Wake and watch

I have not been a very happy sleeper for some years now, waking up with every squeak of the cat or rattle of a bird’s claws on the awning above my bedroom window. So after nights before which counting sheep (or any other not-very-exciting animal), drinking herbal tea, reading deadly boring books or watching mindless television, I need to do all I can to stay awake long enough to finish work…or just to get there. And since I do not and can not sleep in a car, moving or otherwise, I have devised various strategies to get me through the travel time, until I can reach out and touch some sleep-buster like coffee to cruise its caffeinated way through my bloodstream, or cold water to splash my face and eyes with or even my irascible boss to have one of our interminable and completely illogical arguments with.

One of these is to stare out of the car window at people waiting to cross the street. If there is a child standing there, either alone or with a guardian, I smile, wiggle my fingers or even make a funny face. With amazingly few exceptions, the child reciprocates, often with a smile wide enough and so illuminating as to wake even those parts of the world where the sun has not risen yet. If there is an accompanying adult, the child will look up, perhaps say something, look back at me and then, after a slight hesitation, smile tentatively, then gradually grin with every gap-tooth showing.

Or sometimes, when I am stopped at a traffic junction with a policeman directing the various streams of cars, all headed towards him at breakneck speed and then veering suddenly away into the melee. I stop, perforce, and wait for my lane to be waved on. Stare at him long enough, even at his back, and he will, at some stage, turn and glance back, stopping to stare if you smile. Which I often do. Not to aggravate or otherwise stimulate him, but just because I was brought up to be nice to everyone, no matter who they are and what they do. And he will, inevitably, smile back before realising his own grim self-importance and role as upholder of the law and then resuming his dour demeanour. But as I drive directly past him, he will almost always smile again, adding a special flourish to his wave.

Of course, talking to the driver, who is usually the only other person in the car with me, if there is anyone at all, also serves the purpose of keeping me awake. He tells me all about a way of life and an ethos that I do not have and have rarely encountered, in that it is astonishingly simplified in its codes of behaviour and astounding in the range of knowledge the young man has. In his world, women have specific roles, should be married before they are 22 years old, should not be too good looking or too educated and should know their place in the scheme of things, invariably designed by a man. A man, in his role as representative of the male sex, will be single only long enough to make sure his older siblings are ‘settled’, should respect his elders and betters and should know how to keep a woman in her place. His views on how a woman should dress, what family honour means and how fast I should drive are entertaining enough to keep me going until I get to the office or get home.

After which the boss, the caffeine, the work, or the painters, the small cat or my father take over…until the long night comes back to keep me going.

Space racing

It is amazing how you find a place that you make your own and have people coveting it. I seem to have discovered a nice little niche for myself that has a vantage view of all that goes on in this large and convoluted office, but is still secluded and quiet enough for it to be a spot that gives me the privacy I want and still the envy of all those who come to visit. I didn’t start off here; I coveted it myself. And when I found suddenly one morning that it was mine, I moved quietly in, with no celebration or fanfare, and started putting my stamp on it.

My desk is placed against a window, which spreads strategically along my left side. I get a lovely view, chimney stacks notwithstanding, of our small yet lush garden and the parking lot, where I watch drivers play cards, sleep and eat lunch, dogs run madly about, children grub in the dirt and harried journalists walk frenziedly up and down smoking and talking on their mobile phones as if solving the problems of a beleaguered world all by themselves. Beyond the wall, the sloping roofs of the textile mill loom black and dirt-stained, yielding in the further distance to tall apartment blocks still under construction. Occasionally the tiny silhouette of a labourer stands on the very edge of the top floor, leaning up and out towards a crane or a concrete bucket and my stomach drops to the ground floor while my feet tingle in anticipation of a disaster that, thankfully, has not yet been added to my store of traumas.

Inside the vast room, there is hustle, hurry, hammering – of fingers on keyboards, of woodwork being repaired, of story ideas that really have no substance, but need to be given some as faster than possible, as is typical of all journalism. But in my little oasis, calm usually reigns; or, if it doesn’t, it is a storm generated by me myself and I. the phones will ring, the mail will pile up on my desk and in my inbox, the aggravations – both from my irascible editor and assorted others – will increase by the minute, but I am isolated in my pool of work, my earphones plugged into a CD, my mind in whatever I am doing, my eyes switching between computer screen and garden, my fingers bashing away to produce the article needed for the features section, the edit page or my blog.

And this little oasis is all mine in its personality. Regulation furniture is ugly, but art prints, nicely laminated and positioned, brighten up the softboard walls. On my desk, beside a pile of unanswered and unseen (for the most part) letters, sits a terracotta-orange and polished-chrome cat, his face fat and happy, his tail a-curl with observance, his pose smug and settled. Keeping him company is a gilt feng shui statuette, given to me by a close friend. Behind that is a small glass globe and a pen-stand that is, in essence, a large pink-red flower. All of which add up to making it a happy, colourful, bright and brilliant place to work in.

Which suits me just fine.

Back to the books

No one who has any vestige of sanity left in their heads could possibly think of being thankful for having their home painted. There is the dust, the mess, the chaos, the dirt, the fumes…you have heard this litany for a few days now. But there is one aspect of the whole big job that I can occasionally muster up some positive feeling for. It is the fact that since the television is now shrouded in plastic that cannot easily be removed, I am perforce well away from the tube and all its idiotic offerings. You may say that I don’t really need to watch if I don’t want to. True. But somehow, as you sit there, your muscles slowly twitching their way into restfulness, the fatigue of the too-long day slowly fading into a pleasant quietude that you know you deserve, you cannot concentrate enough to do much else but point the remote in the general direction of the box and look for more amusement than you have found through the day at work or on the endless commute to home.

So I have rediscovered old friends of mine that I have been ignoring for way too long: books. While many of my favourites are also shut away from my access, I have managed to find others that I can actually say I am starting to enjoy. One of these is a slim volume that a friend sent me not too long ago. It is called Ex Libris and is by Anne Fadiman, a literary critic and columnist in the US. She writes typically American – friendly, chatty, mixing personal with professional, adding small and delightful touches from the way her husband and she met and married to her methods of sorting books. When the red volume first arrived, the name was rather off-putting. But then, I read the back cover and the author profile and decided it would be well worth the effort. But then time, work and the painters took over my life and it was only when I was stuck in my room, unable to open the door since it was being painted, and I had perforce to stay inside, find a book and start reading. Fadiman it was. And I am so glad it was indeed!

