Mezza Voce

Psst

2010-03-03T04:34:00.000-08:00

I haven't been around here for a while; many thanks to those of you who stopped by to read, I apologize for the hiatus. This is just to let you know that I'm doing a reading diary over at http://grantmebookshelves.wordpress.com. Cheerio!

Goa

2009-04-29T05:12:00.000-07:00

November 2002

Red earth, as the poet said, and pouring rain.

The phrase runs around in my head every time I think of Goa. Red earth of laterite rock, bleeding down the hills as the monsoon storms lash them, the precious rain seeping down into the soil and into the paddy fields, rivulets flowing down leaves and branches.

But that's a vastly different picture from the travel brochures, or indeed from the beautiful one I stepped into at Palolem beach. I sat on fine golden sand, and watched the palm trees dance languorously with the clouds above, the breeze whispering the steps to both. I sat on a rock between a tiny islet and a tip of one Sahyadri ghat, both covered by a tropical forest, and watched as the tide swirled the pinks and oranges of the sunset in among the rocks at my feet. I sat below a velvet black sky, a sliver of the moon giving a Mona Lisa smile while I tried in vain to look at all the bright points of diamond starlight at once. I watched the waves lazily come in, the surf doodling starry patterns in the wet sand to cover the marks of my feet.

And yet, two weeks after I left Goa, the red earth, no more than a faint trace of fine dust now, but still red earth, clings stubbornly to the soles of my sandals, even as not a trace of sand remains. It's not so easy to shake it off, especially as it is that red earth in which I am deeply rooted, the same earth that my ancestors cultivated, the same laterite rock out of which they built their homes, the same that they returned to in death. It wasn't sand; it was earth.

Is it then surprising that beautiful as the beach may have been, it isn't what I could really write about as my Goa? Flights of fancy were possible, but nothing that made me feel truly a part of the place. Nor could I write about the tree-lined road along the river in Panjim, the quiet streets of Fontainhas with houses of cobalt, deep red and ochre, the chapel of San Sebastian, where I was given a key and allowed to let myself in, the sleepy and proudly inefficient tourist office, where "all India" knowledge was professed, but none of Old Goa; I was alien enough there to find myself wandering Goa's capital at siesta time with only a pack of dogs for company. In Old Goa too, I was no more than a faithless tourist, standing in front of the ornate casket that holds the mortal remains of St. Francis Xavier and instead of praying, contemplating the fact that after 450 years, it was perhaps time to return him to the earth.

My Goa, the Goa that brings to mind that red earth and pouring rain, lives in the villages, where I didn't take a single photograph as a tourist, because no tourist ever takes pictures of the familiar. It is possible to visit a Goan village and see what I saw; the gently sagging tiled roofs of the houses, the decrepit but inevitable tavernas covered with promotional paintings for brands of alcohol, the whitewashed churches with flat Portuguese facades, adjoining cemeteries echoing their structures but only as lifeless shells, the wayside shrines, cross after cross and saint after saint, all honoured and cherished and looked after for decades, if not centuries.

It may even be possible to go into a village house and look at it; the shady veranda at the front of the house, with its resident dog lazily opening one eye as the stranger passes, the cool quiet rooms inside, luminous with a faded mellowed sunlight that has to pass through windowpanes of crushed seashells to touch and warm the carved furniture and the geometric patterns of tiles on the floor. Family portraits look down from walls while the Virgin, Christ and the saints who occupy a high altar remain aloof. A beam of brightness steals a patch of the floor through a skylight in the kitchen, where meals may still be cooked over a wood fire, and jars of pickles and vinegar in the corners and the loft await their hour of glory at the table. Chickens scratch in the red dirt of the yard outside, while cats lurk at the doorstep. Pigs nose into the toilets outside, sociable but unwanted, except as an ingredient for sorpatel, vindaloo or sausages.

It's possible to see all of that, but it will never be possible to truly know more about it than superficialities; as a child of the city, not even I should know more. High mass at the church at noon can be attended on a sweltering humid day of a feast, an impromptu football match in the church grounds can be watched, a concert of music organised by the maestre can be attended.

But that secret life that each village guards and holds close, the mixture of love, hate, holiness, patience, tolerance, violence, every emotion and feeling known to humanity - that you can never see, because it lies below the surface. It is brought out furtively on lazy afternoons, after heavy lunches, when tongues are loosened enough to tell of that fertile mixture: the stories that only a Goan, and a member of the family will ever hear, the stories that ultimately give me some possession of that earth.

Who would ever tell an outsider of the man who stole his brother's house and the dowry of his brother's widow? Of the woman who was thrown out into the cowshed to bear a child after her husband died? Of a woman who spoke only through song, or a man who ran away to sea? Of lives lost in the great influenza pandemic? Of walking along the Konkan coast from Bombay to Goa, from India to Portugal as it was at the time? Of marriages arranged, of jewels and ivory brought from Africa, of illegitimate children and unmarked graves? Of secret recipes handed down, feeding generation after generation? Of the remembered stories of words and actions that came from impulses and motivations now dust?

No one will, unless I tell you myself. Those are the tales of my own family and my own village, and unless I one day find words to capture them and overcome the guilt of turning over the topsoil to dig up what lies beneath, they may remain forever untold. One side of the disintegrating hillside will reclaim the old ancestral house of laterite stone, even as the village grows more modern on the other side, and cement buildings spring up from palm-fringed fields.

Mangalore

2008-10-06T10:39:00.000-07:00

(Picture by Mr Mezza Voce, the beach of his native village)

And finally, I went to Mangalore.

Finally because it has always been a place I have known, not in terms of having been there, but by the fact of growing up around people who called it home. I lived in a building that was more or less full of Mangalorean Catholics, all of whom were related to each other. I ate their sorpatel and their fish curry and their pan-pole perhaps even more than I ate Goan food. They talked of St Agnes' and St Aloysius' colleges, of Kankanaday and Chikmagalur and Kalyanpur, of "the estate," a magical term that signified coffee plantations and that was always spoken with some reverence and pride, of "sado" at weddings where brides changed out of their white gowns into red sarees. Fabulous exotica to me, yet strangely familiar.

I knew they were not Goans and not East Indians but something rather different. This is a hazard of living in Bandra, where you might learn this distinction well before you learn the difference between North and South in India. It is an important distinction and learning it is imperative. It would never do to be confused. And, of course, you're only talking of Mangalorean and Goan Catholics here--everyone else might as well not exist.

There were, of course, also my father and Mahima Mangalore Stores. My father; who had lived five or six years in Mangalore at the start of his working career, knew everyone who was anyone in Mangalorean Catholic society and the rest of Mangalore too, and knew where everyone hailed from--a powerful body of knowledge in Mangalorean terms, that is for certain. And Mahima Mangalore Stores on Hill Road in Bandra, from where we bought varieties and more varieties of banana chips, jackfruit chips, and suchlike--the keepers of Mangalore saat and the boondi laddoos so peculiar to Mangalore. It was only many years later that I realized Mahima Mangalore Stores had completely misled me on what was Mangalorean and what was not, by stocking all sorts of typically South Indian and Konkani items that weren't necessarily Mangalorean. Stew powder, for one, which seasoned a good many stews of mutton and vegetables that I ate with rice. What sorrow to find that Mangaloreans didn't make mutton stew, and if they did, it was never with a powder from a shop!

And then there was Isidore Coelho--The Chef. He wrote a cookbook, titled just so, long ago, in Ceylon, if I recall correctly, where he worked as a cook for the governor. Though perhaps I invent that as a cheerful, productive, happily working class antecedent, and it is something else entirely. Ceylon or no Ceylon, governor or no governor, his cookbook, with several hundred recipes painstakingly written out and numbered (no pictures) is a fine encyclopaedia of the Mangalorean palate--and also the Goan palate and the East Indian palate. It has everything from vegetable dishes to desserts to meat dishes, and a final, irresistable treasure--a collection of home remedies. I thought for years that the author of this book that was always lying around the house was a Goan; then I discovered he was a Mangalorean. Perhaps it really does not matter which one he was, it is a separation that goes back only a couple of centuries, a short time if you consider it.

Finally, Mangalore tiles--impossible to not know if you are a coastal person in Western India. These tiles of fired, glazed clay, their reddish earth colour perfectly matching the red earth of the Konkan coast, keep the heat at bay from enormous houses graciously built around courtyards in Goa, from humble little huts, open between stilts to sand and wind and and sun on all sides, that work as fish markets in the narrow lanes leading to village beaches, from dilapidated, sagging old chawls in Bombay.

So that was Mangalore.

I went down this weekend to a different Mangalore--well, mostly different. I am, you see, married to a Mangalorean, though not of the Catholic tribe I am most familiar with. Going down to his native village was the Mangalore I know and yet not the Mangalore I know. It had sea, and sun, and sand, and coconut trees, and fishermen, and Mangalore tiles, and fish curry. In this way, it was really very much like Goa. Which is not surprising, because we coastal people are all the same, quite overtly the same. We cook in the same ways, we center our lives around fish and coconut in the same ways, we tile our roofs just as our brothers and sisters up or down the coast do, we build houses and walls of the same laterite stone, we grow the same endless quantities of paddy swaying as the breeze whispers in sleepy fields. No wonder, then, that Catholics could flee Goa some two hundred years ago to escape Portuguese oppression and cultural imperialism and seemingly endless wars, enter almost seamlessly into Mangalore, despite further persecution from Tipu Sultan, and become an intensely important force that has shaped its present and will shape its future.

And yet, it was not quite the same as the Goa I know or the Mangalore I had been most aware of. The little village we went down to didn't have any Mangalorean Catholics--it had Hindus and Muslims, Muslims and Hindus. A famous temple a few kilometers up the beach, a mosque at the street corner. And some Christians of the very odd unknown quantity that are the evangelical sorts, occupying the very next house from us. I would have been surprised to see a Sikh, but you never know. The language was not Konkani, and it is not Tulu or Kannada either, neither is it the Malayalam from over the Kerala border, only a few kilometers away. It is a complex and welcoming mixture of several of these, requiring a balance of grammar and vocabulary that would no doubt delight a linguist. Everyone around chattered in it, and I understood nothing but it was a cheerful lack of understanding. Ultimately, if nothing else, there were fish, coconut, and Mangalore tiles to help us along. And a little biryani from the neighbours, one of whom matter of factly informed us that he had been negotiating with the police in Mangalore for the release of four men arrested in connection with terrorism charges; that it was scapegoating of decent people.

I enjoyed it very much, though it was hot and forbidding in the sun, and I literally melted into sweat every time I left the relative comfort under the fan. For what is not to enjoy in quiet, sandy village lanes, some lovely, simple square or rectangular houses built of mud, wood, and Mangalore tiles, hysterical roosters and hens in the yard, trains whistling past, and always the sound of the sea in the distance? Not to mention the fish--I have much to thank the fish for, for it sometimes feels as if my new and as yet uncomfortable family will always look on me kindly in the end because I will almost always enjoy its fish curries and fish fries.

