Taking it to heart

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


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


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


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


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

That just ain’t cricket

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drinking it in

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

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

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

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

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

A toast to that!

A wish for joy

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe that wish to be happy did the trick!

Paying attention

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

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

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

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

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

One for the birds

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

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

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

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

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

An officer and a gentleman

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holding fort

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

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

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

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

Slate of hand

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

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

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

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

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

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

Girl talk

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

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

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

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

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

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

Delhi belly

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

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

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

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

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

Coming home

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spanish flying – finale

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

Talking in my sleep

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

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

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

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

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

Spanish flying IV

Spain was becoming a blur. But each time we stopped, usually at a small town that was a main street and a few old buildings, we found something new, something to marvel at, something to make us laugh, ooh and ahh, giggle nervously and perhaps even sigh with more than just a hint of sadness. It was all about passion and heat, brilliant sunshine and chilly evenings, wild swings of mood and colour that could bewilder even as it delighted.

Seville was one such stop we made. It was a bright sunny afternoon when we drove into the city, through tiny winding streets, locals and tourists wandering about in the middle of the road and even a clown who juggled oranges across the hood of the car and then darted into a schoolhouse door with a manic laugh. In the centre of all this rose the Giralda, a golden-orange minaret once used by the Moors for the azaan. We wandered into it and upwards, climbing up a steep spiral of stone stairs and sloping ramp, breathing heavily and holding on to the cold iron of the railing. Windows allowed occasional peeps outside, an ever-widening vista of an urban sprawl that combined the modern with the charm of the old. At the top, we exchanged cheery greetings with an English couple who were on their way down, while a large Spanish family exclaimed and smiled at Mum’s tikka and my nicely-lined eyes.

From there it was a short hop to the cathedral where Christopher Columbus’ tomb was. As with almost any and every old church in Europe that I have been to, it was cold enough to keep ice cream frozen at ‘room temperature’, and we shivered in our wrappings even as we huddled together near the bank of candles at the altar. Wonderfully carved wood loomed grandly around, overhead, overwhelming, drowning any reverence I felt with a feeling of how fabulous a disaster it would be if there was a fire. Shaking off the direness, I walked over to look at Chris Columbus. And came back a few minutes later, highly indignant, to hiss at my parents, “He’s not there!”

It was almost a personal affront. Though the elaborate tomb stands proudly in the massive church, Columbus is not in it. By the end of the telling and as my indignation dissipated very slowly – after all, I was brought up on the song “Columbus sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred ninety two” – I was completely confused about where the poor man actually was buried, Spain, America or somewhere in between. Let him stay here, close your eyes and pretend, my mother soothingly suggested, while my father voiced irreverent ideas about how he could actually be alive somewhere, sort of like Elvis.

But the mood persisted. As we walked through the streets of Seville, now emptying of the local population and roamed only by the occasional group of camera-hung Japanese, I couldn’t help wondering how poor old Columbus had disappeared, since there was some little mystery attached to the story. And by the time we got back to the pretty little pensione at which we were staying, I was dolefully contemplating my own feelings about not knowing where my body would be. The lady who owned the small hostal did not help with her ‘Hola! Buenas tardes!’ and the small hostal with its sepulchral lighting and doors that did not quite fit did nothing to cheer me up either. My mother was convinced that there was a corpse laid out in the house, since the Senora and her family seemed to be dressed in deepest mourning, only a faint touch of white sparking the stark black of their clothes and the melancholy mien they all wore as matching accessories.

And as we drove away the next morning, only one thought cheered me up. I had appropriated the Senora’s pen!

Writing the way it is…

For a long time now I have not written anything remotely resembling fiction – no, not even this blog, which is all the actual truth, occasionally very slightly embroidered for effect. But there was once a time when everything inspired a story and all that I wrote was madder than real life. My real life, that is. Aiding and abetting me in this were a few very interesting people, who gave me the push I needed at the time and still continue to be willing cohorts in my creative crimes. They read everything I wrote and encouraged me to be madder with each piece, forcing all sorts of crazy plot lines and linguistic convolutions out of my over-excited brain cells and revelling in the results. None of what I produced was Pulitzer worthy, but it made me happy and said what I wanted to say and feel at that moment in time.

My favourite story was written as a travelogue, but with a little bit of fiction thrown in for fun. We had just come back from a trip to China and Thailand and I was raring to write. So I did, on every aspect of our wanderings, talking about food, sightseeing, people and everything else, from environmental issues to textiles, for every newspaper that was part of the group I worked with at the time. But there was still one story that needed to come out of me and I say down and wrote it - on the ancient city of Ayutthaya and a monk I didn't meet...or did I? It stayed in the editorial cans for a long time, far longer than I was used to and wanted to tolerate. So, one day, getting my act together as only I could, I sent a copy to my fiction writing teacher in college on Long Island. She was not too acerbic in her comments or critique, but pointed out where my perspective was slipping, what I should have phrased how without losing my own identity in the change and why she preferred a certain word to one I had used.

The story was finally used and given a full broadsheet page spread, almost, interrupted by money-making ads but carried over to the next sheet. It had the photos I had taken blurred into the background, the most evocative image blown up enormously, setting the mood and tone of the story without my having to push the point. The central character was an ancient monk, inspired by a wonderfully calm and soothing stone figure that sat solemnly in the precincts of the ruined temple complex, a yellow scarf around its neck, staring sightlessly and timelessly into the distance. Those eyes saw truths no man could know, and had lived through a history that should never recur. But the monk was a wise man, one who told his tale and let his listeners make of it what they would.

