Eve's Lungs

The Reluctant Detective -Kiran Manral

2012-01-13T22:56:00.002-06:00

Kiran Manral scores a bonus with her remarkably well written debut novel “The Reluctant Detective “ – a racy story about Kanan “Kay” , a ditzy overweight shopaholic who maxes out her credit cards , feeds her son fast foods just to stop his tantrums and pokes her nose into two murders when she shouldn’t . In between she lunches , attends dreaded PTA meetings and puts up with a grouch of a husband who treats her like a juvenile and is also haunted by the spirit of the murdered woman .

Kiran’s book is full of spots of wry humour and anecdotes which tickle the funnybone ,the impossible longings for a size zero figure – at one point she considers kneeling down before a whip thin maid and begging her to be her personal trainer . Her obsession with her avoirdupois and her contradictory reluctance to ”eat healthy” make her a very plausible character .

And that is one thing which is a major plus in Kiran’s novel – the rounded three dimensional characters described with such tongue in the cheek humour – from the TV artiste whose carrer is doomed by her role of the suffering daughter in law in television megaserials , the smarmy small time actor in the Velvet Smoking Jacket , the girl gang ,the husband ,the parents viewed through telephone calls and Kay’s memory , even the little boy Kabir , so reminiscent of bratty little boys used to having their own way and Kay , of course . Very plausible , living , breathing characters , who one might meet at any time .

This is possible perhaps , because Kiran draws them from real life people she might know . The wisdom she displays in that she never strays far from the familiar , in terms of people and places , is an appreciable strength and lends deep credibility to her writing .

The style is fluid, amazingly fresh and well written and races through to a quick finish . All in all a good read which makes one wish that it was a thicker novel .

But that again is something one would have to wait for and nothing whets hunger more than the anticipation of a hearty meal , or in this case a good thick read ! Waiting for another good read , Ms Manral .

Just a little footnote about Kiran - she is a freelance writer , a blogger of repute and a media consltant from Mumbai. To her credit , she is also a social activist and the founder of India Helps which she set post the 26/11 terrorist attacks . India Helps works with disaster victims and has been responsible for the rehabilitation of a number of victims of the 26/11 attacks and others .

2011-11-17T08:32:00.001-06:00

And when winter sneaks up on you and catches you unawares , think back to the scent of green mangoes in a khus basket ....

This basket is off to BWW

Black and White Wednesday

2011-11-01T12:32:00.004-06:00

The flurry of activity of little hands on Sandeepa's blog took me to Black and White Wednesday , a photo event that Susan of The Well Seasoned Cook runs every Wednesday .
Therefore apart from some wonderful recipes that I have been trawling through the last 2 weeks , off and on , there is also some wonderful food related photography .

Come winter and along with the huge variety of vegetables in the market , comes a haul of fish that Bengalis enjoy only in winter - small pomfret , tyangra maachh cooked with greens , parshey with mustard , the aar and boal, my favourites - full of fat , to be cooked with onions and chillies in a spicy but delicate gravy - the chillies , onions and the spices melding together and complementing each other in a flavourful dish to be eaten with steamed rice .

So ,in anticipation of the good days to come , here goes my contribution , shot at the local fishmonger's one evening last winter !

THE DAY'S HAUL

2011-10-29T03:52:00.000-06:00

When one talks about violence against women how would one categorise it ? Rape? filial dominance ? wife abuse?Murder in the name of honour?Incest ?
It is a given fact that violence stems from the dominance of women by males advocated from as far back as Manu the mythical lawyer who directs women to seek protection from their fathers , husbands and sons , in short , defines a woman as a possession , incapable of thought or action .
A study of the lives of women down the ages would show a strong sense of discrimination culminating in the treatment of women as chattels or possessions to be used at the whims of males .

While the statistics for domestic violence and abuse of wives is alarming , cutting across all sections of society , what is even for alarming is the fact that very little by way of punitive action and rehabilitation for women who have suffered abuse .There is also the reality that very few women talk about abuse and coose to suffer silently for various reasons be it economic dependence , societal or parental pressure .

India has shocking statistics for female foeticide with Punjab topping the list and Rajasthan following a close second ,with the trend of child sex ratio showing a sharp decline with regard to females in the last few years . Coupled with the cases of female infanticide on the rise , the scene appears to be bleak as successive Governments seem unable to do anything concrete in this respect . http://www.reliefprojects.org/female-infanticide-in-India.html

A friend coming back from a recent trip to Brindavan said he was horrified to count more than a hundred old women sitting silently in the precincts of various temples . They were all from Bengal, abandoned , victims of emotional abuse and neglect equal to physical abuse ,and left to beg for their daily meal .

Violence against women servants of any age is perhaps as common as physical abuse of a wife . It would be easy enough to attribute the violence to the thrill a bully feels in hitting someone who is physically not his equal and cannot retaliate and is therefore subject to dominance .

In the December of 1997 , my sister and her husband lived in a small cottage on the grounds of a large estate in Santiniketan. Across the wall lived S , a photographer , his wife and their child - a pleasant young couple much given to going off on trips over the weekend . My sister and her husband , inveterate animal lovers had umpteen cats and dogs around the place and late on a Friday night , heard the sound of keening . It was an eerie animal sound and their first thought was that it was a puppy caught in the wire of the boundary wall . Having checked the rear garden they found nothing . When the keening started again - they went hunting for the source of the noise , and again finding nothing they came back .

It was then that my sister realised that the sound was very close to the house and sounded louder when she went to the kitchen . And in fact it was from next door As they did not know that S and his wife were away they fiorst called out and on not getting an answer jumped over the wall and went around to the door which was bolted and locked from the outside . When my sister was insistent that the noise was from inside the house , the landlord broke the lock and they followed the noise to the bathroom .

On opening the door which was bolted from outside they found the servant girl , perhaps 11 or 12 years old , severely malnutritioned and therefore diffciult to make out excatly how old she was -, hands tied behind her back , ankles tied together , the rope looped around her wrists tightly and the neck forced over a metal bucket filled with water and strapped to it so that her chin and mouth were submerged . She was gagged and in an impossible position , unable to move her limbs or talk once she was untied and lifted out from the impossible physical position she had been forced into .

Very often the perpetrators of violence against women are women themselves . I remember a tragic story from my paternal family . My father's eldest sister a child bride at 10 was widowed at 14 . Thereafter she remained unmarried . A classic beauty , she was pampered and cossetted and ultimately ended up marrying my uncle's friend - the son of a rich zamindari family with princely pretensions and a widower with 2 daughters . When she conceived the first time , her mother - in- law , inveigled her into visiting the family home and there , with a midwife got the child aborted . The process used was horrifying . She was beaten and tied up and then the abortion was performed . That her husband said nothing only reinforced the fact that this had his tacit consent . The second time she conceived , the mother in law and midwife came to their house and repeated the process, this time gagging her so that no sound escaped to alarm the neighbours .

Thereafter ,my aunt lost her mental balance and could not tolerate children . Although she had her sane phases , she would lapse into another person at times .I remember her once sitting and decapacitating a cloth doll she had given my sister so viciously it turned my 7 year old blood cold . Ultimately she ended up spending her last days on a world of her own rarely bothering to come out of it and acknowledge others .

Fugue

2011-09-03T01:22:00.001-06:00

It is still dark when the alarm rings . Her heart is thudding - as if she has run a mile or had had a panic attack - an ominous shadow gathering momentum ,bound to hit her sometime later in the day . Her husband is still asleep , huddled under the quilt . Padding to the kitchen she puts the kettle on for a cup of tea . It is 5 am - pitch dark although she can see a light in the house opposite where the intrepid scholar is probably preparing his lessons . As she drinks her tea she runs through the chores for the day in her mind . All on auto really - the lunch boxes , the clothes , the daily wash, the servants , the food , waiting for the children to return, tuitions, groceries , food to be cooked and eaten, Horlicks to be fed , studies to be supervised .
Opening the fridge she takes out a tray of meat patties, around 20 of them , heavy round flattened discs of chicken, bread,onions,tomatoes,pepper and garlic compressed within, and puts 6into the frying pan ;the burger buns on a plate go into the microwave for warming .The milk slowly bubbles and she adds oats, then the sugar .Takes out sliced Modern bread and the butter from the fridge .
The rich meaty smell of the burgers frying fills the apartment . She hears a sound from the bedrooms and closed the kitchen door gently .Reaching for the biscuit tin she is surprised to find it empty .
Once the patties are fried, the tomatoes and onions sliced , she carries them to the dining table. The smell of the patties is irresistible and she breaks off half and pops it into her mouth where it turns to dust .

The flat is silent once more . She hates to wake up the children on winter mornings - they look so peaceful sleeping heavily , under their quilts . Her heart fills with tenderness at the thought of their faces - tears pricking in her eyes .
The porridge is on the table cooling .The toaster is plugged into the socket. Time to wake up the children .
It is easy to wake up her daughter who red eyed , clings to her, nuzzling her face in her neck ,wracked by quiet sobs .Another bad dream recurring , she sighs . Gently detaching the child ,she tells her to get to the bathroom.

The door to her son's room is closed , a thin bar of light visible at the bottom. She opens the door , brow wrinkling to find the bed clean, empty, quilt folded neatly at the foot of the bed , the table where he studies neat ,with books stacked at one end.

And then she sits down heavily on the bed, heart thudding as the universe threatens to swallow her once more .It doesnt help that her daughter and son stand watching helplessly from the door .

Bangladesh - The Golden Age by Tahmima Anam

2011-08-09T11:40:00.013-06:00

In January 1971 , listening to the radio on a Sunday morning I intercepted a frantic conversation between a woman in erstwhile East Pakistan and her husband who was out of the country . The woman wept screaming that the militia had come around asking for their papers and questioned her about the man's whereabouts . The panic and terror in the woman's voice has stayed with me all these years . Papers, journals and radio broadcasts created an aura of fear about a danger that throbbed so close to the border with Bengal. The savagery which inspired the genocide was born out of an intrinsic hatred and such severe loathing as to attempt the extermination of a race . To quote :

"General Tikka Khan earned the nickname 'Butcher of Bengal' due to the widespread atrocities he committed.^[7] General Niazi commenting on his actions noted 'On the night between 25/26 March 1971 General Tikka struck. Peaceful night was turned into a time of wailing, crying and burning. General Tikka let loose everything at his disposal as if raiding an enemy, not dealing with his own misguided and misled people. The military action was a display of stark cruelty more merciless than the massacres at Bukhara and Baghdad by Chengiz Khan and Halaku Khan... General Tikka... resorted to the killing of civilians and a scorched earth policy. His orders to his troops were: 'I want the land not the people...' Major General Farman had written in his table diary, "Green land of East Pakistan will be painted red"."

Still later news of the genocide came in - bayoneted babies , slaughtered children , women with their nipples bitten off , imprisoned in barracks and killed mercilessly after being raped in unspeakable manners , men killed by the thousands - intellectuals , academics,doctors , professionals ,ordinary citizens .

Refugees started trickling in , black with grime , starved , with children hanging from their arms , pleading for a bowl of rice or milk for their children .

Radio Bangladesh beaming from Calcutta - the strident voice of Mujibur Rehman and the song "Amaar sonar bangla" that reverberated through Calcutta , infusing and inspiring young students with the spirit of revolt , the war of liberation in Bangladesh . Days spent in fear of the Pakistani bomber jets , curfew and blackout , glass window panes with crosses of newspaper and black duct tape , diligently pasted by Ruby and Mukul in our house , studying for exams in a shuttered room , by the light of 2 tablelamps carefully covered around the sides with dark chart paper . And through it all the fever thrill of anticipation as the war progressed and the Mukti bahinis and Indian soldiers led by Lt General Jagjit Singh Aurora routed the Pakistani army and General Niazi . To an imaginative 11 year old this was history in the making , brought that much closer , made that much real by the limited media exposure of newspapers , The Illustrated Weekly , All India Radio and the BBC.

Reading Tahmima Anam's book The Golden Age brought back memories of those days . There is nothing delicate in the story of Rehana and her two children Maya and Sohail . The history of the time is fraught with uncertainties Rehana challenges life at every turn , never accepting her destiny . it is almost as she must push forward - and overcome each challenge and obstacle to achieve what she wants, starting with her children from whom she is estranged forcibly after her husband's death .

Her character is etched sharply against the turbulent times the novel is set in - her grim determination to sustain her children's participation in the freedom struggle although she as a mother ,is beset with trepidation and anxiety . She is Mother Earth to the young people who land on her doorstep , she is also the tender lover to the injured Colonel, a worried mother who cannot strike the right note in her relationship with her daughter Maya, feeling the girl slip further away, until ultimately they bond much later.

Although there is enough scope for high drama and emotional interludes , nowhere does Anam lapse into anything remotely maudlin - throughout the book there is a terse containment and an economy of words , space and emotions . The characters and the situations are entirely three dimensional,wholly justifying their existence and Rehana towers over the entire spectrum .

The book itself has to be read at a single sitting because it is impossible to put down . And when one has finished it , it is almost as if a storm has swept by , leaving one drained but strangely refreshed .

TEEN KANYA – AN ODE TO WOMEN – A TRANSLATION INTO CELLULOID BY SATYAJIT RAY

2011-07-12T10:05:00.006-06:00

Tagore's short story "The Postmaster" is ostensibly a simple story - that of a young man Nandalal, whose comfortable life in the lap of his family in Calcutta is disrupted by a transfer to a village post office . As expected , nothing measures up to his expectations - the job, the immediate environment and most important the people . He fails to appreciate the beauty of rural Bengal , he pines for home and family . Having nothing in common with the villagers ,the only ray of weak sunshine is the general factotum of his one man household - the orphan child Ratan , who cooks ,cleans and nurses him through a bout of malaria . He teaches the girl to teach , chats with her about his family and in the process livens up his life and offers a ray of hope to Ratan who , bereft of any love dreams of becoming a part of his family .Ratan's little tryst with hope and happiness is shattered when Nandalal gets a transfer back to the city and as compensation to Ratan, without an inkling of the fantastic dreams she has conjured up of becoming a part of his household at Calcutta , offers her a generous tip which she is too proud to accept . A simple story , no doubt, ordinary even but lifted to a level of excellence in characterisation and situational narrative that could only come from Tagore .

The film by Satyajit Ray stars Anil Chatterjee as the whining , complaining postmaster Nandalal who cannot reconcile himself to his new environment and Chandana Banerjee as the orphan girl Ratan. The camera almost caresses the serene beauty of rural Bengal . Ray who had a magic touch with child actors ( think Apu-Durga in Pather Panchali,Apu's son in Apur Sansar and the little boys in the Feluda films ) extracts a stellar performance from Ratan who conveys more with her expressive eyes than through dialogue . When the postmaster , ecstatic with joy at his transfer forgets all promises made to the child during their long evenings together , there is a proud and quiet dignity in her moment of epiphany when she realises that people do not mean what they promise on impulse and so she withdraws into herself , treating the tip he gives her with the scorn his action deserves -that money is not the alternative to what she craves - a sense of belongingness , security and a family to call her own .

Manihara

Ray's treatment of Manihara is pure Gothic . The film opens with the village schoolmaster crossing the ruins and gardens of a house to the ghat on the river which lies beyond , carrying with him his opium pipe and a manuscript . On the steps of the ghat he meets a man draped in a shawl sitting on a lower step, strikes a conversation with him and narrates the story of the people who had lived in the house beyond . The young man is played by Kali Banerjee and his wife by Kanika Majumdar

We meet Manimala's feet first , shod in elegant velvet slippers and then we see her almost ethereally beautiful face and the exquiste muslin sari she wears . Phanibhushan is besotted with her beauty and would like to claim her entire being but she eludes him . Besotted by her lust for jewels and terrified that her husband would use them to save himself from financial ruin , she plans to go to her paternal house with her jewellery and recruits her rascally distant relative and ex lover , played in a brilliant cameo by the young Kumar Roy , to take her there . For a moment she hesitates because her husband has promised her jewels on his return , if he is successful but the survival of her jewels is uppermost and flinging her keys on the bed she departs .She never returns - except as a wraith , trying twice to enter and failing and finally succeeding on a full moon light , drawn by the promise of the jewellery

Besides being a ghost story , Manihara deals on different levels with power , pride, possessions, lust , craving and dissatisfaction and a deep sorrow .A sense of impermanence pervades the film , the river a metaphor for change and havoc in the lives of the couple .

The subtle play of light and shadows , the sound of footsteps , the gathering dusk, the art deco artefacts in the room over which the camera pans , the sudden rush of sunlight as the camera rushes to the window as if choked by the darkness and impending disaster which the room invokes , moonlit night and throughout the film the strains of the song “Baajey Karuno shurey “ interspersed with the haunting cry of the curlews creates an eerie , evocative atmosphere and brings out the gothic component very forcefully .

Kanika Majumdar’s Manimala is distant -her eyes are constantly searching ,her head cocked to one side as if she is listening to a distant song or a voice within herself . She is brittle and delicate and treading the tenuous line between sanity and insanity .Her eyes glitter with a febrile intensity as she runs her hands through her jewels and adorns herself with them before preparing to run away - the balance having titlted towards insanity and portrayed so effectively . The jewels her husband plies her with and which she guards fiercely are a substitute for a deeper craving- perhaps to experience love in its fullest form and not just as a plaything , perhaps for a child .

