The last of Sushama's brood

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 .

Of Blasts and the Common Man

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 .

Hullabaloo with one mango tree( with apologies to Kiran Desai)

Sara's blog is the quintessential English blog . In her latest post she talks of blackberry picking at a local farm and mentions blackberry and apple crumble with lashings of fresh cream - delicious as all things forbidden to me are (sigh ).

Reminded me of mangoes in summer - In Jamshedpur we had a huge mango tree along one wall of the garden- it was huge and home to innumerable birds that flew in and out in all seasons and exotic insects that frequented the bungalow all the year around.

Every alternate year it yielded a rich haul of fruit which Ma dutifully shared with her neighbours including with the dog loving assassin next door - the Frenchman Saupin and his Burmese wife .

Saupin had three bulldogs who raised Cain when people came to their house and to other houses too and often jumped the wall and sat , tongue lolling maniacally, on our verandah steps to terrorise my sister and I . He also fished for mangoes with his fishing rod if my sister is to be believed . ( She is known to exaggerate heavily and in doing so often strays from the facts at hand).

In my in laws house at Kolkata the mango tree at the end of the garden just next to the green door , and alongside the rear wall ( "in the backside of the house"- so to say ) used to start flowering in mid spring - dusty golden green flowers - their smell mixed with that of the dhobi's coal ,wood ,cowdung fire smoke and emissions from cars ( Euro II being a recent phenomenon) used to travel back to the house and one had to filter through the layers - to get the distinctive sharp perfume .In retrospect it was quite a bountiful tree because it fed all the local little hooligans and there was quite a bit left over for BRG's friends and family .

As summer set in ,the street urchins used to hover in droves around the back wall and mark the tiny grub like fruit - as the fruit grew, so did BRG's tensions - the urchins , the rickshaw pullers , the little devils and the larger ones too from the bustee way down the road would all lay siege at various times of day , armed with slings , pebbles and other miscellaneous weapons .

Afternoons would be the best times because then BRG would retire for her siesta ( rest of the morning she would hang around the rear window and let loose a volley of invectives at the little bastards .

Things got pretty bad one year - in the middle of a kaal boishakhi -( the beautiful norwesters that strike suddenly in early summer and herald the advent of boishakh or the first month of the Bengali calendar with heavy ominous dark cluds , thunder , lightning and winds - particularly beautiful in Santiniketan) which shook and rattled the tree , our girl Friday at that time , Manju , locked up two kids in the servants' bathroom .

Another afternoon , Tupu then around 12 , grabbed one boy larger than her and forced him to drop the cache of mangoes which he had bundled up in his tee shirt - I've never seen her so fierce - shaking that boy like he was a sack of potatoes and yelling her guts out , till he dropped his bundle and ran for the wall leaving a slipper behind. He came back the next day for the slipper , saw Tupu and ran like the devil was at his heels .

Another time a gang of mango thieves from the local school for the underprivileged , bolted the door from outside and had a lovely time looting the tree . It was as good as a gang of monkeys marauding a fruit orchard .

All in all , with the first gust of the southern breeze ( dakhin hawa in Bengali immortalised by Tagore in his songs ) BRG's bp ususally low would start rising till it would reach a fever pitch with the ripening of the fruit . It would seem that not only man , but nature also conspired against her - the one green fruit cunningly hidden by a swathe of green leaves ,from sharp eyes turned a ripe yellow.

That week Tarapada the rascal extended his leave by a couple of days as was his wont and the birds ate the ripe mango - bit by delicious bit while ours ears ached with BRG's rants . That was it . No amount of sniping or sermonising about share and share alike worked on her . She pruned the branches after denuding the tree of all fruit .

Seven years ago just as the buds were blossoming , the tree was struck by lightining , in a kaal boishakhi , and shrivelled up . It stayed that way for some time but eventually had to be cut down . Now only the roots remain , long and arching and brown attached to a bit of trunk .

At first it seemed the sunlight was blinding - and the entire North wall looked kind of naked with no shade - now however we are used to it. Looking back I think BRG used to enjoy the tensions and strife that went alongwith the mango tree and even misses some of the excitement that the long summer would bring for her . I've suggested planting a sapling but she wont have it .

