Hit or miss?

Have you ever felt like hitting someone? You know, just waling in and whacking hard? I often do. But, always keeping Mum’s maxim in mind – she insisted that ladies do not get physically violent, they decimate with a look or, at most, a mild word – I resist, even though it can get incredibly difficult, especially with the level of provocation I tend to attract, at work, at home, on the road. Maybe it is my face, maybe my body language, maybe my own uptightness. I think, most of all, it is because I am almost compulsively insistent on doing things just right, just so, just up to standard.

Father gave me a potted lecture on it the other night. According to him, I take things to seriously. More relevantly, I take myself too seriously. I think he is right. I do. Chill, he advised, though not in that word, of course. And I did. So yesterday, in spite of working later than usual, in spite of being seriously aggravated by various people and issues at work, in spite of being tired and hungry and so crabby and in spite of wanting nothing more than to go home and lie down in a darkened room, I smiled, cheerfully, I waited, cheerfully and I endured, cheerfully, the long and tedious intervals between bursts of whatever I was actually doing, doing nothing. And as I walked in the front door at home, long after I normally do, I smiled, cheerfully, and announced that I was very calm. There may have been a hint of gritted teeth and clenched fists in the declaration, but I did it. Cheerfully.

At many moments during the over-long day I was sorely tempted to hit someone. Not an anonymous, generic ‘someone’, but a real, flesh-and-blood, bone-and-muscle someone who is better nameless, faceless and mention-less. I get the craving often and feel the urgent and intense need to satisfy that need by actually, for a change, doing something about it. But what Mum mandated pops into my head and I can only wiggle my fingers deep into the pockets of my favourite jeans and smile. Cheerfully.

But just consider how it would feel. The surge of energy that moves from the brain to the fist, down the arm and along the wrist, through the fingers and even into the nails. That same energy sparked into action through an upraised arm, a stretched out hand, splayed fingers and stiffened shoulder. And then, finally – aaahh, the wonder of it all – the contact of your skin and muscle and bone against the other person’s cheek and the fabulous clap of noise that follows to reverberate against your eardrum…I was never a violent person, but that has to be a good feeling. Some day I will find out.

Actually I do know already. While I have lightly slapped a couple of people to stop their hysteria, I once really, truly, satisfyingly hit someone, purely involuntarily, which took all the pleasure out of the action, best done premeditatedly. It was when I was in school and the class bully was taking it that wee bit too far with me. Before I knew what I was doing, my arm swung out and my hand made a fabulously loud connection with my enemy’s face. I am not sure who was more stunned by that, her or me, but it did the trick. She never bothered me again and her tone to me changed if ever we spoke. The tiny, impulsive violence worked. That was enough for me.

It’s raining pakoras!

Well, actually, it’s not really. But it is in a manner of speaking, if you will allow me to explain…

It has started raining in Mumbai and the weather has turned from being unbearably hot, humid and oppressive to being breezy cool and, well, kinda soggy. Mumbaikars have exchanged one set of woes for another, but are not yet seeing them as woes, just being overwhelmingly relieved at the lowered temperatures and cooler nights. We optimistically see this time of year as being a complete turnaround from the recently-past days of not exactly wine and roses, but more sharbats and tummy infections. And, even as the rain streaks down the windows and brings in a new crop of mould on the kolhapuri chappals, there is this overall feeling of “Whew! The monsoon has come!”

With the first storms of the season comes a new hunger, a major change from the times of heat-induced nausea and a reluctance to look at anything that might even remotely resemble food. It means the expected appearance on the streets of bhutta sellers, the people who sit in front of tiny charcoal-fired grills roasting fresh corn on the cob. They huddle under enormous umbrellas and wave sheets of paper or corn husks at the embers to fan them into firing up the corn kernels to a dark, almost-popped deliciousness. They nestle the roasted cobs into a twist of husk and sprinkle them with a flecked-red mixture of salt and chilli powder. You walk away into the drizzle biting on sweet-charred-salty-spicy corn that warms your insides even as it catches on your teeth and sharpens your appetite for more.

Everyone issues dire warnings about what should and should not be eaten once the rains arrive. Stay OFF the street food, the newspapers and magazines yell, it will give you everything from cholera to salmonella poisoning. Stay OFF eating out, Father yells, you know your tummy will misbehave and you get very crabby when you do not feel good. Stay OFF Stay OFF eating junk, my doctor yells, I do not want to keep giving you medicines to get well again. So all that is just what I crave, even though I would never normally even consider eating any of the above.

Instead, I make what I like eating at home. We eat hot, spicy, rich khichdi, a soft mixture of rice and lentils redolent with ghee and studded with nuts, vegetables and whole cloves, cardamom and star anise. We eat garam-garam pakoras, soft with besan and strung through with methi leaves, sharpened with ginger and crunchy with cashewnuts. We sip hot rasam, sparked with pepper, tinged with coriander and fragrant with garlic smashed gently into hot ghee. And we eat hot pudding – caramel custard spiked with nutmeg, warm kheer spotted with golden-fried raisins, hot apple pie with warm vanilla custard.

The rain never fails to make me want to eat, even if I am not hungry. The traditional ‘rain food’ is pakoras and masala chai, manna from a heaven that is preoccupied with sending down all the manna it has to soak us and the city we live in. Which is where the problem starts from, isn’t it? When it rains, it pours and when it pours, you think fond thoughts of food that everyone yells at you to stay off of…

English...I think

It happened for the first time when I was just about nine years old. Someone asked me how come I spoke such good English. I bridled, rather annoyed that someone should question what, for me, was something I had taken for granted ever since I started talking when I was about two and could articulate beyond the few recognisable noises I made, or so my parents told me around that time. I may have started with Marathi or Tamil or whatever whoever says even today that I did, but for years now my English is the strongest language in my vast and varied repertoire. And it is indeed both vast and varied, varying from the choicest of affectionate expressions in Portuguese to some very loving words in Japanese to the most sweet and personal expostulations in a mixture of Malayalam, Bengali and Serbo-Croat.

I may exaggerate a trifle, I think, but the basic is still truth. When I was 13 and we lived in the United States, everyone at the local junior high school I was made to attend asked me if I spoke English and, when they found I did indeed, demanded to know how come mine was as good as it was…and occasionally still is, never mind that I work with a newspaper and everyone knows that no known newspaper uses what is even today known as ‘good English’. It’s called ‘journalese’ and would never pass muster as the language that most of us were taught in school, when we were younger, more innocent and bright enough to learn. But then I was, usually, most annoyed, because they didn’t know what they were saying, in more ways than the obvious. After all, they didn’t speak ‘English’ at all, just the strange argot known as ‘American’. It has a weird accent (that I must admit I have imbibed some of) and even odder phraseology (ditto) and is rarely if ever recognised as such in the more commonly-English-speaking nations of the world, like the UK, India, even the EU.

When I was in high school, purportedly studying madly for my International Baccalaureate exams but actually more worried about everything from the state of my nation back home to the blossoming of the spot on my button nose, I was in a Higher English class, taught by the very dishy six-foot-something Anthony Short who was nothing like his name. He was perhaps the one man I would have liked to take home to Ma and Pa, except that he was more than twice my age, was nicely married with children and successfully snubbed me in perfect verse when I wrote about my summer vacation in laboured rhymes. I was trying to be different and he taught me more than my share of the grow-up-little-girl lesson very effectively and succinctly. And his charm came primarily from the fact that he never questioned my fluency in the language, but tried to channel it into greater comprehension of the literature I had never read but learned to enjoy and the writing I never thought I would one day make into a profession.

So when a Japanese classmate asked me how come I spoke English, I managed to smile past my gritted teeth and swallowed a rude rejoinder with the full knowledge that both my parents and Mr Short would parse it to smithereens and show me just how I could have been far more effective by saying far less. And once I went off to college, neatly bypassing the English-fluency-for-foreigners tests – to be absolutely honest, I was terrified that I would not pass them – I could with perfect accuracy say that I had studied English in an international school in Switzerland, making the story less long-winded and more acceptable to those who didn’t know any better.