In the short space of about an hour we are caught up by brilliant performances and tremendous cinematography - almost a distillation of a larger canvas done in miniature .

Samapti

In a sense Samapti or The Ending is the lightest in texture and mood and peppered with a great deal of humour . The story of a girl’s transition from unmarried bliss to marriage – a story of coming of age – the confusions , the ensuing hilarity , perception of mockery of the institution of marriage are played out consummately by Soumtira Chatterji and a very young Aparna Sen who transcends the boundaries of a tall gangling teenager to a woman who realizes what marriage , affinity and love could mean . Ray’s superb touches are there in the scene where Mrinmoyee discards her wedding bed , socal norms and shackles to run away and play on her swing in the moonlight , each upward propelling motion of the swing , reflecting itself in the sheer joy of living that only freedom can gift , the puzzled expressions on the girl’s face when she cannot decipher what she is required to do as a married woman – a set of rules , customs and bindings which have no meaning and the moment of realization when she perceives that she loves the man she is married to .

In a sense Samapti is an ending to the freedom of childhood , and stepping towards adultoohd and maturity .

Tagore’s sensitivity and his exploration of the feminine mystique and psyche were far beyond his times . Ray has captured each nuance of his sensitivity and translated them on to celluloid with such consummate mastery that even if one were one not to read Tagore in the original , it would be a stepping stone to understanding this Renaissance man .

Light Flies and Bees On the Road and One madman

2010-11-04T01:50:00.008-06:00

The people downstairs have got laser lights from Bangalore and instead of doing just the usual fairy light loops on the verandah have also looped in the strands of laser fairy lights . Once lit they hover over the road in a circumference of about 6 feet in a web of green, red ,blue and chrome dots circling constantly like a swarm of bees or mosquitoes in the gathering gloom just before it gets dark.
As magical as it is to the little boy who lives downstairs , it is even more so to Pagla Kanai , one of the triumvirate of mentally ill vagrants who people the area , the others being Bob Marley II and Khyapa .He approaches the lights warily and swats at them with his hand and when they swarm over his hand he tries to grasp them. Then he fishes out a piece of paper from his sack and offers it to the lights , holding it gingerly and then dropping it on the road ; next he fishes out a discarded cigarette packet and drops in under the lights ,squatting and watching spellbound as the little dots keep circling . Then he twitches , a long involuntary shudder convulses his body and he jumps back a few paces brushing his hand over his twitching face and muttering "saala maachhi " , which roughly translated in Bengali is "bloody flies" .
Quite a revelation . If not flies , then coloured mosquitoes in a swarm on the road instead of over one's head or even bees . Disarming , accurate and intuitive , is Pagla Kanai . I shudder to think how tormented he must have been ,his head swarming with buzzing insects all night .

Aftertaste

2010-10-22T02:49:00.008-06:00

After the maddening frenzy and exhilaration of Durga Pujo comes a lassitude and silence that is unnerving . Images remain . Of the next door maid's two children decked out in what is probably the only new attire their parents have managed to buy - hair slicked back , a red clip resplendent on the oiled hair , squeaking new red shoes , the octogenarian couple , the gent togged up in a fine muslin kurta and dhoti , firmly clutching his ivory handled walking stick , kept for occasions such as this , while his wife wears a flamboyant red bordered dhakai with a thousand bootis in red and brilliant green and Rohan with a pair of red boots which he is reluctant to take off and Tani with her two pairs of ear studs .The spotlight falling on the Durga image . , the 108 pink lotuses and the stray white one which is kept aside ...On Dashami - the idol's brow smeared with sindoor , alone in the truck - taken back the way she came with her children , somewhat like being deported to and from a transit camp.

Shiuli , Sharat and Durga ( and a little bit of farmville )

2010-10-11T12:31:00.010-06:00

I have been playing farmville with an intensity bordering on obsession for the last one month . I have upgraded my farm , grown loads of crops - sometimes two in a day , planning the harvesting so that the plants do not wither . I have bought me a farmhouse and other buildings , housed baby animals , contributed to a school in Haiti and built me a pig pen , created multiple identities to be self sufficient in construction activities .Oh and I have also got mastery signs which shows that I grow certain premium crops . All of which denotes a certain feverish obsession as I have already said. Time to breathe now .

I have neglected my blog to the extent that my Indistats ranking has taken a plunge from a mean 77 to just pass 44 . Sad .

That said , this is the festive season . The most beautiful season called "sharat kaal" in Bengali , mystified to a thing of supreme beauty by Tagore in innumerable songs . The skies are a bright blue dotted with puffball clouds which suddenly darken ominously and end in a spatter of rain , only to become bright and sunny the next minute . There is a slight nip in the air at nights and the elusive evocative fragrance of chhatim blossoms .That is the magic of "sharat kaal ".

And this is also the time when Durga is worshipped . This is the time of agomoni -when Bengal waits for a young woman to return to her father's house with her brood for her annual visit .While she is worshipped as a victorious goddess , she is nevertheless the quintessential girl coming back to the bosom of her family for four days of loving before she is bid goodbye.The songs sung in anticipation of her visit , the agomoni songs, are poignant - hinting at the inevitable departure.

On a more mundane note there are traffic jams and hectic shopping , women dressed to the nines in their "south indians" at the mall and at the pavement stalls ,jostling each other to pick up , among all things , terracotta wall hangings , mobiles and doormats,plastic bins , pearlpet bottles .Shopping like there is no tomorrow .The magic of waiting , preparing , is palpable .

Driving past my childhood home on Sunday I wept . The garden is now a garage - there used to be a shiuli tree there and in the mornings , little white flowers with orange stems would pattern the grass like a carpet . My favourite pre -breakfast activity was to collect the flowers in my grandmother's wicker flower basket for puja , being careful not to touch any of the caterpillars that lived on and around the tree , shiuli trees being a favourite habitat of theirs .

There was the window where I curled up with my little sister and my grandmother watching the crowds on Shoshthi waiting for Baba to come home and take us all out .Now of course , none remain of that family except for my sister, who I am not sure shares my memories , and I .

Today I woke up at dawn . From my bedroom window , I could see the sky , now a dark misty grey .Etched against it was a row of glittering yellow lights on the roof of the South City towers , the builidng itself not visible , an absolutely mundane sight - but nevertheless a sight so magical in my half sleep state as to be almost part of a surrealistic dream ....

In Mumbai

2010-08-28T23:25:00.006-06:00

In Mumbai the colours of the sky are reflected in the angry gun metal of the sea as they crash against the buttresses . The sea around Haji Ali which normally sparkles iridescent with light in the afternoon is drab,dreary and grey , a colour repeated in the wings of the hundreds of pigeons wheeling above the trees further down .

a colour repeated in the wings of the hundreds of pigeons wheeling above the trees further down the road .

In Fort we eat lunch at Britannia on the ground floor of Wakefield House ( no not Weikfield). As there is a crowd we sit outside for about ten minutes, watching a TV crew from BBC doing the rounds . They speak Bengali - all of them . Inside we meet Mr Boman Kohinoor Irani pushing 90 , who seats us at a table and asks me where we are from .

He's a gallant old school gentleman and suggests we order the sali boti, dhansak , sweet rice and the berry pulao which we devour with gusto . He also wants us to order lime sodas to beat the Mumbai heat . Never mind that its actually very pleasant that afternoon . Later we eat chocolate mousse which is rather like Nutella - thick chocolate clogging your tongue rather than a light airy dessert .

Mr Irani loves us because we are from the land of Tagore , Santiniketan, Vivekananda and Netaji . He professes to hold Netaji in higher regard than he does Gandhi . He is also a devout anglophile and shows us a card from old Blighty with the Queen's picture and proudly declares her to be Queen of the whole world .

Myth has it that there used to be a live rooster on the counter . Now there is a cat lying supine and being stroked by a small child who hangs downwards from her father's arms . There are 20 kilo rice bags stacked on a window sill . The eating area on the mezzanine has sturdy 60s table fans tacked on to the balustrade to circulate air . The plaster has peeled off the ceiling , the rusted beams are exposed , the air downstairs is circulated by long stemmed ceiling fans and the wall clock , another antique tells the time .

On the Worli seaface , people sit on the broad parapet . Each has their own space , doing their own thing , entirely oblivious to the world .

Young people , a couple -arms wound around each others' waists , a couple of hijras sitting quietly for a change , munching something from a packet , maybe peanuts, three boys horsing around,two girls with their bags on the ledge y , a group of men , a dog with his ears straining back , four crows - all sitting companionably.

The entire palette is a drab grey - brown-black repeat, except for a woman in a brilliant pink sari ,loose hair and a pallu end which suddenly lifts in the breeze as she plays with an anklet and streams in a vivid pink pennant against the sky.

WORDLESS WEDNESDAYS

2010-08-24T21:29:00.002-06:00

WORDLESS WEDNESDAYS

2010-08-11T09:08:00.003-06:00

Of mists, vada pao and a walk in the clouds

2010-08-05T12:25:00.008-06:00

In the beginning there was the rain. The railway bridge over the Thane Creek connecting Vashi with the rest of Mumbai was draped in mists and rain . And through that grey haze so reminiscent of a Japanese painting rushed a bright yellow train .

Soon after the road turned into a river viewed through the wet window pane and then there were the lush green hills wet in the rain , the road a wet slick and thin waterfalls gushing down the sides of the hills .
And then walking into a cloud which bursts on you and drenches you with a five minute shower of heavy rain . You lean over a wide parapet to take in the advertsied breathtaking view of Sunset Point and all you get is a swirling soupy fog with misty vapours drifting upwards which is so strange and beautiful you forget about missing out on the view .
And while we are about it let us not forget the vada pao with flecks of ginger in the vada , a long green chilli and a green chutney which explodes in your mouth to be washed down with hot ginger tea and a nugget of Cooper's chocolate walnut fudge .And the bhuttas ( corn on the cob) in the rain .

You come back and go to sleep at night after partying till midnight and then wake up to see this . Truly magical !

A Chicken by any other Name - I

2010-07-26T11:53:00.007-06:00

Cooking chicken is pretty boring . Washing the pieces if you have bought it fresh takes the mickey out of me and by the time I have graduated to cooking it I have lost all interest and bunged it in the wok with some chopped onions and garlic and covered it and then praised the Lord when the children have eaten it . Not that I'm on the lookout for chicken recipes , mind you,but when one comes across something as uncomplicated and interesting as this one posted by my blogger pal Sandeepa , then one sits up and takes notice and goes out to buy some chicken breasts , nicely cleaned and trimmed of all fat and picks some tulsi leaves to substitute for the basil and lets rip. The result is not bad although I say so myself .

The Recipe - Giada's grilled chicken with basil dressing , tarted up a little by me

500 gm boneless chicken breasts

1/4 cup olive oil

freshly ground pepper

fennel seeds roasted and powdered - 1 1/2 tsp

salt

2tbsp lemon juice freshly squeezed

Whisk the marinade ingredients together and rub the mix into the chicken and reserve for about 2 hrs .

Blend two fistfuls of tulsi or if you are lucky,basil , along with a bunch of mint leaves and 2 chopped cloves of garlic .Add a tsp of lemon juice and some lemon zest along with a little salt and pepper to the blend .Whisk it thoroughly and start adding the olive oil till it is blended through and is a lovely translucent green .

Grill the chicken breasts or fry them in a nonstick pan . You wont need any oil . Douse with the basil - mint dressing and serve . I cooked the marinate through and used it as an additional sauce , not that anyone wanted it - the basil-mint concoction was so good .

Serve with a good crusty bread , boiled veggies tossed in a little butter and some mushrooms cooked with oregano and peppercorns .

Tulika Blogathon 4

2010-07-20T11:37:00.006-06:00

This is for the Tulika Blogathon 4 .

When we were small there were these six page books of "chhoras"or rhymes printed by a Bengali publisher . There were 3 or 4 volumes and they had a rhyme a page with very colourful and detailed illustrations. When I was a child I remember Ma and Thakuma reading out these rhymes When my older daughter was about a year old I was browsing through some books at a magazine stall when I chanced upon the books and promptly bought them to read out to her . My mother followed this up with “Chhorar Boi” a seminal collection of popular Bengali rhymes , with beautiful line drawings that have continued to enthrall children and grown ups alike through generations .

Khoka Ghumolo para jurolo

Borgi elo deshey

Bulbuli tey dhaan kheyechey khajna debo kishe

Dhaan furalo paan furalo
Khajna debi ki?
Aar kota din shobur koro
Roshun bunechi.

Like most old Bengali rhymes this was a direct hit at the Maratha marauders who terrorised Bengal at that time for revenue against the paddy harvests. The paddy was harvested , sold and the money hidden so that when the Maratha hordes , called “bargis” came the excuse was that the birds had destroyed the crops and the villagers had planted garlic which would take a relatively short time to be harvested . Whether the hordes murdered the Bengalis for their blatant lie or waited till the garlic was harvested for a meagre return,is lost to history .

The painting shows a mother rocking a baby to sleep on her lap - the khoka of the rhyme and there is a hazy dreamy background of marauding dacoits on horseback and fields of paddy being harvested .

Another one goes like this

Chaand uthechhey phool phutechhey

Kadam tolay ke

Haathi nacchhey ghora nachhey

Shonamonir biye

An elephant and a horse dance hoof to hoof in a grove of kadamba trees on a moonlit night , possible serenading Shonamoni who is getting married .

Khokababu jaye

Laal moja paaye

Boro boro didira sab unki mere chaaye

Khoka phirey na takaaye

It is ironic and predictably so , that Shonamunis or Ranis always got married or got their leg pulled because they could not cook “payesh” ( kheer / rice pudding ) or gazed admiringly at the brother(as in the rhyme above) - a chubby little boy in short dhoti, a red jacket and bright red socks and turban going off to war with a wooden sword and a scowl , thereby occupying a role that was secondary to the boy, small though he was . But given the time in which they were composed women did play second fiddle and therefore this condescension was to be expected.

The fact however , remains that generations of Bengali children have grown up listening to these rhymes which have stood the test of time and I can vouch for the fact that almost every Bengali parent has sung at least one or the other as a lullaby and most children can recite them pat from memory.

A popular sit down game we played as children was

Ikri mikri chaam chikri

Chaam kaatey Majumdar ,dheye elo damodar

Jagannath er haanri kunri, duware boshey chaal kaari

Chaal kaartey holo bela , bhaat khao shey dupur bela

Bhaatey porlo maachhi , kodal diye chaanchi ,

Kodaal holo bhonta , kha chhutorer maatha

We sat in a circle with our palms down on the floor and one person did the counting , going from finger to finger while chanting the rhyme . The finger where the rhyme ended was "out" and one had to fold up that finger .And so on it went ,till one person and one finger remained and that person won the game . There was no skill, no dexterity ,maybe a little cheating but wholly absorbing in a world where only the print media ruled supreme !

Roughly translated the rhyme hints at a a lot of activity wherein a Majumdar is cutting a skin off an animal , which if you go by the caste hierarchy strictly , is not his work and Damodar,therefore , rushes up to prevent him from doing it . The rice takes so long to be cleaned for the pot that afternoon has rolled by before they can eat . But there is further travail in store because there is a fly in the rice which has to be dug out with a spade . The spade gets blunt so intense is the ordeal of removing the fly and everyone collectively swears at the carpenter – now why ? I I have no idea ! But it is great fun to sing it out .

The fish we took to the Bride's house

2010-07-16T11:38:00.007-06:00

On the morning of the wedding , the fish seller brought the fish .Over 6 kilos on weight it was fat and full , glistening black graduating to a silver pink towards the belly .

Using sindoor the women drew a large dot between the staring dead eyes . They then drew a line upwards representing the sindoor in the parting of a new bride's hair . They fixed a faux goldround nose ring called a "nath" to the gawping mouth of the fish and a faux gold tikli along the line of the sindoor . Then they lovingly dusted it with red and gold powder and fixed a bit of filmy red gold gauze over the fish which looked bizarre but festive .

They laid it tenderly on a freshly washed green banana leaf which was placed on a red "kulo" once used by women to winnow out the unhusked rice and stones from rice before the days of cellophane packaging . A silver bowl of turmeric paste ground by three married women , blessed by the old, toothless fat priest and used by the groom first , was placed beside the fish . Along with an earthen bowl of mishti doi and woven bamboo trays with varieties of sandesh they left for the home of the new bride .

Since it was all rather informal , the two girls strayed to the terrace ,where they saw the fish being slapped around by a dark stocky man in a blue checked lungi . He then washed it clean under the running water and the sindoor flowed away like blood . The "nath" and "tikli" were kept aside carefully , perhaps as gifts for the man's wife.

Washed clean and white the fish lay compliant , yielding even , on the green leaf while the man, whistling , hiked up his lungi , selected a big blade for the "bnonti" and unceremoniously chopped off , first the head and then the tail before homing in on the fish proper .

The younger girl on seeing her beautiful fish desecrated in this manner , fled in tears down the stairs , while the older one , more astute,thought in terms of what a good lunch the fish would make .

Green Thumbs

2010-07-08T13:09:00.001-06:00

The house she grew up in was a tall 3 storeyed yellow building bordering a park . The windows had green shutters and the front door which faced the east had a beautiful stained glass panel which caught the sunlight in the morning and painted beautiful patterns on the marble floor . There was a doughty old grandmother who ruled the house and a beautiful tall dark mother with long hair . There was a doll burnt in a bonfire of foreign vanitie, together with frilly fancy frocks ,by the father who suddenly went swadeshi .

