Food fadding

I was idly watching television last night after a day that stretched endlessly through miles of heat, traffic, pollution and blazing sunshine. My legs twitched, my head ached and my tummy did somersaults – like the kitten was doing around my feet, chasing her tail. And I switched channels, wavering between a wonderfully weepy soap and a more comprehensible travel-food show by maverick chef Anthony Bourdain. I am not sure which made me laugh more, but sitting on the carpet gazing at the tube managed to make me feel better about life in general and the day in particular.

Bourdain has a wonderful mania about him. He wanders the world at will – or as per the will of the sponsor who funds his shows, one presumes – and eats and cooks up the strangest of foods. His two books that I have read and now own (Kitchen Confidential and A Cook’s Tour) described a person who has been through, almost literally, the underbelly of the food world, and the lowest possible in any life, with drugs, sex, rock and roll and seedy backstreet dives where cooking is a shortcut to disease and come out triumphant, ready to show off not just culinary expertise, but chutzpah and a supreme confidence that anything can be faced and won over without too much trouble or effort.

Yesterday I was watching the man eat street food, first in Kolkata and then in Mumbai. Even just seeing in on the small screen, knowing that it was not, in some existential way, real in my own life, the episode was alive, vivid, full of flavour and colour and the sheer joy of a new adventure. While my rather turbulent tummy did more flips and flops than the kitten, who was now rooting about near my knees with a single-minded determination that had me giggling and wincing as her claws dug into a tender part of my thigh, I saw him eat jhal-muri, bheja fry, kebabs of various kinds and, eventually, the great Bombay burger – vada pav.

Much to my regret and oftentimes shame, I have rarely, if ever, eaten street food. I was fed paani puri twice, once in Kailash Parbat at the end of Colaba Causeway in Mumbai and once at Haldiram’s in Lajpat Nagar in Delhi, but both were made with mineral water and neither had the authenticity of the real thing eaten at a street corner or on Chowpatty Beach or, as my friend swore, the stuff of Bengali Market (also Delhi) fame. I have maybe once or twice eaten bhelpuri on the beach, followed up with wonderfully cold and delicious malai kulfi, a burning bottom and many regrets. I did, once, eat something called ragda pattice outside the college I briefly attended (or was supposed to) in Mumbai, but cannot remember much more than the fact that it as incredibly spicy and not worth the pain.

But they tell me that street food is to die for. I will examine that issue tomorrow, I promise. For now, I will stick with what comes out of my own kitchen and watch the kitten do roll-overs on the carpet with steely persistence.

Different folks, different strokes

One of my closest friends will not get online using a chat program, which would be so much more convenient and easier to manage than phone calls and emails and letters and packages that float over the myriad oceans between us. According to her, if she signs up for one of the mail accounts that she will need to log into an instant messenger, she will be flooded with mail from everyone and every-firm that sends out spam of various kinds. There is no way I can convince her otherwise, and so we continue with emails, an occasional phone call and the annual package…

Is she right? Is the whole thing worth it? Let me count the ways how!

Many years ago, I signed in to what was known as ICQ – it still is, I am told. It worked fine for that time and place, and I managed to not just communicate with family and friends without needing to spend time and money I did not have then, but to get a whole lot more work done than I would have otherwise – instant messenger tends to shortcut the whole formality of correspondence and saves time when you need an answer to a minor question that may, nevertheless, hold up an interview or a story you may be writing. Which is the kind of sentence you cannot create on a messenger, it bogs up that give and take which is almost like talking in person!

From there, I soon graduated to MSN, which was fabulous, down to the cute little faces that you could make when you were talking to someone. It was closer to being there, as someone told me, and I loved it. From there, YAHOO was a short hop, used with those people who did not believe in hotmail. There were a few, yes. And soon after, I picked up on GOOGLETALK, which is fabulous but non-iconic, if you know what I mean; no funny faces, no cute pictures, no extras, just plain chat. But workplaces soon caught on to the chat culture and disapproved. Most instant messengers were blocked, which meant that you went bewilderingly on and off line arbitrarily, puzzling whoever you were talking to at the time. There is always a way around the firewalls that company techies install, but shhhhhhhhh….don’t tell them which one you choose!

Today I do chat with friends, family and even sometimes kitten online, even as I hop madly between windows in the course of my work. I write in one, check mail in another, surf for snippets in a third and, of course, collect background information for a story in a last. More than that, and my computer starts grumbling madly at me and my editor makes dirty cracks in an acerbic voice coloured by his envy at not being able to manage all that and more at the same time. In fact, even as I write this, I am looking at layouts for a book project, talking to a buddy, looking for mail that has not arrived and trying to figure out just what is happening in the world outside my little one.

So now back to concentrate on the most important matter of life – living it!

Paper chase

My editor is always telling me that I don’t read the papers. He is, I must admit, right. I frankly don’t have the time in the mornings, my time spent in chasing the maid to see that she manages to reach every corner of the house with her arbitrary broom, closing doors and drawers behind my father, holding a dish of milk and following the kitten on her crazy skitter and, somewhere, somehow, in between, brushing my teeth, restoring some order to my recalcitrant hair, putting on my face and finding clothes that will stay respectably neat through the working day. Besides, even when I can put my feet up and concentrate a bit in the evenings after dinner, who wants to read about blood, gore and more angst?

But it is a battle, one that I am afraid I am not on the winning side of. For me, reading is pleasure, a habit that I was inculcated into long before I could even speak. Soon after My Big Picture ABC came everything from Enid Blyton to Henry Miller, Scott Fitzgerald to Edgar Wallace and far and beyond to places and characters I often saw just once, but sometimes kept to cherish and savour for as long as I could read.

But then I started working for a newspaper…and that kinda messed it all up, as my friend Karen would say. I read because I had to read, not because I wanted to read, and that made it surprisingly difficult to read. So I cursorily glanced at headlines, wandered through pages that had news that attracted me and then cruised on to the comics and the crossword, which were rather more fun than murders, coups and earthquakes. People dying did not appeal to me; giggling over the capers of Hagar and co, did.

It got worse as more newspapers clambered on to the Internet. Now I read once more, but prefer the New York Times, Daily Telegraph, Washington Post, Midday and whatever else may grab the habit, to the Indian Express, Afternoon Dispatch and Courier and whatever else is on newsstands everywhere, as the saying goes. And at home, there is a pile waiting – DNA, the Times of India, Hindustan Times, Hindu…goodness knows what else we will take a fancy to because of good packaging, invitation pricing and the presence of bylines of people we know and love.

In all this, I don’t read any more. I plough through this enormous pile of newsprint every evening, having reduced it slightly in the morning if possible, and see the same stories everywhere, which decreases the charm quotient considerably. Why would I want to know more about a shootout in South Mumbai that I have already seen and heard on television? Will HT give me more insight into the happenings of that dramatic afternoon outside the art gallery than, say, TOI, or even DNA? Of course, the Hindu has its own special cachet, since it comes to us from Chennai one day later, which gives it all an incredibly funny sense of déjà vu!

Unfortunately, with the kind of madness I live within these days, I cannot read anything, really. Pre-kitten, I did the daily newspaper crossword and managed to get through a few pages at least of the crime novel I actually fought to acquire. Now that the little orange furball is bouncing all over the house and the people who live in it, crosswords are consigned to the old-paper pile before I even look at the page that houses one, unless of course, the baby cat has shredded it before then.

I have no complaints. My editor does. Perhaps he should come spend a day at our house!

Getting personal

I was talking to someone on the phone recently and they said that in all that they have read and so learned about me, they know nothing of my social life. They knew about my family, our kitten, the food I have eaten, the places I like going to, the shoes I buy, but nothing about what I do after work, when I am not home, out with friends, whatever. I never write about that part of my life, they say. And they speak verily, forsooth! Simply because I do not have a social life at the moment!

Why? You may ask and you deserve an answer, especially after I take you through so many very private compartments of my life and work with no self-consciousness or hesitation of any kind. It could be a very simple answer: I choose not to have one. Or it could be complicated: I choose not to have one because….Or, as is usually the case with everything human, it could be a nice albeit tangled mess of both, making the sorting out and the whys and wherefores more difficult to comprehend than just the usual very simple excuse of “I don’t have the time.”

For me, complicated works best. For some years, I did the social thing and was seen and heard and made quite a bit of at various dos in various parts of the world. I was at the jazz concert, at the opening of the new gallery, at the book launch, at the restaurant, at the film premiere….wherever there was a soupcon of culture and very little of the usual gossip circle except by invitation only. Then I found out about the joys of working via multitasking and was often cloistered with a computer, making money, getting bylines, thoroughly enjoying myself, even as I did the rounds of events and parties. But it was always discretionary, subject to mood swings, interest levels and free time. I also travelled to – for me - new cities, seeing San Francisco, exploring Santa Fe, wandering through Madrid, hopping around Beijing, racing around Tunbridge Wells in a pancake shaped sports car…it was a hoot and I relished every experience.

But then the reality of life caught up with me. I lived in Delhi for a while and learned to hate being social, seeing more artifice and faux friendships than my stomach could handle for too long. After a while, I stopped going anywhere after work, preferring the company of the cat, the computer, the TV and the few close friends who could enter my well-guarded sanctum with prior permission. It helped me drain the toxins of a bad time out of my system, and it gave me time to re-find my centre and get back into a comparatively serene state of being.

But then life overtook me again and I came back to Mumbai, went through two immeasurable losses – first my cat, then my mother – and turned completely hermit. Today I come to work, go home, write/edit/scramble and then cook/clean/scramble some more, depending on where I am and what needs to be done most urgently. While I am now feeling the need to go out with people my age and my degree of madness and just have an evening of laughter, fun, light-hearted flirtation and food that I have had no hand in making, I am hogtied by the responsibilities I myself have taken on as my own, with house, father and kitten being the least of the burden. There is more – a feeling of not doing enough to keep life happy and moving forward, a guilt at not being as good a housekeeper as I should, a knowledge that Mother would have done it not just differently, but better, and much more that may be silly, but clogs the mind, soul and get-up-and-go quite effectively.

