More Indian than Indians

I spent much of today going back in my head to a time when I was in college, trying to balance, academics, interests and life in general. It was an age when everything was about passion, be it watching a television soap opera or learning how to drive a car with automatic transmission, writing a zillion-word term paper on something you couldn’t quite comprehend but had a fabulously unorthodox spin on or skiing down the slope to the grocery store at two in the morning during a snow storm. And whatever I did, whatever my friends did, whatever we did together, we did passionately, with more dedication than we made up our eyes or debated the merits of hot dogs over pretzels for a Sunday afternoon much-craving. It was all very American, all very intense, all very high adrenaline.

But when I my first real Indian - of the kind from India, that is – I started learning what ‘laid back’ really meant. The first friend I made who was not white-skinned and part of the local ethos was a woman from southern India, who had moved to the United States for an education, fallen in love with an Indian man there for the same reason and settled down to a life of hectic domesticity with him, finally moving into a small town in the Rocky Mountains known for its university and surrounding ski resorts. We became friends almost immediately and I was swept into the family fold with no effort at all. And me, who had never really been able to bond with Indians abroad, melted in very happily and comfortably.

And my friend showed me a way of living that had all the passion that mine had been about, but with a very different focus. Academia or a career was all very well, and the dedication was total in those aspects. But where everyday life and social interaction was concerned, it was a whole new game. My friend introduced me to all hers and I saw how hard they worked to be laid back and casual and, amazingly, ‘Indian’. I was taken to potluck lunches and dinners, did my thing at dandiyas and disco nights, sat through dance and music concerts, even giggled the evening through at a comedy show that was a series of silly jokes and mimicry that centred on Bollywood and South Indian cinema, neither of which I knew anything about, but that was more than familiar to the people I sat with. In fact, some of them who had spent all their lives away from the country that almost all of them called ‘back home’ knew dialogues from films, told me about the private lives of movie stars and even had incredible knowledge of what box office takings were for one section of cinematic society.

And during Indian festival season I learned more than I could ever have done in my own environment in Mumbai or elsewhere that I may have called ‘home’ up to that time. I went to bhajan sessions, I went to pujas, I went to birthday parties and meditation workshops and I got more prayer and people and food than I could handle. But it was all part of that intense learning experience that was life for the expatriate Indian who longed for a home and roots that he or she had never known or had forgotten about. These people were more Indian than Indians who lived in India, even if their India was one that they dimly recalled from too many years earlier. For me, it was an India that I delighted in, since I could, more than anything else, return soon enough to a world that I did know, I did belong to and could understand.

Phone in, phone out

When I was very young, I never had one of those toy telephones, the kind that children play with and sound just like their parents or nannies do. I never picked up a bright plastic receiver, dialled a number on the bright plastic dial, bashed on the bright plastic disconnect button and yelled into the mouthpiece in a bright plastic voice, mimicking what I had seen and heard Mother or Father do. Perhaps that is why I spend so much time on the phone now that I am all grown up, rattling between calls that are for work and calls that are for anything but. And both are a source of not just great loads of information, but occasionally of amusement and, once in a rare while, a lasting connection.

Once upon a time I was hooked on to that dratted instrument. All I did was talk to friends, generally to one friend, and we went on and on about everything and, funnily enough, nothing. She and I went to school together, literally speaking, walking down the hill every morning and back up again every evening. And then we got on the phone and started our hours-long chats. We talked about school and our classmates and teachers and homework and friends and parents and clothes and shoes and books and more. And we always had more to talk about, even after our mothers had pried us off the telephone and pushed us into our rooms to bathe, do assignments and, as a last resort, sleep.

That early addiction led to more serious ones later on, as I grew up. Unfortunately for those who paid the bills, many of my calls were long distance, since many of my friends were in places far removed from wherever I was. So if I wanted to call my best friend, it had to be on the other side of the world, since I was in New York and she was in Mumbai. As I got older, my best friends changed and where we were changed, too. For now, my best friends are in London and Denver, while I am many miles away in my own home city. So phone calls are attenuated and conversations kept basic. Better yet, email does the trick painlessly.

What do you talk about for so long when you get on the phone, my father often demands, with a certain irate tone colouring his normally laughing voice. I cannot explain, since I really don’t know. With Nina it is all about people we know, places we went, food we ate and shopping we should not have done. There are many bouts of giggles and much family news exchanged. In between, there will be a feminine foible or four discussed, health updates made and worries and sins confessed and worried over. Some yelling at each other for stuff done or not done happens, and a little affection crosses the line in both directions. With Karen, on the other side of the world, it is all done much quicker and more rarely, but it still is done, to our mutual satisfaction, once in a while. I have a strange feeling that we are both saving it all up to vent at each other when we meet, hopefully later this year.

Phone calls these days are much shorter, limited to conversations for work, during which I manage usually to sound bored and fed up and very, very snooty, I am told. I want whoever it is to get off the phone as soon as possible so I can get back to whatever I am doing. But when it comes to friends, it becomes a matter of familiar comfort, talking about everything from the weather to the dog’s dinner, what we had for lunch and where we would be after six that evening. This inanity can last hours, or it can be a four-second rush – the intention is to keep in touch, if not literally, at least over a fibre-optic wire.

Funny ha-ha, funny peculiar

When I was a child, we had this slim book in our library that was called Funny Ha-Ha Funny Peculiar. It was all about news reports and headlines, advertisements and billboards and more, where there were bloopers, typos, malapropisms and just plain garble where there should have been carefully edited, cogent, coherent text. It did not make too much sense to my young mind at that stage but, as I grew up and read more newspapers and magazines, I started finding it very funny, even the peculiar bits. My sense of humour was honed by what I watched on television, what I read and what I listened to at home especially, where my parents’ dry sense of what was amusing strongly coloured my more obvious differentiation between what could safely and correctly be laughed at and what was a gaffe of mammoth proportions that should, for all purposes, be ignored.

Part of my growing up was a great deal of laughter. I was tickled in my fat little tummy by my mother, my father and many others who travelled across the city and even the world to see me burp and I chortled happily as I deflated rapidly in the middle after that rapid consumption of the contents of a large bottle. I giggled madly as my small friends and I chased a rabbit across the lawn and watched children older than us play on the tennis courts and balance on the sea wall. And I went into hysterics when a classmate in school showed us how he could burp heartily but then expelled his air content rather violently and noisily through another aperture. And I swallowed chuckles when I re-told the most ridiculous joke last night that was fabulously cute on the surface and amazingly sad and politically iffy under it.

But in all this, I have never been able to tell a joke with the right kind of mood attached to the punch line. In fact, very often, I forget the punch line altogether and end up feeling not just stupid, but socially inept, too, even as my audience looks carefully away from me and wonders whether it is time to laugh or to get up and go away. And I just cannot add all those wonderful embellishments that go into spreading out the suspense and setting the scene in a fabulously dramatic manner. I leave that to the experts and just bumble along, occasionally making people crack up and dissolve into mad giggle-bouts just when they need to be straight-facedly sober.

My own funny bone comes from a situation that I know well and am comfortable with. I can relate it to people I am easy with, those who know me well enough to get past my integral shyness and can understand not just my accent, but also my madness. Which is a select few, but it works well with and for them and we generally spend all our time together bursting into laughter for no reason at all but that we are together and having fun. I once spent a four-hour train ride sitting with one of my closest friends, the two of us in gales of giggles that completely puzzled her aunt, who was sitting just in front of us. When the two of us chat over the telephone, anyone listening to either of us is generally left open-mouthed at the hysteria that never seems to end, the chortles and chuckles that go on and on and on…

But isn’t that what friendship is all about? Someone to laugh with?

