March 23, 2008

this holi…

dear son

this holi

your second

i still

don’t have

any colours

to give you

no sleepy faces

at the door

waiting

to pull

you out

of bed

no neighbours

filling

buckets

of cold water

to soak you

to the skin

awakening

every pore

of your spirit

no laughter

or loudspeakers

at the chowks

with the annual

o rang barse

song

i have

only

stories

memories

of the colours

that rained

orange, red

green and blue

creaky

golden pistons

our weapons

for a few

hours

puranpoli

amti

warm milk

and ghee

that melted

on my tongue

cacophony

of children

all talking

at once

shivering

with the

cold

the excitement

when

it’s your turn

son

don’t be

afraid

of a time

spent

abroad

surrender

to the colours

to the love

to your heart

watch

them fill

your life

just

one holi

day.




February 15, 2008

the unfolding and folding of memories, and why they’re important

i’m just past 56-pages of shantaram, and my brain is bursting with memories of mumbai airport along with its smells, the views and first impressions of dharavi, colaba, the radio club, mondegar’s and most of all, leopolds‘.

it’s hard for me to classify leopolds’ as a cafe, or a pub. it was simply a place where friends met and relaxed. in fact, the interiors of what i remember of mondy’s and leopolds are blurred, and i must be confusing one for the other. (no surprise there perhaps, i wasn’t always having coffee, and anyway it’s way over 10 years now). i must have sat at one of their thick-wood-mahogany tables perhaps three of four times in all my mumbai-life, in the warm company of friends, colleagues from my express-computer days. each visit, though, has a bright, shining memory of its own.

i remember being curious about the people who frequent places like these, and my secret awe at the discovery that such a place even existed in the very throat of mumbai. there, it was the first time i saw more foreigners than indians, dressed in their trademark-cotton baggies and orange flowing kurtas. beads around their necks, or wrists or forehead. my own company, sometimes four or five of us, was buzzing with the latest office gossip, smoking chains of cigarettes and ‘grass,’ and downing one beer after another. and i, the youngest of the lot, had to plead with them to let me have a sip from their glass.

fortunately or/and unfortunately for them, beer always reminded me of a tall glass of urine, and i never liked the taste anyway. so i was simply happy just being there with my friends, soaking in the ambience, and some of the smoke as well. this was a world so far away from the one i was brought up in and went back to, faithfully every day.

it was perhaps on the way home after one of those leopolds-visits that i had realised i was in love. i think someone else did too. in the five years that followed, i changed jobs, i had new colleagues, i never had reason, or the company to visit mondy’s or leopolds’ again, but that special friendship always remained close to my heart. like i’ve heard is the case with all first loves, i think it still does.

and then there were the ex-colleagues who always looked out for me. during one of those rocky, painful, wearing-out phase of this relationship, there was one friend who took me to the radio club one evening, again, a very new atmosphere for me then, and so sympathetically, heard me out, and counselled me on life, the universe and everything. (he still is so sweet, i can never get over the fact that he is allergic to chocolates.) he also told me that who knows, maybe 10 years later, i would be laughing at my past. this is no anniversary, but yes i am smiling and laughing, in a nice way, at all that had happened at the time. it was all a part of growing up.

i can get disoriented when i come across an interesting book, and gregory david roberts is a grandmaster of them all. on the tube this evening, as i read pages and pages of accurate, minutely observed and mature descriptions about his philosophies on life and love, about colaba’s pubs, the radio club, they all came rushing back to me. the places themselves, the songs of mumbai, shubha mudgal, the friends, the laughter, the warm and firm handshakes when we parted at our train-stations, the youth that i left far, far behind…

as i walked home slowly, stiff from the cold and the physical pain after a long day at office, the memories that had stirred up a storm inside my head finally flooded my eyes, and i let the tears fall. even the fox, who has his hideout somewhere opposite our house and usually prowls for food during that time of dark, waited and let me pass.

my thoughts changed track, and i suddenly realised what a beautiful animal that fox was, like the mozilla-firefox logo. i rang the doorbell, too drained out to fish out my housekeys, and a smiling husband opened the door. “let me help you medaam,” he said warmly, and took my coat off (something he has never done so far). when my 15-month-old son – so engrossed in the storymakers on cbeebies -finally turned around and saw me, he rushed with open arms, giving me a tight sooooooooo-glad-you’re-home-ma-bear hug, and before i knew it, i had folded all my memories away. this precious moment, with my husband and kid, was worth it all.

this life was certainly worth it all.