Once I grow out of it, I may be brave enough to step out of the rut I have settled into. If I grow out of it, that is.

Crime and punishment

It was a long time ago in what now seems like another world, that I read Dostoyevsky. It was not a voluntary act; it was forced upon me by a syllabus designed by people who had nice ideas but no sense of time and absorption quotient – of the teenaged brain, that is. We lived in a neat apartment in Geneva, Switzerland, at the time, the small living room chock-full of heavy dark brown-leather upholstered furniture complete with nicely covered flat buttons which were nice to twist and wiggle in moments of any kind of stress, especially because they didn’t come off easily.

I tucked myself almost upside down in a winged armchair and started reading soon after a bath one Saturday morning, with a large glass of Evian for company. Some hours later I was disinterred by a fond parent and fed, then allowed to go back to my book. I stopped when I was done, painfully untangled myself from the chair, tenderly rubbed all the dents caused by the buttons and yawned widely, stretched all my kinked muscles and wandered towards dinner. Raskolnikov and his adventures had kept me rapt for hours. And I was done with my assignment for the dishiest English teacher that side of the Danube!

Today, after growing up and having read and seen and heard and reacted to a lot more than just a book that was part of a school curriculum, crime and its punishment means something quite different, not the angst faced by an accidental murderer after his crime has been committed and covered up, albeit not terribly successfully. Even as I write this, there are protests being clamoured all over the country to free Mohammed Afzal, a man who masterminded an attack on the Indian Parliament in Delhi, when many were killed and many more injured. There have been letter campaigns, protest marches, sit-ins, even riots, just because the man has been sentenced severely for his crime. He is to hang at the end of the year, the courts have decided. The people want otherwise. Even politicians, who should know better than to get involved in such matters, want otherwise.

How harsh should punishment for a crime that has resulted in a number of deaths be? Is it a story of like begets like? Or should it be all about equal and opposite reactions? Murder deserves more than a jail term, doesn’t it? Or have we all become so hardened to crime that we are willing to forget and forgive and forego the punishment that should follow?

Therapeutic value

For the past couple of days I have been rather upset, with no real reason to be except perhaps a slight twinge of the ego. It happens to spoiled brats like me when they don’t get what they want, which is sometimes the case – not often, but enough to make the mien peevish and childishly bad-tempered. The mood soon passes, but while it is present, coloured somewhat by external issues such as PMS, boredom and the inability to vent satisfactorily (throw a vase, slug a man, write a viciously rude editorial), the urge is to be totally non-productive, yell at your best friend and, more often than not, shop.

When my pet died a few years ago I went through many months of retail therapy, stocking up relentlessly and unthinkingly on clothes, bags and assorted rubbish that had no earthly use or reason to be in my life, but I never managed to forget how his little heart stopped as I held him. When my mother died, it was a burning need to refurbish the house, adding all the bits and pieces that she never got around to doing but had always said she would like as part of the apartment and its decor. And when dreams come to a sudden and strident halt, I have usually found myself looking for chocolate, for shoes, for diamonds…for whatever will give me the feeling that I have the power to acquire for myself what someone else has been unable or unwilling to give me.

This time, for a dream that was, rationally speaking, not really what I wanted, I felt a dip of my generally happy and positive mood that was, to me, more upsetting because of its irrationality than because of the cause of it. I had wanted something for its prestige value, not the satisfaction it would have given me, or the joy I would have found in doing whatever it entailed. Which was a good reason not to get it, I tell myself, even as my black mood fades into a more lively and bright silver. This time, my therapy came not from buying, which is easy to do and impossible to store, but from the logic that it was ego that was hurt, not my career or my face value. My image of myself as bright, good-to-look-at and capable was slightly dented, for a short while, and has now almost been smoothed back to happy sanity.

But the urge to go out there and shop has not faded. I want to buy shoes – but is that unusual for me? I always want to buy shoes because, like almost every woman and many men that I know, I have a lot, but nothing is just right for that particular outfit that I want so much to wear for that particular occasion! I want to buy the new line of designer towels that I have been seeing advertised all over – but then, every time I do a large load of laundry on Sunday, I grouch about towels that are getting thready and linen that should have been consigned to the quilting bee histories ago. I want to buy chocolate – but I always do, since I can never have enough of the sweet brown stuff!

So why do I want to indulge in some retail therapy now? Or do I? If I do shop, it will probably be for groceries, cat food, T-shirts to replace my father’s admittedly disgraceful collection, carpets, towels, home accessories….none of which will kill that niggling peeve that I have in me. But hang on a wee moment – where did it go? It was here just this morning….!

Song sung true

Sometimes I revert to type. Which means that I multitask with a vengeance, doing everything from listening to music to chatting with a close buddy about our assorted angsts while I am working and, with all honesty and sincerity, doing it all happily and efficiently! In fact, as I write this, I am plugged into Queen, Radio Ga-Ga for the moment, enjoying every beat of the mix, even as I wonder about the Parsi boy who changed his name to Freddie Mercury and made good, beyond the wildest dreams of anyone else I can think of! In between changing windows when I take a break from the convolutions of my favourite sentences, I may hammer out a review of an art show, pontificate on necklines and hem-lengths or even read through the New York Times’s editorial POV on the crisis focussing on the North Korean nuclear explosion! In between all this work and not work, the song changes with mood and task to be done. I could be tuned into the Pet Shop Boys or L Subramanium or even a staunch companion through many assignments, Manhattan Transfer’s Ray’s Rockhouse.

Perhaps the first real piece of rock I listened to was Pink Floyd’s Pigs on the wing. It was part of a collection belonging to a much older brother of a close friend, who also had me meet The Who, Cream and classic Clapton, and assorted other musicalities like the Beatles, Abba and, in strange counterpoint, Vivaldi. Added to that was classical Indian music, both Carnatic and Hindustani, jazz and be-bop courtesy my parents, and so many other genres that friends all over the world introduced me to.

Perhaps my favourite songsters are people I met through my friend Karen, the girl who was primary in showing me what sci-fi-fantasy is all about. She played all sorts of interesting music in her car, where we spent a lot of time running between Boulder, Denver and various airports. She started me off gently, with the Transfer’s more happy pieces, from Twilight Zone to Java Jive, and then slid me gradually towards KD Lang, Alan Parsons Project, Supertramp (Logical song became a sort of anthem for me, who is quite devoid of logic of the comprehensible kind), Dave Brubeck and stuff I can’t even remember hearing once, leave lone adding to my collection, but I did, because I still have it. These play on my various devices every now and then, some at volume high enough to shatter my computer screen even through my headphones and others so muted that I can hear my neighbours breathe.

In all this wandering through various scales, one set of songs has always been special to me, a symbol, almost of growing up in my house, with my rather eccentric family. Tom Lehrer, mathematician-musician who spent many years at Harvard not getting a PhD, did fabulous satires like Fight fiercely Harvard, Poisoning pigeons in the park, Lobachevsky and the rather madder Be prepared, all of which was fodder for my very young mind, which grabbed it and ran, giggling wildly the whole time. I have very old LPs that my parents bought in the US another lifetime ago, which I wish could be found easily on CD, listened to again and again and chortled happily over, as I did for so long when we still had a record player that worked!

Some day I will find more of that ilk. Until then, aapro Freddie will do it for me, thank you!

Auto mated

Over the past few months I have been looking for the perfect car. While I know that just does not exist, I do want one that is stylish and makes some sort of statement, even if it whispers it only into my ears and no one else’s. I may just have found it – a leisurely prowl around its sleek, Starship Enterprise shape, a test drive and a discussion, presumably erudite, where I do not sound terribly bimboish, with the mechanics and some minor argument with my father and, presumably, the kitten, and I may just have a new car, once my check has cleared, that is. It will be bigger than anything I have owned and perhaps a little too large for comfort on Mumbai’s congested roads, but it will be comfortable and, hopefully, easily accommodate the whole family, feline and her vast luggage included.

But that is still a while away from happening. For now, I look back fondly at all the various cars I have driven and wonder how I could have kept them all in my limited parking space. After all, each one has a special history that is unforgettable, special.

The first car I remember driving is my parents’ Fiat. It was a zippy little thing and I was all of 13, wavering along the road in the cantonement area in Pune. Once I got legal, I was less unsteady, and drove a little too fast for the comfort of the various cohorts in assorted crimes who happened to be foolhardy enough to want a ride to wherever we were going. By then, I was working and having little disasters that, thankfully, my father had taught me to deal with a long time before I could steer straight, like flat tires, silenced horns and, one drizzly, slippery, scary afternoon, a broken headlight – I decided to get a little too intimate with a taxi that stopped suddenly, and the slick road objected to my braking without notice.

But long before that I had been driving a neat little VW Golf in Geneva, Switzerland. I would cautiously inch my way through the early morning traffic from the house to the tram station, where I would get off, and Papa would take the car back home. Once I got my license, I drove whatever I could get my hands…and feet…on – my soul sister’s Toyota, a dear friend’s Ford Nova (which gave me recurring tendonitis of the shoulder), a Dodge station wagon that was closely related to the QEII, a wonderfully pancaked sports model that was born in Malaysia but tooled through the streets of England with élan, a Jeep Cherokee with dreadful automatic transmission, even a minibus along the fog-dimmed motorway across Long Island!

Perhaps my favourite car was a small gold Zen that I drove in Delhi. It was a pet, since it was my first ‘office car’, and I loved it dearly. Every scratch was touched up almost as it was acquired (and in Delhi, you acquire them just by breathing in the car), with gold nailpolish if the auto-paint was not available or not affordable. When I came back to Mumbai, it had to be sold for various excellent reasons, but it broke my heart to watch it being driven away by the buyer, who promised to give it a good home. Once in a while I pull out a picture of that little chariot and sigh – it was a symbol, in a way, of triumph, of a bad period in my life that I managed to make good.