In this telling, I found a certain peace, too. A sense of calm and of a wonderful confidence in my own abilities that could not have been discovered in other stories I wrote, from the romance novel with holes where the steamy parts should have been (I was 13, how did I know anything about steam then!), to the fantasy-horror tale of the aspidistra that ate a girl’s prom dress to the uncompleted serial-saga of Claudette the purple elephant who wore false eyelashes and blue mascara and had to deal with a plane crash in the Thar desert. Those were fun, but they did nothing to make me feel like I was a writer. My monk did.

Spanish flying III

We were in Santiago de Compostela – which you must have got by now if you read this – and seemed to be eating most of the day and evening. Most days began with a large vat of café au lait and a wide range of breakfast bits and bobs to choose from. The first day I, who is known to almost never eat anything before noon, wandered through buttery croissants, tangy cheese and Parma ham, before sliding blissfully into a deep dish of fresh-cut fruit. By the third morning, I was biliously averting my eyes from anything edible and burying my over-fed nose in an enormous bowl of herbal tea redolent with the soothing scents of peppermint, chamomile and hibiscus.

But Galicia exists just for the tummy, or so I am convinced. The meats, the vegetables, the aromas, the spices, the fish, the olive oil, the bread….well, perhaps not the local paysan bread. The first time I met the bread roll, I was delighted, since I absolutely revel in the smell and taste of fresh pan, or pain or just plain old pau, especially when slathered in butter and eaten warm out of the oven. So when I saw the rolls nestled into a basket, steaming gently in the chilly morning air, dampening the snowy white serviette, my mouth opened and I stared covetously, enough for my mother to hiss disapprovingly in my direction. I headed straight for that pile of bread and picked up one roll, hot and brown and crusty and placed it on my plate.

The sound startled me. It was definite, hard, loud, its maker threatening to break the china or bounce off into the far end of the hall. Balancing it carefully in the company of a couple of pats of butter and a small dish of fresh strawberry compote, I went over to sit down. My stomach growling gently, my tongue already feeling the texture of the tiny loaf, I broke it open. Or tried to. This was country bread, I knew, but I didn’t realise that they used jackhammers at the dining table in this part of the country. Ever the optimist, I took a stab at the roll, literally, trying to work my knife into it and slicing through. To no avail. The knife edge slid off the crust and crashed deafeningly on to the plate, attracting all eyes to my struggles. Pink through my sunburn, I gave up and attempted to dig my thumb into the roll, finally succeeding in tearing off a small piece. It was completely worth all the work – the bread was delicious, soft inside like the Indian gutli, with the wonderfully yeasty, homey fragrance and flavour that only fresh baked bread has. Over the week we were in the area, I managed to develop a lovely case of tendonitis of the thumb, but I had one happy tummy.

As ubiquitous as the rock-hard bread was the flan. Basically caramel custard made in small moulds, one serving each, it was eggy, milky and sweet, the burnt sugar and cinnamon flavour taking over from the egginess that was rather off-putting. I headed for it the first night, wanting something sweet to seal my enormous meal of fish, veggies and, of course, bread. It was divine, the warmth and sweetness the ideal end to a long and cold day. And then we met again at lunch the next day and then at dinner…and again at lunch and dinner…and again….Today, ‘flan’ is a cue for the family to remember that summer in Spain and those wonderful wee and wobbly puddings and go into fits of hysterical laughter.

Perhaps one of the most memorable times I spent at the dining table was one lunch, when my mother and I walked after a trip into town in as Daddy Dear and his colleagues were just finishing their meal. Of course, he stayed with us, but so did a few and fond old friends. Before I knew it, but after my aching thumb had managed to pry open the bread, I was deeply embroiled in an argument with James Morrison – known as ‘Jim’, for obvious reasons – a Nobel winning physicist, on the virtues of green peas. He hated them. I liked them and still do. From opposite sides of the gustatory fence, we duelled. I am not sure who won, but he took the honours in making me laugh. My giggles left me with a stitch in my side and a memory of Spain that only I will ever have.

Dance, the dervish

A friend of mine dropped in at work this afternoon. He is, in actuality, a friend of a lot of people I know, and a popular figure in the cultural and social scene in the country. More so abroad, where he is better known and perhaps more often seen. His name is Astad Deboo, and I am very happy to count him as one of the people I am always glad to see. Even though with his flamboyant personality, larger-than-life image and sheer ebullience, I have to be as happy to know that I see him only once every so many years!

Astad is a contemporary dancer, one who does not do anything that anyone can fit neatly into a box, or into a conception that can be called ‘dance’. He works harder than almost anyone I know in the field, and prides himself on being able to do the wild thing in a disco, on stage or on a Bollywood set, all with equal élan, always staying true to his Indian roots. But he has, for the most part, kept away from films, opting only for the occasional project that gives him not just creative satisfaction, but a great deal of enjoyment, on his own terms. He told me today that the promo song for Omkara was one of his, and he said it with that little metaphoric tweak of the collar and rise of the head.

I met Astad many years ago, when I interviewed him for a Mumbai newspaper. At the time, he was dancing more in Mumbai, albeit complaining about the lack of opportunities and encouragement in the country, in sharp contrast to that abroad, where he always has been lauded and welcomed with the proverbial open arms. And his resentment is loud and clear, but honest and completely merited. He has been given less attention and fewer opportunities in India than many of his peers, even though he works so much harder and perhaps deserves it more.

My friend is a media delight. He always has the most wonderful photographs of himself available, his portfolio constantly replenished, his image ever changing and, sometimes, fabulously OTT. For the past few years he has had a haircut that attracts attention everywhere he goes, on the street, in the corridors, in my office. And he is loyal, affectionate and completely wonderful as a friend. In small doses.