The big business of beauty

A friend of mine was at the beauty salon the other day and found something going on that caused an instant retreat behind a copy of Economist. That my friend would be reading something as ‘heavy’ as that rather than the more prescribed fare of Stardust or Cosmopolitan was in itself rather a going-on, but that would make a different story altogether. The place was not a massage parlour with the nudge-nudge wink-wink kind of connotation, and it was not a makeshift country liquor still or a dubious drug dealer den, but a plain, simple and outwardly straightforward parlour where people went in looking less than their best and emerged transformed into what the staff considered to be far better.

What shocked my friend was the fact that the person in the chair next door was getting his eyebrows threaded. What shocked me when I heard about it was the fact that my friend did not shave himself, but had it done by someone else. Also shocking was the name of the salon, but that is a piece of linguistic snobbery that even this blog does not dare to blunder into. Be all that as it may, my friend chose to do a little self-inudlgent pampering on a Sunday evening and found himself, Economist in hand, rather startled in his quest for a greater outward beauty. Even as he told us about it, his voice cracked squeakily in shock, making all of us laugh even as it spurred us on to new heights of descriptive analogy on what a man would do to make himself more attractive.

It happened to me a long time ago, perhaps one of the first times I ever went to a salon unaccompanied by a parent or a close friend who was allowed to see more of my legs than just my knees. In the chair next to mine – I was getting a hair-trim, not my legs waxed – there was a young man getting his face attended to. The beautician was bent over him, her chest pressed astonishingly closely to his nose, working away busily at something that I couldn’t see from my disadvantaged position of not being able to move more than my eyes, unless I wanted to get myself an avant garde asymmetrical hairdo, which I wasn’t quite ready and willing to do. When the girl moved, I saw the young man’s face, glowing red and tear-streaked under the bright lights. Furtively I peeked, then asked, in as much of a whisper as I could manage to be audible above the blasting Hindi film music from the sound system. He was getting his cheeks threaded, I was told, just before I was shouted at for moving my head – purely involuntarily, I apologised, the shock of hearing that a man was willing to undergo pain that was amazingly like that of labour just to save shaving for a day or so making me move more than my stylist would permit.

Over the years, the male quest for beauty has ceased to surprise me. I have seen men wandering into upmarket salons for chest waxing, facials, ear-hair reduction treatment and underarm laser hair removal, among other procedures. And today, when I find that the elderly gentleman sitting in the chair next to mine in the waiting room is going to have his mani-pedi done with a peach blush French polish done, I do no more than blink in response. It is, after all, not that astonishing any more. What still astonishes me is the various names that people give beauty parlours – Sweetie, Cute, Pretty Face, Image USA and much more. What next?

The unbearable rightness of being Mumbai

This city that is called Mumbai is incredible. I am obviously a little biased, but I think it is not just wonderful, but interesting, absorbing, mysterious and magical as well. While I love New York and could live there anytime I am able to, and I thoroughly enjoy being in London, Geneva, Denver, San Francisco, Paris and Madrid, or in so many other cities scattered around the world, I would prefer to be where I belong, in amchi Mumbai, the city that is home. With all its eccentricities and strangeness, it is a place that has a charisma, an undeniable charm, a bonhomie and joie de vivre that nowhere else can lay claim to. And the Mumbaikar has managed to nicely perfect that blend of chalta hai with kya hua and a touch of kaun jaane, making the species uniquely big city in essence, with a scattering of very small village nosiness thrown in for good measure.

Perhaps my favourite aspect of Mumbai is its fabulously contrary nature. The obvious, of course, stares anyone in the face if they actually see it – and the average Mumbaikar is inured to it, so is blind to it, too. The contrast, as ‘true life’ documentaries, both print and film, tell it, between rich and poor is seen best perhaps in this city. There will be slums across the street from luxury apartments, and scavengers walk cheek by jowl with those who fling garbage out of their elitist automobiles. Party-goers heading to the next bar share pavement space with vagrants huddled asleep under piles of rags. And urchins play cricket on the maidan just out of boundary of the school team practising at the nets.

And there is that attitude I already mentioned – one the one hand, the Mumbaikar is way too busy doing his or her own thing, rushing from home to work, or meeting to meeting, or from school to class to party to, at last, bed. Somewhere along the way, this busy-busy-busy person stops to ask how the neighbour’s aunt’s brother-in-law’s cousin’s friend’s son’s class teacher is after her hysterectomy and learns exactly how many spoons of salt to use in a pickle made of four kilos of mangoes that are not too sour and not too sweet but which someone with high blood pressure who has been told to avoid it will insist on eating. This same person will also hurry past a morcha without reading the boards held high by those demonstrating against or for something or the other and hop skip and jump over a sidewalk magic show put on for the benefit of street children who are getting a hot meal and some laughter in an otherwise bleak existence.

There is a wonderful anonymity about being a Mumbaikar, just like there is in almost any big city that runs almost purely on the energy of big business and high pressure financial transactions. No one will ask you your name when you stop at a roadside stall to buy a pen and the man who sold you your afternoon tabloid will smile only if he has been seeing you almost every day at the same time carrying the same umbrella for the past five and a half years, rain, shine or bandh. At the same time, everyone will rush to pick you up when you trip over a dug up road and fall flat on your face, strewing bag, papers and mobile phone around you. They will brush you down, give you back your various possessions and find you water to drink. Some will ask if you need more help, others will smile sympathetically and wave at you as you limp across the road to the station. And a few will be on the same train, check on you at your destination and make sure that you have not collapsed even a few days later.

This, bless it, is Mumbai. It is my city, the one that makes me laugh and reduces me to tears, turns my stomach and makes me hungry, the place I love as much as I hate it. This is my home.

One for the road

It was indeed a long and very winding road. We were maybe hopelessly lost, as Karen said, but making good time, like Marvin the Paranoid Android and his friends, somewhere inside a national park that hid the nuclear physics laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico. We were on our way to Albuquerque and had plunged into the forest singing Supertramp’s Logical Song at the loudest volume possible without disturbing the wildlife, when Karen killed a bird. Logically, sanely speaking, it was not her fault. She was driving, I was reading the map. We were lost, she said; I was trying to figure out where were could be. A small bird chose a moment when I happened to be looking up to fly headfirst and determinedly into the windscreen, committing suicide in one swift, unexpected, traumatic – for all of us – moment. Since we couldn’t stop, not with visions of being arrested for loitering around the edges of a nuclear facility of sorts, we drove on. I glowered at my friend; she tried to explain how it was not her fault. And while I knew, she compounded the felony by eating chicken – chicken! – at dinner that night.

Some of the roads we had driven on during our various holidays had been interesting. There was the straight stretch somewhere between Denver and Taos, which wound up and down but not from side to side – or that’s how it felt. It ran through an endless sea of violet sagebrush, the mountain air scented with the dry herbal fragrance of the plants that grew wild across the plain. Every now and then a small stall selling chillies of various kinds along with coloured corn and beads and baubles would pop up out of the side of the road and signs saying ‘Heritage site’ would find root at what seemed to be totally arbitrary locations.

Driving in West Texas is a pleasure, especially on the wide, double or triple lane highways. They may wind up, down or whichever side the terrain allowed them to, but they were always well maintained and smooth, with all possible hazards nicely signposted. What really impressed me were the signs telling drivers to watch out for roadkill as they coasted along. There was no real need for the signs. The roadkill was obvious. It punctuated the highway with a usually small, untidy, bloody heap of mangled animal, sometimes with its hair blowing in the desert breeze, sometimes a Mohawk of stiff quills quivering in the wind of automobile passage. It bothered me a lot to see what was once a porcupine or a rabbit or even a deer that had been so badly damaged by car wheels, but I soon got used to it and, in fact, wondered to my friend that the corpses were no longer littering the asphalt when we drove closer to city limits!