Jack Sparrow

A site I came across dedicated to that most redeeming feature in all the Pirates series - Jack Sparrow.

Notwithstanding the fact that a very sexy Johnny Depp does a marvellous quick thinking, swashbuckling scallawag of a buccaneer with his braided beard , rasta locks , kohl lined eyes and swish walk , I ate my way through half a regular buttered popcorn and a quarter of nachos and disgusting cheese dip and I am ashamed to say fell asleep through the noisiest part of the film and thereby missed much of the barnacled mayhem that took place somewhere after the interval and woke to find a gigantic Calypso dissloving into millions of crabs - why crabs ? Why not lobsters , crayfish or some other species of crustacean ?

And oh wonder of wonders , I was so busy appraising the ponytail on a tall tubby middleaged gent that I missed the lady with him . This when the rest of the family had checked her out with reference to her background .

Must have been the cheese dip .

No , maybe the nachos

nope - then it MUST have been the chicken stuffed with cottage cheese and olives in herb and asparagus sauce with a small compote of cauliflower , broccoli and runner beans that I ate with such relish at Oh Calcutta!

the other side ..

Every family has its share of lunatics .. mine seems to have more than a fair share. When my maternal grandmother , Shanti Debi , tall, dark and beautiful and long dead, without having seen her family flower to life , gave birth to her first born , a daughter , her mother in law ,the diminutive but steely Gnyanadasundari Debi , took the errant couple , the two year old child and an army of servants , first to Puri and then to Benaras . In Puri they rented a house on the beach , like all good Bengali families of yore and then she took Shanti , my grandmother to the temple , where she had to measure her length from the gates to the sanctum sanctorum ,in the sorching heat of the sun , not an easy feat .

But she did it because the good Gnyanadasundari ,who ruled her household and her son Kali Charan Ghosh with an iron hand ( without any velvet gloves ) was full of righteous Hindu morality and believed that this was the only way that a grandson could be assured , since it was entirely Shanti's fault that she had given birth to a girl child


Last week standing before the second gate to the Jagannath Temple on the Singha Dwaar side , I looked back and wondered how long it had taken Shanti to clear the first lot of steps before proceeding maybe from the left side which is a shorter route , or the right side which appears to take slightly longer and then up another flight of high steps and onto the black polished stone ofthe temple which might have felt cooler to her hot body . I like to think of G Debi marching alongside with the light nimble steps that frail old women often have , cheering her on her way and little Karuna yelling her head off, contrary even at that age . I cannot imagine what my weak willed grandfather did .
Eventually , after the same torment in Benaras and after her body had healed , she had a son ,a good looking , happy boy who unfortunately predeceased his parents and his grandmother at the age of 18 .

No good ever came out of G Debi's advice but her son took it nevertheless , eventually losing his money and the house with the stained glass doors in Bhowanipore and the prancing lions overhead, in the lane next to the park ,at one go ,as the result of a bad investment on the advise of his mother and creating a decade of death and disaster for his family .

No one else took her advice and the strong base of religious fervour and dogma with which she enveloped her family ,died out with her because the girls grew up to be raging atheists with not a single picture of an idol between them.

Passing the TB Hospital in Jadavpur and going to Orissa reminds me strongly of my grandmother since she spent a lot of time at the hospital and was then sent to Puri -and the wistful letters she wrote to her first born Karuna ,entrusting her and not her husband , with the rest of the surviving family because she felt her end was near .

Kalicharan also died a few years later in Dalhousie Square and Ruby , then 16 , had to go to the morgue on her own to identify the body and bring it back , because Karuna was in prison , having hoisted the tricolour on the gates of her college , the Govt College of Art in Calcutta .

The letters were discovered wrapped in blue ribbon , in the recesses of the safe of Karuna's cupboard just after her death, by her horrified daughter who had no inkling about Shanti's illness or the subsequent horrors the family faced later.