There is a little school there, a low roofed set of buildings, thankfully with those Mangalore tiles--a humble place with a computer center sponsored by Mr Mezza Voce's software entrepreneur uncle, who is perhaps the most successful person to have studied in it. The children laugh and play and sing the national anthem (entirely in one key, quite correctly, and then, startlingly, changing keys inaccurately for the last refrain). The ancestral property shakes as if in an earthquake when trains rush past, only a few meters away. In the lane outside, an old man sits and watches as people pass, and the cabin of the railway crossing man keeps watch, waiting for trains and the need to shut the gates so nobody can cross the tracks. There is the main road, from where you get the bus to the city, and the side road, where you can buy for two rupees some soda or ginger ale in a bottle sealed with a glass marble that twists the light within its green swirls even through that thick glass and which rolls up and down as you lift the bottle to drink. There were the two snakes in the coconut grove behind the house in which we stayed, and the mongoose nosing around there, an eternal fight between the two forces.

And then there is the sea and the sand. Almost virgin--there are no shacks here. Crabs running imperceptibly, the odd chappal left behind, the sea rushing in and out, waves breaking on rocks covered in bright green algae, men fishing with the inner tubes of tyres, men in fishing boats pulling at their nets, people strolling along of an evening. The colours changing, morning, afternoon, evening, the greys and dirty blues and earthy pinks and oranges of the Indian seashore.

We went to Mangalore city also. Past Milagres Church, so recently in the spotlight because of vandalism, past Vaz Villa, where my father used to live; we took a photograph for him. To Auntie P's house, which has housed a hundred and eighteen years of a prominent Mangalorean Catholic family, and which now houses, in twenty rooms, two people, countless antiques, and the last of the old style bullock carts that drove through urban Mangalore's streets. It was wonderfully cool in there, under the Mangalore tiles, and the fish fry, again, was perfection. Auntie P showed us her treasures and told us how upset the Catholics of Mangalore were about the several disturbing incidents of vandalism in the city and invited us to the estate for the next time.

The world of Mangalore city outside that immense house was dusty and hot and not very charming. The sugary biscuit-like Mangalore saat was good and so were the macaroons, delicate baked sugar froth enveloping cashew nut pieces, but the Taj Mahal Hotel of Mr Mezza Voce's childhood had deteriorated in quality, and the Mohini Vilas Hotel's graceful Art Deco structure was being demolished. There were no breadfruit bhajjis to be had, for some reason we did not quite fathom, and I am no fan of the wheat and banana halwas that were on offer.

We ran through several rickshaw drivers before getting to St Aloysius College, housed in a series of buildings climbing to the top of a hill, was enormous, with buildings built in various styles, everything from a quaint Mangalore tiled balconied hostel at the bottom of the hill to an imposing facade of a three-storey colonial structure at the top. It appeared to have a dress code of shirts for boys and salwar kameez for girls, and the meters of synthetic fabric that walked past us because of the latter made me feel even hotter. Inside the college chapel, we craned our necks and squinted at frescoes painted on the ceiling by a Jesuit of the late 19th century. I uncharitably but truthfully came to the conclusion that his only virtue was in having made the effort to do it all himself. Not all frescoes are worthy of praise, Sistine Chapel resemblances or not--especially if the Sistine chapel resemblances are the aim, and not something more original.

It was left to love Ideal, the ice cream parlour--for in a city teeming with construction work and terribly hot, nothing is better than a cold dessert.

I will go back sometime--to climb to Tipu's watch tower at the end of the beach, to count the trains that pass, to stay the night perhaps in the city in that mansion with many rooms, to drink soda from the goliwalla bottle. And certainly, but certainly, to visit Mr Mezza Voce's quiet, slightly frail, uprightly polite uncle who writes plays for traditional Kannada musical theatre, Yakshagana, who watched me looking at the showcase full of dolls and masks in the elaborate costumes of that Kannadiga classical performing art, and then brought out illustrated books on performing arts to show me. I am glad I could tell him that my great grandmother's family too was involved in the folk performing arts of Goa and then of working class Bombay. He was curious and interested--he asked questions and wanted to know more.

Even if for nothing else, I will go back again to see him. And perhaps to talk a little more, of writing and of performing arts and of being coastal people. We have found a language we can talk in; it is not hard, we are neighbours after all.

Maybe She Should Have Done My Navjote

2008-08-19T05:58:00.000-07:00

It is my definite opinion that life in Bangalore would be greatly enhanced by the presence of some Parsi friends. In fact, if I were to list some reasons for shifting back to Bombay, the Parsi population would be one of them, and among the highest on the list. Of course, the same benefits would arguably accrue from moving to Pune, Hyderabad, or (increasingly, considering the diaspora) Toronto.

It is probably quite telling that while I can only remember knowing one Tamil Brahmin until I was 12 years old or so, and being aware enough of her cultural practices to know that she was a Tamil Brahmin, I cannot remember a time before I knew Parsis. They were just always there, and always Parsi, though this certainly does not mean that they were always eccentric (or even always mad), always loud, always charming, always musical, always philanthropic, always Westernized, always liberal, always cultured, always polite, always gracious, always named Sodawaterbottleopenerwalla or, indeed, that they always manifested any of the traits that have been attributed to them in popular perception. They were, I repeat, just there, and just Parsi, though what that means is hard for me to define, because it means many different things that you see in many different people who are all Parsi.

My father is almost entirely to blame for their omnipresence in my early life and times, because he worked in a Tata group company for 32 years, which meant that every second colleague he had was a Parsi. One bizarre result of this circumstance is that I have far more memories of Parsi lagans and navjotes than of Goan weddings and First Communions. My aunt is also to blame, seeing as she spent some 7 years of my memory being, in Bandra terms, “friendly” with another Parsi, who eventually ended up becoming my uncle and presenting us with an extended Parsi family of our very own. Which is not to say we didn’t already have Parsi relations by marriage, but none were that close, so his official entry to the family heralded a new era in Parsi-Goan relations as per the de Souza family.

There were few Parsis in school but many in my childhood, some of whom are still around through my parents, some more at college, plenty more at a post grad course I took, some more at my first job in Bombay, and even some stalwarts in Hyderabad, when I was doing my MA. And certainly, many more incidental to living in Bombay. Numbers, oddly enough, can actually be relative—I think three Parsis out of a hundred are quite a lot, all things considered. Though not enough, there are never enough.

Once, I lived in Bandra and it felt as though the world was made up of people who were either Catholic (whether Goan, Mangalorean, or East Indian), Muslims (Bohri or otherwise), Parsi, or Bollywood stars. Now, I live in South Bangalore and it feels as though every second person in the world is either a Tamil or Kannadiga Brahmin. Thus the balance of the universe asserts itself and I learn to shift loyalties from prawn pulao, mutton Bohri biryani and dhansak to curd rice and bisi bele bhaath. Usually, it’s not a problematic shift. Today, it is, because it is Navroze, the Parsi New Year, and I cannot wish anyone except over the phone or via the internet.

So I remember, only some because I have too little time and a poor memory.

The secretaries at my father’s office--skinny Silloo with her two plaits and several long, wiry hairs sticking out of her chin, who went into battle at office birthday celebrations and came out victoriously with two pieces of cake to save in a box for my father, who spent most of his time travelling; whose mother I recall as an ancient lady grinning companionably at me, a chubby child, in a cramped little flat somewhere overlooking Princess Street; Nargis “Billi”, who still calls my father on his birthday and on Christmas day; Nargis “Tatu,” who I think had had polio as a child and still limped, and who embarrassed my poor father by sometimes using his office cabin as a lunch hour shop in which to sell lingerie to the other ladies in the office.

Dr Pardiwalla, who used to practice from a clinic in Bhalla House, an old bungalow on Hill Road, and who I recall as being the gentlest of women and the gentlest of doctors as well. Come to think of it, perhaps she was Gujarati. No, she had to have been a Parsi.

Another ancient lady who we visited when she was ill, living in one of the Art Deco buildings overlooking the Oval Maidan. Who she was I do not know, but I remember the view from her balcony and how she smiled when I said it was lovely.

The nameless—I have forgotten all of their names by now—guests at navjotes and at weddings, in Albless Baug and Malcolm Baug and at that agiary near the Afghan Church, the name of which I cannot remember... how we all ate and drank (ginger ale or raspberry because one was of course too young for the famed Parsi peg of whiskey) together.... ladies in delicate Chantilly lace saris and pearls and the wonderful but rare Parsi Garas, their embroidery coming to life as their wearers rocked back and forth with laughter or got up to dance the foxtrot or even ran when the waiters called out “first service” to get them to the tables (no, that is not a myth). And the Godrej cupboards, of course, in the great halls through which one passed to visit the toilet, one prosaic way in which we all have the Parsi in our homes.

Zarir, Percy, Fali—all the Parsis who became our family by marriage. And their children. And their relations, who also became our relations because that was the nature of our family and it still is like that.

Aunty Sheroo, who always showed up with something sweet to eat because she knew our sweet tooth—dal ni pori and mawa cakes from the Grant Road Mehrwan’s and the mawa boi from Parsi Dairy Farm being the favourites. You don’t know what the mawa boi is? I am not telling. It was a wondrous moulded object, that is all I will say, and we could hardly bear to eat it most of the time, it looked so marvellous. Alright, so you are deprived. It was a mawa sweet shaped to look like a fish. A fish that was a foot long. You will still get it at Parsi Dairy Farm, along with the pipe jalebis and the delivery boys (men) in khaki shorts and electric blue shirts. As for Aunty Sheroo, I have heard you can buy her dal ni pori in Toronto, though don’t ask about the price. We are family, we don’t know.

Sylla Mama, who was equally devoted to "Old Monk nu Rum" and Frank Sinatra, and who was reputed to have brushed her hair one hundred times every night.

Uncle Dali, who I made breakfast (akuri or scrambled egg or boiled egg, never anything other than egg) with and who chatted with me over that selfsame breakfast about his first wife and his second wife and the family at large. Such a great way to begin the day, just like the Bombay Duck pickle he is very fond of.

The ladies of RTI—Ratan Tata Institute, dikra, what else could it be!—who used to sit in their frocks and headscarves (yes, Parsis do wear headscarves) and embroider and stitch all day, chatting, praying, and sometimes arguing, shrieking, with each other, and who would scold us when we went upstairs to enquire within upon what they were doing. Such beautiful needlework and expensive too. If I had a lot of money, I would dress my children only in RTI made frocks and have two or three of their absolutely gorgeous saris. I would also eat more RTI food, or perhaps revive the Time and Talents Club of Parsi ladies who sold the best dhansak (in my father’s opinion) at Apollo Bunder.

Aunty Aloo, who lived at Kemp’s Corner and used me as her own personal audience for news, views, and opinions: example one, “So bad our Bombay Roads are no, can’t even cross Peddar Road now! Before, they used to wash the roads twice a day, imagine! Have you seen those roads in Singapore and London and Hong Kong? Like carpets!” and two, which is even more profound, ”Nowadays our politicians are all bad. Not like our Gandhi family, no? Our Indira and our Rajiv, you think now any of our politicians would die for the people like them?” and then segued into a conspiratorial “You know, no, Feroz Gandhi was a Parsi?”