In contrast, roads in India are far more interesting to drive on. While the expressway between Mumbai and Pune is – for the most part – well maintained and in excellent condition, the old national highway was a lot more fun, even carsick me must admit. It wound and wandered through the hills, did magnificent hairpin bends and switchbacks and dived recklessly into tunnels and over flooded conduits with happy bumpiness. You could see stretches where the rocks had tumbled down the mountainsides and in parts the pretty waterfalls bubbled cheerfully down the cliffs and over the road itself. And as you drove along, you had to watch not for roadkill, but potential death, of the cattle that roamed unexpectedly across on a blind turn, from the trucks that came barrelling down on the wrong side, with the speeding cars that insisted on racing anything that ran on four wheels.

And it has been a very long, very winding and very exciting road for me. I hope there will be a lot more…

Let’s talk about sex!

For some reason, every time I take a look at the front page of the newspaper I am part of, I see a headline that screams sex. It is not that we publish an erotica section, or that we allow smutty language, or even that we provide extracts from the Kama Sutra from the edification of our readers, but the simple fact that so much about life today seems to talk about - if not hinge on – sex. Today it was something about Viagra helping people get over jet lag. Tomorrow it will be something on something else connected to the fascinating topic of sex…and the person most fascinated by it seems to be the one who selects these stories for publication.

But the battle of sex has been going on in Mumbai – and all over India – for a while now. The debate has raged for months over the matter of sex education, with various communities protesting about who should say what to whom and how the delicate matter should or should not be approached. According to most, teaching youngsters about sex will encourage them to not just experiment with it, but also indulge in it, which, the elders of most communities protest, will be disastrous.

What surprises me is the number of younger people who have been objecting to sex education in school - when it ideally should be made part of the curriculum. It is, in fact, then that the young people are insatiably curious, but not too well informed about consequences and results. So unless they are taught about the subject and how to deal with it and its various ramifications, from sexual abuse to birth control, there is a high likelihood of problems arising – unwanted pregnancy, disease or psychological trauma.

But why sex at all? I agree that it is necessary and if it did not happen, none of us would exist. But there is a certain limit to, at least, social behaviour where that topic is concerned. And most men do not even see that limit, let alone understand it – they are obsessed with sex, I find. Their minds wander in that direction no matter what the context may be. Talk about mashed potatoes, they think about sex. Talk about shopping, they think about sex. Talk about the state of the nation, they think about sex. Talk even about the way the sky looks just before a thunderstorm and somehow, via some convoluted mental route, they will think about sex. The brain cell that they own seems to be firmly located in their gonads and anything and everything will be directed thataways.

And I found the best way to deal with it is not mine, though mine does the trick when I want it to. I look blankly at men when they veer the conversation into a lane that ends in some chapter of the aforementioned Kama Sutra and sometimes even snub them with the verbal or psychological equivalent of a very cold shower. But a better way, a friend vouches for, is the aggressive tactic. Face them off, she advises; talk back when they start talking. And if you talk of sex rather better than they can, they get so intimidated that their thoughts suddenly do a U-turn and settle on mundane matters such as how to make really good mashed potatoes and where to buy the best shoes that were ever created in red patent leather.

I must try that some day, the next time a man does his thing with sex. Until then, my technique works fine for me. And there are always newspaper headlines to fuel the imagination.

Dancing in the dark

We were in Taos, Karen and I, and had just wandered up the road from the restaurant where we had just finished an exotic and delicious dinner that had starred everything from a gorgeously garlicky guacamole to a strangely newspaperish tortilla soup to ice-cream flecked with fragments of vanilla bean and, of all things, sage. There was to be Indian dancing in the back of the hotel where we had parked the car, we had been told, and we aimed single-mindedly in that direction. I was all for exploring the town, with its deserted plazas and closed shops, the colours of the brick and woodwork muted and other-worldly in the brightness of full-moon light. But Karen was better clued in to the hazards of a pueblo settlement, on the outskirts of which gambling was legal and liquor stores abundant, and insisted we could do any adventuring we wanted when it was daytime and sunlight blazed into the darkest nooks and shadows.

Any which way, I was in no fit state to explore, as much as I said I would. My resident amoeba, which I had collected during a rather spectacular trip East, was starting to protest something that I had fed it – whether it was the food or the too much of it, I was not sure and not particularly interested in at that moment. As we walked, my tummy rumbled ominously, I was starting to hurt in my middle and waves of biliousness rolled around my insides. But we made it to the small round enclosure where the dancing would take place, and sat down on the low wall surrounding it. For a while, the pain abated. The bright lanterns that lit up the ‘stage’ focussed everyone in an eerie glow, with Karen’s ordinarily marmalade-coloured hair turning an odd white-blonde.

Suddenly, there was a clamour of bells and the whisper of stiff fabric and out of the dark, into the ring of light ran a group of people. Dressed in recognisably ‘Indian’ style, with feathered headdresses, leather tunics and exquisitely beaded shoes, they sang and danced around a small fire that one of them lit in the very centre of the circle, their musical instruments simple, the sounds they made, unforgettably beautiful. Men, women, children – even one tiny boy who endeared himself to everyone, audience and dancers alike, with his antics and delightful smile – hopped, bobbed and stepped around in intricately interwoven rings, the steady drumbeat echoing through the sand beneath our feet and the blood that ran faster through our hearts.

But it was a performance that was well rehearsed and oft-performed. One of the members of the troupe – a tribe that specialised in this art form, we were told – did a very professional commentary, explaining how the dance had been created and what the movements meant. We learned about what to do just before going to war and how to show joy, when to dance for rain and where to celebrate the birth of a child. On cue, it drizzled, the raindrops evaporating off our heads and into the dry desert air within almost seconds. The dance continued through the brief shower, the clouds of dust now stamped flat into the hardening floor.

But it was more than my stomach could manage to take. A few minutes into the performance, I had bolted into the hotel to find a bathroom and emerged feeling green and fragile. I sat through until the end, Karen darting worried looks at me every now and then, neither of us enjoying the evening as much as we could have. But it was a memorable night, still more for the dance than for my predicament, and we went to sleep hearing the quick and nimble stamping of feet and the relentless thunder of the drums, seeing the glory of the intricate costumes and the charm of the small boy’s sweet smile…

The oddities of man

Everyone is a little eccentric – myself, you, all of us – in some way of the other. But there are people you meet, or hear about, who take the proverbial cake where being ‘different’ is concerned. In my life I have come across an awful lot of these, with some ‘met’ by proxy, through what other people have told me about their own lives and experiences.

Most recently, I temporarily employed a driver while my own was away getting married. I had this new chappie, an elderly gentleman, for a month or so, and first believed that he was staid, unexciting, really pretty normal. It was only after a week or so had passed that I found that he was anything but, in a very human way, of course. For one, he insisted that he would drive the way and the route that he would drive, never mind that I actually wanted to go somewhere and somehow else, so I could do whatever it is I wanted to do, wherever I wanted to do it. So when I had an appointment one morning, he decided that we would take a shortcut and wandered all over parts of the city that I had never been to, leave alone heard of. I was sorely tempted to throw him out of the car and proceed, which I have done to a former driver, but I could not, since I had no clue how to get to where I needed to get without the old man to get me out of wherever we had got to! That incident, along with the gent’s alarming tendency to go in and out and over every pothole and bump that he possibly could find on any road made me infinitely glad when, a couple of days ago, my own driver came back, happily married, and a far more dodgy character – at least where the road and its faults were concerned.

A friend told me about a character that he had known for years. The venerable old gentleman was, in many aspects, a charmer, which they do tend to be, but with a most interesting and individual way of looking at life. According to my friend, the man insisted on doing a lot of research into everything that he acquired before he acquired it, sometimes with a passion and dedication that was, to the rest of the more mundanely-inclined population, very strange indeed. You see, the gentleman wanted to buy a toaster. So, instead of just going out and looking at what was available, asking a few people and then deciding what colour he wanted of what size of what brand, he did a little more probing than you or I would have done. He discovered that the toaster made toast that was, unfortunately, slightly better done in one corner than the rest of the slice of bread. This discovery did not come easy to him. He went through 20 pounds of sliced bread, said my friend, already in giggles before he finished the story, and toasted his way doggedly through all of them. And doggedly was the bon mot – since he could not possibly eat all that toast, not in one go and not without suffering the consequences, it is sure, he threw it out. Every dog in the area and a few from elsewhere who had heard about the offer of free toast turned up for the picnic. And left the neighbours and the neighbourhood not just rather crowded with the canine presence and its leftovers, but also with the sound and fury of a whole herd – or should it be pack? – of hungry dogs clamouring for more even as the winners took all the best of the toast and crunched their happy way through a breakfast that lasted long into supper.