Perhaps a new car will have new memories built around it. A history that is all good, all laughter and sunshine, all positivity and optimism. Apart from which, it should take us where we need to go in infinite and absolute comfort. Now to schedule the test drive…!

Maid in India

For the last ten days or so, we have had maid trouble. Like all domestic help, the woman who worked in our house was intensely inventive, creating all sorts of stories that I, as a novice in these matters, had no clue about where veracity was concerned. But over the last ten months or so since I took over house-keeping and dealing with the aforementioned maid, I have learned a great deal.

Lesson 1: Be very clear what the bai, aka the maid, was employed to do. It is obvious that she washes dishes, sweeps and swabs the floor and ‘does’ the bathrooms, but to what extent do these duties stretch? Our bai would rush in like a miniature whirlwind around 7:30 am every morning, clatter the dishes (with a wonderful Stella Gibbonsish fervour), whiz around the house wielding broom and then swab-cloth and get terribly in the way of all three residents – self, father and kitten. The entire apartment would be redolent of soap and eucalyptus oil by the time she left, but we would be edgy, jumpy and very irritated with any noise or movement at the end of the short half hour.
But look closely and you see what is not done. The floor of the lobby outside the front door would be swept and swabbed, but around the large footmat. The bucket used for water used for swabbing would be empty, but with dirt and grease clinging around like a watermark. The garbage bins would be empty…of not only rubbish, but the bin liners as well. And the air-conditioning units would be inch-thick in dust and plant debris because she, in her infinite wisdom and confidence of the long-term employed, would insist that it was not the work she was hired to do.

Lesson 2: Never believe the bai, aka the maid. Ours came up with the most ingenious excuses to avoid work, or take a day off. She killed a series of her relatives at regular intervals – while a couple may have been true, the rest, my friends and the building supervisor assure me, were stories that I should have been able to see through – they all tell tales like this, I was assured; you have to be more strict. At last count, she had no family left and her aunt’s husband had died twice over. But who keeps count of sob stories, especially when the woman sobs as she tells the story?
But there have been other esoteric disasters that have inflicted her and her family. Her son fell in the gutter, her husband would do an occasional spectacular drunk, her niece had chikungunya, she had dengue, her mother-in-law had malaria and her pet hen, if she had one, had a nervous breakdown. The monotony of illness and death was broken occasionally by bouts of flooding, no electricity, autorickshaw strikes, bandhs and riots, just to spice up the week.

Lesson 3: Never allow the bai, aka the maid, to get friendly with the cat. I encouraged it. The cat watched the maid. The maid cooed to the cat. And I accepted one more excuse that the maid made, because she was so positive where the cat was concerned. The sympathy wave got me nowhere. She still left me maidless for longer than I could tolerate.

So one day, after the umpteenth death in the maid’s family and the umpteenth tine she had taken leave without keeping to her promise of coming back on a certain day, I sacked her. Which left us with a house that was not properly cleaned for over a week and dishpan hands from washing up after meals. Now that we finally have someone new to help with maidly duties, I have decided that perhaps the first lesson I should have learned is Lesson 4: Never sack a maid without having an immediate alternative!

To forgive is…impossible?

My friend Rocky once suggested to me, “Forgive and forget”, since ‘to err is human; to forgive, divine’. The point was moot; there was nothing to forgive, since what needed to be forgiven was forgotten and divinity, irrelevant. But it raised an issue worth thinking about – what can be forgiven and what lingers as ‘unforgivable’, like a festering wound?

A child (assume it is a girl) inevitably makes mistakes, breaks rules and so torments her caregivers, particularly her mother. There are almost always subsequent moments of stress so intense that they find expression in a scolding, even a slap or two, a time of mutually antagonistic silence. The mother forgives her daughter; the girl takes a little longer to get over it, but the incident passes into oblivion, to the realm where it doesn’t matter.

As the child grows up, she starts understanding what is forgiven easily, what needs a little more work and what can never be pardoned. She learns her rules, exploring, discovering and testing her limits, foreseeing what her mother will accept. And in that, she develops her own wisdom, in the process creating a framework within which she will judge herself and other people, lifelong. As she matures, she finds herself in a position to watch, experience, adjust and adjudicate, deciding whether she will forgive, whom and for what.

By the time the woman is in a position to pass on her rules to the next generation, she has her own ideas of what forgiveness means. She knows, for instance, that violation of her emotional privacy, shattering of the trust that is the basic element in any relationship and deliberate deafness to her expressed needs of love, support and companionship are not easy to get past. And, while she may be willing to forgive once, twice, even three times, beyond that, she finds it more healthy to forget.

Forget what? That those who broke the rules gave her existence? That they once were more than mere seatmates on the flight called ‘life’? That they allowed her the power to judge? That they were human and she, hardly divine?

Work ethic

Working in an office of any great size is a fascinating experience. You find a lot of different people to look at, to watch, to make fun of, even to talk to, without really getting too involved or interested. For me, it was good to work out of various places, being consultant to publishers, newspapers, magazines, websites or whatever I did. Perhaps the most fun of all my assignments was when I wrote fortunes for the fortune cookies that my friendly neighbourhood baker in Mumbai suddenly decided to make. Even more fun was finding those same cookies with those same fortunes in a swish restaurant in Delhi, so far away, in a different space, time and context!

That apart, ever since I walked into the office that houses this paper, which is, in essence, a huge hall teeming with people all clacking busily away on keyboards (though whether they are working, chatting or playing games is up for debate), I have been meeting people that I may never have come across otherwise. There is the business editor, a shy man with a sweet smile and an iron grasp of his team and his pages. And there is the man in charge of the Sunday edition, a silver-haired gent with a wicked twinkle in his eye who wanders about yelling at his reporters, flirting with the pretty girls who populate the place in abundance and getting his paper out on time to the best everyone can create.

And there are so many others special to me in some way. There is the lady who sits ensconced in her cabin at one far end, sniffing with the fresh paint on the walls and driving her team to higher levels of achievement. There is the lady who sat, for a year or so, at a table on my route between my desk and the coffee machine; stop and she would give you updates on the state of her larder, the pages she worked on and the politics in the establishment. There is the venerable editor who beams over his beard and tells the most scurrilous stories, the gleam in his eye negating all the avuncularity of his everall mien. And there is the lady who runs the women’s magazine, all stern business and fashionable wardrobe, but a warm, friendly, knowledgeable person under all the starch and frosty eyes.

For me, it is the people I do not work with who make the day more fun. The canteen boy, who bounces up to me every morning with a cheery smile and a list of the day’s culinary offerings. That I rarely ask him for anything never deters that routine; he is always ready with a grin and a tray of sustenance should it be needed. The man who walks up and down the room just to smile at me, his glasses reflecting a light that makes me consider being friends. The accounts lady, as I call her, who always scolds me not just for being late in claiming payments, but for being single and happy about it. The boy of all and sundry work, who never fails to have the chill of the air-conditioner lowered when I start growing frost around my mouth. And the receptionist, who always, but always, greets me with a giggle and tells me she loves my shoes.

It all goes into making working here fun. There the parts that are not fun, but those come into a different blog. For today, the sun shineth, the day gloweth and life is full of laughter.

Hang on, there!

There is a big noise being made in this country about the sentence passed on the man who planned the terror attack on the Indian parliament a few years ago, a gentleman (or was he one?) called Mohammed Afzal. He is to hang soon, as per the judgement, but could find himself a live man, if not a free one, if those who are pushing for a mitigation of the verdict actually get their way. These well-meaning folk include politicians who should know better, activists who ought to know better and some ordinary folk who need to know better. After all, planning to kill, maim and disrupt is, in almost anyone’s book, deserving of a like punishment, no? I am not usually too bloodthirsty. But deliberately killing anything, be it a man or a mosquito, is not a good thing in my little book. I do relax that rule a little where cockroaches are concerned, but even those I do not do in myself – I close my eyes and yell for my father or the maid, whoever is closest at the time.

But then, to get back to the original point, I find, in our great and glorious country, a big noise is made about anything and everything. It is sort of expected at any and every stage of anything in progress that someone somewhere will get up and shout in protest, be it for renaming a road or for putting a suffering leopard to sleep. People like standing for hours in a huge and treeless maidan, baking in the relentless sun and not knowing at all why they are doing it. People like walking in slow, winding lines through rush hour traffic, getting cursed by drivers and honked at by their cars, threatened by pedestrians and heckled by gawkers, even though they may not hear what is being said. And people like getting the small sums of money that they are paid for doing all this for the local bigwig who has arranged to have them all there for that particular protest, even if he has no clue who they are and where they came from.

Oh, yes, that is a small secret that someone more knowing than me once revealed. I listened, my eyes and mouth round in wonder and startlement, as I was told how crowds are hired for these rallies and marches and morchas, trucked in by the hundreds from the villages in the state and beyond, paid a few rupees and given a boxed lunch and a bottle of sweet drink for their effort. I also found out, much to my pained surprise, that you should never, unless allowed by those who control these processions, try and squeeze through this crocodile of sweating, shouting folk, never mind how urgent the deadline or need to use the loo. I once did, in the company of a friend more aggressive than I was, and suffered for it – one of the marchers took grave objection to our passage and slapped at us with a hard, calloused hand. My friend ducked, I didn’t. I had the bruise on my back for days afterwards.

But why protest inevitabilities, I always wonder. If you know a dam will be built, if you know that a tree will be chopped down, if you know a terrorist will be hanged, why not consider the ifs, buts and whys of the situation and then rationally and logically go about trying to correct it? Will rabble and rousing it, help?

A different god

It was Dassehra yesterday and Bijoya started today. For the Muslims, like my driver, the month of Ramzan is on, and the day is one about fasting and prayer. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are at this time of year, too. So must a lot of festivals be, all over the world. As long as the celebrations are about giving thanks and being happy and well fed, who really cares which lord is being praised?