The gentleman who sells sandalwood in a little shop outside the big agiary in Dhobi Talao, the one on the extension of Girgaum Road. Not the Sodawaterwalla Agiary (see, that is not a myth either, there is a shred of truth to the name), the other one. If you smile at him, he smiles back. Perhaps he does this only if he thinks you are a Parsi, but I don’t know about that. If I were less reserved, I might go talk to him one day.

Mrs Mistry of Cafes Churchill and Mocambo, who, when I asked if it was possible to cook me a proper lagan nu bhonu for twenty guests to celebrate my wedding, replied, “Anything is possible!” And Cyrus, who told me to ask her and mention his name with the additional magic words “of Cusrow Baug.” It was one of the finest dinners I have ever eaten, and certainly one of the finest Parsi dinners I have had.

Mr Hoodiwalla, who reminds me of a middle class Tata Blocks Bandra version of JRD Tata. Looks like him, still is dapper and somewhat debonair and irresistibly charming, despite a walker and old age and deafness. And his daughter and son in law, who were kind to me when I was in Hyderabad, inviting me over to their enormous mansion, where Aunty Silloo fed me on dhansak and chatted away while holding the reins of the household firmly.

And the 22 Parsis I once had dinner with in their house in Hyderabad (there were also two Anglo Indians), who all made me welcome and expressed polite but fake enjoyment at my understanding of their Gujarati, especially the one little old lady who grabbed my arm towards the end of the evening and said, with an almost villainous glint in her eye, “Come, we will do your navjote and get you married to a nice Parsi boy!” It is not as though she could do this here in India, but perhaps she was formerly a diasporic Parsi or just an extreme liberal. At any rate, she alarmed me thoroughly, but I know a compliment when I get one and that was perhaps the finest compliment I could ever receive.

Uncle Noshir, the only vegan Parsi I have ever met, who was a vegan long before it was fashionable to be one, and who was also one of the politest people I have ever come across. What but polite do you call somebody who forgets to tell my parents that he is a vegan, then comes for a dinner he has been invited to, and when there is naturally nothing vegetarian on the table (except the pulao--he is a Parsi after all, not a Jain) graciously says it is no trouble, he will have an omelette and the pulao?

Thelma, originally from Cowasji Patel Street and a great fan of Yezdani Bakery, who smiled like Audrey Hepburn and was one of the most beautiful women I have ever met. She married a vegetarian and could never eat fish or chicken or mutton in the house, so she would drag me to Anantashram in Kotachiwadi and smile at the grumpy banyan-wearing waiters until we got a little marble topped table and the fish curry we wanted.

My classmates—Rashna and Shaznin and Mehernaaz and Niloufer and Havovi and Hutoxi. And others, who I remember by face but not name.

My students--4-year-old Sheroy, the dreamer who went around humming snatches of pieces by Beethoven and Mozart and Bach, because his parents strictly made him listen to Western classical music at home. And 5-year-old Vistasp, who had the most determined chin in the universe.

My rebel Parsi friend who shall not be named, who wanted to take me to an agiary, because s/he felt it should not be off-limits to people who respected Zoroastrianism but were not Parsis. I declined politely. And Rohinton Mistry, who took his readers to the agiary in words.

Saveckshaw and Kaikhushroo, the street dogs that lived up at Doongerwadi on Malabar Hill, where are the Parsi Towers of Silence. Or rather, the person who named them because it is fairly obvious who was the Parsi there.

And last but perhaps not least, my little cousins, who are baptized Catholics but learn some of their prayers in Avestan. One of my cousins saw a picture of Zoroaster for the first time and afterwards solemnly told us all that Zoroaster was Jesus’ brother. And this, as well, is not a myth. I am convinced of it. It is a truth that exists in the way in which they live and I am glad of it.

I will now ring up several people and email several people and wish them “Saal Mubarak!” I thought of going out and eating Parsi food today—there is a good dhansak at Ebony, the restaurant on the thirteenth floor of Barton Centre on MG Road and an okay one at Juke Box in Koramangala. There is also akuri at Infinitea on Cunningham Road but those fellows deserve to be kicked because they think it is a Japanese dish. Thank goodness akuri is best made fast and at home.

But really, perhaps there is no point to this. I have it on good authority—the authority being no less than Busybee, who said he was not much of a Parsi but certainly was one—that in fact, despite all the feasting there is today after five days of prayers for the ancestors, none of the feasting is compulsory. What is compulsory is the preparation of plain rice and saltless dal. Why? Because this is something everyone can afford. The rich, the poor. Nobody will be left out or feel that they are not able to reach the festive heights called for. The rich can afford more, but they will come down to earth and eat what it is that their brothers and sisters can eat.

It is very likely that not many Parsis will actually do this today. If I had not heard this from Busybee, I would have thought it was nonsense. And yes, it is only a symbolic gesture. As it is, it bespeaks a spirit of generosity that I wish we had more of. In that generosity is probably a certain way in which will we find our redemption.

Saal Mubarak.

Home

2008-07-01T02:09:00.000-07:00

Early this morning, there was a muezzin in the distance somewhere, calling the faithful to prayer; I could hear him and had woken, as I have habitually done all my life, only to fall asleep again almost immediately, listening to that cry that twists and turns and means almost nothing to me. Not knowing what he says, that is the gift.

Then I heard a train in the distance and knew that I was asleep and dreaming, my subconscious playing an old, much loved memory of sounds it does not hear anymore. There are no trains that pass anywhere near JP Nagar in Bangalore. Neither is there a mosque within audible distance of where we live. In the small hours, I hear dogs in the lanes around and trucks on the Outer Ring Road. Sometimes a wakeful squirrel chatters briefly on the window ledge, disturbing me with a sound I am unaccustomed to.

Later, much later, before the sunrise starts to glow faintly from behind our cotton curtains, a Brahmin neighbour chants her prayers in unison with a recording. I hear her very faintly and doze through it all, just as I doze through the crunch of gravel under the feet of the old men who are up early to walk up and down in the space between our buildings and the compound wall and doze through the calls of waking birds. But these are morning sounds, like the bells being rung in four different churches in Bandra in the morning. For the night, I have only the squirrels, the dogs, the trucks, and sometimes a disturbed bird or two.

And it is strange, very strange to be so bereft of the fervent syllables of the azaan, calling out into the empty, dark night, and of the rhythmic clatter of a long distance train hurrying ahead over the railway tracks, sounding as though it is outside the window and not a mile away; so bereft that I actually dream of them.

When I was in Bandra, they belonged to the night. It was rarely possible to hear them at any other time; they were swallowed up in all the noise of people on the move. Perhaps it was possible once, but I do not remember such a time. It was always at night that I would wake, and sometimes follow the train with my ears, noting the momentary pause after each set of four beats its wheels counted out so loudly; and anytime later, while sitting in a train myself, wide awake, I could marvel at the clarity with which the clear air had already carried the familiar pattern of its movement to my sleeping body. It was always at night that I would wake to the far-away man crying out, "Allah-hu-Akbar!" and shiver at the power of his inflection, which rose from the depths and then plateaued, and invoked in me a primeval sense of awe and relief, as though he and I had spent all our strength in climbing in a mere second to the heights and could then rest and wonder both at what lay below and what lay above.

Sometimes it was only a recording played over a loudspeaker, but the night sharpened the sound and strictly removed all disturbance, leaving an austerity of pitch and momentum. And then one evening I stood on an open overbridge at Bandra Station and looked towards the Bandra Mosque a few feet away and towards the sky in the west, coloured as it was by the orange and pink of a sun setting into the sea. The trains moved below me, shaking the bridge as they went, and the azaan sounded out above me, loud and impossible to ignore, and I gazed at the sky.

On one night long ago that I will never forget, never, I heard the trains all night because I did not sleep. And between the trains moving on, passing by, unaware of what they passed through, we all heard people screaming, people wailing, people howling, people crying; softly, but clearly, as if they were on TV in our neighbour's house. The next morning we heard the name "Behrampada" and understood something of what the night had witnessed, what we had been made to witness by the night. It was sometime in December 1992, or perhaps it was January 1993. They were indeed our neighbours, though perhaps neither they nor we knew it when we brushed past each other at Bandra Station. The trains were louder for them, and more disturbing, but the trains and the azaan inhabited their nights as well as ours; and their days as well.

Many years later, I lived in Hyderabad, in a place that was like a bad omen. At night, I heard no trains, I heard no call to prayer. I heard, in fact, nothing, and always slept badly. There was a neat, well maintained park outside my window, with no trees. My neighbours appeared to never talk in their houses. I became genuinely alarmed when, one evening, I ran downstairs for something and came to the realization that the loudest sound on the road was the song playing on my laptop. They were quiet people, and there was a sameness to them that still makes me feel nothing whatsoever when I think of them.

Later, still in Hyderabad, I moved to the hostel that was to become home for a while. On my first evening, I sat on one of the lawns near the Vice Chancellor's bungalow, slapping at mosquitoes every minute or so, feeling the grass prickling at my ankles below the hem of my jeans, looking up at the fading light in the sky. And then suddenly, I heard them both in the space of a minute; first, a train whistled past in the east through the nearby railway station of Sitaphalmandi, and then, to the north, that nameless man called out and I still understood only the first three words. God is Great. They were all I needed to understand.

It was not night, though I heard them sometimes at night while I was there. The train was not so exact in its movements -- most often I heard only its whistle and an amorphous sound of its metallic rushing. The azaan I heard through traffic and through my classmates' chatter, through loud music coming from an upstairs room, through the resident dog's laboured breathing. I was happy there, though perhaps neither the train nor the muezzin had anything to do with that.

One day, at work here in Bangalore on Bannerghatta Road, I heard the azaan again; a crackling, faulty recording being played somewhere to the north, perhaps at a mosque in Bilekahalli. Another day, we were driving south from Frazer Town, and a train whistled and furiously battered its way above our heads on a railway bridge, flinging dust into my face and deafening me for a moment.

And then, last night, I dreamed that a train passed us, far in the distance, carrying people to the new and away from the old, carrying people away from the new and back to the old, and that a man called to the faithful, and they woke to pray before a new day of living side by side with their neighbours who slept through it.

I did not wake. I dreamed instead of what I have come to know as home.

And a few stray thoughts on Bangalore

2008-06-26T03:25:00.000-07:00

That there is, in my opinion, little that is as comfortable as an overcast sky and cool breezes occasionally rising and then disappearing again.

That Blossom Book Shop is a many-splendoured thing, some of those splendours being Freya Stark, Nancy Mitford, Rainer Maria Rilke, A. A. Milne, Julian Barnes, the possibilities for helping society by eavesdropping on conversations with shop assistants and proffering the required books or information that they can't supply, and the probability of meeting those you know or meeting those you don't know but are bound to like because they like the same books you like.

That the trees of Bangalore are wondrous in their capacity to patiently absorb dust, heat, pollution, and stress, and that those who planted and looked after them deserve at least to have trees, their children, respected.