Eccentricity is the spice, literally, of life, and so many people have so many idiosyncrasies that keep me wondering what will come my way next. There is the man who covers all the gutters around his house with mosquito nets so that his own space will not be infested. There is the lady who buys a fixed 20 packets of sweet biscuits every morning to feed the stray dogs in the area. There is the girl who insists on closing every window and door in her home tightly, each sealed with strips of newspaper, so that no lizard can possible even breathe into her apartment. And there is me – and you, I bet – who has more oddities than I can possible even think up. All of which makes all of us, and life, far more fun than it would be otherwise!

Designs and dreams

I dropped by my clothes designer’s store last evening on my way home and found her in her usual welter of fabric and instructions and clients. Even as she hugged me in greeting and welcomed me into her office, she yelled at one of her girls about cleaning up, yelled at one of her embroiderers to change the colour of the thread he had used and yelled at the tea boy to stop putting so much sugar in the thick brew he boiled up every few hours. Between all that noise, she asked tenderly after me and mine, offered me tea and instructed someone to bring over the clothes she had ready for me to take home. And she insisted on climbing over the heaps of plastic bags crammed with textiles to show me some of the new bolts of fabric she had brought in the previous week, telling me how I really needed that swathe of silk or this bolt of brocade.

And I prowled, delighted in what could possibly become a serious addiction and is close to that stage already, I touched heavy silks with that unbeatable sheen, crisp cottons with the freshly starched crackle, intricate weaves that caught on the rough spots on my fingertips and soft mulls that almost seduced me into diving headfirst into them for a long and luxurious nap. On my way around the store I patted a tall pile of velvet cord and brushed past a tottering edifice that was all chiffons and slithery satins that threatened dire, soft, silent collapse.

She showed me colours that had my head floating away into dream-filled worlds and my sense of greed grinning ghoulishly at my bank account. Gorgeous jewel-toned raw silk - in ruby red, jade green, ivory-cream, brilliant scarlet, vivid sapphire blue...my hands reached out instinctively, wanting more, wanting it all. A stack of twill-textured silk weaves invited me to unfold and lech, my heart beating just that tiny bit faster as I opened out a wonderfully sheeny deep turquoise, block printed in pastels with a tinge of gold. And there were the whites, pure, clean, crisp whites, in linen, silk, cord, cotton, chiffon, lycra...after red, and sometimes even before it, white is a favourite colour, especially for shirts and kurtas.

With some difficulty, I prised myself away from all that and finished my business with my designer. And left soon after, my head abuzz with silks and satins, twills and taffetas, linens and line drawings of all the wonderful clothes that I would create with the cloth I had fiddled with…

One Indian summer

Karen and I left very early that morning, locking up the house and heading to the nearly bakery to grab some coffee and cinnamon rolls for a in-car breakfast. The rolls were hot and steaming gently on the dashboard, their cap of white frosting still soft and rolling down the sides of the fragrant curl of pastry. I pulled off bits for my friend as she steered through the city towards the expressway, singing softly with the radio as we drove along. We were headed out of town, out of the state on vacation for about a week, with our usual pact of ‘no newspapers, no TV, no work-related anything’ firmly in place.

I had flown in from London a few days before and she had been working harder than ever to clear time for a holiday and we were both a little punchy – me, from a slight loss of blood, having chopped the top of my finger off the previous evening when I was stripping corn off the cob sitting on the sofa of her living room. The trail of darkening red spots all over the house as I ran around looking for something to stop the bleeding would have put a CSI team into overtime and now I sported a brilliantly fluorescent bandaid over the end of the digit and held it determinedly apart from my other fingers, like something out of Star Trek on a bad alien day.

Undaunted though not unshaken, we were on our way to New Mexico, to see how the ‘other Indian’ lived. Our first stop would be Taos, where we had booked space in a hacienda that promised to be picturesque and still comfortable and affordable. As we wound through the Rockies across state lines, we found the vista gradually changing. Rough rocks and sharp edges gave way to violet-blue undulations of sagebrush carpeting softer contours of desert land. Far on the left of where we drove along the sand-swirled road rose the Sangre de Cristo mountains, where, legend has it, the blood of Christ colours the rocks even today. Huge sand dunes piled along the foothills in the famous national monument.

Suddenly, we were there. Taos scrolled its length in front of us as we came through two hills and into the ‘valley’, well known as a ski resort and artists’ town. We located our hotel and checked in, charmed by the blue-painted door set into adobe walls. Terracotta tiled floors led us into our room, a pretty twin, with what had to be the smallest bathroom I have ever squeezed myself into with the lowest water pressure I have ever tried to bathe in. If you sat on the potty, you mashed your knees into the door, while to see yourself in the mirror over the basin, you had to get into a strange semi-crouching sideways tangle, with your feet in the shower stall and your nose squashed against the cabinet.

But we were young and eager to see more and in the mood for adventure and it was all just that: a great adventure. In the early evening we wandered into the small town, not too far from where we were staying, and sat down to a feast of tortilla soup – which tasted rather like old newspaper in dishwater, to be honest – lashings of lemony guacamole with blue corn chips and enchiladas bathed in delightfully piquant chile. That was perhaps the night I discovered my body’s aversion to avocados, even though at that time we firmly believed that it was my resident amoeba that was doing mischief rather than what I put in my stomach that did me in. I staggered agonisedly through the rest of the evening, which was a fabulous melange of music, dance and light and sound.

And my rather blurred memories of that and more in New Mexico I will continue with another day, another blog…

If only I was rich…

Once in a while I wander into a museum and gaze longingly at something displayed in a particular gallery. That is perhaps one of the few times I wish that I had all the money in the world, at least enough to be able to take that piece home with me. It happens very rarely, but that impulse has been known to rear up in my head and bat me between the cerebra as if to tell me to wake up and get with it, get real, get back to reality. Not too long ago, maybe six or seven months before today, I looked lecherously at a delicately coloured print of a very pretty teenaged Krishna, lounging languorously as if he were aware how attractive he was. I am still working on the owner of that piece, but I am not sure I will ever get my greedy little paws on it.

But this acquisitive impulse has been mine ever since I can remember going to a museum. When I was about ten, I was taken by my mother to the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, where I fell flat in love with the wonderful bust of Queen Nefertiti, her proud head lifted slightly, that gorgeous nose straight and slim, the cheekbones sharp and the chin a statement to her power and confidence. I wanted her. I prowled around the not-very-big statuette many times, attracting the attention of the guard, who came over, all smiles, to agree with us about the lady’s undoubted beauty. My mother beamed fondly and bought me a print of the queen’s head, which did not quite make up for not having the real thing, but it did ok.

Some years later, we went to see the sculpture garden at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. I took one look at Henry Moore’s Moonbull and was enchanted. It was all soft sweeping curves and wonderful dips and hollows, all invitation to touch and feel and stroke. I wanted it; I asked for it; I demanded it. I got photographs of it, perhaps even a postcard. But it was obviously out of reach, as much as it was out of touching reach – when I reached out, a security man in typically American heavy armoury grinned and said, “Honey, don’t touch!” Many years later, I went back to visit the Moonbull and had that same impulse and was frowned upon by a guard of the same ilk, though a couple of generations younger.