Once I started working, I got better known for my funky language skills through whatever I wrote, which was widely published both in print in various parts of the world and on the Internet, which is a world without any real frontiers. And that gave me the chance I had been waiting for all these years, ever since I was a little girl and someone asked me that first question: How come you speak such good English? I now look at anyone who does and say, very blandly and with a totally straight face: Would you call it ‘English’?

Checking it out

Father had to have a check up today and we went to the hospital at about the crack of dawn…or perhaps even before dawn had thought of cracking. Still vaguely bleary, we walked into the pathology section of the vast complex and took a number, then sat down on excruciatingly uncomfortable chairs to wait our turn. Of course, typically in this father-daughter relationship, we did a little arguing, a wee bit of to-ing and fro-ing about whether it was really necessary for me to be there and whether some people who do not cheat would actually cheat and say something was checked when it really wasn’t. I was told not to fuss and I said not to be so stoic; all in all, a fairly satisfactory little series of spats, all before dawn had had the chance to crack, too.

And when Father was finally ushered in to the sanctum where needles were slid into veins and little bottles were discretely handed out for people to fill, I was told sternly that he could manage on his own and I was to stay out. OUT, Father said firmly, knowing full well that I was quite capable of going in with him and slugging the technician if she didn’t get the first stab right. So I stood just outside, peering in through the glass window set into the door, ready to go barging in to do the slugging if I needed to. I shifted my weight from one hip to the other, doing little four-step walkabout rounds between wall and door and trying my best to avoid looking at anyone en route. But I was being looked at, I knew, I could feel it, and went pink around the edges as I shuffled around, waiting.

As soon as Father emerged, only to go through another door into another set of laboratories, I shot off after him. This time, I stuck with him through the glowers and growls, insisting that I would not – repeat, NOT – stand there to be stared at again. But we had to walk back out through that same crowd, Father muttered rude things under his breath, while I followed a meek few paces behind him, doing my own share of a little mutter-glower. And I kept my eyes glued to my feet (metaphorically speaking, of course) as I walked past the various people still waiting to be tested in various ways.

There was the gentleman who was having a very bad hair day. He sat there, his knees wide apart, his head leaning back against the wall, obviously catching up with a sleep-time that must have been so cavalierly interrupted at the crack of dawn or before to make it to the clinic on time. His greying locks stood on end, pointing in many directions at one time, each hair seemingly unconnected to the rest. There was the lady who kept losing her husband – every time she went with him to the counter, their seats would be occupied and they would have to move to two new ones when they got back, never side by side. So at one stage she even turned and addressed some evidently trenchant comments to me, startling herself when she found it was not the person show as trying to talk to. And there was the gentleman who sat himself next to me and had wandering elbows, every now and again prodding me in the side or against the side of my leg, every time making me edge closer to Father, on my other side.

And there were all those eyes following me as I scurried behind Father. Finally, I refused to go into that waiting area any more and stood in a puddle of sunshine near the main staircase, ready to leave whenever my male parent was done with his check up. And when that time came, I shot off to the car, fed up with being checked out and all set to check myself back into my own comfort levels.

Being a potato

For the last few days I have been feeling rather under the weather. So much so that, as a friend and colleague very tactfully put it, I look as if I have been sat on fairly hard by the weather, thunderclouds, rain barrels and all. And if looks are anything to go by, I feel that way, too. But be that as it may, I did a lot at home – mostly sleeping. It was what I really needed, after a week of Small Cat’s yowl-filled nights, too much to do at home and at work and a mean stress level that signified nothing more than incipient break down. The old system finally gave in and demanded that I stop, take time off, rest and recoup.

That’s exactly what I did. With a variable fever and knees that suddenly vanished, I staggered about the house trying to do my usual quota of chores, but falling asleep before I could finish sentences. And then, when after much thought I found that I was still alive and human, I sat myself groggily on the sofa in the living room and switched on the television.

Mercifully, it was not a week day and I could be spared the usual ration of saas-bahu serials. While I would normally revel in those, with no clue who was doing what to whom why, how and when, and I delight in watching the gloriously tinselly-tacky clothes and jewellery and make-up, my eyes, hurt, my neck hurt, even my hair hurt and I could not enjoy it as much as usual. So I idly read the comics and horoscopes in the many newspapers and magazines that we get, flipped through a delightful photo-book on the Parsis and made affectionate noises at Small Cat, who bounced about the carpet chasing a chick-pea and seemed to be completely recovered from her troubles of last week.

Equally idly I flipped an occasional channel on the TV. At some stage I found two cookery shows running together, one hosted by a rotund gentleman and the other by a rather loud lady. Neither had any clue how to go about the proceedings and kept interrupting the person cooking to make completely banal conversation in a piercing over-tone that seemed to irritate the cook as much as it annoyed me. I soon cut to a rather better food show, where a peripatetic host wandered madly around the Indian countryside eating whatever he could put in his mouth and enjoying every moment of the experience. In contrast, another well-fed host did his rounds of some Indian-Chinese food, pontificated boringly on about his sophisticated taste-buds and managed to set my teeth on edge with his patronising air and better-than-thou commentary.

And then I came across a talk show, where the host, a well known filmmaker, was interviewing a once-number-one star who was making a tentative comeback to Bollywood. Karan Johar was talking to Madhuri Dixit, she of the radiant smile and the expressive eyes. She was confident and sure, he was trying very hard to find some controversy – after all, that was his job. And, just when she warmed up and started talking about her life out of the spotlight, the storm outside got fiercer and the TV dish on the terrace decided that it had to get out of the rain for the night.

That was the end of my brief and inglorious career as a couch potato. Small Cat and I closed up the house and decided that the best place to be at that time of night was in bed – she in Father’s and me in mine. And so…good night!

Tea for me, too!

The virtues of white tea have been yelled from the headlines of the relevant pages of various publications for the past few days. I am not sure why this fabulous stuff has suddenly taken pole position on the health and nutrition track, but – at the risk of sounding self-righteously virtuously puffed about it – I have been drinking the stuff for years now. Well, to be absolutely accurate, I discovered it a few years ago and, at that time, could afford so little of the precious leaf that I drank its essence as a special treat for something out of the ordinary accomplished. Then I managed to acquire more and still drink it to celebrate an occasion, though these days that celebration comes on Sundays, when I do not have to stagger out of bed and blunder my weary way to work. So I am rather chuffed that what made a lot of people who know me well chortle in ridicule as I delicately sipped what they considered to be tasteless tinted hot water is now cited to be the healthiest thing this side of celery.

But then I have always liked strange things to drink, almost always avoiding the more conventional liquids – usually alcoholic – that my friends, relatives and other acquaintances were quaffing whenever they were quaffing it, especially in my presence. Apart from the preference for avoiding the clichéd and the norm, I liked the taste of the strange things I imbibed. And they made me as sane – or mad – as I am now, which is all to the good, in my own considered opinion.

Once upon a time I drank coffee. Now I do only rarely, perhaps on occasions that I have more work than the letters in my full name waiting for me to get through and have had to spend a sleepless week courtesy Small Cat’s hormones. Perhaps it is my sense of gustatory discrimination that has finally been aroused, making me more conscious of the fact that the instant brown liquid I once swigged by the mugsful is actually nothing more than diluted – and that, sometimes not – mud that tastes of the bitterness of a bad acidity attack and has all the effect on me of a high-voltage shock on a bad hair day. Today I regard coffee as a useful accent to a tiring day, but a dreadful thing to be avoided as far as is humanly possible. Which I do, if I am being my usual self-righteously virtuously puffed self.