My mother Ruby was the child of her soul and she mourns constantly for her in her letters , written from her hospital bed, the sands of Puri , lying back and looking up at the stars and savouring the peace and solitude while worrying not about the other four , but about Ruby - who was gentle , kind ,sweet and trusting with very little fire - and agonising about the little time left to them .

She would have been happy had she met my father Mukul- a giant of a man with a mammoth sense of humour , a taste for good food , good music and good books and innumerable friends - who loved Ruby to bits and was lost without her and who wrapped her up in so much love and security and tenderness that the greater part of her spirit and self died with him.

I love watching Pia with her daughters , They crowd around her - whenever they sit they flank her , one on each side . When she speaks they drink in each word she says , they wait for her to say something funny so that they can laugh , they giggle together at shared memories , they kiss and cuddle her - they absolutely adore her and its beautiful watching them.

Pia has brought up her children herself without any interference from anyone ;she is strict with timings and monitors television watching and internet surfing - three things which create dissent in homes - the children are happy and cheerful and do not resent any teasing digs that Pia takes at them and I wonder just where I went wrong and why my girls dont hang on to me like hers although they love me ... the only difference I can come up with and which Tupu endorses is maybe she doesnt show bipolar behaviour which both AG and I do . Maybe .

hey simon! and a dash of miriam makeba..

My sister who is an artist of growing repute is at present exhibiting her canvases .

When she was a skinny scrawny child she had uncommon business sense which would translate into her drawing very attractive bookmarks and cards and exchanging them for books . She gave the cards , her friends loaned her the books . She has always displayed erratic bouts of intelligence such as being friends with Susan Chia who enrolled her into the deep dark mysterious world of authentic Chinese cooking , and marrying a guy who makes excellent "scrabbety"( Tani's linguistic interpretation of spaghetti at the age of 4 ) and even better bread and who maintains a deep Buddhist calm through all the sturm und drang she subjects her family to in the name of atristic temperament .

My friend Bapi talks of some owls she used to draw - funny I cant remember them . But I am holding on to the cat , the etching of Sammy ,the two ladies on the chair and the very evocative etching of the lady with the parrot in tones of sepia , my favourite shade .

Not that I understand much of art , but standing in the gallery and looking at the canvases I felt quite humbled - not because she sold practically all the canvases before the preview , but because in her world this marked her coming of age .

the grim reaper and KKG

Comrade KKG is gone into the vast blue yonder way over into the great beyond to the mighty clubhouse where all souls go after their bodies are consigned to the flames, earth and the vultures . So there was this vast crackle and puff that was the end of his earthly remains , all over in an hour and all that remains of him now is a series of very recent pictures taken on the old trusty nokia , the older ones having been eliminated as they seem unfamiliar- three very typical poses staring straight into the lens - glowering and so typically mulishly stubborn and not willing to buy any ideas especially BRG's , blase and a little tired in the next and full of childish delight with the sweetest of sweet smiles in the last as I coaxed him to give me one more smile ., in retrospect there's tiredness , pain, helplesslessness and the unvoiced personal indignity of dependence on others...

and so Tani sings one last song with her make believe guitar and a lot of hip swinging .. and then the little one gives KKG's dead face one last tight kiss and trudges away without another backward glance to give her final exam while her heart breaks ..and she's glued it tight with all the reserve that a 13 year old can gather at such times and I weep silently to see her doughty little figure walk away ...it's at moments such as this that children grow up suddenly .. and all those questions as to where exactly KKG is on this final momentuous journey will come later when we are in bed ..for the other one comfort comes in putting on the much washed grey t shirt that the Comrade wore and curling up on his bed and sleeping and then waking up and sitting on his chair for a read and putting up her feet on his foot rest ... and the indomitable BRG deals with her grief by putting the mountain of fruit and sweets that people will insist on bringing , into polythene carrybags and sending them around to the neighbours ... later life will take its course and KKG will , join Ruby and Mukul on the shelf, his picture frame a little newer ..

pyromaniacs and mist shrouded fields

Tupu and her friends decided to do the Springfest at Kharagpur much after those who wanted to chase it seriously had left - I get the feeling they were the only ones left on the campus hence the hasty decision to up and leave . I guess I beat my mother when it comes to worrying about the girls - so of course I put my foot down and had to pick it up when AG agreed without any hassles .