All through my growing up, religion has been about worship of a way of thought rather than a deity or even a string of words recited with a special cadence. My parents took me to churches, to mosques, to temples and to Gurudwaras. I even went to a synagogue or two and to a bewildering series of Taoist shrines in strange places. And found peace in the most unexpected of all these, whenever I wanted and needed it. In that search, I came across pain, too, the agony of a bloody history and the anguish of generations who had seen it happen.

Perhaps the most disturbing images came to mind from the cathedral at Coventry, which is really a museum complex as well. On one side of a wide aisle is a brand new, modern chapel, soaring into a complex structure of blindingly modern, hard, coldly spiritual beauty. On the other, piles of bricks and stone, the devastation of Luftwaffe bombs still starkly evident so many years after the war. There is pain in the bricks, something that makes me want to walk faster and leave the site, go anywhere else, even into the icy new church that chills my bones and my spirit.

In contrast is the serene hull-shaped chapel of Notre Dame de la Haut, at Ronchamp, in the mountains of France. Built of concrete and designed by Le Corbusier, it is perched on a hill, shaded by cherry trees and velvet lawns. Inside, it is stark, simple, monastic, with brilliant light streaming in through tall and narrow coloured glass windows. It is a prayer to the Virgin Mary and her child, who nestle into a niche high up above the altar table, watching over worshippers with gentle, all-knowing, always-forgiving smiles.

When I was in college in Colorado, life was hardly easy or peaceful. Stress relief came through exercise of the vaguely masochistic kind and, when I was tired to the point of physical collapse, in a small chapel halfway down the hill between the dorms and the shopping complex. It was a clean, neat, sparse little room, with a cross at one end and candle stands lining one side. The chapel was always open, always tidy, but I never saw anyone in there. Except once – the pastor of the local parish dropped in after a meeting in the area and found me sitting there, eyes closed, hands huddled into the warm pockets of my anorak.

I was not upset, just tired. I needed to rest, alone, and it was snowing outside, so too cold to walk, as I normally would. So I had come in and, well trained in the process, said a prayer that confused some of my Hindu scripture with the traditional Our Father, with a general chat with the power that could be. The pastor sat at the other end of my bench and waited for me to open my eyes. When I did, looking sideways at him, he smiled. We started talking.

It was not about religion or god or prayer or even why I was there. It was about being Indian, eating chicken tikka masala and watching the dance programme in Denver during Diwali time. It was about acceptance and non-questioning open-heartedness. About feeling warm and safe and comfortable. And that, to me, is what god is all about.

All win-win

It is Dassehra today, signaling the victory of Lord Rama and his re-entry into his kingdom, the defeat of Ravana, the classic triumph of good over evil. Many battles have been fought on that premise, that the good guys always come first, but life, real life, doesn’t always work that way. Take the zillions of wars that have been won by the wrong people – be they on a huge and international scale or in relatively insignificant personal levels. But, at some stage, at some time in your life, if you are good, and you have done all that your duty is said to be, you do come out the winner…or so goes the Indian way of thought.

In the past few months that I have been working on the section of the newspaper that I call ‘home’, I have been looking for and often finding just this sort of sentiment for the spirituality column that we publish. Most of it is connected to some scripture or the other, some has been written by a guru of some note. But I find interesting bits and pieces that come from odd places that I cannot explain but do understand. The extracts I use are perfectly in context, wonderfully timed and just what I need for that moment, from Mark Twain on criminal justice to Margaret Noble (also known as Sister Nivedita) on Durga puja. Neither is a ‘spiritual’ writer, but both talk of a philosophy so necessary in today’s rather disturbed and disturbing world.

For me, triumph comes from persistence, from inner strength, from determination not to let go of values learned young and stuck to, no matter what the temptation. It is about looking yourself in the eye (in a mirror or metaphorically) and knowing that you can, without blushing or feeling furtive in some way. Do right, do wrong, do dubiousness, but do it in a way that you respect, is what I was taught and what I live by. But my version, linked to my so-called ‘career’ is more simple – it is my byline on the piece. Can I read it without flinching?

That is a question I often wonder about. Whether I am involved in editing a book I do not wholly support, or whether I am credited with saying something that I would never have if I wasn’t pushed (by someone, by emotion, by mood of the moment) into it, I rarely deny the fact that it is my signature at the bottom. In most cases, almost all, I can gaze at my own face and claim ownership. And, for me, that is what triumph is all about.

Feasting, fasting

Some years ago, a novel was published by that name. For now, it seems to sum up the manner of the season, the way in which life works for people around me. The Bengalis are celebrating Durga puja, while the Gujaratis are busy with Navaratris, with the Tamilians stacking up their kolus for the same occasion. And shops have huge sales; people are buying like mad and everyone wants new clothes and new gadgets and new jewellery and new cars, since everything is being made available at tempting discounts.

In the middle of all this expenditure, there comes a need for sustenance. While traditionally each day of the nine-day period of Navaratri mandates a different kind of food offering to the gods – especially Devi – mithai rules. In good South Indian style, the naivedhyam will have something sweet to it, be it fruit or payasam or pongal or whatever. I am still trying to work out whether sugar substitutes are allowed, apart from the fact that I have not followed the usual family custom of providing that offering every morning after a bath and lighting the lamp. My mother used to, even if it was just a katori of sweetened milk that she had available and often included chocolate, apples and fruit cake on her puja thali. I have not had the time or the mindspace to manage it, though I do remember I should, usually when it is too late.

Some of my friends take a day off from food during this time. Sometimes even many days off, though they will make up for the abstinence during the evening and very early morning. I like the idea of fasts Indian style, especially what I know of the way the Gujaratis and Konkanis do it. Friends of mine will not eat regular food on whichever particular day they fast. Instead, they munch their way through what I would categorise as ‘junk’ – chips, sabudana vada, sabudana khichdi, usal and more, all made with ingredients that are heavily fried in oil and are redolent with salt and spices that, on normal-diet days, would horrify my doctor and nutritionist. Others concentrate on fruit, crunching their way through bowls of papaya, mango, grapes, chikoos and citrus, washing it all down with water, limbu paani or chaas.

My mother never fasted, not that I know of. She refused to allow me to do so, even when I used the argument that it was not only good for my figure and my digestive system, especially my amoebiasis, but was also a common bonding glue – I had little in common with people I went to college with, so maybe this would help to find some ground that we could share. But it was verboten, which was perhaps good for all of us, since I left not just college but the country soon after and had very little to do with anyone I had met in class.

And after the fasting comes the feasting. For years friends have been asking me to take a walk into the small streets in the concentratedly Muslim areas of Mumbai, after dark, during Ramzaan, when the food is divine and the ambience special and unusual. I haven’t yet. Maybe one day, when I have tamed my pet amoeba, my nerves and my tastebuds, I will.

Dancing in circles

It’s getting to be that time of year again, when all of Mumbai goes crazy. I am sure the virus attacks various other parts of the country as well, especially Gujarat and Rajasthan, but for now my own city is in focus. The festival of Navaratri is on, in full swing, as commonly stated, and the noise levels are blasting through the roof in many parts of town. For the most part, people have started making the revelry a sarvajanik one, gathering in huge vacant spaces to dance the night…or at least as much of it as the local authorities will allow…away to the syncopated sound of synthesised beats. Where I live, the sounds are barely discernible, a marked change from even just a few years ago, when my parents’ bedroom echoed with the rhythms of dandiya and sleep was at a premium that we non-participating folk could never afford.

It was even louder when we lived in South Mumbai, on top of a huge apartment block perched at the highest point of a hill. It had a fabulous view from all sides – in fact, we often said that even my bathroom had the best view this side of the world! It was set bang in the middle of an area densely populated by Gujaratis, for whom the festival and the dance has special significance, and the celebrating went on all night, with no ‘quiet time’ rules to stop the clamour. From about 7:30, when the sun was truly down and the lights went on, until long past our collective bedtimes, the tinny, electronic wail of synthesisers and regular thump of disco drums would batter past the window glass, covered with thick brocade curtains and heavy blinds, straight against our vulnerable eardrums.

And the views from every balcony and window would include whirling skirts, glittering fairy lights, long buffet tables, strobes, car beams and mirrors…always mirrors reflecting millions of tiny images of dancers spinning around the circle, bobbing and weaving to the beat of traditional music, revamped and rejiggered with a Bollywood twist. Falguni Pathak wailed along with other famous voices, the same tunes ringing in various pitches with the words changing according to the fad of the time.

Today, nights are strangely silent, even boring. But I can – if I really wanted – catch the action on the channel my cable television provider has saved for the local telecasts of events. So when I do my dose of surfing before going off to bed bearing small cat, I see glimpses of my own past in full colour. Thankfully without the deafening decibels.

Print perfect

This morning I went to a sort of pre-preview of an art show that opens soon in Mumbai. Since the newspaper I work for wanted to give it some coverage, and I sounded vaguely knowledgeable on the subject, I was dispatched, and got there before 10:30, my heels throwing up tiny sprays of water as I got out of my car and dashed into the gallery through a wonderfully grey drizzle. I found the lady I was there to see and was summarily dispatched to take a look at the work on show. And, if I didn’t have a conscience, I would have walked off with at least one smuggled out under my kurta, never mind the rather unsightly and sharp-edged bump it would have created.

The exhibition was part of a collection of oleographs and lithographs belonging to a gentleman from Kolkata. In my family, while the concept was not unfamiliar, works of this genre were always looked at with a certain degree of contempt, as ‘calendar art’, with stout women who looked singularly unintelligent and fairly unrealistic albeit fervent portrayals of mythological, historical and nationalistic themes. They seemed somehow too brightly coloured, too detailed, even too cheesy, for lack of a better word. But today, I was charmed.