All this suddenly vanished when the father took a bad business decision and the family was suddenly doomed - two children dying , the mother too, after a while from tuberculosis and the rest of the children parcelled out to relatives , as the father also passed away .

Now , in all of this , the girl had no chance to find out what affinity she had with nature and the earth especially .That came later , when she married the Man she went to college with, finding love and security and the comfort of a home she could call her own .

The first houses they lived in were apartments and it was only when she went to Jamshedpur , that the idea of a potted garden struck her and she discovered that she had green thumbs . The collection of plants then travelled with her wherever they went in the course of duty - the little cactus plant with hard thin bony stems and the loveliest tiny red flowers , the crotons , the curry leaf plant , the strange plant with the bloated stem sprouting deep pink flowers, the roses which bloomed in an almost rabid frenzy ,the bonsai bodhi ,innumerable plants and cuttings .

For some time when the Man was very very sick and there was tumult raging in the small secure haven she had created , with her husband and the two girls ,she put them on the back burner and when the Man died and she relocated to a small University town , she planted this cactus .

It blooms once a year in the height of summer and has a faint lingering fragrance that stays even when the flower has dried . There is something ephemeral and ghostly about its almost mystic beauty , its sudden appearance and its sudden departure .

( Photos - courtesy Manjari Chakravarti)

She has been gone these long ten years ,a time that seems to be so compressed as to be almost yesterday . Sometimes one turns to the phone to ask her a question or seek a frame of reference and then the sudden pang of realisation that she is not there any more ,is so sharp and sudden that it is almost like a physical pain , so pure is the agony .

And then suddenly something like this comes . It is physical - this feeling that she is reaching out to comfort and reassure and then one realises that this is the hardest thing to endure .

What it takes to beat a stereotype ..

2010-07-06T11:58:00.005-06:00

Been tagged by Dipali and Ceekay to note down things which show the shades of Yang in me . I am guilty of not having been a tomboy in my shadowy childhood and youth - I never climbed a tree , nor could I learn how to cycle - I fell off 15 times in one afternoon - I could drive, but Ashis certified me unfit to drive because of his personal neuroses which seemed to magnify every time I took the wheel . I could go on and on ....

But no I am not an "abala nari" and I have always believed in personal freedom, spaces and the ability to do things on my own . I also do not believe in gender stereotypes and-firmly believe that each person has to end up being able to carry out functional jobs without depending on others .

I do not differentiate between blue and pink and both my girls have worn both shades happily when they were infants .

However -

I love to whistle and do it quite well
I take very long strides when I walk . I have never minced or sashayed
I can change a fuse and have done it often when I lived in the hostel
I love gizmos and I am the one who connects new electronic gadgets and gets them working , reads the literature and understands the working and can actually get a screwdriver to work without being all thumbs about it .
For a long time I have been a lone woman in a male dominant office and juniors often call me "sir"
I have no problems with travelling alone , staying in strange places on my own and moving around on my own in a strange place .
I DO NOT NEED anyone to chaperone me around anywhere ( read I don't need AG as a permanent escort ) and am happy when left to my own devices .
I can change light bulbs , provided that they are not too high up . When the drawing room bulb blacks out , I climb on to the window sill , reach up and change it
I move the furniture around when it is required and do not recall AG ever condescending to help me . Anyway I would rather have him out of the way when I get around to doing such things .
I believe in wearing out a pair of sandals/slippers / shoes before starting on another and cannot be bothered to co ordinate my outfits( not that I look bad ) . In fact the day I co ordinate, my colleagues' collective jaw drops .
I forgot to add that I often swear like a stevedore on shore leave which prompts my friends ( including Dipali ) and family to say "Language , Ruma " !

I am sorry I do not have a son because I would have ensured that he cook, serve, sew a button , wash the dishes and so on and so forth and generally make himself useful around the house . While I am supposed to tag people I will just leave it as an open option as I am sure others would have similar stories - so do examine yourselves and hold forth !

Of Crabs and chocolate cake

2010-06-27T01:09:00.009-06:00

Like the rest of the week my weekends are also compartmentalised into various matters that I cannot fit into my weekday schedules . Saturdays are for shopping , having lazy lunches with families or friends , taking the girls out on long drives , favouring the neighbourhood Barista or browsing in a bookstore .

Sundays however are reserved for cooking , watching a DVD in the afternoon whilst eating salted jamuns and a lazy evening thereafter .
Sunday mornings are spent worrying about when and with what AG is going to turn up with from the market . .On steamy summer mornings when the humidity hits 95 and the temperature maxes at 42 he is likely to come back with a kilo of shrimps which need deveining , tiny fish called mourala which need cleaning and all this at 1130 which gives us a scant 2 hours to clean up and cook lunch. The man is good - he stocks the freezer himself , with the fish - the calculations of which fish on which day just pass me by .

Last Sunday was Crab Sunday . Delectable little meaty softshell crabs .cooked to perfection in a gravy of garlic-onion-ginger-cumin -chilli masala .Eaten with steamed rice - it's pure heaven .

Bengali Crab Curry

500 gms softshell crabs, cleaned and in their shell

Onion,garlic,ginger - pureed

1 medium onion chopped

Turmeric/Cumin powder - 2 tsps each and chili powder - 1 tsp or to taste

Salt

Mustard Oil

Green chillies - slit

Potatoes - cubed small

In a wok heat the oil and fry the onions till translucent . Fry the onion ginger garlic paste and add the dry spices and salt . Add a little water and fry till the oil floats on top . Add the diced potatoes and the crab legs and cook till tender .

Place the crabs over the potaoes and spoon gravy over them . Cover and steam for about 15 minutes or till the crabs are cooked through . Remove and serve with steamed rice and a cucumber,tomato,onion salad

Sometimes ,Sundays are bake days when I cook standard favourites or pick up something from the net or friends . The cinnamon chocolate bundt was discovered by Itchy and passed on to us . What can I say ? It was soft and moist because of the butter -oil combination in equal ratio and the yogurt which went into it along with the cinnamon powder .

The cake was greeted happily by Tani but Srin , being more of a conservative and not given to culinary experiments with her favourite cakes wrinkled her nose .

Plano,Texas

2010-06-23T07:30:00.001-06:00

Will Plano Texas please stand up and identify itself ( for want of a better pronoun)

The Lotus Bakery on the Pemayangtse Road

2010-06-18T22:29:00.010-06:00

If you are going to Pemayangtse from Pelling , you find the Lotus Bakery on the left of the road . A ramshackle hut ,patched with tarpaulin , woven reed sheets with industrial ovens behind the counter ,it houses the most amazing bakery .

Run by the Muyal Liang trust , the proceeds from the bakery are used to provide free education to the children of Sikkim . In Sikkim there is a tremendous emphasis on education and throughout the day one comes across groups of children either going to or coming back from school .

You have a choice of alfresco or indoors . The cafe has a cement floor and a short plastered wall topped with a bamboo frame , set with square uncurtained windows through which sunlight streams in . The walls are a patchwork of yellow and blue tarpaulin and plastic and sheets woven out bamboo. You wait at a rickety wooden table on blue plastic stools and breathe in the warm yeasty , cinammony , chocolatey smell of baking ,

while the girls rush around getting the tea ready. The tea is not important , the food is .

But nevertheless you order lemon tea

Staffed by a set of young girls and one man , the bakery serves the most delicious apple rolls , yeasty bread , Danish pastries , cinnamon rolls , apple pie with the thinnest flakiest crust imaginable ,chocolate sponge , buttery biscuits studded with nuts and raisins and cream rolls and buns oozing fresh cream . lemon tarts with the soft, fresh lemon butter - delectable ! I have no pictures of the food because it went down so fast !

And if you are lucky the fat tabby who lives off the fat of the cafe , literally , might come and sit at your feet , hoping for a few crumbs from the table !

Of Snobs,yobbos and the Grammar Mafioso

2010-06-09T20:25:00.007-06:00

Sue is hosting a blogathon on the correct use of the English language . I have studied in a convent school run by the Carmelite nuns . I was pulled up sharply by Sr Kochu Therese in class VI for using the word "throng" in an essay - she said there was no such word . I can happily say that apart from the rudiments of English grammar the various schools I went to ,did little to teach me the Queen's English .

However , they did impart to me the basics of English as she is spoke - in India ,and which I sharpened and honed over a period of time by extensive reading and writing .

The correct usage of any language comes with reading the language , writing and speaking it and ,in short , practicing it . Therefore it appears to be morally wrong to expect people who have never read literature extensively or written anything beyond a CV , or answered a question paper with answers directly from a tutorial or notes ,to write a sentence using proper syntax or know whether they have split an infinitive or used an adverb incorrectly.

So, there is a certain piquancy when a man applies for leave saying "I am birthed a baby so I am not attending office and craving leave and your blessings " or when someone does a straight translation from Bengali and invites someone to a neighbourhood function saying " We will have a good time , so come spread your legs and enjoy" or the very terse and succinct "Why so such?".And then of course there is the ubiquitous "My sister and me" and I am not even splitting hairs on who combed their hairs .

In school we were taught never to start a sentence with "and" and "because".But I live for when a smart alec says "As because" - it sounds so complete and sums up the situation .

And no I am not tired of these phrases - my inner Wren and Martined being does not want to reach out and slap the offenders into usigng English correctly and no I am not even going into Malapropisms .I may cringe when the going gets very tough and sigh and then enjoy it .

"As because" it is vernacular Indian speaking through the Queen's English , peppering it with quaint phrases , rounding off with the correct sensibility if not the correct language , infusing it with a regional touch , keeping one on one's toes constantly to decipher and decode as to what the actual meaning might be . It is like adding lime, pepper , chopped coriander and yes , even chillies to a prosaic language that we hold on to desperately as the last vestige of the British Raj without appreciating the regional context !

A taste of heaven

2010-06-08T12:43:00.001-06:00

A week well spent in one of the most beautiful places - Sikkim .

Books make a difference !

2010-05-26T11:21:00.005-06:00

Thanks Dipali , for your post which inspired this return from a fairly long hiatus from blogging - http://dipalitaneja.blogspot.com/2010/05/books-make-difference.html

My earliest memory of books is the ten volume set of Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopaedia set to me by my uncle from London . I remember poring over volume after volume , first spelling the words and trying to make sense because my mother couldnt spare the time to read to me as much as I wanted her to do , and then I started to read . very suddenly . I would spend entire afternoons on a bench in the back verandah crouching over volume after volume .

And the world opened up . Names of countries and their flags , art treasures , poetry which I could not make sense of and stories - fables, legends , myths , history - all marched through in a colourful parade . This was when I was four . There were other books too - the Ladybird series and Ivanhoe - a graphic novel , the Phantom comics , the fairy tales of Hans Anderson and the Brothers Grimm .

Jamshedpur was limited in its stock of books so whenever my father had a business trip he would come back with a book for me , a habit which continued till he died.

In Kolkata , slightly older, I discovered Enid Blyton and the envied world of the girls of St Clare's and Malory Towers , Angela Brazil and Elinor M Brent Dyer ,

Books were , however, rationed . I still remember agonising over a choice I had to make over two Angela Brazils because I was allowed to buy only one . That was Baba teaching us restraint. Ma on the other hand thought nothing of buying me a book on her way back fro her shopping trips .

I was lucky however that neither of my parents monitored my reading habits or banned any books . The library was ours to raid . And how I read - Ian Fleming , Dostoevsky , Pearl Buck , Agatha Christie , PG Wodehouse , Somerset Maugham, Maupassant , poetry , Chekhov , Hardy , comics ,Leslie Charteris ,Laurens Van der Post , volumes of the Readers Digest Condensed series and like many children of my generation the glorious World Atlas ,books from the local lending library "Mullick's ( the man who ran it - Mamu still runs one on Freeschool Street).

My father often read aloud to us - , sharing something he had liked in some book - and I often draw a parallel to this with Ashis who reads out to us in a similar manner . Like my parents we have no embargoes on "suitable reading'for the children who have the run of all our books .

The Flame Trees of Thika by Elspeth Huxley , The Stars look down by AJ Cronin ,The Winthrop Woman , Mother and Peony both by pearl S Buck dominated the better part of my adolescence along with Ian Fleming and Leon Uris and Ayn Rand .

The Russian classics were great favourites especially War and Peace and Anna Karenina - they had to be read very carefully for the content , the vast panoramic canvas and the innumerable characters . My love for the English classics was fuelled by Bronte's Wuthering Heights , Jane Eyre and Austen's Emma and all of Hardy.

Enduring loves have been James Michener's The Drifters , Leon Uris'Armageddon which shows both sides of the war , Sophie's Choice , Kipling's Kim , To Kill a Mockingbird,Anna Karenina , The Razor's Edge. The snows of Kilimanjaro and Dr Zhivago. These are books to which I return again and again and possessions I treasure the most . To me not being able to read would probably drive me to suicide !

Having said this it is very difficult to say which book had the deepest impact on my life since different books had different effects on me at different times in my life . I would read a book, think about it , revisit it , imagine the characters and so on . Therefore I like to think that the books I treasure most have had a collective impact on my life, my thinking , and the person I am .

BlogHer and BookRenter, a company that rents textbooks to college students, have joined forces because we know that books make a difference.

From May 3-28, together we are working to make a difference in children's lives by generating new books for children who need them most -- via the nonprofit organization First Book.

Voyeur

2010-05-03T12:07:00.006-06:00

Sometimes I take pictures .Like the one of the two men probably handcart or rickshaw pullers , taking a ride in a rick with tattered patched cloth hanging down the back almost replicating them in a way .Or the two women perched on scooters behind their men- two of a kind,the man pushing the girl against a car - unfortunately our car took off before I could see the end of it ..,the container at night , the road vanishing into nothingness, children in the classroom at my old school and crowds waiting to join the Muharram procession.

Most times I don't - take a picture,I mean .But wish I did . The little boy on guard at his older brother's pushcart laden with fruit, sound asleep with his head resting on the sill of the cart , the small boy selling balloons to more privileged ones just outside the mall,the utterly mad man with his Rastafarian locks, the kids call Bob Marley,directing traffic with much aplomb ,clad in a greatcoat in the stifling heat ...

A piece of fish

2010-04-26T12:08:00.001-06:00

She had spent most of her young life in and around the kitchens of the huge house where her mother , a tall ,spare, stern Brahmin widow, a distant cousin of the master of the house , was the cook . The girl's hair was cropped close to her head and her attire was a homespun white sari . She had been married when very small, to someone who died shortly afterwards - she herself had no recollection of the man she had married ,but the fact that it was short lived was something that was drummed into her every waking minute of the last six years - which was now an eternity stretching forward into a dark, fathomless pit .

Not for her the luxury of food or clothes or even the simple pleasures of rides in the fairs or the colourful bangles and red ribbons , a colourful striped handloom sari ,or even the sweets that the other children enjoyed .

Abstinence and austerity - these two words ruled her life . These and hard work -to keep her soul and body clean and pure . Wash the vegetables which the maids cut , pick the leaves of the sag and wash it carefully, clean the rice and soak it , run errands for her mother. The food she ate was also dictated by the almanac .Special diets on certain days which she shared with her mother .

Cooking held no fascination for her . When her mother cooked fish it was torture . First the cleaning and gutting ,then the slicing of the fish into pieces with the bnonti ,applying turmeric and salt and then frying in hot smoking mustard oil in the huge iron korai (wok). The smell of frying fish was so evocative - she salivated , watching round eyed as the fried fish was deposited on a plate - rui from the master's ponds in the village, crisp and brown on the outside , the flesh ,pale pink and white .She imagined eating it , her eyes closing and toes curling in orgasmic delight at the thought .

She wondered that her mother who never ate fish could cook so well that the master would have none but her cook his meals .

The huge platter with the fried fish was inviting . While her mother prepared the spices for the gravy , the girl looked around the dark ,smoky room now redolent with the smell of fried fish .There was one maid at the far corner slicing brinjals into roundels for frying . Her skinny hand shot out and curled around a small piece of fish .

Panting with the thrill of the illicit , she quickly rushed out . Finding the dark corner she was looking for ,on the other side of the huge tank in the courtyard, she ate the fish , hurriedly but with relish , watchful eyes darting here and there . It tasted like manna , it was exciting , it was glorious . She closed her eyes as she licked her fingers and ran her tongue around her teeth and it was then that the fear overtook her and the sheer magnitude of her act overtook her .

Now she was sobbing with fear and loathing for herself , terrified that someone would smell the fish on her breath and hands and imagining the recriminations and other consequences that would follow .

Could she vomit ? So that the sin could also be expunged along with the fish expelled from her system ? She ran towards the toilets , slipping in her hurry on the wet, mossy cement . Nothing came up although she retched and retched . Now she had to have a bath because she had used the toilets . So she bathed , scrubbing at her tongue and mouth and her body so that the smells she imagined were no more . She rushed to the small room she shared with her mother and changed out of the wet homespun white sari she wore .Looking through her mother's pandaan she picked up a betel leaf chewed on it , her heart thudding violently .Having chewed the leaf she swallowed it and closed her eyes .

Creeping out of the room she made her way to the kitchen where her mother was covering the pan which held the fish curry .She looked up at her , eyes expressionless . The girl crouched over the peeled potatoes scrubbing them in the clean water .