February 14, 2008

bbc looks for love in the wrong places

how’s that headline for a taste of their own medicine?

either the bbc is turning very short-sighted about all matters related to india, or they are plain lazy and should simply pass the job to someone else.

it’s not been too long since i mentioned this before, and the bbc does it again (check out all the pictures from 1 to 8). is that the only picture they could find about indians ‘celebrating’ valentine’s day? why show nice, gooey-romantic images from the rest of the world, and portray india as an enemy of the idea of love, which in fact, is not the case at all.

i bet there *must* have been an archie‘s shop just around the corner from where pic#8 was shot, overflowing with red heart-shaped balloons, mushy-mushy cards and big, huggable teddy bears. also, will someone direct the bbc (and check if their eyes are wide open) to any one of the over-100-shopping malls in mumbai itself, or, the remaining 258 in the rest of india. here, this directory should help.

i have been following bbc news faithfully for quite a few years now. but these days i find their reporting to have turned anti-everything-india for some reason. look at their own news items on valentine’s day here (2007), and here (2002). why be different now? yes, there are anti-valentine protesters in india, but i would think the news is about the millions other indians, who easily outnumber them every year, and even make some extra money while they are at it.

to those second-, third-generation indians sitting abroad and reading misleading reports about their home country on the bbc, i think this is sad, and really, really unfair.




February 13, 2008

a story, unpublished

something i witnessed during my recent mumbai-visit stayed in my memory, and haunted me for a long time.

last month, when i watched taare zameen par (tzp), for no reason related to that movie, i remembered that scene again. i wrapped it in a fiction story and sent it, one by one, to two publications. wrong choices maybe, because, forget about any feedback on the story, neither of them responded at all (this, after we’d already exchanged emails). or perhaps they thought i was offending aamir khan’s original intentions, or that i was taking the realism a bit too far. perhaps they simply didn’t like the story. whatever. one thing’s clear…. i need tuitions on how-to-know-who-is-the-right-publication-for-your-story, and once that is clear, how-to-market-it-to-them. any published writers out there, hint, hint 🙂

well, anyway, i cannot keep this buried in my pc anymore. tzp is already yesterday’s news. and stories have to be told. so here it is, *sailee ki kahani…saare zameen par.

*(sailee, afzal. not their real names. the shaunchalay at nariman point, very real.)

saare zameen par

sailee loved aamir khan. afzal loved sailee. in their young 12- and 14-year-old lives, it was their friendship that had survived the displacement of their slums, the death of their parents in the lathi-charge, the humiliation by the police, the nights without food, their puberty. and there was their love of films.

after his day job at the sulabh shaunchalay at nariman point, afzal worked evenings and nights at the local theatres in the city. the role of a black-ticket-marketeer was not a permanent one. it had its share of risks and profits, but it was fun. and moreover, he was doing it so someday, he could take sailee to see her favourite star. first day, first show. taare zameen par. and he wanted to do it in style.

the kids were both excited. this would be their first ‘date.’ for sailee, as dusky as her name, afzal managed to borrow a lovely, deep-pink chiffon kameez from his friend who worked at the dry-cleaners. the dress had a mending job to be done, but the tear was hardly visible to the naked eye. besides, it would not be collected from the shop for another four days. from her own meagre earnings (for it canot be called a salary) – from cleaning car windshields, and selling mogras and magazines at the signal opposite hotel ambassador – sailee bought for herself, for the first time in her memory at least, a soap and a shampoo. but the municipality tap that she shared along with other slum refugees had running water only for an hour in the mornings, during which they all filled their buckets. where would she have a good bath now, at this time in the afternoon?

afzal thought about it. “why, you can use the shaunchalay!” he said. indeed, it was the only way. and in between two crammed latrines, amid the dirt and slime leaking through the drainage pipes on that hot afternoon, sailee filled up the leaky orange bucket with water from the toilet taps, crouched in the middle of the narrow passageway and scooped water over her head, using one of the coconut shells that the narial-pani vendor often so carelessly littered behind.

outside, afzal sat at a desk, collecting one-rupee coins from anyone who wanted to use the public facility. luckily, there were hardly any ladies coming in that day, and the gents could barely glance over to the somewhat-well-concealed ladies’ lavatories. secretly priding himself for having given sailee the chance for a luxurious bath, he hopped over to the other side of the road to buy them some mid-afternoon snacks. it would have to be ragda patties, he thought, spicy, tasty, hot, just the right thing after a bath.

