i try to capture

the lotus creator
a figure asleep on
the bed of snakes
a long haired woman
seated by his side

my page reeks
of oil paint
guilty,
messy

yellow, peacock blue,
red and green and black
the colours of vishnu
are on my hands

and now they smell
of dove soap.

i have shorter weekends and longer saturdays now…if you know what i mean. and i’m learning about bananas.

for someone who’s always run away from the word ‘medicine’ itself, i’m surprised i enjoy working at the pharmacy (saturdays and alternate weekdays) for four hours a day. it keeps me moving about (much necessary for my backpain, which is why i signed up in the first place), keeps me in constant touch with people of all sorts and sizes, and besides…makes me feel less guilty when i want to impulse-buy a new tshirt or book, or new shoes 😉

the pharmacy here is no different from the ‘chemist’ store we have in india, except that the systems here are …well, totally different. no handwritten prescriptions to start with…everything is typed in on separate sheets of paper. if you’re above 60 or under 16, if you have a tax-exemption certificate, are pregnant or have some kind of medical exemption certificate, you don’t need to pay. for lesser mortals like us who pay the tax regularly for all these mentioned above, there is a charge of �6.40, for every medicine prescribed.

in india, everyone paid for their medicines, and everyone was seen by the doctor. he/she patiently listened to all your woes, health-related or even about how your servant doesn’t turn up on time, and then writes down some medication that usually treats both mind and body. the dispensary i used to visit in thane had someone (i think his name was gaitonde) to dispense medicines just by the door. patients waited to see the doctor outside in the waiting room, they gave their little handwritten chits to the dispenser and waited for their medicine-pudis again. the whole place would smell of bitter tablets, sweet syrupy cough medicine and dettol, and i would watch in fascination as the two hands and ten fingers blurred, breaking whole tablets in half, picking up tiny envelopes to drop the halved tablets in and mixing colourful liquids in amber-colour bottles to take home…all within three minutes or less.

he would also suggest some home remedies for you to get over the side effects of the medicines he’s just made. and then he would put his big head (along with the nehru-topi) out of the little hole in the wall and call out…”chala, naeeext.”

in the uk everything is different. you have to pray that you fall ill at the right time. that is… anytime between monday noon to wednesday evening. if you were bad in a previous birth, you might fall ill on a thursday morning; when that happens do consider before the receptionist asks you: “is it an emergency or do you want to see the nurse?” if you say you have been having the problem for about a week or two, it’s not an emergency. if you collapse and someone else dials for the ambulance, it is.

if you do say you want to see the doctor (of course, that’s why you called, right?), you will be told to wait and ‘be patient’ until the next monday. if you hurriedly do submit and say okay you don’t mind seeing the nurse, hoping at least you have some medication to see you till the next week, you will only regret it later. because if you don’t belong to any of those exemption-categories, you’ll end up paying both the nurse now and the doctor later, that’s �12.80 for just two medicine-prescriptions.

the doctor will see you for precisely four minutes. if you happen to mention an unrelated health symptom that’s also bothering you, he/she will just ignore or cut you abruptly with an unwelcome smile: “we’ll discuss that some other time,” and hand you the green paper that he’s already printed out.

the pharmacy will be down the street or next door, there are usually three to four dispensers and someone assisting them with the delivery items and the till (sales counter). the store smells of deodorant and coffee, and not tablets and syrups. you get entire strips of medicines you won’t even need perhaps, stapled and packaged into neat crisp paper bags; awkwardly-folded sheets of paper explain why you are taking the medication and another two pages go on to explain the side-effects if you muster up the courage to take them later.

if you do bring back unused medicines they will be thrown into the wastebin. tonics and cough syrups are readymade and can be bought off the shelf, and to counter side-effects you need to buy more medicines after you see the doctor again. (if you are still alive that is.)

now that i am on the other side, what i like about working at the pharmacy are the customers.

…like this 90-year-old woman who walked in slowly on her crutches. she even had all her teeth in and with shaky hands she clutched a pen and asked,”where do i sign, dear?” when i offered to sign for her she insisted she would do it herself! and here i am complaining of my back problem!