That there is nothing so creepy as a plateful of potato smilies smiling away insistently at Koshy's, even as you eat them up in an act of perverse cannibalism, and that this is made creepier and yet oddly more enjoyable by a couple of mugs of beer.

That it seems, thankfully, as though the Indian Coffee House will continue to prosper, as long as the coffee is good slap-in-the-face-and-wake-you-up stuff, the ferociously-moustached man in the poster on the wall continues to be "a fine type", the scrambled eggs on toast are done in butter, and the sunlight comes in through the open doors and windows along with the bustle of M. G. Road.

That the "Towns"--Cox Town, Cooke Town, Frazer Town, and so on--appear to be nice, laidback, friendly places with just the right hodge-podge of people and the right dose of sinister spice.

That it is great fun to be at Ranga Shankara, where you get to see everything theatrically-oriented, from Girish Karnad looking just like the Girish Karnad of the newspaper photographs to plays with background music that sounds like aliens farting, from young and enthusiastic actors who are already stalwarts of the Kannada theatre scene to unabashedly drunk audience members who dig in their noses when the actors address the audience and look in their direction -- and where samosagaLu chennagi ide!

That while I frankly think Bangalore's colonial architecture is mostly boring, and St Mark's Cathedral is ugly, the great, heavy wooden doors on its colonial buildings hold such mystery and, sometimes, so do the worlds of quiet around old stone and plaster, the hush of dusty, tree-cocooned convents and churches and government buildings, even those that are on busy roads.

That despite the inadequacy of every chicken puff in Bangalore, it is undeniably blessed in its sausages.

That if Zafar Futehally and Vijay Thiruvady chose to live in Koramangala, there has obviously been more to it than the software boom and soaring land prices -- and that it probably has something to do with what gave us, when we lived there, an eagle on our neighbour's terrace and a delinquint monkey on our kitchen window.

That it is impossible to not grin when you first hear about "Congress peanuts" (peanuts split into two, like the Congress party after Indira Gandhi split it) and "Communist peanuts" (you figure this one out yourself).

That the sheer nippiness of Bangalore of an evening post-summer is to be felt to be believed.

That it is interesting how so much of interest in Bangalore revolves around food and coffee, even now.

That Shivajinagar is alarmingly respectable in parts and can actually exhibit all the dubious charm of a small village now grown and made decrepit, and that the most endearing house in Bangalore is arguably on one of its alleys, a little tiny house that opens its front door onto a tiny porch and the street, and does it so invitingly that I no longer want to steal the house of Colonel Ferris -- or was it Colaco? -- that is in the more uppity environs of Church Street.

That even though Bangalore isn't, in my experience, the most friendly city around, there is nothing like a little good company to make me want to list some happy thoughts about it.

That this form is borrowed from Busybee, and it would be interesting to see if he ever had anything to say about a visit to Bangalore as it was.

The Confessions of a Culinary Nazi

2008-06-13T02:28:00.000-07:00

It started a few weeks ago, when my mother asked, over the phone, "So what do you want from Bombay?" Mr Mezza Voce was going there for a long weekend, and my parents do sometimes look on him as a glorified postman who's joined the family. It probably struck them as a good opportunity to send me something.

As usual, I had a hard time coming up with ideas. Almost everything I could think of was too big (my piano) or too perishable and messy (our cook's pepper chicken) or liable to inspire the gift of a rather larger quantity than I might have wanted (my parents once came to Hyderabad with no less than eight packets of banana chips, just because I said I wanted one small packet of the cheese flavoured variety from Mahima Mangalore Stores). The last time I had asked for something, they had sent a parcel with a cousin and really, while two marzipan Easter eggs were delightful, two packets of Goa sausages were a bit excessive when---

At that point, an idea hit in mid-thought. Goa sausages, eh? Goa sausages, otherwise known as chorizo, aren't really a favourite item with me. I have some trouble stomaching the quantity of palm vinegar and spice that goes into them. There is no doubt the smoked, cured pork in them must have been useful and very welcome to a primarily fish-eating community at times when fish was in short supply and in days when nobody had a fridge to store food. But they are just too, too much. They are greasy, smell a bit, look somewhat like dry dog poo, and ultimately, the casing is always, always recognizable as something highly unappetizing--pig intestine. This is a pleasant thought for nobody, not even the most hardened meat-eater.

They are, however, very edible and even good to eat when taken out of their casing and eaten with lots of rice, in a chorizo pulao. The rice absorbs enough of the vinegar to develop a faint sour tang, while the cured meat absorbs water and becomes a bit juicy. The smell turns into a fragrance, the overpowering taste becomes a highlight, and the grease is spread out in the rice, making each grain just a little bit more defined, more individual than before. The overall effect is rather like that of lime pickle with curd rice, or alternatively, if you like anthropomorphic food, a bit like Rodrigo Fonseca, the life of the party at the Catholic Gym Christmas dance way back in 1959, telling spicy stories to make the girls giggle and rearrange their stiffly-starched skirts and managing to liven everything up so that the band plays faster music, the aunties start smiling, and the whiskey pegs become just a little larger. Can't you just hear the grains of rice all gasping excitedly "That chorizo? What personality! Is he single?"

And the general effect is the same when eaten with the sort of bread that can add enough texture and enough bulky bread-taste to keep that spiciness in check. Too many risque stories, after all, can get a bit tedious and indigestable, depending on whether you can take them at all or not. Am I stretching the metaphor? Anyway, there is no better way to eat chorizo than by throwing it into a hot pan for a while and then taking a small, somewhat round loaf of bread that has a very crisp, hard crust and a soft, welcoming inside, tearing it open to expose that inside to the air, putting your chorizo in, and then closing it up again before you take a large bite. Good, isn't it?

Which brings us to what I'd thought of when I remembered the Goa sausages. I didn't care that much about the sausages, but I did care about that bread, that particular sort of thin-hard-crust-outside-soft-soft-sponge-inside bread that you get at its best only in Bombay -- the pav.

The pav is known to most because of its use in pav bhaji, in which vegetables and masala are beaten to a pulp and then made to line the inside of a pav, a form of culinary enjoyment that has more or less managed to make its way across India's urban centers. If you're a bit more of a connoisseur, you might know the vada pav, in which a comfy hot potato vada sits inside a pav with some garlic-flavoured powder and green chilli chutney to dress it up a bit.

If you live in Bombay and are a bread eater, however, you'll know the pav as the sort of bread that you get at its finest from Irani bakeries. The key is in the contrast. The hard crust, hard enough to be significantly different from the inside and yet, in the case of a normal pav, soft enough to be pulled off and rolled up by itself (in the case of a brun pav, the crust is hard enough to break your teeth on if eaten cold). And the soft, plump, airy inside, just waiting for your teeth. This isn't a chewy bread or a sticky bread, it's just soft and terribly, terribly welcoming. You get these in a slab, of six or eight together, maybe even ten, and you call them ladi pav. It's like a bunch of buns all stuck together, only no mere bun was ever that good.

And the long preamble was just to tell you that, in fact, when my mother asked me what I wanted from Bombay, what I did think of was ladi pav. It's not as though you don't get some form of pav here in Bangalore, but, well, um, er, let's put it mildly -- it's not pav. No self-respecting pav has the same crust a simple bun would have, the soft crust that flakes off. The pav you get at Nilgiri's is, alas, like that. Just like most of the pav that makes its way into plates of pav bhaji across the country. It completely misses the point, thinking that pav is just a bun-like bread, when, in reality, the proof of the pav is in the crust. I gather there are some trade secrets about keeping the air in the oven moist to ensure a hard crust, but though I like baking, the point of this is not a recipe, its just an expression of love, soft, welcoming, airy love, with a bit of a rugged hard edge to it...

Er, sorry. Bit maudlin, I know, and somewhat like a Barbara Cartland romance novel.

At any rate, there is a special affinity I have for the pav, and this is not because Goans are called pavs (allegedly because they were the only bread-eaters to begin with, possibly because the word pav is the word for bread in Portuguese, oh, never mind, this is too complicated to go into). We'll run through this -- my family is Goan, but it's also a family of migrants that moved base from Goa to Bombay three generations and more than a hundred years back. We eat fish curry. But actually, we eat a lot of other things as well. We're proper migrants, picking up the culinary habits of those around us, diluting our own food habits as we please.

This was bad enough in my grandparents' house and became worse in my parent's house, not least because the cook we've had for 25 years is an Adivasi with a flair for food. She came to us barely knowing how to make tea -- now, if you go to visit my parents, there's a good chance you'll be eating chhole and sabudana vada one day, pepper chicken the next, steak the third, some bastardized Chinese-style noodles called "chow" the fourth, Gujarati khadi and East Indian style bombil fry the fifth, Mangalorean mutton curry the sixth, and tandoori chicken on Sunday. Our food has long since ceased to be a fixed point of cultural identity; this has everything to do with both my parents' appreciation of a good thing when they eat it, which led them to never demand fish curry unnecessarily, and our beloved cook's fondness for experimentation and constantly adding to her repertoire. We're not purists, we're philistines, and proud of it.

As it happens, her fish curries are really nothing out of the ordinary, probably because she doesn't eat fish -- on the other hand, everything else she cooks tends to be her own personal riff on the traditional style of cooking whatever dish it is, which leads to even more confusion, albeit along with intense pleasure. (Note: Some readers of this blog have been making plans to lure her away. I know who you are and where you live and more importantly, if I tell this prized cook not to make what you like the next time you visit she will.... actually, she'll make what you like no matter what I say. She likes her admirers. Fine, whatever!)

And hence the affinity for pav -- whatever the cuisine, we can and do eat pav along with it, which means that it is an item of "home food" for me in a way that nothing else is. We had the same pav-walla from A-1 bakery come to the door to sell us pav for more than 20 years; now he's dead, but his son has taken over as pav-walla. As for A-1 bakery from which we always get our pav, it goes on, hopefully forever, and the son of the owner has trotted off to the further suburb of Malad to bake and sell pav there. Change; constant; you see what I mean? Much as we like chapathis and phulkas, they'll never quite unseat the pav.

But, yes, to return to the pav I wanted from Bombay. Mr Mezza Voce promised to get me some. He was at work in Bangalore again when I got home, secure in the knowledge that there was some pav waiting for me. I dropped everything and charged into the kitchen to look for it. And it was there -- only thing is, it wasn't quite there. I got uneasy when I saw the sealed transparent plastic packet -- pav out of a packet is rarely very good. At any rate, I opened it up and was suddenly, rapidly, deflated.

It had a flaky, soft, bun-like crust.

I had not been that disappointed in a long, long while, which should explain why I called up Mr Mezza Voce and rather maliciously said flippant but rude things about how he'd become a Bangalorean and didn't know a proper pav when he saw it any more. I take the opportunity to apologize here both to him and to Bangalore; I will write an ode to Iyengar bakeries soon and to Mr Mezza Voce's ability to find good food wherever he goes. They -- and you -- must understand that it was a little like being told that your mother is at home waiting for you and rushing in to find the lady who lived two doors down, who, while a nice motherly person who truly likes you, is not your mother after all. And let's say you haven't seen your mother in ages but you've been wanting to; doesn't that turn into a nastier shock?