Calder is another artist who invites a tactile exploration of his work. I dragged my Soul Sister Karen clear across San Francisco one chilly afternoon to see a special exhibit of his work when we were there for a week-long trip a few years ago. We gaped upwards, mouths ajar, eyes round and tearing with focus on the gentle movement of the pieces that hung at various heights from the ceiling of the gallery. They spun around and round, slowly, sometimes faster, occasionally turning to travel the other way for a while. My hand went instinctively upwards, my touch thwarted by the distance between me and the work. But then later, in the museum store, I found a replica, one that spun as whimsically hither and yon, as seductive even in its scaled-down form. “You wanna pay how much for that?!” a totally aghast Karen dragged me away, her practical streak overtaking my impulse and perhaps making me regret it for ever more. Though the jury is still out on that one.

There have been many instances of this since, from the Scythian gold from the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg that Mum and I drooled over to the Nizam’s pearls at the National Museum in Delhi that I instantly demanded money from my parents to buy. There was the painting of circus acrobats at the Jeu de Pomme in Paris, the Brancusi head at the Guggenheim in New York, the antique red heels at the London V&A's costume gallery, the sleek, supercilious cats at Steuben and the wonderful old-gold brocade sari at the Prince of Wales Museum in Mumbai. And each time I had that urgent desire for money, money, money, lots and lots of it….

Writing the Great Indian Novel

So many of my friends want to become writers. More often than not, they are deep into writing the great Indian novel - or the great American novel, in some cases – and have been doing research on whatever subject they plan to write on for ever since I first met them, sometimes when we were in nappies together in the same baby ward. None of them has really got beyond a first draft and if they have, even getting published, few have met with any degree of success, if they ever managed to spell the word right, that is.

Me, on the other hand, refuses to begin. I do not even think about it, in fact. While I do not doubt that I am a decent writer, I do not believe that I have in me the makings of a full scale novel, or even a shorter version of an opus that may, to some, seem magnum, while to others it is a mere half bottle. I don’t want to be a popular beverage, to continue to mangle the analogy, but I do want to be a cru that is not just rare, but far beyond the realm of easy accessibility. And that, by the way, is not to say that I should be incomprehensible, but merely that I need and want and aspire to be so good that there is no way in which I and my writing can be compared to whatever else is already available, or will be easily enough.

Whew.

Having got that off my conscience, it may interest you to know that I have been toying with the notion of writing a book. On what and when and how is all stuff of which I have absolutely no clue, but it would be fun to get started on at least those questions, if not the book itself. It will not be, I assure you to avoid the hazards of sounding like I am contradicting myself, a novel, certainly not a Great Indian one. What it will be, if it ever will be, is a vaguely bizarre, offbeat, funny, convoluted, fantastical, mad, crazy, eccentric adventure that only I could go on in my own head. Whether it will actually ever happen I cannot predict, but it has been started on various occasions in various ways, with various characters in various states of sanity. All to little avail, if any at all.

So the other day when I was talking to a dear friend of mine, we chatted about writing that famous Great Indian Novel. Neither of us ever will and neither of us even want to. But we made a good start, with all sorts of oddities creeping into our sentences even as we mused on the permutations of characters that live life in a plot of exceeding strangeness. Somewhere along the line there was Subhash Ghai, master-director, who was creating a story that somehow escaped reality and wandered into a series of worlds that went from borderline oddball to maximally unbelievable. And in and out of the framed there were characters that faded into wild fantasy. Where they went, what they did and who they were, I cannot remember, but I do know that we enjoyed every comma that we pounded out on our respective keyboards.

So that was my stab at the Great Indian Novel. Maybe I will take a real one at some vestige of a book, like I said earlier, once I get up enough go to get up and get going on it. All I need is a shove from a not too gentle encouragement. Maybe a nine-figure contract from a publisher?

In the gathering

I was reading a report this morning on two people who collect stuff. The ‘stuff’ in their case is old films and music, of which they have an enviable collection. Reading the story made me marvel at their patience and passion, to gather up all this and be so committed about it. I envy people who collect things. A girl I know stockpiles bus tickets – I did that once – and uses them to make bookmarks, she told me a few minutes ago. The same girl, who has a delightfully quirky sense of style and a way of speaking that never fails to charm me, also collects various other bits and pieces, from CDs to earrings to “all sorts of things that I really cannot throw away even though I know I have to,” she says ruefully.

A friend of mine collects Indian contemporary art. He has such a huge array of canvases and sculptures that they are rotated through his home and his workplace, making their appearance goodness knows where else. And with each sale, each auction and each exhibition, he acquires more, all of which needs to be looked after, gloated over and, best of all, shown off. Sometimes I wonder where he keeps all this and whether he can keep track of what he has, but he always assures me that he knows just what is where and when and why it was bought. Occasionally he will get rid of one piece…and probably replace it with many more!

Another friend also collects art, but of a slightly different kind. He acquires prints and occasionally picks up an original painting. Someone else I know accumulates – and I mean that literally – cars, buying everything from the most modern and hi-tech of models to old iron steeds that should, ideally, be stored in vacuum cases in a high security vault because they are so rare and so beautiful. A venerable old gentleman I have heard a great deal about has a huge collection of playing cards, while a person I once interviewed has a stash of fabrics, old and new, from which I had to almost literally be pried away, since they were so beautiful.

I never really collected anything with any kind of passion. My bus tickets were put into a large box that just filled up gradually, none of its contents catalogued or even sorted. Every time I went somewhere by bus, which I did quite a bit in the days before I ignominiously discovered just how bilious I could get in that huge vehicle, I saved the ticket, finally gathering so many that they had to be either thrown away or done something with, if you know what I mean, convoluted grammar notwithstanding. Then, one day, perhaps just before I took off to college, I went through the box and decided to throw most of what was in it away; all that I saved were the really interesting expeditions – the bus ride in Athens to see the Parthenon, the first time I rode to work from out home in Mumbai, the last day of high school after all the weepy farewells were said…

But, when I really think about it, what I do collect is people. So do all of us, but mine, to me, in my little world, are extra special. They all come in and out of my life with a certain drama, a significant fanfare, be it at work or in my personal realm. Each has memories that are good and bright and sunny and fun; every one of them has memories that are dark and bad and of the kind that should be forgotten, sooner the better. But they all mean something unique, a little potpourri of experience and incident that should, realistically speaking, never be thought of as unwanted. Because they have all made me what I am…my own collection of ‘stuff’.

Going by the book

Many moons ago, I started doing book reviews. It wasn’t because I liked reviewing books, or because I was especially interested in telling other people what I thought about something I had read, but because by reviewing a book, I got to keep it. And at that stage in my life, books were not what my money could be spent on, even though I had a veritable passion for them, so any source of acquiring them was fine by me, never mind that it was not particularly ethical a way of doing so, when I thought about, which I tried not to. Then my income increased, as did my comfort levels for an everyday existence and some of my more expensive habits (like book buying), and the drive to do book reviews correspondingly decreased – or, rather, it became more discriminating. So, if and when asked, I would pick and choose the books I wanted sent to me for review, opting for those on food, on travel, on crime and punishment (aka mysteries and thrillers) and, occasionally, the latest on the over-hype list.

But the word spread and I was commanded to review books for a would-be-literary website that was a part of the Internet company I was employed by. That worked up to point, except that since the books were part of the e-commerce scheme that the firm had begun, and sales were all, what I was sent for review was hardly what I would have wanted to collect. Jokes about various kinds of people and different communities abounded and, after about the five millionth gag on a characteristic of a group of people, the humour failed to elicit even a lacklustre response from me or anyone who may have been told the joke I was trying to find funny. Spirituality was another hot topic and after the nineteenth volume on the essence of God and the existence of good in the self, I was ready to never read again.