The fish that Surama's mother cooked was rui , a type of carp. It is a sweet water fish and is normally cooked in light thin gravies or in a rich onion ginger based gravy called the kalia .

Ingredients for Rui maachher kalia

Rui fish - 8 pieces preferably from a fish weighing around 2 kilos
2 medium sized Potatoes - halved around the middle
Mustard oil

Turmeric - 1 tsp
Coriander ,chilli & Cumin powder - 1 tsp each
Whole Garam masala - 2 sticks of cinnamon,three cloves, 2 small cardamoms
1 medium sized onion and an inch of ginger - ground to a paste
1 bay leaf
Whole green chillies
Ghee or clarified butter - 1 teaspoon
Tomato puree 2 tsp

After marinating the fish in a turmeric - salt mix , fry the pieces till brown in mustard oil

Fry the potatoes and keep aside

Discard the oil and pour in 2 tbsp of fresh mustard oil . Heat till smoking and put in the bay leaf and whole spice .

Combine the onion-ginger paste with the dry spices and add the tomato puree . Cook on a low heat till the oil comes to the surface . At this stage add the fried potatoes with a cupful of water

Cook till the potatoes are soft .

Add the fish pieces and cover .Add salt and a pinch of sugar

Since the fish has been fried over high heat , it is already cooked . Cooking it in the gravy only enables it to soak up the flavours of the spices .

Before removing it from the heat add a teaspoon of ghee and serve with hot steamed rice .

This post is my contribution to the Food Fiction event hosted by Aquadaze - Of Chalks and Chopsticks.

The last of Sushama's brood

2010-04-07T08:53:00.000-06:00

In the early pictures , she is solemn , sulky even , shrinking perhaps from the more glamorous looks of her older sister or the two brothers , one older , the other a little younger but petted , being then , the youngest . Two more that lived were to follow . The expression remained the same persisting through time - worried , anxious and solemn , a sign of the pressures brought on by looking after a family when her father died . Her mother , delicate and coddled with her nose forever in books ,was not much good at budgeting and shopping and much less at managing mischievious five and seven year olds .

In times of stress and trouble her three brothers turned to Mili for advice , often having to face the wrath of their wives .Despite this , her sisters in law loved her .I know my mother did . She was our support when my father died .It was she who gave me emotional support when I was alone in Calcutta and it was she who met Ashis first when we were going steady .

In all her activities related to her family she was joined by and supported by her husband - a student of Freud and Jung , who was the sweetest , most lovable person I ever knew their love for my father and his family being unconditional .

She was tall and elegant with a long patrician nose , a clear skin,long artistic fingers and a superb sense of style that we tried to emulate .

In later years , after her husband's death ,she was to emigrate to Canada which she had left reluctantly in the late 60s . Later ,she had Alzheimer's disease following a stroke which left her semi paralysed . Often she would strugle to get up and put on her trainers to go the Park next to her house because her husband was waiting for her there .

In moments of lucidity she would remember her family. Her voice once firm and authoritative was quavering and high pitched , ghostly even.She would ask after my mother now gone for the last 9 years .

To speak to her was emotionally unnerving because this was not the person I said goodbye to when she left excitedly for Canada in the early 90s . She died in late December 2009 , going peacefully with her daughter beside her , in the hospital .

With her went the last of Sushama's brood - the stormy Shefali doomed to die very young , Amala who was to die in a lunatic asylum because she was psychotic and it was dangerous to keep her in the house , Mukul, my father, ravaged by disease dying at a ridiculously young age , Bulbul the eldest who followed my father soon after , dying of cancer , Prabhat the glamorous and handsome brother we rarely saw , also dying of cancer and last of all Kamala , the bulwark against all adversities true to herself , dying last .

Random

2010-03-12T13:25:00.007-06:00

To break the monotony of everyday cooking I swished some olive oil in the large non stick skillet , dropped a few fennel seeds, a crushed garlic pod and a quartered onion, bunged in the chicken, splashed some red wine vinegar - would have sprinkled pepper , had Tani not screamed "No pepper" , put the lid on and waited . The onions were soft and creamy, the chicken nicely browned and shot through with the flavour of fennel and garlic and the ciabatta was just right with it . Missed the Sula blanc though .And forgot the camera .

Some time in January a niece got married . The reception which brought a lot of Gangulys together was at a grand old house in Bhowanipur , which area by the way is peppered with such houses built at the turn of the century by barristers , doctors etc .They are mostly pretty baroque and a mish mash of various styles .

This house had a grand porte cochere ,turrets at odd angles , some beautiful furniture , a lovely door with stained glass panels and a lawn with a tent of lights .

The stained glass panelled door. If you look carefully you can see a manual lift beyond the passage

The light tent
The house through the lights
Reflections on a glass topped table

Idylls

2010-03-04T10:11:00.006-06:00

For the last 15 days I have led a fairly domesticated life , going to office only for a couple of hours in the afternoon to avoid any glitches which have a nasty way of appearing whenever one is on leave . The mornings were spent on my third floor which has a pristine floor and my late mother's furniture scattered around - things that I am not permitted by her to cut up or give away . Some I would not - but one I would happily dissect and put to better use . Anyway the third floor has no doors and has windows running around three sides letting in light and air .

It also helps to put in a distance between us and the cacophony of the three maids going about their chores in the lower floor , interspersed with shrill calls from BRG who doesnt believe in the adage of letting sleeping dogs lie and is on a permanent watchout for Corners That Did Not Get Swept and sundry other issues which involve a lot of cross floor yelling , clarification and validation.

By the time we have finished our work ,the sun has shifted from the east leftwards and we have been disturbed by the light filtering through the sheer handloom curtains bought from Alcha ,a quaint treasure trove of textiles and craft in Santiniketan, has been alternately magenta , grass green, aqua blue ,turmeric yellow and a startling crimson , pooling on the white floor . We have also been distracted by the birds – bulbuls , doels ,mynahs , sparrows, the ubiquitous crows , shaaliks, munias and one baby eagle .

More on Alcha . It operates out of a bungalow in Santiniketan and stocks the most beautiful sheer curtains , bags , saris , kheshes , kanthas and pottery – all very reasonably priced . You cross through to the café on the other side down a crazy paved drive . There is a small lending library with a scatter of thrillers and some serious reading . The chocolates are not bad , the parathas are huge and they used to make nice bread pakoras at one time . If you are going to Santiniketan this has to be a must see/must buy on your agenda .

I have read like a maniac , having gone through a Ken Follet – Eye of the Needle , I was grabbed by this urge to read some more Follet so off I trotted to the South City Starmark and bought Jackdaws, World Without End and Code 10 . Having promptly finished them , I trotted off once more and bought 2 novels by Naguib Mahfouz – Thebes and Radubis . Read them through and balanced the last 2 with Candace Bushnell – Lipstick Jungle and One Fifth Avenue . Oh and Victoria and Abdul , The Old Patagonian Express and The Constant Gardner.

Which brings me to a book reading by Paul Theroux (who is a favourite) and my older daughter who in a burst of filial love woke up at an ungodly hour and sprinted halfway across the city to get my copy of The Great Indian Railway Bazaar signed by him . Incidentally she also asked him why he had been so cussed about India in the book . I am not sure what answer he gave her .

The flip side has been the amount of food I have eaten every afternoon at lunch . My cook who does not have the opportunity to feed me very often has been very creative - making karai daal and alu posto , dhokaar dalna, khichuri made with moog daal , cauliflower and green peas,pabda and chitol fish ,kadhi pakora . I have also baked samosas, chops, cakes and biscuits .

The break has helped to declutter my brain , take things easy and de stress . Of course I know that this is too good to last , but while it does - what the heck I'm enjoying it .

And suddenly the rain...

2010-02-17T11:44:00.003-06:00

When we lived in Lucknow January was marked by cold sharp rain accompanied by a freezing wind that chilled the marrow in one's bones . December and most of cold January is a pleasant dream now that the weather has turned warmer in the daytime .

Yesterday Ashis and I were looking down from our second floor back window onto the small dusty patch with a few straggling evergreens we call our garden and moaning about how sad , dry and dusty the place looked - the leaves coated with a thick layer of brown dust . So much so that I made up my mind to hose them down when the Corporation water supply came in at 12 pm .

Of course I forgot . But then at night there was a sharp gust of wind and a spatter of rain which soon turned into a brisk shower . Caught unprepared I ran up and down closing windows and securing the bolts .

Today morning was a pleasant surprise . The leaves washed clean , the smell of wet earth and little mushrooms where the mango tree had once stood .

Happy Birthday !

2010-01-18T10:25:00.003-06:00

It was cold that winter too but global warming was an unknown word and we conserved neither water ,electricity nor any of the non renewable resources that we are so particular about now .

It was just plain cold as winters were supposed to be and you wrapped up warm and layered your clothes, wrapped mufflers, wore woollen caps and sunned your quilts mid November just so that you could use them in December .

And the night you decided to start on your outward journey was freezing cold - so much so that when I broke my waters at night after getting into bed , I was damp and anaesthesized with the utter frozenness of it .

And after a short labour when I held you slimy , wet and bedraggled - with green eyes that slanted upwards at me , your hair slicked back in an elfin curl and your little pointy ears - you looked like an elf baby as you curled against me .in my arms and I felt nothing could equal my delight ,wonder and marvel at having created you .

I love your sense of independence and individuality . I love your diffidence and your trick of hiding your true self at most times from others. I love that you read like a maniac. I love your short fuse that blows off with the least provocation. I love your honesty and your ability to love.I love the way you crinkle your eyes in the sunlight.

I love you the way you are .Happy Birthday !

With one foot in and refusing to fall...

2009-11-05T09:11:00.005-06:00

DG was diagnosed with cancer of the stomach three years ago. Post surgery he was fine until the tumour blocked his colon and the doctor said he could do nothing. For the last six months he has been in and out of hospitals . In the intervening periods he attended office , driving over six kilometres either way, in a desperate attempt to maintain a semblance of normalcy.

He ran away from hospital the day before the pujas started - on Panchami because he was afraid he would die over the Pujas in hospital- in an alien place without his family near him. People yelled at him , scared that he would indeed die and spoil the festivities for them . Back home he went to the market with his wife and stocked up on food . Mind you, he could not eat and had passed neither urine nor stool for around 15 days .But he was desperate to be with his wife and ten year old daughter . I ask you, was it a bad thing ?

The doctor told him he had just a week to live . He lay in bed and drank cold water with sugar candy in it and waited for death to claim him . The water trickled past his mouth and gagging he threw it up. His wife gave him cold thin soups which, too , he threw up . He tried the water and sugar candy again and and found that if the solution was thin enough it would trickle past whatever blocked his throat and go somewhere into his wasted body .

The apartment which he bought recently ,has three bedrooms and a huge living area . Restless he totters from room to room trying to find a way out of the terrible agony he is doomed to live with, till death- who insists on playing truant now, claims him - the red plastic bucket into which he throws up, a constant companion.

He likes the bedroom facing the south - there are a couple of mango trees where birds start their songs before the sun rises . The red curtains which screen the window reminds him of the evening he took his wife and child shopping to New Market. So many memories bubble and froth like the vomit that inches out of his mouth and sometimes shoots out in a trajectory .He tells me he does not know what sins he has committed - perhaps it is karma .

For the time being he is folded up on the bed , his six foot frame like a paper cutout , entirely one dimensional, groaning continuously, refusing to go to hospital, waiting to die , a man without food and water , with the cancer having spread to every conceivable part of his body.

It is a macabre scenario, this waiting for merciful death to release him , that has played for the last 30 days now- the doctor's prophesy of 7 days having stretched this far.

He refuses the comfort of any medicine to alleviate his pain , he refuses saline and will not have any more needles stuck into what remains of his body .Even the doctors are baffled and irritated at his refusal to die . He does not want to talk much, even less to listen.

There is a wife - protected and sheltered for so long by her husband that till a month ago she was unaware of how to go about writing a cheque .

There is a little girl, tall for her age . She flits in and out of the living room , into her father's room and back again She switches on the television, pirouettes and demands to know whether she is looking nice in her white chikan kurta and salwar. She settles down at the dining table with paper and pastels , seemingly unconcerned .

Suddenly she turns and says to us conversationally " I told Ma to wear all the nice sarees which Baba had bought for her for the pujas. He's going to die soon you know . Then we shall all have to wear only white clothes."

Of Old Houses and Ma Durga

2009-10-09T00:25:00.001-06:00

My grandmother's father's house was in Baghbazar - in the lane opposite Girish Ghosh's house in Bosepara lane. When I was a child , Sunday mornings meant snuggling up to my Thakuma and listen to her stories of Durga Puja in her father's house , where a bull used to be sacrificed , the beam in the aatur ghor or the maternity room , where a cobra swung itself down , poised over the cot where the infant Bulbul , my eldest uncle lay , the house opposite, where Sister Nivedita used to stay , the gardens full of fragrant flowers which the acolytes used to pluck for the mornings devtions . In a corner of the garden they threw the flowers from the evening worship which my aunt Mili used to want to pick up - because they were still fresh and smelt beautiful. This year my cousin came - she was full of stories gleaned from her mother and remembrances of stories Thakuma had told her and we went in search of the house .

We had no clues except the name and repetitions of that name were pleanty , matching with my grandmother's maiden name - and we were trapped - in the narrow alleys , houses marched tall and old, huge Follies , with the stray apartment house thrown in . Time actually stood still here , talking incessantly of a time gone by .

An open door led into a paved courtyard with verandahs lining it,

the spire of a temple rose , where the lane turned into another -

Such follies they built in the olden days -a house with the most intricate wrought iron verandahs and lead paned gothic windows and across the lane - hugely majestic;

a verandah in a dilapidated house with beautiful wrought iron banisters ,

huge trees that must have stood there for years on end .And the ferry ghat ..

The pujas came early this year and it is just now that the clouds are laundered white and fluffy and the sky an impossible blue . The rain god however was not too mean and we had our share of the good times ...

Sexist stances

2009-07-17T21:25:00.008-06:00

This is what The Telegraph has to offer this morning as a derogatory comment on the state of the declining law and order situation in West Bengal .

Although there is a disclaimer below the picture , apart from the political scenario in West Bengal which actually prompted the piece as well as the "haha" photograph ,I wonder what exactly the paper wants to convey - that women are indecisive ? Or inefficient perhaps ? That to take command of a situation you have to hitch up your jockstraps, light a Marlboro and ride off barking orders left and right and lay about you with a cudgel if they are not followed ?That only a man , by default , can be the ruling faction ?

And then , by the law of deduction, if a man cannot do all these things , put him in women's clothes , slip a few bangles on his wrists and make a mockery , not of the man actually, but of all womankind in general ? By de categorising him, in effect ?

And then they slip this in the Metro section of the paper and call it role reversal .....

(photographs downloaded from The Telegraph)

Vignettes of a summer afternoon

2009-06-26T11:55:00.008-06:00

When I swivel my chair around I can see the Magnum Opus of Realty rearing its manicured head skywards against a backdrop of relentless afternoon sky . Lower down across the lane is an apartment house . Tier upon tier of verandahs with laundry waving lazily in the sunshine - crisp white sheets and pillowcases drying in the sun are so evocative .

And then there are the curtains at the window there , they billow with a sudden gust of breeze and I can see a pair of long bare legs on the bed . And then a man comes up and closes the window and I can almost hear the hum of the air conditioner and feel the room going smoky with passion and cool by turn and suddenly I feel late afternoon-drowsy .

If I stand and look down at the road ,I can see the children returning home from school , bags hanging off their shoulders , dragging their feet in the sand piled up in the corner there , swinging a bottle at a school chum , the other girl ducking and running and then there's a little chase before they quieten down and continue walking home wards .

Across the road the richkshawpullers have put up a small roadside shrine where they are now playing very suggestive Bhojpuri songs about bhabhis and devars . I hum along a little under my breath , the tune is so staccato and catchy. One rickshaw puller doubles up his lungi and does a little dance, pelvic thrust , gyrate and bump

And the house across the road has broad window sills . The servant girl has curled up on the ledge , holding on to the window grille .And then I see to the left a Krishnachura tree , in a burst of orangey red flowers . . There is a house just beyond the branches loaded with red flowers - a white house with tall windows and a verandah shaded by the tree . And it is strange but there is A Man wearing shorts and a singlet , stretched out on an easy chair , legs propped on the verandah ledge , reading a book . The verandah looks cool and inviting . It is dark and shady and the man is drinking something in a glass and reading a book .

That is absolutely the last straw . How is a girl to work surrounded by the burgeoning voluptuousness of a summer afternoon ?

My cellphone rings . I pick it up . Its The Husband , of over 20 odd years , calling to say he will wait for just 5 minutes before he goes off . I slide open the window and there he is in the car grinning up at me from the road . I panic, switching off the computer , clearing my table , running to tell the boss I have to leave suddenly and will explain later . I pick up my bag , lock the door and am out with a minute to spare .

Suddenly it rains , a spatter of drops as I run across the road and duck into the car .

Playing hooky after absolutely ages has never been so full of joy !

2009-05-20T11:48:00.008-06:00

The Sunny One - tagged me for the Numbers tag

ONE life . So make the most of it .
TWO of us - AG and I .
THREE - ganging up against me - AG,Srin and Tani
FOUR of us making up my family

FIVE days of the week stretching interminably and then suddenly the weekend has come and gone

SIX pairs of assorted footwear. I need a baker's dozen.