Especially by two pieces. One, I have not yet stopped talking about. It shows the Draupadi vastraharan, the stripping of the Pandava queen by a Kaurava villain. She is obviously horrified, but stylisedly so, her feet planted just so, her face grimacing in a very ye olde filme way. Sort of like Theda Bara or Fearless Nadia would have done if she was being so publicly stripped for celluloid posterity. Her sari flows in a vivid mithai pink wave, in real fabric, perhaps georgette or chiffon, dotted with neat rounds of zardosi work – which also finds place on other costumes in the same print. The whole looks like film still, movement captured in a frame, with the villain looking amazingly like the hero of a South Indian potboiler. Shamelessly, blatantly, I asked the gallery lady, a sweet person with a mercifully good sense of humour, to convince the owner that I would give it a good home, and she laughed. The owner, when I asked him, was even more amused.

The other piece I would have taken home if I could was as charming, though more subtle. It was a delicately tinted work of an adolescent Krishna, lounging gracefully, a tiny smile edging its way out of his eyes and on to his lips. It could have been a young girl semi-lying there at an al-fresco picnic, soft colours and a sense of playful peace emanating from the picture. I have not said anything about that one to anyone; perhaps I want it too much!

I looked at the whole show carefully, doing two rounds. But only these made my acquisitive instincts bristle. Now I need to work on the owner to sell them to me. Do you think he would? Or does he feel as connected to the prints as I do?

Remembering Daniel

Delhi for me was all about mixing with a crowd that made me intensely uncomfortable and valued me very little for myself. They wanted someone else, not the ME that I was, with all my insanity, my giggles, my sense of the ridiculous, my strange accent and my frankness. So when Asra came into my life, her timing was perfect. She was like me in many ways, could understand what I said and why I said it and had the same craving for affection rather than usefulness. We did not have to talk much to communicate and could spend time laughing about all that was ridiculous, from wavy French fries to Delhi roundabouts to the drunks we dodged at various totally silly parties. She was a serious journalist from the Wall Street Journal; I was trying to make something of my own career on the Internet and beyond. We became friends.

And Asra brought someone into my life that I will never forget, all the sappy sentimentality and resale value attached notwithstanding. She sent me an email one day after she had gone back to the United States, asking me to talk to a friend of hers who couldn’t decide whether to live in Delhi or Mumbai on his posting in India. He, too, was a journalist from WSJ, and a really nice man, with a really nice wife who was a little careful with her English, Asra explained tactfully. And one morning, the man phoned. “Hi, I’m Daniel Pearl,” he introduced himself. Soon after, he was sitting in my living room, asking me questions about India, its culture and the two cities he needed to choose from, his glasses glinting with his enthusiasm, his clean-cut, amazingly young face alight with excitement at a new adventure. Formality and stiff tea drinking fast shifted gear into casual, feet-on-the-sofa friendliness. We had started becoming friends.

Daniel listened to what I had to say very patiently and with a smile on his face as I tried not to play favourites – after all, Mumbai was home for me, and Delhi was hardly a pleasant experience. Eventually, he took a list of telephone contacts from my little red book (with me, it would rarely be black) and left, his first stiff handshake now a warm shoulder hug. Soon after, he emailed me, saying that he and his wife, Mariane, had decided to live in Mumbai and that he would get in touch when they got there. I heard about Daniel from my friends – he had called everyone on the list and endeared himself to most. He liked Mumbai, and the city accepted him and his wife easily into its enormous and friendly fold. He was working hard, enjoying the heat of the city and the warmth of the people and felt comfortable, which perhaps he would not have been able to do in Delhi, he wrote. And I was glad. To me, he was someone I liked, not just for Asra’s sake, but for his own. A few months later, I met Mariane, too, when Daniel brought her to Delhi and out to dinner with me. She was shy, obviously unsure of her linguistic skills, extraordinarily pretty and totally adoring of her husband. They made a good-looking couple, and radiated a quiet contentment that was all about staying home and being a unit.

Daniel kept in touch with me at fairly regular intervals, telling me what he was up to and how Mariane was. It was a casual, friendly, vaguely affectionate correspondence, punctuated by an occasional phone call. Asra formed the third side of the bond between us, and it was a happy relationship all around. And then she moved for a while to Pakistan, the land of her extended family. Daniel and Mariane travelled there. Asra emailed to say they were staying with her and that Daniel was following up on a story lead, interviewing some local people who could tell him more about what was happening in that part of the subcontinent.

The rest, the world knows.

Happy day

Yesterday was my birthday – and no, it doesn’t matter how many there have been so far. It was not a very eventful day; rather quiet, in fact, except for the phones that kept ringing. But it didn’t feel like I was older – that happened in December, when growing up suddenly became a priority and I took over as lady of the house when I was not quite ready to be one. What I really felt was old, tired to the point of exhaustion, fed up with all the strange tricks fate was playing on me and mine and definitely unable to cope with much more than was already on my plate. But that was a momentary lapse of sanity. A short while later, I was back on the bounce, masochistically wanting more to do and less time to do it in.

Some people are like that. Take Osama bin Laden, who wants to kill Americans, the more the merrier, the faster the better. Or Ghenghis Khan, who cut a sharp swathe through the lands and peoples he conquered, riding off into the sunset as a hero who not only ruled huge tracts of a savage land, but ate yoghurt to stay healthy as well. Or even Casanova, who laid down the ladies – in more ways than the obvious or the smutty – with a charm and panache that so few have yet been able to match that he is the buzzword of the art.

On the whole, birthdays have been fairly happy for me. One of my favourites is now family legend – maybe that is why it is one of my favourites, since it was too long ago for me to remember, but my parents always laughed so much when they told me about it that I giggled happily, too. It was a birthday party for me, the heroine of the piece, who was turning something below the age of ten. A young friend came, ate plenty of cake and then got into an altercation with me, the birthday girl, who was the only one authorised to fight with anyone on her special day. The little friend – male, of course, as you may be able to tell from his behaviour – threw a major huff and walked out, taking his present with him!

Birthdays are all about people, for me. Getting chocolates and diamonds is all very well; getting lots of them is even better. But what matters most is the good stuff: the love. I woke yesterday and wandered blearily into the kitchen, where my father gave me a huge hug – that set the day rolling with a smile on my face. The kitten came past and rubbed up against my ankles, rolled herself into my sheets and bit me wherever she could reach, which is her sign of trust and affection. And the breeze blew through my window, tugging at the sheers and sending a cool wave through the house. The jasmine bush outside my parents’ bedroom window sent clouds of scent into the apartment and the floors radiated light and the cool tinge of eucalyptus oil used to swab them. There were good things to eat, nice clothes to wear, a fond father o hug and a fuzzy kitten to cuddle. What more could a girl getting older ask for?

Post script

The elephant died very early this morning. May her soul rest in peace.

Stock taking

I was out for a meeting in the city this morning and decided to spend a little time stocking up for the house with odds and ends one never gets down to buying unless one is in the right place at the right time and remembers it all. So in the car I made a list and tucked it away so carefully that I still have not located it. After the meeting, I made my first stop at a fairly new shop that specialises in that manna from the kitchen: chocolate. I walked in and was stopped in my well shod tracks by a wave of aroma from the ovens – fresh bread, cake, chocolate and more chocolate. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, I felt, and bought what seemed to be the whole stock. Without a single twinge of guilt, may I add!

From there, we drove to Crawford Market, a general melee of shops and hawkers located in a domed heritage structure. It teemed, even that early, with shoppers, all buying in bulk and at discount prices, which is why most people come there to find groceries from all over the world. I headed for my favourite grocer, who tells me what not to buy and gives me media gossip, news about his family and the price of the dollar all at once. This time he diverted me from Parmesan and into the softer realm of cream cheese, which I didn’t want, so didn’t get, unusually enough. We chatted informedly about different shapes of pasta, nodded sagely at a lady who insisted that a local make was the best and wondered if the situation in Thailand would affect the sales of coconut milk.

From there I headed for the paper products. Foil, weighing a veritable ton, stretched my arm even longer, while tissues and toilet paper tried in vain to balance it out on the my other side, along with mayonnaise, mustard and bullseyes. I examined heaps of cane baskets for our little cat to curl up in, but found none that would satisfy her exacting tastes. I looked for cashewnuts of a particular size for a special recipe and tasted a variety of raisins, each sweeter than the other. And I avoided the milling paathiwalas, the men carrying huge baskets who would, for a fee, heft your shopping to your car for you.

Finding the car in the chaos outside was easy. Finding a toy for the baby feline was not. I walked far along a very dirty and crowded street, for a change without anyone heckling me in any way - except for one chappie who insisted that I buy some very oddly shaped apples – to no avail. I looked into stores wholesale and retail, went in and out of smaller establishments and smiled coaxingly at what seemed like the entire male population of the area, but there was nothing that would suit the kitten. And, each time I said “ping pong ball”, I got stared at in a very odd manner, as if I had said something incredibly smutty on the wrong day of the week.

Finally, driver, car, shopping and myself were collected in the same place and we started back to work. I had all my chores done, though when I find that list I made, I will probably see something I had clear forgotten about. And though no ping pong ball has been acquired for our small beast, she will be very happy to have a whole new collection of very noisy plastic bags to play in!

Jumbo woes

A female elephant called Roopkali was hit by a water tanker on the road in an eastern suburb of Mumbai recently. It lay on the road for hours, as people thronged the area, some trying to help, some gawking, some criticising, others inventing scenarios that could mean the worst case for the poor animal. Six hours later, the beast was in its new and hopefully temporary home at the animal hospital in Mumbai, being given the best care by the most qualified people who could save its life. With all her will, the elephant seems to want to get better, a friend who works there tells me, and is cooperating totally with her nurses and doctors. But she needs more help than is easily available – a crane to help her stand, since her back legs are badly hurt, medicines, food and, of course, all the love that she can get. Which is coming in a-plenty, since the elephant is a symbol of the Lord who has just left our city. And, more than anything else, people are responding to the huge, gentle, friendly animal who cries real tears when she is in pain or is grieving.