Another book I re-found was Larousse Gastronomique. It has always been one of my favourites, always been something I read bits of to help me relax, give me something apart from websites and newspaper editorials to think about, something apart from small cats and pain fumes to be distracted by. Yesterday I made myself the most amazingly delicious Confit au Canard - in my head, of course - with careful instruction from Larousse and a little memory that was mixed up with a trip along the Seine on the bateau mouche and a Frenchman with the most delightful smile…

But with this I needed a little diversion, something that was not in any way serious or even intellectual. So I grabbed myself a romance novel, a good old Mills and Boon, something that I would probably have blushed at when I was at the age when I first read one of those. And I found that while I did not blush, I was rather startled at the way things progressed between hero and heroine. Instead of the expected flirtation and gradual development of a relationship punctuated by arguments and animosity, with a vamp and a villain thrown in for good measure, a few passionate clinches, blossoming emotions and more, they hopped straight into bed for a lusty night – or afternoon, as the case was in that particular novel – of steam and sensuality. Which made me wonder: do people actually live like that?

Maybe they do. For now, I am enjoying being shut out from the inanity of Indian and cable television. How long my serenity will last, I am not sure. But I intend to make the most of it while it lasts.

India indeed!

Yesterday was Republic Day, which meant that, between the holiday, the painters and the general mood, this blog did not get written. But, being of conscientious mien, I decided that I would make up for it today, albeit pretending that it is actually yesterday, which is not true, but then that is what pretending is all about.

Once upon a time, life was simpler, with less pretending to be done and being done all around. Those were the days when I believed that India was the best place to be and Indian was the best way to be. I still do, but not without a certain healthy dose of cynical realism attached. I know that things will never get done without payment, to either contractor or labourer; I know that I will have to wait for longer than my turn unless I tell people that my father is a very important person, or that I know someone who is; and I know that if I leave it to the government, my street will not be cleaned, my stolen car will not be found and the security agency that does everything but its job keeping my home safe will not be penalised.

But India still has charm, perhaps most of all at this time of year with its Republic Day celebrations. In the capital of the country, New Delhi, practice sessions begin long before the day with the dress rehearsal bringing together too many people from too many places to walk solemnly along Rajpath watched by eagle-eyed secret service personnel, fond parents and gawkers galore. On the day itself, with costumes somewhat a-pong, the same parade is repeated, with displays of jingoistic fervour, from the procession of our newest and shiniest weaponry to the representative tableaux of various states and their well known products. All punctuated by groups of little children, trained to stay in step and smile proudly back at even prouder families.

All around the country, the same celebrations take place. I would watch the parade for hours on television after I came home from school where we would have to go early in the morning to hoist the national flag and sing the national anthem in doleful, fed-up, vaguely annoyed and shrilly, indignant voices. It was supposed to be a holiday and there we were up and about, and at school, to add insult to injury. But the rest of the day was good, with nowhere much to go and nothing much to do, except lounge about, eating junk food and making desultory conversation.

Today things are different, again. A holiday is always a pleasure, but a day packed with work on and in the house. Right now it is about chasing the small cat, pushing the painters into working faster and balancing recipes with calorie counts. We may live in a republic, but we are certainly not very free!

Rubble rubble, toil and trouble

Our house these days looks like a bomb hit it. I walked in the front door yesterday evening after a typically mad day at work and was greeted by clouds of white plaster dust, swathes of black and white plastic sheeting, four paint-spattered workmen, one grubby small-cat and a rather ruffled father whose dark blue T-shirt was batik-streaked and paw-printed with shades of light grey. For a few minutes, it was utter cacophony, with everyone trying to tell me what they had been doing and what they thought of each other, the proceedings and the world in general. As the doorbell rang to announce the arrival of the car keys (with the driver, of course) and the building supervisor who had a beef to discuss in a very loud and battering voice, I fled into the relative calm of the kitchen, to find cold water, incense sticks and my steely core of serenity that comes in most useful at times like these.

Later, when all was quiet, the painters had gone for the day and news had been exchanged with father, cat and unrelenting phone-callers, I surveyed the apartment and its devastation and wondered with a certain fatalistic resignation whether the process of redoing its interiors would ever end. Since optimism was the only route to travel, I believed firmly – or told myself sternly that I did – that it would all come together soon, and the world within would be a better place to live in, not to long hence.

The painters have at last moved out of what is essentially my space in the house. My bedroom is done with, my bathroom is pristine and all my paraphernalia (my father calls it ‘junk’, I must tell you with a certain degree of indignation) has been placed back were it came from…more or less. There is a lot of stuff, from carpets to chairs to back brushes (why would one family of two people and a small cat need so many of those?) that do not normally live in my room, but needs must for now. The cobwebs, my pet peeve, have been eliminated, and so have the small paw prints that speckled the wall beneath the large windows – of course, those have already started re-making their appearance, but that is why we used washable paint, I presume.

The study is a mess of another kind. Apart from my father, who has perforce taken up residence there, in the company of his computer system, library and more bits and pieces from the rest of the house, there is a tangle of more carpets, curtain rods, crystal, bronzes and assorted other artefacts, chairs, suitcases and cat-toys to navigate around. But no back brushes. We have always been proud of the fact that we do not own too much ‘stuff’, preferring the rather minimalistic, bare look to the fussy, decorated, ‘traditional’ one, but we still seem to have accumulated the most esoteric collation of objets that a small nuclear family possibly could.

My father’s bedroom is a scene of devastation. The plaster has been hammered off the walls, the built in closets are encased in plastic sheeting and masking tape and the storage cupboards are hidden under a blanket of polythene and newspaper. Even the switchboards and light fittings are protectively swathed. The living room is about the same, but now mercifully lacks the dark newly-cemented wall that we were just starting to get used to – that is now covered in primer and plaster, making it more concordant with the overall whiteness of the house.