So off they go without breakfast on Saturday morning roll into a train at 12 noon , landing in Kharagpur where none of them have ever been - without an inkling of where they would stay at night. My cousin's wife who is on the faculty of IIT calls up in a panic wanting to bring Tupu back to her house , a move she steadfastly resists - and resolutely vetoes immediately .

But what I gather from the blissful conversation with daughter no 1 is that they had a divine time under the stars , wtith the fields shrouded in mist , a bonfire (and other peripherals which have not been discussed with me )and no place to sleep in the night- I think the lack of organised travel was what appealed to her since she belongs to a generation and type which has been bred in superlative comfort and for want of a better word has been obsessively mollycoddled by parents like us .

Therefore the supreme freedom of travelling in a local train , having to squat on the floor of the bogey , (something that I used to do while travelling from Burdwan to Santiniketan - having detrained from the relative comforts of the Amristsar Mail at Burdwan station ), not knowing what to eat , feeling the explosive gust of air from the open carriage door , must have added to the adrenalin rush .Somehow I keep feeling that the Springfest was only incidental ! I only hope next year she and her friends are a little more organised .

But hey , you're young only once ...

smokers section

On most weekdays around 9.30 , Maharani the daily part time help ,our chief cook and bottle washer Shyamali and Tarapada the dafadaar ( for want of a better word to describe him ) , meander to the terrace to eat their breakfast , drink a hot cuppa and smoke a couple of bidis . Sometime Tara , maharani's sister in law also joins them . BRG's olfactory nerves having failed her cannot smell the bidis on anyone's breath - god bless her - or we'd never hear the end of it . The original smokers were Tara and Tarapada , Tara's baby hanging from her breast and Tara puffing away madly - this was about 20 years ago . S is a very late entry , this month I think . Sometimes , M's husband who checks on her at least 4 times a day to make sure she hasnt run away with somebody , joins them , downstairs , of course , not in the house - and they all squat around and have a puff before they go about their work . Sometimes I wonder whether I'm living in a campsite of sorts ..

Christmas Eve was very tranquil – mild yellow sunshine in the early morning curled up on the chair next to the long long windows with the first cup of tea – promise of turning into hot sunshine later . the children clamouring for rides at the mela and trudging thereto . Hot hot hot – sit carefully on the swing boat so that it doesn’t interfere with the mad rush of air as the boat swings to giddying heights – up and down – a peculiar feeling of lightness as you curl up your feet under the seat all the better to experience the giddiness – the boat is made of wood and metal and what if a sudden flash of electricity swings through the apparatus knocking us all out for one massive six …… little bunny doing the mickey mouse climb and then bump with a dogged persistence over and over , her little face set and grim with the strain of her endeavour ..

The bunny's grandmother playing Christmas carols for the best part of Christmas eve and the next day … no invasive sounds of traffic or television , just the stars and a massive slice of black sky sprinkled with glittering stars and carols from a distance … Hosannah .. peace be unto all .. joy to the world and silent night ... rising , fading and dying in the dark cold night air , throbbing with the alien songs ..maybe it's my convent school childhood but I relate remarkably well to Christmas and the associated trappings and there is something infinitely moving about the musical arrangement of most carols ..

We saw in the New Year over the weekend .. a get together with friends on Saturday .. Absolut Citron for the ladies and good old Old Monk for the men with takeaways from Azad Hind Dhaba .. I like this lot of friends very much although we see each other infrequently , but I am very very fond of S and her husband and their cosy beautiful home . I love S ‘s serenity because that is a quality I lack , I love her utter simplicity and honesty and wish I had both .