Astad is someone my mother was rather interested in, as a dancer, as a personality. And he has always been pretty fond of her, keeping her updated on his work and life and talking for hours to her over the phone and in person. For the past few years, his life and ours – my family’s – have moved apart. But with today’s visit, perhaps that old bond can be re-established. In a whole new format, of course.

Spanish flying II

We were in Santiago de Compostela, in northern Spain, and Daddy Dear was busy with his conference. With left the accompanying persons – as Mum and I were used to being called – with not much to do but gently wander through the city and be good tourists. So, draped with warm woollies, cameras and affectionate advice from friends and a relative, we wandered off after a breakfast of milky coffee, croissants and good cheer. The morning was chill, the breeze cutting through my jeans and boots as if they were not there. We were driven down to the main square and then abandoned.

But Santiago is a place where abandonment is the only route to take. You need to let go and absorb the history, the culture and, of course, the food, which is as delicious as Galician cuisine can possibly get, which is as delicious as Spanish cuisine can possibly get. But first the exercise, to take off the calories before you put them on. You walk up a series of steps and a ramp to get to the main Plaza del Obradioro, where grandees stepped over ancient stone and pilgrims made their way to the cathedral door. After all, the city is at the end of the Camino de Santiago, a medieval pilgrimage path that leads to the blessings of Saint James the Apostle. At one edge of the plaza is the Plazo de Raxoi, seat of the Galician Junta, looming squat but powerful, almost as if it is making sure that only the true devotee will worship at the shrine.

The façade of the enormous church is awesome, its grey stone reflecting the cold and the sharp wind blowing bits of paper and, oddly, an empty box of film across the cobblestones. I watched it idly, wondering how far man has progressed and how he (and she, of course) still has not learned that no garbage is good garbage. Something of the kind, anyway. I was too cold to be my usual logically coherent self. I huddled for a moment against Mum as we gazed around the vast expanse of square and then, giggling a bit with chattering teeth, we ran inside the cathedral.

It was dark, as all medieval stone churches tend to be, and cold, but without the breeze to slice through all the wrappings to us. Candles formed brilliant but tiny auras of brightness around the altar and all along the walls, lighting up the stone faces of myriad saints tucked into their niches, watching over the crowds that prayed in silence and not so quietly, chanting as they watched the priest intone his verses in a soft, sibilant but carrying murmur. We sat down in one of the pews to watch, wait and, hopefully warm up, still huddling together with hands tucked into Mum’s shawl.

Suddenly there was a rushing sound and everyone looked up. The scent of a hundred flowers flowed over us, bathing us in the most divine cloud of reverence. An enormous sensor swung on its chain from the central dome high above our heads, an instant spike of vertigo and an irrational fear that the links would break and the massive metal container would come smashing down on the unprotected heads below. But nothing happened, and the incense holder went on its pendulum course, as it had done for so many years before us and would do for ever more.

We left the cathedral soon after a stroll around its confines, peering into the gloom at the pilgrims, the tourists and the saints. It was time to move on, to find more that the town had waiting for us. It was also time for lunch.

A little big deal

I walked into the house yesterday evening after work and found people there. Not just my father and Small Cat – who knows she is as much ‘people’ as most people we know – but visitors, of the ilk that we do not often get. These were people who were now strangers, to me, at least, since I had not seen them since I was about 20 or something thereabouts. But I had grown up with them in my life, as friends of my parents, so I could not do my usual social stint of nodding a polite hello and then retreating to my own room. But because I had known them to long, I could take my time to start making conversation.

So I pottered around the house getting at least a little unwound from the office and chatting with Small Cat, who had beat a hasty and scared retreat under the chair in my room. She had to be coaxed out to eat the dinner of tuna that she normally barrels into the kitchen for, and peeked furtively at the guests after each bite. And then, after she was done, fled again to her security position. I, meanwhile, took as long as possible to get set to sit. Lighting the lamp, pulling down the blinds, closing windows…all rapid-fire jobs, were dragged out for as long as possible. It is not that the visitors were bad people, or even those I did not like. It was just that I knew that they would do a long stint of reminiscing and may talk more than either my father or I was comfortable with about my mother.

But I was surprised, in a way pleasantly so. My mother was not mentioned, except in casual passing, until they were leaving, when the lady told my father how much I looked like her now (“Obviously, I am her daughter!” I hissed indignantly and illogically at him later). And while the gentleman babbled on with some degree of incoherence, the lady burbled paeans to her success, the success of her children and their children and their various friends and relations….

But at the start of my socialising with them came something that was amazingly incongruous, in a way very irritating, and disturbingly familiar. The couple was seated on our three-seater couch and the lady patted the cushion between her and her husband, asking me to come sit there. I almost instinctively refused, vaguely repelled, saying that I would stay near my father, but the suggestion grated. It was as if I was a very young child again, one who would have her cheeks pinched and her hair ruffled. Which left all of me ruffled. It reminded me of an evening years ago when the front door bell rang and I opened it to find a gentleman standing there staring at my knees. While my knees were at that stage fairly pulchritudinous, I did not think they deserved so much attention. It turned out that the gentleman was one who had been rather closely bonded to the family at the time that I was born – my parents and I, an infant a few days old, were brought home from the hospital in his car. And he had not thought that I could have grown up a little from that period in our lives.

Even while I know how associations stick and how age is comparative, I will never be comfortable with the words “My, how you have grown!”. I always start thinking sadly of the piece of chocolate cake I should not have eaten and the jeans that once fit me perfectly without my having to breathe heavily to get into them. I see myself ballooning alarmingly from a wee baby in a cradle to a full-grown adult, soft curves, spike heels and all, as if it were faintly unsavoury an activity. And I cannot help feeling that the assorted traumas of the years I spent growing up were all for naught.