And then, as the word wandered over to a larger audience, people started calling to offer me books to review. While I always insisted that the final decision would be made by the books page editor of the publication that I was, by then, working with, I was rather nonplussed by the selection that I was being presented: how to win over your boss in ten days and get the keys to the washroom just before he went off on a week-long vacation; why wearing a tie will always help in promotion prospects in a sales-oriented job; when God is within you but is so busy battling the evil that resides there that you feel you have been forgotten in the more practical scheme of things…well, perhaps not exactly that, but you know what I mean. The books were not what I have ever seen anyone read, but I do know that they sell, perhaps to visiting aliens from a planet so far away that it has never been discovered.

But in all this, there have been moments to remember. When I was sent The Impressionist and told that I had to review it within a mere ten hours; when I called Kamila Shamsie in London and had more fun talking to her on the phone tan I did actually reading her book; when I spent a couple of hours talking to Shashi Tharoor about a work of fiction that was, at best, average, even though the writer was someone I could have cheerfully reviewed; when I gave a certain amateurish work a scathing review and the writer and her friends and family wrote in and called in to protest in terms that questioned not just my reviewing skills but also my very existence…it has been a fun span in my career and one that I would happily continue with, ups, downs, really bad books and all.

Today I am very selective in what I want to review. Most of the popular fiction comes my way, even though I tend to want to read and keep only the detective and fantasy novels. I have plugged solidly through stuff from managerial types telling people how to do better at work and through how to use mud to become more beautiful (which has, fortunately, little to do with ‘inner beauty’. And I enjoy the use of words to describe each one, whether I actually read it or not…which is a trade secret that I am not going to share at this time and in this blog!

Set them free

As we get ready to celebrate the anniversary of the start of the Indian freedom struggle, a battle that began 150 years ago, I start wondering how many people really understand what freedom is all about. Most think that it means the absence of chains of the limiting kind – the doors, the bars on the windows, the gates, the restrictions…but true freedom, the kind that Attenborough cried about all those years ago, is something else.

It is the air you breathe and the water you drink, the food you eat and the people you meet. It is in the life you live and the dreams you see, the bed you sleep in and the asphalt you walk on. And, most of all, it is in the face that you see looking back at you in the mirror. Because freedom is about heart, about soul, about spirit, about self. It is the story of how you believe that you can do what you want to do, be what you want to be and feel what you want to feel.

In this, there is a moral code. You cannot find true freedom by taking someone else’s. you cannot be truly free if you need to cage another soul to do it. And when you are free, you know just what it means to not be free, to be tied and tied down with more than you can break out of.

One aspect of life that keeps anyone from being truly free is love. Not the love of Harlequin romances or that word that is so casually tossed about when you talk of the ice cream that you like or the shirt you bought last week, but the love that comes from your mind, that makes you give up that much-vaunted freedom freely and happily with no regrets, ever. It allows you to be free in that you can love whoever, whatever, as much as you want to, as much as you possibly can, but it also binds you to that love in a way that you cannot be free of. It makes you feel a sense of responsibility, of gratefulness of duty, of wanting to please and never wanting to harm. It is what keeps you tied and tied down, that feeling and knowledge that makes you wonder what life was before that love happened to you.

The same loss of freedom comes from hate. You are so busy hating whoever, whatever, that you cannot set your mind free enough to see whatever else is around you, to enjoy it, to know it, to understand it, to believe it. All your energies are focussed on that hate and the object of it, so you do not have any left to find the light that is freedom. Which is perhaps why we, as Indians, will never be completely free.

Think about it.

Mango mania

The papers have been full of how the fruit flies. For about a week, perhaps more, there have been happy faces beamed into my living room courtesy the television news channels. And ever since it happened, my email box has been throbbing with junk mail telling me about how delicious it all was. What on earth is this all about? Very simple: The average Americans, a people I dearly love but will never forgive for their unrelenting naivete, have finally taken a bite of that elusive delight – the Alfonso mango. And they are going gaga, or more so than they normally are and always will be. For, you see, it has been, literally speaking, forbidden fruit for too long.

It is not that the United States has never met a mango. After all, these vaguely rounded and ideally sweet products of nature do grow in South America, Mexico and even the US, where they are cultivated in small boutique farms, or so I am told. But for reasons of a one-time bug infestation, the true-blue – orange, really – Alfonso, aka Apus, aka Hapus, aka so many other pet names has eluded Yank-land. So after much diplomatic to-ing and fro-ing, many years of requests and rejections and (I bet) a certain amount of hardline bargaining, the fruit finally made its way across the seven (or however many) seas and was scarfed down by an avid and elite set of taste-testers. All of them still being alive and well, the next consignments will be aimed at the aam (ha ha!) janata, people who can get to the stores selling them early enough to manage to buy a few. And the crowds are going crazy, the reports say, demanding more than supply can produce and willing to pay the rather extravagant price asked for them.

Some of my friends are protesting, saying that if all the good fruit is sent to America, as is likely to happen, there will not be enough for mango-philes here. Which makes sense, in a strange kind of way, since I firmly believe that if we didn’t have enough, we would not be doing this export stunt and once we do this export stunt we would as a nation have enough money from the sale to grow more, if not now, at least for the next season. When I said that to someone, she looked haughtily at me and sniped that I just did not have the sensitivity to appreciate something that was as close to ambrosia as fertilisers could make it. I somehow thought she meant sensibility, but she was clearly not in the mood for an argument.

As for me, I wouldn’t mind if every mango in stock – but for the few that Father will enjoy - was sent to wherever wanted it. I am not a fan of the fruit, even though I was born one. Rumour has it that my mother ate so many mangoes when she was expecting me that her family firmly believed that I would emerge a tasteful orange in skin colour with a nicely rounded shape and a sharply upturned little nose. Sort of paisley-ish, you know. When I was a little girl, I ate my share and more of the fruit, tucking in with a bib tucked neatly around my neck to keep me neater than I would have been otherwise. But, as I grew up, my skin and my tummy refused to keep up with my food habits and protested every time I ate a mango. As a result, there was more for the rest of the family and I turned my button nose up (mercifully it was not sharply upturned) whenever I was offered the fruit. As per contract with my mother, I did eat one spoonful from hers, as a mandate, but protested each time at the strange aftertaste and new spot that I knew would sprout on the very tip of the aforementioned nose within the next hour.

Call me a philistine, call me a tasteless boor, call my comments sacrilegious and blasphemous, but a mango and I are not soulmates. Whether we ever will be again, I do not know, but I have my doubts. Until then, all I can say to the Americans who are wallowing in delectably luscious orange fruit is: Bon Appetit!

Have a hat!

I read this morning about the death of Isabella Blow, the queen of the strange hat. On her last visit to India, she showed off some extremely exotic confections, one with a couple of birds perched on it, in rather dire straits. But she wore even the most bizarre of headgear with panache, walking tall and proud into all sorts of occasions without a twitch at the reception she – or her hats – got. She was ‘Aunty’ to ace designers like Philip Treacy and Alexander McQueen and, right through a serious illness, maintained her sense of style and humour. And her hats, of course.

I love hats. I look at them in stores, online, on other people’s heads, and sigh longingly. Many years ago, when I was younger, slimmer and far less sensible, I even bought hats. There was at one time a nicely stacked pile of the wonderful accessories on top of my wardrobe, and every time I got a free moment I would try them on, one after the other, posing in front of the mirror with my hair up…or down….or somewhere in between, sort of like a combination of Veronica Lake and Diana Ross on a bad hair day. And I would hold the aforementioned hat in what I fondly imagined to be sexy poses, tilted over one eye, over the front of my face, against my hip…rarely anything even remotely salacious or adult.

The only problem with hats is, will be and always was that I hate wearing them, except for these temporary stints admiring myself when no one else can see. I never liked anything on my head, be it the hood of a raincoat or the fold of a dupatta or a…sigh….hat. perhaps it is a latent case of claustrophobia, maybe it is the Asterixian feeling that the sky will fall on my head, or it could be that I just prefer my uppermost keratin follicles to get the same dosage of Vitamin D as the rest of my head, I don’t know. But ever since the time I was in kindergarten, my various care-givers – Mother, Father, ayah or Granny – would have a time and a half trying to keep me dry during the monsoon, or cool during the heat of high summer.

