A fatal fascination

Somehow I – like so many others I know and many more than I don’t – have a morbid desire to read about all the gory and painful details about death, especially when it happens en masse. We scan headlines in newspapers and cover stories in magazines, surf television channels and keep up with updates and timelines and personal profiles and responses from friends and family. And we know, somewhere inside our rational selves, that we are being not just silly, but self-depressive as well. But the fascination never goes away, not unless a conscious effort is made to shoo it out of the mind. Which is easier said than done.

For me, I first got really aware of this strange predilection when Princess Diana died in that horrific car crash in a tunnel in Paris. With many of my friends I, too, watched every moment of replay on television and every second of grief that her family went through. For some reason, we looked at the website dedicated to her memory every few hours, talked about what she wore and how she looked and that song, the original of which we could never listen to again without thinking of that tragic dying. Perhaps it was then that I decided that I would never ever be associated with a gossip publication, never ever be part of a genre that, in a way, contributed to the death of the princess so many people cared about.

Then, some years later, came 9/11, as it is known. I had just come home from work and was all set to watch a travel show on television, one that Father often spoke of with words of praise. But instead of the warm tropical waters of wherever and the exotic cuisine of wherever else, there were these images of something I could not every imagine would happen in real life. For a while I believed that it was a film, a fairly bad movie being telecast because its director was dead or perhaps it had just released somewhere significant. Only after I flipped channels and found everyone was showing the same horrific scene of a tower slowly collapsing into itself and a plane hitting the other building did I realise that it was actually happening, reality, not fiction, fact, not nightmarish fiction.

And in the weeks, perhaps months or even years, that followed that devastating day, I – and my friends – went back to the scene of that crime, reliving it as we read about how the various planes crashed, how people died, how the people responded in New York, in Washington, in Virginia, how the world was still reacting to what had happened so quickly, without warning. And, every year since, we all go back to that tragic place and stop to think about the people who died, the people left behind and the people who were responsible for the whole event that was, in totality, the phenomenon known as '9/11'.

It is almost like poking a bruise or picking at a scab. Even while it hurts, it feels strangely good, a sort of reaffirmation that the pain was nasty, and could happen again. Even while it heals, there is a bizarre need to know once again that it had been wounded, that there had been trauma. And maybe in that knowledge there is a surety that I – or you, as my friend – will never be responsible in any way for a tragedy of this kind anywhere, any time. Maybe all potential student killers on college or school campuses all over the world need that lesson now. And maybe we all need to remind ourselves at regular intervals that it could happen…to you, to me, to ours.

Saying a fond farewell

No one stays anywhere for ever, not these days, at least. Especially in a professional environment, people keep moving around, wandering from job to job, finding new and exciting opportunities around every point in their overloaded resumes. And along the way there are partings, farewells, some good, some not so fond, others barely even noticed. Something like that last happened with someone I know just yesterday; top dog in his particular place and time, he suddenly took off for parts unknown with just a couple of days’ notice for all those who worked with him, leaving behind a shocked and rather stunned wonderment. And when he finally made his exit, I hear, it was not to the usual nicely orchestrated clamour of cakes being cut and hosannas being sung, but a silent slink out the front door that attracted only the attention of those in the immediate vicinity. Which is, in itself, astonishingly lax on the part of all those who should have known better.

Any professional farewells that I have made – and I have done my fair share of those – have always been done with a certain flair and drama. Perhaps the people I have worked with have been more fond of me that anyone was of my friend, or else my own personal colourful and flamboyant personality has made things more loud and obvious, I don’t know. But it has always been a story filled with avowals of endless love and promises to keep in touch for life. None of which actually happen, since a farewell scene is like the movies – all sound and fury signifying very little, if anything at all.

When I quit my first job, it was after the terribly meaningful time span of all of two weeks. It was a ‘mutual decision’, as the phrase goes, with my boss saying as grateful a farewell to me as I did to him. My colleagues, who probably did much to get rid of me, were all sympathetic, giving me small presents of sweets and hugs as I bounced down the stairs to find a taxi to escape the area. I knew that I was wrong for that job, as wrong as it was for me, and I had bigger, better and brighter things waiting, if only I knew where to look for them.

They found me soon enough. And, after some years of toil and troublemaking in the same wonderfully ancient building with a colourful history, I walked out one late evening bearing potted plants, dried flowers, chocolates, unidentifiable pieces of knicks and knacks and staggered homewards, wanting to cry but knowing that it would be the silliest thing I had ever done in my short working life.

Some day I will leave here, where I work for now. And there will be people who will miss me, who will be sad to see me go. In that, they will give me all sorts of memories to take with me, in various shapes and colours and smells, and we will all vow forever love and remembrance. And as each of us gets busy with a new life, some in the same place, some in new ones, we will slowly forget to keep contact, fading into our new and hopefully improved set of friends, colleagues and times to think fondly of. All of which I wish for the person who left yesterday….

Finding a safe place

The newspapers this morning headlined horrific news: 21 people shot dead on a college campus in the United States. By the afternoon, that figure had climbed steeply to 33 and who knows how high it will go before the story is deemed a final report before the investigation starts. This kind of nightmare has been recurring over the past few years, getting to the frightening darkness it now has in huge leaps. Maybe death always did lurk on university grounds and in school cafeterias, who knows; now, it is a fact of life that needs to be dealt with, not just by the law enforcement authorities, but also by behavioural psychologists. And not just in the United States, but all over the world.

This sort of arbitrary killing is not unknown anywhere in the world. There is very little that pushes a human being past a critical point, when they start acting irrationally and dangerously. The frightening part of the story comes with time and thought – India has been absorbing so much from the West, particularly from that El Dorado known as ‘the States’; is this penchant for slaughter going to be the next cue? Think about it.

I was once a student in the US, with little care for my own safety. I never knew what it was to feel threatened or scared. None of my friends or acquaintances was unstable or irrational in any discernible way and all of them had a thick vein of sturdy common sense and practical reality running through them. In fact, as a protected, sheltered, fairly innocent baby of the pack, spoiled by circumstance and all those who knew me and kept pristine by my own unsuspecting, accepting personality, I never even dreamed that anything could happen to me, or even that anyone I knew could be in any way ‘bad’ or ‘misbehaved’, leave alone ‘evil’. That in itself kept me safer than I could imagine.

As a result I took risks that I never realised were risks. I would walk home from the lab at 2 am, uncaring that I had to go through a deserted car park and cross a road that was a direct feeder between a mall, known for its rather insalubrious bar scene, and an expressway ramp. I would drive back across the county to my apartment complex long after the traffic had eased into somnolence, not worried about headlights following me too closely or the car in front slowing down too much, too suddenly. And I would find absolutely nothing wrong in talking to a fellow student who was young and male and known to be a rover, long into the night in an otherwise deserted college building. It was not that I did not know the dangers of it all, or the stupidity of my own behaviour, but just the surety that nothing could possibly happen to me.

In that, it never did. Someone was watching over me, I knew, so I could be sure that I was safe, no matter the provocation I presented. But I never thought of this kind of horror, where someone could walk into a classroom and shoot for fun, out of rage, from an inner pain that broke through its walls without warning. Who knows why these people killed. That they did is an evil that first their families, then the nation, then the world will have to live with.

In with the new

A lot of India has been celebrating New Year over the weekend. As Tamilians, we did our thing on Saturday, with food and a certain amount of fun, a certain oddball reverence and some semblance of tradition, though skewed to suit our fairly modern attitudes. But, what with it being a working day on April 14 and with crises of work reaching their usual weekend crescendo, and my own inability to handle both work and my portion of home-chores without forgetting trivialities such as how much water to put into khichdi or when to turn off the gas under the ghee, it was a bit of a rush and the pother overtook the good sense and planning.

It all began the previous evening, when I was getting the kheer ready. It came out perfect, with the right consistency, the right amount of rice, the right proportion of sugar, the right number of threads of clotted cream and the right sprinkling of saffron, touched by a tinge of wholly unconventional nutmeg thrown in for devilment. The planning for the khichdi and the kadi, the crunchies and the afters was superbly timed and prepared for, with some sudden eventualities allowed to occur if they absolutely had to. The new tribal-craft bedspreads I had bought at an exhibition and was hoarding were taken out and put in the bedrooms, ready for use the next morning when the beds were made. My clothes were decided on and Father’s wardrobe examined for anything new that he could wear. Even Small Cat was included, with a swanky new collar ready to be clicked into place around her pretty little neck.

And then, like the world according to Murphy, things went left of centre, in their usual unpredictably crazy way. When I woke in the morning, I was still bleary with lack of sleep because I had been battling a persistent mosquito who did not understand the implications of “shoo”, repellent ointment or bug spray. Then, just when I was starting to think about taking out the sari I was thinking of wearing, I found that I had to drive myself to work and, between that fact and the other that the time I would be in the office would be long and frazzled, I chose the safe and comfortable option of jeans and a Tshirt instead. When I was headed to get that pressed and neat, the iron rebelled and refused to work. Finally, I just left, muttering direly to myself and thinking nastily about how this would be the perfect day for the car to choke or another taxi to get suddenly and painfully intimate with my little chariot.

Mercifully, the car worked fine, humming cheerfully and undauntedly along. The work day was long and arduous, with more than my usual share of editing done to my own satisfaction, and I managed to get out at a respectable hour, with time enough to go home and make dinner. Now there was a less happy story, which will need a little patience and time to tell, apart from a whole lot of my well-stored sense of humour.

