Going before the fall

It was all a matter of pride, I tell myself. But it really was not, when you think about it. I make a habit of it, having done it at various memorable occasions during my long life time. I am talking about my relationship with stairs. It has never been happy. I have a fairly serious issue with vertigo and have never been able to handle stairs or bridges (I have no idea what the connection is there) very well, going into a cold panic or a nicely deep freeze when confronted with either without warning. When I drive over a bridge, I focus on the car in front of me, or the far end of the narrow strip as I can see it, and steer blindly almost towards it. Where stairs are concerned – well, the bond has always been rather more tenuous.

Many years ago, when I was a mere child, I would be picked up from school by my parents. When the end of the day bell rang, I would be the last one to come downstairs, walking cautiously, one hand holding tightly on to the banister. It was a family joke, but got rather more serious as I grew up. It wasn’t only a matter of my heels growing too – I graduated fast from flat sneakers and school shoes to perilous spiky sandals that needed a course in ballet to navigate with. But they always allowed me to keep my toes on the ground; no platforms for me. And then there were bicycles – I have not yet managed to ride one, mainly (according to me) because it meant I had to take my feet off the ground and look down from what seemed like a tremendous height. The doctors diagnosed vertigo. I thanked them politely and stayed off platform heels and bicycles.

So when it came to walking down stairs, I allied myself to the side of caution. I took it easy, no matter how loud the horn was being sounded in the car waiting for my downstairs, and told myself it was always better to be dignified than end up in a battered heap at the bottom. I have, of course, done that too on various occasions. The result has rarely been pretty, with vari-shaped bruises punctuating me regularly and unaesthetically in different portions of my nicely rounded anatomy. Perhaps my most spectacular feat of this kind was the time I was hopping happily down some shallow stairs at a friend’s house; I was wearing warm booties with soft soles and slid neatly off the carpeted step to rise up in the air and land rather hard on my behind, not losing a drop from the two loaded plates of food that I was carrying. It was a little painful to sit for about a week after that, and the balancing act is still spoken of with some awed admiration in those circles.

But the other day was rather more fun to watch, I would think. I was in town on some small errands that had to be done before it was too late, and stopped at one of my favourite stores to wait for Father, who would meet me there later. Walking up the three steps into the shop, something happened. I am not sure why and how and all that, but I found myself very suddenly scrabbling for a foot and hand hold, neither of which was on call. I landed very hard on my left knee and felt a very odd kind of movement in my ankle and foot. The gentleman who was trying to walk out of the store was perhaps more startled than I was, while the security guard rushed to haul me back to my feet. There was no feeling for a moment and then, as my friends at the shop gathered, the pain flooded over my mind. They all twittered and scuttled around looking for ice, for a chair, for some kind of relief, while I stood there looking down at my foot, two toes already swelling fast, the foot itself red, my scarlet jeans marked with a patch of pale dust.

That day, as my foot and ankle swelled and darkened and the toe closely resembled an overcooked sausage, I sat with Father in a swanky restaurant having lunch, my toes wrapped in a napkin full of crushed ice while the waiters hovered making soothing noises as they served up delightful food. The story is still in progress – I am confined to my home with a bandaged foot, strained and bruised and painfully limited in movement. I am not sure what hurts most: my dignity at such an ungraceful descent, the fact that I cannot wear heels for a while, or the lack of clothes to match the ever-changing colourscape that is my left foot.

What rubbish!

(Like I often say, sometimes something I write for the paper makes sense online too. Hence this one...)

He uses garbage to create art, to make a statement about life and society in a show called Trash. Artist Vivan Sundaram explains his aesthetic...

In a dimly lit room in the gallery is an array of what seems to be rusty iron cots, their beds sagging, dark with the grime and wear of the years. A closer looks reveals these to be rough frames with the ‘mattress’ made of shoe soles that have indeed seen better days. A light directed on one from above casts intriguing shadows. Vivan Sundaram walks around, examining the soles, adjusting the overhead lamp. Twelve-Bed Ward is one his works on display in Trash, a show that has evolved from his consuming passion: garbage.

Why beds? According to Sundaram, it is a kind of metaphor exploring the relationship between waste and the waste picker, life and the man who “walks morning to evening and then comes to rest – in some sense this is where it could be real or symbolic, as the day starts again for these people.” The space itself, as large as is available to him, or more concentratedly small, is “a place for recuperation, or a night shelter”. It could server as a “stand in for a hospital ward, or a jail, or even concentration camps – the soles of shoes, shoes stacked up”, images that evoke the death camps of the Nazi regime.

Sundaram is almost obsessed with rubbish. In fact, other people’s rejects have fascinated him since 1997 and Trash itself continues with a theme that he worked on with Great Indian Bazaar (1997) and living.it.out.in.delhi (2005). For these he worked with Delhi-based NGO Chintan, involved with attaining the rights of this largely unorganised workforce. His creativity was concentrated on creating a city from the piles of garbage that he painstakingly sorted through; the resultant panorama, on a scale that changed as the work grew, he had photographed to make one large cityscape. Today that work is at the root of others – Sundaram continues to think about the social implications and consequences of social consumption.

For Trash, he conceived the show across two galleries – it is a constraint of space, he says frankly – and in that itself there was a “difference and yet a continuity. The works have a certain mood; Twelve-Bed Ward and the video in Chemould, and the works in Project 88 that are digital photographs combined to make “a different register of visuality.” He selected his pieces in “a curatorial kind of way. It was about a content relationship, the space in each gallery – I was able to articulate it.” Each of his three mediums – photographs, video and installation – has been “positioned in relationship to the other. The thematics have different registers.” Sundaram is pleased with the fact that “private galleries today agree to build whole rooms and walls to create the desired environment”. And as the space changes, so does the show – “in Mumbai, because it is two spaces, it has fullness and completeness. When it is shown in Delhi, it will have what was not seen there earlier and when it moves to New York or Chicago, according to the space available, it will change again.”

Why garbage? The world today is looking at the resuse of waste, of material that can be given new function, perhaps even an aesthetic that is not the obvious representation it could have. As Sundaram explains, “In art, at one level, it obviously foregrounds the subject matter; then it moves into the domain of the visual, the aesthetic.” For the viewer, “questions are raised about the relationship of the work to the waste picker and the audience. It becomes a discussion, and brings to notice things that we like to complain about and look the other way from.” From that point of view, the use of trash in art does arouse some new “awareness of the unorganised sector and raises the question of ecology, the quality of air and health and environment.” And today, the artist believes, “increasing numbers are trying to engage with this vast complex issue of what we live in and what constitutes the urban.”

Trash will move out of the country, too, scheduled to be shown at the Biennale in Sydney next month and at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo later on.