The hospital is a place I cannot go to, not after my last visit there. It was where I took my beloved baby, a lovely black and white three-and-a-half-year-old cat who had slept on my pillow since he was four weeks old. He was very ill, treated by many doctors, and finally needed more expert care than he would get at home. For ten days he was put on drips, given medication and examined carefully, his blood tested every day, his systems gradually failing. And I watched him go. Then, in one final, horrible stroke, I signed the form that would release him from the agony and send him to what is, hopefully, a far better place for him to be. He died as I held him, killed by a dose of potassium chloride and some other cocktail, injected into his collapsed veins. And then the light went out in my life. But now it has started coming back, after the darkness got blacker at the end of last year. Which is another story that does not need to be told right now…

The hospital in Parel, Mumbai, is a lovely place. My friend there, Saroj, handles the nutritional needs of all the patients, and smiles as each one recovers, even as she cries with each inmate that dies. For now, she tends to Roopkali, the elephant, finding her the best and most easily digested food, making sure that dinner is on time and locating people who can help disseminate a public appeal for help. Saroj is adopted by people who meet her and find her a kindred spirit – like me, for one – and becomes a combination of good buddy and den mother to them all, providing a shoulder, hankies, support and good advice. The rest of the crew at the hospital is as valuable to both the animals they look after and their owners, providing care and food and medical aid, as well as a whole lot of love that can be shared equally, no matter how many patients they have. I am sure there are problems and bad eggs in the vast complex, but I never met any.

For now, Roopkali is in good hands. The best available. With a little luck and help, she will be back on her feet, literally, soon. It is up to Mumbai to keep her there…and safe.

Male prerogative

I have a new admirer in the office, one who thinks I am attractive and who wants to get to know me better. He has suggested a glass of wine, dinner, anything, but insists that running around trees is not on his agenda at any time. For once, someone is straight, adult and mature about showing an interest in me. But it feels good and could be fun, if I had the time and mindspace to allow myself to let it develop. Which, unfortunately, I do not right now. It is, however, a refreshing change from the speechless, open-mouthed yokels that my world seems to be populated with.

Speaking of which, for many years I have had one of those stalking me. At first it was silly. Soon it got irritating. Very gradually, it got frightening. This man would stare at me at the station from which I commuted in to work, stare at me on the train most of the way there so I would be more careful about the seat I chose and the time I travelled and, then, to my consternation, he would be everywhere I went, from the service provider’s office I went to check my site designs on, to the small café I sometimes picked up lunch from to the bookstore I frequented. One day he was stopped and given a good talking to by a very large and very quiet friend, which deterred him…but not for long.

I spent a few years away from Mumbai and came back to life in the city with a certain unhealthy degree of cynicism in my emotional baggage. And there he was again, haunting my every footstep. But this time I ignored the niceties of my upbringing and brought out the cops. The chowkidars from the apartment building I live in turned up at the station to grab him and he hid, like the despicable coward that he was, behind pillars and assorted travellers. At work, the head of security arranged an ambush and he ran, like a scared little rabbit. And he called – on my home telephone, on my office line – and was told exactly what to do with himself. Finally, he started sending emails to my official address – which have been and will always be trashed.

There have been others rather braver that that creepy character. One chappie at work stood for many months and stared at me over the cubicle partition, never saying anything and shying away if I smiled. Another, who has known me and worked with me for years, prefers to stand at a distance and smile idiotically, making very stupid monosyllabic or completely irrelevant conversation. And yet another gets completely incoherent when he speaks to me, the end of his sentence entirely unconnected with the beginning.

In this context, my new admirer is indeed novel for the situation and the environment we all function within. His behaviour is his prerogative, as it is all the others’. As for me – I plan to enjoy it while it lasts. After all, a girl can’t get enough attention of the right kind, don’t you think?

Gas trouble

There is a petrol strike on in Mumbai, the city of many dreams, a few nightmares and the average day. Which makes these days less nightmarish, especially when commuting to work is concerned. Ever since my father won our long-standing battle and I drive to work in mercifully air-conditioned comfort, I have blessed him for his infinite wisdom, but cursed a whole lot of other people, from my own chauffeur to the zillions of taxi drivers who get in our way to the hundreds of other hurdles that make the ride of about 40 minutes over an hour long. Yesterday was thusly, since people don’t seem to have caught on to the idea that perhaps a car needs something called petrol to make it go and if they had filled up like sensible people (my father, for one) did on the weekend, they would be home and not as dry in the tank as they probably were today, when there was far less traffic and so more driving comfort!

(Whew! Having got that vastly over-extended sentence off my mind, we can now progress.)

I first started driving when I was about 13, during a family crisis in the smallish city that was once Pune, about two or three hours away from Mumbai via the new expressway. It was the first time I was behind the wheel by myself (not on a parental lap) with the engine on and I was terrified, but had the bravado of the new teenager who had angsts coming out of her jeans pockets to carry me through. So I revved up and jerked to a rather ignominious halt as my foot lifted right off the clutch too soon. My father smiled patiently, told me all over again what the process was and we tried again. This time, I took a couple of hops and then stalled. It felt very Jessica Rabbit, with none of the seduction or charm, just a Bugs Bunny-ish version of the vamp.

The driving lesson progressed, with minor mishaps, and soon I was older, my father was wiser and we both got along better in the front of the car. On my first foray out of the driving lesson area of Mumbai and on to the main roads, I managed to get on the wrong side of the bus without mowing down any of the passengers getting on and off and, to my eternal shame and horror, just avoided running over a school-mate as he crossed the road at the same time I did, he on foot, me with one foot down a little too hard on the wrong pedal. Gradually, it came to driving test time and I passed without too much trouble, except that I was advised not to drive so fast and to make sure I had someone in the car with me until I accomplished that.

Today, our family has one small rule: Let the woman drive, or else she will be carsick, especially on long and winding roads. Or she will sit next to you and squeak if you come anywhere near any other vehicle, even within six feet of it. Or else, with steely determination, she will grit her teeth, clench her fists and generally be so stoic that it makes you want to give her the keys, the wheel and the car itself. If it had petrol in it, that is!

Book learning

A few months ago, I was closely associated with a book that made a little bit of a noise, more than most other projects that I make part of my life. It is now out, launched with some fanfare in various parts of the world and I thought this would be a nice forum to write about it, especially now that all that I felt about the process of creation and introduction to the rest of the world has faded into a little box in my mind that will be opened only when I am no longer stirred by its contents.

The book, published by Mumbai based India Book House, is called Lights Camera Masala, in a deliberate and cutesy twist to the conventional. It is essentially a collection of photographs supported by reams of text – or perhaps the other way around – all nicely packaged into a fun, gimmicky, attractive and noise-making whole. It is, as you may have figured by now, all about Hindi films, from the POV of two would-be filmmakers, who set out to discover just how mad the big bad world of Bollywood can be. It has a pouting Abhishek Bachchan on the cover and in various avatars on various pages inside, but it does satisfy almost every woman’s (and many men’s) need for male pulchritude with some mind-blowing photos of the very dishy John Abraham, along with some other representatives of the huge industry that is India’s very significant contribution to world cinema.

It all began some years ago when the publisher showed me her catalogue. At the time, she pointed out a listed book that had a leaping Hrithik Roshan on the cover and I told her I wanted to be part of the process of getting it to bookstores. It was many months later that she called again and said that it was all going to come together and would I be involved, as editor. I had been working with a Bollywood website for a couple of years and was keen to put the knowledge I had gained through that experience to good use – producing a result that would look good on my resume.

It was, in most ways, a fun assignment, albeit an excessively hectic one, though only in fits and starts, somewhat like the egg that the curate is said to have eaten. I finished the core of the editing just before I changed jobs, then more of it after my mother died, and the final proofs when I was deep into what I moved on to. And there were problems that I couldn’t even start enumerating – money, sponsorships, deadlines, language, captions and, in a stunning last minute bombshell, even the entire concept of the book that had been created, which clashed dreadfully with the original plan. In the rush to keep job, sanity and editing standards intact, we managed to keep out tempers cooled, our egos subdued and our opinions to ourselves and brought out a book that is, to say the least, well worth the effort.

It isn’t as if there are no mistakes. Or no hard feelings. Or even no hurts. But, in spite of all the problems involved in creating something that blends the talents of so many people, Lights Camera Masala is a book I am proud to meet and include in my inner circle of accomplishments. Do read it!

Shop hopping

I was at the mall this afternoon looking for a ping pong ball and found nothing that satisfied my needs. Maybe it was because I was generally in a not-very-nice mood, having started out the day that way, or maybe it was because of the heat, the sweat factor and the traffic that refused to crawl as fast as it should have if the cars on the road and their drivers had observed even a smidgen of the discipline that would have made life easier for everyone. But, be that as it may, I was not a happy shopper.

Why a ping pong ball? Simple. We have a small cat at home and she needs to be kept amused. One of her favourite toys is a wine cork, nicely dried of its alcohol content, which she bats around happily but tends to lose easily – under the storage chests, under the cupboards, under the bed, wherever. Then she proceeds to look at us reproachfully, make sad peeping sounds and then root about under the carpets looking for her lost plaything. We have tried bigger balls, bits of paper, foil and rolled up plastic and, while she plays with them all, she likes the cork best. Since we are rather restrained in our intake of all things alcoholic, we needed to find her something else, fast, and the ping pong ball met the criteria of being light, easily moveable and big enough to not be swept under low furniture.

But the mall was not the right source, I found. I walked into the large and noisy toy department of the lifestyle store in the mall and found that no one understood my requirements at first. Then, once I had gesticulated, explained and, eventually, glared, I had a host of uniformed minions rushing hither and yon bringing me everything but what I wanted. Finally, fed up with all the clamour, I hunted for the objects and found them, but in a pack of three, complete with ping-pong paddles and net. Now while I am most proud of our kitten and know that she is a clever little beastie, I realise full well that though she can do almost anything she sets her wee mind to, holding a paddle is not one of those marvellous tasks she can accomplish.