At any rate, enough of these family-centric analogies that exclude those who don't like their families. It turned out that Mr Mezza Voce's mother has been buying that sort of pav for years, so for him, that is a pav of equal status. And, remarkably, because I never thought it possible, I am actually a culinary Nazi who wants some things "just so". A lesson in perspective and in context and in the necessity of very clear communication in a marriage. Ambiguity is bound to make its way in somewhere, but we can at least try.

I did eat the pav. To be truthful, after that first flush of irritation at it, I felt a little sorry and decided to be kind and less Nazi-like and more welcoming. I ate it with home-made hummus and some superb and very North Indian garlic pickle, which made for an interesting sandwich, even if a sandwich as unhomely as that bread itself -- there I go again. I'll shut up now. Sorry, that was a pav, just not the pav I'm used to. There are other realities, and my stomach must collide with them and learn to live with other versions of what it is accustomed to.

I suppose that is a moral, so we'll stop now.

That Damned Elusive Milk Bar!

2008-05-25T09:19:00.000-07:00

For many "old" Bangaloreans, I understand that Lakeview Milk Bar, formerly of MG Road, is a stolid old staple of life--the sort of place to which parents took their children and then were taken to along with grandchildren once the original children had become parents themselves. In the old days, they say (and they probably mean 1990), when everything was shut at 11pm, Lakeview was open. Customers had their choice of icecreams in various forms, and could even park across the street and have their purchases delivered to their cars by Lakeview waiters.

I am not so sure of this alleged stability. It seems as though Lakeview and I have been playing a game of hide-and-seek, and I always lose--well, I lost most of time, at least.

My first introduction to Lakeview came on my second visit to Bangalore, sometime in 1995, with my father, sister, and a cousin. This was the Bangalore visit during which we all got food poisoning to varying degrees, became well acquainted with the gutters of Indiranagar because we threw up in them on several occasions, and drove our kind hosts mad with worry (for those with no sense of history, this was not the previous trip to Bangalore, during which Indira Gandhi was assasinated and we were confined to our hotel, which entirely lost its head and served nothing but puri bhaji for a week, thus condemning us to eat it as mourning food). My sister and father recovered fastest and were eventually taken by kind hosts to Lakeview. Not exactly ignorant of her thus superior position in life, my sister came home and bragged about eating six flavours of ice cream in one bowl. My cousin and I, weak and more or less confined to our beds and curd rice, looked miserably at the wall and howled, frustrated at the fact that we liked the idea of ice cream but couldn't even imagine letting it pass our lips.

Thus, Lakeview escaped me that time. A dozen years later, when visiting my boyfriend in Bangalore, Lakeview didn't hide well enough. We went in one night and had ice creams. I recall a banana spilt, and am not sure what he had. I was hugely fascinated by the place; there were lots of small children with harassed parents, eating from boat-shaped bowls of ice cream. You would have expected the children to be boat-shaped and boat-sized too, considering the serving sizes, but miraculously, they were all just average skinny children with mothers in kanjeevaram sarees fussing over them. We ate our respective ice creams in silence, paying tribute to the generations of Bangaloreans that had no doubt added pleasant memories and several inches to their waistlines in that rather dingy little ice cream parlour. When we spoke up, it was to argue about whether Lakeview would possibly have started out near Ulsoor lake or not, and to wonder what on earth a Garfunkel sundae could possibly be. I suspected then that it had something to do with tutti-frutti, and still suspect so. In southern India, sweet things with exotic names very often do.

Several times after that, when popping in to Bangalore to spend time at home post-marriage but before I could make a permanent move, I walked up MG Road, walked down MG Road and remembered Lakeview every time. If in the need for something savoury, there was always the Coffee House and the most marvellous scrambled eggs on toast, but when I wanted something sweet, oddly enough, Lakeview was not to be found. It was puzzling. Had I imagined it all? Did I really have to stoop to going to the Barton Centre Barista instead? It remained a conundrum until one day, somebody told me that Lakeview had shifted elsewhere so that the building that had housed it could be demolished and a new, swankier building put up on the same site. In other words, it was just that I had a rudimentary knowledge of MG Road geography and hadn't realized a whole set of shops was missing.

And that is why, today, when a couple of acquaintances I bumped into suggested that we go to Lakeview, I could tell them that it wasn't on MG Road. But where was it? I had a hazy recollection that it was on one of the roads off Residency Road and south of MG Road, but that particular section of Bangalore geography always ties my otherwise infallible sense of direction up in knots. We walked down Residency Road and asked first a pot-bellied mobile phone shop owner and then a svelte young woman. We expected at least the first to know, but he didn't; the girl looked agahst at the question, as though we would make her fat simply by mentioning the words "ice" and "cream" one after another. Turning the corner onto Museum Road, we accosted a man walking along holding the hand of a very little girl, but he had no idea where it was and hadn't even heard the name before. We were horrified. Did nobody eat ice cream any more?

A little further on, two sets of hand-holding couples and their ignorance showed us that courting couples do not go to Lakeview either. I toyed with the idea of asking the post office -- this was an address change -- but it was a Sunday, so they were closed (and possibly eating Kwality Walls at home, if we have the measure of Bangalore). We rounded the corner again and latched onto a small family coming out of a steakhouse, the name of which I forget. The first four members ran on, saying "MG Road!" but the last, a youngish lady, stopped when I said, "It's shifted!" She apologized; it had shifted, but she didn't know where. Clearly she had eaten ice cream sometime but not in the last one year.

It was left to the wonderful, glorious, saintly Magazine Shop in the same compound to tell us; the man behind the counter was on the phone and double-checked with whoever was at the other end, before telling us, "Right and then circle left." We trotted on, all eager now. Evidently some people still ate ice cream at Lakeview.

Eventually, we got there--to St Mark's Plaza on St Mark's Road. Outdoors, there were too many flies and a major population explosion outside the paan shop. We went upstairs, where the fans were. At the next table, a man was eating chocolate ice cream out of the sort of soup bowl you usually find in a cheap Chinese restaurant. I shook my head. That was a lot of ice cream. A sorrowful waiter took our order, and then turned his expression to a disgusted one instead. M, a purist, was going for the peach melba, while R and I wanted to take advantage of mango season and were ordering mango milkshake with ice cream and a fresh mango sundae respectively.

Just to serve me right for judging other people's appetites, my sundae turned up in another Chinese restaurant soup bowl. The ice cream was good--milky, with just a hint of minuscule ice crystals to make it vaguely grainy. We ate, again, in a reverent silence. I felt like a little pig by the time the last bit had been spooned into my mouth, but it was a good feeling. The mango had been fresh and sweet, the mango ice cream slid down easily, even if the chocolate sauce on top of the mango was a little stomach turning.

I memorized the location this time. There will be no escaping the next time, Garfunkel sundae! I shall have you, in a cheap Chinese restaurant style soup bowl!

All the same, memory of location or not, Lakeview might still have revenged itself on me for finding it out. I have a dreadful stomach ache. Chocolate and mango do not mix well.

I Capture the Castle (Film Review)

2008-05-23T23:22:00.000-07:00

Romola Garai as Cassandra

At 23, it seemed I'd be too old to read and really enjoy Dodie Smith's 1948 novel I Capture the Castle. I thought it was a book for older children (and it is sometimes positioned as such because Smith is remembered for writing a book for children, The Hundred and One Dalmatians). Instead, it revealed itself to be an unexpected treasure, very adult and very wise in the scope of its emotion and breadth of thought. 2003 saw the release of a film version, directed by Tim Fywell and adapted by Heidi Thomas from Smith's novel. It is not by any means a perfect film, but it evokes, amazingly enough, some of the same feelings that come with Smith's witty, charming, heartfelt depiction of the English countryside in the 1930s and the life of a 17 year old girl growing up in it.

Our narrator is Cassandra Mortmain, a girl on the verge of adulthood, who lives in a semi-ruined English castle rented by her extremely odd family and writes in her diary about life, so that we get to know the story from her perspective. Her father, James Mortmain, is an author who wrote a critically well-received novel some 12 years previous to the film's action, and has since not written a word, though nobody in his family can quite understand why. A fascinating but somewhat neglected subplot delves into this matter of why Mortmain finds it so impossible to express himself, and the final result is one of the film's biggest surprises.

As a consequence of James Mortmain's inability to work, and the fact that the family is of the genteel upper class that is educated but unskilled to work, the Mortmain finances are non-existent. This poverty-stricken state is much bemoaned by Rose, Cassandra's red-haired beauty of an older sister, who longs for the comforts and opportunities that money would provide. Thomas, Cassandra's bespectacled, intelligent little brother, and Topaz, her striking, embarassingly bohemian stepmother ("brackets: not wicked", as the film says), round off the family and also inspect the accounts dolefully. In the margin, but very important too, is Stephen, the extraordinarily handsome hired help who hasn't been paid in six months but keeps working for the family both out of loyalty and because he is besotted with Cassandra, who looks on him as a brother.

When we meet the Mortmains, they are ruing their financial situation and Rose, in addition, is howling about how she will never meet any eligible (and more importantly, rich) young men if she stays in their tiny village. Almost immediately, two eligible young men turn up (and some of us are reminded of Pride and Prejudice). They are brothers, Americans named Simon and Neil Cotton, and are indubitably rich, owning properties not just in America, which is where they're from, but also in England--in fact, Simon is the Mortmains' landlord. Rose immediately decides to make Simon (as the older brother and the heir) ask her to marry him. Presumably she might also want him to fall in love with her, but marriage is what she cares about, for the money it will bring. She is a gold-digger for certain, but the film gives us a chance to understand why and leaves us the option of even sympathizing with her.

What ensues is comic, sad, dramatic, and sublime by turns. Nothing can be simple when a family that has been forced by circumstances to lead a sheltered existence suddenly comes into contact with everything that is alien to them--whether it is circumstances, perspectives, opportunities, moral values, or the spark of sexual excitement. Several characters end up loving those they cannot have or at least think they cannot have, and how they work their different ways through these situations and come out on the other side is the stuff of this story. But this is not a film only about love or lust; it is concerned also with conscience and with intellect, in subtle ways that are related to the acts of feeling and expressing love and any other emotion or thought. The situations the characters are in would seem almost ridiculous sometimes, especially to our over-exposed post-modern minds, but this is a period film and they have period morals and perspectives on life. They are as true to life as they can be in the situation they are placed in; and the situations they end up in are as messy as life itself is. Ultimately, there is much confusion and some heartbreak and a lot of learning for Cassandra to do; right through the film, she tries to deal with her new feelings and new thoughts, as well as her responses to the new behaviour exhibited by other characters, in a way that is most discreet and inoffensive. Her bitter tears when she does not succeed are testament to how she has tried to balance two facets of adulthood, sexuality and responsibility.