Trash, Chemould Prescott Road and Project 88, Mumbai, till May 17

In the name of art

Over the past few weeks I have been seeing a lot of very strange configurations of objects that is called ‘art’. It varies from fossilised lumps of dough to old shoe soles to video clips strung together, but all if it has had some kind of deeper meaning that, very often, has escaped me completely, never mind that the artist has actually shown me around personally and explained the exhibit to me in simple terms that would clarify things for even a two year old with a rather tenuous grasp of all things grown up. In this, I have managed to learn more about human behaviour and mental make-ups than about the art itself, both being more or less subject to whimsicality and mood, perhaps even time of day and lunch menu.

One of the most fascinating and yet perhaps most meaningless was a show called Fluxus, at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai. My city is a place full of contradiction and dynamism, eccentricity and even madness, but this surpassed all, overtaking anything that Mumbai and its inhabitants could possibly dream up in the name of creative expression. For me, it was a delight, something that amused me and delighted me with its insanity, making less sense than it wanted to, but a lot more than it could have if I had seen it with any preconceived notions of what it should be. It seemed to be a motley collection of arbitrary objects placed randomly for maximum effect. Like I said earlier, a few dried out lumps of dough set into a frame was art; a piano with objects tied to it with rope was art; and a smile made of a slice of watermelon (plaster or plastic, I hope) was art. It was engaging, flirty, fun and each piece winked at me as if the artist who had created it knew that it was all a huge big joke. It made sense, in a world where everyone took themselves and their work a little too seriously….

Soon after, I went to a show that was all about installations. The artist was a well known painter who had not painted in many years – an affliction that affected the next person I went to interview as well, I found. She had lost her partner some years previous to this show and it seemed to colour her work. The videos playing on different screens in the various rooms of the gallery were gloomy as a whole, somehow sad and depressed, crying quietly rather than shouting exuberantly with joy. Even though the music was hardly dark and grieving, the mood was – Pink Floyd, Abba, Bob Dylan: reality bit me rather harder than I wanted it to that morning. And, when I talked to her, the artist spoke of remembering, the past, times gone by, all that good stuff but with a grey pall over it that affected me in the telling, the writing and then the reading of my own article.

This past weekend I went to see another artist, one with a beaming smile and an endless articulateness. He talked a great deal, seemed to know what he wanted to convey through his work and found some meaning in his own world that he was trying to tell the rest of those around him through video, photographs, models and, strangely enough, shoe soles. There was opportunity for a great number of puns and somehow I seem to find them as he spoke, working through his sentences and his art to see what he was trying to do and say. It made sense from some perspective that I was standing at, but it also made me wonder what happened to the good old-fashioned ways of expressing yourself with a certain simplicity that in a manner that always has more meaning than convoluted, cross-references sentences (like this one, for instance). But it was all fun, soles, souls and all.

Now I await the next exhibition. Some day I hope I will see conventional art again, something that can be seen, felt and remembered with no confusion of space, time and objects to force me to push it right out of my mind.

Ring in the new

It was Tamil New Year yesterday and we did all that we remembered we should to bring in the new period and gently send away the old. For me, it was a time when things needed to be cleaned, from fans to memory banks, with the old and fairly useless being ruthlessly eliminated to make room for what I hope will be new, improved, fresh and happy. The last year, whether measured in the conventional January 1st time-frame or the more ‘Indian’ version that slides according to the phases of the moon or however it may be calculated by whichever community is calculating it.

But life feels fresh and new for now. It could be that the fans have been wiped free of the accumulated dust, it could be that Small Cat has had a bath and been given a new collar. It could be the fact that both Father and I wore new clothes yesterday or that the fridge is nicely restocked with interesting stuff to eat. It could also be that I finished all the laundry instead of needing to wait for another day to run another wash. Who knows. All I know that is that it all seems to be gearing up to take off from a starting block that I have not known before. And I hope that it is a good one, a fair race, a happy ending.

Perhaps the best part of any celebration is the food that announces it. For us, it was about payasam and paanagam, neermor and hot, spicy veggies that went well with fresh toast and homemade mayonnaise – so who said Tamil New Year had to be conventional? New Age cuisine also makes it all happen, you know! Somewhere along the way, even in the traditional cooking, there was a sense of adventure, a dash of something that may not have been deemed acceptable by the pundits who set the menu so many aeons ago. In the payasam there was a dash of nutmeg; in the paanagam there was a pinch of clove powder and in the neermor, an added sprinkle of jeera powder that may not have been in the list of conventional ingredients. But it worked, never mind that I sort of forgot the lemon squeeze into the jaggery water, the whipped curd was thicker than it should familiarly have been and the rice pudding was thicker and less sweet than was the norm.

But isn’t that the best part about celebrating? To take a festival and make it your own, something that is special to your family and circumstances, be it new clothes in the form of pajamas or a T-shirt, a puja in the shape of a direct communication with a parent now in a different plane of existence and a prayer in the words of perhaps one of the Simpsons – praise the Lord and pass the pudding.

Found and lost

I was chatting with Father while pottering about the kitchen this morning and suddenly remarked about everything that had come and gone in my life. While friends are almost entirely replaceable, people you consider family rarely are – well, the people I consider part of my world and therefore mine in emotional fact. There are some who peek in, woffle wishy-washily about staying or not and then either leave or are ejected/rejected without much ado; they are just passing ships, nothing too important. But the others, those that do stay, those who are welcomed into the fold, linger for much longer, until it is time for them to leave too.

Of course, parents don’t count in this. Whether you like them or not, you almost always love them and they create a huge, gaping, unfillable hole that, every now and then, hurts with unbelievable, unbearable, incomprehensible pain. And then, suddenly, you remember the laughter, the sunshine, the good rather than the bad and you smile again, even though that little niggle of hurt never ever goes away.

Then there are people you never knew you cared so much about. One of these I have written about before – an old family friend who lived in Delhi. I had met him many years before I actually moved to that city, but only as a sort of old-schoolfriend-acquaintance of my father and his brothers. But then, after we met again as real people in a city where I was still an alien and he was willing to ‘adopt’ me, we became friends. We went to parties together, to openings, to plays, to charity sales and dance recitals, polo games and leisurely dinners. And he beamed happily al the while, when he introduced me to his friends, when someone paid me a compliment, when someone teased him about his new ‘girlfriend’. He was like a father once removed. And now he is removed from my world.

My godmother was a wonderful person. She was a woman who liked the finer things in life, who sort-of-introduced me to beauty-care face masks and romance novels, rich food and kitchy décor, bitchy gossip and minor entrepreneurship. She was a close friend of both my parents and treated me with the same casual affection as she gave her own young relations. Being a very large lady, she occupied rather more space in my physical world than my mother ever did, and gave bigger, warmer and more breath-taking (literally) hugs, without the angst and involvement a maternal relationship would have. And she is now in another world, one where life is all one big dish of delicious biryani.