And over it all, even over the small cat who scampers helter-skelter all over the apartment like a pale orange ghost with a bell attached, is a pall of white, like a snowstorm is still settling with eerie starkness. Surfaces dusted a mere ten minutes earlier will be ideal sources of fingerprints in a few moments, we know, and have stopped bothering too hard to clean them off. The walls echo with a million stories that each brick will tell, if it could speak. And we wander about, father, small cat and myself, lost in our own mind-blankness, waiting for it to end…some day.

A life well spent

I am reading Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, the autobiography of Rupert Everett. Having got through most of it, I am wondering why it was written and why Rupert Everett would even bother to consider writing it. It is not that he is a bad actor – he is a very good one, both on stage (or so I am told) and on screen. But he seems to have spent most of his life indulging in what people primly call ‘excess’. Drinking, drugging, sleeping around – even prostitution, partying and worse (or better, depending on your perspective on the matter), living a life of Riley (whoever he was) without the means to do so without worrying. It all seems to have been dreadfully wasteful of a life so full of promise. But then, those were the days when dissipation was haute, shoving strange pharmaceuticals into your body was chic and it was considered the height of louche not to know anyone who was anyone in the circuit. What happened to his immense talent and his roles? Who knows. Maybe they all got sublimated into the book. Maybe – as is usually the case with me – they were too important to make this public; the little facets of his life were not as meaningful and could be easily revealed without any vulnerability being displayed or expressed.

But then there are other lives that have been as intense, as meaningful, as public, conducted with far more dignity and discretion. Consider Chandralekha, the Chennai-based dancer, who died not too long ago. She was indeed a well known figure, someone who commanded attention with her diminutive stature, her dramatically white hair, her frank opinions, especially on sex and its depiction in classical dance and, of course, her choreography and performance. She managed to bring a special fire into all that she said and did, however controversial, with touches of sheer genius in productions like Leelavati. But she was not known for her lifestyle; more, for her art.

Or there is Helen Mirren, now in centre-focus for her performance in the Golden Globe winning Queen. Her life has been eventful, to say the least, by all reports, but she has always been better known for her acting. Her role in Prime Suspect, as a brilliant detective with a drinking problem was just about the best thing to watch on TV at some stage – we never missed an episode, even if it happened to clash with dinner or guests. And now she has done a star turn, literally, as Queen Elizabeth trying to handle the death of Princess Diana. Oscar, here she comes?

People live their own lives in their own way. But when they choose to make those lives public, there is a certain responsibility involved. A mandate to show off what is meaningful, comprehensible, identifiable with. And not just a litany of who that person has slept with, under what circumstances and how it all happened. There has to be more to life – any life – that that!

Who’s the best?

I did something I normally never do last night. I watched one of the most popular shows in the recent history of Indian television and, no, it was not Mahabharat or Ramayan. It was Kaun Banega Crorepati. Starring the man who made being the best a fashion statement: Shah Rukh Khan. And I enjoyed it thoroughly, even as a part of me watched dispassionately and found him not just over the top, but over-practiced and rather wooden as well. I even got so wrapped up in the show that I changed channels to avoid watching the chappie in the ‘hot seat’ get eliminated. And I have been, for perhaps the first time in my life, able to discuss a local TV show with some vestige of intelligence and informed awareness.

It started with the wrong channel. Then, after some frantic and argumentative searching, we found the right one. Somewhat appalled, but sure that it would not last, we sat through a really tacky and downright awful music video starring SRK – I read somewhere that it was an introductory sequence only and hoped fervently that that was indeed true. Dreadful! Under-clad women, SRK trying to be a teenybopper, cracks at everyone from Bollywood and beyond, pseudo-hip-hop music…it was a whole package that was, frankly, truly BAD.

But then the show really began. It was clear that SRK was trying very hard to be different, but was astonishingly self-conscious of the fact that he was replacing the icon of Indian showbiz, as he is called, Amitabh Bachchan. There were apologies, wise-ass comments, a pushy almost intrusive friendliness and an attempt at instant bonding – add bonhomie and cheer – that, for an audience with a cultural ethos that mandates some distance, especially with the opposite sex, rather fell on its face. The nervous tic-like reflex the star had of licking his lips – you can see that in a lot of his films and television interviews, apart from live appearances as well – the fumbling for the pen, the self-deprecating comments…it all got too much.

But then the charisma took over. The man was obviously charming his guests, and as they smiled, almost wiggled in their seats in their striving to please him, I did too. My father watched for a while, then went to his room to read, while the small cat did a few somersaults in the planter’s chair and then decided to take a nap. I sat through the entire show, saw one contestant stake all and lose and then the other, less outgoing, slowly thaw out of the ice of his nervousness to respond, beaming, to SRK’s banter.

Did Badshah Khan, as he is popularly known, beat Bachchan at the game? For now, the men and their personalities are so different that it is hard to say who wins. TRPs will tell. So will the way in which the participants work hard to match the host. And, of course, I will tune in at least once a week to make sure that I can keep up with office gossip!

Oops!

Yes, well, I was mixed up with the painters yesterday, with no access to a computer. They finally got out of three rooms and wanted the other three, so we ran hither and yon, occasionally tripping over the small cat, the painting paraphernalia and ourselves, trying to get things cleared. Where what is at the moment, only providence will tell us...we hope!

Hair and thereby

(Well, hell, it was a long day yesterday and I never got around to writing this, which is excusable since I have hardly ever missed a day, right? And does anyone really read it, or is it just self-indulgent self-expression, as someone I know says about blogs in general? But consider this a double – for yesterday and today…)

It has been a very long week, which is not said in any kind of complaining manner, but just as a statement of fact. While life at work has been a story of overloaded brain cells (yes, I do have more than one and they do spark into function every now and then), compensating for lack of staff and coordinating with a boss who happens to be many miles away, life at home is at the moment all about painters, white plaster of Paris dust and complete organisational chaos and makeshift everything, from baths to meals to sleeping arrangements. It is not funny, but it is still sort of maybe perhaps almost fun. Hence the discombobulation of mind and body, you will understand…

I met the same state of being yesterday, when I was at the salon. You may ask what I was doing there if my everyday existence is such a mess, but the explanation is simple: my hair-expert gives appointments that are not easy to get; I needed a little stress relief; my hair needed it more than me; and I had errands in the area in any case. So I sat there being washed and dried and unguent-ed and otherwise dealt with, even as I made mental lists of things to be found and done, work to be finished that day (and the blog was one of those, only it got left out) and dinner and other assorted chores to be handled. I was relaxed, since I knew the people who were doing things to my hair and scalp, and was able to switch them off except to listen to instructions such as ‘Lift your head’, ‘Lean back’ and ‘Go for a wash’.