So my day kick-starts itself with the adrenaline of needing to get through it and the knowledge that at some stage it will indeed end. There is, after all, no other alternative. I drink my green tea every morning except Sunday, then zip about the house doing whatever it is I think I need to do to get things in order and ready to go even after I leave. Then I get set to leave and blast out of the front door in a flurry of heels and instructions about lunch, dinner, Small Cat, Father’s peregrinations and whatever else I can remember, all the while asking myself why I need to, since I don’t really need to. After all, they are all perfectly capable of looking after themselves, I tell myself as I bounce downstairs to the car, feeling silly even as I feel self-righteously virtuously puffed about doing my housewifely duty.

It’s the tea, I mutter as I sit back and am driven to work. I knew I should have stuck to hot water!

Bridging the gap

A long time ago I had a small, monastic single bed. It was fine for my purposes, and perfect for the kind of room I wanted at that stage in my life – full of books, posters, step-rugs and lots of junk that the average teenager collects and cherishes. I occasionally fell off it when I did an especially violent flip to change sides, but I kept that bed with me until I was long past the teenage phase, literally, chronologically and metaphorically, and I managed fine with it, even after we moved to another apartment that needed furniture of a different ilk. Then I transferred myself to another city and slept for quite a long while in a bed that was enormous, but actually two beds joined together. As a result, it had two mattresses and if, for any reason - from repacking suitcases to getting into a morning exercise routine for some strange reason that may have had a little to do with the fact that I had to breathe in deeper each day to zip up the same pair of jeans and did not have the excuse of then just having come out of the dryer – the two got even slightly separated, some part of my anatomy would inevitably slide into the gap thus created, sometimes rather painfully.

And then I got a cat.

While that, to most, would sound utterly mystifying and totally illogically unconnected, it actually is not. My cat would sprawl his entire length over the bed, sometimes pushing me into one far corner. He also liked sleeping with his head on my pillow, using one soft paw to shove my head off it, but keeping that same paw in my hair to stop me going very far. When it was cold, he would cuddle close to me, often clambering on to some part of me to lie curled up with his head as close to my neck as he could get it; and when it was warm, he would stretch out right under the fan with one leg towards me, ‘holding my hand’. All of which mandated that I needed a new bed in my room at home.

So when I moved back to Mumbai, I had that bed made. But the cat left me sooner than either of us believed he would and I was left alone in my new bed, bigger and better and more suited to sprawling over.

And then we acquired Small Cat – or did Small Cat acquire us? She spend the nights of her first two weeks in our apartment cuddled against my tummy, occasionally emerging from under the sheets to eat, drink water, use her catbox or take a short and tentatively exploratory stroll out of my room. And then she suddenly got braver and moved into the rest of the flat, mainly to Father’s space, following him from his room to the study to the kitchen to wherever he went, even sitting dolefully outside the bathroom when he showered. Now she alternates her nights - when she is not having certain hormonal issues, as now – between his bed and stalking around the house playing with a ping-pong ball, a feather, a kidney bean…

And I do my own little sprawl across my bed. No gaps to fall into, no edges to fall off of. And no need to worry about when to turn to avoid squashing the cat!

Cat calling

Small Cat is in dire straits right now. She is in heat and having a lot of trouble with it, most of all because we do not want her to start having babies and, more important, go out of the house and meet very unsuitable boy cats to start off the process. As a result she has spent the past five days and four nights yowling all over the house driving herself and us completely insane and to the point where sleeplessness has gone way past the point of mindlessness. I have never been known to lie in bed in the dark and bellow for quiet – which I have done frequently these past couple of nights. I have never been known to drink coffee of the most instant, machine-produced and ghastly kind – which I have done frequently in the office these past couple of days. And I have never (well, maybe once) been known to fall asleep in mid-sentence during an edit meeting (ok, so I tend to exaggerate sometimes) – which I almost did this morning at work.

It is not that we do not want to help Small Cat. We do. We love the little furball greatly and indulge her every want and whim, including her penchant for playing at all times of day and night, her demand for one special brand of snack biscuits first thing in the morning as we stagger blearily around opening windows and her liking for biting as a mark of her intense affection for us. But this time is not easy for us. She is truly suffering. Her little body goes rigid, her tail skews awkwardly into spirals and she stares fixedly at some spot we cannot see, in her desperate attempt to make demons leave her alone. And she has stunned us with a whole orchestra of new sounds, from her familiar and cheerful chirps and squeaks to loud, low and long growls that send us scurrying about in the gloom trying to find her to provide as much comfort as we can.

As a result of this frantic night-time activity, both Father and I are reduced – or elevated, as the attitude may be – to a state of auto-pilot functioning. I am not sure how it has happened, but I get my sleep – whatever little of it I am able to snatch – between spells of intense yowls of various vocalisation levels, when one is fading into silence and the other still not begun. And when it does start, usually as a series of pathetic squeaks and gentle snorts, I try and rouse myself enough to leap out of bed, run into the living room, locate Small Cat in the dark and quickly grab her and begin the process of soothing before she can wake Father. Of course, I do not know how often he does the same, and has done over the past few days, but when I look into his face in the morning I see how he looks, which sort of closely resembles the way I feel: haggard, deathly, exhausted, bone-crunchingly jet-lagged.

I am hoping that this unfortunate state of being does not last. Most of all, that is does not endure tonight, which would be a blessing of untold proportions. If it does, there is nothing I can do except keep my temper, summon up whatever pathetic store of patience I may have left stored in my sluggish brain and try and soothe both Small Cat through the night and Father during the endless morning. Of course, he has the day-long ordeal of dealing with the furry feline once I have left for work, but his story is one I cannot tell. Meanwhile, if Small Cat is over her moment of crisis – which I profoundly hope is indeed the case – we can all rest, at last, in peace.

Daddy's darling

(I never said I would not do this again, did I? I wrote this for our paper to celebrate Father's Day. I would have preferred to be more my usual acid self, or even nicely funny, but this is what they wanted. And between Small Cat being obstreperous and fabulous weather, I do not feel like starting something new from scratch. So, voila...!)

Over the past few months, many of the Hollywood paparazzi have been focussing on one young target: Lindsey Lohan. Apart from her own alleged problems with substance abuse and the various angsts of being a young woman who has managed to get too much, too soon, she also has a major family issue to deal with – she is estranged from her father, Michael, because of his ‘self-destructive’ behaviour. Other big stars like Halle Berry, Tatum O’Neal and Angelina Jolie have also had well-publicised problems with their male parents, for assorted reasons. And, during any crisis or major event in these celebrities’ lives, that father, who is not really considered to be part of their lives, has surfaced – or been dug up – to tell the world and the eager readers of the gossip press, just what their darling daughters are really all about.

I find this distance easy to believe, but very difficult to identify with. After many years of battle, pitched, armed and occasionally dangerous, my relationship with my own father has stabilised to more or less even keel, one with few highs or lows but lots of mutual caring, sharing, love and, most of all, tolerance, like most father-daughter relationships are, or should be. We both give each other space and, now that I am ‘grown up’, talk about everything – from bad elevator maintenance to a cantankerous boss, wardrobe malfunctions to fiscal responsibility – and try and sort them out without lost tempers, sulks, silence and an occasional thrown dish. It is not ideal, but it works. Perhaps it does because my father figured out his role fairly early in my life. I was his responsibility, apart from being the apple of his eye.

So he did his best and stretched himself to do more, like all good daddies are wont to do. As add-ons, he taught me how to be a girl and yet never feel the need to be a boy. So during the frequently painful process of becoming an adult, I learned how to change a tyre and clean a carburettor, rewire fuses and explore the insides of a washing machine, deal with recalcitrant Internet service providers and carry my own overloaded luggage across miles of airport terminal. All this, without losing my innate taste for silks and diamonds, stiletto heels and scarlet nail-polish. And somewhere along the way I also found out how to hotwire a car, unlock a door without keys and see the difference between a man with long eyelashes who flirts very nicely and one who has solid worth and that I could actually introduce to Father without being furtive. Those are, however, aspects of my life that the pater was not privy to while they were in progress and will probably glower at me about even today.