Spanish flying - I

A few years ago, we wandered through Spain. It was, as always, a work-vacation, where my father had a conference for a week and then we wandered through the country, stopping at random to explore, recoup and, of course, eat. And we met some very interesting people, folks we had known for years and others we had never seen before. There were also lots of sights to see, from magnificent cathedrals to stunning art, landscapes that shattered reason and small towns where ghosts ran through the streets. And each moment was an experience to be treasured, to be remembered, to be savoured.

We started in Madrid, landing at an hour that seemed unearthly after leaving Mumbai in the middle of the night. The hotel was cool, calm, quiet, almost gloomy, its walls and floors a dim jigsaw of water-coloured mosaic, the central elevator shaft a silent column that whisked people up and down. My room was around the corner from the one my parents occupied and between being terrified of windows that would not open and a door that creaked horrendously, I managed to dream up all sorts of visions that were as horrific as the box office was for Lady in the Water. A couple of days we spent wandering through the cool mornings and sunbaked afternoons in the city, tramping across painfully cobbled plazas and wandering down shaded lanes with laundry draping over balconies on apartment blocks coloured vibrant pink, green and yellow.

And then it was time to go north. The great adventure began early one morning, when we tramped, bags and baggage in tow, down to the car rental office. While my father filled in forms and my mother examined all the tourist literature, I got into the car – a Renault – and started it. It obliged, efficiently, neatly, hummingly. I put it into gear, watched carefully by the man who was handing over the keys, and urged the little chariot to move forward. It sat there, its small button nose perky, almost sniffing the air with an eagerness to get on with the trip. The man beamed fondly at me, waved me forward. I wiggled a little in my seat, trying to tell the car that it was okay to move. It just sat there, obdurate. I had a little chat with it, telling it how I was actually a pretty good driver, I knew which side of the road to be on and I did have a valid and untagged license, but it didn’t respond, except to chirp almost disparagingly when I hit the horn in my effort to find the brake. It just was not there. The man was starting to worry, that was obvious. And I was starting to get annoyed. Eventually, when my parents came out to investigate, the brake suddenly came undone and we shot off towards the opposite pavement.

Leaving behind a visibly alarmed car-hire official, we got on the highway and headed for Santiago de Compostela, where the conference was scheduled to be, at the northern end of the country. We got there late in the evening, and were greeted affectionately by old friends. Come out on the terrace after you settle in, we were instructed, and we did, hair and clothes blowing in the chill breeze, fingers and toes numbed by the cold, noses flowing with the unexpected and sharp change in temperature. A huge pot of dark red liquid was brewing under a large umbrella, wafting its interesting scents towards where we shivered. It was red wine, being simmered with coffee beans and goodness knows what else, spicy, fragrant and, best of all, hot. A close friend came up to give my mother a hug as she held her glass. Startled, she jumped; the poor man recoiled, his shirt wet, his chest probably seared. My father watched, smiling, while I stood there, my eyes watering, hoping that we would soon be fed and sent to nice warm beds inside…

Inside, outside

Over the past few months a lot has been done in our apartment – tiling, polishing, painting, woodwork, refurbishment and much more. And in the process, I found myself going back in time a little, to when I was not just younger, but far more enthusiastic about doing this, that, the other and a good deal that was fun and adrenaline-pumping. One of these myriad assignments was as text editor for a plush lifestyle magazine. It was actually all about large and very luxurious homes, with a bit of personality of the owner thrown it for interest. It was a fun assignment and taught me that a lot of editorial work is make-believe.

And then it grew, rather out of control. It all began with the biannual magazine, but ended with a very large, heavy and – giggle – “authoritative” book. Sponsored by a former cricket player turned businessman, it had big names attached, from Mont Blanc to Baccarat to Burberry and everything from the design to the tone of the writing had to match. The primary reason for the volume was to use the enormous collection of very nice images that the magazine had accumulated over the years, which were mouldering in the stores after being paid for, at exorbitant rates. So the book was conceived, the plan formulated and the begging began.

It was not easy to put together. The publisher wanted Names to write it, from the introduction to the end-note. Letters and faxes were sent out, phone calls were made, lunches were hosted, tea was poured and yours truly decided to do a bunk until stuff was available for me to work on. But when I got back a long while later, having been happily and conveniently out of India and determinedly out of touch, I found that there was total chaos. No writing had been done, because none of the desired writers had agreed to do their bit. And we had an oversized dummy, an oversized ambitious streak and an oversized wish-list, but an undersized budget, an undersized deadline and a sadly undersized body of evidence from which to find inspiration.

Nevertheless, we soldiered on. The managing editor and the publisher were sure the project would happen, on time and in place and, while they argued, I wandered around the shops around the building in a happy haze of retail therapy. Finally, the decision was taken, after much cogitation and campism. A reluctant participant, I would run away whenever I could, being completely uncooperative and obstreperous, and would be found in the nearest bookstore or shoe shop, only to be dragged back to the office, not quite kicking and screaming, but protesting wildly all the while. A stern lecture from the inner self later, I sat down with the team to chalk out just how it would be done.

And it was a masterpiece of time management. I was working full time and had only the odd weekend to spare. My managing editor was a busy woman herself, but very firm about keeping my button nose to the grindstone. And once I had pinned my own self down to work, that’s exactly what I did. The book was divided into chapters and took very little time to actually write. The boss took on a little, a little more was farmed out to people who said they knew how and the rest was left to my imagination. Which took on its serious avatar and set to finish the job the best it could.