Another elderly gentleman was a public curmudgeon, but a teddy bear at heart – at least, with me. He had known me since before I was born, in a manner of speaking, and kept up the contact with my family, though at a distance, for a very long time. Then, as he got older and edged towards being retired, and my life got busier and more absorbed into everyday work and life requirements, we drifted away, apart, to different worlds, not just physically, but intellectually. When I saw him last, it was many years after he had retired from his long-term position and was acting consultant for a well known firm in another city. We were the visitors then, Father and I; we had just lost my mother and perhaps we looked him up because we both wanted some kind of reassurance that some things were still where we wanted them to be, even as others had left us adrift. He was old, fading, fragile. But still curmudgeonly, still hyper-critical, still as fond of me as ever. He wanted us to take him to our home, so we could give him the kind of life he wanted, the kind of support and care and perhaps family that he missed. I refused, knowing it could not happen. And I never saw him again.

He passed away not too long ago at over 80 years old, still grouchy, still determinedly independent, still stubborn and mumbling bad-temperedly at his doctors, we are sure.

Horn OK please...no!

Today has been declared No Honking Day in Mumbai. I think it is a great idea, as an idea, since there is way too much noise in the city that could very easily be cut out. In fact, wherever I drive, I find myself being tailed at least once during the journey by an irritatingly peevish horn – whoever is behind me has no reason to sound off, except for the very existence of a horn that he or she can sound off. And it is extremely annoying to hear that persistent beep beep that goes relentlessly on and on, especially since there is nowhere that the person behind you can go, since there is wall to wall traffic on all four sides of your little car and you yourself are stuck in one place on the road wondering where else you can be that is infinitely better than where you are now. And you do, I admit ruefully, get tempted to horn as peevishly and persistently as the person behind you has been doing. Perhaps the only fitting response that I have ever seen being given to this kind of pestering has been from a taxi driver, who suggested (with the appropriate accompanying gestures, of course) that the person behind become the person in front by clambering over the cab, because that was the only conceivable way to get there.

But, more seriously, the small world that is Mumbai has just woken up to the fact that there is something known as ‘noise pollution’, a something that can be as lethal and as difficult to manage on both personal and societal levels as other more obvious and acknowledged forms of pollution in the environment. And it was a great drive this morning. Everyone was more alert, wary, watchful of the traffic patterns rather than blindly plunging into the stream without looking around, confident of the repellent power of the car horn rather than the skill of manipulating the vehicle. There was a sense of a leisurely morning calmly making its way to a more stressful work day, even as vehicles jostled with each other for precedence on the already crowded streets. And most of it was done silently, only the roar of an occasional exhaust and the growl of a stalled truck engine making enough noise to force passage through.

For this city, it is nothing short of a miracle. Consider Mumbai’s roads and you know that it is a situation of being an olio rather than a disciplined state of affairs. There will be trucks pushing cars out of the way, cow-carts plodding stoically down the middle of the lane that a Mercedes wants to cruise along, motorbikes zooming in and out of every possible crevice in the jam-packed melee and people, always people, wandering into and out of traffic with the élan and insouciance of surety that death will not come as their end, not today. This is why it is not easy to drive in this city without honking madly at every step…or turn of the wheel. The one time my horn failed in the middle of late afternoon traffic in Mumbai was nightmarish. I was almost in tears with every jerk of the brakes and frustrating smash of the horn button, to no avail. It seemed an impossibly task to get from here to there without the noise that blared me through…but today proved me different.

As we wove through the streets and their miscellaneous occupants, my driver remarked on the silence as often as I did. It was indeed remarkably silent this morning, with only the very sporadic beep or honk to punctuate the astonishing quiet. I hope this encourages people to stop using that gadget as much as they do when they drive through the city and beyond. Even that pest who always seems to be behind me….

The courage to be

A friend and I were talking about being brave. For us both, it was about having the courage to be yourself, to face yourself in the mirror and say “This is me, warts and all and I am ok with it.” It is also about knowing what you can do and having the strength to do it, never mind what people around you say and do. And it is about facing what you are in other people’s eyes and minds and being okay with it…or not…as long as you know what you are about. It also about giving answers to questions that make you uncomfortable, about being able to give rather than take, and the knowledge that you have the power to hurt and therefore you will not.

I once met someone who didn’t have any of that, not in the brief time I knew him. He seemed to be honest and straightforward, with a mind that wanted to absorb, to explore, to know. He read books that ran the gamut from food to photography, but somehow never got curious enough to peek into the wide and wonderful world of fiction…or else never admitted that he did. He was always asking questions, often with the wonder of a child, filing away the answers in a mind that seemed almost a library catalogue of information. And he seemed to revel in minutae, expanding on every second of the life he lived rather than seeing the bigger picture of his life in the context of the world he lived in.

But, for all his virtues, he had a startlingly closed mind. He did not see himself as others saw him, not people he interacted with, not me, whom he said he considered a friend. He would not communicate unless forced to, and even as he spoke to me and many others about so much, he said so little. An art in itself, I know, since I often practice it myself. Where I spread my feelers wide and say a little about a lot, he said a lot about very little, going vertical, in the Internet portal sense of the word, rather than horizontal. As someone to know, it was about the most irritating and frustrating experience I could think of.

This man had great charm, a sweet smile and much that was endearing in his personality. He also had a frightening arrogance, a dismissal of what did not seem relevant or important to him, never mind that it could hurt and even damage those he came across on whatever level. That, perhaps, was my least endearing memory of him. Even as he wandered through his own life, he rarely saw how he may have bumped into other’s, causing a certain kind of impact that was damaging and unforgivable.

He did that in my life too. He came into it suddenly and left even more suddenly, without warning or announcement. He left me and those who form my own mesh of my world bewildered, wondering what had happened and why. Even as I struggled to understand why anyone would go out of their way to cause harm to me, I felt a certain relief that I could continue travelling my own journey without too much lasting impact. Analysis of myself showed me that the effect he had had was not a lasting one, no damage that could not be quickly repaired had been caused. If I had allowed myself to be less wary, less unguarded, less accepting, the story may have been different. It took a day or two to know that, but I did.

And the reason was simple. I knew what I was about. After all, I had the courage to look into myself and see what I had done. And I knew that he would never be able to do the same…not while looking into a mirror, not while looking at himself, not while looking into my eyes, where he will see nothing but the question he will never be able to answer honestly and satisfactorily: Why?

Passage to Venice – III

(Sometimes writing does not go chronologically. It leaps across time to a memory that is suddenly new and fresh, one that evokes laughter, a sigh, even a feeling of wanting that time back…)

Venice was almost like a whole new city. We had been there before, but it felt like a different life, a different dream. This time, I was near-adult, almost grown up but still needing that reassuring presence of parents and a frame of reference that they provided. My friend was with us and we were in Venice, city of canals, city of dark romance, city of strange smells, gorgeous people, bloody history and environmental disaster.