Perhaps that is why it has never been easy to find a suitable boy…man, actually, since that aforementioned ‘growing up’ happened some moons ago. And I am not the only one struggling with this dilemma; many of my friends bumble along with their non-happening relationships, each one looking for someone that they cannot describe, but somehow know is very familiar. Just as research has discovered, only children of the female persuasion tend to look for mates in the mould of their own fathers. They crave that same caring-sharing-nurturing-generous-loving (ad infinitum, as nauseum) ilk of person that they have grown up with and are used to. And, at some strange and self-tortured level, they sometimes get lucky and find that individual, but only after some masochistic trail and error that the father watches with a certain horror, anger and helplessness. And if they never do, it’s fine; Daddy will be there for a long while, after all!

For me, without any trace of the rather unfortunate Elektra in my make-up or attitude, my daddy is indeed the best. It could be because I know no other. It could be because I cannot possibly have any other. And it could also be because he is. And I don’t need a special day to celebrate that fact.

Daddy's darling

(Well, hey, I never said I would not do this again, did I? Yesterday was Father's Day. I wrote this for our paper to celebrate the occasion - I would have preferred it to be less mushy and more And between Small Cat being obstreperous and fabulous weather, I do not feel like writing something from scratch. So enjoy this one...)

Over the past few months, many of the Hollywood paparazzi have been focussing on one young target: Lindsey Lohan. Apart from her own alleged problems with substance abuse and the various angsts of being a young woman who has managed to get too much, too soon, she also has a major family issue to deal with – she is estranged from her father, Michael, because of his ‘self-destructive’ behaviour. Other big stars like Halle Berry, Tatum O’Neal and Angelina Jolie have also had well-publicised problems with their male parents, for assorted reasons. And, during any crisis or major event in these celebrities’ lives, that father, who is not really considered to be part of their lives, has surfaced – or been dug up – to tell the world and the eager readers of the gossip press, just what their darling daughters are really all about.

I find this distance easy to believe, but very difficult to identify with. After many years of battle, pitched, armed and occasionally dangerous, my relationship with my own father has stabilised to more or less even keel, one with few highs or lows but lots of mutual caring, sharing, love and, most of all, tolerance, like most father-daughter relationships are, or should be. We both give each other space and, now that I am ‘grown up’, talk about everything – from bad elevator maintenance to a cantankerous boss, wardrobe malfunctions to fiscal responsibility – and try and sort them out without lost tempers, sulks, silence and an occasional thrown dish. It is not ideal, but it works. Perhaps it does because my father figured out his role fairly early in my life. I was his responsibility, apart from being the apple of his eye.

So he did his best and stretched himself to do more, like all good daddies are wont to do. As add-ons, he taught me how to be a girl and yet never feel the need to be a boy. So during the frequently painful process of becoming an adult, I learned how to change a tyre and clean a carburettor, rewire fuses and explore the insides of a washing machine, deal with recalcitrant Internet service providers and carry my own overloaded luggage across miles of airport terminal. All this, without losing my innate taste for silks and diamonds, stiletto heels and scarlet nail-polish. And somewhere along the way I also found out how to hotwire a car, unlock a door without keys and see the difference between a man with long eyelashes who flirts very nicely and one who has solid worth and that I could actually introduce to Father without being furtive. Those are, however, aspects of my life that the pater was not privy to while they were in progress and will probably glower at me about even today.

Perhaps that is why it has never been easy to find a suitable boy…man, actually, since that aforementioned ‘growing up’ happened some moons ago. And I am not the only one struggling with this dilemma; many of my friends bumble along with their non-happening relationships, each one looking for someone that they cannot describe, but somehow know is very familiar. Just as research has discovered, only children of the female persuasion tend to look for mates in the mould of their own fathers. They crave that same caring-sharing-nurturing-generous-loving (ad infinitum, as nauseum) ilk of person that they have grown up with and are used to. And, at some strange and self-tortured level, they sometimes get lucky and find that individual, but only after some masochistic trail and error that the father watches with a certain horror, anger and helplessness. And if they never do, it’s fine; Daddy will be there for a long while, after all!

For me, without any trace of the rather unfortunate Elektra in my make-up or attitude, my daddy is indeed the best. It could be because I know no other. It could be because I cannot possibly have any other. And it could also be because he is. And I don’t need a special day to celebrate that fact.

In the dark of the night

I was unusually late again going home last night and it was a new experience once more. This time, from a different point of view. When I walked out of the office block to my car, it was well past 7:30 pm, but the skies were unnaturally light, sort of like twilight on an early spring day. The street and compound lights were on, but there was a kind of gleam that pervaded the whole area, as if there was a landing strip nearby, or else we were in the halo of amazingly sharp strobe lights. As I got into the car, apologising to the driver for not leaving at the usual time, he remarked on the light, too, saying that it felt like there was a big storm coming.

And there was a storm, though it was not very big. By the time we had driven a couple of blocks down, it was raining, a steady, persistent drizzle that slowed down traffic and loosened the mud and dirt ingrained into the roads. As a result, cars, bikes, scooters and pedestrians alike skidded gently towards each other, sometimes stopping in time to avoid collisions, sometimes breaking a headlight or denting a fender. Every now and then, when traffic could least afford to slow to almost a stop, there would be two cars stopped in the middle of the road, their drivers out in the rain, peering through the gloom at their vehicles and yelling damply at each other.

Gradually the light changed. The night darkened, the rain fell harder, the traffic slowed more and my nerves went from being on edge to practically tipping off it. My feet hurt, my legs ached, my head rattled with a mixture of exhaustion and irritation. The windows of my car misted every now and then and the air-conditioning felt strangely cold. Outside, tyres made hissing-shushing noises on the tar, the monotonous hum broken by annoyed honking from peevish horns and an occasional irate yell from a bad tempered and probably tired taxi driver cursing a pedestrian darting through the stream of vehicles.

It was risky driving. And it needed more presence of mind and alertness than either my driver or I had at that moment. Luckily, we could not progress with any speed and crawled forward without mishap or mayhem and got closer and closer to home with each turn of the wheels. And then, just as we were exulting the fact that we had got to the last stretch without any problems and not too much of a lag from our usual time, it happened. No, nothing happened to us or the car. But there was fairly major trouble on the road and we slowed again to just below a crawl.

It was at that last flyover before the highway to home-ground. As we glided up the stretch of the on-ramp to the bridge, my driver – who was admittedly more alert and awake than I was, bless him – said something under his breath that sounded rather rude and then veered off to the side-service road. That woke me up and I sat bolt upright and demanded to know where we were going. With infinite patience (he knows me well by now), the driver explained to me that traffic up ahead was stuck, all six lanes of it, and we were going to try and bypass the sticking point with a little clever manoeuvring. From below the level of the bridge we could see the cars waiting to go somewhere, anywhere, as long as it was away from there, that’s where. Smugly, we drove on, albeit inch by slow inch, and got to that somewhere, anywhere, that’s where ahead of the people who were above us and now far behind us.

From our vantage point we could see that there was something toppled over on the bridge, something that needed the help of a horde of policemen and a tow truck. Further on, we saw a car stopped at a point almost at the base of the down-ramp of the bridge, its nose mashed into the engine, a man holding his head sitting in the front seat. My driver peered into the rearview mirror to try and figure out what had happened. I just wanted to get home.

As we drove home, a little faster now, one image stayed clear and sharp in my mind. When we were below what was perhaps the highest point of the bridge, I had looked up to the road and seen something that seemed to embody the spirit of my city: indomitable, persistent, strong and enduring. An elephant plodded darkly through the rain, its bell clanking, its legs moving on and on and on towards a destination still unknown…

Moving up in life

The first time I did it, I must have been about nine years old, with all the blasé snootiness of a nine-year-old who used ‘attitude’ as her second name. I was, of course, a little nervous, but held tight to my father’s finger and stepped into the breach…well, it was not quite that, but close enough for the definition. I stuck my neck out, leaped into the unknown, reached over the abyss and whatever else I cannot think of to describe something I have never done before. It was exhilarating to know that I could do it, like the little red engine that huffed and puffed its way up and down hills, and even more so to know that where I succeeded fairly easily and quickly, so many more, older and wiser than me, couldn’t manage it at all.