Two things make the book stand out: one is Dodie Smith's gentle love for the English countryside and the other is Cassandra's wit and her sharp observations in her diary, in writing. The film is a pleasure to watch because it succeeds in translating both these factors onto the screen. The cinematography loves everything in this film--the greens and blues of an English summer, the stones of the castle, the glow of candlelight, Rose's flaming red head and Cassandra's mouse-brown one, the woods, the angles in Topaz's face, and even the near-opacity of a rainy day--but it loves its landscapes most beautifully and is most mellow with them. As for Cassandra's narrative, Heidi Thomas manages to pick the best lines fom the book for the fine young actress Romola Garai, who plays Cassandra, to speak and Garai does the rest. When the camera lingers on her face, it subtly shows what her character feels. The most moving, intensely truthful passages from Cassandra's diary come physically into being. Even if there was nothing else good in the film, Garai's performance would be a revelation and would be able to carry the film through to the end.

If readers of Smith are unhappy with the film, it will be for two reasons. First, what the book only hinted at and conveyed quietly with regard to Cassandra's sexual awakening and her confusion over it comes out into the open when Fywell puts physical bodies on screen to bring her story to life. Similarly, an undercurrent of darkness in the Mortmain family, and a couple of scenes of domestic violence, are given room in the film--and again, these are not so much departures from the book as thoughtful, perceptive 21st century re-readings of it. There would have been much that Cassandra's narrative would censor, the feelings she found hardest to put into words, and these feelings are left to action and expression in the film, where they play their parts most effectively.

If I do not feel that the film is a triumphant success, it is in part because of the actors playing the Cotton brothers, Henry Thomas (Simon) and Mark Blucas (Neil). They lack the charm and attraction the book suggests, and Simon, in particular, is not given the time and space to show the sensitivity that his character shows in the book. The other actors, especially Rose Byrne (Rose), the wonderful Bill Nighy (James Mortmain), and Tara Fitzgerald (Topaz), give more than commendable performances, in contrast. The problem is that Fywell does not trust his cast enough; where they could carry the weight of the film on their faces, he pulls the camera away and gives us their surroundings. This is particularly noticable in scenes where Cassandra is imagining what is portrayed on the screen; we cannot help but feel that by showing her imaginings graphically rather than via their appearance on her face, Fywell is refusing the risk of letting his actress tell a story unaided. And then, sometimes, it becomes apparent that Fywell is losing out on high emotion because he prefers to watch his characters from a distance. Underplaying the emotions of a set of characters when you have such an excellent cast on hand can only be an error of judgement.

I Capture the Castle is nonetheless an eminently watchable film and it probably bears a second viewing as well. I cannot go so far as to say that Dodie Smith would find it pleasing, but as a reader, I certainly do. It watches humanity make a mess of itself and still makes life seem beautiful and and worth living, even in its messiness. Few great books are ever adapted into great films--so if a good book is adapted into a good film, what more can we, as audience, possibly ask for?

Film rating: 4/5

Orthopaedically Inclined

2008-05-21T09:53:00.000-07:00

This evening, a couple of hours ago, I was sitting on an x-ray table at Wockhardt Hospital, Bannerghatta Road, having my ankle x-rayed and feeling profoundly foolish. I'd never been into a corporate hospital before; the necessity had never arisen. My family is of the sort that either has undying friends who are doctors or has doctors who are undying friends; we've never even felt the need to marry doctors or have offspring that are doctors or, for that matter, become doctors ourselves. That, presumably, is for those less gifted at public relations.

It's quite a tradition to uphold, and, to my eternal credit, I managed it even when living in Hyderabad, where, other than the campus doctor, the only doctors visited were friends of friends and in one case the mother of a friend. Not so in Bangalore, at least at present, since I know so few people as yet, and that should explain the disgrace of Wockhardt Hospital. Mind you, the x-ray was fine, very fine--it was so fine and so sharp that I afterwards spent five minutes staring at it, fascinated. And then I heard the voice of Dr K in my head, remarking on what a fine x-ray it was, and manifested an entirely new sort of homesick. Now you witness something you might not have ever heard of before--I am homesick for my orthopaedic surgeon.

My parents first encountered Dr K (initial only to protect privacy) nearly three decades ago. He promptly proceeded to break their daughter's arm.

Surprisingly, this is not the end of the story.

My then five-year-old sister had a green stick fracture of her arm; the bone was bent and only if it was broken could it be set properly. Late on a Saturday evening, three days after the injury had occured, Dr K decided not to delay matters further and to work without the anaesthesia that would be available only on Monday morning. One short but piercing scream from my sister and one loud "crack" from her bone later, my parents fainted away simultaneously. Only my tiny, fragile-looking, pink-and-white grandmother stood by steadfastly, holding on.

Three hours later, my sister was dancing the night away at a building Christmas party, her pain and discomfort forgotten. My grandmother came away with a new opinion of my parents and forevermore, afterwards, when talking about the incident, dismissed them as "a pair of funks." As for Dr. K, with that one spectacular procedure, he gained an entire family of patients to add to the two-year-old orthopaedic practice he had in Bandra.

From then until now, Dr. K has fixed my family's legs, arms, wrists, ankles, hips, and backs efficiently and with minimum fuss. His usual suggestions for the more straightforward injuries are simply rest, the old-fashioned practice of "fomentation" or applying heat to the injured area, simple exercises to prevent stiffness and swelling, and then more rest again. More complicated problems are dealt with carefully, but again, rest has a great part to play. My grandmother's two dozen fractures from a hit-and-run accident, among them broken ribs, collarbone, and femur, were dealt with simply by putting her into traction for two months. Nothing could work quite like having her just lie still and stare at the ceiling, Dr. K said, to all her grumbling, and he was right; she recovered completely from her numerous injuries and had an active life for several years after that. Dr. K was then, and still remains, very conservative; if he suggests surgery, you know you definitely need it. He would never even consider it otherwise.

But Dr. K's skills as a doctor go beyond pure orthopaedics. The man's equally great strength is his ability to walk into any house, with a patient from any community or class, and make everyone comfortable -- including himself. Over the years, I've seen him stroll into our bedroom several times, smiling sunnily on everyone and saying, "Hello, hello, hello! Kya hua, beta? What have you done now?" as if he were a pet relation, not a doctor; and perhaps my fondness for him came out of his penchant to squat to a child's height to talk and call me "gudiya rani" when I was a little girl. If the house calls aren't enough of a shock, Dr. K goes one step further; rather than make the patient go to the hospital to put on a cast, change a dressing, or remove stitches or staples, Dr. K will often come home and do it for you. In the next generation of doctors, it will be impossible to find senior surgeon who will hang around to work with plaster of paris or synthetic fibre roll.

He's not the sort of doctor you'd find impressive at first glance; he's actually a funny-looking, balding man with a big nose. His proclivity for chatting on and on might even seem unprofessional in an era where doctors make patients pay for every fifteen minutes of their time. But this the doctor as family friend, not the doctor as a super-professional stranger for whom you are reduced to being the sum of the body parts he's been called in to look at. Not surprisingly, he has a great fan following among the Auntie Ednas and Auntie Silloos of Bandra and Khar and numerous stories to tell about his interactions with them. My favourites are the Parsi auntie stories, especially the one about the auntie who had surgery in a Jain, pure vegetarian hospital and whispered to him, just before leaving, "Doctor, so nice, no, this hospital is! Very polite, very nice, very clean. But they should give some little egg and bacon for breakfast, not this idli-sambar!"

I didn't really get to understand Dr K at close quarters until a couple of years ago, when I broke the ankle I was having x-rayed today and had to have it fixed up with orthopaedic hardware. I remember that Dr K showed up at 9 in the night at our house, looked at my x-rays, shook his head sorrowfully over the visible damage, and then became indignant when he saw the uncomfortable cast an inexperienced medical student in Manali had put my leg into. Dr K wanted to change the cast. He didn't know that the well-meaning but completely inept med student had pulled my leg around to cause me unbearable pain. When he looked up, he saw that my teeth were chattering and I was shivering, on a warm, humid Bombay night, flinching even before he could take my ankle in his hands. So he smiled at me and looked into my eyes and said, "Dr K will not hurt you."

I didn't quite believe him, but then he took my foot, held it up by the heel and one toe, and wrapped a cast gently, so gently around my ankle, talking all the while to me about the mountains and their beauty and about where I had fallen down, about his terrace-top vegetable garden, about the roads of Bandra on which he walks from house to house and to the hospital, daily, about all the aunties and uncles of Bandra he knew. He seemed to go on forever, and then, suddenly, he was putting my leg on the bed. I had felt not even a single twinge of pain.

He was there again for me before surgery, bringing the anesthetist around to say hello, and then during surgery, when I, under sedation, kept telling him insistently to go and eat his lunch. And then again after surgery, to redo a painfully tight cast, to change a dressing, and then again to send me home, and then again to come home and remove my stitches and let me onto crutches. He scolded when I baulked at walking because it hurt and was as thrilled as me when I showed up walking properly again, after long months of not being able to do so.

One day during that time, when I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and wishing that I could just walk as I used to, my mother started to tell me a story I didn't know. Dr K, she said, had had a small son who was around five years old when his father had been practicing for a few years. On evening, the child was playing on the terrace of the building, and a terrible thing happened. He somehow fell off and hurtled down four or five stories. Practically every bone in the boy's body broke. He died shortly afterwards. Many years later, Dr K, his eyes wet with tears, told my mother, "Everytime I see a patient, I think of my son. I think of how I could not mend a single one of his bones. And then I mend their bones."

It was raining when I got out of Wockhardt Hospital, and the rain was pleasant rain, the sort of rain that makes even the nastiness of Bannerghatta Road seem lovely and ripe for a good evening, the sort of rain that ensures I enjoy Bangalore. All the same, it felt odd to have taken an x-ray and not be heading off to Dr K to exhibit it. I have to send it to Bombay, and then, maybe, if Dr K wants to get my hardware out, he'll call me to Bombay. I don't really want the surgery, Dr K, not even if it stops my ankle from randomly hurting. But somehow I can't rid myself of the conviction that it will be good to see you again and to hear about Auntie Maisie and Mr Randelia and Mrs Punjwani and forget for a moment about why right now I have to go to Wockhardt Hospital when I'm in Bangalore.

Some Small English

2008-05-14T06:01:00.000-07:00

These days, I edit fiction in my spare time. A few months ago, a kind friend passed my resume on to one of his kind friends, who just happened to work in a senior position in a publishing company. The friend-of-friend must have been pleased with me, for I soon received a manuscript to edit. Which brings me to this evening and the work at hand.

I sit for several hours at a time and work very slowly still, though I am now significantly faster than when I first started. The manuscript is a short novel, originally written in Malayalam, now on its way to appearing in print in an English translation for the very first time. I found it a bit patchy when I first read it, but now, as I edit, it seems, if not a work of genius, at least a very finely balanced piece of work, which has been lucky enough to fall into the hands of a careful yet excited translator.