It was not a complicated book. What we did was do a walkthrough of a home, from the walkway to the bathroom, taking in the foyer, the living and dining areas and the bedrooms on the way. Somewhere along the way we filled in the bits and pieces that go into creating a home from a house, and used details in the photographs we had to add interest. And, while some words became favourites (patina, finish, lush and more), on the whole it was a well designed, well written, well executed product that I still see in bookstores in various parts of the country. And, even as the kudos did collect and the celebrations happily fizzed though the social scene, we knew we had a product that we could and would be proud of, glitches and all.

But only we knew how it all really came together – and that’s our little secret!

Turning the page

I have a habit that the family encourages. It occasionally goers spiralling out of control, but no one minds, beyond mildly grumbling that we have no more space for storage. And, no, it is not my shoe fetish, the one that my father teases me about (just to clarify, I do NOT have 189 pairs of shoes and not all of them are four-inch spikes either) relentlessly. It is not my dreadfully decadent tendency to read soap labels, nor is it the inescapable need I have to close cupboard doors and slide shut half-open drawers.

What I do, sometimes furtively and deviously, is buy books. Not always after a great deal of browsing and pondering, but by first genre, then author and then series. As a result, I have the strangest conglomeration of literature (in a manner of speaking) that I know of, mixing romance with crime, food with travel and ancient history with modern chick-lit. Eclectic, yes, eccentric, perhaps, exotic, very often. All of this works perfectly well in a library, in a newspaper format or in a logically considered discussion on literary taste, but not so sensibly when it comes to shopping.

But the way we do it makes more sense than the actual doing of it, if you know what I mean. Perhaps the first thing I do when I am anywhere near a bookshop, in whatever city I happen to be at that moment in time, is to find the most sympathetic face amongst the sales staff. It is very often male, and I use the age-old knowledge of the power of woman and smile beguilingly, until I have the chap’s attention, to the exclusion of any one else in our little ‘friendship’. Casually cheery chat, a little personal Q&A and I have a friend for life, which in the book-buying biz is the magic formula. So whoever it is remembers me, finds me what I want and almost always sends me a sweet greeting card for major festive occasions. I also get an occasional call asking where I am and why I have not been to the shop in a while, but those are part of the game and, after a point, I am actually interested in talking to the man.

So now I have people in my life who are not just kinda nice, as the phrase goes, but also truly useful, which is a bonus. There is Mahesh, who owns his own bookstore in the distant suburbs, who once in a while wakes up and gives me what I have asked for many moons earlier. Then there is Sanjeev, who is part of a well known shop and has actually found me two books in the short span of a week after I asked him for them. And there is a nameless but very helpful young man at a huge bookstore chain who always comes bustling up to me when I walk in and demands to know, persistently, what he can do for me.

Women in the business are very different. The same store with the anonymous gentleman once gave me Binnie, a young woman who was fast became a friend, never mind that she rarely found me anything I wanted to read. And at another equally extensive and reputed chain, I discovered Rima, ruthlessly efficient, wonderfully au fait with almost every esoteric title I threw at her and totally apologetic that she could not help me more when I needed it.

Soon I will be at one of my favourite stores in Delhi, trolling the shelves for reading pleasure. And, after I find it, I will beam fondly upon another old friend, whose name I can never remember, and thank him for existing. He was put on this planet and in that store just for me, I always believe. Just as all these very nice people were!

The great potato saga

I read a bit in the Daily Telegraph today on how Christie’s had held an auction of old cookbooks. While some interesting volumes sold – like one by Thomas Muffet, who told his readers how curds and whew was made, perhaps the same recipe used for his daughter Patience, aka Miss Muffet, the arachnophobe! – one, written by a German, did not. It was the first known that explained how to cook potatoes. Which is a good thing to do; after all, potatoes being the food of life!

The first time I ever cooked potatoes was when I was about 12 years old. I spent a fairly long time talking my fond mother into allowing me to use the stove without constant supervision. Then, acting on my creative instinct, which was indeed most creative at that time of my life, I sat on the kitchen counter and grated my way through what seemed to be an endless pile of spuds. It was not without incident. After having peeled off bits and pieces of my own skin, I proceeded to grate more of my fingers into the heap of potato, very painfully and, regrettably, red-tingedly. Oh, well, I reasoned, we were all not pure vegetarians and it was family blood, so it was okay.

But the rest of the culinary adventure was not even as successful as this, albeit rather less painful. I chopped up some garlic, ginger and onions, macerated tomatoes and cleaned a heap of green coriander leaves. The plan was prepared for. All that I had to do was cook. I had a nebulous idea of how I would go about making what I could see as the end product, and took a deep breath before splashing some oil into a pan and lighting the gas.

That is as far as the theory went. In practice, after sautéing the spices and browning the onions, the potatoes went in. they were supposed to cook soft, then go slightly crunchy at the edges, keeping the basic shape and size of the shreds intact, even as they got completely cooked through. But my culinary skills didn’t quite match my conceptive ones and something went a little off. By the end of the process, I had this wonderfully fragrant and, I must admit, delicious mess. The problem was that it was just that: a mess.

As I got older and played more in the kitchen, I became fairly good at managing my potatoes. A few days ago, I boiled some almost completely done, then did a quick last minute sauté in a touch of butter, sloshed in a little red wine, some mustard and a sprinkle of thyme and let it cook down until the spuds were soft and smelling divine. Then a moment or two on high heat and the edges were crisp, a deep golden bordering the pinky-brown of the body. Matched with julienned zucchini sautéed in olive oil with paprika and broiled chicken breasts, it was not bad at all, even though I say so myself.