But for us, still teenagers with moods more whimsical than the Italian weather, Venice was fascinating. We pretended to be expert photographers, our small box cameras taking sweetly silly instant pictures that we all found worthy of comment, if not outright praise. And it was that self-professed talent that got us into a bit of deep water…though not especially of the hot kind.

We had driven into Venice fairly late in the day and checked into our hotel, all piled into one large room because of a severe lack of alternate space in the city. It was, after all, New Year’s eve and everyone was set to party. You could see the buntings all over the narrow cobble-stoned streets and people dashed hither and yon carrying mysterious cartons on their shoulders. Stores were open well after sundown, their windows blaring announcements of sales and their mannequins wearing the most vivid conformations of sequins I had ever seen. Gondolas and small motorboats slid over the canals, carrying loads of party-goers and musicians – one boat even had an entire rock band, long hair, leather, silver studs and all.

But we were rather less adventurous. All of us wanted not much more than to sleep and, after a quick dinner, we decided to retire…and then my friend and I found that the door of our hotel opened almost into the foyer of the movie house across the alley. In we ran, watched – I think – three shows back-to-back of The Aristocats – and then wandered sleepily to fall asleep with unwashed faces and our socks still half on our feet.

The photography started the next morning. It was very cold in Venice, the wind whistling sharply down the alleyways and straight into our ears. But we had to take our pictures from the middle of St Mark’s Square, so it was there that we headed. There was, however, one small problem, it was high tide and the square was thigh-deep in water. VERY cold water, we discovered, when we waded in, shoes and socks and purses left in the custody of my parents.

On the tips of frozen toes, our jeans rolled up as high as they possible could get, we edged out shivering way to a flagpole in the middle of the square. There we clambered atop the small platform and balanced, precariously, on the concrete block, our fingers shaking, our hair blowing madly, our sunglasses doing nothing to stop tears pouring out of our eyes from the sheer cold. But we were there, we had the sun glinting off the gold of the frescoes on the cathedral full-focus in our lenses and nothing could stop the enchantment of moment, not even blue feet and the prospect of going back into the water to find our way to warmth.

It all worked perfectly. The photographs still have that magic, all these years later, and the thought of that morning still makes my toes curl gently in the search for heat, never mind that it is summer-hot and sweaty in Mumbai these days.

Passage to Venice – II

We had planned to be in Milan for lunch, but got there only very late in the evening. As we slid down through the mountains, occasionally getting a little to close for everyone’s comfort to a cliff-edge or another sliding vehicle, all orchestrated by a few squeaks and many gasps, the day wore slowly into the afternoon. We demolished some chips, a few cookies and lots of hot chocolate from a large flask, but the hunger for lunch was kept at bay by the sheer terror of the conditions in which Father had to drive our little Volkswagen Golf. Finally, tired, tense and at last ravenous, we tottered – in a manner of speaking – into Aosta.

Well known for its ski slopes and celebrity visitors (though that was not top-of-mind then), Aosta was a small town with many large hotels. We parked outside one and walked in, brushing snow from our coats and boots and demanding food. The dining hall was large, luxurious, welcoming and, most of all, warm. We sat, we asked, we ordered and we wilted as we waited. The food arrived and we fell to, not really noticing what we ate until it was halfway done. Then I saw that the seafood risotto I had been so avidly working my way through has tiny bits of octopus tentacles, suckers and all, arrayed around the edge of the soup-plate. I like octopus, I am fairly adventurous as an eater, but when the octopus looks at me, so to speak, I quail a bit. Some help from a parent and I was equanimous again, chewing happily.

We actually got to Milan only for dinner. Our hotel was an old and charming one, with no elevator, and we lugged our bags up heavenwards, heaving and pushing and puffing and occasionally saying a rude word, bashing into ankles and squashing a finger or two en route. Food meant we had to walk all the way down, but it was easier without luggage. I was just starting into my health-food bias then and wavered agonisedly between hamburgers and fries and salads and natural juices. I compromised with a large cola and a leafy salad, one that seemed to include all sorts of plant life, from artichoke hearts to spinach, mushrooms to what was thence-forth fixed in my mind as nettled – the stabbed me suddenly mid-bite in the roof of my mouth and left my tongue stinging painfully for some time afterwards.

A painful meal, a fairly late night, a long drive…it all led to a very deep and surprisingly refreshing sleep. We bounced up and out the next morning, all keen to see the chapel in which the Last Supper was being slowly restored, to eating a typically Italian pasta and walking past the stores that we had only read about that sold big-name designer fashion that we sighed over but never imagined even seeing in real life. We did all that and more. And furtively peeped at gorgeous people walking down the pavements, delicious cars prowling the streets and beautiful buildings that for some reason always had a cold wind blowing against them that made our eyes water. But it was Milan, the city of beautiful visions and the warmth (even in mid-winter) of a freedom to live a dream.

Passage to Venice – I

Many moons ago we spent a few weeks in Italy, a country we all like very much. There was my mother, my father and me, along with a friend who had been at school with me in India and now went to a prep school in England – she was spending the winter break with us in Geneva, Switzerland, and was with us, almost automatically, on our holiday. We drove through snowstorms and over skid-icy roads to get to our first stop, and then wandered through from big city to small town with happy arbitrariness….or so it seemed to us girls, but what did we know then, we were just sloppy teenagers who slept a lot, giggled a lot and worried about washing hair and zapping zits. But it was, then and still now, a trip that was indeed memorable.

It began not-too-early one morning, or perhaps after dinner the nights before. My friend and I were old enough to be ‘grown up’, but young enough to play silly tricks on each other. And we had just gone through the worst – she had done something I cannot remember now, but I retaliated by spraying the most awful perfume that I had been given by a friend for Christmas on her pillow; my mother was most annoyed, since the smell permeated the whole apartment for days after my friend had gone back to school some weeks later. And, when the day was more or less done, my friend tried on a pair of jeans that had fit perfectly when she had bought them in England not that long ago. They didn’t any more. She lay on the floor near the dining table and yanked, pulled, groaned, wheezed, to no avail. So she went to bed in them and the next morning, just before we were ready to leave, she managed to zip them up. Of course, she had to undo the zip once we got in the car, since sitting down made her face turn blue…

My parents piled us into the back seat, a couple of acrylic car blankets snuggled around us to keep the cold out as far as possible. You could just about see the tip of my friend’s nose, but the rest of her was a fuzzy pile of synthetic pile. The heater was on full, everyone was smothered in wool and we started off. We would be in Milan for lunch, my father promised. Life was great, the roads were clear, the sun was shining, the world was a joyous place. And then we drove through the Mont Blanc tunnel that links Switzerland and Italy. The Swiss side was typically efficiently pristine, immaculate, even the snowdrifts along the sides of the road arranged just-so at regular, nicely-shaped heaps of cold whiteness. The border security guards beamed happily at us as we drove into the well-lit tunnel, our collective claustrophobia acting up but not too severely, with only a slight panic expressed by my mother at the thought of so many tons of rock above our little car.