So some years later, when I was nowhere near nine but almost twice that age and far more snooty, blasé and attitude-laden, I came across it again. This time I was seasoned at the game, but the person I was with, was not. The story happened this way….

At nine, I stepped on my first ever escalator in the airport at Athens. It was not too scary and easy enough to master, especially because no one even remotely thought that it would be anything else. It was all a taken for granted thing – my parents stepped on it easily, and I just followed, Father’s finger being the guiding force. When the steps moved upwards, I did, too, smoothly, without faltering. It was as if since no one else made a fuss about it, I didn’t either. And since no one else hesitated, where was the need for me to do so? Since no one had trouble stepping on and, more importantly, stepping off, it was a cinch for me, too.

But at about 16, it was a different story. For me – and everyone else that I knew – an escalator was not an object of awe, fear, dread or any of those delightfully negativistic emotions. It was all about convenience, getting from down to up or, on some occasions, up to down, without too much exertion or effort. We – my friends and I – hopped on and off and ran up and down the moving metal stairs with no thought of having problems at all. And so we didn’t. So when my great-aunt came to visit and was confronted with an escalator for what was perhaps the first time in her life, it was a time for me to detach myself from my family and pretend I knew nothing of anyone involved in the incident.

It was, then, for me, a matter of intense and utter embarrassment. We were at a large and comfortably equipped shopping centre (this was before the time of malls in this country) and needed to go upstairs to the floor above. The easy way was to use the escalator. The elevator was crowded and my mother was claustrophobic, while my great-aunt couldn’t really run up the stairs like the rest of us usually did. So we talked her into trying to step on the moving stairway. She was game, poor old lady, and walked up to the contraption, ready and willing. But the spirit was weak and balked. Big time. She looked at the steps emerging from the belly of the machine and quailed. She moved her foot forward once, then back again. Then, holding tightly on to my mother’s hand, she tried again. No go. She backed off, this time a little further away. My father got into the act and urged her to give it another shot. Valiantly, she stepped up again, holding on to Mum on one side and Papa on the other….and she just couldn’t.

With the unforgiving mind of a teenager, I had walked away, pretending great interest in the stores that ringed the central well of the building. I saw the crowds building behind my family and heard the comments being made about the “old lady” who was “mad”. And, where now I would have quelled any hecklers with a look or waded into the fray to demolish anyone who made any nasty remarks about me and mine, then I did all I could to make it clear that they were nothing to do with me. Finally, my aunt went up in the elevator with my father. My mother and I walked up the stairs.

It took a few years for me to be ashamed of what I had done. But the process of realising my smallness and silliness had to be gone through, painfully and slowly. It was called ‘growing up’. And now I hope I have.

Night fever

I have never been a night bird. Part of the reason for that could be that I have always been a little afraid of the dark, unsure, like Calvin (of Hobbes fame) just what may be lurking in the gloom under my bed. But after many years of conditioning, I finally convinced that quiet little voice of not-quite-reason in my head that there was, indeed, nothing under the bed that I now sleep on, except for perhaps a few cat-hair-fuzzballs and a stray piece of thread – if the maid was doing her job properly, that is. Apart from the wonderfully reassuring fact that my bed is constructed in such a way that there can be nothing under it unless whatever is under it is very thin and flat, like a few sheets of paper or, at most, a slim newspaper.

But under my bed is not the focus of this blog. What is, is the night. Which I rediscovered yesterday, when I left work considerably later than I am wont to do, or have done for the past couple of years. My driver was as tired as I was and we both sat in our respective seats in what, for us, was silence, saying nothing except a few polite mutterings that soon faded into an exhausted stupor – in me, at least, sprawled in the back seat. But somewhere along the route home I found what could have been a second (or was it the 15th?) wind, temporary as it may have been, which wound me up enough for me to look out the window and actually see what the world beyond the glass was up to.

In the long, lean car next to my little buggy was a gentleman who would never fit the ‘long, lean’ description. He sat there rather like Jabba the Hutt from the Star Wars movies, toadlike and flowing from forehead to shoulders in one smooth slope. His head, with its drastically receding hairline and its oversized and astonishingly hirsute ears, was egg-shaped. Through the night lit in strobe-like intensity by passing headlights, his glasses glinted. One hand lifted his mobile phone to his ear, the gems on his many rings flashing briefly as he gestured with the other. At some point, he must have felt me staring, albeit idly, and turned his head in my direction. I hastily looked away, abashed, ashamed at being caught doing something that I had been taught all my life was unladylike and plain rude.

At the next traffic lights, we stopped. A cockroach-like autorickshaw edged up too close by us and both my driver and I glared daggers at its occupants. There were many of them, two adults with at least four small children, all dressed in their glittering best, obviously for a wedding or a special outing. A little girl standing between her father’s knees stared at me as my eyes skated past her face and I did the classic double take. She was a pretty thing, her hair caught up in two ponytails, each one lavishly decorated with strings of white and orange flowers. Her eyes were ringed with kohl and her small mouth was stained berry-red with lipstick, her face strangely lighter than the rest of her with powder. Her mother had obviously taken a lot of loving trouble over getting her ready for the occasion, matching her clothes with her shiny bead necklace and drop earrings, her hair-ribbons and her sandals. I smiled at her just as the lights changed and we moved forward. In that last tiny glimpse, I saw her start to smile, a radiance tentatively lighting up her whole being.

As we turned into the satellite city where I live, a long-distance bus slowly slid out of its berth towards the centre of the road. In its row of dimly lit windows high above my car I could see faces in different phases of living. A bejewelled lady, not too young, rested her head against the glass, her eyes closed. A small boy pressed his nose against his window, eager to see every bit of the start of his possibly long journey. And, framed in the last pane, was a young man with, with some strange logic, sunglasses on, even though it was past 8:30 pm and the sun had long since wandered off to the other side of the world.

And there, I was home. The hot, heavy, humid air drooped over my head as I stepped from air-conditioned comfort into the lobby, brightly illuminated and like a haven from the possible terrors of the dark. In my drive home, I had seen and felt none. But that didn’t mean they were not there!

A fishy tale

A Bengali friend and colleague brought lunch for the team today, lovingly made by his mother, who was visiting him in Mumbai. It was actually supposed to be an at-home meal Sunday afternoon, but for various reasons people preferred to do it on a working day. So we trooped down to the office cafeteria and sat ourselves down, napkins tied around our necks and cutlery brandished, ready to get down and dirty with the starring cast of the lunch menu. After some to-ing and fro-ing with plates, spoons and dishes that needed to be collected and cleaned, and arguments about whether the food should be heated or not, who wanted rice and who, rotis, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

And then it was time to eat. We sat solemnly around the table, knee to knee and crunched into our chairs to avoid the drips from the air-conditioner pipes that ran along the ceiling overhead. Native politeness classed with greed as each container was pried open, the aromas of the seafood overwhelming the usual canteen miasma of floors stained with spilled oils and coffee, stale air trapped inside a closed room that held too many over-stressed people who sweated madly with repeated visits to the heat of the outdoors and the pressure of meeting targets, both marketing and editorial.

A plate of rice was placed tenderly in front of me, a spoon balanced precariously on its rim. A dish of fish curry, its fragrance tempting even my temperamental tastebuds, wafted past my nose and I gingerly picked out a small piece and bathed it gently in gravy. I mixed, I prodded, I scooped, I ate. I licked the last little grain of rice from my spoon and did a repeat of the mix-prod-scoop-eat routine. It was delicious, all the care with which the food had been made reflected in its smell, its taste, its look, its appeal.