But the lady in the chair next to mine was rather more stressed, in so many ways. It was her first time at that particular salon, her first time with the trichologist who has known me and my hair for so many years. After much reassurance, and some gentle chatting from me to tell her how happy I was with the services offered, she settled a bit. But we soon found out why she was so hyper and edgy. Her daughter was getting married next week and she wanted to look her best, but believed that it would take a short while. When she heard that it would be at least a couple of hours, she started panicking. And then resigned herself to making lots of phone calls instead of rushing madly around doing the talking to whoever in person.

But what made me smile was how she slowly unwound from the tight, complicated knot that she had been tangled in. Within a few moments of her treatment starting, she began smiling – at me, at the hair lady, at the manager of the salon, at herself. Her feet, which were clenched in her rather ugly sandals, stretched and then coiled into a lotus position on her chair. And her fingers, from being tightly entwined, were playing with her mobile phone keys, smoothing her eyebrows and gesturing to add colour to what she was saying. Very soon, she was talking to us – me as the uninvolved onlooker and observer of human behaviour – telling us about her family. She showed off pictures of her daughter, the one who was getting married, and told us what the menu would be for the reception dinner and how three days of celebration had to be melted into one, since some elderly relative had died and it was not ‘right’ to get too ostentatious.

Soon we knew more about her than we wanted to. How her husband was a diamond merchant, how her son was in Boston studying, how her daughter was marrying someone who lived and worked in Singapore, where they had a house. We knew about her visits to the skin specialist, how the lady needed to get her clothes for the wedding in order, where and when they had been shopping, what they had bought and how much they had spent and how she was completely horrified by some of the prices that were being quoted so lavishly at her.

At which point I was done with and ready to leave. Saying my fond farewells to my friend and her helpers, collecting my present from her and then making a quick exit took longer than I expected. So I missed the lady with the wedding completely, thinking of her only when I was well on my way back to work, and too much of the same stressful hassle that made her and all else work-unrelated fade from my mind. Until just now…

Being Indian

(I actually wrote this as an opinion piece for the paper I work with. For various reasons, it did not work for the space it was meant to occupy. but it makes sense to me...and I bet to so many others like me.)

It’s not easy being Indian, especially if you are not immersed in the everyday ever-changing ethos of this country and its people. Ask anyone who has been keeping a watch on what the government has planned, over the years, to offer the Indian who does not live in India, announced each year with great fanfare at and around the annual Pravasi Divas jamboree. Various friends of mine who are Indian but have either never lived in this country or moved away when they were very young, are starting to look thisaways with a certain interest that they never felt before. It could be that they are all of the age when roots and true identity have begun to matter at a level that goes far beyond the cliché of ‘finding oneself’ or exploring one’s family tree. It could also more likely be that India has now changed, evolving into a country that is not as Third World and backward as it was once seen to be. And that seems a more plausible reason for coming ‘back home’.

When I was living abroad with my family, I was often seen as a rare beast, one who could not possibly have spent most of her life in India. A Japanese classmate of mine in the Baccalaureate programme in Geneva, Switzerland, asked me, in all innocence, whether I came from a village. It had happened before – in junior high school in the US – and happened again – in college, again in the US. The incomprehension of what I was about was not limited to language, but everything else, too, from food habits to dress code to moral principles to attitude. But I am like that only, I would protest. More, we in India are all like that only. What people did not understand then and perhaps are starting to do now, is the fact that in urbanised India, particularly in big cities like Mumbai, the divide between ‘them’ of the West and ‘us’ of the sub-continent has never been too great; and it has started disappearing. We are no longer as easily distinguished as aliens when we move out of India and make a life for ourselves in the United States or Britain or Europe somewhere. One reason for that is the vast numbers of Indians who went there before my generation did, and set the standard and the scene for folks like me to arrive.

The other is that we as Indians are less conscious of the fact that we are ‘different’. Many of us have already travelled abroad and are as comfortable being Indian in, say, New York or London or Sydney, without the ghetto mentality with which our predecessors so fiercely protected their identities. We know, after all, who we are and where we come from and that if we did go ‘back home’, there was a life worth living waiting for us. And – a point that few bother to consider – the diversity in this country is so vast and the distances between cities and communities shrinking (metaphorically, of course) so fast, that mismatches and dissonances are so rapidly incorporated into existing cultural norms to become new and generally improved codes of conduct. The same assimilation takes place when someone from Mumbai moves to New York to live, or vice versa – the adjustments necessary today for the latter are more about dealing with bureaucracy to get a phone connection, finding the right servant or keeping mould out of your shoes during the monsoon. There is the expected feeling of drastic change from the world you are used to, but it goes away soon enough.

Best of all, the Indian now knows that opportunity is knocking quite enthusiastically on a national level these days. ‘Progress’, ‘money’ and ‘advancement’ are no longer buzzwords that stretch visa queues outside consulates in the city. So much so that people who moved away from India years ago are now looking to come back, to ‘give back’, to find a life that is as privileged and comfortable as they discovered outside. Which is why the NRI is being wooed to return home, moneybags a-rattle, to show off what India and its Indians are capable of, given the chance…now, all home-grown and of international standard.

The new urban Indian is as much of a global citizen as is someone from San Francisco or Rome, without the ubiquitous bottle of mineral water and the unfamiliar accent. Perhaps only the residence permits or PIOs make the difference.

In the name of god

I was at the temple the other day to collect prasadam, as I wrote yesterday, for Pongal. Going to a temple is not something I do as a habit or even too willingly, for various reasons. Perhaps strongest of all is the feeling I have had for some years now that there is no real use talking to god – whoever, whatever and wherever that god may be – since I have not been too happy with the behaviour of the divine in my life over the past few years. So why chat, when you are not too pleased with the being that you are chatting to? Prolonged arguments and extended debates get me nowhere; I have too much to do and too little time to waste in doing it.