But the other side, even we emerged, was rather different. Italy is warm and beautiful and friendly and happy, we all knew, but the Italy that greeted us was just white. Right after going through the friendly, warm, beautiful and happy security zone that marked our passage into the country, we slid neatly down an icy road to a parking spot at the side. Our snow tires were not enough traction; we had to use chains as well. My friend and I volunteered to do the fixing – lots of rude words muttered as clouds of white mist and a broken nail or two later, we were back in the car, pink nosed and snow spattered, but warmed by the exertion of clipping the very cold metal links together around the very cold rubber tires with a very cold wind whistling down the backs of our necks.

And then we drove on. Slowly. The car turned left around a bend on to a bridge over a small frozen stream and kept turning. There was a squeak, but who it came from was not known – it could have been all of us, or any one. As my father worked his feet furiously on the brakes, changing gear, spinning the steering wheel, trying to get some traction and undo the skid, we slid gently to a halt, just about an inch away from the stone of the bridge wall, the slabs of rock that kept us from sliding straight into the ice beneath.

It was a good start to a good vacation.

On the road

For about a week my driver decided to go off to his village, leaving me to drive myself to and fro between home and work, sprained/pulled/strained wrist and all. While I have no idea how I damaged myself in the first place, I do know that driving in Mumbai traffic made it worse to the point where even brushing my teeth or dragging a comb through my mop of hair made me wince. But in the driving, I learned a lot that gave me more to ruminate on, both about myself and about the world around me that has any kind of impact on me.

Perhaps what really made it to the front of my consciousness was the most obvious. One night, driving back alone, fairly late, after a long day at the most dreary routine of page-making, I was switched off in my head but fully focussed on the road and traffic. Suddenly there was a flash of light that bounced off my tired retinas. It came again…and again. And then I heard it, that sound that never fails to make my hands go cold and my mind blank. There was an ambulance close behind me, demanding passage. Even though I know well that ambulances in this country tend to sound their sirens just to get through traffic jams – and less for the urgency of getting its passengers to emergency medical care – the sing-song blast of noise always makes me freeze, first emotionally and then intellectually. The rest of me works fine, but on auto-pilot.

The siren blared incessantly, unforgivingly, mercilessly. It demanded a route past me and others in its path, or even through us or over us…just beyond us. It loomed up against my back window and its lights showed me my fingers gripping the steering wheel so hard that my knuckles were white, just like in the bad description of stressful murder-chase scenes in bad thriller novels. Trained to give way almost automatically, I started to edge towards the lane where there was less traffic – well, one less car or motorbike or truck than the zillion that clamoured just around my little car – and, sweating gently in the blast of the air-conditioning, finally managed to get out of the way. the ambulance roared past me, not going too far ahead, but far enough for the sound and light show that it was putting on to fade a little from my immediate sphere of attention.

I am not normally phased by things like this. Ambulances are a normal part of everyday life in a crowded ever-commuting city like Mumbai. But it takes me back to a traumatic early morning when my mother was taken to hospital and we never brought her back. It was a bad time, one I should learn to get past. One day, when I can face – or hear – an ambulance yell for through-way without flinching, I will know that I have. Until then, I just grit my teeth and pretend it is all just part of a life I have to live.

First we win…

…Then, more often than not, we lose.

It’s a cycle that typifies Indian behaviour, in some strange way. Even as I write this, the office is going mad with joy. All day the televisions have been on, blaring every move on the cricket field as India and Australia slug it out Down Under, over the last hour or so, people have gathered around the TV sets, staring fixedly up at the screens, breathing heavily or not at all, cheering when not gasping or going into little huddles of hectic parlay on who played what shot hot and why they should have done otherwise, who was doing what when while that shot was being played, etc etc etc. and then, as it got closer to the end, the volume went up when something good happened for Team India and switched almost completely off when it didn’t. and then it happened. That last shot made sure we won…after a pause when the decision was finally taken and announced by the power that was and then, after a micro-second of stress-induced silence, everyone leaped and cheered and hugged each other, on the field, in the stands and in the office.

So India won the tri-series, or whatever it is called. Our team – please note the jingoistic ‘our’ there – did their best, sledging and all, and mustered up all forces to beat the rather persistently rude Australians quite comfortably, thus challenging all the nay-sayers to make themselves heroes. So when they come home – as they did after the first Twenty/20 match that they won – they will be feted and lauded and celebrated and all those good things that essentially mean the same thing every which way. There will be parties and bus rides and bouquets and champagne and more endorsements and so money and more adulation and more everything that will make the collective and individual heads of Team India and the country in general swell with pride… and get so inflated in the process that it will no longer fit through the door that opens into success.

Yes, that kind of falls flat every now and then, almost as an inevitable cycle of what goes around comes around, without fail. But it is true. It may be an Indian trait engendered by the weather, as someone once said and backed it up with some highly tenuous research, which makes us so complacent and smugly self-satisfied that once we get what we fight for, we give up and let it all slide into ignominious failure very soon after. If that is what will happen to Team India and its game, all the battling on the field and off in Australia will hardly be worth it.

Socially networked

This is something I am not, not in the today sense of the word, at least. I do know people who know people which means that in some roundabout way I know the people that the people I know do know, if you know what I mean, because I am not sure I know. But it’s called networking – knowing someone who can find you someone you need when you need that someone for some purpose that you can define only in reference to a specific context, since why would you need that someone if the context was not what it is at a certain point in time? Be that as it may be, it just happens that ever since I started working with a newspaper many years ago, my social networking skills improved. And if I did not know someone, I found that I invariably knew someone who knew someone who was exactly the someone I needed at any moment in time.

But this is the old-fashioned version of networking. Today it all happens in cyberspace, where someone pings someone and then invites them to join some social networking site or the other and exchange news, views and plain old gossip with everyone else who happens to be a member of the same social networking site. So there is everything from Orkut to Facebook to LinkedIn to goodness knows what else, leaving me cold and rather bewildered about why anyone would want me to be part of the whole cloud of chatter going on online. It is not about being part of something that large and unwieldy, or even that I become a tiny mote in a community that is stretched beyond the limits of my knowledge base and my personality management skills, but a rather more simple reason I prefer to stay out of it all. My memory. Each of these sites needs a registration form filled in, with a password and a login name. Which means that even if I just join two of them, I need to remember four more pieces of information that are not exactly earth-shatteringly important to me or even remotely relevant to what I do through my day.