It began with the khichdi. The rice and dal was picked and ready - bless Father – and I started it cooking, along with a judicious handful of spices and a prayer. Then I got the bondas ready to cook – spinach, paneer and potato balls with a coating of gently tangy besan batter. They came out perfect, as expected. The khichdi was perhaps rather too well done, but the resultant gruel was delicious. Unfortunately, when I was ghee-frying the nuts and raisins for the kheer, I forgot about them and we got somewhat charred bits of charcoal dotting the pale gold of the payasam in our bowls. And stuck in our teeth. But the piece de resistance – to which Father exhibited a strange resistence - was the kadi. Having made it only once before with the expert guidance of Madhur Jaffrey in constant attendance (in the shape of a book, not in person, I must hastily add here), I had little clue, but decided to wing it. Wing is about right. It was absolutely delectable where taste was concerned, but could perhaps be better used as a means to stick together old books that were falling apart. If reinforced concrete was used to stick together paper, of course! Father has made his acerbic remarks on the subject, but I maintain that if his eyes had been closed, he could have thoroughly enjoyed the taste and never mind the look!

But we ate, we chatted, we thought fondly of Mum and played with Small Cat, who burped happily after her snack of a new brand of cat-treats. And we all believe that the New Year will be a good and happy one. As we hope it will be for everyone else in the world.

Idol chatter

I was watching American Idol last night and must confess that even though I normally do not like reality shows, and hate the hype associated with them, in particular, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I have seen it before and find my opinions more or less spot on with the entirely obnoxious but very percipient and funny Simon Cowell. While I like Randy Jackson and his enthusiasm, Paul Abdul’s wishy-washy, always-Miss-Sunshine remarks are hardly constructive, albeit encouraging to the contestants who will, a few seconds later, likely be squashed flatter than the proverbial pancake by Cowell. And the music is always fun, be it the totally besur yowling of those who are normally eliminated or the finesse of the final ten…or six…or three.

Yesterday was Latin night. The ‘mentor’ was the diva herself, Jennifer Lopez, who was surprisingly normal, even though her voice was much weaker and tinnier than her recordings or music videos show. But she had a vitality and warmth that transcended that possible flaw, her smile lighting up the screen and her hands expressing more than her words did. And when she finally performed, the pyrotechnics and backup dancers notwithstanding, she was spectacular, that famous curve of bottom and sexiness of every move adding magic to the fairly mediocre.

But more than that, what was amazing was the lack of spark and spunk from the singers who were vying for the title. With songs from Santana and Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine dominating, it was a blah evening, all the passion and fire that Latino music has completely lacking. Where Gloria would have set the stage and the audience smoking with her vocals and her moves, none of the contestants managed that, no matter that they were all, for the most part, not bad at all. Why? Perhaps they were self conscious. Perhaps they were awed at the 15 minutes they got with La Lopez. Or maybe they were just tired of acting something they were not, and hoped that the music would do the trick instead.

But fortune has a way of smiling on the brave, or at least on bravado. Sanjaya Malakar, considered the worst singer but perhaps the most charismatic, managed to pull off a performance that was his best and one of the better ones of the evening. All without a kinky hairdo, even though he did throw in a few shy smiles and seductive sideways sneak-peeks while he sat on a stool and crooned his love song. It worked. He was still in, while a more sexy, lively, bouncy number did little for the girl who sang it, getting her booted out of the contest, as a matter of fact.

There has been a great deal of debate about Sanjaya and his continued presence on the show. People have threatened to fast until death and Cowell has said that he would quit if the boy won. And for some reason he keeps sliding through to the last few. Is it the minority vote, as many believe? Is it the persuasive power of Howard Stern? Is it his ever-changing coiffeur? Or is just sheer luck of the draw, when other people have been so much worse than the half-Indian youngster with the HAIR?

Whatever the case, Sanjaya is making it big, laying the basis of a future in showbiz even if he does not win the contest. If he does, more power to his notes – there better be, since he could do with some strength to his rather reedy voice – and to his ilk. And, of course, it will give India a new chance to claim another son, never mind that he hardly qualifies as being one!

A day to remember

Tomorrow is the fateful day, Friday the 13th. While I do not have anything even close to triskaidekaphobia, I do find it rather interesting that the number 13 should have such negative connotations in so many people’s minds. For me, it has always been a number associated with change, with fun and with a whole lot of growing up.

When I was about 13, we lived in a wonderfully situated apartment block in the very posh part of South Mumbai. High on a hill and edged by the sea on three sides, with the best view of Marine Drive from my bathroom window, it was on the 13th floor of a 14 storey block. That was a time in my life when everything was bright and colourful and sunshiney, with nothing really wrong beyond essays that needed to be written, a closet that never stayed clean and obstreperous adolescence that was hard to deal with all around. I was, on the whole, a fairly decently adjusted teenager, without the usual angsts of spots, crushes and horrible parents. It was more about wanting something I could not identify, needing to find some kind of rootedness apart from my parents and looking for a self that I still had to define.

The 13th floor was a fabulous place to grow up, which I did, in almost every way possible. It was an enormous apartment, with huge French doors at either end of the endless living-dining space, the large balconies hanging high over a steep cliff dropping down the hill. From there I watched the year go by, from the chill and breezy days of winter, when women made pickles and papads on terraces below us to the madness of the Ganpati immersion and the wild thunderstorms that rattled the windows and sparked fire over the ocean. And it was on the 13th floor that I learned to hate pigeons, to love the scent of the night queen blooms and to think about life, the universe and everything in between.

When I read about luxury hotels eliminating the 13th floor in their counting and people who refuse to step out of their homes if the 13th day of the month happens to be Friday, I giggle gently to myself and remember where I came from and what made me the person that I am. And I add to that what my stout-hearted friend and colleague said this morning when I reminded him what date tomorrow was: “So? It comes too often for it to be special!” He is right, isn’t he!

Pizzas and peanut butter

I was talking to a friend recently about food – what else! – and found that pizza had features large on the lunch menu. And it took me way back to the time when I was in college and always hungry. It was many years ago and I had just moved to a campus in the gorgeous Rocky Mountains. In the coed dorm where I had to stay for a year, I met all sorts of people, from unclad Norwegians who helped name my rubber plants to the college Casanova to a Boston Brahmin with incredibly bad breath. And along the way I made friends who taught me an alternate way of food, stuff that was not light, lite, healthy or high-fibre, had plenty of calories and fuelled the system for the hard days that we all had to go through.

Perhaps highest on that list was pizza. Every occasion that counted - which meant every excuse that could be invented – mandated a call to the nearest pizza delivery service, the more coupons we had for it, the better. At one point in time my roommate and I had 22 people in our room, scattered over bunkbeds, desks, chairs and the floor, all munching on pizza and talking non-stop with their mouths full. Smoking and drinking alcohol were not allowed in our small space, since both of us and the plants had various allergies, but bad jokes about bananas and minor jousts with forks were permitted, if the provocation was strong enough.

And whenever we had these dos, there would be leftovers. The hosts got to keep them, unfortunately. Or was it fortunately? With my terrifically Tam-Bram snobbish upbringing I quailed rather when it came to the question of very cold and very stale pizza, but my roommate thrived on it. I remember waking one very cold winter morning to find her standing by the open window watching the fat while flakes cover the lawns, while she munched happily on a day-old slice and sipped from a steaming mug of instant coffee. When I asked what in heck she was up to, even as icicles formed on my sleep-sagging eyelashes, she turned and offered me a bite. The piece wilted in her hands and whatever hunger I may possibly have felt at that hour wilted, too.

But the same girl also taught me about some pleasures of this kind of instant food. She would sit on the floor by the miniature refrigerator I had and smear lettuce leaves with sharp mustard, rolling them up and crunching into the tunes with great enthusiasm. For a long time I looked and shuddered, but one day I was goaded into taking a bite. And now I know just how wonderful fresh crisp lettuce with spicy yellow mustard can be! Then there was the peanut butter and celery thing – this was before I got allergic to peanuts, but after I had discovered a passion for American celery, which was large, tender and most delicious just by itself. My roommate would open the jar of extra-chunky peanut butter that I hoarded, grab a few sticks of celery from the fridge and do the dip-and-eat routine with almost cow-like devotion to the chewing. Soon she had me doing it too. And while I keep my distance from peanuts these days, I find that tahini or cream cheese does the trick equally well for me when teamed with lush green sticks of crunchy healthiness.

But old cold pizza still will not make me want to indulge. This is one genre of leftover I would rather leave over.

A laugh a minute

When I was very young, my parents introduced me to the wonderful world of comics. They kept me amused for hours, until I actually learned how to read and figured out what was going to happen long before it did happen. Which kind of spoiled the fun a bit, except that by then I was too busy discovering more new and exciting comic strips that brought back that amusement and giggles.

Perhaps I began with the age-old standards, comics than truly set the standards (ha, ha!) for me. I was introduced to characters like Little Dot, Lotta, Richie Rich and Caspar the Friendly Ghost, and decided that they were ‘people’ I needed to have in my own life. For years I looked everywhere for friends like this, and occasionally found someone who was close, at least in character. And they are still with me, even though I rarely read the comics these days.

Then I was shown the racks where Charlie Brown ruled. Living in a small town in Germany then, which had just one bookshop that stocked anything in English, I managed to accumulate as many Peanuts compilations as were available there. So I read through the entire roster of Charlie Brown’s adventures, identified closely with the fussbudget Lucy and danced my way into a world that was populated by the madness of Snoopy and the Red Baron, Shroeder and his passion for Beethoven, Linus, Woodstock and everyone else who made life so much fun for me and my generation.

Then came the advent of a new set of characters – all from the Asterix and Obelix series. I had the whole set, some bought in stores, others ordered for me from the publishers by my parents. The comic books were all in German, and astoundingly funny – and, in some ways, as hilarious in English, especially since I knew where the original puns came from – and while the newer plots published more recently have been more political and less regional, they have not lost their original quality. Perhaps the best part of the stories was that some of my schoolfriends of the time were also fans, so we could all talk about it and giggle happily in school. I was even given a set of brilliant orange plastic figures of the main cast by a friend who, if we were all much older and more worldly wise, may have had serious designs on my virtue.