For most of my life, going to a temple has been more to please my mother, or to accompany her there. I was not really a willing participant, but wanted to make her happy – or prevent future arguments, I am not sure which – so I would tag along and follow instructions without too much grumbling. So whatever I do know about prayer, ritual or even what to do in a temple comes from memories that are admittedly dim, since I rarely was conscious of what I was doing, having blanked happily out while worrying about whether the car would be towed and acting only on cue.

So when I did get to the temple, I had only the faintest idea of how to go about things. I smiled hopefully at the chappie who was making receipts for money he collected for the puja thalis, and he seemed to realise that I was more or less clueless. He told me how to proceed and watched from the entrance to see that I followed directions. But I have never missed a cue in all the appearances I have had to make on stage, and I was not about to miss one in the house of worship. I trotted dutifully behind the crowd, tailing on particular woman who seemed to be there with a definite purpose, not lingering vaguely muttering prayers like most of the others.

It started with the frenetic beating of drums as the doors of the shrine opened and the folks gathered got the first glimpse of the lord for the day. It was a small idol, almost primitive in its bug-eyes and rough finish – very unlike the nicely polished and shaped limbs of the other statuettes. But it was the reigning deity of the temple complex and appeared to garner all the devotion of the moment. I handed over my thali to the priest and was summoned a few minutes later to collect the blessed offering, I dropped in my coin, waved my hands over the sacred flame and beat a hasty retreat, collecting my prasadam en route to the real world that waited outside.

I was asked by someone later if I didn’t feel good about having communed with the gods. I had to say I didn’t. I would rather have found salvation and my inner peace with none of the trappings. After all, don’t they say that there is god within each one of us all?

Pot of rice

The problem with most Indian festivals, however minor, is that they involve food. Yesterday was, according to the TamBram calendar, one of the four days of Pongal, the one that we choose in all our infinite wisdom, to celebrate. It was, for us, also the most convenient, sandwiched between one long working week and the next, sort of bundled into a time-and-space continuum that fit neatly into our combined lives.

So, forewarned being forearmed, we got all set for the Big Day. I remembered only dimly what my mother did for the festival but, after a brief argument with the self, the Patriarch and the kitten – who yawned, bit me on the thumb and muttered direly something to the tune of feed me or else I will bite you and shred your favourite silk kurti that is lying on the bed – I decided to keep it simple, think clean thoughts and step nimbly over the religious sentiment and ritual to my seat at the dining table. The day was all about pongal of two kinds – sweet and savoury – and a bite or two of crisp friend something and some dahi-based something else.

Which worked out well. I do a good khichdi, which is what ven-pongal essentially is, and am a dab hand at pakoras. It was the sweet, nut-and-raisin-studded sakkaraipongal that defeated me, not in deed, but in word. I looked up the recipe, combed my memory for what my mother would do and got all the ingredients together. I was all ready and fairly willing to get to work, since all it really involved was to cook rice and dal in milk, add jaggery to sweeten it and the dunk in the bits and pieces nicely fried in copious amounts of ghee. Plan made, process not difficult, but prospect distinctly frightening.

With all this, I needed a back-up plan. So I made one. I called the Rama temple in central Mumbai and asked if they were making the sweet-rice concoction for the occasion. They were indeed, and I merely had to call them, make a booking and then go and collect the prasadam – as that was what it would be, nicely sanctified and more appreciated – before a certain time in the morning the next day. I did. And, while that makes another story that I shall tell tomorrow, I picked up my containers of sakkaraipongal and bore them triumphantly homewards.

On Pongal, duly and dutifully bathed and purified in body if not quite in mind, we sat down to a lunch of ven-pongal, morkozhambu (kadi), bajji (pakoras) and sakkaraipongal. It was delicious. Maybe it would have been better if I had made it. Maybe next year, I will.

Home sweet home

It is coming around to that time of year - well, maybe more than one year - when minds turn not-so-idly to thoughts of redecorating. Winter is perhaps the best time to do any work on the home, since it is cool and breezy and going without the fan or air-conditioning is still fairly comfortable. This is when there is a great deal of hammering and scraping going on in almost any apartment block, with painting, tiling, polishing carpentry and other jobs in progress what seems like all day and night long. The people downstairs become enemies, as the people upstairs start a feud with the people above them, who have a war going on with the people next door to them…ad infinitum.

We are in just this situation right now. When we had a little of our house ‘done’ – a new linen closet that extended into a window and what was, in effect, a new wall replacing the old that was water damaged and nicely polished floors over which father, kitten, maid and myself slide as we try and move from one end of the house to the other – we were self-conscious to a fault about how much noise we were making as furniture was pulled around, doors were slammed and machines whirred furiously. But our work had a finite start and finish, and the clean up was as fast and furious. There was little debris left outside the house and, though we are still trying to get rid of the swathes of white cement left behind by the final ‘finisher’ of the marble polishing process, nothing of the activity is visible in the lobby, the landing or the stairwell. I cannot say that of the people downstairs, who have been littering our wing of the building for weeks now, making the most unholy din through the day and late into the night – until threatened with legal action – and generally being uncouth and disorderly about the entire proceedings.

In all this, we have decided to get our own tiny form of revenge by starting work on our apartment just when the unmannerly people downstairs have finished with theirs. Which means that we will begin painting our home shortly, make a satisfactory amount of noise doing so and disturb the folks who have made our lives fairly unhappy for a while now. This is not a deliberate decision that we are taking, even though my father and I do grin wickedly and make evil jokes about how to make it even more difficult for our vertical neighbours to rest in the peace that they are used to from us. It just so happens that the timing is more or less perfect for our nefarious intentions.

But getting a home painted is not as easy as it sounds to be. First, we have to decide on when. While we are ready almost overnight – I said “ALMOST” – the painter has to visit and figure out what needs to be done and how soon it can be done – which takes another few weeks to schedule. The entire house cannot be given over, however tempting it may seem, and we cannot possibly, in all practical reality, move into a hotel for the two or so weeks it will take. Once that is done, the colours need to be chosen. This time, I thought I would look at textures or colours that would bring more light and sunshine into our home and so our lives. So I looked for gold, rough-surface veneers and the like, but was offered designs that ranged from wildly aquatic swirls to pastoral scenes to Spiderman swinging over Gotham City with Batman in hot pursuit.

Shudder.

We are now planning to stick with plain white or off-white. And we hope to get it started as soon as the people downstairs move back into their flat.

