Lookie! A Cookie!

Now that we're in Bombay, we're staying in a serviced apartment till we can move into the flat. This is our 4th day here and each evening we've come back to the room to find a little glass jar containing 4-6 cookies, some chocolate and some plain. They're rather yummy and Anando and I started looking forward to it the moment we realized it was a pattern. We polish them off and the next day the empty jar is removed when they clear the room. This evening I happened to be in the room when the doorbell rang (5 minutes ago). I opened the door to find a uniformed staff-member grinning at me. Holding out the jar he said with a cheerful smile, "Hello ma'am, evening snacks for you!"

Wow. I feel like I'm at a school picnic or camp, with allotted meals. But if snacktime equals cookies, I'm not complaining! Will keep this short as it's hard to type with a crumbly cookie in one hand.

Flight from the Desert

Mixed feelings, as always. We leave Dubai for good in another hour's time. Although you might argue that I "left" when I closed that bank account, got my cable TV refund, or when I locked the doors to an empty house one last time. But that moment, when the aircraft noses upwards and I crane my neck to watch those skyscrapers give me a standing ovation in the sun for 20 months well spent, will really be it.

I am pretty sure I will have moist eyes and a lump in my throat. There is so much to look forward to. But I am glad there is so much to look back on with joy and nostalgia as well. There had better be. It would be a shame if I'd spent this time of my life here and found nothing worth remembering. It's not Dubai, but a life, a lifestyle, a friends' circle, and the last of my 20s - which I saw off here - that will forever linger in the desert haze of Dubai.

I will be back to reclaim it, but always briefly, and always temporarily. I don't mind. It's going to be my very own time capsule.

Memories for Sale

It's that time of life, again, when you put a price tag on things you cannot keep any more, and try and convince other people to buy them. Moving to smaller accommodation in a different country means rationalizing, and I mean really rationalizing, what all you can make room for. And the things you give up move into a mental shelf instead, where they will defiitely remain, unspoilt for much longer than their physical incarnation.

But even though you put a price tag on some things, you only realise their true worth when someone tries to haggle over it. So I dusted, polished and photographed our shoe cabinet and posted the ad online.

Within hours, I got a curt response "How old? Is it scratched and much used? I will give you ___ (insert woefully low amount here) Dirhams for it and pick it up this evening."

Well I beg your pardon!!! How presumptuous. Did he really think I would just worship him for extorting it from me! My shoe cabinet is unscratched, very new, and definitely worth more than that, thank you very much. And so, indignant and emotional, I took the ad off the Net.

What's left? The washing machine that knows my dirty linen inside out and tumble dried; the sofa-bed which...hmmm; oh well, the cooking range where I experimented with hotplate cooking; and the bean bags that enveloped my family on relaxed afternoons on our balcony.

Visitors to our Bombay house - do not be surprised if you find woodwork emerging from the inhabitants, as at this rate I doubt I will sell anything.

Wuff...

In all my blogging negligence, I forgot to introduce a new arrival at my parents' home. So just for the record, here's Kaizer. Watch out, he bites. But he'll also drop whatever he's doing for a tummy rub.

The Flower

It’s Thursday today. She used to need hibiscus flowers on Thursdays for her pujo. When younger, she would go to the park herself, looking through the shrubs for perfect flowers to pluck for her gods. A twisted ankle thanks to an unseen pothole ended the independent trips. Then it was up to us to fetch her flowers. As pollution and cars around the neighborhood park increased, I returned empty-handed on Thursday mornings, rushing to change into my school uniform. By the time I joined JNU, she had given up expecting fresh flowers, making do with a refrigerated garland of marigolds, bought the previous evening. Rushing to class through the campus wilderness, I would chance upon the red flowers, but it was too late to pluck them and take them home. By then her pujo would be done: her wet hair drying down her back as she read the paper and chewed her paan in the wintry noon sunshine, rising briefly to rescue the prasad placating her gods before the ants and lizards got to it.

It’s Thursday today. And exactly 2 years after I said my last goodbyes to her, I was greeted this morning by a nodding hibiscus flower on a balcony some floors below me. A living, breathing reminder of a love-and-tears memory.

Farewells

I said my first Dubai good-bye yesterday: to a neighbor who left this morning and won’t be back in Dubai till the end of the year. We weren’t close, we just met occasionally while waiting for the lift. J, who lives alone, is an elegant, charming lady, probably in her early sixties, an Iranian who has her family (and some posh homes) scattered across the world. So she spends the summer between South Africa, LA, Paris and wherever else she wants to go. She has visited India seven times.

She had invited us over for dinner some months back. The evening had been pleasant, though rather amusing thanks to two show-off men who competed to tell a rather undressed, hot, blonde, Australian diamond buyer how they had been all over the world, really, and “even eaten fried tarantula” (“oh it tastes awesome” nodded show-off #2). But J herself has no airs about her. She has a quiet dignity and wealth she takes for granted but needn’t flaunt.