When I was in college in the United States, my friend Karen had me meet her favourites – Opus the Penguin and his friends from Bloom County. I was already tuned into the world of animals with Garfield, and had been reading Calvin and Hobbes and trying to understand the American political commentary of Doonesbury. But my favourites remained: Beau Peep, Hagar the Horrible and, of course and always, Peanuts. Many of the creators of the strips are now gone to that funny-house in the sky, though their work still endures in reruns and memories. Today, I still read the comics in preference to going through all the hard news and deeply meaningful editorials that are necessary for me to deal with a day at work, but now it all happens at top speed. I still turn to the comics page in whatever one of the four newspapers we get at home and log into my favourite comics site online as soon as I can. My preference now leans towards things catly, and I check in on Mutts, 9 Chickweed Lane, Kit ’n’ Carlyle and Rose is Rose – the last for its charming vignettes of a young family – regularly.

But somewhere along the way I miss my old favourites. And some day I will catch up with them once again and find out just what Charlie Brown, Little Dot, Asterix and Opus are up to. Then, my funnybone may just wake up to do its familiar little wiggle of joyful excitement.

Brave heart

For some strange reason that she never tells us about, Small Cat has an odd way of dealing with things that are new and potentially – to her little mind – threatening. When the front door bell rings and she knows (with finely honed catly instinct) that it is not one of us, she scuttles from wherever she is at that point in time and leaps on to a chair at the dining table. Hiding under the tablecloth, she peers out to see what or who is asking for entry, her big eyes circular and her ears set back in alarm. Once the visitor has come and gone, she will cautiously hop off the chair, sometimes persuaded by our coaxing, and cautiously investigate any traces of the person who has come and gone.

Over the months that Small Cat has been with us (or we have been hers), she has become rather braver, even though she has her moments of determined and single-minded scuttle to positions under cover. Yesterday, for instance, she emerged from her haven to take a closer look at the piles of plastic and cardboard that the electricians – who were there to do some work in the house – had brought in. And that is not all; she has been closely monitoring the work of the gardener as he repots and prunes the plants, she supervises the maid doing the dusting every morning and insists on checking the toes of a family friend, never mind that he believes that he is allergic to cats.

Small Cat’s bravery does not stretch too far. When I had been away for a week or so and came back with bags and baggage, she took one look at me and my suitcase and fled, tail low, back low, ears low, apprehensions high. It was a while before she would deign to accept my advances, and stayed at a ‘safe’ distance watching with round eyes before she suddenly realised it was me, the person who gave her dinner and cleaned her catbox. Then she was her usual mad self, leaping out at me in her much-loved ambushes, following me around the house as I got things done in the morning and demanding a cuddle when she felt the need for one.

But we all have fears and are never sure how to deal with them. I have spoken of how I knew that there were no lions under my bed, but was too afraid to look to see if there were or not, because I was sure that they would get me if they were seen. So I spent many irrational years of my life not doing what could have saved me all that anguish, just because I was afraid to. In the same way, I know people who will not step on cracks in the sidewalk, because something nasty would happen to them. And I know that few of them have read about how Christopher Robin would hop over the pavement to make sure that the bears at the zoo didn’t get him!

A wise woman once told me that you should confront your fears so that you can see how small and silly they are. I have often taken her advice, whether it is an interview I am dreading or a sure knowledge that something is going very wrong in my life. It has usually been true that the fear is real and needs to be handled with a great deal of courage, fortitude and determination, some support from those who care about you and who matter and a whole lot of chutzpah. Just like Small Cat shows when she has got over the first instant alarm reflex.

Putting on the glitz

I am a firm believer in bling. The bigger the better, but with a certain taste attached. And while I would never advocate the kitchen-sink look, I do appreciate and occasionally indulge in a certain amount of the shiny stuff, when time and circumstance allows. And I do like a bit of OTT myself, at least once in a while, with a piece or two making that special statement that cannot but prove that you have ‘it’, whatever that ‘it’ may be. But there are rules to any bling, large or small, which must be followed; unless, of course, you want to look like the faux jewellery counter at the corner bania shop, with absolutely no connection to anything spelled D-i-o-r or even j-o-o-l-r-y.

I was at the mall today looking for cat food and various other sundries when the friend who had come with me got distracted and wandered off. Keeping one eye firmly on her movements, I watched people with the other, perhaps looking rather strange, but undaunted by the even stranger sideways glances I was getting from the spotty young man who had been trying to sell me some kind of smelly stuff – or stuff to make me smell of something apart from clean female and baby powder, I am not sure. In the waiting boredom was my companion, so I drifted a little left, peering at the cases of jewellery presumably tastefully assembled to show off a lot of nicely illuminated shine.

There were bracelets and bangles and rings and necklaces and earrings and other bits and bobs that seemed to be of mysterious function that was beyond my comprehension. And there were a few women, accompanied by patently bored men, who stood there trying things on, surfing, as it were, through the display and, occasionally, examining the results in the too-small mirror provided for that purpose. At some stage, one lady put on a ‘full set’, which consisted of a series of very shiny chains cascading down into her ample cleavage, with a pair of earrings that started at the tops of her ears and draped down into her neck. And a pretty young girl with a small silver ring in her nose draped a long and baubled necklace around her slim waist, adding to her charms considerably, much to the appreciation of four young men at a nearby counter who had become somewhat distracted by the sight.

I have been bling watching for a while now, fascinated by the range of faux jewels available and the panache with which they are worn. Television soaps – that I was riveted by a few months ago; the charm has worn off now – are perhaps the biggest consumers of ‘paste’, as it was once called, with everyone from the servants to the memsahibs decorated in swathes of the stuff. I was even more ensnared by the fact, reported in some gossip magazine, that a lot of the jewellery used by the saas-bahu types was made of – hold your breath – paper! While I figure that one out, I will go ogle some more of the glitter that is available in the store down the road from home…

The rabbit and the egg

I am a great believer. In almost anything that involves food and joy. Which means that I celebrate Easter with as much enthusiasm as I do Diwali, Eid or Hanukkah. I light candles, diyas and lanterns with equal fervour and stir up as mean a paal payasam as I do a Christmas pudding. But for me Easter has special memories, as a time when I was younger, slimmer, happier and madder (yes, that is possible, I assure you).

Many years ago, when I was a child and lived occasionally in Europe (as it was then, not EU as it is now), Easter was unusual, to say the least. With American friends in a German town, it became a mish-mash of local tradition and foreign festivity, with Easter eggs mixed up with willow branches, mixed up with ‘bunny gardens’ mixed up with daffodils. There was marzipan and chocolate, pies and pastries, fresh bread and the equivalent of hot cross buns. And lots of children running egg races and doing egg hunts, cheered on by adults wearing absurd bunny ears and hopping around looking totally ridiculous and entirely charming.

When, as a somewhat older person I took off to live for a while in the United States as a college student, I had a readymade family to celebrate Easter with. I was – and still am, I am assured – their ‘Indian daughter’ and had, once their children had gone off to various colleges, my ‘own’ room, decorated with textiles from home. I was included in all the festivals that they took seriously and went to church services with perhaps more curious delight than I had ever shown apropos a temple visit. And we ate, lots of delicious food of uncertain provenance – since most Easter feasts were pot-luck events – that was all relished and polished off to the last crumb at the bottom of the serving dish.

One very early and astonishingly cold morning, I went with my ‘foster mum’ to an Easter service on the beach. The Long Island shore is chilly at almost every conceivable time of the year. With cold winds blowing in and even colder water lashing the painfully pebbled waterfront, it was not the most joyous occasion I had ever attended, but it had an eerie beauty and a strange spiritual ambience that could never have been matched by the more sheltered – and far warmer – environs of a chapel. We stood there with hair, coats and (if possible) goosebumps flying madly about, our teeth chattering as the pastor sped through the service and the seagulls fluttered overhead. If ever there was a reason to swig the brandy served up at the reverend’s house later, the frost glittering at the tips of my eyelashes was it, but my allergies intervened and hot chocolate was my antifreeze.

What came after was more my style. My ‘family’ gave me more chocolate than I could eat in the hour after I got back to my apartment, and for a few days after that I gorged my little stout self on chocolate eggs, marzipan flowers and….but no, there was a hitch to my happiness there. I had as part of my loot a large-ish chocolate rabbit, beady black eyes and all, with all his fur (I presumed it was a ‘he’, since he had that somewhat lecherous glint in his sugar-candy eyes) carefully detailed in swirls of sweet brown stuff. Every time I reached towards him to take a bite, I imagined him looking reproachfully at me.

It got so finely balanced that I could not even break off a ear to enjoy my favourite food in its purest avatar. The rabbit sat on my work-desk for days, even weeks, still in his little clear plastic box, staring sadly at me – which could have explained why that term paper was so late – until I could take it no longer. A friend came over, I explained the situation to him and he zapped my rabbit in the microwave oven until he was a puddle of warm chocolate in a soup bowl. And, once his beady little eyes were taken out and thrown away, I managed to do the dirty – I spooned up that lovely pool of sweetness with all the relish of a starving woman deprived of chocolate for too long.

Which is the best way to celebrate Easter, methinks.

All for love

Mumbai is a city that never sleeps. And, according to the papers, it has no place to sleep in. or sleep around in, as the case may be. There is, reports say, a severe shortage of anywhere to have that loving feeling, nowhere to do a canoodle or three, no space for a cuddle and smooch. Over the past few days, the morality cops have been clamping down on loving couples hanging around promenades, gardens and malls, picking them up and taking them to the police station for their crimes – which are nothing more than simple demonstrations of affection. Parents and lovers alike have been protesting, balancing the wave of criticism and carping that has been echoing through parts if the city.

There is nothing wrong with a little love, even if it happens to be in the wrong places. But sometimes the wonderfully warm and fuzzy feeling that needs urgent expression gets a little too heated, and broad daylight in a public space is admittedly hardly the place to express it. Sitting on the parapet of a sea wall and indulging in a serious make-out session can be dangerous – apart from the possibility of falling into the water, you could also fall into the ambit of a photographer’s lens and be seen in living colour by half the country as you get into a passionate clinch with your significant other. Which means that all your friends and family and assorted other associates could be witness to your demonstrations of TLC, which you may not really want to happen, depending on what you consider to be ‘private’ and ‘personal’, rather than the public screening of a semi-porn video.

