counting down to when I found a new one.

So, with my patience pasted on my anger and my irritation levels held firmly in a straitjacket, I started out to work. The driver managed to jerk my chain a few times, but I kept my cool, refusing to get visibly affected, talking to various people on my much-maligned mobile phone instead. But by the evening I was ready to let go, to lose my temper in good family style…and I did. The driver heaved sighs and pulled faces, as he stopped to let me in at the porch of the office block. When I asked him to move the seat in front of me forward, so my knees could fit without being compressed, he shoved so hard that the cushion hit the dashboard. He was still given a chance, when I asked him what was bothering him.

It was then that everything hit the fan – or would have, if there had been a fan to hit. At his insolence and aggression, I blew my fuse and demanded to know just who he thought he was, since all he really did was drive me from home to work and back, with few stops, if any, with few other jobs to be done by him, if ever any at all. He replied, in a louder than was required voice, that he was a driver not a servant and that I could sack him if I wanted. It was what I had wanted for a while. He was asked to pull over and get out. Before he realised what I was doing, I had driven off. My hands were steady, my mind was bathed in brilliant red and I was so furious I was cold. By the time I drove into the gate, the ice had set in and I was able to ask the man who had got me the driver what in heaven’s name had happened, heard him out and then told him never to let the man into the building ever again. When I walked into our apartment, the anger and hurt poured out in a veritable flood, only partly soothed by the kitten and her purring, my father and his murmuring and text messages from various friends asking if I was okay and safe.

Today I drove myself into work, at peace with even the horrendous traffic. I am told a new driver will be coming to see me tomorrow morning. I just hope he is a better experience than the old one.

Mall rattling

A friend from work and I decided that our stress levels – individual and combined – were getting too much to handle and we needed to get out and go somewhere…anywhere. So, gathering ourselves and our bags, we hied forth in my little chariot to the nearby mall to find food and some entertainment. It was up for grabs, and we did our best to grab it.

We started with the parking lot. Perhaps the first nicely lit, nicely aired and nicely organised underground garage I have met in Mumbai, it sprawled at the end of a circular ramp and had easy access to the various elevators dotting the complex. I found parking on the first turn, slid into my space and we started our crawling through the mall.

Shooting up to the top level, we emerged in the food court. Just as we got out and clacked in our heels (my feet are reminding me that spending time walking gently through a shopping centre is to be done in soft and comfortable sandals, not glamorous stiletto slippers) across the highly polished floor, I got a text message on my cellphone inviting me to test drive the Rolls Royce. Should I? I asked my buddy who, with her well-developed news nose, wanted the story in 350 words by close of edition.

Food was a matter of some confusion. Should we go with Indian or not? If not, should it be Chinese, Thai, Japanese, barbecue, anonymous sandwiches or a burger of sorts? Or would it be better to opt for the more conventional idli-dosa, roti-sabji or tandoori platter? I finally decided on momos, while she headed for South Indian. We re-united, sat down to eat and gently gossiped about the office and its various personalities. Gelato had to be slurped, and we beelined for the dark chocolate, with its infinitely fabulously therapeutic properties of soothing the nerves and satisfying the calorie count. Diet dessert? Yuck! Our opinions matched perfectly.

Then began the real crawl. Friend and I had shoes on the mind, as may be expected, and we ducked in and out of wherever looked promising. But, on close inspection, there was never anything completely right about anything we saw. A wonderful pair of black and white heels at one store was perfect in every way…but for the faddishness of the insole, which would be out of fashion within a few weeks, if not days. A gorgeous pair of open toed sandals wound around the ankle…but managed to put me off with the arbitrary floral decoration on the top – it was a flower, but a very improbably one, which did not do it for me. And a gorgeous set in red and gold was almost mine…but it came only in a size that needed my feet to grow at least two more inches which, at my age, would be impossible!

Then we headed clothes and bag-wards. Neither inspired too much, though I did find a brilliant red shirt, all pin-tucks and lovely soft cotton, that just yelled to be taken home. I did adopt it and am now wondering about the ironing nightmare that it will become. My friend looked at a white shirt with interesting detailing on the front placket and we looked at each other and laughed: “Another white shirt?” Another red shirt – the one I liked - under my arm and we headed back to work, stopping briefly at a store selling the most unlikely and exotic underwear, some beaded, some feathered, some even made of the most strange rubber-like stuff. With a shudder, we left, giggling about it in the car.

That was my style fix for the week. Next week…who knows where my feet will take me!