…there was this old man of 67, utterly dejected and depressed because his tests for cancer were all negative. “you should be happy,” i said, and felt like handing him a lollipop to cheer him up. but he stood there like a statue, fat tears welling up in his eyes but not rolling down his cheeks.

…sometimes there are strange people who wont tell me what they want, and insist that they’ll see the pharmacist, even if they just need some paracetamol. sometimes they sound rude, like someone did to me today. these, i’m told, are the ‘funny kinds’…the kinds who don’t like asians, if you read between the lines.
hmm, well… *shrug*

…and then there are people who teach you about bananas:
a little boy of three (with his mom) asks for bana-aana-flavoured medicines. we ask him what colours do bananas come in and he thinks and says…”umm, shtawberry, pineapple….ummmm..and bana-aana.”
“really!?” we ask. “and where do they grow?” we ask again and he says, without thinking this time: “oh, they grow in little packets …with stickers on them”!! 🙂

these are the best people i’ve ever seen – the little ones, aged 10 months to four years. they climb on chairs and tables, or cling on to their mothers and try and read out everything that’s on display in the store. they fill the place with laughter and we beg them for more.

it’s a different world altogether, working for a pharmacy in the uk…
when i tell them that in india we rely more on tried and tested home remedies, they look surprised. neither the doctors nor the dispensers have ever heard of the healing properties of turmeric or cumin.

“neem?” they ask, “isn’t that for the dogs that itch?”

my creative-writing-class tutor just called, requesting me to get an extra copy of my homework this evening.

i asked him why, secretly wondering if he was going to pass on my writing to someone senior to have a look at and appreciate, but his reply has left me puzzled. he said it was because i had the softest voice in class and he can never hear me well when i’m reading.

sheeesh! should i feel glad that he took the trouble to call me up and ask me to get an extra copy just so he doesn’t miss out on my story? or should i feel ashamed that i can’t speak loud enough?

🙁

…is wanting to start with it NOW, when you also know that you have absolutely *no* resources to go ahead with what you so badly want to do 😐

ask any kerala-iyer about his/her favourite food that they can eat anytime in the day and they’ll say thairchadam even before you blink. also considered to be healthy for your system, thairchadam or yoghurt-rice requires the least effort on your part as far as cooking goes. all you require is some cooked rice (preferably left-over from lunch or dinner the previous night), and some curd.

here’s what you need for the seasoning:

mustard seeds – one tsp
jeera/cumin – one tsp
two finely chopped green chillies
chana dal – one tsp
urad dal – one tsp
one dry red chilly
a pinch of asafoetida or hing
few curry leaves
one-inch-piece ginger – finely chopped
one pod of garlic – finely chopped (optional)
few small madras onions – finely chopped (optional)

— mix the rice and curd well.
— add the salt
— heat a small pan with some oil and add the chana and urad dal
— add the mustard and jeera seeds and when they begin to splutter…
— add the hing, chillies and rest of the seasoning ingredients
— take the pan off the gas and pour its contents over the curd-rice.

mix well and enjoy with some lime or mango pickle 🙂

the best accompaniment for any long journey, curd or yoghurt-rice will not go stale for a long time. it might just go sour, as is the property of yoghurt. to avoid this, my mother used to add some milk along with the rice and curd. that reminds me of another tasty alternative that she often prepares…

if you want to have curd-rice in a hurry and don’t have the time to cook the rice, use flattened rice flakes, also known as poha. wash some poha well and drain all the water. leave it aside for about ten minutes, while you get rest of the ingredients ready. if you have a cucumber in your fridge, grate it until you get about quarter the quantity of the poha and keep aside. now mix the curd and poha and grated cucumber, and add the salt. add the rest of the seasoning ingredients as above and enjoy!

you can use grated cucumber even with normal rice, i like it that way. my sister also likes to add dessicated coconut with the rice. that tastes yumm too 🙂

i had always wanted to do it. ever since i set foot in this country almost three years ago. every time i visited the streets of london, every time it rained, every time i craved for them, i wanted to do it.

i wanted to sell wada pav in london.