So where do lovers go in Mumbai? Stories have been written on this matter for years now – in fact, I wrote one, too, many years ago, when the morality brigade first made its presence felt in the Mumbai that I knew as a ‘journalist’. I have seen couples being rather overly friendly on Marine Drive, one of the more scenic main roads in the city, and tch tch-ed at their plight. I have watched passionate pairs – with a certain sympathetic detachment, of course – dodging vigilant policemen in public parks. And I have heard about people getting caught in ‘the act’, as it were, in the conference room or elevator of the newspaper office I once worked in. Perhaps the most innovative of these amorous adventures came when a duo was doing ‘it’ on the terrace of our (I was a denizen then) heritage building and was seen - though I presume they did not know it – by the entire staff of the municipal corporation from the building next door; lunchtime entertainment for the masses, just what the makers of ‘family’ films would be delighted with, no?

A lot of young couples have nowhere to go, admittedly, for a little slap and tickle. So public places are their only recourse. But couldn’t they use a little discretion when they get there and get down to whatever they are doing? Or is this going to be the new behaviour to show off the liberalisation of a modern generation?

A fool’s game

I have never been so pleased about April 1. It took a while for me to get down to being that pleased, since I have been looking over my shoulder with a degree of furtiveness to make sure that I am not caught unawares, as I usually am, by the day when practical jokes and smart aleck gags tend to be my lot. It is not that I am stupid or completely unintelligent; it is just that I never see it coming and get slimed…in a manner of speaking, of course. But this year it happened on a Sunday and I was nabbed by only one person: my father. And he knows how I feel about it, and was therefore exceedingly kind in yanking my leg neatly out from under me.

It was painless and easy, cashing in on one of my paranoias. Bugs. Almost everyone who knows me knows that I do the jump-and-run routine when a bug happens to cross my path…or doesn’t, in this particular case. I was groggily sipping at my morning mug of green tea with Small Cat rooting around under the dining table, when Father looked sharply up at a spot above my head and announced with much solemn seriousness: bug. In my usual poised and polished manner, I jumped…right out of my chair. I also ran…right out of the room. And when I peeked around the door to find out if aforementioned bug had been politely shown out the window, I found Father chortling, with Small Cat looking suspiciously as if she was muffling an attack of the giggles, sitting on the dining table and staring bug…err…big-eyed in my direction.

Happy April Fool’s, they wished me.

It hasn’t always been this kind. There have been moments of greater agony, when I have been left wondering what hit me, though not literally, thank god. People have told me about telephone calls that I could have been waiting for, given me presents that were actually useful (like glue - why?) and scared me with assorted wildlife, primarily bugs. So over the years, on April 1, I tend to start looking furtive, peek over my shoulder at the least provocation and jump higher than I normally would on any other day of the year. Every year I tell myself that I will have nerves of steel on that day, brace myself for whatever may happen and make sure that I am not at all surprised, startled or otherwise, by anything that anybody is likely to dish out.

I had all the steel ready and willing to go this year, too. But someone up there had a special surprise in store for me. The night before, as I was tidying my room, a large and curious moth fluttered a little too close for comfort. Being my usual brave self where small and fragile winged creatures were concerned, I shrieked and fled, strewing pillows, books and the air-conditioning remote in my wake. Small Cat sat sleepily up in her basket; Father looked up from his crossword and I screamed my distress in what I later replayed as a rather pathetic squeak. Chuckling and making unwontedly sarcastic remarks, the family went on an expedition of exploration, my demand being for them to catch the flying beast and send it on its way outside the house. I then sat myself on the couch and waited for the mayhem to subside.

After a while, I went to tentatively investigate. Father was putting off lights, while Small Cat rooted in a corner behind my planter’s chair and muttered enquiringly to herself. Soon after, she came galloping out of my room, in hot pursuit of the moth, which came to a fluttering halt somewhere near my feet. I did the jump-and-run routine with magnificent grace, leaping for my bedroom door while Father and Small Cat routed the moth.

So, in essence, the stage had been set for future fright, which happened successfully the next morning. Could you possibly blame me for becoming the April’s fool, once again?

Powerless in pongville

It’s been, in a very special way, a very long weekend. After the manic rigours of the week, it was a pleasure to be home and function at one’s own pace, I thought, when I woke at my usual just-when-dawn-is-cracking time on Sunday morning. It had been a while since I had slept after 6 am, definitely in my own bed, and I got up groggy and unwilling, but unable to sleep any longer.

Pottering through the morning was normal. Sipping hot green tea, chatting idly with Father, feeding and indulging Small Cat, greeting the man with the milk, keeping an eye on the maid, sternly quelling any impulse the washing machine may have to make attempts to hop into the living room with its violent clatter…all that was part of the weekend for me, basics that the day would be incomplete without. I got through my usual day of household activity surprisingly smoothly, not even a stubbed toe to unwontedly punctuate my bustle. But I spoke to soon, methought. When I was done in the kitchen, I sat down for a few moments to read a newspaper…and that’s when it all went in the direction of disaster.

At 11:30 am sharp, the power went off. It is not something we are not used to, but it was an unexpected time. Load shedding to save electricity is a phenomenon of everyday life in townships just outside the city and we have all learned to live with it, albeit sweatily and occasionally grouchily. But the way things have been going in our area, if the power has not gone off by about 9 am, we do not expect it to go at all. I sat there trying not to move too much, Father wandered about saying how hot it was and Small Cat stretched out in a paper bag on the cool marble floor breathing heavily and flexing her claws. All part of what we already know and can live with since we have to.

But the unexpected, like trouble, tends to kick you in the behind when you can’t see it coming. Just when I had decided that a bath would do the trick, the water stopped. It was a problem in the mains, we were told, and there was no water to pump into the overhead tanks from where it would flow through our pipes (in a manner of speaking, that is). But tankers of water had been ordered and as soon as the power was restored, the pumping could begin. That was ok, understandable, not a problem. But a bath? Since there had been no warning, there was no water stored. So how could my bathroom, my hair and my self be cleansed?

I sat there and refused to get annoyed, since that would have meant a rise in my internal temperature and therefore a corresponding rise in my sweat factor (as the weathergirl of yore insisted on calling it) and thus general aura. We managed to get through lunch and some of the afternoon before I started smelling myself, a kind of gentle pong reminiscent of damp clothes and hair that had become soggy after a healthy set of aerobic exercise in a closed room with no ventilation. By the time the power was back, around 3:30 in the afternoon, I was not only wonderfully bad tempered, but feeling like I had spent some generations in a vat of particularly pongy cheese that was going rather off. I knew it couldn’t be that bad in reality, since both Small Cat and Father were still being sociable, and no one who had come to the door had keeled over with my emanations, but I felt like something that had crawled out of a swamp that held the most noxious primordial effluence.

It was a pleasure to stand directly under the high jets of a cool shower. And, as I washed all the sweat and imagined (for the most part) ordure out of my system, I thought fondly of the days when power and pong were nicely balanced in my small and happy world…

Of me and mortality

About a week ago I was driving myself home when my car was hit by a speeding taxi as I was waiting to do a U-turn. Though the damage was not too extensive to either car or myself – even though both of us were rattled and somewhat bruised and battered around the edges – the incident left me with a feeling of shock and, in some strange way, a new consciousness of my own mortality. In the few seconds that it took for the impact to be felt by all senses, from touch and sound to sight and, finally, outrage and anger, I felt somehow dissociated, as if it was happening to someone else, and that I was just watching from somewhere far above myself and the scene in general. It was only a couple of days later, when the aches and pains and consequences started making themselves felt rather painfully, that I realised just how much could have happened – to me, to the car and to whoever was involved with me.

But no one will let me say anything about it. My friends brush it off, as if it were nothing – which, honestly, is true – though a couple of them are obviously concerned about my well-being. Father seemed more concerned with the damage to the front bumper and number plate than to his only chicklet, who was not just shaken, but stirred into feeling fragile and needy. And my driver was torn between trying to figure out how to make his chariot look better and how far he could go in teasing me about being a typical woman driver who should get out from behind the wheel and stop being a hazard to myself and to the public at large.

For some strange reason, I – and so many others who have been in fairly minor scrapes like this one – need to know the answer to that eternal question: “What if I had died?” It may be macabre, ghoulish or any one of those wonderfully nasty words, but it is something that, if answered, will settle a lot of unwanted and unneeded mental discombobulation. Maybe it is a matter of ego, the assurance that I am important to those who are important to me. I do know what people will say. Father will shrug and ask what he could do apart from just accept it. One close buddy will say “Shut up, idiot!”, while another will tell me “I really don’t want to talk about it.” And a third will insist that he will be upset but that he will have nothing to be upset about, since nothing will happen to me. And the question remains: What if…?

Why is it that people need to know how others will feel if they died unexpectedly? All my friends – and a rather bloodthirsty lot they seem to be – have asked me this at one stage or another in our relationship, and I am always firm about it; I will indeed miss them and be most upset if they left me, but since this is a theoretical discussion, we do not need to go too far with it, right? Am I being squeamish or do I believe by avoiding the issue I will make sure that it does not happen? And what about me? Am I so sure that I may go through an occasional bump or two, but that nothing serious will happen to me? That I have a healthy set of responsibilities to handle and cannot possibly leave them to anyone else, so need to stick around? Or is it that my stars and my palm have said that I will be on this earth in my mortal form for some years yet, so the question is not even relevant?

Whatever the case, I am healing from this particular bump fairly quickly. So is the car. But I still need to know…

Something to think about

I went off to the Nehru Centre yesterday to interview Tina Ambani. It was not a social report, nor a Page 3 kind of gossip piece, but a serious interview about art and the new Harmony show, the art promotional event that she has been hosting every year for 12 years now. When I got to the gallery, just about ten minutes away by car from work, there was a sense of controlled chaos, people bustling busily about with framed canvases and hooks, papers and rolls of sticky tape. And in the middle of the mess, unruffled and cool, was a lady in white, orchestrating the happenings around her with a gentle wave of a diamond-studded hand.