Culinary short comings

I am all for doing things in the kitchen, and more so for doing them the traditional way. While I completely agree with the convenience that the miracles of technology and design that are ‘mixies’ and garlic squishers afford me and my cooking habit, I am unexpectedly – especially since I am a child of the modern age - pleased by the old-style ‘gadgetry’ that involves time, hard labour and much sweat. It is for some reason far more satisfying to create a masala paste using a seasoned stone ammi than a whirring blender. Making a pesto in a Moulinex (which is synonymous with ‘grinder’ in some parts of the world) is all very well, but pulverising the basil, pine nuts, olive oil, parmesan and garlic in a pestle and mortar worm smooth with the pastes of time is far more edifying. And slowly emulsifying the ingredients for a fresh batch of mayonnaise using a whisk or an egg-beater is a great deal more creative than it is to pour it all into a goblet and flick a switch.

The best part of the process is the sensation that each step produces. The peeling of the garlic, the shelling of the pine nuts, the grating of the parmesan added as the final stage…it is all part of the mood created, which lingers until the last lick of the sauce has been swallowed. There is the first sharp tang of the garlic as it releases its essential oils; then the stiff crackle of the nuts as they crumble under the pressure of the pestle; then the leafy scent of the basil, changing from an almost-citric wave to a more gentle waft of herbal freshness - the entire blend speaks of sunshine and warmth, old stone kitchens, huge pots simmering on a fire and the passionate gossip of Italian women.

The only time I ever hand ground idli batter was when my father and I convinced my mother that it would be nicer, more effective and far more interesting to do it the hard way. So we set up the enormous and startlingly heavy attukal, cleaned of the accumulated dust of the decades of its disuse, and assembled to try and figure out what to do. My mother, though she had never really been in a kitchen before she got married and went nuclear with Papa and me, had a clue. So we struggled through the fug of incomprehension and started the grinding. Standing and moving the heavy grinding stone around the way it was prescribed did nothing for either our backs and shoulders or the mixture of rice and dal that needed to become a smooth blend. Finally, after many rude words and inarticulate huffing, we clambered up onto the large kitchen counter and managed better that way. I broke a couple of nicely manicured nails, my mother bruised a finger, my father got combinedly bellowed at for his ‘useful’ suggestions…but we got the job done. Though the idlis didn’t taste very different from the usual hi-tech grind, we felt the satisfaction – and the wounds – of a job well done under rather adverse and totally unfamiliar circumstances.

This may not be the shortest, easiest, most hassle-free way to work in a kitchen. But it makes you feel that you are actually being creative, making the effort to produce something with all the love and labour that it entails. And, finally, that you really do deserve all the credit and kudos you garner at the end of dinner…or lunch.

Vamping it up

I have talked about how I want to be the bad lady in a television soap opera many times before in this space. But what I never really spoke of is what happens when I get labelled the ‘bad lady’, without having any clue where the title came from and how I deserved it. Something of the kind is happening to me right now, and I am fairly amused by it, my feelings tinged a little by a sense of indignation at being the villain (villainess?) of the piece without my having any concept, clear or otherwise, of what the piece is, or was, and what my role in it has been. If I knew, I could enjoy it more.

It all began with a potential friendship gone off, in the way that food goes off – somewhat nasty to look at and giving off the gentle pong of something that should be consigned to the bin asap, using a pair of long tongs or a clothespin on the nose approach. I did write about that whole bit of ick in my life, and had forgotten, for the most part, all about it. It was one of those ships in the night scenarios that are best not even having been known when it was, the moment it existed, if you know what I mean. But, while it was fun, as long as it lasted, the idiocy and wastefulness of energy, time and interest that it involved then left behind a brief regret even as it faded into nothingness. (Do I protest too much? No, actually, I was trying to spin this blog out a bit, which is why I am going on so!)

Be that as it may and all that good stuff – my life has not changed in any way after that little blip, and I don’t expect it to now. But what I do find is that I am the baddie for the moment. All those who watched and waited avidly for more are now seemingly seeing me as the perpetrator of whatever crime left the relationship – for lack of any other more suitable word – in a certain black hole. Which means that an entire section of the place I work at is not talking to me, not even smiling in my direction. Which is okay, except for the minor fact that most of these people have known me for a good ten or more years, and have never yet missed out on the opportunity to stop and chat, never mind that I am bogged to the ears and keyboard with deadlines and page-making programs. Now, almost all of them walk past, eyes firmly forward, as if I was some kind of bad smell.

In a strange way, that is fine, too. My problem is not being ignored or snubbed; it is the lack of an appropriate image for me in this whole picture. I am not dressed or made up for it, which annoys me rather. As I was telling my irascible boss and my best-bud this morning, I need a slim-fit red velvet gown, slit up to above the thigh, long black satin gloves, a jewelled cigarette holder, spiky perilous heels, a bouffant up-do held by a diamante flower pin, lots of eye black and red lipstick and some tastefully scattered diamonds of the very expensive kind. We are still debating the virtues of fishnet tights and a frilled garter. That, in my opinion, would be tarty.

I have the heels, the make-up and a soupcon of the sparkly stuff. The rest…well…when I acquire it, I can play my part to perfection. Until then you, like me, will have to wait and watch how the story pans out and how far upwards the TRPs will swoop.

Children of the light

There are horrific tales of child abuse coming out of the north of India these days. Stories of children kidnapped and sexually abused and killed and cannibalised. Body parts and decaying clothes found buried in the garden or rotting in the gutter. Surgical supplies, disinfectants and deodorisers added to the bone-chilling story of nightmarish death. The parents have searched for their children in vain, to be told many days, even years later that they had died horrifically, in a manner that is the stuff of snuff films that are beyond disgusting.

The children that vanished belonged to people – to mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, other relatives, homes, families…while none were especially wealthy or privileged, they all were, in some way, treasured and missed. To find them – or what remains – in such a devastating manner not only condemns the already-beleaguered image of the Indian police, but also the people who did this to them, trial by a jury of media watchers, before the law or justice can get them punished.

Anyone who hurts a child – and there are so many of them all over the world – should be made to suffer as much as possible. While I will not spout sappy sentimentality about how children are little flowers that should be nurtured, I think that if we want a future with any sort of light and hope, young people should be kept safe, loved, cherished.

