Transported

He was on his way back from work, having left the snazzy, new-age, all-glass office in the heart of the city's financial centre. Sitting next to the driver in the battered, used, overused, abused taxi, the young consultant let his gaze wander to the horizon, trying to overlook the rows and rows of cars clogging the well-maintained road that sped through the Middle-Eastern city, lined with pink and white creeper flowers all along the way. A distance of 3 kilometres and it could take him another half an hour or even an hour to cover it.

Curious eyes watched him from the back seat. At least 4 pairs. He hadn't looked back long enough to check. There were women in burkhas, an old man, and a little child, who lisped and asked for water every few minutes. There was none in the car, and the consultant, used to solving people's problems, wondered what could be done about it in the middle of a traffic jam. The father of the child, sitting at the wheel, growled in Malayalam to the boy to sit quiet, or the police would take him away. At least, catching the word 'police' in the torrent of Malayalam that left the driver's lips, that's what the consultant figured. The child shrank back till thirst conquered fear for another attempt.

For no fault of anyone's, the overfull car with old upholstery and insufficient airconditioning smelt to high heaven. The driver had turned the AC on as a kind gesture. If only he hadn't...rolling down the windows would be infinitely better, thought the consultant, as he held his phone to his nostrils in a futile attempt to subtly block the fragrances of all the passengers in that long, sweaty, desert day who had ridden that car.

The taxi driver who picked him up each evening at a fixed time for a fixed rate had brought his whole family that day. Were they planning a picnic after dropping him off? Or had they come along for a ride, for lack of anything better to do? They seemed absorbed in watching him. The young passenger wondered what he would do if his boss pulled up next to this tiny Nissan in his silver Jag right at that moment. Slink down in his seat? Or roll down the window with bravado and cheerfully introduce his adoptive family to the Brit?

This was still better than the morning, when the young 'Paakstani' driving him to work had started showing off his new handmade shoes from his 'vatan' just as they pulled up at the porch. The consultant had jumped hastily out of the car, paying exact change to avoid waiting, before others coming in to work saw him being threatened with a pair of rough leather handmade shoes brandished in his face.

Of course, any of this was better than the agency telling you, in this city of too-much-traffic-too-few-taxis-too-many-people, that inshallah the cab would be there on time, if at all. Or the cab driver calling to say he was 'here boss', at 4.30 am instead of 7, as he sat bolt upright in a too-springy hotel bed, hair on end, wondering why it was dark out at 7.

As he sat and thought about all this, he was disturbed by a crackling sound of static as the driver, bored in the car, started fidgeting with the radio controls. No please please please, he thought, cringing mentally at the thought of Malayalam music flooding this overcrowded tin box.

Suddenly, 'jhalak dikhlaa ja...ek bar aja aja aja aja aaaaja' pounced out of the radio and attacked the smelly space. The back seat yielded first, focusing on the music rather than this fellow Indian who'd sat uncomfortably in the front seat as his collar bristled under the scrutiny. The driver tapped the steering wheel in time to the music. And the young consultant found his feet tapping too. All of them could close their eyes and imagine they were transported to a street in Bombay, in Kolkata, in Cochin, in Kozhikode....The whole car grew happier, and the traffic started creeping forward as a distant light turned green.

Smells like Home

The sound of a pressure cooker whistling and sputtering out is one of the most reassuring, familiar, homey sounds in the world to me. It reminds me of Sunday afternoons lazing at home, in the warmth of family all around. It reminds me of hyperactive evenings with a houseful of friends and relatives as my mother went into overdrive in the kitchen, feeding them all, tired but proud not to have failed everyone's expectation of her as a good cook! It reminds me of walking back from the bus stop on hot summer afternoons, sticky school uniform, a test coming up the next day, and then, as I walked down the corridor towards our flat, the sound of a pressure cooker...Ma's at home, she's cooking.....mutton!!!

I have always prefered to eat than to cook. Ma would occasionally start telling me the process of cooking something when I wandered unsuspectingly into the kitchen to steal a bite of what was cooking. Next thing I knew, I'd be standing there shelling peas as I let her recipe float over my head, paying minimum attention, just enough to make all the right sounds!