I worry constantly about my edit. It is hard enough to edit somebody else's work -- it is harder still to edit somebody else's work of fiction, and harder yet to edit somebody's work of fiction that has been translated by yet another somebody else. The author sits at one end of the line, the translator sits somewhere in the middle, I sit at the other end. We all hold a string that moves through our nervous, twitching hands, and sometimes, it is certain, we misinterpret each other completely.

I cannot know if the language of the translation was really intended to mirror the sense of apathy and fatalism that gloats from the first to the last page of the novel, but it seems to. I cannot know what the tone of the author's language was, because I do not speak Malayalam. Then a passage of great passion and yet great misery comes along, and I wonder if the feeling has come in because of the translator or if it was there within the author's text. As I edit, I add words and wonder whether the original Malayalam held the same shades of meaning my additions bring. Oddly enough, I rarely delete any words -- I only change them and know that in bringing in what I see as a more appropriate word, I am also making endless judgments about meaning and tone and voice. I do that everyday at my day job, but it is far simpler with a research paper. The meaning of that is evident; there is a logical argument to cling to. Fiction is terrifying.

At first I was afraid to delete anything. Now I remove whole sentences, growing more confident as the chief editor urges me to think of the reader alone. My awe of the author changes to a desire to simply make the book as good as it can be without any substantial changes, and I grow impatient with what sometimes seems like unnecessary verbosity. Then, in a page, I begin to wonder again about whether the verbosity is the translator's or the author's, and run back to the last major edit to restore it to something as close to what I surmise the author, twice-removed from my pencil, intended.

Sometimes I catch a glimpse of an effect that was subtle in Malayalam but is as nothing in English. I am forced to consider how another language -- and one I do not know at all -- might possibly express its meaning, forced to guess at what the author and then the translator saw, expressed, and understood in that language. At other times, I just forge on ahead as though it is my book alone and I have to consider nobody else. This is not an uneven way of working -- it is actually producing a fairly good edit. It is indeed our book, not just the author's or just the translator's or just mine; how could I ever edit it if was only looking around to see what the other two were saying, or if, equally, I never looked around?

It is a traumatic, intense experience -- and I can only imagine how much worse it must seem to anyone who falls in love with what they are reading. I have saved myself from that at least.

At times like this, it behooves me to remember and smile wryly at what the non-editor boss of an editor friend used to say about her work; it was, he said, of no great consequence, practically dispensible, just "some small English." I would not be surprised if my author and translator said exactly that. Being able to smile at the ungrateful is half of my job, being able to feel that the work thanks you in its reaching for its own favoured sort of perfection.

Hail Mary

2008-05-01T01:27:00.000-07:00

It is the first day of May, and no doubt, this evening my mother will call me from Bandra and give me the news I already know, that today is the first day of an entire month of special rosaries to be said "down" in the building ("down" being a famous place of many to-ings and fro-ings, as it is for all residents of sociable buildings in Bombay). May is Our Lady's month, they say, but now I have forgotten why October also gets dedicated to her and another month of special community rosaries. At any rate, Bandra has reasons that reason cannot understand, most of these reasons having something to do with being Catholic, so we say rosaries.

We got into good training for community rosaries at home, since we had a grandmother, Nana, who was educated by Irish nuns in Mhow who said the rosary militantly, every day, or so she reported. It was compulsory to sit around with the family every evening and get out the requisite number of Our Fathers and Hail Marys, commemorating the set of Mysteries of the Rosary applicable for that day of the week. There was no way to escape this; games had to stop, studies had to be postponed, and if surprise visitors were Catholic, they had to join in. One of my first memories of rosary-saying comes from the evening on which we first got a walker home for Nana, who had broken her hip and had to use one. Everyone else prayed away stoutly, ignoring the fact that I was very busy; the plastic cover the walker had been delivered in was coming loose and I was intent on tucking it neatly around the frame, occasionally interrupting my labours to pipe up with a cheerful "Holy Mary, Mother of God..."

Of course, if we all got bored and caught up in honest manual labour as five year olds, later on, we got caught up in rosary fashions. No countesses ever cherished their diamonds the way we cherished the fake-crystal rosary beads that the lucky ones got from Don Bosco's Shrine, Matunga. I don't think anything really tore us away from the delights of those beads as they caught the light, not even the glow-in-the-dark rosaries or the rosary rings, with ten little nubs and a protruding cross on which to count our prayers, or even the blessed rosaries from Rome or Jerusalem. Not surprisingly, the pleasures of these accessories only led us to miscount and say alarming decades of two Our Fathers, six Hail Marys, and no Glory Be at all, or even one Our Father, thirteen Hail Marys, and two Glory Bes, and be glared at by those of our elders and betters who cared.

But perhaps the most impressive when it came to the rosary fad was Papa, my grandfather, who took it one step further; he was so devoted to Mary that he presented Mount Mary's Basilica, up on the hill down the road from where he lives, with a set of enormous rosaries to be hung up in the church building, where they swung overhead from the choir-loft until a few years ago. The beads weren't crystal, or wood, or even glow-in-the-dark; they were actually painted ping-pong balls. Our knowledge of these secret antecedents made them that much more exciting. It's not as though any of us had gotten away with taking ping-pong balls to church, and the fact that Papa had succeeded gave us all a share in an aura both religious and sportive!

Even later, we got into another rosary fad: Mystery booklets, with pictures showing each of those Mysteries (significant events in the lives of Mary and Jesus). We quite fancied ourselves to be ahead of the trends, especially since we had one benefit that few of our peers did--a family friend who lived in Portugal and was apt to dole out religious goodies when she visited us in Bombay. Other than the candles with the Sacred Heart on them, and the rosaries of wood and imitation pearls, Alda brought us glossy posters with little pictures showing all the Mysteries, which we dutifully cut out and pasted onto chart paper to make concertina-folding booklets by which to remember the Mysteries. There were often bonus pictures of Our Lady of Fatima, a hot favorite because of the Portuguese connection, and sometimes Our Lady of Lourdes, who presumably was grudgingly accepted only because she was related to Our Lady of Fatima. Once, Alda brought us the ultimate in rosary merchandise -- a videotape of a movie about the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima to Jacinta, Francisco, and Lucia, three Portuguese children. The movie met with much approval on our part because it showed these blessed and delinquint infants hurrying up their rosary-saying by simply saying "Our Father," "Hail Mary" and "Holy Mary" instead of the prayers in their entirety and rushing off instead to take care of their sheep. Sheep we had none, but this seemed like an intelligent, time-saving idea. I never could understand why my grandmother frowned so on this innovation or why my parents giggled when I argued the case for it.

Still later, I moved on to being a Litany-junkie. The litany being, in essence, name-calling of a polite nature, giving Mary all her titles, it held much scope for imagination. For years, I thought that "Mother inviolate" meant that she was wearing a particularly fetching lavendar frock and wondered why the hell anyone would call her the Tower of Babel, or, for that matter, a Tower of Ivory or the Ark of Covenant, these and a few others being quite inexplicable alongside the rest of the titles, which were variations on the Mother-Virgin-Queen themes. The Litany had a pleasant rhythm too, being made up of mostly 4-6 syllable invocations, responded to with "Pray for us" in a two-syllable condensed version that sounded remarkably like "Wafers". Towards the end, it slowed down with the invocation, "Queen conceived without original sin," which was amazingly difficult to fit into the rhythm of the rest of the litany; made sure everyone kept tripping over their tongues with the next three invocations, also longish ones; and finished up most satisfyingly with the very tight "Queen of peace." I firmly believe the author of the litany put the last few tongue-twisters in only to make sure that nobody could fall off to sleep repeatedly muttering "Pray for us" at appropriate intervals and actually get away with it. It certainly worked at home with us, where someone or the other, most often my father, would get caught out by the difference in rhythm and be embarrassed.

Perhaps the greatest sense of how the rosary was so much a part of family life came when we visited other friends and relations and came to the last bit of the rosary, the random prayers tacked on as per individual taste and the sets of Our Fathers, Hail Marys, and Glory Bes said for family specific reasons, such as dear departed ancestors and relations. I was always stumped by this bit; it was impossible to figure out which prayer was being said in time to actually say it and on several occasions, force of habit made me say the paryers my mother always said, unmindful of the fact that everyone else was muttering something entirely different. The day my parents suddenly added a prayer to the Scared Heart to this list, after years of not changing anything, I was as shocked as if I'd gone out and come home to find they'd shifted all the furniture in the house around and put the piano in the kitchen. And the day my mother added a set of Our Fathers for Nana, who had died the night before, I cried unabashedly. I had lost all belief in "as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end."

Community rosaries were a different matter. Here, crystal rosaries were of no consequence and family prayer structures were easily forgotten. The only important thing was getting to blow out the candles. Getting the community rosary started was a long process, involving fetching a plaster statue of Our Lady of Lourdes, two candlestands with glass covers, and a tablecloth, and setting up an altar on an old wooden table. Lighting the candles was possible only through divine intervention, considering the strong breezes that blew in our building. Eventually, I guess Mary would beam upon someone's efforts, the candles would be lit, and we'd all arrange ourselves for the fifteen-minute session.

If the adults were busy praying that any litigation the building was involved in would be sorted out soon, we children were all watching the candles. On occasion, we'd be distracted by something else -- such as my three year old neighbour singing "Song Sung Blue" in a piercing baby lisp, while everyone else tried to keep from giggling -- but we knew where our attention had to be. The truly intelligent would stand exactly opposite the candles, at the shortest distance from the table that was possible, and inch forward carefully while the prayers went on, moving a bare millimeter at a time to gain the advantage. As the last "Amen" was proclaimed, these intelligent ones would race forward, pull off the glass candle-shades, and blow the candles out. Every once in a while, someone else would run in from the side, and a fight would start, or some unfeeling adult would stride up and blow while we were still running. Those were terrible days.

Almost as important was the boiled channa and cold drink served on the last days of May and October, in celebration of the end of the community rosary event for the month. While everyone else chatted amicably, we trawled the auntie line up, taking handfuls of channa, noting who had added the most coconut, pulling faces at any lack of sugar in the cold drink, and eventually deciding which auntie was to be looked upon most favourably for the rest of the year because of her generosity and culinary talents. This, however, remained secondary, probably because it was a thrill of just two days, whereas we got 60 days a year to fight over the candles.

Now, my building has become fancy; there are no candles to fight over at the community rosary and the small statue of Our Lady of Lourdes has been replaced by a permanent grotto with an almost life-sized statue of Mary holding the dead Jesus in her arms. For that matter, the number of people going down to say the rosary has dwindled considerably; few people have the time any more and not many parents insist that their children should go. There is still channa and cold drink at the end of May and then again at the end of October, but they have lost their charm for a generation brought up on more exotic delicacies. As usual, I am caught in ambivalance about this situation; on the one hand, as a professed agnostic, I really don't care if people stop saying their prayers, while on the other hand, as someone whose only culture is so caught up in Catholicism, I'm sorry that each time I revisit it with a sense of nostalgia, it has lost more and more of its community feeling.