Perhaps my first and only real experience in dealing with a child was when I met the very young daughter of a close friend of mine. She was just over two years old at the time and we became friends almost instantly. She was my bodyguard as much as I was hers – she would protect me against people (particularly men) getting too friendly at parties or at the mall or grocery store and I was her “aunty”, buying her pink lace negligees and bright red roller skates and teaching her how to use make-up for the time when she was old enough to use it. She was my sweetie, my baby, my pet, something I could play with and enjoy and teach, but that I could return to its rightful parent once I was done. Perhaps that gave us more freedom to be ourselves and to be friends. Today that baby is grown up, in college, ready to face her own life and world. And today I am half that world away from her, not having seen her for more years that I like to remember. But the affection and the memories of the bond we once shared still lingers.

That was perhaps the best learning process of all my life – how to make sure that someone else is happier than I am with what I am to her and to myself. And it also taught me how important a child is to life – mine, hers, society and the world in general.

Just cat style

Our kitten is rapidly developing into a – sigh – cat. She has not yet lost the baby cuteness that makes us give her whatever she wants when she wants it – and, oh boy, does she ever make it so clear that she wants something NOW! – but she has an occasionally-distressing tendency to be startlingly independent and is even hiding things from us, her adopted family. ‘Adopted’, because she claimed us as hers; we had little, if any, say in the matter. She has her moods, which are very human in some ways; she will run away and hide under the bed when she does not want to be social, bite if she is restrained or constrained in any way and choose her own times to be friendly, affectionate or demanding of our attention.
And it is a specific kind of attention, too, not just what we have the time and energy to dole out at that particular moment. When she wants us to play, she will come and tap either me or my father on the foot and then run away when we shriek in nicely simulated startlement, which is exactly the response she wants. Or if she feels that she is being ignored, neglected or just plain devilish, she will charge at us, bite smartly at a toe, an ankle or a dangling hand and then skitter madly over the highly polished tiles to ‘hide’ under the carpet or bedspread, fondly imagining that since her little big-eared head is hidden from our view, we cannot see the rest of her, fat little bottom and wildly waving tail, that is clearly visible. Her other favourite trick is to slide under the flaps of a cardboard box she takes siestas in – ignoring her nicely cushioned came basket – and pretend that she is invisible, why we pretend, in our turn, to be looking for her everywhere.
But where she is still very much a baby is when the vet arrived. As he did yesterday evening. It was a routine check-up, to see if she is healthy and for a fortuitous clipping of razor-edged claws and a cleaning of the mystery that is her digestive system with a judicious deworming pill. She started to run when the doctor and his assistant came in, then proceeded to make a scene with ear-splitting yowls and screams as her nails were cut and her tummy felt to check for anything that should not have been there. But it was when the pill made her acquaintance that she really let fly. It was truly a caterwauling, as she struggled and clawed and bit both men who were trying to hold her still on the sofa and shove the half-tablet down her throat. I stood with my back to the scene, my ears plugged, while my father hovered over his pet, making soothing noises.

All to no avail. The vet gave up the battle and the cat fled to her haven under a planter’s chair in my bedroom. All four of us – vet, assistant, father and self – stood sheepishly around, examining our wounds and exclaiming how the urchin who had come to us the size of a teacup had grown into such a healthy –and loud – animal. Much later, long after the visitors had gone and we had done mopping up blood, she emerged, ears flat against her head, eyes rounded, tail waving apprehensively. It was only after she was held, cuddled, talked to, shown that there was no one there and fed some of her favourite treats that she deigned to settle down, still wary of noises that were not immediately identifiable.

But all was not lost. After dinner, while she and I idly watched something on television and father-dear had gone to bed, I quietly, without any fuss, opened her mouth and pushed in the deworming dose. She swallowed it before she realised what I was doing and then ate a hearty meal. Which only goes to show that she, like all people, is a person whose feelings need to be respected.

Seasonal greetings!

’Tis generally the season to be happy. Apart from the overall spring cleaning that has been in progress in my life – everything from my address book to my desk at work has been refurbished, the extraneous weeded out, the excessive removed – there is a sense of fresh beginnings and new directions to explore, a bright morning that will last, I hope, a very long time.

It has a lot to do with the weather. After a very long and hot summer last year came a burst of coolth with the rain, late and sporadic as it was to start with. The monsoon then gained in sound and fury, signifying a whole lot for the beleaguered Mumbaikar, who was dreading a rerun of the deluge that had drowned the city the year before. There were floods, but fewer people were trapped by them, since most chose to stay home and safe from the rising waters. Clearance work was fast, gaining the municipal corporation some praise, but the flack came with the shape (literally) of the roads and the state of the city’s transport systems.

And then, after the rain, came the relentless heat. It burst into the air, heating the atmosphere, the city and its denizens with no mercy, frying butterflies as they alit on the pavement for a brief and lethal moment, melting the tempers and tiffins of commuters in trains, buses and cars alike. A brief thunderstorm or two assuaged frayed emotions and battered asphalt for a few moments, cooling overheated minds and bodies even as the fat drops of salty rainwater vanished into the haze that blanketed the city.

But over the last couple of weeks there has been some relief. A merciful lowering of temperatures at night has made it easier to bear the brilliant sunshine and golden heat of the afternoon, when the birds, the plants and our kitten take a deep and prolonged nap. And the past week has been chilly, to the stage when I turn off the air conditioner in the car and tuck my feet under the bedspread at night. The morning chill sends the kitten into a frenzy of mad activity, sliding across the newly polished floors in the house, skittering chirping over the sofa cushions and hopping wildly behind us as we potter about, half-asleep, opening windows, tidying beds and making coffee.

It’s great for the mood, too. I feel lighter, brighter, better, happier. My year has started well, with family, friends, affection, laughter and some chocolate. I hope it stays that way!

Bonds over time

I met a friend this morning. She is someone I have worked with in what now feels like an earlier life – in fact, she was my boss then and my friend now; when we made features pages together in the newspaper we were part of, we fought truly, madly, deeply every other day, but got our work done to what was perhaps the best that was ever seen in print. When I left and, eventually, she did, too, we became friends, the relationship cemented by years of merciful distance and even longer of affection allowed to grow because of the infrequent meetings. So when she called to say she was around the corner and would I spend some time with her, I was more than willing, except for the fact that there was no way I could go very far from my office, my startlingly good-humoured boss and his edit meeting or my precious mug of piping hot water. So we met in the parking lot downstairs, chatted as the wind blew through our already ruffled hair and exchanged gossip, giggles and hugs even as people we both knew and neither wanted to see walked past to and from work.