It was Tina Ambani. She posed for a camera, not pleased with its interruption, but knowing that it was part of the hype that she had so efficiently channelled to make her show known and taken seriously. Dressed in white, fabulous gems glittering, she had the air of knowing exactly what she was, who she was and what she was doing. Speaking to her added to that impression – I had seen her before, spoken to her before at a more social gathering, but had never really listened to what she had to say. And that was a whole lot of sense, stuff that showed that under the former-movie-star, socialite wife, one-time playgirl image was a woman of some substance, one who had made a passion into something that was constructive and commendable.

There are so many women like her just in Mumbai today. Some of them may be seen by the general public as flibbertigibbets, butterflies and dilettantes who flit in and out of various projects and causes because they have the right social profile at that moment in time and are the perfect image to create for then and there. But there are others who are genuinely involved in what they are doing, really truly concerned with the cause that they have chosen to promote and the way they go about doing that. Many of these women are wealthy, most attached to rich men – fathers or husbands – but a few have got where they are by themselves, on their own steam, with their own hard work and determination. Those, perhaps, are the women to respect and look up to. The women who are, as one magazine used to mandate, women of substance.

Breaking the past

Eating is one of the pleasures of life, even though cooking rates higher on the satisfaction scale. And over the past week, I did too much of the ‘eating-out’ thing or, at least, the eating-food-not-from-my-own-kitchen thing. Which made my stomach finally curl up and beg to be spared further torture. When I stopped my usual work-week frenzy to listen to what it – and Father, friends and weighing scale – had to say, I agreed wholeheartedly that the way I ate was not very good for me and, consequently, mine, since it tended to keep me rushing from dining table to loo at the most awkward moments and caused me to erupt with the most unladylike sounds just when I was trying to be well-bred and polite. As a result, I am resolved to stay far away from restaurants, fast food delivery outlets and friends who speak with fork in hand and persuasive tongue. For now, my lunch will be brought in by me and eaten at the right time with the right state of mind as a suitable accompaniment.

It is not that I do not enjoy the biryani, the grilled sandwiches, the kathi rolls, the kulfi, the khir-kodom and the French fries that have been an over-frequent presence on my desk through the afternoon. It is not that I have consumed vast quantities of any of these, or mixed them into a dreadful collation of calories that decimated whatever shape I take pride in owning. It is not even that any of it – or all of it, really – has affected my internal workings for more than a few hours, if it did at all. It is just that my nutritional conscience has been making its assorted noises and telling me that I have been a very bad girl and need to shape up – ha, ha, I didn’t need to be told that one – or ship out to a health farm or a military-style gym. And to detox my insides, asap.

So from going astray with a self-indulgent lifestyle of nibbling arbitrarily at bits and bobs that floated past and being easily influenced by calorie-unconscious friends who smile enchantingly and order food that is spelled s-i-in, I am now back to my rather austere diet of fruit and yoghurt, with an occasional dash of leftovers from home thrown in. My ankles are slowly deflating from their salt-swollen state, my mind is clearer since the time it was delightfully fogged by heavy sugar-dosage desserts and I am able to walk past the coffee machine every afternoon without needing to inhale a cupful of the swill it dispenses in order to keep awake long enough to write a semi-intelligent edit on the shortage of fish in coastal waters, the gender divide or why to pay attention to not paying attention.

But not everyone is like me. My friend, the one with forked tongue – well, sort of, since she wields a fork with alacrity and talks me into more food than I need to handle – finds me odd, since she believes that food should be eaten heartily and enjoyed thoroughly. Father occasionally fires a lecture in my direction, the one that speaks of nutrition and work levels and evenings that are all about being grouchy and over-tired. And my colleagues look at the ‘picnic’ set out on my desk and make disparaging remarks about apples, yoghurt and small containers of high-fibre foodstuffs. All this, as I happily chew my healthy way through my dainty lunch, relish every bite and then rattle through my work on my way out to a life that is all about more than just a job.

I like what I eat. And I like that I can eat it, without getting bored or light-headed. So for all those who eat too much Chinese food or sandwiches and chips or oil-laden Mughlai too often during the week, I am a happy camper with a happy tummy. And at the end of that occasional splurge meal, at least my jeans don’t need to be unbuttoned!

Taking it to heart

A letter came in to our paper that complained bitterly about a restaurant review that one of our food critics wrote. It was long and impassioned, the writer obviously very hurt and insulted about what the critic said about his food. While there were a few small holes in the review – after all, how much can you say in the little column space that a newspaper will give you these days – it was, for the most part, fair. But the style of writing was, like the critic – who happens to be a fun and funny new friend that I treasure – wry, tongue-in-cheek and very bright and clever. And it did say some nice things, albeit in a somewhat backhanded and oblique manner. Which was all perhaps a little too much for the restaurant owner to digest.


Writing food reviews is never easy. Ideally, the critic should visit the eatery at least three times, at different periods of rush, to find out what the service, décor, food and patrons are truly like, in moments of stress or moments of comfort. Then there is the menu itself, which could go into reams of typeface, fancy or readable, that must be decoded so that you can see the relationship, often obscure, between the listing and what actually appears on the plate in front of you. And then there are the externals that you need to look at – whether the place is in a salubrious neighbourhood, whether it is accessible, whether there is parking, whether environs are clean, whether the customers are…Of course, the most diligent food critics visit the kitchens, check out the produce and may even take a peek under the fingernails of the prep staff, but that could be paranoia and the effects of knowing too much that no guest would really want to know.


In a perfect world, no restaurant owner or staff will know who the critic is. While this does not mean wigs, hats and fake moustaches, it does mean a certain discretion in behaviour, not taking frantic notes during each course or nibbling small mouthfuls of each dish and leaving the rest for the leftover bin. All of which makes the multiple visits mandatory, so that the waitstaff does not get suspicious and the writer has a fair chance of being unbiased and being able to sample more from the menu than would be feasible in a single visit. But where, oh where in the modern journalistic world, is something like that possible? Who has the time, the leisure or, indeed, the budget to do so? Of course, going with other people makes the tasting more extensive, but it could be a good day or even a really bad one, making the review as good or bad from both points of view: the restaurant’s and the critic’s.


Over the past few weeks I have been watching a lot of food shows on television, from the nightmarishly tacky Hell’s Kitchen to the more aesthetic Made to Order to the extraordinarily interesting Chic Eats, and learned that while running a restaurant is no simple task, there is a way to make it fun for everyone concerned, from chef to client. Almost every upmarket eatery worth its spices has a tasting menu, while the more plebeian ones do not care too much for critics or what they have to say. Many of these reviews are genuinely unbiased, thoughtful and informed, written by invitation when the place opens and – which will admittedly come as a bit of a surprise for restaurant owners in this city, considering the way they believe that they are the gods who have produced ambrosia that is universally desired and relished – the feedback is taken seriously and changes made to the food on offer before the public gets a taste of it. Whatever comments are made, are considered, good, bad and unwanted, and all that can be done to be as universally appealing, is.


But that is something our letter writer perhaps does not understand, his cited vast experience in the business notwithstanding.

That just ain’t cricket

When I drove home last Friday, the traffic was unprecedentedly heavy. There were cars packed with earnestly talking passengers, buses were crowded and you could see commuters sardined into trains as they passed overhead on the various bridges we went under. And my driver was cheerful albeit cautious, citing statistics and caveats about whether the Indian team would win the match at the World Cup in the West Indies. People I knew planned to sit up all night to watch television, some hosted parties, others cut talking to their loved ones short, a few cancelled trips and took leave from work. Everyone was excited, agog, awaiting…

But Saturday morning was a different scenario. I woke up to scan the headlines in the four city papers we get and found that the results had not yet been reported. I will find out when the driver comes in, I thought, but then Father checked the Internet and told me that India had lost, rather ignominiously and humiliatingly. Almost blasphemously, I was glad. Along with various friends who understood and agreed with my point of view, I wanted our team to be booted out of the tournament, to take time off to figure out just what they were doing in the exalted space they occupied in the psyche of the general Indian populace and get down to earning it once more.

I am not a cricket fan, neither do I even pretend to like, understand or be intelligent about the game. But I am aware and informed enough about its various aspects, the players’ names and profiles and, most of all, about the basics of human nature. I have nothing at all against the cricket players we have in this country and know how talented some of them are. However, I have also seen them growing too fast, too suddenly, from mere minnows (a favourite word this World Cup) to arrogant, high-handed, overblown and puffed up men too aware of their importance and all too unaware of its transience.

Which is what almost everyone is like. It takes a rare personality to deal with the fallout of fame, a very unusually strong man or woman who will stay the same, no matter what changes life and its little conveniences. There are all the perks that work to turn the head, the psyche and the character around to something not so nice or so human – the sycophants, the gossip media, the groupies, the money, the adulation, the headlines, the endorsements, the fans and much more. And a perfectly good personality is ruined.

Does it happen to everyone? Obviously not. Those who begin with a certain degree of privilege don’t need the money or the name or the edge that keeps them looking for those. Those with a supportive and level-headed family can do it, too – not lose themselves in the clamour for a new identity. All it takes is a little self-respect, a little dignity, a little self-consciousness and a knowledge that only the hard work that got you there can keep you there.

Maybe that is what the Indian cricket team needs to relearn.

Drinking it in

My wonderfully irascible boss firmly believes that I drink so much hot water because I have some kind of medical issue that mandates it. What he refuses to accept is that I like drinking lots of water and if I drank regular chilled water from the fountain, I would be very cold inside, added to being very cold outside, especially since the place I work in firmly believes that frigid is the only temperature possible and acceptable for a bunch of hot-tempered journalists. So, for that very simple reason – that is, to defrost my iced fingertips and warm the cockles of not my heart but my neck, I swig the steaming stuff like it was, in a manner of speaking, going out of style.