afzal was away for about four minutes. during this time, there was but one woman who needed the public toilet. she came away stunned, not understanding which of her feelings were most dominant – relief for having emptied her bladder at last, or shame, at the plight of a young girl having to bathe like that. sailee pretended not to notice anyone, and continued with the scooping of water. it was not until the soap slipped out of her hands and fell into the indian-style latrine, that she lifted her head and noticed him standing there. and then she felt his eyes. eyes that studied her smooth-fresh-smelling body, and caressed her long hair and naked skin. sailee shivered. millions of tiny little goosebumps erupted all over her. and the eyes, unabashed and hungry, lapped up even those with pleasure.

it had taken less than a minute. for a girl who was bathing in her own naivety, dreaming of simple treats like aamir khan and the movie that evening, to come down to reality, how vulnerable it was, how cheap and how easily available.

that night, throughout the movie, afzal held her hands in his and wept. no, she hadn’t told him anything about that afternoon. it was the movie that made him sob…the heart-warming songs, the dyslexic boy ishaan, and his so-hard-to-break-father.

afzal wept, because he missed his own parents, his own brother. he wished he had a father who demanded to know his marks, he wished he had a mother to wipe away his wounds with the end of her saree, a teacher to set free his imagination, if there was one, he checked himself. the letters that were like greek and latin to ishaan awasthi were not any simpler to read for afzal either. he wished he had an education.

and sailee? her eyes were dry. unfeeling, like big black pebbles stuck still in their white envelopes. sailee had grown up just a few hours ago. every passing reel in the film made her aware of a deep hurt and anger bubbling inside her. the false promises made to her parents when they were alive, the teachers who wanted a school built over the land, the man who came with the bulldozers, a childhood spent washing away the bird-shit off cars, the never-appeasing hunger for food, for love, or for a soap to wash her skin with, a place to bathe in privacy… ‘every child is special.’ with every song, she became aware of the hypocrisy. this was the real world, she decided, where sailee and afzal and many thousands like them were born and perished each day. no flute-player in a red and yellow clown’s cape was coming for them.

“but i thought you liked aamir khan,” a confused afzal said, walking a quieter-than-usual sailee back home on the sepia-street-lit mumbai night. “i was wrong,” replied sailee without lifting her eyes. “i hate him.”

to sailee. may you soon find a place to bathe in privacy. from, the nri woman who was just visiting mumbai.




January 30, 2008

*jhattapatti

bounce. bounce. bounce. swish. plop.

for the second time on that wet morning, sree had to sink her feet in the mud.

“hurry up! come on, we only have five minutes till the bell goes…silly girl!”

sree heard them chuckling behind her, but she maintained a blank, not-affected look on her face, passed them the ball, then squatted down and buried her hands in the brown earth-water, her wide eyes glistening like her now-freshly-browned palms.

“hey! who’s going to be the donkey again? come back here, slowcoach.”

sree got up. she jerked her wrists in the air to shake the mud off, and walked back carefully. taking her place in the centre – a few feet away from both the girls, one on either side – she turned this way and that, and round and round, jumping to get a hold on the ball that the two passed from over her head, giggling all the while.

“will you let me have a chance tomorrow?” her small voice finally found the courage to ask the girls as they walked back from the playground for the next lesson. math. the girls laughed again. “why not? but you must be quicker.” sree calculated for a moment. “i…i dont want to be the donkey this time…”

“but you are one already!” they guffawed, others joining in their laughter.

math. the very mention of the subject made her want to hide below the bench. “get your homework out everyone, where i can see it on your desks.” ten minutes later, sree was making her way to the staffroom where all the teachers drank tea and shared stories of incorrigible children, husbands, and mothers-in-law. hands stiff and behind her back, with one finger she stroked her other hand where the cane had fallen, making a track of the hot-hot, soft skin. no homework meant kneeling down in the staffroom where her face too would turn hot with shame. when she came back to her class for the next not-so-dreaded english lesson, she found her name scribbled all over the blackboard: “sree is a bad girl. true / false.”

at home, sree ate her dosas in silence, watching the door, while a tv added to the kitchen cacophony. a click, a jingle, and it flung open at last, letting in her father and kid brother who bounded towards her happily. sree waited till the father went in to the kitchen, then smacked him hard on his head, and made him cry.