It was fun to talk to someone outside what has become my fairly limited sphere of interaction. More, it was good to spend time, however short, with someone who knows me, is fond of me and has no interest in deriving anything from me except for affection and laughter. And I have missed that. But today, apart from my delight at meeting her, there is a freedom and a sense of relief and lightness that I feel that has me smiling, genuinely pleased with my life and where I am in it.

The darkness that I have shed from my mind seems to have something to do with recent events. For a while now I have been trying to make friends with someone who is nothing like the usual person I count as part of my life, certainly not my ‘type’, as so many others who know me well have pointed out with varying degrees of patience. This man has been expressing his interest in me for a few months now, in spite of the fact that I have said, many times over, that we want different outcomes of any kind of bond we may develop. And now, that message seems to have struck home, or else my disinterest in his intentions has. He has decided not to know me, which is not a problem. But he is also behaving like a child, which was for a moment hurtful and is now just plain hilarious. He walks the long way around the huge hall that we call home at work just to avoid a possible acknowledgement of my presence and is doing all he can to be deliberately and pointedly somewhere else. Bless the man and his silly little mind!

Any interaction over time is a relationship. There is no denying that truth. Even if there is no sense of permanence, no commitment, no feeling that is beyond the here and now, there is a commonality of time and place and experience that creates something that is more than just two strangers passing each other on the street. When it lasts, like it did with my friend who came to visit this morning, it leaves a warm and fuzzy feeling that is a joy to know. When it doesn’t, like the second person I wrote of, it drains away with a temporary bitterness that fades into oblivion, as if it had never existed.

Proof of the pudding

Every family has traditions, created for a special occasion and maintained fairly faithfully thereafter. In ours, we have the great Christmas pudding week. We assemble it, then start cooking and, voila, some days later, we have a pudding. And soon we have the proof, too, with the smear of caramel and the crumb of dried fruit peel that are the remains of the day we started eating.

There is nothing, essentially, new about this. What is, is that we eat this pudding only three days after Christmas, to celebrate the birth of another male child, who grew up and, many years later, became my father. It seemed far more appropriate to cut into a rich, redolent, dark-as-Satan’s-mind melange of fruit, fat and flour than it did to slice up a wimpily sweet and airy-fairy heap called a ‘cake’. That we do on Christmas, though some years it has been caramel custard, kheer or even cookies to celebrate the coming of the Christ-child.

Officially, the making of the pudding begins on December 25. But preparations are made long before. In early December, we start with shopping. One of us heads out to the store, determined to stick to the list…a truly impossible task without huge doses of will power, especially when the shopper looks at all the various spices and dried fruit lined up on the shelves and wants to try everything with the vague idea that “Maybe that would go well in the pudding!”

But restraint and all, all the ingredients get slowly accumulated. Breadcrumbs are made, with leftover toast and many arguments about the virtue of white bread over the grainy, high-fibre browner versions that I prefer. Candied peel is chopped fine and soaked, along with sultanas and raisins and an occasional apricot or honey prune, in a slosh or four of brandy. Every day for a week at least this fragrantly alcoholic mix is turned and tasted, with a few more drops of brandy added, a little more nutmeg grated in, a couple of fresh raisins put in to replace the ones taken out for the taste tests.

On Christmas, in between the general cooking and the arguments about whether mithai would be better than chocolate pancakes with ice cream, the pudding is put together in the bowl in which it will steam for the next few days. Flour, eggs, breadcrumbs, spices, fat, the steeped fruit and a little more brandy are stirred together to make a thick, studded, aromatic batter that is alcoholic enough to make the cook stagger after a deep breath.

Then begins the cooking itself. The pudding bowl is placed in a deep pan, a modified bain marie, and set on the stovetop, where it will simmer over the next three days, a few hours every day, morning and evening, after I get home from work and before I leave in the morning. Every now and then the water level is adjusted and a little more brandy is poured in.

On THE DAY, the cooking continues until dinner time. Then the stove is turned off, the pudding allowed to sit for the half hour or so while we eat a light repast, which could be anything from toast to soup to salad to dahi-chawal to dal-roti-sabji, as it was this year. The table is cleared and the dessert plates and forks set out. The pudding is gently, lovingly, carefully unmoulded to the music of some interesting words when a raisin sticks to the bowl or the top doesn’t come off in one piece. And then it is carried out with ceremony, flamed with brandy, a wish made and generous slabs cut and served.

And then there is only the sound of forks clinking on glass and a spice-laden silence…

Back with a…err…bang!

I have always wondered why a new year is such a big deal. And today I found soulmates on-line. Nope, not a chat room or a cyber-club of sorts, but a group of protestors in Nantes, in western France, who have decided that time does not have to go by, that a new year is a waste of effort and progress in the direction that the world has been taking all these years should be stopped. And a year before it is time, they have been yelling, “No to 2008!”

I like time going by, mostly for the reason that when it does, the nightmares of the past can fade a little. For me, the end of the year used to be the start of a new one, a beginning that heralded new experiences, new books, new restaurants and, in a few months, the new tax year. Then it became a time that needed to be forgotten but never could, when my mother died at the end of a year that was, to put it mildly, painful. Now, just over a year after that nasty period in our lives, nothing has faded, nothing has been forgotten, nothing has settled into a calmer and more bearable place. But things have found some closure and the mind has reconciled to the fact that it all happened, sadly, unfortunately, unforgettably.

For this new year, I am looking forward to a great deal. A new job, perhaps. New friends, certainly. New experiences, of course. And a whole new attitude, hopefully. If I have a resolution, it is to be more positive, more proactive, more accomplishing. I need to get things done and, much to the dismay and trepidation of the two friends who know me well, I have said I will do, react, respond and revise. Everything from my life to my wardrobe, my address book to my fashion statement. Perhaps it is only my snob values that will remain constant.

PS: Happy New Year. The French in Nantes would not approve. I am not sure I do.