Maybe my favourite way with potatoes is the South Indian style. Chopped into cubes, sautéed crisp in a little oil tinged with sputtered mustard seeds, sprinkled with curry leaves and cayenne powder and finished with a squeeze of lemon, it is failsafe and delicious, ideal with the standard concoction of dahi chawal or dal and rice. Try this with sweet potatoes, avoid the salt and add some pepper instead of chilli powder and you find heaven in a pan. Try it. And if you know any interesting recipes I can play with, do tell…

Day and light

It’s a wonderful day outside my window. I hammer away at my computer keyboard, trying to write an edit that would be at least minimally coherent, and occasionally steal glimpses of my view, wanting to be out there with the fresh cool air, the newly mown lawn and the small puppies playing in the parking lot. Even the wisp of black smoke from the factory chimney looks clean and adds to the overall picture of an astonishingly bright and brilliant sky, a marvel of distilled clarity in a city that is normally heavily polluted and smog-clogged. There is a gentle breeze that cools the toes and nose even in the golden heat of the sunshine that beams down into our little enclave. A tiny butterfly does practice runs at the glass, veering at the last minute to avoid crashing into the closed window. The drivers lounge in the strip of garden, playing cards, sleeping, gossiping and reading.

And upstairs, in carpeted air-conditioned imprisonment, I watch, envious, sighing, wanting my freedom.

Chalk the line

A friend of mine is very firm about not crossing the line, about sticking to preordained limits and being circumspect about behaviour and responses. There is, of course, some logic in this diktat, however irritating it may be and however unnecessary. But there is a simple point that my friend may not have taken into account when setting the rule: maybe there would be no need for the rule at all. Also, a little smudging of the chalk line, albeit mentally drawn, can always move it from the position it was originally meant to be in. and, since it is a rule, it can always be bent, if not broken.

Which is a good and worthy thing to do in today’s world, when following the rules to the proverbial T can be not just boring, but considered a display of a lack of initiative and ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking. It happens very often in writing. Using a word out of its normal semantic framework, or changing its context to fit what you want to say rather than what it is normally supposed to say makes the story far more interesting. And there is a wonderful way in which words can be manipulated to “jump through hoops” – as I once told my fiction writing teacher in college – to mean one thing on the surface and another to those who have any intelligence. It’s a great way to be bitchy without sounding it!

There are, of course, obvious roles to break. Like traffic lights. And no-parking places. And one way streets. While I am fairly law-abiding where those are concerned, there have been moments when I peer furtively around to check on policemen and then zoom through the red light, down the wrong way to park just under a no-parking sign. My pet policeman in South Mumbai would aid and abet me when I was much younger and much less practiced at the game, even making sure that a rival didn’t get in before me, never mind that the car was closer to the space than mine was.

And then there are diet rules, which are perhaps the easiest to formulate the most difficult to keep to and the best to bend. Try keeping to the abysmal regimen of a high-fibre roti, boiled veggies and no chocolate and see how you suffer from everything from dizziness to an overactive colon to badtemperedness. And you will understand just how and why you wander over to the fridge after everyone else has gone to bed and can’t see you breaking the rules, dig into the leftover cheesy bake and that wonderfully dark chocolate and wreck whatever will power and calorie count you make have been determined to keep. And the next day, through the cloud of regret that you feel when you think about the inches you were supposed to be taking off your middle, you have a quiet sense of peace and satisfaction that only comes from doing something you should not have done.

Which comes in almost anything that you really want to do, and go out and do, rules or no rules. And that, my friend, is why the chalk line always moves!

Deep throat

(I know, I know, it is not quite the association one wants here, but it is descriptive, as you will soon see…)

For the past few days I have been under the weather and pretty low. Which is not unusual, since the weather has been cowed down by a strangely whimsical lack of control from the powers that would normally control it. Add to it paint dust and wood polish fumes and, voila! You have my favourite ailments in the whole world: cold, cough and fever. Having got rid of the first, for the most part – it is in the green gunk stage, but that would be so disgusting to write about that it would put off the few readers that I have – and banished the second to almost-normal degrees (ha ha!), I am now having a prolonged argument with the middle factor. I never get coughs (she says with valiant good humour, trying to speak through a paroxysm of hacking and wheezing, with a couple of gasps thrown in for good measure) but I do get the infrequent bronchial attack. I call it one of the few things that Delhi gave me. For which I am duly ungrateful.

So as a result, apart from the most unbecomingly ungraceful whooping that I occasionally am convulsed by, and the nasty dull ache in the chest that makes me wish I was dead, at least until the cough was completely gone, I have this wonderfully growly voice that is very unlike my usual dulcet tones (Do I hear a derisive “HA!” from those who know me well? Believe me, they are just envious.). I crackle into the telephone like I am trying to vie with the phone company in the who-makes-more-static stakes, and I occasionally break into a hilariously uncontrolled squeak just at the moment that I am aiming for a seriously intent tone. More amusingly (for listeners, not myself), my voice tends to get rather stuck somewhere on its way out of me, so I push to be audible; and right when I have the decibel right, it gets unstuck and whatever I am saying comes out in an embarrassingly high-phonic bellow.

So I decided to take a bit of a spot poll and see what other people thought of my voice, since I could not judge it for myself. Being rather biased, of course, and firmly believing that I was sounding as sexy as Satan’s female equivalent in a pair of wicked red spike heels, I knew that the opinions would be positive. But life is full of surprises. My boss, startlingly me with his non-irascibility and actually being astonishingly cheerful about life in general, the office and my spectral appearance after a morning out in the sun, gave me an avuncular lecture – mercifully severely edited down to minimalistic proportions – about how if I didn’t rest the chest, I would be debilitated. After confirming that he did know what the big words meant, I glowered at him and walked back to my own desk. Then I spoke to a buddy in Delhi, more to thank him for a parcel he had sent Small Cat than to show off my voice, and asked whether I sounded husky and dark-chocolate-ish. Go home and stay in bed until you are all better, he said, a certain disgust in my obstreperousness lacing his normally fond tones.