SEVEN deadly sins - Wrath , that's me

EIGHT years since Ma died .
NINE months you carry a baby inside of you and whoosh suddenly she's all grown up and gone away
TEN minutes to do this tag - seven days to post it .

And then she did not tag me for the literature tag. but I like it so I'm doing it anyway !

1) What author do you own the most books by?
A toss up between PG Wodehouse and Agatha Christie

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
None that I know of - I'm careful that way

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?

No I have left my proper English speaking /writing days days far behind me . Now, I split my infinitives, use or drop articles indiscriminately, malaprop like mad . So.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?

John Galt - a teenage crush that has persisted

5) What book have you read the most times in your life?

Hemingway's The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?

Princess of the School by Angela Brazil

7) What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year?

I read a lot and enjoy whatever I read so its difficult to say , but well Dan Brown's Deception Point , was terrible .

8) What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?

Mimlu Sen's "Baulsphere" for the content and the sheer joy of living which the book projects .

9) If you could force everyone to read one book, what would it be?

I wouldnt force anyone to do anything .so nada. But I definitely would recommend Maugham's "Razor's Edge " and Hemingway's short stories .

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for literature?

Amitav Ghosh Each book is a reinforcement of his writing skills . My personal favourites are The Hungry Tide and Dancing In Cambodia.

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?

The Enchantress of Florence - it would make for a stupendous crossover blockbuster . Imagine the scope of the film - whimsy, sex, magic, the action panning across continents , incorporating emperors, doges, pirates ,sorcery in its huge plan . It would be filmed using the best of Hollywood and Bollywood and would be one fanatastic potboiler

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?

Hmm Uncle Fred in the Springtime .

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.

Nope , none .

14) What is the most lowbrow book you’ve read as an adult?

I read lowbrow books to relax and therefore any choices I make here would smack of partiality, so I'm not telling.

15) What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?

Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness .We had it in the Modern English syllabus for my PG studies - but I never did get around to understanding the angst of Kurtz . I never read the book nor did I answer any of the questions related to it .

16) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?

Shakespeare of course.

17) Austen or Eliot?

Eliot

18) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?

Bengali literature . I'm illiterate that way and ashamed of it .

19) What is your favorite novel?

The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh

20) Play?

Shaw's Pygmalion

21) Short story?

The Open Window by Saki

22) Work of non-fiction?
William Dalrymple's City of Djinns

23) Who is your favorite writer

Hemingway.

I am not tagging anyone . Please feel free to take it up !

Linking Moms around the world

2009-04-15T03:37:00.003-06:00

An interesting tag started by HBM and David found its way to me via HipHop Grandmom . Although I have been a mother for over 22 years now it was a little unnerving to list down 5 things about why I love being a Mom . I have loved motherhood most of the time but never gone gaga over it .

I worry constantly about not being a good mother or being responsive to my children's needs in time . I know I get hysterical if anything troubles them and I get mad when they run to AG when they are in deep trouble and not to me because he represents solid security to them . I am bipolar - swinging between deep discipline and fun .

But yes , overall , motherhood has seemed to make me a complete person in terms of being more perceptive to emotions and feelings , I am more intuitive .I have never for a minute regretted putting them foremost and everything else on the back burner . I have learnt to look beyond myself and taking their opinions into consideration . Today Srin is an adult and I have complete faith in her sensibilities . Tani still has a long way to go but her levels of intuitiveness amazes me It has also been important create a bonding between them and me and encourage openness .

My feelings about being a mother range from the mundane to the poetic , from cuddling the babies and singing "Hello Sunshine , hello leaf ,hello flower, hello , hello " - and having the satisfaction of huge baby eyes looking solemnly at me as I nattered on , to pressing my ear close to Tani's chest to check whether her breathing was vacillating wildly towards an asthmatic attack for the nth time , to despairing as to whether she would actually ever talk , to wiping cacky bums and mopping up puke, to holding hands and listening to teenage confidences and wiping tears and handholding over rough patches - and stifling homicidal instincts at the perpetrator of those tears .

Therefore ,to actually pin down 5 points is extremely difficult . But anyway here goes :-

Approaching delivery was scary but at the end of a short labour when I held Srin, smeared wet with my bodily fluids and shivering in the January cold , close to my breast ,she looked up at me with slanting eyes of a pure Byzantine mosaic green , like her father's and grabbed my thumb with slimy fingers , I knew a love that makes me cry every time I think of it. Tani was a miracle baby because I was desperate to have another child and she was conceived after a shattering miscarriage and I came close to losing her because of physical problems . So holding her a day after she was born reinforced those feelings all over again .
Being a mother is a constant challenge . Children are very intelligent and I love the battle of wits where we try to see how much Ma knows and how much slack she's likely to give .
Both my children are very different from each other .Over the years I have learnt to handle both of them in diverse ways without comparing them . Srin is a compulsive bookworm but Tani was always too lazy to go thru the entire book - it was always that much easier to read the beginning and end or listen to my stories. I have loved the constant stoking of my imagination that Tani prompted when she was smaller and I wish I had written them down! Srin has had it easy but everything Tani achieves is like a milestone . But somewhere there is a common strain that runs through both of them and it never ceases to amaze me as to how similar they actually are .
I love seeing the world through my children's eyes . It has kept up this yearning for constant learning in me . I love being around Srin and Tani's friends and they make me feel younger than my fifty years .
I love my unit of 4 as AG calls it . It was a struggle in the early years but now that we have grown up along the years - we have our understandings , our lessons in values and morals , our jokes and our nuttiness . I love it when the girls gang up against me - I love it when they pamper me because through all this I can sense that to these two girls I am a rock and I am never going to let them down.

The meme requires one to tag at least five other mommies . Just write a post of your own (5 things that you love about being a mom) and find someone to link to and tag - someone from your own country, if you like, but definitely someone from another country - and link back here and leave a comment.

I am tagging Onedia ,Mystic Margarita & Sandeepa , both in the USA, Susan in Kerala , and The Muser , also from the USA. Oh and I cannot resist adding Mrs T from the UK - would love to read her take on this .

Happy tagging ladies .

An Officer and a Gentleman

2009-04-09T10:45:00.003-06:00

He comes often to the office these days. Nothing is familiar,really- not the building , not the people.The organisation too has a tenuous link with the one he worked in and left almost 40 odd years ago, when he was much younger and sought after , both professionally and personally.

His English ,is impeccable, his eyes shine as I show him a tattered copy of a manual he had once authored . Very much the boxwallah he talks of the old Calcutta , of long lazy lunches at the club, the nightclubs on Prk Street . We respond to him , sometimes absently because we are running against time .

Someone once told me that he had a stormy long term relationship with a well known actress , famed as much for her beauty as for her acting skills . Now of course , his wife has the upper hand .

At times he forgets his address and telephone number. At such times , one of my colleagues puts him in a taxi, gives him the taxi fare , tells the driver his address and then calls up his house an hour later to make sure he has reached safely.

Last week he had to be driven home because he was disoriented , dishevelled , his clothes spattered with undefinable stains , a long , bloody cut on his arm, which has to be dressed by the office compounder , and which ,he said, his wife had inflicted because there was no money. Not very true because he lives in one of the posher areas and has a well run household.

Sometimes he talks about my father whom he knew. At times his voice , a refined low baritone becomes tremulous and he switches to calling me "madam"and has to be discouraged from doing so, gently and firmly.

Difficult to believe that this was a man once hated and feared by officers and workmen alike , responsible for closing down and dismantling a flourishing tin plant over a short weekend ,closing down the largest oil depot and the aviation stations in the east , because the foreign company he worked for , wanted to sell off its assets systematically ; floating a VRS scheme and finalising the list of employees who would have to opt for the scheme - and rendering jobless almost 500 personnel within a span of 2 months .

As a reward for carrying out his assignments he was sent for a long holiday to England so that the unions could purge him out of their systems .On return he resigned and joined elsewhere - the only safe option for him at that time

When he pulls himself straight and proudly says he was a covenanted officer in a British company , it is easy to see that he was once a handsome man - the bone structure, the hair, the blue eyes and the haughty patrician Brahmin aristocratic looks . It is easy to imagine him with his wife , the two daughters in identical white dresses with blue sashes , the lazy appreciative glances at the attractive women in office and the club , a courteous escort , a loving provider to his family, a passionate lover to the stormy mistress on the side .

At over eighty now , he should be on a verandah , sitting in an easy chair reading the papers or dozing off comfortably, basking in the company of his wife , his children and grandchildren but life it would seen has different plans for him.

Motion uninterrupted

2009-03-19T21:09:00.012-06:00

This is Zubin who stays downstairs. Caught him at his hyperactive best .

There's the door at the end of the passage downstairs leading out to the road ...

And there's Zubin ..pausing

contemplating....

Before he takes off . And how !

Made me quite dizzy just to look at him . But quite made my evening .

ROAD HOGS AND MCPs

2009-02-25T21:01:00.008-06:00

This new arrogant brashness and arrogance coupled with insolence scares me . I must admit that if I am walking and a bike or a car driven by a young man comes from the wrong side I do shout but not without a small niggling fear inside me of the person doubling back and ramming me from behind , just because I dared to call out when he was having fun.

My friend Kiran's post is all the more frightening because it happened in the confines of her apratment complex where her child was playing and which admittedly should offer more security than on the road , the perpetrator being a small time actor on the small screen with an unshaven face and a glare. The guy apparently doubled back , when Kiran protested and threatened to run down the child the next time , issuing a palpable threat and backing down only when Kiran's husband took him on , thereby proving

That he is a bully who likes to insult and take on people who cannot match him physically viz.. women and children.
That he is arrogant and insolent and intimidates women and children since he is supremely confident of scaring them off by cursing , swearing and yelling even when he is wrong - just because he is a man
That he has no finer feelings and hates apologising even when he is in the wrong , like almost running down a small child and not apologising
That he is a coward and is frightened when accosted by someone bigger than him or maybe just a man , like Kiran's husband

However he has to remember that other than being a public figure - (though I am not sure of his "bigness" since I do not follow TV serials and the plastic one dimensional characters that populate them ), he is also a human being , endowed I hope with a modicum of learning and I am sure ,values, of which love for one's fellow beings and compassion for all living things must surely figure.

And these values must surely add with them the rider of being aware of when one is wrong and when one is right and the discerning ability to adapt one's behaviour to the circumstances rather than behaving in a loutish, insolent manner as I understand from Kiran's post ? And together with it some road sense, proper driving skills and some ethics and manners .Is that too much to ask , Mr Gaurav Chopra ?

Although I have no knowledge about you ( although I did make an effort to google your name )isnt it unfortunate that we should meet like this, but as my other friend, Dipali says ,and I quote " but now for me your name will forever be associated with arrogance and cowardice."

In defence of a blogger

2009-01-31T10:49:00.007-06:00

I was shocked to read here , about how a blogger , Chyetanya Kunte was forced to withdraw a post he had written on Television reporting during 26/11. For those who watched the channels over that long drawn period , it was evident that all the channels were vying with each other ,to project their footage of the events as they unrolled ,with scant respect for the operational strategies or the feelings of people they cornered for quotes - people just rescued , or waiting for news from inside and even families who had lost loved ones . It was a relentless , hysterical pursuit for "that quote", "that angle", "that scoop". In the process , perhaps , what was sacrificed at times was common decency at respecting the right to grieve and mourn - in the righteous endeavour to hold up to the waiting public , all the right scoops at the right time - give the public, the vicarious satisfaction of having pried into private griefs and sorrows, at commando strategies and hand to hand battles , right there in the drawing room or bedroom wherever the television set was kept .

While TV coverage drew a lot of flak from various sources , what is mystifying here is why Chyet anya Kunte has been singled out for libel by NDTV for voicing an opinion a lot of people actually felt and expressed in various forums and over a period of time .

After all , Mr Kunte was expressing an opinion as he very well can under the constitutional rights for freedom of speech and expression ,afforded to him as an Indian citizen. It is sad that the media which endorses and upholds and fights fiercely to keep this freedom in place ,could stoop to garroting an individual for expressing an opinion .

It is at times like this that one wonders where we are heading . Is freedom of speech and expression , then limited only to the elite media ? And then, who is the deciding factor ?

Oh me, oh my ...

2009-01-10T05:04:00.000-06:00

A tag which took me about 3 evenings to put together and one to wrap up and post . OOf HHG just you wait till I get to Jamshedpur !

The rules are simple:

Answer the questions below and do a Google image search on your answer,pick a picture from the results on the first page, with minimal explanation.

1.The age you will be in your next birthday:

Image courtesy :www.51walden.org via google search : images
51 - is a long way to have come but apart from my long quick stride having slowed down a bit, the pain in my bum knee and my system's obvious reluctance to shake off the excess baggage it carries , I do not see myself having changed many of the inherent quirks that maybe I was born with.

2. A place you’d like to travel to- Kausani

Image courtesy : Uttarakhand tourism.com via google search

3. Your Favorite place: Jamshedpur , where I grew up .

My favourite house on Straight Mile Road

4. Your favorite food/drink: First flush Darjeeling tea brewed to capture that lingering flavour at the edge just before it catapults into bitterness ( mind you , it's a tough job ,brewing tea) Luchi and alu5. Your Favorite pet: My Tibetan spaniel Sammy who was with us from 1978 to 1988 . He was an absolute little rascal but so beautiful with his golden brown fur and his soulful eyes . I loved him so much never kept a pet after that .I haven't scanned any pics of the Pill , but here's one that looks just like him

Image courtesy http://www.petplanet.co.uk via google
6. Your favorite color combination: I

7. Your favorite piece of clothing: Handloom sarees

Image :courtesy www.indiaheritage.org/creative/clothing.htmvia google search:images
8. Your all time favorite song: "Eki labanyopurno prana " , a song by Tagore

9. Your favorite TV show:

Image courtesy :www.jammag.com via google search:images

10. Full name of your significant other: Ashis

11.The town in which you live : Kolkata

12. Your screen name/nickname: Eveslungs

13. Your First job:Put to cleaning the bookshelves for a pittance by my ma, over the long summer holidays

14. Your Dream job: Travel journo

15. Bad Habit you have: I swear I shall not buy another book until I have finished all the books I have bought ......

16. Your worst fear:
17. The one thing you’ll like to do before you die:

18. The first thing you’ll buy if you get $1,000,000: 2 tickets to Europe . Take a lien on our jobs and take a long tour of all the places we have read about /

Image courtesy -http://tourism.indiabizclub.com via google

Oof so that's done . I'm tagging The Muser, Ladelirante, Mini ,Abha and Anamika for this one .

Happy New Year !

2009-01-01T09:00:00.013-06:00

I thought we would spend last evening quietly at home with a glass of Sula blanc and the TV shows but we wound up on the 6 th floor terrace of a friend's house . The barbecued chicken was warm off the skewer , there was wine, South City mall painted the sky with colours from the rooftop and at night it seemed as if the whole city had let off fireworks - for all the world like showers of precious stones in a crystalline shimmer of cascading colour . I think we all heaved a sigh of relief that the year was behind us. It is a little special because of this little mite , BRG's great grand daughter , who was born last month .

We were not the only ones celebrating . The household help also vamoosed , with the cook shunting off in the afternoon to celebrate her sister's birthday and see the new year in ( she's very posh that way ). The part timer Maharani , whose connubial bliss has us fuming at times , had an appointment with her husband to go the zoo and we are all hoping they had a good time and did not lose their way .

This year I have no New Year resolutions and I am not surprised to see that Usha of Ageless Bonding shares my reluctance towards making New Year resolutions . At my age you suddenly realise that the list of nonsense one makes faithfully every year and never abides by is of no use at all because somewhere in the welter of everyday living they get lost while you attend to things which assume more importance.

Most new year messages this year have the "safe" element packed into them - like a crossed finger syndrome where you hope against hope that the extremists pack up their genocide agenda. But of course that is a futile hope as the Assam blasts today will prove.

However , I am hoping that together with all the wishes for ,love,safe etc , someone could actually wish away all reality shows on TV including those where prepubescent children participate , music reality shows , which now, make me want to barf ,cookery shows where the anchor does things that you and I can never hope to achieve - of course I would not wish to cook like Nigella Lawson( she's so over the top with the loads of butter and cream she uses and the lusty way she lunges at food , with a sidelong arch ,coy glance at the camera ) but I wouldn't mind doing a Kylie Kwong ( she looks like my friend Snigdha Patnaik from school and overall, appears very restrained ) ;programmes like Big Boss and Splitsvilla which you run down but secretly watch . But then again I am at that age where I am not so secretly pining for the good old days of Doordarshan- back then of course ,I'd wish there were more channels .

Oh and being a Telegraph reader , I am wishing they would do less of the Ritus , both Parna and Porno and concentrate on other Bong celebrities .The Porno has recently been very much in the news , not so much for his films but because he bashed Mir , a talk show celebrity of sorts and a popular RJ at one time - more her e . I happened to watch the show and was appalled and fascinated that an "intellectual"( in Kolkata the aantel or the Buddhijibi which is a thinking Bong - normally they sit around a table on Star Ananda and get into deep meaningful discussions on all issues under the sun , outnumber the fishheads in the Sealdah wholesale fish market. More on the "antel" here ) could spew such venom .