That never stopped me buying hats, however. When I was about ten, a summer in the South of France gave me a big orange straw hat, one that I may have worn for five minutes every time my mother would see my unprotected head and yell at me. When I was rather older, I bought a black and white cartwheel that shaded my head and neck and, indeed, most of the rest of me, if I ever wore it, that is. And when I was in my early 20s, an oversized yellow straw and satin hat made me feel wonderfully mysterious and Mata Hari-like, especially on the one occasion that I actually put it on my head, my long hair curling wildly from underneath and my grasshopper sunglasses doing a Paris Hilton with my face.

But gradually, better sense has prevailed and I have slowly stopped buying hats. I look at them. I cover them. I even lech for them. But I do not sidle furtively into the hat department of a large store and try on a few, with an aim to buying at least one before whoever I am with catches me and takes it away. I no longer walk single-mindedly into tourist shops and test-wear the hats stacked in one corner where I hopefully imagine no one can see me and stop me. The stack on the top of my wardrobe is down to none and I have been happily hat free for years now.

But whenever my friend Nina tells me that my life sounds like she needs to buy a hat (no translations offered for that, sorry!), I sigh, again longingly, thinking of the days when I could and would go out and do that myself.

Those flip-flops may affect your promotion

(Again, I cheat a little. I wrote this for the newspaper I work for and it appeared yesterday. But I like sharing, so....)

How to look good and impress people has always been a bestseller, be it as a book, an advice column or a television show – the latest in that series being two loud-mouthed and aggressive British women who invade people’s homes, lives and wardrobes to give them a makeover that doesn’t always make everyone made-over happy, especially during the process. But the very fact that shows like this work is indicative of more than just a voyeuristic tendency in audiences at large, be they readers or viewers. It displays a consciousness of the truism that how you look matters to more people than just yourself. And the workplace is where it all comes home to roost…and make that vital difference.

A job today is not just a way of taking home the bacon, or even the paneer tikkas. It is about being ahead of the pack, of succeeding, of going from strength to strength via increments and promotions and doing better than the person you sit next to in the office. It is also about attracting the attention of the boss enough to make appraisals sweeter and the take-home more taxable. It speaks of efficiency, initiative and all those wonderful attributes that are so highly rated by the HR department in the company profile sales pitch to prospective employees. And, what they don’t tell you is, it is all about looking good, too, well shaped, well dressed, well presented.

While an hourglass figure for a woman may be favoured by a male boss with a chauvinistic bias and a lecherously appreciative eye, a generally ‘fit’ shape is the preferred norm in most places, since the first impression still has more impact than an in-depth analysis that unearths talent and experience. But whether this is based on the underlying reality that obesity related health and stress management issues can hamper performance or an inevitable instinctive inexplicable discrimination against those who are not ‘beautiful people’ is not clear. Health professionals in India see weight gain as a problem that is increasing, especially in urban areas, ironically as a result of doing well at work, earning more and thus being able to include all sorts of fattening foods in the daily diet.

But fatness is not all in this context. The way a professional is dressed makes all the difference these days. A list was recently compiled with information gathered in a monster.com poll, which listed tank tops, visible innerwear and flip-flops – aka rubber chappals – as the fashion faux pas to end all from a professional point of view. This is not the rule, unfortunately, especially in a creative field, so there is no yardstick that one can measure up to. I, for instance, went to my first job interview dressed in a – hold your breath – housecoat and spike heels. It was not a deliberate style choice, but the simple fact that I was on my way from a photo-shoot to my home when I was dragged willy-nilly into an interview situation and had to sit there answering questions, trying to look intelligent and egg-headed with pancake on my face and eyelashes that threatened to unpeel themselves from my heavily shadowed eyelids. I got the job, but for years afterwards my then-boss would look warily at me whenever we spoke.

I would not do the same today, insisting on the time I needed to transform into a more suitably clad and more work-worthy avatar. After all, dress for success is the reiterated mantra. And a body that is premium in shape and low on fat content is highest on the assessment scale. But the clothing itself is not the mover and shaker of the salary scale; employers want to know how seriously a prospective employee takes herself, and where she rates herself apropos maturity, self-image, responsibility and reliability. Strange as it may sound, all this is evident from the way the person is dressed, from the prints on a shirt to the length of a skirt to the frivolity of the shoes.

So, keeping this in mind, how does one dress for work? Obviously, a miniskirt and camisole are non grata. So are wild prints, four-inch stilettos, sequinned saris, sparkly hairbands and op-deco earrings, unless it is a fashion forward job or a post in a teeny-bopper discotheque. Men, too, have their framework to fit into, nude women on ties and knuckle-duster rings being examples of no-nos. Experts advise restraint, dignity, chic rather than outré as a fashion statement and focus as a style mantra instead of the kitchen-sink approach of more is always less. Let the quirks of personality, attitude and wardrobe dawn on a would-be boss gradually, it is suggested, once performance has been proved. Most of the time, that works. Never mind the calorie count.

Bed head

One of the pleasures of the day is going to bed at night. I look forward to it almost from the moment I get up, pushing away the sheets and pulling myself reluctantly out of my nest of warm and comforting pillows. As I walk groggily around my room switching off the air-conditioner and opening windows, the bed I have just left sends out a clarion call that almost seduces me back into it, asking that I crawl back in and snuggle into sleep once more…

But needs must and I have everything and everyone from the half-asleep milkman to my wonderfully irascible boss waiting for me to rush madly about catering to their whims, fancies and urgent text messages. I bustle hither and yon, with various purposes in mind, staunchly ignoring that soft cotton tangle that is my bed, inviting me back into its folds. Making it helps me resist, but before I can get to doing that, a game must be played with Small Cat, who will lurk under the sheets and demand that I scratch her tummy, whereupon she will wrap her paws around my arm and bite whatever part of my hand she can get to. And the more I yell, “She’s biting me, she’s biting me!”, the happier the little beastie is, growling and wiggling, stalking and pouncing, all from under that stretch of well-washed fabric.

But eventually the clock tells me to get back to routine, Small Cat’s claws make bloody dents in my skin and Father reminds me that the power could be switched off before my clothes are ironed. So I turf the little feline out on to her perch just outside my windows, shake out my pillows and smooth the considerably ruffled bedsheets and cover all temptation with a brilliant spread that serves only to temporarily camouflage the place I would rather spend the day, not erase it from my memory.

The day goes slowly by, leaking slowly through the sand from the commute in to work to the commute away from work. As I watch the traffic and pedestrians that we speed past through the car window, wincing at every pothole and roadbump that the driver unfailingly manages to collide with, my thoughts wander idly in the direction of my bed. I think of the moment when, after a cool shower, I slide my legs into the envelope of my colourful cotton sheets, lie back against the pillows and slowly, as the cold air from the air-conditioner wafts through the room, feel each muscle slither gently into a loose, relaxed softness. A friend will phone and I reach out for the receiver, tucking it against the pillow as I chat in fading tones and drift ever so smoothly into that never-never land that lies somewhere between waking and sleeping.

And then, suddenly, I will be jolted awake by the songs of Small Cat demanding a cuddle, her morning ration of wheatgrass and her favourite game of chase-the-feather-on-the-string-that-my-humans-hold. Father will be clattering dishes in the kitchen next door to my bedroom and the birds will be going crazy with their dawn warbles in the trees outside. Try as I will, I cannot fade back into oblivion, but gradually unwind myself from the nest of my bed, emerging in parts, as it were, into the new day. And with each stretch, that bed lures me back in. Some day, its siren call will be louder than the sounds that pull me out of it…

Moving out…and in

A friend and colleague is moving house today, from the centre of the city to one of its very far flung suburbs, across the creek and on the mainland, further on from where I myself call ‘home’. In his excitement and, indeed, mad frenzy of coping with everything from getting his new apartment painted to finding an air-conditioner that he can afford to learning where the best fish is available, he has found himself exhausted but somehow energised by the whole experience. And, as he speaks to me about it all, I remember the many times that I have moved house, across the city, across the country and across the world.