As Bengalis do, we all ate in courses. Rice with fish curry, rice with prawns in gravy, rice with more curry and fish. A little at a time, a few spoonsful with each mix. There is a delicacy in that, a certain finicky meticulousness that demands careful attention to every morsel that is eaten. It is not like the way that most people will wrap themselves around a meal – sambhar, rice, vegetable and papad, all in one sumptuous bite; or naan and kebab and onions and chutney, with a little extra mirchi thrown in for relish; or even bread and steak and gravy and salad and dressing, assembled to complement each other and fill the senses with a melange of flavours adding up to an entirely new one.

The next course arrived with a special message for me. Since I am not very adept at dismembering fish and am never sure how to spit the bones out politely, I tend to avoid it. But I will attack any prawn that may come my way, never hesitating to grab it from under anyone else’s nose, however fond I may be of them. After all, I am rather fonder of the prawn than of the person vying for it! And these were divine. Bathed in a wonderfully sweet-tangy-spicy gravy unctuous with oil and studded with cinnamon and cardamom, these prawns did a gentle waltz with raisins, cooked soft and oozing sweetness. They made perfect one-spoon bites with rice – a small puddle of rice, topped with a few drops of gravy, hiding a tight coil of prawn and a tiny treasure of honeyed raisin. Is this what they meant when they called it manna from heaven?

And, redolent of a good meal well eaten, savouring the last tinge of flavour in my mouth, I wandered back to work, thanking my colleague for the lunch, thanking his mother for the feast that I had not cooked and thanking the powers that be for the gift of a prawn, perfectly finished…

Beating the heat

The monsoon has decided to do a bunk as far as Mumbai is concerned. Oh, no, it is not that it will not arrive…eventually…but this year it seems to be taking its own sweet time, as we Indians are wont to say. While weather is always temperamental – or iffy, in more local parlance, but of a different vintage – it is being unusually so now, leaving us in a collective lather of ruffled temper, pouring sweat and rampant speculation. “But you promised!” everyone seems to be pointing fingers at the Met Office, which declared that the rains would arrive a week earlier than normally scheduled, not a week later, as is now the forecast.

So what went wrong? Well, there are various theories. Urban legend has it that if the monsoon arrives in the city on or a day before or after June 10, life will be normal, hunky-dory, happy. If, however, it is late, there will be floods, as if the rain gods are making up for lost time and over-compensating. And if it is early, especially a week or more before time, there will be famine, prognosticators say darkly and with that cynical and almost-evil sneer on their miserable little faces as they speak words of doom and, typically monsoon-ishly, gloom. None of these apply to the rains this time, we are told by newspaper headlines, television newscasts and the Met Office alike. The culprit is a malcontent weather system in the Persian Gulf, one that sucked the storms that herald the rains into the straits of Oman and dumped so much water there that there were floods and tidal waves in a region that normally does not see water from above too often.

As a result, we are being very depressive and doomsday-ish about what Mumbai and its people are going through right now. Never mind the fact that for months, even years, farmlands in the state have been severely water-deprived, so much so that farmers are killing themselves for lack of a decent crop and thereby a subsistence livelihood. Never mind that for longer than we can remember we have been suffering the consequences of water shortages and power cuts and all sorts of associated problems, each time creating such a hullabaloo about it that the government is forced to take drastic measures to not just shut us up, but actually start working on a way to perhaps start tackling the matter in a long-term rather than just an ad hoc manner. That, by the way, is about how the government functions, with plans that are formulated over years to start dealing with the way in which to formulate plans…at some remote stage arriving at the actual matter at hand, rather than a plan to get there, one day.

But in the meantime, we are vocal about our agonies. Make gentle conversation with any Mumbaikar at this time and you will hear moans, groans and whinges about the heat and how horrible it is. We sweat if we move even a fingertip, but need to push that aforementioned digit into motion to do what we have to, to keep cool, be it turning on the fan or waving one if the electricity has been cut of at that particular time. We moan, groan and whinge about how there is no power, how the water is so hot, how the ice has not formed in the freezer and how the inverter does not cool the room enough, sweating profusely in the very effort to make our woes heard and shared. But what we forget, usually, is that someone else has a story that is as horrific if not more so, than the one we have to tell – my friends in Delhi tell me that it has hit 48 (degrees, not the toll in a hit-and-run); the cheerful upside: only eight people have died today because of the heat.

In all this heated debate, humour tends to edge on the macabre. It may be funny to some, especially those who are not direct sufferers, but to most, it is a pain we all share. And, as soon as the rain does stop holidaying in Oman and finally arrives to cool off Mumbai, we can change the focus of our moans, our groans and our whinges and whine about how the rain never stops….

On the wire

As a journalist in a fairly hot and happening newspaper, I have to field some very strange calls. While the TRAI ruling doesn’t seem to have kicked in yet and I get all sorts of offers from credit cards and loan services, apart from free holidays, new schemes for car finance, grocery delivery services and more that I cannot for the life of me remember, but refuse to even listen to after the first sentence. Perhaps what annoys me most is that most of these callers get my name wrong and, for some mysterious reason, call me Mr. Last time I checked, I was not a Mr. But then maybe they know something I don’t.

And in the course of so many years being alive and visible through my bylines, I have had to field a whole lot of very strange calls from very strange people with very strange requests. Like the gentleman who calls from Kolkata every couple of weeks with some “vital information, madam” but never calls back to follow up or send me email to let me know details of whatever he wants to convey to me. He tells me of these fantastic leads, from an exhibition of Satyajit Ray sketches to an interview with a rarely heard and even less frequently seen classical musician. And then, after promising to forward me more information via email, he does a neat vanishing trick, until the next time he calls to tempt me with more.

Then there is the nice young lady from the PR agency who never fails to call at least once a day to demand that I do something about the artist that she is in charge of, hype-wise, that is. Unfortunately, the aforementioned individual lacks both talent and personal aesthetics and I have no space for her in anything that I may have an opinion on. The PR lady tries hard, I am unfailingly polite, but I cannot help her and she has to do her job. So we have nice, well-behaved conversations every now and then and part with mutual assurances of faith and good intentions, and then go our own ways, me doing nothing for her. I would like to, if only she would find me people I can write about!

Then there is the occasional caller with no discernible name and varying identity. He or she will call, demand to know my name and, when I ask for theirs first, will rattle off a string of syllables that means, at the end of it, very little, if anything at all. Then after I want to know why they called, they will say they need to know who does book reviews, or who writes about dance performances or who they should contact for getting a poem published. Why I still do not know, but they seem to trust implicitly that I will have all the answers, as if I had just popped out of a nicely polished brass lamp and possess infinite knowledge of life, the universe and everything else that lies in between the two. Sometimes I am in a mood conducive enough to provide answers. Other times I need to be left alone and will growl and hang up. Much of the time I ask them to call back, ask the operator what they want to know and wait with the certainty that they will be directed right back to me, since there is generally no one else in the office at that early hour.

When I am alone and trying to get some work done, I dread the telephone ringing. But I tend to almost always answer it, somewhere in my logical, sensible, practical mind knowing that it just possibly could be someone I do want to talk to or, more importantly, someone I need to talk to. So I answer, knowing as I do that it is all, once again, an exercise in wonderful futility.

Salt of the earth

It is indeed unfortunate, but I cannot tolerate too much salt in my diet. In almost the next instant after eating a too-salty morsel, my ankles swell alarmingly, as do my eyelids and my fingers and various parts of me unmentionable in print. And that leaves me feeling intensely uncomfortable, as if I am walking on wet sponge and sounding vaguely squelchy with each excruciating step. And then, after much water of various temperatures and an occasional cheat-dose of caffeine – which is know is terribly unhealthy for me and my salt content – I rush hither and yon to and from the loo and finally get back to my normal and fairly balanced self.

But this intolerance is a great pity, since so much that I love to eat is denied me. French fries from a fast food restaurant, for instance. While the servers will stretch themselves for a sweet smile and a polite ‘thank you’ and give me fresh fries hot out of the oil before they are salted, occasionally they cannot oblige and I munch my way through the salty snack practically feeling my response to it as I down each bite. After a visit to one of these places, and a delicious and most soothing lunch of burger, fries and soda-pop, I stagger out tummy leading to spend the rest of the day water retentive and miserable.