However , this year I hope to become a baking goddess and am working towards it steadily and slowly - I also hope to move away from the book club towards the bake club and aim towards using my persuasive powers in this direction. I am also thinking that it will not be much of a loss because the book club is now practically defunct and peoples' attentions are wandering .However, this will not detract me from reading at all .

2008 has passed by very fast ,almost in a blur of days and events compressed like a closed concertina , threatening to spew loud , discordant music when opened . But all said and done , like my sister , I prefer to view Jan 1 as the day after Dec 31st, no more, no less.

So let us raise a toast for a better life in the next one year and good health and happiness for all our loved ones .

A Tag or what you will

2008-12-14T10:48:00.005-06:00

A tag from my oldest blogfriend , dear Hill grandmom , which travelled to her from another old blogger friend HHG. So here it is :-

My oldest memory:
Travelling from Jamshedpur to Allahabad and back via Rewa and Varanasi in old Trusty , my father's Ambassador driven by our driver Durgada . I was three and my memories of that journey are quite graphic, especially the arriving in pelting rain at my aunt Mili's house in Allahabad , where I saw my grandmother consciously for the first time - a small delicate frail lady with the loveliest aquiline nose which her children inherited and a very sweet fluting voice. It was my birthday too and they all chorused happy birthday and carried me in to the house .I was a much petted child.

Ten years ago:
The girls were younger and life was less complicated than it is now .We went to Delhi, Jaipur ,Agra for a holiday and my Ma was still alive and well .

My first thought this morning:
Aha , its Sunday . AG is doing the weekly fish and veggie bazaar and omigod he's gonna come home at 12 , then I'll want to cook some fish ,and by the time the food is cooked and I've washed my hair and we've done lunch it's going to be 3.30 . That's exactly what I though and it's what actually happened !

If you built a time capsule, what would it contain:

A Motorola cellphone from the early 90's - we have one lying around somewhere,a floppy disk(the larger ones), my first Kodak box camera, the HMV fiesta record player and an old Herald car , if I can find it , a chulha, a batery operated emergency light with an explanatory note on power shortages and books .

This year:
My older daughter left home to study in another city and my family is now minus one chick for most part of the year - another part of growing up for all of us . Sporadic terrorist attacks culminating in 26/11 will ensure that this is a year which I am not about to forget easily .

14 years from now:
I hope my family is safe, healthy and happy and that I am in full possession of my physical and mental abilities and that the world is a better place than it is today .

By the rules of the game I must pass on this tag . And so here you go , Chandni, Sunayana and Anamika .

On another note an FB friend sent a link of this song , sung by Hayley Westenra of Celtic Women. One song sung in two very different ways . Simon and Garfunkel . a version we are accustomed too , since it is an enduring favourite of most Simon and Garfunkel fans. I would have preferred uploading the canticle but couldnt find a link , but this will suffice . And the one by Hayley Westenra has haunted me - her voise is pure and lilting and she lends a mystic air to the song

Mumbai

2008-12-01T11:39:00.003-06:00

Watching the 9/11 attacks in a hotel room was surreal – at first the visuals looked like shots from a disaster film and I appreciated the artistry of the stark grim picture of a plane flying straight into a building, the clouds of smoke and fire from the explosion against a deep cerulean sky and laughed to myself at the ingenuity of disaster films .
Just a little later I shifted channels and saw the same visuals being repeated ,I surfed some more channels , trying to understand what exactly was happening – so bizarre and unreal was the situation, until realisation dawned that it was real life , not a film .

There was a feeling of dejavu on 26/11 . A lit porch , glass doors with warm inviting lights and interiors within,interspersed with the crackle of gunfire and the madness .of people running around . Rapid visuals – of the railway station , a petrol pump belonging to my Company, bombs going off in cabs , a young South Asian man talking of a man walking out of Leopold’s café holding a machine gun casually , grenades being flung off the roof of Colaba market .

It had the makings of a third rate thriller with ambitious young men holding a country to ransom – a plot totally fantastical and illogical – the backdrop was pure Julius Caesar - Act I , to mind – dangerous and evil things walking in the dark , ominous rumblings hinting of a world gone so terribly wrong – a premonition of a disaster still nascent but throbbing with life.

The last 5 days, as it were , has been a jumble of frenetic images, near miss experiences of two friends , a loss suffered by a friend at the Taj Mahal Hotel .I was glued to the television set , watching the monstrous scenes unfold . I have been numb with fear and frozen with what I have seen .Images endure – thanks to the relentless reporting of the TV channels – images that will be hard to erase from memory . There is anger , too at the inept and callous government . which time and again shows how incapable and irresponsible it is and I am afraid does not care whether you say ENOUGH or not .

I also wondered about the terrorists – whose youth had provided fertile ground for ideals , however irrational and misguided they may be, to take root ; a system which has taken over the minds of men , so completely as to produce mass produced terror machines with just the one agenda - to destruct and also liquidate themselves in the process.

And the most enduring pictures are those of the armed young men at CST , hardly older than my daughter – one terrorist especially terrifying because the expression on his face is perky and happy as though he is enjoying himself – Through it all I have in the last 5 days also wondered how a handful of young men have held my country to ransom with a swaggering insolence which has entailed destruction, death , savagery beyond belief and there is a numb and frozen despair that this is a world we have brought our children into .

A strange imprisonment

2008-11-20T23:00:00.000-06:00

The sea is just across the road , a wide crescent split in the middle by the apartment house opposite . It changes colour at various times - from a misty grey blue early in the morning brightening to a tranquil blue and then in the afternoon to a golden shimmer ripple stitched through with hot white sails of the fishing fleet to the dark indigo as dusk falls and the lights come on across the bay , till late at night when all you can see is the pin dots of bright light on the opposite side and the rest is an inky basin.

There is not much work after getting the man ready for his office in the same way that his mother used to get him ready for school and just in the way he expects .There is a great to do about the trousers and the matching shirt, the tie and the socks , the car keys , the cellphones and chargers and the wallet , all of which you would expect a grown man to organise on his own , but no it has to be the way Ma did it and she does it with devotion.

After that all she has to do is cook and then the whole day is at her disposal . To clean or not to clean -is a dilemma but then she decides it is better to clean ,although the two maids have done their job; to tuck in the corners here and straighten the objects on the shelf there - the house is os stamped with the man's mother's touch , as to be a complete replica of the one they have left behind in another city .

Lying on the bed she can tell the time , just by watching the sea through the window . The sudden vicious slash of music from a speeding car or, the pigeons roosting in the recess above the window ,suddenly busy with their billing , cooing and fluttering of feathers ,an anachronism in this city , wake her up from her dreamless sleep in the afternoons.

Most times she is on the bed watching television, or the sky and sea ,and the pigeons . She does not like books , nor does she care about the work she once did with such finesse - the feel of the textiles, the paintbrushes, sketchbooks, the tools of her trade are all relegated to a small secret alcove in her memory - dark and unlit.

At times she glaces sideways at the mirror in between her chores , checking the gentle swell of the tummy .

She cannot ride an auto ,she has been expressly forbidden by the the man's mother to get into a cab on her own or even to walk down the road towards the sea , ahead . Her ouutings depend on the man's convenience .

So she waits - patiently with her unborn child , somnolent, lethargic , quietly watching in this seamless ,dreamlike state ,with the days fusing into each other ,waiting , maybe plotting a strange and sinister revenge in which she will have the child as an ally .

She is a qualified designer but she does not do any work , she does not read , she has no friends . It is strange , this transformation from an eager animated girl , so active , so full of dreams and ideas . When I drop her at the house after a day well spent in shopping and eating lunch out she holds my hand tightly as if she is reluctant to let me go.

When I look back from the car I see her standing oddly alone and frail, the tall house rising menacingly behind her .

A little ooze,cheers and a lot of blood ..

2008-10-25T11:16:00.009-06:00

To kill a dog you need a gang of boys from the slums, a dog which did not oblige and hence could be termed mad , a length of rope, a thick club to bludgeon the dog with , two brutish leaders and a gaggle of excited boys to cheer them on.

They would have cornered the dog which would have been snarling,angry at first, snapping a little later when the pestering got out of hand, foaming at the mouth with rage and fear ,showing its teeth, a little later and then the chant would begin "mad dog!"; in a matter of minutes ,the noose would have been flung around its neck and secured to a tree or post.

Then, the pelting with stones would have started ; the dog thrashing around,trying to get away and failing - the children excited at this unaccustomed revelry ,chucking stones , bricks, whatever came to hand, the men joining in,while the dog would have howled in agony.

When it would have hung limp ,exhausted ,wracked by pain , they would have untied the rope and a man in black pajamas and a dusty black kurta would have wrapped it around his wrist, for the final act.

Joined by two thuggish looking teen aged boys in singlets,shorts and hair tied in ponytails, the macabre cavalcade would have taken off ,at a run ,dragging the dog, the children cheering , one of the boys, bludgeoning the dog in the hindquarters from time to time .They would have accelerated around the corner and drawn up full speed at the corner where the road meets the golf club wall.

Saving the best for the last .The dog would have reared up up one last time on its hind legs,aware of the limitations of the possibility of escape , with a phenomenal surge of strength , and, throwing its head back ,would have let out a last unearthly howl which would have been cut off as the teen aged boy would have battened its head in with the thick beam of wood ,bashing the skull and watching with glee as the brains oozed out and the children howled and cheered .

It is the same blood lust, lack of logic ,reason and sanity which prompts the forming of a mob - which acts no differently with a man than it does with a helpless cornered animal . It is the that thick palpable fear which attracts an unimaginable bestiality when even the most rational man can lose his sanity and become capable of looting,killing ,raping defying all reason and rational thinking . Today it is religion or a regional parochialism that gives a different name and characteristic to a man who has lived alongside you for years. Tomorrow it could be the food you eat or the way you dress or how old you are ,which might define the standard of whether you are allowed to exist at all.

Side by side with the murder and mayhem of Kandhamal, Maharashtra and Bihar and the jarring incident of the mad dog bashing on a side street in Golf Garden( which is an infinitesimal speck in the much bigger picture of man killing man, yet important as a livid example of blood lust ) is the celebration of Chandrayan- Space Odyssey India ,wherein India seeks to say "Yep , I also ran".
Note, we are not saying to the rest of the world that we are running with Serbia-Bosnia-Croatia and Rwanda too .

Puja now and after..

2008-10-10T06:24:00.019-06:00

If I were to paint her , I would first sharpen my pencil to the finest point to draw her features - slanting eyes , a small sharp nose , a curved mouth set in a heart shaped face that we call paan pata in Bengali which literally translated means betel leaf shaped in prosaic English . She would be an intriguing blend of demure daughter , a minx and a raging fury .

On Panchami , which is the fifth night of Navaratri , the image comes - a small clay statuette , slim hipped, many armed , bare of any embellishment .

Over the next two nights , artisans work to create her finery - decking her out in her beautiful clothes , adorning her with traditional jewellery , creating a work of art which is an absolute wonder.

The flower trays for the worship

The seasonal flower - shiuli - small white stars with bright orange centres

The one hundred and eight lotuses for the sandhi puja ,Rama's worship of Durga before his battle with Ravana, leaves of the bel tree , three to a stalk carefully checked for any blemishes ; the blemished leaves go into the basket for the anjali

Flowers - jaba and aparajita traditionally a part of the ritual worship

More flowers used in the worship , this time marigold, lotus, tulsi and bel leaves

On Dashami , the puja before Durga is prepared for the journey ahead back to Kailash, from her parents' house . The bhog comprises of panta bhaat , cooked rice with water poured over it and gandharaj lebu and slit green chillies for frangrance , kochur saag ( stalks of the arvi plant ) cooked with coconut , flaked rice mixed with mishti doi and batasha ( sugar candy ) - ,( all these are cooling foods which are appropriate for the journey ahead ) sweets made with chhana , naarkel naaru and fruits - banana , sweet lime , grapefruit , apples ,pomegranate and cucumber.

There is a pathos in the mantras which the priests chant - the lament of Durga's parents as their daughter prepares to leave , the invocation to nature to be gentle as their daughter takes the long path home to her husband's house, the entreaty to come again the next year - the priests are in tears as they prepare the bowl in which the symbolic immersion takes place - water is mixed with turmeric and a small silver mirror is angled so that the tiny aalta ( a red liquid used by married women to paint their feet and toes) smeared foot of Durga can be seen .

It is now time to bid adieu

Babughat is a total mess . The idols are taken out of the lorries , one after the another , and then carted unceremoniously by the coolies - there is a strange helplessness about the idols and they look almost human as they are hauled to the river bank hurriedly - the more they dump the more money they get- and then eased head first into the shallows, to be immediately stripped of the trappings , separated from the wooden frame and straw , and left to disintegrate back into the mud. On the banks there are huge piles of shiny toxic weaponry and finery , hopefully to be carted off in the morning .

For now the memories of the revels remain - the shining lights , the glimmer of light on the idol's face from the spotlight , the new clothes of the children , the childlike dressing up of the adults - a surreal setting . Today the market has crashed , there is an explosion in Pakistan .. so it is really back to reality with a bang

Durga Pujo

2008-10-05T04:47:00.006-06:00

For little over a month , the mandir in our neighbourhood has been a hub of activity - meetings , rehearsals, adda ( the magical word for chilling out , in Bengali ) plans and more plans , strategising , fiscals .
In between there were the children..
Stuart Little

Friendships and bonding

Looking for a broken finger with AG in tow

Happy Things :)

2008-09-22T10:53:00.006-06:00

Rain splashed window and the buildings beyond .. turn of the century houses built by the well heeled babus of Bhowanipore
Big windows with rain splattered glass panes ,rain washed green leaves outside

And a delicious baked potato oozing butter and melted gruyere served with a tomato,onion sour cream salad and a smidgeon of coleslaw

Bringing me that much closer to heaven.....

And this .

Dear Padma who blogs as Hiphopgrandmom , and Usha of Ageless Bonding gave me an award for being an honest blogger . I don't know that I deserve this because I am very non committal but some iota of honesty must have shown through ! Thank you, dear friend .The rules are to send it to 7 bloggers . I would be doing an injustice if I did that ,and therefore am including all my favourite bloggers on my blogroll and Madmomma ,that very nice young lady,who is not on the roll because I have been too lazy to update it , but who nevertheless , knows that she is a favourite and a daily necessity , like my first cup of Darjeeling tea

Of Blasts and the Common Man

2008-09-14T09:15:00.001-06:00

And so the week culminated in a series of bomb blasts ripping through the capital . Since I had been reading, and not watching television, I was not aware of the serial blasts . It was only when my sister in law called up incoherently asking how Srin was , that I pressed the panic button and called her up .
She was safe and riding back in an auto with her friends from the vicinity of Sarojini Nagar. Given time I suppose she would have gone to GK , or CP or wherever young people hang out on weekends . The mandatory warnings of not to venture away from the campus for the next few days over ,the anger set in .

Hyderabad,Ajmer ,Jaipur,Bangalore,Ahmedabad and Delhi ...

It could happen anywhere . It makes no sense to tell my daughter not to venture out and to keep away from crowded places because one does not know when and where they will strike, just as it makes even less sense for Mr Patil to go on National television for the umpteenth time and talk as if he were an an inept college principal unable yet again , this new session, to handle unruly seniors ragging freshers and taking recourse to threats which nobody takes seriously .

His voice is flat and even , the expression on his face deadpan . But of course, it's a scene and a script he is familiar with , so you can just go ahead and and applaud while appreciating the fact that he did not refer to notes or have a lackey prompt him , while talking to the television reporters . It is interesting to note that from the flashbacks that Aaj Tak aired on statements made by him that there was very little deviation .

The Chief Minister on NDTV had more howlers to offer in a conversation peppered with "you know" .She said she was not aware of what "they" were planning - who "they", were ,was not clear - the terrorists, the police? She was also under the impression , poor duck, that the blasts happened on a busy Sunday evening .

The Financial Times had this to say about the state of Indian intelligence .

Therefore , while the political parties battle it out and terrorists rampage on unchecked , we ,the people ( to borrow a phrase from NDTV and here , I also recall Laxman's puzzled Common Man in his checkered coat, a perennially baffled expression on his face ), live out our petty lives -with our petty fears ,our commonplace ambitions which sometimes get snuffed out before they are realised , our trivialities - and our whining and sniffling .

At times like this , we get angry and vent out our anger at street corners or our private soapboxes , we respond to appeals on TV channels and send out impassioned messages berating the government or the people who perpetrated these bestial acts of violence , (not realizing that it is yet another trick by the channels to measure their ratings and the viewership numbers ) ,but by and large we respond , obediently ,to what Big Brother and Big Sister tell us .

And something tells me , that like Laxman's common man , we sit , watch , wait and suffer ,sometimes quietly , sometimes not , because we realise there is very little we can do .

Oh really !

2008-08-31T12:28:00.007-06:00

Thank you Usha , for mentioning my blog . This might , as we like to say, in my profession, motivate me to perform better , that is to say , maybe average at least 4 posts in a month instead of the usual 1. Let us see .