*i am not aware of how to translate jhattapatti in english. it’s a children’s game (from maharashtra) where one player – say x – hits or touches another – y – then y goes on to touch z, and so on. the game involves a lot of running barefeet, and sometimes you don’t know if the resounding slaps are coming from the feet on concrete, or from sweaty hands on skin.

ps: yes, when i read this piece again, it reminded me of TZP, and i winced. amazing how the mind travels…and all i thought of was a little girl being the ‘donkey’. honest.




January 28, 2008

ma, why does self-raising flour…

…not do what it says on the pack?

self raising flour




January 18, 2008

house #47, acton street

my train/tube commutes have always been interesting.

if i’m not mentally memory-surfing between mumbai and london, then i’m travelling across many minds and through many characters on paper, leafing through pages and pages of them till i reach my destination. and then the story continues on my way back home. sometimes, a little disoriented when i have just read a powerful story, the characters travel a short distance with me, and drop off even without me knowing when. most times, i am happiest when i come across a happy ending.

one certain book that never ran out of characters, or stories, was but a door on acton street. i passed by this door en route to my office on the #45 or #46 bus, which starts at kings cross station, passes through pentonville road, kings cross road, acton street, and finally grays inn road where i get off. a seven minute-journey, i think, including all the bus-stopping times in between.

opposite one of these bus stops is this door to house#47, which i always found half-open. i must have noticed it the first time i passed acton street, for not all houses in england keep their doors open to the public. as i passed by the door a second and third time, i began to wonder about the people living inside. were they young, too careless to think about an open front-door? were they elderly, too ill to walk? perhaps someone inside was just too hot, and decided to ventilate the room a little. but why was the door open every day, and especially at that particular time i passed the road.

the door was a dark, old shade of green, with a worn-out gold-coloured ‘u’-shaped handle right in the middle. the glass above the doorframe was cracked, broken, as if shattered by a little boy who missed catching a small ball that his friend must have thrown across, or a lover who wanted to get his message across to his/her beloved who lived with very strict parents. the message would have to be wrapped around a little pebble strong enough to smash the frosted glass. maybe an elderly widower, who always forgot his keys were under the doormat, once had to break glass to get into his own house. maybe there were vandals on the street who bullied and harrassed, and troubled the residents of the #47 house the most. what if there was an extremist group inside, mixing flours and chemicals and cooking recipes that threatened innocent lives? maybe one of them had an argument and that is why the glass was broken. no, no, maybe there was nothing to it at all. the house perhaps was rented by someone who was so busy that the door and its broken glass was never on their to-do list. gasp! what if it was a haunted house, and no one liked to live in it? …that’s why the door was always half-open (maybe it creaked horribly too), that’s why i could never ‘see’ anyone going in or out…

everyday the bus stopped in front of #47 on acton street. everyday, the characters changed. the stories changed. the writer also, changed. the bus journeys became irregular and i began to travel once a week to work. the rest of the days, i worked from home. i always looked out for the door though, and all the stories it wanted to tell me.

yesterday, for the first time in one-and-a-half year, the door was shut. it was brand new, and had a fresh coat of shining, black paint on it, like it was teasing me. the doorframe had been replaced too, and the glass, frosted, was all intact. i kept looking, even when the bus had taken in all its passengers and had begun to move on. when i could not crane my neck any longer, i relaxed. the activity must have brought a smile to my face, because the person in front of me returned it, surprised, and somewhat awkwardly.

he should have known. i just happen to like happy endings.




moving on…

nothing fancy. nothing extra. just a new location…less spam maybe. more convenience.
hopefully more words. many, many more words.

do keep coming back. and yes, before i leave the most important part out, please update your feeds.