But I found myself a wonderful way to satisfy my craving for fries and still keep my feet happy. Apart from salt substitutes - which are chemical and therefore avoidable in my book – I do the trick with a little whipped sour dahi, or a touch of lemon mayonnaise – which, if it is home-made, is tangy but not as salty as the store-bought kind. Also try homemade salsa, fresh garlic aioli or sour cream and they work great as dips for chips. But even better is fries made from sweet potatoes; these need just a light sprinkle of black pepper powder for that dose of deliciousness that the mouth and the tummy and, most of all, the soul craves.

For years now we have used less salt in home cooking. Even pickles – Indian style, with chilli powder, crackled mustard and oil – have that low-salt ethos that makes them easier to eat, depletes the bottles sooner and makes us gustatorily very happy. If more salt is needed, it is added individually at table, but more often than not a squeeze of lemon is all that it takes for the flavours to be ramped up to requisite levels. As a result, food in other people’s homes or even at restaurants tends to seem over-salted and vaguely much of a muchness in taste and aftertaste, too.

But a salt problem is a matter of much deprivation as well. I look longingly at the colourful rows of snack packets in supermarkets and sigh sadly when I walk past, knowing full well that any of that would be a no-no for me. I do a quick trot along the pavement outside the fast food outlet in the mall, trying hard not to succumb to the temptation of the waves of aroma emanating from within that tells the story of hot oil, trans-fats (though not any longer, I am assured) and lots of salt, all forbidden joys. And I wave my hands and shake my head violently and make loudly protesting noises at the sandwich counter when they reach for the salt shaker to sprinkle its contents over my otherwise healthy, high-fibre lunch.

It may be a healthy way to live, but for me it is a necessity. Sometimes I wish I was strong enough to let go, give in and indulge. Never mind that I will walk through the rest of my life with gently squishing, squelching noises in my wake.

Arts and parts

Over the past few weeks I have been paying a great deal of attention to the arts, more because I have to deal with that section of the newspaper I work in at the moment than anything else. Much of it is rubbish, written about and photographed more for the instant news value than anything else, spoken of because of the celebrities that attend the opening, or the ‘name’ of the artist involved, rather than the actual merit of the art involved. But today, in this particular realm, the more noise you make the better you are reputed to be, never mind that what you actually produce is not worth the space it occupies or the hype it is given.

And every time, with every story, I wander back to the past in my head, thinking of shows I have been to and artists I have met, most of whom have been huge names with huge reputations, all, in my ken, well earned. They are – or were, in some cases - people who were true artists, those who didn’t need the hype and PR that, more often than not, are part of the modern artist’s entourage today. Some of these people I was familiar with, in that I had seen their work all my growing up years, and could converse with some degree of intelligence on then and with them.

Perhaps the person who appealed to me most of all was Jehangir Sabawala. With his gentle smile and fabulously Daliesque moustache, he was someone I bumped into once or twice a year at a social do my parents would drag me along to. It helped, of course, that his daughter was once upon a time a friend, albeit a rather older one; we would sit on a sofa and exchange scurrilous gossip about the school we had both attended and make acerbic comments about fashion statements at the dinner we were at. I never did speak to her father except very casually, from the hi-bye-good-to-see-you-again kind of point of view, but I saw his work often and loved the misty colours and vaguely fantasy air they had.

Anju Dodiya was someone I liked when I met her. I was interviewing her for a new website and she spent most of the long weekend at the art camp I was infiltrating holed up in her room, working. Even while we spoke, she stayed almost hidden behind her canvas, emerging only briefly to refresh her palette with more blobs of paint or dip her brush in what was presumably cleansing solution. I sat on the floor almost under her feet, watching her bird-like movements and the totally absorbed look on her face and, finally, saw what was emerging on her easel. There was a quiet joy in her work and in her personality that gave me a sense of warmth and good feeling.

Some years earlier, I was sent off to meet B Prabha, one of the biggest names in contemporary Indian art. She had lost her husband only a short while before that and was rumoured to be rather difficult, I was warned. But I found her – when I did find her, tucked away into a basement studio hidden within a car park – she seemed to be a very sad, very grieving woman, one who still produced some fabulous work, but who was getting increasingly lost in the darkness of a mind that was full of loss and tears. She was an unbelievable talent who had fallen into an emotional abyss that she didn’t seem to want to climb out of. In writing the story after I had spoken to her for a while, I found my own mood becoming darker and grimmer, feeling like I had this enormous grief resting against my back that I could not shake off.

Since then I have met a number of extremely skilled artists, some with great talent, some with great publicity agents. And all of them have been interesting case studies in that funny psychological balance called life.

Romancing the rain

(Yes, well, I do this sometimes. Today happens to be a rather hectic day at work and I just happen to have a story that I like that was published very recently in the paper I work with, and happenings all came together and did this. So here goes....)

Many years ago, Annie Lennox – who must have been a tourist in India in July when she composed the song – sang Here comes the rain again. It had a lovely haunting melody with that insistent backbeat and a gorgeous raindrop-py rhythm that I loved. If there had been mobile phones back then, that would have been my ringtone. But there weren’t and I was rather too young to want one. And, most of all, those were the days that I liked rain.

Things, like life, change. So did I. And my tastes. Once upon a time I liked getting wet in a downpour and insisted that my father come with me for a walk in the first rainstorm of the season. Dressed in short shorts and T, enveloped in water repellent rubber-coated canvas and wearing cute gumboots (if they were not cute, I didn’t wear them) and holding my father’s hand, I splashed through puddles and sang, for some mysterious reason, a funny mixture of Roop tera mastana, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall and Back to the USSR. Once we got home, soggy around the edges and ravenous, we would be banished to shower and change, then dosed with hot spiced chai and, if we were very good, onion and cashewnut pakoras that we dipped into ketchup or mayonnaise. Rain was good. I liked it.

As I grew up, rain was still a good thing. Lots of it meant a holiday from school and, a little later, no need to go to college. Living away from Mumbai for a year or two here and there in time allowed us to escape from the rigour and eventual monotony of the monsoon months, oddly enough making us want to feel the warm rain beating down on our shoulders again soon. Like homing pigeons – or congenital idiots – we often flew back through big black clouds to a tarmac slick and sometimes waterlogged, into a city that was cleaner, but smellier, soggier and mouldier. The older I got, the more I hated the rain, from the aggressively steamy heat of the summer to the heightened sweat factor of the first couple of weeks of wet to the unending dampness of a season that should never have been invented by the powers that be.

But that is not the point, people tell me. Rain is for romance, for long walks with a beloved, for snuggling under a shared umbrella, for that Pyaar hua ikraar hua scenario, for the Kaante nahin katte wet sari dance…at that point my practical bone kicks me in the love synapse and I come back to reality. I can just see my beloved developing a sinus irritation after getting a trifle damp in a gentle rain shower. I can imagine trying to get out of a wet sari. I can feel the slugs exploring my toes and the earthworms crawling up my clothes as I wade my unwieldy way holding aforementioned beloved’s hand, through ankle deep water in a side street that has not been cleared of the debris of last year’s floods. I know that the chai will be too sweet and the pakoras will have chillies waiting to ambush my unsuspecting mouth.

There is no romance in rain. Romance is all about sitting inside watching the rain, thinking fondly of dry feet, warm knees and a nice large mug of hot apple cider. Romance is the story of a mushy movie on TV, the fragrance of baking brownies and the sure knowledge that there is no need to go out and get wet. But, at this time of year, here comes that rain again. Drat.

When nature calls

There was a rather interesting article sent to me this morning for the spirituality section of our newspaper that was titled ‘The Call of Nature’. For a moment, I let that title go; then, to my horror, I realised that it was a little suggestive in nature (Ha, ha! I actually did not aim for that one, but hit target!) and decided then and there that it had to be changed. It was, to something more innocuous, but for a moment it was a rather close call…and not too natural either.