Ok, so I was getting nothing I wanted with this lot. So I got on the phone to a friend that I knew would be nicer. “You been ill?” she demanded to know with my first hello. I gave up. I asked Father, with the fabulously coaxing note that only a daughter can use to get what she wants. He said, “I told you to stay home, you sound awful.” So I retreated into my head and replayed the scene where I had laryngitis a few years ago and had asked my mother whether I sounded sexy and wonderful; she successfully dampened me with “You sound sick.”

I felt like Mick Jagger; no satisfaction to be had anywhere. I think I will talk to Small Cat instead. At least she only bites.

Excuses, excuses

Ok, so between friends visiting from out of town and leaving at the most inconveniently short notice, too much work for an over-taxed brain, residue from house painting and polishing and a stress level that is reaching beyond personal management levels, my buddy the virus is back. Which means that I get a break from this blog. Sigh. And to think that this is the route by which I make friends and influence people and talk about what matters most to me!

Oh, well, so that is life as she is wrote. And she will not write for a few days, not until her head is stuck firmly back on her neck. After she finds it, of course!

A woman thing

Some of my favourite heroines are from days long gone, but their attitudes and beliefs are so incredibly today that you almost expect them to be standing on the front mat when the doorbell rings. Which could be the reason that I prefer books with a strong and sassy women as lead player, be she a lover, a fighter, a doer or a detective.

One such that my mother introduced me to is Flora Poste, star of Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm. In spite of the mud, in spite of Big Business the bull, in spite of the Starkadders and, most of all, in spite of the lack of baths, Flora is undaunted. She goes about the process of managing her relatives’ lives with ruthless efficiency, marshalling them into marriage, new careers, psychotherapy and much affection for her, even with her meddling and domineering ways. All using only her admittedly devious mind, her organisational strategies and her infinite and self-admired charm. And, at the end of it all, she was quite willing and ready to sit back and let her man take her home…with her conniving it all, of course. She was perhaps the first heroine of a book that I ‘met’ that had chutzpah – in fact, she probably embodied the word for me.

It took a long time for anyone else who lived between pages to match Flore Poste. Most heroines of novels today, even the most liberated and feisty, tend to wilt rather when they finally meet the man of their (pah!) ‘dreams’. Like Barbara Cartland’s girls, they swoon, at least mentally and emotionally, and become doormats who would do almost anything for a hormone fix. If they wouldn’t, then they moped and whined when they had to cope alone or, at the very least, without the man who made them tingle.

Perhaps Christine Vole from Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution came close. She didn’t whine and whinge, she did not wait for things to happen, but made them happen, and she certainly did not expect the men in her life, whether her husband or Sir Wilfred Robarts, the lawyer defending him, to do much for her. She was magnificent in Christie’s words, and as regal and contemptuous in the unforgettable role by Marlene Dietrich. While Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier’s heroine) was cold, calculating and self-serving, Christine had a class that transcended all notions of women with power. For me, at least.

Also an Agatha Christie creation, Miss Jane Marple embodied all that is strong and resilient in women. While physically getting frailer as she gets older (naturally), she used her old-lady charm, her amazing mind and her observations of the world around her to make sure that criminals got what they deserved. And she did it with much dignity and old-world sobriety, making her methods and her manner not just believable, but likeable, too.

There are so many women in fiction who can be considered Flora Poste-ish. But they exist today and tend to be macho rather than feminine, scheming rather than gently conniving and blatant rather than just certain of what they want and how they will get it. I have not yet given up looking. Maybe that’s why I buy so many books!

Film and foible

I met a friend for lunch today. He is a filmmaker, with ad films, short films and even a music video to his credit. We did not spend too long together, but I enjoyed the time – it was perhaps the first real conversation I have had with someone apart from my father, my friend Nina and my unusually cheerful boss in a time that has been too long. Over pasta and a sandwich, we talked about a lot of things, none in any great detail, sort of a catching up and introduction that has been a long time in the happening. And there will be more, when we have the leisure and the inclination, I know.

But one of the things we did talk about was movies, albeit – like everything else – in very brief. This meeting happened just after I had finished writing an editorial on the latest on Manoj Night Shyamalan, the director who made the unabashedly fabulous Sixth Sense and the not-bad Unbreakable. Since then, the brilliance that everyone had learned to expect from him seemed to have faded. ‘Night’ had become lost in the daylight, with no real sense, sixth or otherwise, of where he was going, cinematically speaking. His films were not bad as productions – The Village, which spooked me after the first ten minutes so that I never watched the rest, and Lady in the Water, which sounded so bad that I never made any attempt to see any of it – but they didn’t quite do the trick. Not in the way that Sixth Sense did, at least.

So why Shyamalan now? The news is out that his Lady in the Water has been nominated for four Razzies. Which couldn’t be worse for a man who made a film that made it to the Oscars a few years ago. Of course, a lot of people who are well known, from Ron Howard to Sharon Stone to Nicholas Cage to Jessica Simpson are on the list as well. Which makes for distinguished company. And, at some level, the Razzies are taken seriously – since they happen the day before the Oscars, those who win know well that they need to get their cinematic act together and get to work to do better, regain their form.