yesterday, praveen and i did just that… right here down the street where we live!! i was going crazy with excitement, and ideas! the weekly tabloid announced a street-fair in the old town last sunday. the old town is just five minutes from where we live and i thought there couldn’t be a better time to try out the wada pav experiment, just to see how the english respond to the indian burger.

since it took me almost the entire week to confirm about the fair, get a table-space in front of cochin restaurant, we made all the purchases at the last minute. our friend harish, who also shares my enthu for this idea unfortunately had a visiting cousin (along with family) from glasgow, so he couldn’t make it, neither could jayu and girish who were equally excited but had visiting friends. so it was up to praveen and me to give it our best shot. we weren’t sure what to do next, both of us had never stood behind a stall before (although praveen’s cousins back home run a hotel), and i had made wadas just two or three times by myself at home. naturally, we had so many questions…how many will i have to make? will they taste good? will they sell? what will the response be like? and so on…

anyway we decided we would surely enjoy ourselves, and that was what was important. so we set out, buying potatoes from the local market, oil, chillies and ginger, coriander leaves, and pav / flat burger-buns (although they don’t have the mumbai-type square bread we would have to make do with the round ones). also gloves (since no one wants to buy hand-touched food here!), about two hundred and fifty paper napkins and plates. i think i was most embarrassed buying the bread, because everyone seemed to be staring and pointing at our 240-burger-buns-full-trolley, smiling to themselves at the sight. to make things worse, praveen laughed back, telling them “well, i’m just feeling a little peckish today”!! that was the last i saw of him in the store, because i decided to wait for him in the car park outside while my face regained some of its natural colour.

saturday 8pm:
once we got home praveen and i made some simple posters advertising our product. we had a quick neer-dosa dinner with some masala-potato bhaji. next, we got a huge deep vessel to cook potatoes in from our five-doors-down-the-line-neighbour (who also owns the cochin restaurant). a batch of potatoes in and while they cooked, i made the coriander, ginger and chilli paste that would go in the recipe. almost two hours later, we got about 88 wadas from this first lot. that helped us get an idea about how early we would have to start the next morning, since the fair would only begin by 1pm.

sunday 11am:
our kitchen looked like it was hit by hurricane wada pav…and the whole house smelt of thick oil and potatoes. two more batches of huge boiled potatoes were waiting to be peeled and mashed and rolled into wadas, and the others waiting to be fried. by this time i had also made some date-chutney (a last-minute idea) and was waiting for praveen to get back with some more fresh coriander for green-chilli-mint-coriander chutney. on his way back he also managed to put up some of our posters on the lamp-posts leading to the fair.

1pm:
i sent praveen out with the first batch of hot and ready-to-eat wadas (about a hundred), the chutneys and all other paraphernalia that would go on our table. he forgot to take his cap and it was going to be a very hot day…good for business we thought 😉

1:45pm:
“boni hogaya!“, he yells into the phone, over the noise of all the people and music in the background, (boni is hindi for the first sale of any product.) he had sold three.

2:30pm:
i am done with the frying. i’m totally dehydrated now, and wash my face with ice-cold water in the basin, wondering how so many people sell wada pavs in india every day. i am curious about our little venture nevertheless, so i take some caps (i learn that it was one of the hottest days of the year) and set out to join praveen. he says he had some good news, that he sold 26 of them and that the people were coming back for more. i think i felt a grin touch both my ears then.

5:00pm:
praveen and i are still baking under the sun. we hadn’t had our lunch (we didn’t feel like it, with all the wada pavs in front of us and the sun overhead), and we probably gulped down about four or five bottles of water. i got the foldable three-legged seat for praveen from our car and watched the bare skin on my feet grow dark inside my thick-strapped sandals.