January 11, 2008

to the bbc…an irresistable rant

the world’s cheapest car. surely that’s front page news for every general/business-publication on the planet. but wait, the world’s cheapest car from india? go on then, put down the usual, that’ll will easily give you 25 to 40 words.

and so the bbc must have gone on to present its front home page news (which i should have taken a screenshot of, as i can’t find it now, and I can’t believe how foolish i was for not thinking of it earlier), with the oldest of india-related clichés available in their database.

in fact, i suspect they must even have a stylesheet to represent india: third world, most polluted country, most populated, clogged roads, lack of infrastructure, relentless traffic, (especially photo captions, one of which almost always reads the same for every other news on india: one in three indians live in ‘harsh poverty’) a third of the population living below the poverty line, shanty slums, ‘children living off scraps left by the railway passengers’… like a friend so casually put it, “what goes of their father?”

look at this classic example for instance (scroll down to the last picture and its caption): is it in any way connected with the rest of the story?

oh puhleease, writers at the bbc, do your reports always have to be so skewed? india has grown up, why wont you?

someday when i have the time and resources, i do want to make a documentary with snapshots of all the ‘good’ that is in india too, along with the ‘changing’ (i won’t call it bad, things are really changing, and i can see the change when i go back every year), and i want to send it to the bbc so they can get rid of all their old footage on india. or i might just sue them for defamation. whichever’s quicker.

and yes, we *do* have motorists taking two, three, four of a family or friends on a two-wheeler. it’s not a miracle that they don’t fall off, it’s faith, and it’s all over the country. yes, we have pollution, a crumbling infrastructure, poverty, beggars…name one country that doesn’t.

at least, we have better (read, reliable) medical care.




December 30, 2007

dancing in the dark

another writing crisis. i have had so many so far that i sometimes wonder why i even try.

at other times there was a plain ‘what-do-i-write-about’ lack of inspiration. this time the big question is w-h-e-n, and how do i manage my time around work and athri. this time it is also more severe…how do i break into the mood for a novel when i can’t even find the time (or the energy) to blog. i ‘think’ all the time. i eat when i am hungry. so why must i not write?

so here it is. fifteen minutes of dancing my fingers on the keyboard. while it is still dark outside. while athri and praveen are fast asleep. while i myself can’t sleep over the worry that i am not writing.

i could probably start with our short, quick break from the bitterly-cold winter in london (or so i was told), to a hardly-wintery india…

flying alone with a one-year old is not going to be something on my list for a long long time. but yes, both athri and i survived. or that must be more due to the fact that we visited the doctors in mumbai as soon as we landed, before any other social visit. athri was promptly given some asthalin and alerid so he could breathe through his over-four-week-old nasal congestion. for my fever that went up and down and up like a sensex chart, (what the so-bemused nhs gp here had so fondly dismissed as a common cold and viral infection, and sent me home not with medicines, but a suggestion to ‘have patience’ instead), the doctor in mumbai declared – with some alarm – a severe state of bronchitis.

five days of strong knock-out antibiotics later, wherever i went, i was well enough to not-spare tales of a desperate medical system in one of the most highly developed countries of the world. a chance meeting with a leeds-resident – again, at a doctor’s clinic in thane – landed me with a useful tip that perhaps you too can use: when in front of a uk-gp, always highly-exaggerate the number of days you have been suffering an illness, any kind. so two days of cough becomes three weeks of a terrible time, and …you get the drift.

other highlights of the trip include a very happy athri; a relaxed mom and dad; elated grandparents; a greatly-relieved to meet sis (who, in all the confusion of parting, i even forgot to hug, and regretted all the way home…deeps, i owe you this one) and brother-in-law; meeting my kottakkal doctor – who officially declared (to my relief, for i thought i was beginning to imagine all the pain) my fibromyalgia at a point of no return – but assured he will help me deal with the fatigue symptoms; a first-time-dentist visit and thankfully-not-as-painful-as-i-thought tooth filling; a long-awaited trip on the train to mumbai vt for half a day, which included mysore masala dosas from the guy opposite the express-towers building at nariman point, where i had started my career (is it really 11 years now!?); and last but the most impulsive highlight of all…my decision to face my fear of the road, and learning to drive.

now the vacation is over. the bags are not quite unpacked, and athri is still jet-lagged – sleeping all afternoon and keeping us awake for the longest hours of the night. he can’t stop walking now, blows kisses that fly, and talks a lot. to the cbeebies characters on tv, to the radio, the lights, the switches, and most of all, to this imaginary-alien-friend i am convinced he has, who lives under the cot. i say alien, because our thirteen-month-old thinks it is his moral duty to feed it as soon as daylight fills the room…be they milkbottle-caps, vicks vaporub, the tv remote, the landline-telephone handset, feeding-spoons, or even my only bangles. (now tell me, what kind of human friend would have a diet like that?)

there, he is doing it right now, which means my fifteen minutes are long over, dawn has broken, and i have to stop writing.

have a nice day.




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