But my aforementioned wonderfully irascible boss will not believe me. He says that if I was indeed that cold – we are talking thermometer measurement, not emotional degree of thaw – I could drink coffee, tea or even a little something alcoholic, which would serve to warm me up. Yes, so much that I would be steaming around the hall, unable to navigate or do any work, I generally reply acerbically. Ah, but you will do so very happily, another friend comments, with her usual manic giggle. At which point I stalk off with my button nose held high to get myself another mug of hot water and try and get back to work.

It is not that I am against drinking stuff that is all about nicely fermented grapes or whatever. It is just that for one, I do not enjoy the taste; for two, I do not enjoy the effect it has on normally fairly intelligent and coherent people; for three, I am sort of allergic to alcohol; and, for four, I far prefer to cook with it. All through college I have been designated driver, handed the car keys whenever we – my friends and I – have reached our destination for an evening out, and trusted implicitly to get them home in various states of stagger. So it became another reason not to go alcoholic, one that endures even today.

Getting drunk may not be my thing, but I have no problems if it is someone else’s. My only caveat: at least be a happy drunk. So many people I know not only get silly, which is a logical part of the game, but get morose and unhappy. As they get more pickled, they get sadder, gloomier, unhappier, sure that not only is the entire world against them, but that nobody in that world and beyond has any regard, leave alone affection, for them. The music that they listen to during this process reflects that, especially in India, when the upbeat rhythms of ear-friendly pop or Indi-pop gradually yields to the most dreary of oldies from Hindi films, where death, loss and desperation are the central notes and the evening – or the very early morning, as it inevitably will be by then – fades into deep, dire darkness of the foggy mind.

A good buddy of mine is a study in contrasts. As she osmoses the gin, she gets happier, brighter, more giggly. She also gets more obstinate and obdurate, refusing to listen to reason or sanity, liking where she is and very cheerful about it, too. Which makes it near-impossible to get annoyed or even remotely concerned, since she has an infectious laugh and comes up with the most outrageous stories peppered with that insanely catchy chortle. It has been some time since we spent time of this kind together, but it was fun while it was. And may she always be as joyous about life as she was then!

A toast to that!

A wish for joy

Someone wished me a happy day a few hours ago, leaving me wondering why. Apart from crabbily demanding to know what I had to be happy about, I glowered blearily at them and then closed my eyes for a brief moment, hoping that the rest of the oh-so-happy world would stop grinning idiotically at me and leave me to fry in peace.

I am not a negative person, in essence. Nor am I any of the usual personality traits that could conceivably make me blue, glum or otherwise bad tempered. But sometimes I wake up that way and just need to be left be, so that I can indulge my feeling of being mean, nasty, grouchy, squabbly, annoyedly blah.

Why would I be that way? On a day that was all about sunshine and a cool breeze, chocolate truffles and mint jujubes, warm hugs and cool clothes? Simple. Because I want to be that way. It makes me happy. It gives me joy. It leaves me fabulously, self-indulgently, bathetically miserable, enough to find an astonishing amount of happiness in small things like a cuddle from Small Cat, a laugh from Father or a toothless smile from a wrinkled old lady hobbling across my path as I drove in to work.

And then I had to stop and think. What did I have to be miserable about, really? Actually, honestly, frankly, nothing. I have a loving and affectionate family of one and a half, lots of loving and affectionate friends, a loving and affectionate boss, albeit an irascible one, a job that seems to be affectionate enough to me and a life most would envy – with the perfect blend of warm and fuzzy and sparkly and inspiring. And, as I walked into the vast hall where I manage that aforementioned job, I was greeted with a brilliantly blinding smile from one of the office boys making a brief stop in his routine of chores to help me with the sliding pile of books that I was toting. I smiled back, something in me lifted out of the proverbial doldrums.

It is small things like this that make my day what it is – sunny and cheerful. So why did I need to be grouchy, crabby and so irritable? The thought surfaced again during our edit meeting, when the aforementioned (again) irascible boss chortled into his well salted beard at his own talent with linguistic acrobatics and my colleagues cracked the silliest jokes about almost nothing. And as I exchanged mild doses of gossip with a friend and sipped on my zillionth mug of steaming hot water, the last of the bad-temperedness vanished. I was myself again. Undaunted, unruffled, unfazed.

Maybe that wish to be happy did the trick!

Paying attention

There is a story in almost every paper in Mumbai today about how not paying attention is being paid attention to. It’s all about mind-wandering. And it is, the researchers studying it insist, too common to be ignored any longer. It is more than just forgetfulness and not due to a problem like ageing or senility, but just the mind taking off to parts known and unknown, exploring side streets and little gallis on the way, finally perhaps coming back to the road that was originally to be travelled.

My mind wanders all the time. It begins with a multitasking mentality, one that comfortably has four windows open on the computer, each with a completely different word file to be played with – edited or written or just read. I hop between writing this blog and plugging my weary way through readers’ letters to cleaning up an astonishingly long document for a magazine project to an edit on, this time around, paying attention to not paying attention. But just because I am doing so much, all at the same time, it does not mean that my mind is not focussed on any one of them, just that my mind is wandering into and out of each one. It is not so much an attention deficit, as an attention divisive action. I am, honestly, truly, genuinely, paying attention to all of it.

Life is like that for me in every aspect. Sundays are the epitome of that phenomenon called multitasking, aka that ability that allows the mind to hop from one to the other through to a tenth matter at hand, each as important and as necessary as any. There will be four or five books in various stages of my reading them all over the house. There will be two cutting boards on the kitchen platform holding different vegetables in different stages of processing for different recipes. There will be laundry going on, even as clothes are being sorted and folded away. And even as all this happens, Small Cat will be clamouring for attention as Father goes through his shopping list and a friend calls to catch up on our lives and tell us what she is doing. So it is not surprising that in the middle of any one conversation, my mind takes off to a warm and fuzzy place where there is no need to answer, no need to make any decisions and no need at all to speak…

It is not surprising that the mind wanders, especially when doing all things routine or dreary. It is the mental equivalent of knitting or shelling peas while watching a soap opera on television. Or talking on the phone while shopping for onions. Or playing with Small Cat while dusting the bookshelf. Or dreaming wonderful dreams while reading email…

Hey, what was I saying? Sorry, I lost track. Guess I was not paying attention….

One for the birds

Small Cat has a love-hate relationship with birds. She will stop whatever she is doing – be it chasing a bug, ambushing Father, chirping at me about her plans for the day or sleeping sacked out on her back on the once-cream sofa cushions – to stare piercingly at the offending fowl when it lands on the awning-roof outside any of our windows, and then chatter her teeth and make keening, protesting noises. If she is perched out on the air-conditioner, protected from any kind of danger by a neat metal grill that creates a small balcony, she will stand up on her hind legs and try and grab the bird – to no avail, of course. And if you give her a feather, she will chase it and bite it and mangle it, as if it is the bird that she really wants to get her paws on and claws into, leaving most of it intact albeit barely recognisable, the rest tucked nicely into her fat little tummy.

Cats and birds go together like French fries and burgers, pizza and college dorms, Tom and Jerry, the Roadrunner and Wylie Coyote. Some years ago I had a very handsome black and white tom, who had his big green eyes fixed firmly on a family of hoopoes that lived in a tree that drooped over my garden. I never thought he would do anything about it. But slowly, day after day, he managed to slither his way up that tall trunk, grab first the babies and then the parents and devour all of them. At least, I think that’s what he did, judging from his rather smug and satisfied expression at the end of the adventure. I never saw him do the dirty deed – or deed, since the family had four members – but my parents did, and told me that he scuttled off into the park behind the house with the birds hanging limply from his mouth and then came back licking his chops and shuddering with gentle burps.

One night - or early morning, as it actually happened to be – the cat was out on his usual routine of fighting, playing and prowling. He came back, as was the habit, a while later, the bell on his collar jingling, his squeaks gradually escalating into a demanding yowl. This time, though I had woken up when the jingle filtered into my fast-asleep brain cell, his vocalisation sounded different. When I blearily opened the door, he bounded in, charging into the bedroom and on to my bigger-than-double bed, with what seemed suspiciously to be a furtive gleam in his eyes. I followed hastily, some instinct telling me that he was up to something that was no good at all. And I was right. He sat there, figuratively tying a napkin around his neck and polishing up a knife and fork, as he got set to tear into what looked to me to be a very dead pigeon. It was. The rest of the story can be known without its telling, but what I remember best is the only words I could come up with at the time: “Do you realise that it is 4 am!?”

I do not like urban birds very much, not those that I see most regularly around the apartment block where we live, at least. Mostly mynahs, parrots, pigeons and crows, I sometimes spot the occasional kingfisher, its brilliant plumage in shades of glittering blue shining jewel-toned and gorgeous in the tiny moment it flutters around the plants outside the windows. Upstairs, in the stairwell leading to the terrace, lives an owl, Father tells me, not too large, but happily settled in its snug and rain-sheltered nook. And the kite that sits on a ledge on the bank building next door preens and screeches some weekends, dropping by from wherever it normally soars for a short but spectacular visit.

For me, birds are natural, lovely, elegant creatures, in their natural habitat and familiar element. All I ask is that they stay there.

An officer and a gentleman

About a year ago, I said a long distance goodbye to a man who was with my father in school. He had become my father figure when I was alone and unhappy in Delhi and stayed a dear friend as life became brighter and easier. And he gave me his family, too, mainly his wonderful – and, as is the norm with most friends of mine – and delightfully mad wife, who is still and will always be a very special part of my life.

My first memory of meeting Gurbir, as the man was called, was when I was in India on a break from college. We were headed for Ladakh, the kingdom in the Himalayas, and wanted a little extra from the trip, which we were told that the army could help us with. So, since Gurbir had been – or perhaps still was, at the time – with the Indian army, he knew someone who could give us what we wanted. We met him and his family at his club, shared a happy lunch and lots of news and advice and then went in our different directions.