Mission aborted. I stormed away, ready and most willing – since it has been a week or more of nothingness in this aspect – to buy a pair of shoes. But I was put off by the crowds that thronged the stores to either shop or, more likely, enjoy the air-conditioning. But it was not a completely useless expedition for me. Even though I returned with nothing resembling a ping-pong ball in my various packages, I did manage to get myself a vast amount of pasta of various configurations. Our kitten may not be able to play with it, but at least it will give us the fillip we need to play with her!

Wet and wild

Just this morning the newspapers reported on the weather with unusual coherence. The monsoon is not over yet, not until the 30th of September, the Met office insisted, and the papers detailed where it would be soggy over the next few weeks. Don’t put your raingear away yet, everyone was quoted, but most of Mumbai takes that lightly – after all, after July 26 last year and a few other days this year, no one believes the weather people any longer. And it was a case of Murphy and one of his strange laws once again. With hardly anyone carrying an umbrella, it poured and still continues to do so as I bash away at my keyboard.

I was caught in the first of the storms – a series of which has been crashing over the city – this morning, all my plans gone totally awry. I had just finished having my hair done and trimmed, a neatly glossy curtain that is so unlike my natural growth swishing wonderfully down to the middle of my back. I paid at the front desk, gave my stylist a hug thank you and was pushing open the heavy glass door to exit when the heavens started the drum section rolling. There was a violent blast of thunder, bookended by a few intense flashes of lightning that sparked weirdly across the pink-tinged darkened noon skies. Even as I hesitated moving more than a toe over the threshold, the clouds let go and it POURED. I retreated, wise and unwilling, especially after an hour or so having my head bashed about and anointed by various presumably very expensive unguents.

My stylist refused to let me go. You get wet, I don’t care, she obstinately stated, but you leave your hair here. (It was a strange morning, as you may understand.) Since my hair and the rest of me are sort of rather attached to each other, I decided to let discretion play the better part of ruining my ’do and waited. It took about ten minutes for the rain to let up enough for me to consider walking in it. But there was another small problem to deal with – since no one believed weather reports, no one had brought along an umbrella! We scrounged around and I finally was lent a brolly by one of the staff, who knew me well enough to know that I would return it post haste. I sloshed my way to my car and started the drive back to work, returning the umbrella.

Of course, as with all things Murphy, when we drove away from the salon, the sun was shining brightly with nary a cloud in the sky.

Shoe scare

My father just phoned, telling me that I have over 200 pairs of shoes. And that is not counting the left and the right individually, he assures me. I think it is a scurrilous lie. He just wants me to stop buying more. Which, frankly, would be an excellent idea, one that I need to think about seriously. You see, as I have said before, I kinda sorta maybe perhaps like shoes!

This crisis has arisen because of a small accident in our house. There is a history that needs to be explained: The back of my shoe cupboard is set against the wall on the other side of which is the kitchen sink. A few days ago, after a bit of a storm at the dead of night, with lots of thunder, lightning and wind, I came face to face with a tiny cockroach that scuttled behind the aforementioned cupboard after a mutually horrified look that passed between us. With a shudder, followed by a faint squeak, I hopped back into bed, resolutely avoiding thinking about the bug, which had no business whatsoever invading my sanctum. The next morning, still blearily asleep, I asked my father to liberally spray that area with insecticide, keeping small cat well away from my room. In the process, he discovered a mass of damp and mould that had seeped into the cupboard and ruined the wall, the back of the wooden box and a couple of my slippers in the process. Clean it, he suggested, of the small cupboard. I had been planning to, but between housekeeping and work, had never managed to find the time. Or maybe I didn’t really want to.

That soul-searching debate apart, Father dear did the needful this afternoon. With a battalion of plastic bags, gloves (I hope) and some towels, he emptied the cupboard, cleaned it and each pair of shoes and packed everything neatly away again. Much to his satisfaction – since he can now happily pick a bone or three with me about it – he found many many many pairs of shoes, sandals and slippers that he (and perhaps I, if I was being absolutely honest) didn’t know I had. Some in a good state, some that cry for retirement, some that have little use in a climate like Mumbai’s average: hot, muggy and unbearable where the relationship between closed shoes and feet is concerned.

Whatever that may be all about, I hotly deny the statement that I have too many pairs of shoes for my own good. I disagree, for the record, of the count as well, and can assure not just Father dear but the general public that may read this that no one can have enough footwear. There will always be an occasion or an outfit that does not have anything to match it. Trust me. Being the proud owner of an unsubstantiated number of pairs of shoes, I know!

Cooking by the tube

I just read an article in the Washington Post about how to learn how to cook from television shows. Which is not difficult, especially considering that that is how I learned most of what I know about food and cooking, with a little additional help from books, family, friends, websites and my own overly fertile imagination. And I still watch cooking shows – Jamie Oliver last night – and enjoy not just the food, but the people involved. There are so many different styles and cuisines being played with, making it all even better than a saas-bahu soap!

Perhaps my favourite when I was in college was the Frugal Gourmet. He taught me how not to wash mushrooms, how to tear lettuce instead of chopping it and that what makes a good chicken soup is the love that goes into it, not the vegetables, herbs and salt. He also suggested I could use lemon juice to make up for a deficiency in salt. And I did all of that and more, and loved it and the results. So did everyone who ate what I cooked up.

Soon I was hooked on to Madhur Jaffrey, who actually taught me how to make lump-free kadi, that wonderful golden liquid made of buttermilk or sour yoghurt, redolent with fenugreek, asafoetida and tiny pakodas a-crackle with ginger and chillies. Her rotis came out varied shapes, her dal sometimes looked lumpy and her curries were not more fiery than I or my digestive system could handle. And she was exquisitely neat, her cooking surfaces cleaned and her splashing not beyond my endurance.

Floyd on the other hand was messy, but carried watchers along with him. He walked the streets of wherever he was and ate whatever he found, with joy and a huge appetite. He cooked interestingly, with enormous amounts of spices and not much regard for finesse, and drank liberally, which made him funny, human, but best in small doses.

Oliver I watch because Oliver I read. His recipes are simple and make the culinary world easy to travel through, wandering through the Far East and India even in the making of a basic lobster sandwich. He touches my tummy with his deft handling of food and neat presentation and, most of all, his love for his family, wife, daughters, parents and friends.

Perhaps Anthony Bourdain is the best of my lot. He doesn’t cook a whole lot in how television shows, but goes all over the world eating his way through the strangest of foods. Last seen, he was in China, crunching on stuff I could never even look at, leave alone identify, and he truly enjoyed it all. And if he didn’t, he said so, in his characteristic bored-but-loving-it style and his maverick history.

In this kind of environment, India has come up with its own brand of television chef, too many to list comprehensively. There is Mallika Badrinath, who propagates the principles of low-cal cuisine, perhaps because it sells, for now. Kunal Vijaykar eats his way through the country, with a certain amateurish charm and casual table manners. And Sanjeev Kapoor, of course, the love of many an aspiring chef, has his audience captured and rapt with much practice, an everyday simplicity and deep dimples. And many more, whose names I cannot begin to remember.

Of the wrong kind

The huge ghost that is now 9/11 is back to haunt us again, as it has done every year since 2001, when the World Trade Centre came crashing down in a cloud of lethal rubble. In contrast, in some strange manner, the other two equally deadly crashes – one into the Pentagon, the other into a field – has left an eerie emptiness that has little significance, even though memorial meetings are held and the bereaved still weep as heart-brokenly. Death has no measurable magnitude, but destruction does, and what happened in Manhattan overwhelmed humanity and continues to do so, especially since every excruciatingly moment of it was captured on film and beamed over television networks the world over.

For us, as Indians, that day has begun an inheritance that magnifies what we already had and will probably always have – a fear of being rejected, of being stigmatised, of being unfavoured. Because post-9/11 there was a wave, albeit not too unmanageably strong, of feeling against Asians, especially of Muslims, which still exists, now tempered to more ‘civilised’ levels. The ‘terror plot’ unearthed in the UK, planned on the lines of a much larger are far more terrifying and devastating 9/11 brought all the negativity back. But why? What is the point of the bias? Are all brown-skins, Asians, Muslims (at one time, after the Kanishka crash or Indira Gandhi's murder, it was the Sikhs) the bad guys?

In a way, the prejudice is justified. Sort of. After all, the proven villains of the terrorism piece are Muslims, from an Eastern country, people who have no compunctions blowing up planes, the innocent and themselves, all for a cause that, according to those who have studied and understood the true meaning of the religion, does not exist. (I have just finished editing a piece by a Muslim writer of some repute that demands to know what makes a Muslim kill, particularly because nothing in the Koran suggests he should or does condone it.) But then, as my editor point out, there is a reason, a justified one, for a certain degree of racial profiling to be done by security agencies, since there is a known set of parameters that define the terrorist in today’s world, and these groups fit.

But in a manner that I have never understood, the tag of ‘Muslim’ tends to cause eyebrows to rise along with hackles, and a cold distance to be established between people who could normally be close friends. It has happened to me often enough during my life in Delhi, when people who were in one moment very chatty and bonhomous turned, in the very next, into icicles, making me feel like a very bad smell, when they found that my own intimate circle of friends and family included those who were followers of – gasp – Islam. A buddy in Karachi and I often speak about this and wonder how people we know can behave thusly. After all, we wouldn’t, why would they? And they are part of the same social milieu, right?

Ask yourself a question, the way I ask it of myself. You do have discriminations, you and I both know and accept that. But which ones? And why? Is it a religion that you have a bias for or against, or a personality? A social group, or a type of individual? Is it a belief system that you cannot accept, or x, y or z’s thoughts and affiliations? Think about it.