But now, with a kitchen to myself, (it's a hot plate, and it's on the left in a small passage on the way to the rest of the room we call home while we live it up (?) in Dubai), I seem to have discovered the joys of cooking! It's a delight to go shopping. It's an even greater delight when I come across a recipe on Sandeepa's page that seems to need all those ingredients I don't know what to do with. And when, in an impulse attempt to cook Chicken 65, I race out to buy karhi patta (curry leaves), I hurry over hot roads in the desert sun, past sights and sounds and foreign cars that remind me that I am far from home, and go looking for those familiar leaves among overstocked shelves with a sense of anticipation and impatience. I glimpse a tightly shrinkwrapped bunch, and raise them to my nose to check and, I am home in that moment, in that smell.

Trying to be content with brief phone conversations with family, when I splutter jeera in the pan prior to cooking aloo gobhi, I close my eyes and breathe in that aroma that always meant that dinner was ready and that daal, with fresh tadka and dhania leaves, was going to be on the table, golden and tempting.

Smells are so much more evocative of memories than anything else. Just like books, they can help you travel, and take you places you loved and treasured, settling you firmly among all that was special, all that was home.

Dreams in their Eyes

What motivates people through life? I'm in Dubai nowadays and I see lots of Asians all around me, working quietly backstage to keep the Emirate running smoothly. Sweepers, waiters, porters, construction workers, hotel housekeeping staff, chefs, taxi drivers, airport bathroom cleaners, they're all Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Afghans (Okay, lots of Filipinos too). They struggle everyday, living in terrible conditions, sharing bathrooms and bedspace with 8-10 other equally desperate people, eating simple food day in day out, and all this without the comfort of home around them. All this, knowing that the country they are in is just exploiting their terrible need for money. Money to send back home, money to fund marriages for an endless line of dependents, money to educate the children so they go further and higher than their fathers, money so that people back home can live a life that is denied to them otherwise.

I met an Afghan who has been here for 25 years and has slept in a tour company's desert camp every night for the last 10 years, so that he can finance his family's survival back in a war-ravaged homeland. A taxi driver who has been here for 30 years and is now being forced to quit his job, probably in the government's bid to give jobs to locals (this country will fall apart!). A Mallu cab-driver who spews angst in everything he says about his employers. A Pakistani (who pretended to be from Bombay, should I have believed him?) who has slept on the floor of a 10 square-foot room with 8 others for the last 11 years and sees no improvement in sight. A Goan who cleans my hotel room and dreams of returning to India and working in a call center.

Dreams...these are what have kept all these people going. There are those who dream big, and those who dream small. A dream is the eternal carrot, making us all run, lame though we may be, though we know we can never run back to where we started from, though we know that the carrot may elude us always, we still run.

On KBC, it is interesting to watch people following their dreams to the hot seat. There they sit, in front of a quiz master who has everything he wants, and in the nervous excitement of the game they are about to begin, where they could win it all, they confess their dreams to him. Someone wants to fund surgery for an ailing mother, someone wants to buy a house, someone wants to start a charity organisation, someone wants to vacation on an island with JLo. They spill their desires and dreams to the whole world, with stars in their eyes, and keep quizzing.

Dreams are crushed everyday. The construction worker trapped in an unsafe building will never send money home again. The soldier killed in action will never march home again. The teenager who jumped off a building with a broken heart will never smile again.

And then, someone wins the lottery, or you read someone's rags-to-riches story, and you start to dream, again. And when you look at the world with stars in your eyes, everything looks beautiful, and much can be achieved.

Feather-weight

I was just trawling through the dictionary (don't ask why, I have this weird curiosity about words and where they come from and how some words are connected with others) and I happened to find the definition of feather.

Now, feathers are soft, gentle, light, tickling devices. They give birds wings. They are the basic units that allow flight. They used to decorate pens in Shakespeare's time. They can be seen on exotic, colorful costumes. Don't they have this soft association to them?

But here's how the dictionary defined it! And it is so unromantic I just thought I'd share it as trivia:

Main Entry: 1feath·er

Pronunciation: 'fe-[th]&r

Function: noun

Etymology: Middle English fether, from Old English; akin to Old High German federa wing, Latin petere to go to, seek, Greek petesthai to fly, piptein to fall, pteron wing

1 a : any of the light horny epidermal outgrowths that form the external covering of the body of birds and that consist of a shaft bearing on each side a series of barbs which bear barbules which in turn bear barbicels commonly ending in hooked hamuli and interlocking with the barbules of an adjacent barb to link the barbs into a continuous vane.

sigh....