We see in the new year with more friends , Vodka , whisky and as an afterthought , chicken marinated in yogurt and a mish mash of spices – I prefer my barbecue marinade plain – onion, garlic and oil and then barbecued and pulao and mutton . Too rich – I go for the barbecued chicken and the vodka – dessert is a chocolate layered cake from Nahoum’s . Why Nahoum’s I cannot fathom because the cake at Nahoum is always brittle and dry . Their forte is the light honey plum cake , sponge cake and the small cheesecakes apart from the cookies which are to die for … but chocolate cake ? Yuck . We dance and listen to much music although someone is insistent that Shakira's Hips dont lie keeps on being played ..not my cup of tea but I am happy with my drink..

I like to think I grew up a great deal in the course of the year by gathering a great deal of experience which I would be happier without . There were revelations of the worst kind that I never thought I would have to hear , there was heartbreak and there was a steeling of the self against so many betrayals that were painful to watch and be a part of but I would like to think that this has been a process of evolution of the self and somewhere through all this we have developed a resilience which has helped us to rationalise and cope with failures and helped us to emerge stronger and a little better than we were .

when bunny came to visit

It is determined to be a bunny - albeit it has a bobtail and long floppy hare-y ears - but its legs and nose are undecidedly un bunny . However , the moppet informed me it came from Germany so maybe German bunnys are like that ..






Then there was an awful baby dino ( seen partly to the moppet's right) which went awk awk in a deep hoarse bass with a quaver in the middle ( yes there can be such a thing !) which threatened to eat up bunny ..

Not that the moppet was perturbed - we had a ball , baby dinos notwithstanding !

And the moppet even did a flip

family outings

We do our outings in parts - 2 of us or 3 of us - for a long long time there has not been the 4 of us .A good thing over the past fortnight was the 2 movies that we saw , the numerous friends we caught up with and the family that spent time together after a long time , although there were major sulks at seeing movies in "uncool "malls with dirty loos - which I prefer for bargain shopping and the chinese bhel in the foodcourt








That's not me - that's Bakul rani with her son, my husband - the other 2 are our daughters , both very embarrassed over my clicking away with my trusty camera phone . It was only later that I saw "Photography strictly forbidden " , but by then it was too late because I had already forwarded all the pix to my gmail .


And this is the itty bitty old lady we went to see the next day
meeting her is always a very evocative experience .

sepia tints.....

there's a very tenuous link between insanity and sanity . My boro pishi Beli was very beautiful and given to the luxuries of life like fine sarees ( I have a few) and velvet mules and imported perfumes and cosmetics ( snow powder ?) ,
. Now Beli had been married at 12 and was a widow by 14 because her crook of a father in law had not told my grandfather that his son was on his last legs - with what I never could fathom out , despite my wicked ferreting ways as a child , and those who could tell me are all dead and gone , except Mili who's in her second childhod and far far away , both geographically and in her mind ..but I did glean this , she married a second time , this time , a widower with 2 daughters , he was a zamindar 's son with their ancestral house at Jongsherpur (??) and his m other would not allow her to have a child - since she was a widow and therefore maybe not a virgin (this was in the early 40s maybe) .So evertime Beli was pregnant her mother in law drugged her and got the dai to abort the foetus . She did this thrice before Mili got wise to what was going on and raised Cain . But by then the psyche , a little brittle perhaps had started to crumble ...She died mad in Lumbini Park many years later .... because her husband was dead and she was psychotic and it was not safe to keep her in a house which had kids ....