For those who came in late, the purpose of the prize is to promote as many blogs as possible in the blogosphere. The rules are:

1. When you receive the prize you must write a post showing it,
together with the name of who has given it to you, and link them back

2. Choose a minimum of 7 blogs (or even more) that you find brilliant
in their content or design.

3. Show their names and links and leave them a comment informing they
were prized with ‘Brilliant Weblog’

4. Show a picture of those who awarded you and those you give the prize
(optional).

5. And pass it on!

Most blogs that I read have already got the award . However , I shall pass on the award to a few of my favourite bloggers and not maintain the guidelines of a minimum of 7 :-

Thinking Cramps - I adore her brevity , a rarity amongst us ranters . It is a rare writer who can sum up thoughts,feelings,descriptions in a few words . And Ana does it to perfection, Here's to you !
Mallika of Quick Indian Cooking - short , snappy,humorous posts with wonderful recipes and attractive photographs .
Onedia - an old friend who has wonderful insights into life in general .Her tagline "Please, speak your mind, even if your voice trembles or your finger hesitates over the enter key," is inspiring in its courage of conviction which essays from her posts .
Iz of Audacious - Her outrageous take on life is hilarious .
Rimi - university life and beyond - witty , sarcastic and thoughtful .
Lalla Lydia - sheer visual delight .

There you go, shine on and open the doors to new blogs !

Letting go

2008-08-25T11:03:00.007-06:00

An eventful 30 days or so . Srin has flown the coop to study in Delhi - it has been hard letting go of her because she is a wonderful daughter and companion, but sometime,somewhere , one has to cut the umbilical cord and this was as good a time as any . It reminded me of another time , another place when I crossed the country in the opposite direction from Lucknow to Santiniketan - not that I was a totally willing participant in that exercise .

The week we left her behind was a totally girls' week in Delhi spent in taking in the sights for Tani's benefit, spending time in the souks (!) and the restaurants fot all our benefit . The Big Chill Cafe at Khan Market was a big hit ,Veda, Moets , Moti Mahal , were all tried and tested but yes we did go back to The Big Chill , the most . The pastas, grills , frozen yogurt, baked potato and cheesecakes were to die for. The bread at the cafe was great but the foccaccia at Moet's was scrumptious - soft and stuffed with herbs served with a delicious tapenade, oozing green olive oil,just thatright bit of tart,astringent taste .

We bought kurtas in Anokhi , saris at Utsav,bags, Oshos, skirts in Janpath, book at Bahrisons - I hadn't been to a standalone bookshop in ages and enjoyed browsing in all those corner bookstores that populate all the Delhi markets .

The sights of course were marvellous and as I explained to a very literal Tani , just being in the now sanitised ruins of the Purana Quila , one could , if one took a deep breath , smell the sweat and rancid animal smell of the invading hordes , the skins that they flung around their shoulders, the blood and gore that ran in the streets of Delhi , the smoking swords , their arrogant self aggrandizement manifested in the monuments that they built .

Of course Tani being Tani , bless her , said "Ma that's history", but that did not stop her from looking fearfully over her shoulder in one of the mausoleums in the Humayun's tomb complex.

It rained when we left Srin at her hostel so much so that I couldn't see the room she moved into. There is an empty space in the house , a little less clutter ,there are the phone calls that help us to keep in touch , so removed from the waiting for letters and a mad scramble to see what the post had brought - news sometimes sanitised and controlled to spare that one person so far away.

But there is a gateway and through that gateway is a lot of light and hope and a prayer for a bright future which is up for grabs ...

Colours of the sky

2008-07-30T11:38:00.012-06:00

At the office today I turned my chair around to clear my spilling over "out "tray . I normally keep the blinds closed because the light reflects on my monitor , but today afternoon I had to roll them up because the sky was a marvellous cerulean blue with huge cumulus clouds sweeping through the expanse , in varying shades of grey with white puffy edges . The setting sun had gilded the clouds through with sharp golden edges .
And all I had was my 2 mp phone camera

Although it hadn't rained there was a rainbow, the first I had seen in a long long time ,

Below the swoop of grey,white and blue swirls was a frill of orange red , peeping out like a petticoat under a skirt , a little mismatched , but there , nevertheless ...

And on the other side over the golf course , a presage of doom followed by a light spatter of rain

When I got married , the sounds in the neighbourhood , were varied - the long drawn whistle of the goods train echoing through the empty night as it hurtled on the tracks between the vast desolate fields and the huge expanse of the lakes. On winter nights the jackals and foxes bayed closer and the neighborhood dogs set up a clamour , sometimes warring factions in the slums alongside the tracks let loose homemade bombs which resonated loud and clear . And over it there was the siren , to which we set our clocks .

At six in the morning the hooter was enough to wake up by - alarm clocks were superfluous. The 9 am hooter meant one was running late . At night , the hooter went off at 10. And all day , the main road was busy with workers running for their shifts . Often , the CITU flag would be tagged up at the gate and yet another group of workers would demonstrate vociferously. The open gates would show a tantalising glimpse of huge acreage and sheds when we drove past . On the other side of the road was a charitable dispensary for the workers ; alongside the factory a row of yellow barracks meant to house the staff , unpainted , unkempt for - sordid and ugly like all mass made housing quarters are . And then suddenly all the noise ceased - the clamour of the hooter , the demonstrating and striking workers , the trucks .

Not that we noticed it . It was only when the sirens ceased that we noticed a strange disquiet . The gates were now double padlocked . It was then that we that we noticed the factory was gone - silently and stealthily without any noise , and none of the clamour and outrage that such a closure would have warranted in a state that professes such love for the downtrodden by virtue of the doctrine it follows .

Now, a garage flourished beside the bus terminus , with the accumulation of garbage,sludge and other detritus that such places normally attract. And slowly the wall came down and we saw the huge acreage inside , ploughed up to make way for the project .

And as floor upon floor rose , just so many inches of sky were lost , the red gleaming eye of the TV tower around which we had woven fantasies for Srin and Tani disappeared behind the gigantic towers which are now Kolkata's pride and joy and a shrine to what we loosely term "development" . In the making of the shrine many lives have been lost - - labour plunging to their deaths because of lack of safety precautions , workers committing suicide over lost jobs - perhaps fitting, in the sense that all gods demand sacrifices.

The charitable dispensary is now a downmarket medical investigation centre and we shop for vegetables and edibles at the hypermarket , where we also watch films , chewing caramel popcorn and slugging great glasses of Pepsi . The people in the immediate not too tony neigbourhood use the lobby as a recreation space - the chilled interiors , the cushy seating , the glossy shop windows where they can fantasise about the size 0 mannequins in lingerie , drool over girlie magazines in Starmark, watch the rich kids strut by and copy them - oh there's fun , there's room for aspiration and tomorrow is certainly a better another day.

Meanwhile the bus route refuses to move from its terminus , the local politicos hold meetings on the pavement , the roadside snackwallahs have a field day . And on days when I go shopping and cannot get a cab and do not have my car , nothing can stop me from hopping into one of the rickshaws , obligingly parked close to the kerb...

Freedom songs

2008-07-07T09:44:00.003-06:00

The dictionary defines freedom as liberty, emancipation , independence – words which carry the sweep and majesty of a great power but words which are meaningless when most of us attempt to apply them in our own life . For if you have one form of freedom , you sacrifice another - in real terms or virtual , it doesn’t matter really .

I admire P’s integrity with herself . It demanded a high level of courage to walk out on a neurotic husband with OCD and a sick daughter and go away with a man she really knew nothing about , except for the fact that he was new and exciting- not even middling good looking or well off . Of course she attracted a lot of flak – her very act of rejecting her daughter made her an unnatural mother but then at that point of time one guesses that preserving her sanity was uppermost on her mind together with liberating herself from what she perceived as bondage - the gateway through which she could escape was the man she went away with . In the end it was just a matter of exercising her personal choices , which she did .

J did it a little differently . To start with, she came from Bihar , was fairly conservative and married into an equally conservative joint family with a dominating mother in law at the helm of affairs . Her husband was the spoilt and dissolute younger son of a very wealthy tax lawyer addicted to all the imaginable vices about which her family was totally unaware . She put up with being sat upon and condescended to by all the others , put up with her rogue of a husband who embezzled his way out of quite a few jobs and resisted all attempts to cure him of his alcoholism and drug dependence .Therefore, deciding she had had enough of jibes,hand outs and hand me downs , she got herself a job .

Being an efficient young woman , she did failry well and after some time had a showdown with her husband who showed no signs of improving himself .She moved out of the family house with her son and cut off all ties with her husband and his family . Not being privy to all the details , I could imagine the snide comments she had had to put up with , the pity , the commiserations , the constant put downs . I remember , there was quite a stir from the mother in law and the other 2 sisters in law , when she had bought some sarees with her first salary – about J decking herself out ,accompanied by a lot of laughter . Funny , when a little positive support would have worked wonders .Of course ,none of her in laws had a good word to say about her because for them it was easier to accuse her of leaving her husband in the lurch .

I admire the route she took – while she could have continued being put down upon for the rest of her life , like countless women in similar situations ,she took a bold and decisive step and walked out of a hapless marriage into freedom , which ,given her background , took sheer effort and courage akin to a non swimmer diving off the deep end .

For B , the age long habit of scrimping and ferreting away amounts from the household money persists –old habits die hard and she cannot get used to her new found financial freedom and the choice to do what she wants with her own money – no matter how wisely the funds are invested – it is the fear of not having enough that corrodes her psyche and she is till saving one rupee and five rupee coins madly , hoarding them for that great rainy day, which God forbid should never descend on her .

And there’s the freedom song that my maidservants sing – lusty , loud women who commute daily on local trains from great distances , getting up at the crack of dawn , cooking and then leaving their houses so that they can clock in at 6 am ,drinking a cup of tea here and eating a chapatti there – lucky if they can get a job where lunch is thrown in. They smoke bidis ( if emancipation is about that ) one has a guy on the side ( if emancipation is about that ), people are afraid of them because they have sharp biting tongues and vitriolic tempers .However , one of them , the most vociferous one, has a husband who beats her and abuses her – she buys the rice , cooks and pays the rent – he only loafs , nevertheless , she pinches our cigarettes and matches , wants to buy him a cellphone , pays for his liquor – and is afraid to walk out on him because after all her liberty is drawn by the red sindoor in the parting of her hair , again the bondage that binds so many in our sorority.

I was discussing what freedom means, with a friend . Ultimately we could not stick to a particular definition for the simple reason that the lines kept blurring . One might be financially independent and mistress of her own soul , body and house but could be in bondage to a man – so what price freedom ?

To me , in an ordinary way , it means the right of choice which may be a luxury for many , but luckily one that I can afford – rights that I exerted in choosing my partner , when we should start a family , voicing my opinions and also being financially sound , but then I am a slave to disease – I am bound by my limitations which prevent me from being a free eater .Although I may think and act with full faith in my actions , I am also in bondage to societal norms ,orthodoxy and a fear of disturbing equilibriums and I will definitely think thrice before I do something unconventional.

And there’s the freedom song that my children sing yaddayadda yadda all day – someone’s past the legal age and no thank you they don’t want a drink when you very kindly offer them one but they want to try life on their own – I ask you – give up home comforts , meals and laundry on time , fully paid up internet on dial 24 hrs , running water , meals out once a month , take aways and Mom’s gourmet cuisine more than that – I ask you again – but yes hard as it is for me to let go eventually I will have to let go so that they have their first heady taste of freedom .... to make mistakes , face hardships and learn from life.

A negotiable price and conversations with God

2008-06-16T10:07:00.016-06:00

Early morning at the Jagannatha Temple in Puri ,perched on the edge of a tank , 12'by 6' and about 4' high , a man in a cream dhoti and sacred thread , a tuft of hair pulled back in a knot at the back of his head , playing God . He dispenses favours with a practised ease to the gullible and the simple . Four South Indian couples , freshly bathed – the women in gorgeous silk saris and flowers in their hair and the men in intricate bordered lungis perhaps easily believe that the hood perched there is God’s advocate who can grant their boons whether it is to bestow a long wedded life with haldi kumkum intact all the way to the pyre , a long life or a son.

Accompanying them is a temple tout who speaks their language and acts as a translator.

The panda invokes the Lord's blessings and intercedes with Him for a son, for the expectant young couple before him. A pause and then he dips a receptacle into the pool where lotuses , dead flowers and leaves of tulsi and bel float and gives it to them to drink He then proclaims that they will indeed have a son. Next he stretches his palm and demands Rs 151/-.

The young man turns out to be quite canny. It appears that an intercession with the Almighty for a son is negotiable . He gives him Rs 71. This triggers off an angry remonstration from the hood but the young man will not budge from his stand . The woman is disturbed - the panda now suitably agitated is sitting on his haunches on the edge of the tank.

Enter the tout who negotiates skilfully asking the man to hand out another fiver . Bending to the tearful persuasion of the woman, the young man hands out a fiver .The tout realising he is bested by this valiant Son of Andhra asks the panda to drop the matter .

"Tchah!" says the panda and goes back to his invocations with the next couple , promising them a son too .The couple look askance at him - the man around 75 , the woman touching sixty five . No No they yell - Oh ok ' the hood says and changes it to the long life mantra for the man and infinite haldi kumkum spiel for the woman without batting an eyelid, still smarting from his early morning fiscal loss .

Later in the day a crowd of pilgrims appeared on the beach .The crowd straggles to a halt near the sun shelters under which we sit , the women carrying the odds and ends of luggage , the men barking orders . Ultimately the women settle down on the beach in a colourful heap and the men sit down a fair distance away .

Strangely enough they carry the National Flag .

Minutes later , another group appears farther down the beach , carrying another tricolour .

My mind is fogged with sun and sleep . Tani explains that’s how they communicate from a distance – a sort of flag morse maybe ,

Sad to think what easy meat they would be at the temple the next day .

But it is a beautiful place

www.odishahotnews.com

- the floors of the sanctum are buffed to a soft black sheen, intricate carvings crawl up the facade of the temple , at dawn Lord Jagannath is woken from his sleep to the sound of drums and cymbals , the chanting of mantras and a great hallelujah of hymns, The sanctum is plunged into darkness, lit only by the brilliance of a myriad of oil lamps during the mangal aarti to ease him into daylight

In the evenings a brisk breeze cools the courtyard - there is activity everywhere , whether it is the supple athleticism of the young man climbing to the pinnacle of the temple to tie a pennant ,or the group of bank employees who gather to sing impassioned kirtans in a part of the temple courtyard , the acolytes in saffron and cream dhotis and sacred threads , some with tonsured heads and some with small knots of hair at the back of their heads , sacred scripts in hand , an anachronism in the outside world , but so real inside the temple and its immediate environs as to be surreal , the widows lined up on one side, old and bent in dirty white saris , each sadder than the one before .

It is strange to think that in the midst of the rituals of worship from dawn till the doors of the sanctum are closed and the thousands of devotees who throng the temple each day, seeking peace, salvation, riches , good health , in the end it is really a commercial establishment with each activity meeting some established fiscal target

2008-06-15T10:35:00.007-06:00

If you want to eat out in Puri other than the hotel you're staying in - all you'll get is a mish mash of cuisine that's neither here nor there - mostly"Authentic Chines ,Bengali and Moghlai" as Santosh Hotel advertises . There are no authentic Orissa eating joints on the lines of Dalma in Bhubaneswar - so if you are staying for a week and are tired of eating jumbled up hotel food ( even the Mayfair where we were staying , was bad ) , you can hop down Chakratirtha Road to the Honey Bee cafe.

It's a small neat place with interesting benches , sital paati on the walls , square polished tables , lanterns hanging from the ceiling and eclectic music - we heard beautiful jazz one day, some Western classical another evening and a Jagannatha stotra one morning when we had breakfast. The owner bakes his own bread and pizzas , buys his cheese from the Eastern hills and laments that the weather will not permit him to make it himself.

The tuna garlic spaghetti and the plain old macaroni cheese were delicious .
So was the cappuccino with its cinnamon sprinkle

and the filter coffee
But the piece de resistance was the chocolate pancake , more of a hot cake than a crepe.
But to be fair the creme caramel at the hotel wasn't that bad

About me - a tag

2008-06-05T10:43:00.005-06:00

Usha tagged me on this - it needs a lot of thought and I'm definitely not a thinker. I am not a very personal blogger in the sense that I talk very little about my current life, my family, my feelings and my profession .I would never rant when I have a spat with AG because that's between him and me and like rational adults ( dont grin, jewel) we sort out our differences . But yes , had blogging been around when I was younger perhaps I would have ranted and broken less china and alarm clocks . Looking at me ,you would never know what I was feeling
Yes I do talk about my childhood but that's because its a part of me which I truly miss because my parents who were in it, are no more and when I talk about it , I feel that they are around, in some way .

I am:absolutely naive about people
I think: I should pump up my self esteem. I have an absolutely rocbottom Firo B score every time I take the test
I know: that I should not be flippant when people around me are dead serious but what can I do ?:P
I want: people to remember me with love when I am dead
I have: a very loving family
I wish: all children could be happy and carefree .
I hate: liars
I miss: my long,luxuriant,black and beautiful hair .
I fear: old age
I feel: too much . I wish I could be somewhat of a blockhead at times.
I hear: the television all the time and I don't like it
I smell: the nape of Tani's neck - it still has the baby smell and wispy curls that I love nuzzling. I also smell old books at the second hand bookshops in Gol Park and in the office library
I crave: death by chocolate , moist , dense ,dark chocolate cake with crumbs that melt in your mouth ,soft light chocolate souffles
I search: for names of people when I meet them after a long time because I forget them easily
I wonder: if there is life after death- f there is , dear God, make me the Vodafone pug in my next life
I regret: my profession. I wish I was in publishing or academics
I love: drinking tea with AG on Sunday mornings at the Makaibari van in the Lakes
I ache: when I see little old ladies begging because they remind me of my Thakuma ( grandmother)
I care: about not upsetting people
I am not: very good with numbers
I believe: that there is an innate goodness in every person
I dance: when I'm tiddly or when Lalit commands all of us to dance at HR meets ,then I dance with Suresh
I sing: when my favourite Rabindrasangeet is playing
I cry : when I'm upset and want my mother. This happens mostly when I'm sick .
I don’t always : try hard enough
I fight : for petty things
I write: down the tasks I have to complete so that I don't forget.
I win: the card games on my Nokia
I lose: graciously
I never: interfere with other people's lives
I always: try to be good.
I confuse: faces and names.
I listen: to my children. Its always a command performance from me.
I can usually be found: on the net at around 9 pm
I am scared: of losing my eyesight and not be able to read and write.
I need: to be loved
I am happy about: life in general .