6:00pm:
the bells of the cathedral start ringing and all of a sudden there are people in front of us. one man wants “nine bombay burgers” for his family dinner, another man wants two for his wife, another maharashtrian lady (the only indian all day) buys two again…she had bought four earlier with her husband and for a moment i almost feel guilty for charging her. if there weren’t so many people at one time, maybe i would just give them to her, we could even be friends… my mind is running with thoughts but my hands just can’t stop working, spreading the chutneys one by one neatly on the open bread, filling in some garlic chutney and ‘boondi’ and two wadas. business seems to have shot up suddenly and praveen and i find that most customers were second- and third-time buyers in the day. some of them also asked for the recipe. they say they had never tasted anything like this before and we say you’ll find it only in bombay. praveen gets carried away and begins to shout “burgers, burgers, bombay burgers for a pound!” :-))

7:30pm:
the roads are open to the traffic nd we’re asked to pack up now. praveen and i look at each other and smile. we had worked hard, we had had a good day, we had made new friends and we had enjoyed ourselves all the time. a lot of the wadas were unsold, but neither of us was complaining. tired and happy, we walked back to our car, looking forward to a nice warm bath and cold and refreshing thairchadam that i would prepare later for dinner.

you are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. you may have to work for it, however. — richard bach, illusions.

when we started in the day we were apprehensive if we would at least recover our costs (£56), but we found that we had indeed, and also had made a profit of over £70! “not bad at all,” i tell praveen, “see, i think this is what they call low investment, high returns!” and praveen replies,”don’t talk to me about wada pavs for a month.”

so well, i can tell everyone now, i sold wada pav in the uk. i know i can do it again, but i am not sure when. maybe someone else eventually will sell the bombay burger here, and i’ll probably bite into a few and casually mention that hey, we did it first…read it on my journal!

right now though, i’m quite content.

it’s a blank feeling, what i have right now. just when you are given something to be happy about, another choice comes your way uninvited, leaving you to decide which one will make you even happier.

when i heard the voicemail last evening i was excited. so excited i called my parents in india right away. i think it is natural, for anyone who is called for an interview after having been sending out applications steadily for the past year-and-a-half, and receiving only rejections or silence in response.

so this is it then, i thought, hugging praveen and sighing with a-difficult-to-hide-relief. this would be my (second) real interview since Mantra almost forced me into agreeing to work for them. but this would also be something i would much rather be doing, i knew. i wanted it too.
good company, one-year contract, distance: commutable.

i rushed upstairs to our computer room dragging praveen right behind, asking him to read the application i had sent them. when i opened my mailbox, there was a new mail waiting for me. it said i had been shortlisted for another job. wow!
big company, permanent job, distance: too far. praveen said we could relocate if necessary.

my planets seem to have suddenly changed track! i am just told i also have a saturday-four-hour-job i had casually applied for at the local pharmacy. talk about some of the mysteries of life! all this when my backpain is going through one of its worst phases yet.

i am not sure right now how i will do at the interviews. i am positive though, either of the jobs will suit me well. till then, well…i just will have to wait and watch 😐

update on other fronts:

— i passed my driving theory test with full marks for the multiple choice and 79% for the hazard perception. practical test’s two months away and yes, i am still quite nervous on the roads.

— i enrolled in a car maintenance course so i know what i’m driving. praveen enrolled in a micro-robotics course but he was recently told that sadly, it was to be cancelled because he was the only applicant in the entire hertfordshire county!

— i have been reading a LOT. i didn’t get selected as one of the ten volunteer reviewers for the guardian first book award, but well, my bookreview made it 🙂 and it’s put up right now at the waterstones’ store in london.

— i have learned that i am more passionate about cooking than ever. it makes me happy, it makes me adventurous, and it doesn’t make me hungry.

— these days i am teaching my husband to give me surprises, so we are leaving tonight for a place i don’t have a clue about. only, praveen can’t seem to hide it in his stomach and keeps throwing names of places at random! i am also working on a wishlist so he knows what little things will make me happy. i think slowly though, he will learn 😉

— we also have been going for regular morning walks since about a month. because obviously, praveen needed much more exercise than merely writing about suryanamaskars 😐

— now that we both understand each other better (i think!), we have also joined a rifle-shooting club at watford. with real (and heavy) .22 rifles and lead bullets that travel 25/50 and 100 yards to hit their target. had initially planned it as a surprise for praveen, since it was something he had always wanted to do. but when i wrote to the club authorities and we went to meet them, they encouraged me to join as well, as women shooters were few (only one in their club, now, two). to my surprise (and theirs), the very first day i got all my bullets in the black circles, and two of them bulls-eye.