But, being conformist up to a point, I agreed to log into three such sites. Which never fail to send me email telling me that there is a message form someone or the other waiting for me. And that in itself leads to more problems than I want to handle. First, I need to log into the email accounts that tell me that I have those aforementioned emails. Which is manageable, since I use those addresses anyway to check mail, personal and for work. Then I need to open the mail I get from whatever networking site it is, and go into the site itself. That asks me for registration details, which I will have forgotten, since I rarely use them. That in itself implies two or three stabs at it, with me flailing – in a manner of speaking – not just on the keyboard, but also in cyberspace. When I finally access the message, it will probably be a friend suggesting I join some other group online, which means more registration forms, login names and passwords….

That is why I am very glad that many offices are gradually banning the whole concept of social networking sites being accessible. While I wish the easy ways of communication, from MSN Messenger and Googlechat would continue working they way they do, their access via a bootlegged gateway or otherwise, I am fairly glad that Orkut, Facebook and goodness knows what else have been blocked at work. If they weren’t, I am sure that someone would insist I join in, with registration, login, passwords and whatever else I need to be part of a warm, friendly, communicative, valuable, useful, etc etc community. Frankly, I prefer to know someone who knows someone who knows someone.

Trophy lives

It’s the time of year where filmi types all over the world get together and give each other statuettes and air kisses. It’s awards season.

A couple of nights ago, India time, the Oscar awards were given out. There was the usual guff about who was wearing what and who designed which jewels for whom, but under the frivolity there was the reality of a situation that has been, in a way, mirrored here, too. The films that won were not the usual pulp fare, the commercial formulae guaranteed to succeed, but the movies that were unusual, made a strong statement, may not have found box-office bonanzas, but took home the bacon the form of critical applause. Which about what happened here, with a little concession to the usual round of popular and populist principle of appeasement.

I watched some of the Indian awards ceremonies on television, the ones that have been held, like Star Screen and Filmfare. And when I was part of the Times of India group, I even watched the Filmfare Awards live, standing right in front near the stage and bopping along with the music, loud, crass and tremendously appealing as it was. And the memories come flooding back every time I watch any vignettes of the occasion on TV. It was a formative time in my life, when I learned that not everything Bollywood is nasty, most of it is great fun and infectious in its appeal. And I found that the space in my head that is ready and willing to absorb has pulled in everything I have read and seen about the Hindi film industry with an osmotic pressure that has been, to me, not just revealing, but startling as well.

I rarely watch a movie in a theatre. In fact, I cannot even remember when I last went to a movie house – I do not like the noise levels, the cold and the proximity to other creatures, human and insect, that a theatre mandates. So I wait until the film is either available on DVD or on cable, and watch it at my own comfort levels, my feet curled up under me on the couch, Father within yelling distance if something scary happens and Small Cat muttering and rolling about on the carpet. I can switch off when I get sleepy, knowing full well that the same film will be broadcast endlessly and I can have seen all of it, albeit in parts, and put it all together somewhat like a jigsaw puzzle without a ‘finished’ picture as a template.

Perhaps the first movie I saw that way was Amar Akbar Anthony, with Vinod Khanna, Rishi Kapoor and Amitach Bachchan. It was a giggle-fest, with slapstick comedy punctuated with family drama, fights, songs and bimbo-heroine love stories. Great fun, even seen in choppy bits, and memorable indeed. Another favourite is the Aamir Khan-Juhi Chawla starrer, Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke, where chaos and confusion are dotted with completely OTT fun and games that are not in the least bit credible, but hilarious any which way. And, of course, more recently there have been the Karan Johar potboilers, with Shah Rukh Khan dominating the proceedings, all glitz, glamour and glycerine. Those are rather easier to watch, since the fashion dominates the plot and everyone is so busy looking gorgeous that nothing much really happens that you cannot catch up with in whatever little you do see.

But this time a lot of smaller films have been part of the marquee for the awards – Bheja Fry, Life in a Metro, Cheeni Kum…all part of a line-up that dares to be hatke and manages to do so without losing kudos. Of course, the big winners were the big tickets: Om Shanti Om, Kareena Kapoor, Shah Rukh Khan, Taare Zameen Par and more. But that was expected…and accepted.

View from my window

I sit next to a window at work and every now and then peer out to see what the outside world is up to. Not that there is much to see, since we overlook a parking lot and garden, with a factory and chimneys beyond the retaining wall, but it can often be more exciting than the view within, which is mainly people hacking away at keyboards or else standing around in groups chatting or, at certain times of the day, sitting in clusters and yelling madly in what is defined as an ‘edit meeting’. Occasionally there will be a wild outburst if there is a cricket match on television, or if there is a birthday, after which the housekeeping crew bustles about trying to get frosting out of the anonymously coloured carpet. Beyond the small upheavals of life, it is routine in here, nothing really exciting happening other than the daily grind of a broadsheet being made ready for production.

On an average day – which is what most of them are – life outside is far more exciting. Right now, as we speak, there is a gentleman in a brilliant pink shirt and blue tie (his trousers are unremarkably black) walking up and down the garden, talking animatedly on his cellphone. Nothing unusual about that. Except that every now and then he peers at another mobile phone in his other hand, texts out a message and then continues his conversation. Somewhere along the way, he stops, unhooks his first phone, speaks briefly into his second and then reverts to type. Which makes me wonder what he is saying to whom and why he cannot sit in the cool confines of his office and do it, instead of wandering about in the heat of the late afternoon.

My driver was telling me recently about some drama that happened right outside my window. You didn’t see it, he was astonished, but then he did not realise that every now and that I get pulled into one of those rather meaningless edit meetings and an dragged away from my little panorama of the world outside. Apparently, there was a human drama that unfolded late in the morning. A couple from the office next door had a little spat outside and there was violence, he exclaimed. First they came out, smoked cigarettes, drank coffee – or maybe it was tea, he speculated – and then chatted briefly. The talk became an argument and finally a bit of a fracas, as the woman hauled off and slapped her male companion. He, startled at first and then obviously furious, returned the favour – he hit her full on and she stood there, I was told, her mouth open, one hand to her shocked face. Then he put an arm around her and she leaned against him. They chatted a little more, smoked another cigarette and then went back in to the office they came from, evidently friends once more.

Perhaps more worth watching is the animal life outside. Apart from the birds, there is often a dog outside, playing in the garden or romping in the parking lot, frequently with a puppy or two in tow. The first litter that we saw was given a lot of attention by the staff of the newspaper – one or the other would run downstairs with milk or biscuits and feed the babies, while others played with the dirty, semi-starved little creatures. But by now so many of these litters have come and gone that we are all rather blasé about them, admiring the puppies, coochieing with them if we meet them at close quarters and then more or less forgetting they exist. We cannot do more; we have only that much angst and time to make them more special than they are already as young animals just starting to make a life for themselves.