My first rather dim memory of this process is when we moved from a ground floor home to one that was perched on what seemed like the top of the world at the time. I sat in the truck that transported all our belongings and was excited at the idea of a new world to explore and get used to. It was great fun, perhaps more so because I didn’t have much to do, since I was only a little girl at the time. And maybe the thought of having my own room – albeit one shared with my grandmother – overshadowed all other feelings of living and being. Not too long after, we moved to Europe. Again, it was not much involvement for me, except that I had new clothes and was going to be on a plane flying long distance for the first time – short hops within the country hardly counted. Perhaps the process of starting a new school and making friends was more important than finding groceries and dealing with the garbage collection, I do not remember.

But this upping and moving thing really hit home when I had to pack to come back from my first stint at an American college. Until then, someone else did most of the dirty work of finding cartons, coordinating shipping and dealing with packing and unpacking. When I graduated and came home, with only vague plans to continue with my education, I had to do it all myself. It was fun in that I could look at all that I owned and sort out what to keep and what, not, but it was bone-tiring and painful in that I had to leave a place I actually had got somewhat fond of, along with the people that mattered to me. The actual moving process was simple – cartons were stashed safely away in a friend’s garage, my suitcases were stuffed full and sat on by various large people so that they could be locked and my tickets were checked for the millionth time. And then I got into a plane and flew back home.

When we moved from one part of Mumbai to another, it was a rather more complicated process. There was a lifetime of stuff to be sorted and thought about, a whole world (and more) of books, pots and pans, bits and pieces and, surprisingly, very little in the way of clothing and very personal effects. We packed and repacked, labelled and fought, finally throwing piles of uncatalogued volumes of everything from romance to crime to old magazines into enormous gunny sacks that were loaded into the back of a truck that seemed to open like the humungous maw of the Loch Ness monster…or worse. We finally drove out of the city in a convoy – the truck, a smaller tempo, a large car and a small car – and lugged everything up three flights of unfinished stairs in a spanking new apartment block that had running water in the lift shafts and no elevators. By the time it became home, we had decided never to move house again…until I did it a few years later, moving across the country to a different life that was temporarily mine.

So I understand exactly what my friend is going through. After all, I have done it enough times myself. And, even if I do it again, I will still make the same mistakes, feel the same fatigue and find myself at that same high-adrenaline level of excitement.

A bite of the Big Apple

I was 13 when I first met New York. It was when we lived briefly in the United States, I was a snotty, spotty adolescent with so many chips on my rounded shoulders that I could have made an entire motel complex of log cabins out of them, and I hated everything from my own life to my parents to school to the idea of going back to India to the shape of the planet. But in a strange kind of way I missed home, missed the high-octane pollution and the constant honking of traffic and the throngs of pedestrians that chose roads over sidewalks to stroll about on. In the suburban Maryland enclave that we called home, excitement was the latest moon landing and an event was getting my ears pierced at the local mall.

So when my parents took me to the big, bad, beautiful city that was New York, I was in heaven. It looked right, with its towering, reflective sky-scrapers and billboards glinting myriad neon. It smelled right, with the sharp pong of exhaust and the constant waft of fish-tinged ozone. It sounded right, with the blare of car horns and the clack of the buses changing overhead traction, the clamour of passing stereos and the steady undertone of human voices. And it felt right, with its energy, its spirit and its anonymity. It was so much like home and it felt as if it could become one for me.

We stayed in a hotel not too far from the centre of the city and walked around every day that we spent there. There was the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a place bigger than even the Louvre, which had been the biggest collation of art that I had experienced until then. There was the Guggenheim, that fantastically sculptural home to art that had been when it was created and still was radical when I saw it then…and is even today. And then there were the bits and pieces of heart and soul that were scattered all over the city, from the fountains in Rockefeller Plaza to the stained glass windows of the Lincoln Center to the galleries that marched along the main streets.

And then there was the food. I was taken to eat kosher at a Jewish deli and met pastrami on rye for the first time, the stuff that Mother had told me so much about for so long. I saw a bagel for the first time and wondered how the filling managed to avoid the hole, but then decided that a hole-full of cream cheese was the closest thing to bliss that was edible. I also ate my way through a classic New York City hot dog, a few bites of divinity that left me with a life-strong passion for the wiener blanketed with mustard and relish that endures even today. And, of course, there was the NYC fries, served up in a paper cone and bathed in anything from molten cheese to Thousand Island dressing to chilli.

When I was older and wiser and less naïve, I went back to the city that gave me a life when I believed I had none. It was the same magic, one that I could channel to rejuvenate with just one deep inhalation. The magic made my face come alive, a friend told me, watching as a winter-long spell of low blueness instantly brightened into the warm bloom of a golden summer of the mood. I enjoyed walks around Saks, Bloomingdales and Tiffany as much as I did wanderings through MOMA and Radio City Music Hall. I shopped for books at Barnes and Noble and listened to concerts at the Madison Square Garden. And I ate pretzels and sushi, blinis and piroshkis, blue cotton candy at the Bronx Zoo and sour pickles at Fulton Fish Market. And the classic New York City hot dog.

It is a city I still want to live in some day. But for now, I have been there, done some of that and, yes, even have the T-Shirt!

A year in the life...

Today is exactly a year since I started this blog. And it’s been 12 months of some ups, some downs and more plateaus than anything else, spanning what has felt like a lifetime of events, experiences and feelings. In this year I have learned to keep house, with all the mistakes that I make, to cook everyday dinners instead of aiming for glossy-cookbook perfection, to control my temper and tantrums and even reactions and to live with stress levels elevated above those I thought I could not handle. And in all the potholes and speedbreakers that there have been at home, at work, with people who matter, with those I have met by accident and by design, there have been moments to remember, usually with a smile.

Like the time I came out of the salon with newly ‘done’ hair. It glowed a deep and glorious purple in the brilliance of the January sunshine and managed to blow away some of the cloud that weighed down my mind, for a few minutes, at least. My stylist stared at me from about four inches below my height, and suddenly burst into delighted laughter. She had never seen the colour job work this well and expressed her joy at her own success with a tight hug and many exclamations, all of which startled the security man standing guard outside the swish shopping complex and attracted the attention of taxi drivers and hungry seagulls alike. My exclamations as the colour gradually faded to a straw-like orange were not as delighted a few months later, but that is another story.

Or like the time I walked into the house to find a tiny orange furball perched on Father’s chair in the study of our apartment. She was shivering and dirty, bug-infested and starved, injured and scared. But her big eyes and bigger ears charmed us, as did the little squeak she produced just before she dived feet and all into her first-ever dish of real food. That little scrap is now a good sized feline with a gleaming coat, bright eyes, astonishing intelligence and all the personality of a diva with the persistence and confidence of a spoiled brat who always gets her way. And she rules the household with an iron claw hidden under soft fur and seductive wiles. Small Cat is not all joy, but has brought in with her a great deal of laughter and fun that we sorely needed.

And then there was the time I came home to find that Father had created the most delicious lemon-curd pie…and the apple one, too. The time that the power was not shut off after days of four-plus-hour loadshedding stints. The time that the painters left the house after what felt like years of tracking dust, dirt and white blots all over the newly polished living room floor. Or even the time when I arrived back from a week away and found Small Cat making cautious overtures of friendship only half an hour after I first said hi to her. And so many more, too special to share, too meaningful to put into a public forum. It’s been a year of recovery, of learning, of adjusting, of discovering. And a year that has, I hope, slid into the next without the shattering bumps of the previous one…