And this is just what the situation at the office has been over the last week or so. The combination of a water crisis and a blocked and then broken pipe resulted in a ‘little inconvenience’, as the company administration tactfully put it. The consequence: everyone from this floor had to troop down to the ground floor to use the ‘facilities’, which were, in any case, over-stressed. Because of which, logically, obviously, the aforementioned facilities broke down, too, and those of us who had rushed down to use them had to rush back up, take a container of water into the loo with us and do what needed rather desperately by then to be done. It was reminiscent of the scenes from the past – which none of us had probably seen in real life – when you took your little lota filled with water from the well and went out into the fields when nature called.

That is a very Indian concept, as far as I know. I was brought up on properly installed western ‘facilities’, only occasionally using the more native and occasionally primitive version that was not just amazingly difficult to master, but somehow exciting as well. I remember one traumatic trip to Goa with a group of classmates. We all stayed in a friend’s family home and learned how to coexist, literally, with various creatures, including pigs. In fact, they were the sewage system, if you know what I mean. It was a ghastly experience – I came back home to Mumbai with a twisted foot (no, I was not avoiding the pigs, I slipped on a step and dislocated a bone), a head-full of nightmares and a bad case of constipation. And it took me a few years to get back to eating pork again.

That trip was indeed memorable. It was one of the few times I had a bath with other people sharing the same space which, for someone who values privacy above any other quality of life, it was truly horrendous. The first night we were in Goa, we had to draw water from the well in the yard and then use the dimly lit stone-flagged are to get on with our ablutions. Being rather a prude, I managed to take the fastest bath in the history of suds and forever after have believed that I was trying to lather up with a dead frog, not a bar of soap. I couldn’t look any of my classmates in the eye the next morning. That evening, and for the two that followed that we spent in the village, I refused to bathe outdoors; I did so rudimentarily in the regulation loo, a friend keeping watch at the door – I returned the favour when she washed up – as I squinted through the gloom to make sure I located the bucket of water when I needed to wash the soap out of my eyes. My first action when I got to my own home was to head to the loo and shower; my parents, who had been out to dinner, came back to find me fast asleep in a vast chair, one foot swathed in crepe bandage and a damp towel still wrapped around my wet hair.

Not having access to a proper loo of a certain level of hygiene sends my digestive system into a dormant state, a cross between a camel and a dik-dik, I am often teased. But what else can I do, especially if deadlines loom and the water if cut off in the office loo?

When nature calls

There was a rather interesting article sent to me this morning for the spirituality section of our newspaper that was titled ‘The Call of Nature’. For a moment, I let that title go; then, to my horror, I realised that it was a little suggestive in nature (Ha, ha! I actually did not aim for that one, but hit target!) and decided then and there that it had to be changed. It was, to something more innocuous, but for a moment it was a rather close call…and not too natural either.

And this is just what the situation at the office has been over the last week or so. The combination of a water crisis and a blocked and then broken pipe resulted in a ‘little inconvenience’, as the company administration tactfully put it. The consequence: everyone from this floor had to troop down to the ground floor to use the ‘facilities’, which were, in any case, over-stressed. Because of which, logically, obviously, the aforementioned facilities broke down, too, and those of us who had rushed down to use them had to rush back up, take a container of water into the loo with us and do what needed rather desperately by then to be done. It was reminiscent of the scenes from the past – which none of us had probably seen in real life – when you took your little lota filled with water from the well and went out into the fields when nature called.

That is a very Indian concept, as far as I know. I was brought up on properly installed western ‘facilities’, only occasionally using the more native and occasionally primitive version that was not just amazingly difficult to master, but somehow exciting as well. I remember one traumatic trip to Goa with a group of classmates. We all stayed in a friend’s family home and learned how to coexist, literally, with various creatures, including pigs. In fact, they were the sewage system, if you know what I mean. It was a ghastly experience – I came back home to Mumbai with a twisted foot (no, I was not avoiding the pigs, I slipped on a step and dislocated a bone), a head-full of nightmares and a bad case of constipation. And it took me a few years to get back to eating pork again.

That trip was indeed memorable. It was one of the few times I had a bath with other people sharing the same space which, for someone who values privacy above any other quality of life, it was truly horrendous. The first night we were in Goa, we had to draw water from the well in the yard and then use the dimly lit stone-flagged are to get on with our ablutions. Being rather a prude, I managed to take the fastest bath in the history of suds and forever after have believed that I was trying to lather up with a dead frog, not a bar of soap. I couldn’t look any of my classmates in the eye the next morning. That evening, and for the two that followed that we spent in the village, I refused to bathe outdoors; I did so rudimentarily in the regulation loo, a friend keeping watch at the door – I returned the favour when she washed up – as I squinted through the gloom to make sure I located the bucket of water when I needed to wash the soap out of my eyes. My first action when I got to my own home was to head to the loo and shower; my parents, who had been out to dinner, came back to find me fast asleep in a vast chair, one foot swathed in crepe bandage and a damp towel still wrapped around my wet hair.

Not having access to a proper loo of a certain level of hygiene sends my digestive system into a dormant state, a cross between a camel and a dik-dik, I am often teased. But what else can I do, especially if deadlines loom and the water if cut off in the office loo?

Romancing the rain

Mumbai has been unbearably hot and muggy over the past few days. An occasional rain shower has done nothing to alleviate the Mumbaikar’s weather woes, though it has given him – or her, since I am a her, as you will know by now – something to grouch about, as happens every year until the temperature drops a little and people get a new crib to whinge on. It gets worse every time, they complain, wiping the sweat from their commuting-weary brows and waving the afternoon tabloid in front of their faces in a vain attempt to cool off a little. And then they complain about complaining, saying that it is all very well to complain, but that they need more to their arid – for a short while longer only – lives than to complain.

Sigh.

To cut the endless story short, it rained last night. Just as Father and I were clearing up after dinner and Small Cat was vociferously reminding us that it was time to play, not to fritter away time in the kitchen, there was the ominous rumble of thunder. It had been growling on and off all evening, ever since I had walked in the door hot, sweating and vaguely bad tempered because of the guilt of being later than I normally am in getting home, but Father had not believed me and I dismissed it as being too far away to bother about closing windows and making sure no water got in the cracks. And when I told Small Cat about the possible storm, she looked at me, burped and went back to chasing a dried pinto bean around the living room.

But by the time I was ready for bed, the storm had arrived overhead. The momentary brightness of the sky that we saw at irregular intervals had evolved into being strong flashes of brilliant lightning that streaked downwards, seeming to hit buildings, the surface of the sea and the hills just beyond where we lived. Hot on the heels of the lightning came the thunder, the crashes rolling into each other even as they drummed like the percussion section of the New York Philharmonic and Zakir Hussain at his frenzied best combined with Vikku Vinayakram and Rick Allen (the Def Leppard drummer, for those who don’t know) doing their thing in a particularly passionate moment in a full stage concert. The rain battered down on the fibre-board awning above the windows and the wind rattled the glass of the windows and whipped the plants into endlessly mad whirls of foliage.

I lay in bed watching the storm through the sheers. The sage green of the net gave the bursts of brightness beyond them an unearthly hue, as if nature was being sucked into the sky to form a homogenous blend of colour and leaves that shone with a strange, eerie light. Every now and then I would close my eyes as lightning blasted through the air, often with a startling crack and the thunder pealed bass over the hills and into the sea. At some stage I got up, opened the windows a wee bit and took a deep breath. There was a wonderful freshness to the air, wet earth and cool wind, the acid tinge of water from the canal across the highway and the sharpness of electricity singing the trees.

And in the morning, the world was clean and new. Gulmohar petals clung to the cars downstairs, while the yellow of cassia flowers littered the awnings below mine. Puddles glimmered in the brilliance of the morning sun and Small Cat stood on tiptoe on the air-conditioner to peer out of the grill at the pigeon shaking out wet feathers on the roof of the apartment under us. It was almost time for the rainy season and the world was starting to get ready for it.