For now, life outside my window is a diversion from the humdrum working day. Once in a while, it colours a blue mood and sometimes lowers my otherwise blithe spirits. But it is always changing, always new, always different, just like life itself.

Prophecies of the day

I once wrote a blog on how people are dead keen on horoscopes. A former editor of mine would grab the afternoon tabloid from my hands if I had bought one on my lunch break and then flip fast forward to the forecasts for the day. Once she was done with that, my paper was mine again; the rest of it was not relevant.

Then I worked with Internet sites on astrology. Which meant that I had to do a lot of research to find out just what people wanted from them, what kind of stuff they wanted to read and how deep they were willing to go online. It was amazing that so many would even plunk down money to learn that they would be married in such-and-such year and find a new job say when and have to deal with a personal/professional crisis then and not now. But I was and still am a bit of a cynic. It doesn’t really make sense to me to consult anyone who does not know me about what will happen to me.

And as for horoscopes – well, I have to confess this one: when I was just starting out as a journalist, I have on occasion had to juggle around predictions for the week if the astrologer who normally sent them had been derelict in his duty and we were horoscope-less for at least that day that I was making the relevant pages of the newspaper. Which meant that even if I just moved the forecasts around, changing them slightly, it really made little difference. It worked – the astrologer never objected and the reading audience lapped it all up.

A few years after that, I was in charge of an online astrology portal (almost) that had a number of astrologers on board to answer queries for a fee. Since it was essentially e-commerce, and I was rather averse to dealing with people who had some kind of beef about the money they spent that was not being realised in the way they would prefer, I stayed out of it. But then I was asked to filter the experts and retain only those who were really worth having, contracts renegotiated and re-signed to the company’s satisfaction rather than that of the astrologer. I was only the editor, I protested fairly violently, but no one would listen. So I girded my loins, swallowed my qualms and got down to the job.

It was an interesting but exhausting business. Each of them was so eager to please, so keen to stay in the loop we had created for them that they bent over practically backwards to make sure they were pleasing me and the chappie who was in charge of the money part of the deal. Each insisted on charting my astrological profile and telling me what my fate was all about, past and present. None of which made me happy, since all I wanted to do was get out of there and either get back to work or go home, depending on what time it was that day. The experts worked very hard to do their jobs, my colleague worked even harder to get me to stop being my usual nasty self and just hear them out, even if I had to be in a semi-asleep daze to do it. The net result of the exercise was entirely predictable – the astrologers were disgruntled because so many of them were thrown out of the portal citing contractual non-extension, and I was disgruntled because I was bored, not-pleased and completely out of the depth I normally cruised at.

But somewhere along the line I was amazed at the similarities in the various predictions. Most of the experts said the same thing, about my past, my present and, more or less, my future. That I would never have paid any of them to predict my life for me on the Internet was a different issue all together. It was just not my style to do that, even if I had believed in the whole shebang. And it all made me rather sick with the unctuousness of the people involved and the oiliness with which we had to eliminate them without causing rancour. All a hoot. And we should have known better - and we would have, if only we had consulted our horoscopes!

One for the birds

I was at work, wondering what to do after a rather healthy lunch that made me feel like saying “Moo!” when a pigeon landed heavily on the light fixture just outside the window beside which I hack away at my keyboard all day. It peered at me with its beady little eye, first one then the other, and seemed to dismiss me as being not just irrelevant, but unworthy, since it shrugged, settled its feathers and then took off to more interesting and important assignations. For a moment there I was startled, then thought deeply and darkly to myself that since for so many years I have regarded the wretched birds with so much contempt, it was only fitting that I should be seen in a similar light. And pigeons have such expressive eyes that you can read what they are thinking by just looking at one.

Once upon a different lifetime we lived in an apartment that was high up on a hill. Which meant we not only got a fabulous view all around, but also got all manner of fowl wandering into our flat when all the windows and French doors were open. It was, of course, fairly unpredictable, this kind of invasion, since we never knew when it would happen that a bird flew into the house and forgot how to get out again. It often was the case that we had to chase the silly thing all around the apartment, swearing madly and wondering if we would ever get the poo off the brocade cushion covers and the pin feathers out of the Chinese lampshades. All the fans would hastily be switched off and the glass-slatted vents closed, just so that the idiotic creature would not fly into something that would injure it. Every time it headed that way, I would close not just my eyes, but my ears as well – just as I do in the spooky moments in movies and television shows, to avoid seeing anything that would be unwontedly bloody and stick in my rather fragile psyche for the rest of my life.

The incursions were not infrequent. It came to such a pass that we had to put up chicken wire – or bird wire, as would be more appropriate – over all the openings that the pigeons could fly into, from the large windows to the even larger balconies. In a way that sort of solved the problem, for the most part. But the stupid birds (lovers of the pigeon community would instantly censure me for that, saying that the IQ of a pigeon was higher than I believed it to be) managed occasionally to find a way in and flew bashingly into the mesh and got tangled it is, sometimes breaking through into the flat and causing the aforementioned merry - and loud – havoc in the process. We did avert most of these mishaps, but had to replace the netting at regular intervals.

In the apartment we now live in, pigeons are not visitors, though they do peer hopefully in once in a while. As soon as they land on the awnings over the windows, Small Cat takes grave objection and chatters her teeth with a yarring sound, looking glaringly in the general direction of the birds. That is all very well, except that she does that even if the pigeons perch on a rooflet in the next building. She will keep doing this for as long as it takes for me or Father to shoo the fowl away. But she will never make any attempt to attack or jump at the birds, preferring to lie regally like a furry little princess on the carpet or a chair, sounding off. Only rarely, when she is feeling exceptionally hoppity and believes that the pigeons are daring to make inroads on to her turf, will she gallop across the living room, leap onto Father’s large armchair and chatter at the enemy from a more vantage point.

I am still wondering what Small Cat will do if a pigeon actually comes into the house and does its version of testing the chaos theory. But I am not particularly keen to find out.

Speaking in tongues

We were talking today at work about how nobody in this city speaks Hindi as it should ideally be spoken. Except perhaps Amitabh Bachchan, someone said with a bit of a sly grin showing. His sonorous voice and his nicely rounded vowels make listening to him a pleasure, though I did hear some time ago that some of his voice-overs were actually done by someone else and you could tell the difference only if you knew whether the Big B had done the assignment or not. Be that – as I giggle saying – as it may, there is admittedly hardly anyone I know who is a good average Mumbaikar and who can do the Hindi thing like it should be done. Our Bollywood movie stars least of all.