Why don’t we have Razzies in Bollywood? For such duds as the new Umrao Jaan, the recently released Salaam-e-Ishq, the fabulously dreadful Bhaagam Bhag…there are so many that I can’t even remember them. Watching Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham for the millionth time (only for Kajol’s Chandni Chowk part, I swear), hastily clicking past Kabhi Alvida…, looking for anything apart from Jaaneman – life is not easy for someone who has fun watching Hindi movies but refuses to waste time on anything dire, dreary or difficult to understand. A Razzie or four (as poor Shyamalan may just go home with) could possibly change the trend of making terrible movies into one of making decent, even watchable films.

Or maybe not, who knows. We need to ask Karan Johar, Nikhil Advani, Pridarsan and their ilk to find out!

Feline foibles

Small Cat is a big girl now, or she would have us believe. We, on the other hand, know how much of a baby she still is at all of seven months old, as she scampers through the house leaving a trail of small white footprints and chirping in varying tones all along her route, announcing her sudden arrivals and even more precipitate departures. And we are reminded of it as she leaps out from inside her favourite hiding places to ambush us as we walk past, skids over the polished marble floors in pursuit of an imagined bug or falls asleep in mid-hop when we tease her with a piece of string. And when she is hungry, she bites; when she is tired, she droops into her basket; when she wants attention, she lies on her back with her head craning in whichever direction we may be. A cuddle is always wanted, but she needs to be caught first, her astonishingly loud meows telling us that she is lurking behind the bedroom door, sneaking under the sofa or hiding under the flap of her cardboard carton.

But in all this, she still does not really have a name. Some time ago we did decide that officially she would be Cindy Clawford, but we have never called her that. A friend of ours does, asking every time she phones how ‘Cindy’ is. Another friend calls Small Cat ‘Red’, since I once wrote in this blog that my favourite colour was red and even our pet was a shade of that hue. But for some reason, neither Father nor I have a name for her that she can identify, though she does respond to the tone and the fact that we invariably have a treat for her to either eat or play with – a pigeon feather, a biscuit, a handful of wheat grass…

For me, Small Cat is, more often than not, ‘Punkin’. She is like my favourite gourd, the deep orange pumpkin, round and sweet and delicious. She also gets called ‘Nanu’, which in Gujarati means ‘small one’, which suits her well – she is, after all, small and doll-like. Occasionally, she is given the moniker of ‘Fatty’, especially when she is just waking up from a long nap, her face round, her bottom fluffy and stout, her eyes circular and curious. We talk to her in a strange mixture of Tamil and a little English, with the meaning in the voice rather that in the words. But we do not call her by any name.

Which is starting to bother me. The cat I once had and adored had a name that he answered to, running in from the garden or jumping on to the dining table when he was asked to. This little girl is starting to respond when I or my father calls her in Tamil…though that could be more a response to the dish of food that we are setting out or one of her toys that we are holding. But what name she is to be familiarly known by is still a mystery. Suggestions, of course, for a name for Small Cat are always welcome.

A rose between the teeth

It is an awkward situation or, at least, potentially so. A friend of mine is in town – he lives in another city – and we plan to meet. We have spoken for hours in the time we have known each other and look forward – mutually, I hope – to the time we will spend chatting in person over lunch, catching up on our lives and times and books that we read and want to. But there is one little problem that I worry about, if I think about it. I have no real picture of him, except as tall, long-limbed, black clad and bearded whom I met for all of about 30 seconds on a day when deadlines breathed heavily down my keyboard. Which picture could describe a lot of people in Mumbai in general and the community of communicators that forms a large part of my professional life.

And because of the profession that I have chosen – or that chose me – I have done a lot of that; meeting strangers, I mean. Many have been people in the news, so what they looked like was a fairly easy issue to deal with. At times, I have had to guess wildly, or else depend on a mediator to do the introductions, which has worked well, most of the time. More recently, it has become easier, especially over the last ten years or so, since the time mobile phones became standard issue in this country. Today, I rarely even meet some of the people I need to work with, since all dialogue is conducted over the telephone, email and online chat. But that is a different story.

Journalism is not a boring business and meeting people has always been fun for me. Perhaps one of my first lessons in judging whether someone was worth meeting or not came with the photographs they carried of their work – the really good images always merited a large spread, a smaller one, more substance and less visual. Many of these people come to you instead of you having to go to them, which makes it all a breeze, because you do the interview, ruthlessly shepherd the guest out, turn back to hammer out the story in a shorter space of time than it takes to meet whoever the subject is, and then get on to bigger and better things like going out to eat chocolate cake, shopping for shoes or heading home for dinner.

One of the few times recently I had to meet someone I did not know was a few weeks ago. I had no clue what the gentleman looked like and had only a voice over the telephone to identify him by. I did have a tiny panic attack, since I am remarkably inept at the introduce-yourself-to-a-stranger bit, but then I remembered the marvellousness of the cellphone. We were to meet in a bookstore, which made it rather more comfortable, since there was something to do before the rendezvous actually happened. Of course, with typical enthusiasm, I did smile beamingly at a couple of men - who were not my ‘date’ and so understandably rather startled by my cheeriness – but managed to recover my sang froid quickly enough to pretend I was laughing at something I was reading. The meeting did eventually take place without my embarrassing myself too much, and it made for fairly decent reading.

But nothing in my life happens in singles. Right after this little work-related get-together I had another man to liaise with, in the same bookstore. Him I had never seen either, just spoken to over the phone as I drove home. And it was even more important that he get a good impression of me, since it could mean a new job that would be more fun than what I do now. In my characteristically irreverent style – which he fortunately seemed to approve of – I asked if I should hold a rose between my teeth for identification, but he reassured me that a phone call would do the trick. And it did.

Now whether I should use the same strategy for my friend from out of town or no, I am not sure. But if things go as they tend to in all the rest of my life, we will manage to find each other fairly easily…and then have much to remember and giggle about for as long as we are friends.