I would like to tag Onedia , A Muser, Mystic Margarita ,Opaline and Hillgrandmom .Also Anamika ( don't kill me sweetie, I know you love tags ).

A Book Tag

2008-06-01T09:48:00.005-06:00

La Delirante - a Salvadorean living in beautiful Malta has sent me a book tag , the rules being :-

1. Pick up the nearest book.

2. Open to page 123

3. Find the fifth sentence.

4. Post the next three sentences.

5. Tag five people, and acknowledge the person who tagged you .

I have a habit of reading a lot of books simultaneously - maybe I take my mutitasking very seriously . I have this fondness for Doris Lessing and I am reading her book "Under My Skin" as well as finishing Rushdie's "Enchantress of Florence" . And no, I have not read Jhumpa Lahiri's angst ridden diaspora reflection "Unaccustomed Earth" and we have slammed it good and proper at an ahem "Book reading " on the net -at last call there were 39 mails on the subject ,not all complimentary, a few puzzled reflections and some plain mean :)

To get on with the tag :-

I am on page 123 and on sentence 5

" It was in that place that for the first and last time in my life I walked in my sleep '"

The next 3 sentences :-

"The washrooms were down a steep flight from the dormitory step. The washrooms were down a steep flight from the dormitory rooms , and I woke up as I tried to climb on to the basins , thinking they were a bed.I fled up the stairs in the dark into the darkness of the dormitory that glimmered with white shapes".

Now for the difficult part - tagging 5 people . Maybe Dipali , Madmomma,Opaline,Anamika and Mrs Turley .

Yet again

2008-05-31T23:39:00.001-06:00

This meeting after two long years has left me trembling

Reminding me that I was incomplete without you ,

This feeling of lassitude , this lethargy,

So familiar , so dreaded

This anticipation that you might be on your way - a heaviness in my body,

A quickening of the heart and a slow numbing

And then without warning you are here , before me ,

This sudden coming of yours reminding me that I am complete once more...

Patchwork quilts

2008-05-25T00:25:00.003-06:00

There were two children on the first floor window of the house at the end of the cul de sac, faces pressed through the gap in the vertical window bars , holding on to a rope with a cloth bag tied at the end . A boy , his face screwed up with trying in vain to look upwards was yelling and untying the bag . They stopped in mid action on seeing the other girl at the head of the road . Her attention was glued to the children because it meant an end to lonely long afternoons and evenings in a strange city . Another older child appeared at the 2 nd floor window to scream out orders to his men and stopped short ,staring at the stranger . In the middle of the afternoon silence , with the children's cries dying out , the Other Girl moved away .

In the apartment at the end house was a long passage which gave away to a terrace with urns of bougainvillea spilling their bounty . Table lamps spilled pools of light - a round table with books and writing material took up a side of the room , its top polished to a dark shine ,deep wicker work chairs with faded covers were placed so that anyone who sat in them could look out on to the terrace .In the summer evenings a heady smell of flowers from the secret walled in garden ,down below , would envelop who ever sat there . Outside ,a precarious wooden ladder stair led to the topmost storey where the pigeons lived wheeling about in a great flutter as they prepared to roost - the coos and murmurs echoing and settling in the evening air - sometimes there was kite flying too .

Best of all was when a bunch of seven year olds sat in the dark ,lamp lit living room and listened to French songs which the master of the house played for them on the record changer . At times , he would break into a song with his rich baritone , eyes and voice tender which as all of us know are mandatory for singing French songs.

Across the road , lived another little girl with a brother who was mentally challenged . A sweet boy he tagged along after his older sister . When he got too energetic , he was tied up and confined to a back room of the first floor where he howled in misery and frustration.Their mother was a chronic depressive and spent most of her time in a darkened room and in a state of great dishabille , hair spilling from a loose topknot, sari end trailing behind her , the hooks on her blouse askew.In moments of lucidity , she taught housewives English . Ruby,curious woman that she was ventured there one day and came back greatly puzzled with a notebook and a Biro , bidden urgently to go again the following day . The little girl was much envied because she had a free run of the mango jam bottle into which she dug liberally every time she had a meal , largely unsupervised.

There were books - special was an illustrated edition of Lamb's Shakespeare . Juliet appeared on a colour plate , in a rich Elizabethan gown with her hair braided with roses and was much wept over . There was also illicit reading for a precocious 7 year old in the form of the Ian Fleming novels to be read curled up on the window seat and dumped behind the sewing machine at the sound of a footfall .

That was also the year when young men were picked off the streets and packed into police vans , a sudden knock at the door and a man begging for shelter in the garden from where he could make a get away and Ruby opening the side door for him to rush through into the garden and climb over the wall.It was also the resumption of Beli's madness when she sat through family conversations and stared blankly at the wall , picked up a pair of sharp scissors and gouged out the insides from a stuffed doll she had given the child .

I don't know why I am writing about all this . For days I have been thinking of an evening when Mou and I curled up on a round plastic chair and listened to that gentleman joining in with the voice on the LP , his face half turned to us , eyes twinkling and voice tender as he sang a snatch in a language neither of us understood - the melody evocative and exciting - the white pigeons sadly depleted on the terrace of the house next door remind me of greater numbers in another time , another place . M with whom I work,went down with an attack of depression and took 6 Trika tablets in one evening .All this happened when I was away to Mumbai last week and was , I thought, the result of a wigging I gave her over some work not delivered on schedule. It could have been a trigger but she assured me was not the reason. This reminded me of Beli , my pishi ( aunt ) who was schizophrenic and ended her life in Lumbini Park, an asylum and therefrom to Mita's mother , all of it jostling in my mind , creating a patchwork quilt of sight, sounds and memories .

Bird nests

2008-05-17T11:14:00.002-06:00

The crows are at it again . They have built a nest in the grilled cover of the bathroom window of the house opposite ours .The flat is normally vacant since the people who own it live elsewhere , but as fate would have it they descend at the oddest times especially when a crow couple builds a nest - and they break it up. This year the crows have bee fortunate and I suspect there is a batch of little crowlings there .

Now most old Indian houses have ventilators set up high on the walls close to the ceiling . Our house has them too. They don't serve much purpose except to let rainwater in. This year birds have nested in one of the ventilators in the bathroom.While the rest of the fmaily thinks its a pigeon couple , I have my doubts . There is none of the distinctive cooing noises that pigeons normally make . Last Saturday there was an unholy smell much like a dead lizard. We searched high and low for the offending object and drew blanks from the bathroom and the shelves outside stacked , no, jammed with magazines that I cannot throw away.

However sniffing high and low , we deduced that the smell came from the ventilator where there was a lot of baby chirps and a great fluttering of wings and suchlike activity . It must be a crow family and the dead lizard must have been an offering of unending love to Mrs Bird . Since pigeons are not , to my knowledge, carnivores , it must be a crow family .Long may they live albeit without such offerings .
I dread what they might bring next to feed the babies .

Unending Love and the Bunny's visit

2008-05-17T02:39:00.000-06:00

A book I read when I was 10 , much much before the hype with filming children's classics started - The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe" - magic,adventure , total enchantment - a book which was thumbed through and read with total absorption for a week before it was returned to the school library.
Over a period of time it was remembered and thought about , maybe added to and fantasised about and then relegated to the farther recesses of the mind . Till demands for bedtime stories from the first little one brought it out - there was a struggle to remember the actual name of the book and then scouting around in the bookshops for a copy. Remember this was much much before the hype so it was pretty difficult to get a copy but get one I did in the Family Bookshop on Park Street and read it over again and gave it to Tupu to read . One reason I love her so so much is because she read , all my childhood favourites so willingly and trustingly, without complaining .( she is going to protest in her very "ornery"way when she reads this , I know )

Now of course children have the total package - a cellophane wrapped set of all the Narnia volumes and film versions too . No agonising over unattainable , and hunting for them in vain. I wonder when someone will start with the Wolves of Willoughby Chase and the follow up books ?

Today we went to see Prince Caspian . Children have it so easy these days . Read a book and watch a film - there's not much scope for imagining anything or even reading the book . Cut , dried and pasted - not much to think about except the sensory thrill of actually watching the film. However , it was not much of a film , anyway and vaguely reminiscent of the Lord of The Rings especially the landscape and the walking trees .

We went to see it because the bunny was visiting and wanted to watch a film in a multiplex.The bunny was happy .and I am looking for the dogeared copy of the book .

Lunch was at Mainland China ,AG and Srin went for the buffet and the rest of us being small eaters ordered a la carte and filched bits off the buffet eaters

the bunny and Tani were richer by a pair of shoes from Levis ( Tani) and toys for the bunny .The bunny also had a blue tongue from eating blue sky gelato

On another note ,I came across a translation of a Tagore poem . I quote from a review :-

"William Radice explains that Unending Love ‘is a lyric poem, not a song, but it takes us into the world of Tagore’s songs, in which love between human beings is a manifestation of divine love, and the play of lovers a counterpart to the khela (interplay between God and his creation) of the universe.'

Radice goes on to explain the intricacies of khela—‘khela has a dark side to it, since it separates us from God, and sometimes it stands for the vanity of life. But more often it implies creativity, for God can only express his joy through creating finite forms, just as the poet expresses his love through creating poems and songs. Because khela involves union and separation at the same time, the two feelings are much emphasized in Indian accounts of love. What I have translated as ‘meeting’ and ‘farewell’ are really the states of being together and apart…’ Unending Love by Rabindranath Tagore"

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times,
In life after life, in age after age forever.
My spell-bound heart has made and re-made the necklace of songs
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms
In life after life, in age after age forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together,
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount
At the heart of time love of one for another.
We have played alongside millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-
Old love, but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you,
The love of all man's days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life,
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours-
And the songs of every poet past and forever.

It is beautiful,lyrical and haunting but unfortunately I cannot make out what the Bengali version is . I need to google it maybe , but I have a feeling I won't be lucky .

Tagged

2008-05-11T00:17:00.003-06:00

Tagged By HipHop Grandmom !

Last Movie You Saw In A Theater:
Jodha -Akbar - the mother of all turkeys

What Book Are You Reading:
"Alentejo Blue" by Monica Ali

Favorite Board Game:

Ludo
Favourite Magazine:
That would have to be "Outlook"since I read it every week

Favorite Smells:

The smell of incense and flowers trapped on BRG's floor , the fragrance of kamini flowers on summer nights ,"Chymara'from Body Shop, baby smells -powder,soap,sweat and regurgitated milk, kaalo jeera ( kalonji ) in hot oil, gandharaj lebu ( a variety of lime)

Favorite Sound:

Birdsong at dawn, Mohan Singh singing "E ki labanye purna prana",the sounds of children playing borne on the air, snatches of young girls doing riyaaz ( practising vocal music) in the early morning or at dusk .

Worst Feeling In The World:

Impending disaster and that I am absolutely unprepared for it .

Favorite Fast Food Place:

Maybe KFC on very rare occasions

Future Child's Name:

Not likely now but mine were the ruling votes for naming both my girls .

Finish This Statement. "If I Had A Lot Of Money I'd...”

...ensure that at least 2 children got 2 square meals a day.

Do You Drive Fast?

I dont drive .

Do You Sleep With A Stuffed Animal?

Yep . AG

Storms-Cool Or Scary

Beautiful and terrifying at the same time.

What Was Your First Car?

A white Premier Padmini

Favourite drink:

Fragrant tea or a vodka with water and a sliver of lime

Finish This Statement, "If I Had The Time I Would .....”

Spend it all with my family

Do You Eat The Stems On Broccoli?

Yes I do.

If You Could Dye Your Hair Any Color, What Would Be Your Choice?

When Im adventurous its mahogany.

Name All The Different Cities/Towns You Have Lived In.
Asansol,Jamshedpur,Kolkata,Lucknow,Santiniketan

Favorite Sports To Watch:

Dont know - maybe 20/20cricket

One Nice Thing About The Person Who Sent This To You:

Nice:)

What's Under Your Bed?

I shudder t even imagine what's there.

Would You Like To Be Born As Yourself Again?

Yes. I wouldnt make the mistakes I committed in this birth.

Morning Person Or Night Owl?

Morning person.

Over Easy Or Sunny Side Up?

Scrambled.please .

Favorite Place To Relax:

My armchair with my feet up on the footrest.

Favorite Pie:

Apple . But cannot indulge since I'm diabetic.

Favorite Ice Cream Flavor:

Vanilla. Unadulterated.

Of All The People You Tagged This To, Who's Most Likely To Respond First?

Maybe Onedia. Im tagging BongMom , Hillgrandma and La Delirante and Onedia ! Happy tagging ladies .

Stuff I picked up on the walk

2008-05-09T10:51:00.005-06:00

The slanting tree -it has the most inviting bench to one side ..

When I was small there were ducks here , now there are fat fish fed by kind fat men...

I have no idea what these flowers are called but they fell ..

from this tree.....

Since the morning was quite hot , this was in order ..

followed by this ....
and this ..

sunlight and a tumbler

2008-05-09T10:32:00.005-06:00

A glass , the first rays of the sun through louvred blinds ...

In company

2008-05-01T00:49:00.010-06:00

It's a difficult tag that Lady Onedia has set her friends . It goes like this :-
If you could spend an entire day with any five people who are now living*

who would they be
why would you choose each person in the group
how would you like to spend the day with them
where would you like to spend the day with them

Not to be included are family, friends, or co-workers, fictional characters, or deceased persons.Whoops - difficult, since my ideal group would have people who have long since departed . After a lot of thinking and cogitating I have come up with a list of five .
They are Salman Rushdie , , Chhanulal Maharaj , Dayanita Singh.and Paban Das Baul

Why I would choose them :-

Salman Rushdie - because I have enjoyed his books since I first read Midnight's Children 25 years ago He paints on broad canvases- like very busy medieval paintings , with so much activity going on that one has to very careful not to lose the thread of what he is narrating .

Pandit _Channulal_Mishra- because he is my latest find directed to me by the wise and kind Dipali.His music is so supremely evocative of Benares and he sings of Krishna with such love and devotion it is hard not to fall in love with the Blue God .
Dayanita Singh - She photographs people, objects and situations ,goes into homes and captures the thoughts and expressions of the inmates ,without ever crossing the thin line into voyeurism . She seduces the viewer and she presents works of art around which one can weave endless stories .
Paban Das Baul - a prolific Baul singer. I could die just listening to him sing "Nadi Bhara Dheu "
William Dalrymple- the last of the great adventurers , foraying into foreign lands , chasing ancient routes and writing about them with just that right touch of acerbic wit that saves his books from becoming just tomes .

How and where we would spend the day - Ideally we would spend it in Kolkata - maybe give them a tour of the Ganges in an open boat , settle down for adda in one of the rooms in any of the palaces in old Calcutta . The room would have long shuttered windows , fluted pillars , marble floor and elegant furniture - maybe one of the posher rooms in the Marble Palace.
Salman Rushdie , Dayanita Singh and Dalrymple would regale us with stories and there would be heavenly music from Chhannu ji and Paban.

Since chaa is an important part of adda , there would have to be a selection of fine teas from
Dolly's Tea Boutique, served in small earthen pots . The food which would be authentic Bengali cuisine would be catered by Kewpie's .

To digress a little , Although it is difficult to pin down the exact meaning of adda , for the uinitiated , loosely defined it would indicate a a group bonding over shared anecdotes , music and basically chilling .It is extremely important to bond, toherwise the main purpose of adda would be sadly defeated . In Kolkata before group housing and mulistoreyed apartments took over , houses had verandahs with steps leading upto them. The top step was known as the "roak" where men , young and old sat and whiled away the hours . A few years ago the roak next to our house was enclosed with a grill gate , thereby robbing my father in law and his group a"roak"for adda.

There , Onedia . That's done !

Riddle-me-Ree, Who can she be?

2008-04-21T09:29:00.002-06:00

Greetings wonderful MTBs!!!

and good work to all of you!

For having solved the riddle before

I give you all this clue.

The letter " N "

Write it down, add it on...

And let’s move on to the next little song.

“For this newest kid on the block

Here's a welcome tune

Self confessed resident of the clouds

Living in the garden city, that’s a boon

This one can make lists and saves

A fresh start she always craves”

Solve it and you get your lead

Misguess, and you lose your speed

Solve it slow but solve it now

And before you go, take a little bow

Go to 'Comments' and leave me a clue

Tell me which blog you are off to.

Good luck! Good luck! Be on your way.

You have your work, cut out for the day!

Tag : Fair Game