Shefali was scatty and glamorous and beautiful and hopelessly in love with one of the Pande boys who was a pilot ( he was another mad bugger , (but thats another story ) - he used to fly his VTs over her house and drop flowers and scatty Shefali who never poured herself a glass of water so long she was in Dada's house had to sit with a ghunghat upto her belly button , rolling endless chapatis in Hari's mother's house - that was till Mili went , saw her and raised Cain ( of course Mili raised Cain in her Mom in law's house , too ) . From rolling out of shape chapatis to giving birth to Khuku/Niru and then upping and dying suddenly , leaving a host of beautiful memories behind like heaps of rose petals .. that was Shefali . Indelible marker memories in her brothers' sisters' and mother's minds who filled my childhood with talk about Shefali ,so that when I used to pore over her mother's Joy scented photographs ( yes Moni ma used to keep an open bottle of Joy in her trunk in one corner , I swear that trunk still smells of Joy after all these years .) and open her copy of some poetry book ,{ forget the name, but it had a blue leather cover and was a longman's edition, pristine without ever a pencil scratch ( which means she only mooned about Hari all the time )} I used to imagine I knew her .
My second pishi Mili was like Jo of Little Women . She looked after the house, and her assorted brothers , one younger sister and the older one Beli. She married Pishamoshai who was the best Pisha anyone could ever have - I adored him my husband adored him and my girls loved him.
All of them were a bit wonky , thats what AG says - but they were terrific , brave people -all the men handsome and charming ,all the women ,beautiful , - all with a tenuous hold on reality - one died young , one died in Lumbini Park , hopelessly insane and the other is old and frail far far away still guarding whatever memories she has and living in them far away from reality .. because that is all she has now that everyone is dead. Wherever you all are and that includes you, Ma , I'm raising a toast ..Prost !

of christmases present and past ......

We like to leave out Ashis because he hates going inside shops- ( he's much better at window shopping or walking past them in his 7 league boots ) .

Saturday, the 24 th as such was remarkable for 2 reasons - 1) because Tani walked it from New Market to Flury's ( an achievement for a lazybones like her )& 2 )Tupu declined my offer of a Breezer on the plea that alcohol did not agree with her ( now I am worried as to how much alcohol she has had to form this assessment of non tolerance)

. Our plan to eat at Flury's was ruled out by the security guard who said there was no space inside . The second door had a short- ish queue before it ..much like the Ananda Publications stall at the book fair and Sree Leathers during the pujas - the queue was mostly made up of worried looking young girls , middle aged men and some harassed looking women muffled up in heavy duty shawls ( probably out during the lunch break ) all presumably looking for "Christmas cake"...

Nahoum's interestingly had a different profile - harried old men (doting grandfathers maybe , or husbands in their dotage or merely old diabetics greedy for illicit sugar ), babus from Writers Building, some didimonis too ( with multi hued umbrella and rexin bag clamped under one lelbow leaving the other free to wave in the air calling for attention ) and one fat determined lady(not me ) all yelling for Christmas Cake .

Anyway we ate a few doors down at One Step Up ..--Lunch was not bad although Tupu and Tani probably got tired waiting for their food to come ( each had an exotic order , both delicious as we found out later - sometimes I am expected to replicate the stuff at home ) and ate up a lot of mine .The upshot was no cake from Flury's ( although we did manage a dark plum cake and a light one from Nahoum's )and more pairs of cheap slippers from NM than the girls will have use for

The girls are grown up ,so synthetic little trees and much ado with gilt balls ,and bells , tinsel paper chains , and little lights and socks being hung up ... is out for us now ...Santa once bought a whole set of Roald Dahls for Tupu ,which Ma and baba had also hankered after!! Beyblades were hot this year , I hear from parents like Shekhar whose Chintu still gets visited by Santa ( Chintu is a heavy smart kid who still believes in Santa ..)


When I was a kid in Jamshedpur , Christmas eves used to be chilly , frosty and windy and Santa a huge shadow , amongst the shadows of the trees on the bedroom wall ( my mother being a fresh air fetishist used to keep one window open in winter also) and you had to screw your eyes shut because if you saw him he'd go away ; it also meant going with Baba to Kwality's in the evening for a treat , I got to choose 4 cakes to bring back home and that was unbearable agony for a four year old ( now I let the girls buy as many of whatever ( within limits )..I know it's bad for their value system and discipline),then on to the soda fountain at Meghanis for a soda pop and once I remember black and white bull's eyes, dark green and white striped mints and red and white candy canes -, a woollen cloche with a pompom at the end on my head and a black woolen coat - oh that was a joyful Christmas . I still have the gilt ballerina brooch Santa gave me .. one Christmas eve - I wonder how Santa knew I 'd pore over the Degas reproductions in my Arthur Mee encyclopaedia ? Well, mothers have eyes at the back of their heads ( I do too )

I've thought about this quite often..why do children, once they turn eighteen turn monosyllabic with their parents ?