Many years later, I was alone and he was willing to be my more-or-less guardian. I spent many hours in his garden, playing with his dog, chatting with his wife, exchanging jokes, puns and information with him. Gurbir became the parent I was missing, in lieu of my own, but with a detachment and distance we both liked and respected. And we had fun together, going to polo matches, plays, dance performances, book readings, exhibitions and lunches and dinners, all with lots of laughter and warmth involved.

And then, like so many people in my life over the last year, he went away. Permanently. I had left Delhi some time before, and kept in only sporadic touch. But he was still that memory associated with love and lots of sunshine. He went at a time when I couldn’t mourn, when my own grief at losing my mother a few months before was too intense for anything else to add to its flavour, so it was a quickly camouflaged albeit disconcerting new hole in my psyche that was quietly and quickly locked away for me to think about later.

And later came a short while ago, when I was in Delhi for a brief holiday. A friend and I dropped in on his wife, still in the large old house set in its spacious garden. She was as affectionate and delightfully crazy as ever, her hug hard and warm as it had always been, her eyes sadder but still with that sparkle of wicked laughter and joie de vivre that was so specially hers. That evening, I finally mourned for my friend, watching a tiny flame flicker up in a small silver lamp, reading his last letter to his wife of so long, exchanging mutters with his multi-gene dog in the garden. As I cried, his dog licked my chin; as I battled with missing him, my friend held me; as I remembered all the time we had shared, his photograph smiled gently, fondly, at me.

Gurbir was, in every way, an officer and a true gentleman. And I wish he was still on this earth, just as he will always be part of my history.

Holding fort

It was a three day long art camp at an old restored fort in Rajasthan that is now a heritage hotel. I was sent there to interview a group of artists for a website for a publishing group and was rather reluctant to do so, mainly because I found it very difficult to get up so early in the morning in those days. But I managed and handed over the keys to my car to be parked later on to the security guard, even as I unloaded my overnighter and joined the crowd in the gallery. There were people matching names I had only heard spoken aloud with awe and faces that looked as sleepy as mine, but with a more august (or July, as it was then, I think) presence. And as we piled into the bus to head out of the city for the home on the hill, I could feel the start of a resigned camaraderie that had to last us three days.

But as the drive wound on and the sun climbed hotly higher, the air-conditioning got fiercer, the mood lightened. There was laughter, some embarrassed because of the vaguely blue humour that elicited it, some hearty and full-bellied, some dutifully reactive. And there was, from one far corner of the large, long bus, a harmonic chorus of snores from a painter with a strong Bengali accent and a shy smile, but very little comprehensible English. I sat baking in the sunshine as my hands slowly froze into frigid claws, smiling vaguely and sleepily at an elderly bearded artist who, all through the duration of the camp, tried very hard to make suggestions that bordered on not just the indecent, but slid into the clichéd and deadly boring very fast.

The bus finally got to its destination, the base of the low hill on which the old fort of Neemrana perched. The yellow stones merged gently into the arid landscape, dotted with glints of glass and flagged with a single scarlet banner defiantly streaming from the highest tower. Parapets interrupted the line of the building that strained up towards the sky and birds twitched in lazy arcs overhead. A convoy of flat carts trundled towards us, pulled by large and bell-draped camels, the one that I looked at staring back at me with a decidedly wicked gleam in its eye. We all clambered on, then jerked and jolted our way along the narrow winding path to the fort, getting off at the enormous wooden doors studded with metal black and shining with the touch of time and a hundred invading and homecoming hands.

Inside, the old structure had been carefully restored, its ancient interiors now a series of comfortable and modern guest rooms. Mine was on the highest terrace, tiny but exquisite, with all the mod-cons in a compact space. I had to negotiate various sets of steps, cross an open and frightening parapet and hop across a gap in the wall that, to my vertigo-sensitive mind, was as wide as the Rift Valley. And when I got there, the wind blew my hair into wild corkscrews and the sun kissed my nose, leaving behind a new freckle. Never mind Yusuf and Sunil and Paresh and Anjolie waiting to be interviewed as they worked magic on canvas. The place to be was here, right here, only here…

Slate of hand

A friend of mine has beautiful hands. Spare bones under surprisingly soft skin, with long fingers and well-kept nails, the kind of hands that would do a great job soothing a frazzled nerve or two or even making them buzz with a new life. They would probably work brilliantly stringing pearls onto silk or folding a sari into intricate pleats or even shaping chocolate frosting to form delicate peaks and valleys. Or in tickling a kitten or rolling up a roti or leafing through an old manuscript or unbuttoning a shirt or sifting through a pile of photographs. But I digress from the main subject here and have, I hope, managed to make my friend blush…

Hands are indicators of a life lived, interestingly or routinely. My hands are rough, calloused by dish-washing detergent, my fingers tipped with tiny hard spots created by a daily dose of bashing at a keyboard. They have the most intricate network of almost-visible scars and dark lines of scabs, all to the credit of Small Cat, who likes to chew on her slaves for fun, her sharp-ended paws locked into skin as she does so. There are small blue spots of bruises earned from playing with the feline and being gripped too hard, bumping into woodwork and bashing into the edge of the metal shelves at work. And they speak of stories written, meals cooked and hugs given.

The hands that I perhaps know best just by their function belong to my hairdresser. She tunnels her fingers with their brightly painted nails into my hair, digging under the strands to examine my scalp, lifting and feeling each lock to decide on what to do with it during that session. She will gently massage my head, parting the hair in sections, testing it for weight and texture and finally giving it a gentle tug before sending me on to the next stage in the routine. She knows, by just a touch, what I have been doing to my head and how to fix it.

On the rare occasions I am at the salon, I watch fascinatedly as the experts use their hands to bring beauty to others’. I have never had a professional manicure and will probably never do so, but I stare as it is done to various clients – the cleaning, the creaming, the curing…each step is like a little dance, its movements carefully choreographed to give the customer pleasure right through the process. And as they are massaged and primped and painted, I sigh with a certain envy, wanting to go home with hands as pretty and beautifully groomed, but knowing full well that it will never happen.

Once upon a life I had hands like that and used them well to express the emotions of a hundred heroines that I became on stage. Each nuance in gesture was a tale told, a facet of a woman bared to the audience. The red alta painted on my fingers and palm added fire and focus, becoming symbols of love and anger, devotion and grief, longing and living. Today, I have become a passive watcher, seeing her being lived in someone else’s hands, through someone else’s wordlessness. And then my hands get to work, typing out my feelings as I watch someone else’s unfold.

And my friend? Those hands tell a whole new story…

Girl talk

I like being a woman. And I am glad to be one. When she dreamed of having a child, as almost every woman does, at least once in her life, my mother wanted a girl. My friend Bela-Chameli, fairly recently a mother, also thought more of a girl than a boy, and eventually had a daughter who now is the focus of her life. And on the few occasions I ever considered the matter, a girl child was the only choice for me.

But that is not the case with so many women who are part of the Indian population today. Recently there has been a spate of reports about new plans that the government has for dealing with the girl child, wanted or not. Special education schemes, special banking plans, special insurance packages and, best of all, special status for the baby who just happens to be born with a double dose of the X chromosome. All this, because the baby who is thus genetically gifted is deemed by fate and much of traditional India as unfortunate, undesired and, worst of all, unloved. She is often killed before she is born and as often after. Or she is thrown away.

What frightens me is that this is not a figment of some deep, dark and dire horror film script-writer’s imagination, but really truly part of today’s ethos in much of the ‘modern’, ‘civilised’, ‘educated’ world. Friends of mine shock me with the way they think in this matter, when they tell me stories of how it all works in their own families and, even more horrifyingly, in their own lives and minds. For me, to be a girl child was to be wanted, to be cherished, to be given the best, of not better, than any boy would get. For them, to have a girl child was anathema, a disgrace, an urgent need to try again and get it ‘right’.

I first heard this when a friend and colleague of mine was pregnant. She had worked with the newspaper group that I called home for as long if not longer than I had, and had taught me a great deal about coping with everything from fast food to commuting in the city we lived in. She and I would take off just after lunch for a quick walk around the block, determined to keep our waistlines trim and our minds from becoming filled with the cobwebs that infested the heritage building in which we spent most of our awake time. So when she announced that she was getting married and moving away, I was a little upset at losing a friend, though glad that she was doing what she had always seen as the personal aim of her living. As a middle daughter of three, with a younger brother to keep the family name going, she knew where her destiny had to travel to.

Then she told me that she was going to have a baby. While she insisted that it did not matter whether it was a girl or a boy, she also told me, over and over, that a male child would mean that she did not have to have another. I took that as a joke, a passing comment on the orthodoxy that we had often written about and lamented. But then it became said so often that I realised, albeit rather painfully, that it was true. It took a while for me to understand what it meant, culturally speaking, but when I did, she had already had the child and told me that she was so glad that it had been a boy, because otherwise family pressure would have been overwhelming. They would have been very disappointed in me, she said in a letter, telling me that she was relieved that she did not have to go through the process again, since she had done her duty the first time around.

That was some years ago. I have become a lot less sensitive about the subject and a lot more understanding of what my friend was all about and where she came from. But I still do – and will always – believe that a girl is the best thing to be. No matter that I am part of a culture that tends to believe otherwise.

Delhi belly

Being away from home always disrupts my food routine, but in the nicest way. and sicne I am for the most part responsible for my own kitchen, when I planned my brief holiday, I got the fridge stocked with enough to last Father the week and make me feel better, albeit long distance, about fibre, fresh veggies and the rest of that sort of good stuff. And I packed up my assortment of vitamins and make-up and got on that plane. Breakfast was served soon after take off.

At which point I almost got off. Though it smelled decent enough, with the sharp tang of tandoori spice cutting through the acrid whiff of newly perked coffee, by the time the cart came around, I was ready to jump out, even sans parachute. “Tea, please,” I asked with the timidity I feel only on planes during meal service, knowing that one inadvertently rude word can provide you with a lapful of steaming liquid or no access to the loo just when you are desperate enough to use a paper cup. And when the hot liquid was poured into my small plastic cup, I quailed; it was strong, it was brewed and it was the colour of tar distillate or furniture varnish. One sip was enough to jolt me out of the early-morning fug of sleeplessness that was mine at that hour of the day. The food, I shook my head mutely at.