So anyway, I had hoped to call her over one evening and really get to know more about all she’s done, places she’s lived, and her opinions of Iran. But she was away in LA and came back just briefly before heading off to Paris. And I told her we were going to leave in October for good. So over sticky Iranian sweets and a quick tete-a-tete to say bye, all I learnt was her childhood memories of Maxim’s Restaurant in Paris and how Pierre Cardin has ruined it by buying it and setting up chains all over the world (“It used to be so nice, like a club, you knew everyone, and you had your personal table right from your father’s time…” she protested) and how she is a “bad Moslem” (she doesn’t fast for Ramadan and she served and drank wine when we’d visited her).

And I came away with a box of Maxim's chocolates and a little card with her name and Paris address on it, and an invitation to visit her anytime I like, and an email address where I can contact her. And memories of a smiling neighbor who genuinely seemed to like us. And I hope she remembers us as the smiling young couple across the hall whom she will someday meet again.

I think traveling helps you to leave little bits of yourself all over the world. And that’s what I like best about it.

Time to Go

Uproot. Unroot. New routes.
Changing the soil beneath our boots.
Watching, observing, experiencing.
Thinking, feeling, hearing, glancing.
Stability. Comfort. Routines to follow.
Cultural differences to swallow.
Time flying on calendar pages.
Just yesterday. It’s been ages.
Uproot. Unroot. Time to pack.
Stability under attack.
Excitement and anticipation too
Unfamiliar. New. And yet not new.
Old town. Old friends. Shops we know.
Places where we used to go.
Uncaring. Certain. Bombay awaits.
Omnipresent in our fates.
We’d gone to save. To live. To earn.
She always knew we would return.

Oops!

I was waiting in a hotel lobby for Anando, leafing through a magazine. At each 'ping' announcing a lift's arrival, I would look up to see if it was him. A lift arrived. 'Ping'. A man stepped into the lobby, looking a little bewildered, a heavy laptop bag weighing his left shoulder down. He was dressed in a t-shirt and baggy jeans. His head swiveled this way and that, not sure which way he was meant to turn. At that crucial, absent-minded moment, a voice warned him, "Sir, your zip...". The poor man wildly reached for the fly of his jeans, starting to raise the hem of his t-shirt, when the Good Samaritan added, "on your bag."

For the next few seconds I had to bury my nose in the magazine as I stifled my giggles.

Thankam

After my last post, I had hoped to write something more cheerful. Of course, I had also hoped to blog sooner than I eventually have. But this one is sad too.

She used to make us the most amazing idlis. With this awesome chutney which would just drape itself all over the idlis and the shining stainless steel boxes in which she carried them to the office. And all of us would descend on the box, devouring huge quantities and licking it clean before washing it and handing it back with a big smile, already asking for the next installment. When I had stayed long enough in the company and she thought I was important enough, I would sometimes get an entire box to myself.

Her spellings were terrible, and when she typed letters on our behalf we had to be careful to avoid hilarious bloopers. The day we received emails from TS full of spelling mistakes, we knew she was filling in for his regular secretary, and would call her to warn her before he realized his carefully dictated mails were full of embarrassing errors.


She had a clear plan for the future. Her only child was 25. She and her husband would arrange his wedding, and then move back from Delhi to Kerala and live a retired life.

This was 3 years ago. She came for my wedding. I left Delhi, but very occasionally I would call and speak to her. We spoke after TS passed away. And now I heard that she lost her husband all of a sudden. They still hadn’t moved back to Kerala. They still haven’t married off their son.

At a time in my life when I am anticipating with excitement our return to India from Dubai, a home of our own in Bombay, and a new set-up in a familiar city, I wonder how it feels when dreams are denied. Not deferred, but lost forever because the other half dreaming them with you is gone. I’m waiting for Thankam to return to Delhi so that I can call her. But I don’t know what to say.

Update: I found out later that Thankam's son had got married earlier this year and her husband was well and present at the wedding. I also got around to calling her. And after a little awkwardness and consoling, she turned the tables on me in Thankam fashion, reminding me I'd been married almost 3 years now, where was the "good news" and listed all the others who were ahead of me in that race! The conversation ended with laughter, and that's the best way, always, to hang up!

Toss

She lay next to him, a young bride, flushed and incredibly happy. He held up a coin. "This is the coin I tossed to decide whether to come home from the city when my parents said they had found me a bride. It told me to come home, and I did. And now I am with you."

She did not know what to say, except stare at him with all the love she could muster in her eyes. He was handsome, loving, and more understanding than she had been brought up to expect in her small patriarchal town. And he would remain loyal to her in 44 years of marriage, through difficult times, joblessness, complaining relatives, and occasionally ungrateful, always forgetful children.

Then one day, he was gone. She saved the coin, secreting it into her purse so that it would always be with her, to remind her of love, and what a matter of chance it was.

And now, it lay in the mud, slipped from her arthritic fingers. And all the world passing by could see was an old woman, stiffly bending to reach below a parked car, as a shining coin of no value lay just out of her grasp.