strangely, i haven’t been able to match my shooting scores since, but well…we still have some years till the next olympics, don’t we? 😉

i have always hated the karela. maybe as a child i used to associate its bitterness with the powdered medicine-mixed-with-honey i had to have almost every other day. i guess for the same reason, i still dislike honey.

but these days, likes and dislikes have ceased to matter as much as they used to, and the importance of eating the right food and vitamins is what comes first. that is, unless your husband/family can resist fried stuff and buckets of humous unlike mine 😉

so i tried to make something different with bittergourd, something that i would not need to have to add jaggery to, to avoid the awful ‘uggghhh’ expression on my face while tasting it. i looked up google and found three interesting recipes i thought i would like to try, picked up ingredients and mixed them about, and here is how it turned out…

what you need:

bittergourd or karela – 2 long and thick ones
two onions, chopped coarse and roasted, along with
two tomatoes, diced
one onion chopped fine
one tbsp ginger-garlic paste
one tsp corainder and cumin seeds, ground coarsely
oil
salt to taste

de-bitterising the gourds:

— chop the ends of the bittergourd and cut into three pieces
— scoop out the seeds and insides and keep aside (throw out the seeds, leave the coverings)
— sprinkle a little salt over the now ’empty’ karela pieces to reduce its bitterness, and also some salt over the scooped-out insides of the bittergourd.
— leave aside for an hour.

for the stuffing:

— roast and blend the onion and tomatoes to a paste
— heat oil in a kadhai and add in the ground coriander and cumin and ginger-garlic paste
— now add the onion and tomato puree and stir
— add the bittergourd ‘insides’ that you had kept aside after you squeeze out any excess water
— add salt to taste, fry this mixture for a while, until the paste becomes thicker and ‘stuffable’

finally, the recipe:

— drain the bittergourd pieces on a papertowel or press lightly so as to remove any excess water (do not squeeze them)
— fill in the pieces with the onion-tomato masala
— fry them in a flat pan with a little oil dribbled over them
— set the flame on low gas and cover with a lid for a while
— when they are half cooked (the pieces will be tender and the stuffing will be well packed within)…
— place another kadhai on the gas and heat some oil
— fry the finely chopped onions and add to it any leftover onion-tomato masala you had prepared earlier
— place the stuffed karela pieces gently with a spoon into this kadhai and cook for a while

if you exclude the de-bitterising time, the recipe should take you just about 20 to 25 minutes to make!

don’t forget to garnish with with dessicated coconut, coriander leaves and a dash of lime. enjoyed best with chapatis or plain hot dal and rice!

let me know if you liked it too! 🙂

one man walks free, yet another, tomorrow dies.

what makes them different?

for someone who is yet to read her first pulitzer prize-winning story collection ‘the interpreter of maladies’, jhumpa lahiri’s second book and debut novel the namesake, comes as a refreshing literary surprise. here is something less ‘magical’, but poignant enough nevertheless, for you to pick it up again.

lahiri’s novel revolves around four members of a family and single event(s) that change the course of their lives. the book that saves ashoke ganguli from the train accident, his life with ashima in america where, torn between duty towards her new husband and her roots in india, she chooses the first and lives a life of compromises…right from altering favourite (indian) recipes to choosing friends, and having to maintain a social ‘bengali’ group with frequent parties for every birthday or ritual.

an official formality in the hospital forces the new parents to name their boy after ashoke’s favourite author nikolai gogol; something that the (less indian and almost american-) boy grows to despise throughout his life – only to understand its significance and want go back to it much later.

through its very plausible conflicts and situations, lahiri’s narrative carries you through two generations of a family split by the lifestyle and cultural differences between two continents 8000 miles apart. every character in the novel has been given an individual-short-story-like treatment, letting you mature along with them as the pages turn. her just way of handling the finale leaves you wanting to read more, yet pleasantly satisfied when you put the book down at last.