Man style

A young man waiting to cross the road at the traffic lights this morning chewed gum with a certain fanatic devotion to the cause of ridding himself of his double chin, which sported the most spectacular collection of acne spots. And he glittered as he stood there, his various beads and baubles flashing in the morning sunshine, vying with the shiny decal on his T-shirt for my attention. In one ear he had two earrings; his hair floated over one side of his face and down his neck; his rounded belly strained at his stuck-on jeans. And chains that defied description cascaded down his front, one with a large Om on it, another sparkling with a diamante-laden cross, a third – perhaps the only one that was real gold – with a rudraksh. Just as I was about to lower my window and ask how airport security reacted to his collection, the lights turned green and we cruised on.

I know very few men who wear jewellery. Shah Rukh Khan did in a couple of his movies, Salman Khan wears hoops in his ears and bracelets around his wrist and almost every young male soap star has a tiny stud glinting on at least one earlobe. My father, in contrast, would really prefer not to wear even a watch, and disdains all forms of jewellery, be it a chain or a bracelet or a ring, all of which my mother always wanted him to have, if not actually hold.

But a whole industry has sprung up focussing on the concept of jewellery for men. Think about it, and what can they use? Especially on an everyday basis? Cufflinks? Today most shirts are buttoned rather than open cuffed. Tie pins? Most executives of the tie kind put on the stranglehold accessory just before going into a formal meeting of sorts. Chains? Normally part of the average Indian male anatomy – the ones around the neck and the psyche, of course. Bracelets? Ditto. Rings? Ditto again.

How much can you do with all that? Plenty, if the jewellery designers are to be believed. What would you do with it? You tell me!

Sole ambitions

I have been a very good girl lately, especially over the past few months. My favourite shoe store had a sale and did I go? NO! The chappie who makes shoes for me called me for a special sale. Did I buy anything? NO! Well, actually, I did, but I returned them, since they did not fit right. Everyone at work has been flitting back from an expedition to a local mall for a sale to end all; was I part of the flock? NO! So I am not only low on my stock of newbies, but also am owed a pair to replace the unfitting one. Not bad, huh!
People who know me know my passion for shoes as well. They probably also know about my feelings for cats, chocolate and much else, including life, travel, food and family, though perhaps not about my top secret recipe for banana bread and my liking for all things small, soft, wiggly and cuddly – I HATE soft toys, though, let me warn you! I may have inherited many of these preferences from parents and an odd friend or two (‘odd’ being the operative word here), but some have developed on their own, emerging from the primordial swamp of my own imagination and creative ferment, as it were.

One of these, nurtured by my mother’s style statement, is footwear. She had pretty slippers to match all her outfits and taught me how to be as coordinated and put-together. But perhaps she never bargained for my need to wear spike heels of the most delectably perilous kind, the sort that you cannot imagine running in but which work fine on your feet and your ego when you walk into a party or an office and everyone stares downwards.

Making that statement has never been important, but feeling that incredible power that comes with high heels always has. You can step on someone’s toes with a spike heel backed with a couple of tons of pressure on a tiny surface (yes, that is the case even though you may not weigh more than 50-something kilos, I am told). You can squash someone’s ego with the prettiest, funkiest, sexiest stilettos created by man guided by women. And you can flaunt a well-turned ankle, a honed calf, a set of perfectly shaped knees and a flirty skirt when they are all being stretched just so by the slant of a sharp angle from heel to toe.

Sigh.

My last shoe acquisition was a pair of deep red spikes that was, in essence, a tangle of leather thongs woven over a slim black heel. I have not worn them yet, but long to. They need to wait in line, since before them comes a totally ridiculous pair of gold, black and diamante cone heels, ruched purple satin stilettos and a completely unreasonable pair with gold and sparkles balanced on a high metal toothpick. Those, in turn, hang around in the wings behind a pair of cream ankle-strappers, pink and blue thongs and pale red suede slip-ins that begged to be taken home with me. There must be more, some even flatter-heeled, but I need to explore a bulging shoe cupboard to find out. Trouble is, I am not sure that once I open it, I will be able to ram it shut again.

Ganpati bappa morya!

It is the day we say goodbye. No, this is not another dreary, weepy, pathetically sad bit of writing, the way the last one was, perhaps, but a happy event that Mumbai celebrates with much sound and fury signifying a great deal to us locals. It is the day that Lord Ganesha, in his toweringly large sarvajanik avatar, leaves the community, the city and this worldly realm, dipping into the waters until his return next year. He has been worshipped for ten days in a public forum, with lights, music, prayers and offerings that could, actually speaking, finance an entire country, even a mid-sized one. And today, ten days after he arrived, he goes back to where he came from, his pot-belly awesomely full and his devotees wonderfully content.

Ganesha is this country’s favourite god. He is a child, in most of his depictions, one who is full of whimsical humour and good food, one who adores his parents – especially his mother – and always has mindspace for a good laugh. He gives and keeps giving, he protects, he blesses, he confers peace and goodwill. And he is lovable with his shape and size, akin to the fat-tummied laughing Buddha whom you pat for good luck. And though the generally accepted style is to use a capital first letter for all that pertaining to divinity, Ganesha is more plebeian and human in a certain very special way, being part of the masses who bow down to him in awe, in respect, in pleading.

In Mumbai, as in Maharashtra on the whole, the Ganpati festival is, in some ways, more important than any other such occasion. People save money, office vacation time and bonhomie for the ten days, gathering goodwill as they chant the name of the elephant-headed deity, sometimes through songs set to popular Bollywood tunes, sometimes through ancient verses recited sonorously over a sound system, sometimes through silent movements of the lips during a commute from one crowded venue to another. And before any action that needs a nod from above, be it a job interview or a college exam or a wedding, there will be a prayer to Ganesha, asking for his benevolence to be handed over in spades.

But with all this goodwill and good thought, when the Lord leaves, there is no sadness. There is dancing and singing, huge processions and loud music, laughter and a sure knowledge that he will soon be back, in about 12 months or so. After all, he is seen off and invited back, with a loud and fervent send-off of “Ganpati bappa morye, pudchya varshi laukarya!” (Farewell Ganpati, come back next year!)

When it’s over…it ain’t

I was away at the funerary rituals of my aunt last week and behaved very badly. With a brave face and steel in my mind, I stood close to where the sacrificial fire would be lit, all set to watch something I had not been able to look at when my own mother died in December last year. And I was past that immediacy of trauma, I told myself, and waited for the bricks to be arranged, the sticks to be laid, the dried cowdung cakes to be set just so, the chanting to begin. Then I fled, into the garden, clinging to my own composure by talking to a friend at work, two-plus hours drive away from where we were.

Later, when I was asked to play a miniscule role as a daughter of the family, I did, stone faced and rigid, staunchly holding on to whatever vestige of poise I had left of the vast store my mother had trained me to keep within myself. My father, as bereaved, if not more so, stood by me – as I did by him – the whole while, holding me as I finally cracked and wept against his shoulder out there among the shrubbery. It was a time we should not have had to relive…but we did, for my uncle’s sake, for the family, for us, in some strange way.

Death is not something you ever ‘get over’. The trauma of it all lingers, from the shock of that enormous loss, the pain of all the memories, the guilt of the overwhelming imbalance of the ‘not done’ as against the ‘done’. The scenes that you live through from the moment the person you lose has left you – or is on the way to doing so - until the time you come home again and bathe after everyone who has come to condole has gone get locked into a little box in the recesses of your mind and peep out at you just when you think you can look at them again without flinching. And, though the sharpness of the pain goes away, at least a little, it settles into a deep, incurable ache that you can never find a painkiller for.

Animals in the news

Many years ago I wondered what it would be like owning a pet – not a human one. And I found out, when I had my first cat, and now my second. But, apart from a certain inherent empathy with felines that most women are said to have and I seem to have accumulated in spades, a series on cats on BBC television kept me entertained way past my then-bedtime for days on end, even though the final episode showing weird species rather put me off. All in all, it decided me: a cat was to be had. More, it showed me the charms of animals filmed, from tigers to snakes, though underwater shots sort of got me rather bilious and made me want to change to the most mundane of silly soap serials. Which, at the time, were not on my must-watch list.

From then on, it was a short step to Animal Planet, once it arrived in India. At first, it was all about a veterinary hospital in the UK and how animals were saved and lost and everyone cried either which way. Then it moved on to funny things that animals do, which suddenly vanished off its evening slot to reappear goodness knows when. Then it was two docu-films, that have been played so often that even our kitten at home has stopped looking up when the big cats on screen make familiar sounds.

The first is a film on two tiger cubs that are sent to a rescue centre in midwest America and grow up, on camera the whole time, to become fearsomely large, albeit still cuddle striped beasts. As they stagger around the house – sort of like our own little tiger cub – they are furry, funny, fabulous little animals that make you smile and worry. As they grow, and start eating vast amounts of very bloody meat, their baby-faced appeal reduces somewhat, though they continue to be fabulously desirable and magnificently beautiful. And, once grown, they are to be admired, watched, but not rough-housed with.

The other is a story of tigers being tended at a monastery in the Far East. Brought up in the company of monks and a few lay brothers, the big cats learn how to coexist with man, even as they are taught to get along with each other peaceably. It is indeed amazing to watch the enormous and glossy, healthy, well fed animals play like kittens with the head of the monastery and his acolytes, rolling in the sand, playing hide and seek among the rocks and splashing in the water like playful domestic pets rather than the fierce carnivores they actually are.

Many of the wildlife shows on television, be they Animal Planet, Discovery or National Geographic branded products, are wonderfully filmed and immensely interesting. And with each comes a different personality, the host or one of them, at least. ‘Crocodile Hunter’ Steve Irwin was probably, for me, the most intrepid, but the most irritating, annoying the big reptiles and being so high-energy and excited that it left no room for the wonder and awe that the animal kingdom tells tales of. And now the poor man is dead, killed by one of the animals he was so passionate about. He went as he lived, in the company of animals. He will be missed, even if I, for one, rarely watched him.