In Delhi I was fed by friends who tend to get it right. Perhaps the nicest meal I had was a lunch that was simplicity itself – a plate of fine slices of smoked salmon, with a wee pot of sour cream and a handful of wonderfully tangy capers to add that special cachet. The array of chocolate at the dessert buffet did little to tempt my temperamental tastebuds, but the slices of delicious fish, soft and pale veined, peachy pink and gleaming, made my tongue do a happy tango with each bite.

Then there was the stuff that my friend’s cook dished up. For me, there was fibre, leafy, green and delectable, fresh and fragrant as it came off the pan and on to my plate. Eaten with hot and fluffy rotis, it was delicious more for the way in which the cook, an old friend himself, urged me to eat more, frowning when I refused and beaming happily when I held out my plate for more. We chatted over the stove, bemoaning the lack of fat in my friend’s diet - and kitchen – and exchanging recipes and methods that did their gustatory magic every time that I visited.

One lunch at a Chinese restaurant in the centre of town was again memorable, more for the company than for the food itself. An old friend was host, and he smiled gently and affectionately across the table at me as we ate our way through a collation of noodles, spicy chicken, tender fish and dimsums that lit up my insides as they brought back memories of a dimsum festival in a strange city in a country that I was visiting for the first time. And as I swirled hot jasmine tea in my mouth to unglue my back teeth from the steely grip of caramel-coated cashewnuts, I thought of a small boat bobbing on the largest river in the world and people who had a wonderful history and an incredibly interesting present….

Coming home

I have spent the last week in Delhi, staying with a very close friend. How close? Close enough to see me first thing in the morning, my hair frizzed wildly around my face, my eyes bleary with sleep and no mascara and my smile pleading for that morning dose of steaming green tea. She is perhaps the only person who is allowed to lecture me on my rather erratic food habits and the only person who is allowed to tell me what I should do, never mind that I rarely will do it, especially if I see no reason to. Be that as it may, she allowed me to invade her home – and even invited me back soon – and managed to gallivant all over the city, steering me into stores and away from them, as the temptations may have been skirted or indulged in, making me a very happy holidayer at the end of the too-short vacation I had.

It started with a bad case of bronchitis and ended with a sneeze. Leaving Mumbai was not as hard as I thought it would be, particularly because I knew that Small Cat would be permitted to perch on the dining table during mealtimes and that Father’s fibre intake would drastically decrease in my absence. But we all needed the break and so I took it. I flew out one sunny and sweaty Monday morning, on a plane that was, unusually, just a few minutes late and packed with people going to the capital and parts beyond. I sipped excruciating brewed tea in an attempt – vain, I must admit, since I gave up after the first flavour-mote hit my tastebuds – to wake up enough to be civil to the stewardess and glowered at the gentleman to my side who tried to make friends. The food was dreadful, the papers were crumpled and incomplete and the air-pockets were frightening. And then we were there.

It was cool and breezy in Delhi, the epitome of a brilliant and beautiful spring day. Insulated in a large car with wonderful climate control, we drove through familiar territory to my friend’s home, stopping at the very place that my car would be parked on all my previous visits there when I lived in the city. It was almost like coming home, with a small difference: it was not ‘home’ for me any more; life and my existence had shifted focus to a new framework of servants, grocery shops and work stress.

It is always not-too-easy to start a vacation and even more so to end it. I had new balances of affection and bonds to deal with, even as I managed to make myself fit into an environment that was so evolved, but that had, in a way, stayed the same since I had left it all those years ago. My friend was still my friend, the affection between us deeper than ever, but she had moved on with her friends, as I had with mine, and we had adjustments to make and more to talk – and giggle – about. A few "What it ees?" and we were back to a childhood that we may not have shared, but we occasionally reverted to.

In that week, we managed to visit all our ‘favourite’ places, be it the deli in Jor Bagh or the boutique in Santushti that we frequented on Saturday afternoons. We fought over fudge at the Chocolate Wheel and debated the pork chops at Pig Po, tasted cheese and pate at the Steak House and sniffed spice powders at INA Market. And we shopped, almost like vacuum cleaners osmosing dust, at the Upasana racks in a new store that she had discovered. And I walked out of Tulsi the proud owner of a frighteningly expensive and amazingly beautiful kurta not available in Mumbai, the manager assured me.

And now I am home again, disciplining Small Cat, Father and myself, making sure the household slips smoothly into its routine with no sign of my absence showing in any way. It is almost as if I had never been away…if it wasn’t for the natty cat-prints on the glass top of the dining table, you would never know I had.

Spanish flying – finale

(I am off again, this time for a week. See you on the 12th of March! Adios!)



While there is so much more to remember and say about our trip to Spain, you must be as fed up reading it as I am of writing it. It was a wonderful time, with gorgeous weather, wonderful food and the warmth (and fire, sometimes) of being with family and friends in a country that was welcoming and encouraging. It invited me in to find out more, to explore, to learn all its secrets and discover new ones in every small town and ruined castle, each olive grove and secluded monastery. And in the adventure I found out more about not just a land I had never been to before, but also about myself and what I had evolved into.

In the journey I saw so much that was exciting, yet so familiar. Each aspect had a fresh perspective, be it a gloomy hotel or a sun-baked wall in a ghost town. And it was all like a spread at a tapas bar – small tastes of everything, but more than you could ever be served at a gourmet restaurant with brocade tablecloths and far more than you could ever digest. Each colour, each vista, each flavour, each sound, each face…they all added up to a fabulous picture that, for some reason, has always been described in tourist brochures as ‘a taste of sunny Spain’ a cliché that is, surprisingly, so true.

Perhaps for me Spain is best thought of as brilliant – the light, the colour, the simplicity of it all, the essence of warmth and sunshine and brightness. As we drove along the highways and smaller roads to wherever we wanted to stop for the evening, we wound through endless fields of sunflowers, each bloom tilted to the sun in a vivid expanse of yellow, orange and brown. And, seemingly real until you got the right view, were the giant black bulls, standing upright and menacing in the midst of the scene. They looked ready and very willing to charge, steam and froth spewing from their enormous nostrils, their horns lethally pointed. Then you drove past them and found that they were actually flat, black-painted metal cutouts, advertisements for anything from a local beer to the tourism department, we heard.

And set against that golden light would be small farmhouses, some converted into tiny hostals and restaurants, calling in the hungry with wafting aromas and the pink-cheeked, sunburned lady of the house, straight out of Grimm’s fairy tale, smiling and nodding at the door. I ate fabulous frittata and even better gazpacho, the intense flavours of garlic, olive oil and fresh herbs lingering past the super-mint toothpaste. Almost as good was a deep bowl of fagioli zuppa in a Madrid bistro – it was thick, rich, warming and unforgettable.

One night we all drove up into the hills above Granada to watch a flamenco performance. Though it was carefully staged for tourists like us, we did get carried away by the passion, the fire, the rhythm and the brilliance of the dance, the music, the setting and the mood. Heels clacked on the wooden boards of the small stage, sometimes softly, almost silently, then louder, louder, drumming into our heads with a frenzy that was almost violent. Then, suddenly, the music wailed, keening from low to high, speaking of sadness, love, need and death. My stomach curled into itself as I huddled with my mother in the chill, the tiny hairs on the back of my neck bristling as I absorbed the fervour of the dance and its dancers.

This, for me, was Spain. This, for me, was an unforgettable summer.

Talking in my sleep

I am told that I talk in my sleep. That could be worrying if I was the worrying type, but most of the time I am alone in my room, apart from Small Cat, so it doesn’t really matter if I do have conversations – or monologues – that Racine or Shakespeare would envy. But various friends and my mother have told me, with an enviably and staunchly maintained straight face, that I don’t say anything I should not, even when I am so fast asleep that I wouldn’t know which planet I lived on.

Perhaps the last time I heard about what I said was fairly recently. You did say that, the friend I had been talking to on the phone insisted. I knew that was not true, because there was too much of a grin on my friend’s face, a suppressed bout of hysterical giggles that could be easily felt over the telephone line. I had been tired beyond imagination and while I have no memory whatsoever of what I had allegedly said (in true journalistic style I always cover my back), I know I could not have said THAT. Or the THAT which could be inferred from the insinuations and exaggerated account of my very unlikely mumbling.

But I do know that I talk when I am asleep, or at least when I am far enough gone as to not remember whether I did speak or not. My mother always told me I had long chats with someone she would have loved to meet, since whatever I came up with was so full of giggles and madness, but she never quite managed to tell me what it was that she had heard. She was too busy giggling herself. But she did say that much of it was in French, which would have been marvellous if I had known any French at the time!

My friend Karen has also said that I talk when I am fast asleep. While by the time I knew her well enough to do sleepovers at her house I was over the constant babbling stage, I did chatter when I was really tired, but had things on my mind. The last occasion we spent time together, I was on a thick mattress on the floor in her room, her large cat ensconced comfortably on my ankles on top of the comforter, both of us chatting desultorily to my friend as she sprawled on her bed. I had just arrived in Denver after a trans-Atlantic flight and was not sure which way was up, but we had so much to say and were determined to say it. Of course, I was asleep mid-sentence, but continued the conversation for a long time before she realised I wasn’t quite an active participant. Pushing me over on to my side, she managed to shut me up. But, a few hours later, I sat bolt upright, flinging aside cat and comforter and bashing my head painfully on a knob on her dresser. “What time is it?” I demanded, and then curled up again, hugging my pillow and telling the cat to shut up, he would wake the neighbours. Of course, though I had a pretty severe headache in the morning, I hotly denied asking any such happening.

I still have no clue why I do this, though I know I do. Maybe I have too much on my mind, or too much to say about whatever is on my mind, I am not sure. Whatever it is, if I provide amusement to whoever listens to any of my burbling, I suppose I should be happy. Now if only I could find out just what it is I said….