Most of them speak in tongues that are not discernibly anything. In the ‘old days’, as my irascible boss loves to put it, the actors came from parts beyond, usually north-ish, and spoke Hindi like the natives of the heartland that they were. Dharmendra had his good looks and his drawl to endear him to the masses who clamoured to watch his films. And he spoke decent Hindi, though he stumbled through English with pitiable results – every speech he made at every awards function was fraught with stress and effort for both the actor and his viewers. Then there was Dilip Kumar, who had moments of chaste Urdu in his public appearances. And there was Sanjiv Kumar, Rajesh Khanna and so many more. The women, too, were articulate, from Madhubala to Geeta Bali to Sadhana, even Hema Malini, who spoke good Hindi in a wonderfully Tamilian accent and never managed to do much with her English, even years after being the well-travelled public persona that she is.

Today the younger stars, be it Shah Rukh Khan or Salman Khan, Aamir Khan or any of the others of that generation, are far more comfortable in English, albeit oddly accented at times and definitely ‘Indian’. When SRK speaks to the public through a media interview or some kind of special show, he tends to say whatever he wants to say in ‘Hinglish’, mixing his own special brand of cocktail that works wonders for his articulate and expressive image as well as for his appeal to even those who are not Khan fans. Salman Khan speaks his strangely American-accented English without very much hesitation, though where he acquired his twang is still a mystery. Aamir Khan talks a lot when he does say anything, and he goes far deeper and is a lot more diplomatic than his peers. Akshay Kumar’s English is not as good as his Hindi and the action-emotion star very wisely sticks to the language he is more comfortable in, which makes a lot more sense than to babble on in a strange tongue that no one really understands but is too polite to question.

The women, too, are off-and-on types when it comes to speaking. Kajol talks a lot, in loud and very ‘Bombay’ English, though her Hindi is not bad either. Rani tends to trip over her pronunciation, and her accent is never very far from her Bengali roots. Tabu is unabashedly a non-English speaker, never mind her experience, and Manisha Koirala’s speech varies with her escort of the moment. Priyanka Chopra, Lara Dutta, Sushmita Sen and Dia Mirza are very articulate and can hold their own in an international forum, but Aishwarya Rai’s accent tends to slip into Tulu when she is self-conscious, which is most of the time. But all these women have the unfair advantage of being well-finished products of their time, polished from toenails to phonetics. And they have been communicating internationally for so long now that it all comes naturally.

Which makes me wonder – if the men were shoved into international beauty pageants, would they speak better?

Friends for ever

It’s funny how the whole concept of friendship changes over the years, as you grow up. Once upon a time I stayed far away from the idea of ‘friends’, because we moved in and out of the country and any that I did make had to be left too soon; for a child, that can be devastating. But as I grew up, I got more cynical and a little more realistic – I made friends, albeit not very close ones, whom I could spend time with, laugh with, play with and then leave, perhaps keeping in touch for a few months, or even a couple of years, before relegating them to the back of the memory-closet where they could be looked at and savoured when the time and need arose, with no rancour or regret. Rediscovering friends like these is in itself a unique experience, refreshing from the point of view of a psyche battered by time and always looking for a new way to recuperate and reenergise.

Many years ago, I had a ‘best friend’. We spent more time together than anyone who lived in the same house would, and we shared everything from childhood dreams to teenage crushes to eyeshadow travails to driving lessons. Since she was a little older than me, it all happened to her earlier than it did to me and I often found myself running harder to catch up than I really needed to. It was only many years later that I understood that it was not necessary at all for me to catch up with her, or indeed with anyone else. I was myself, I was what I was and why should I feel the need to be or do anything that was not in my own destiny?

My ‘best friend’ and I had our own lives, quite separate from the one we shared in so many ways. She became another child in our household and was treated as one, an open affection often opposed by me, overly possessive of my parents’ affection, attention and time. I made occasional visits to her home, while she had free season in ours, neither of which really mattered to any of us. And we spent most waking moments in communication with each other, as only two little girls can manage to do – we would wake up and call each other, we would bathe and call each other, we would call each other just before we left our own homes, walk down to school together and then spend most of the day together in our various classes, finally walking home together after the sports session was done, the immaculate hair dishevelled, the uniforms wrinkled and grubby, the socks sagging somewhat over bruised ankles and the pong of sweaty little girl hovering like an almost-tangible aura over us both.

We grew up soon enough. It was often not too happy a process and we dealt with angsts and anxieties, parents and, in her case, siblings. There was rivalry and small envies, none ever spiralling into an argument or anything that could remotely be described as a ‘fight’. But slowly, as we grew in different directions, so did the friendship. I had new experiences she could never be part of, she had a life that never impinged on mine. For a while, we did not communicate at all – I was out of the country, she had a separate orbit. And then we met again, almost like we had never been apart. Adult now, both of us were careful about how we talked and what we talked about. But there was the old affection, the old teasing and knowing and awareness. It just was not that important to me when it all ended. It didn’t seem as important to keep it going, or to find out why it stopped.

But, like the cycle of perhaps life itself, it seems to have come around again. There is some sort of contact between the families…or what is left of them. What happens next, I wait to find out. It should be fun, any which way it goes.

Keeping the faith

Today is Pancake Tuesday. The day when all old food is cleaned out of the house to make way for a period of austerity and piety called Lent, which begins tomorrow, with Ash Wednesday. I used to know all this, since close family friends that became my home for a period of time when I was in college observed all the customs and traditions associated with the religion that I was peripherally familiar with and had watched with interest ever since I was very young. It was perhaps at that time that I seriously started thinking about faith and its observance, the way different people in different countries and decided that I liked a little of each and would ‘talk’ to whoever or whatever I believed to be divine rather than do it the conventional way via prayer, rite and ritual.

And, for me, it has worked. It makes sense to be somewhat like Akbar’s own brand of religion, the Din-e-Ilahi was said to be in my history textbooks, but more so. Where the Mughal emperor tried to blend the best of what he considered to be faith in Hinduism and Islam, for me God – of the godhead – was wherever I wanted it to be, from a temple to a mosque to a church to a synagogue and a gurudwara, wherever the spirit, in a matter of speaking, beckoned to me and I followed. It was not a God, never one figure to whom I addressed whatever I ‘said’. It was a wild combination of various entities that all embodied one aspect of belief: the faith in something that was clean, true, honest and, most of all, supportive.

For a while now my ‘God’ has been paying little attention to me, or so it seems. I love and it is taken away when I want and need it most. I trust and that trust is shattered. I believe and my beliefs are destroyed by everything from humans to circumstances that are beyond any conceivable human control. And whenever I think about loving, trusting or believing again, that nasty little voice inside my head asks me whether I really want to replay my own history and live through that same trauma once more.

But then I think about it and my own native, natural, internal sense of logic kicks in. Faith is about believing in oneself first, about trusting in oneself before in anyone else, in loving oneself and then spreading that love. I have all that. I have it coming into me and going out of me. I have a home, a life, comfort, support, security. So what am I complaining about? Everything in human existence has a shelf life, all faiths say that. I need to just accept that all that I am is also here for now. As for tomorrow…God knows!