Coffee Kicks

I think the smell of coffee is one of the bestest things in the world! Give me coffee over tea any time. Primarily because just that smell starts to work its magic on you while the cup is still making its way towards your eagerly waiting mouth. If tea has such a powerful olfactory impact, I am not aware of it and I don't really care. Because the coffee scent just makes me go mmmmmmm! :)

A sudden sleep attack made me slump over the keyboard as I worked. Miraculously, a cup of steaming coffee swam into my blurry vision. Goodbye inertia! I was up in a jiffy, made myself that cup of coffee and as I swallowed the dregs with a mix of pleasure and regret, I realised I was wide awake again. (This does not work on me at night if I want to stay up for a deadline!)

I am not a coffee addict. In fact, I can go days without drinking coffee. It's usually a social pleasure to snuggle up on a Starbucks/Barista/CCD sofa with a cup of coffee. Or to down a cold cold cold coffee on a hot hot hot Delhi/Bombay day. But coffee can really make me happy! And it can wake me up.

So here's to coffee, and coffee shops, and friends to drink it with...

It's Swim-ple

A bright beautiful sunny day in Bangkok, Thailand.
The momentous date: some time in July 1995.
The venue: pool and poolside of a neighbourhood swimming school.

Rows of excited parents chattering in Thai wait for their 3 and 4 year olds to embark on their first swimming lesson. From the changing room, the pitter patter of tiny feet is heard as 15-20 little angels in oh-so-cute swimsuits dash out and run circles around the pool to warm-up before they enter the water. Cameras and handycams are activated by said proud parents.

But what is this blocking their view as it goes thundering past, beating a thunderous tattoo on the concrete? Is it T-Rex? Is it the Concorde? (It is jumbo though.) Oh, is it the swim instructor? No...it is the oldest kid ever to join this class.

Meet yours truly on that date: 5 foot 6, about 50 kilos (that sounds like music now), 16 years old, in a swimsuit for the first time and terribly self-conscious. A good time to seek the sanctuary of a hiding-place. This is not when you do jumping jacks by the pool in the company of Lilliputians.

As I slide into the pool to find that watery hide-out, fervently praying for invisibility or at least chameleonic powers, my last refuge is denied to me. The water in the pool is a mere 4 foot 8. leaving a LOT of me sticking out. This is going to take forever (forever equals 3 months).

Needless to say, I am a bad swimmer. I re-entered a pool yesterday after almost 9 years. And all my old weaknesses re-emerged. I think I shall hold on to the sides and blow bubbles under water.

"But She's a Mom!"

I was chatting with a friend, G, this morning and complaining that my mother, despite getting leave in order to come visit me here, was denied a visa by the UAE Embassy. Below is an excerpt from the conversation:

G: Mom coming soon?
A: Nah, it's not working. Apparently it's really tough to arrange visas for lone women
travellers :(
G: Oh god - even moms?!

We exchanged smilies and scowlies and moved on to other topics but the thought remained, of how mothers always seem like a category apart. Like they would be above doing sneaky things to damage the nation's integrity by staying on in Dubai long after the visa expired. Evidently the UAE government is on to them and in typical suspicious fashion has decided that unless they come here on work, no lone woman, mother or not, will be allowed in by herself.

What is it about mothers? I have two close friends who are members of the Mommy Club and one who will soon be joining and I can guarantee that when we talk, we are often up to no good! (Well, you could blame my corrupting influence on their mommy halos, given that I am not a Mommy.) Are mothers not separate entities?

Let me take my mother as an example. She is certainly a "mother" type. And for the first 12 years of my life, she was a full-time mother. Reminding me to drink my milk, polish my shoes, helping with homework, glaring at me over bad report cards. She looked the stereotypical mother too. Long, black hair that I loved to comb. Saree. Hot food. Medicines for fever. Band-aids as and when. Treats. Scoldings. The works. But then, after my brother was born and had grown up a little, I saw my mother embark on a desperate and determined search to find herself.

Her duty with us as a full-time mom was done. She could think of herself too. And she reinvented herself. Without ever leaving us to cold food or uncounselled teenage troubles, she went ahead, chopped her hair, got a job, began working, began earning, and became an individual. I am not saying that she was not one before. Just that seeing her metamorphose taught me that within my mother, and indeed within all mothers, is just another girl who wants to see herself in the mirror first, and a mother, wife or home-maker second.

As we grow up, grow old rather, I realise that I am changing too. I have other responsibilities. A home of my own. I am now a wife. I am someone who works, but from home, for various reasons. I am the person who has to plan the menu. I am the one who chooses the groceries. I welcome (almost always!) these mantles and try to do my best. But every interaction with my girlfriends reminds me that I should never forget what I have always been. A girl with a mind of my own.

Take Me Home

I am in an alien land but I am not alone. Away from my country, in a place full of Indians, I am another Indian. Here are some things that have reminded me that I am in a new place and made me think of home (Delhi/Bombay/India) in small ways over the last 2 weeks:

• A hoarding for Titan, with Rani Mukherji's face on it
• A poster advertising Jat Airways, which made me smile, laugh and then say "Oh!" when I discovered that it is not a carrier bringing Jats to the Middle East, but a Serbian airline
• A 50 paise coin that met my searching hands as I groped for a lost piece of paper in the bottom of my handbag
• The sudden music of an unseen person on the road below hawking and then spitting with gusto
• The smell of jeera frying as I cook on a hotplate
• Loudspeaker somewhere playing "Aalo Aalo"
• Supermarket shelves selling Amul butter and Mother's pickles
• The local dhobi going by on a bicycle

The list could go on, just like Indians go on coming to Dubai. Yes, Indians live in Dubai, and in many ways, so does India. But it is still not home.

What do I do?

Having lately acquired a husband and given up a job (in reverse order) I am often a bit taken aback when asked "and what do you do?"

Well, I was an editor, a good one I think, and I continue to be. Only now I do so from home, in my pajamas, with loud music keeping me company. And of course, TV, friends online, other blogs, interesting books, laziness, sleep and sunshine on the balcony do occasionally get in the way. But the question has now struck me, more than what I do, what is it that I can do?

I can write.

I keep losing sight of that fact while ploughing through other people's writings. My blog feels bad. So does everyone who has ever believed that I can write. The list of such people is small, but weighty. And so I am going to promise myself that I must, must, must write.

Which means, I am back........taran taraaaaaaaaa.......

Choosing Death

A girl I used to know when I was 12 killed herself earlier this year. I heard about it from other people who had known her as a grown up, as an individual, as a student, a woman, with dreams and ideas of her own. She was chronically depressed, I heard, and kept sinking deeper into this state. Finally, she ended her life. In a strange way, I was affected by this. Just because I had sat next to her at school for some 4 weeks, I felt that I had known her. I was taken aback that someone I had once known, however little, could have been determined to stop living.

One hears miraculous stories of survivors in extremely adverse conditions. One hears of miracle babies. One hears of people starting to believe in God because they, or a loved one, escaped death. And then one hears of people who would rather opt out.

What drives them? A woman in the block next to where I live set herself on fire a few nights ago. It was quickly hushed up and all I have now heard is a rumour that she died in hospital. Then of course there was the horrific visual of a man in Karimnagar, A.P., who jumped off a building after threatening to do so over several hours, hitting the pavement in full view of the press and the police and lots of bystanders. (I'm not even going into how worryingI found media attention to the story, as if having filmed him was a scoop, an "exclusive".)

The page 3 of the main newspaper is very different from the page 3 of the supplements. These page 3 people of the main newspaper are usually rape/murder victims, people who have been robbed, or people who have killed themselves along with their own families. The reasons for such murder-suicides are many---debts, illness, anger, drunkenness, shame. I can never even begin to imagine the despair that drives such an act. I am thankful to the powers that be that I don't (and never should) have to. But all the same, it is sobering to think that the life we celebrate with birthdays, with laughter, with love, with prayers, blessings, presents, family, friends, dreams and hopes, should, in some cases, be a burden that needs relieving at any cost.