I can still go home to Bandra and sit down with my grandparents and say the rosary, thankfully. I don't have to say it with my parents, who are still confused about whether I'm an agnostic or an atheist, but I haven't the courage to startle my grandparents by not joining in. We all sit down together, Grana, Papa, my mother, my father, my sister C, and me. Grana and Papa get the treat of saying a rosary with the family, as they always used to, instead of with the rosary as said on the Eternal Word Television Network, a Catholic TV channel.

Right from the start, it is evident that we are hopelessly out of sync with each other. I've never heard such a mismatch of rosary-saying styles all trying to reach some sort of harmony and failing miserably. My mother says it calmly and at a measured pace, sounding just like the schoolteacher she was with years of experience of dictating notes in class. My father starts out with a sonorous boom and then gets gradually softer until you can't hear his Amens. Grana says her prayers with a peculiar diction that makes it difficult to tell if she is speaking a garbled Konkani or Latin or Swahili or actually saying the rosary. My sister C charges through her prayers furiously, as though she can't wait for them to be answered. Me, well, for someone who is saying them for the sake of saying them, I am remarkably slow at my prayers. I listen to everyone else as I say them and listen to the words and appreciate the language--and still wonder why the hell anyone would call Mary the Tower of Babel.

Perhaps the only one of us who still says the rosary as though he's part of a community is Papa. His rosary goes at the pace of a solemn procession, and if I close my eyes, I see him walking along, holding a long candlestand, with a large crowd shuffling along before and after him. All of them say their prayers at that pregnant pace. We're the ones who lurch along, each of us alone, while Papa has company. We seem like nothing so much as a set of horses with varying running abilities. My sister C comes in first every race, Grana, Dad, and Mummy all get in soon after, I meander along, and Papa comes in last. One of these days, a string of ping-pong balls will pull him along and he'll catch up, and we'll add another mystery to the mysteries of our family rosary.

Wafers, O Holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

-------------------------------------

When my mother read this, she promptly ran off with her rosary to do some research, saying the entire litany a couple of times to check what she was doubtful of. Eventually, she called me up and informed me that there was no invocation that went 'Tower of Babel," but there IS one that goes, "Tower of David." Still -- why the hell would you call anyone the Tower of David, that's what I'd like to know.

Summer

2008-04-28T23:22:00.000-07:00

Now it is hot in Bangalore. The children of the colony play downstairs all day and most of the evening, shouting and laughing, annoying the helpful old disciplinarian lady who is our ground floor neighbour. Some days, it's cricket, other days badminton, often catching cook, sometimes Air Force with paper rockets; and once, unforgettably, a game of cops and robbers revised into a manifestation of the Cauvery water dispute. They don't seem to feel the heat.

I watch them when I get home from work at five thirty in the evening, sitting in the little balcony when the sun is lowering in the sky and the great copper pod trees outside our flat begin to brush darkness over its corners. This is perhaps the best time of the day; coming in from the unhealthy mixture of heat, pollution, and inconsiderate driving on Bannerghatta Road, the cool smooth mosaic tiles and the subdued light in our old, thankfully unstylish building are better than slices of cucumber laid over the eyes.

At work too, I am thankful for faded stone facings on buildings, for the long, shaded labyrinth of corridors and their openings into sudden courtyards with plants and trees. The raintree outside my office window holds up bravely, spreading its branches with their delicate pink and white brushes of flowers to dim and cool the air. On the way to the main gate, the magenta bougainvillea flourish gaudily; they seem almost unnatural, while their orange kin fade like aged crepe paper, the frangipani look dusty and forlorn, and the jacaranda blossoms fall, one by one, from their trees and get trodden into the dirt. Sometimes the breeze blows, disturbing the heaps of fallen bougainvilleae and slamming the enormous wooden door into my room shut. When it doesn't blow, we are dotted all over with sweat and shudder at the thought of silk sarees.

My boss alternates between bursts of activity because he has no classes to teach and running home to spend time with his children. I wish for a fortnight off to go to the hills. We are visited during the day by children on holiday, coming to their parents' workplace as a treat, and sometimes by the two beautiful bullocks that pull the garbage collection cart around the campus. They meander into the shade our building provides, and eat of the foliage outside, the bells hung around their necks tinkling occasionally, their tails constantly sweeping to drive away the mosquitoes, who promptly enter our room and bite us mercilessly. In the afternoons, I yawn ceaselessly, sleep falling over me with the summer.

Walking under the trees is like jumping in and out of the desert, great heat in the sun, a comfortable coolness in the shade. I wait for buttermilk, for fruit juice, for cold watermelon, and long for the soft water of Bombay to quench my thirst. We eat mangos and enjoy them. It seems far too hot for beer. Phone calls home are all about the weather, and I hesitate to invite my parents to visit in May.

In the evenings, grey rain clouds come in low and hang there, threatening to rain over the IPL matches at Chinnaswamy Stadium. On some days, they are lower, when it has been more unbearable during the day. One day, there was thunder and lightening and a drizzle, but the next day was as warm as ever. I hear airplanes in the distance and think it is the sound of thunder and thrill to it before I am disappointed.

At night, I am thankful for the lack of mosquitoes and leave the large balcony doors open to let in the fresh air. Every now and then, I politely escort outside into the dark the bugs and beetles and bees attracted by the tubelight. We put the fan on full speed at night, slow it down a little later, and turn it off in the early morning, when the air is cooler and more pleasant and it feels like what we expect Bangalore to be.

Somewhere in Lalbagh, the last of the chandelier-like flowers of the Pride of Burma falls to the ground.

This is summer, and we long for rain.

To Freddie and Paul

2008-04-25T04:02:00.000-07:00

World Book Day, 2008

Long ago, in 1928, you were boys. Where, I do not know. Perhaps in India. Perhaps in England, perhaps in East Africa, in Australia, in Burma, in Ceylon, in any of the territories that were then British. There is no other way this could have happened: five fat books that belonged to you ended up with me in Bombay, where they are yours and mine, both.

You were the children of the time between the wars. It seems probable that your father and your uncles fought in the First World War and your births must have seemed like expressions of hope. They would not have known then that there would be another of those wars that would torture half the world's population. Or that you might have to fight in it. For it seems equally probable that you did. Perhaps you lay in trenches or flew bombers over Berlin or crawled through sweat-soaked jungles, miserable, and remembered the books and the stories of your childhood, our books among them.

As children, were you the spoilt darlings of your parents? I think not. Your mother's handwriting shows great elegance and grace. She would have been a wise parent. She was wise enough to gift you a set of what were then the first graded series of anthologies of literature for children, The Book House. I can see her now, a pale, faceless shadow to me, a warm, loving mother to you, sitting in an armchair, looking at what she was giving you, and smiling to herself; then, sitting at her desk and writing a dedication to both of you on the flyleaf of the first book. This much I know, as well as if I had been there with her.

Did you love the books? Something in your mother's handwriting says that you must have learned to, for this would have been important to her. She would have wanted sons who could and would read and grapple with literature just as enthusiastically as they would set out from home to fish, or swim, or sport.

Our fingers touch the pages of our books -- first, your fingers, then, decades later, mine. We smile at the same sentences, we screw up our noses as we try to read beyond our abilities. I can see you, dimpled boys, running along in shorts and caps; then striding purposefully, older, leaner, almost grown up.

As grown ups, you are lost, because we no longer read from the same books. I know only that eventually, half a century after your mother set down her pen, closed the ink bottle, and called you to receive your gift, someone -- someone so mysterious that I do not know their age or gender or location, leave alone their name -- handed five of the books to a Catholic priest in Bombay and asked him to give them to anyone who loved books and would appreciate them. He gave them to my parents.

And one day, I climbed onto a stool, wobbled dangerously as I stood on tip-toes to look into the high cupboard, so near the ceiling, and found your books. At first, you hid away, scoffing at my faltering over the nursery rhymes in the first book. But as I read through the series, you could not help but run through the pages with me.

We read folk tales and fairy tales, the myths of the Greeks and the Norse, works from South Africa and Brazil and India and Japan, poems by Longfellow and Wordsworth and Christina Rossetti and Tagore, stories from Shakespeare and the Bible and Cervantes and Spenser and Dante and Dickens. We pored over the illustrations together, those delicately printed little pictures of places and people and our imaginations. And one day, I looked again at your mother's inscription on the flyleaf of the book of nursery rhymes and tales outgrown, and saw what a gift she and you had given me.

Now you are quite possibly very old somewhere. I like to think that one of you kept the last of the books and leafed through it occasionally, remembering your mother, and sharing the book with those younger than yourself. The pages in the books I have with me aren't crumbling; they smell a little dusty but look fresh and are strong, even if a little yellow with age. Human bodies go through more than some books do, the careless pushing of indifferent decay. Perhaps you have succumbed to that. It has been many decades since you were indestructible.

And as I walk through life, I might even bump into your children or grandchildren or great grandchildren and not even know it. For all I know of you is two first names, a date, a woman's handwriting, and five books that gave me much pleasure. And all they would know of you would be adult, not the happy children I know. You and I are separated by what history cannot touch, by the sheer ordinariness of the unrecorded, unremembered processes of getting and giving away, by lives, spaces, times now gone.

Yet we did meet, many times, and looked out together from the tower window.

2006-08-23T23:53:00.000-07:00

Somebody outside shouted.

Perhaps it was her name,
or perhaps not.
Startled, my grandmother dropped
the gramophone's needle
into one of the minute ridges or valleys
on the slowly revolving record.

Somewhere in the vinyl
a bar from a saxophone shrieked
in terror.
It knew the fragility
of its musical perfection
in careless human hands.
They shake, they smudge,
they bring ruination.
They can't confine themselves
to the sleeping silences on the rim
and at the center.

And there:
for all its long-playing eternity,
a scratch.
Harmony and rhythm
strangled
into a weird, quick caterwaul,
before the notes sing onward
as if it were possible
to forget this past violence,
that will repeat
each time the record spins.

How strange it is
that fifty years on
amidst the crackling sighs
of a thousand other tiny warpings
bought about by the ruthless needles
of intervening decades,
I barely notice the agony in that cruel scratch.

My grandmother hasn't yet forgotten
her guilt in losing concentration.

But I hear only music.

St. Paul's Cathedral, London

2006-08-18T12:26:00.000-07:00

June 2004

A peculiar empty heaviness hung in the great cathedral, as if the very air was behind glass. As I moved slowly across the black and white tiled floor of the nave, the immenseness of the building bore down. It seemed to stretch on to infinity, despite the fact that I could plainly see the farthest reach of walls and ceiling. I felt, suddenly, very aware of my own movements and of a certain all-pervading chill. Everything was far away; up on the interior of the dome were murals, not clearly visible; the mosaics in the quire caught the light in their glimmering colours and threw it back at the eyes; it was impossible to look at that much marble and Portland stone and gilt and glass and wrought iron, without wanting to sit down and breathe less rarefied air.

The exterior of St. Paul's Cathedral was once designed to loom over everything in the City of London, and even today, the great dome is an inevitable sight, standing tall over buildings and trees, its curve shaping the skyline from across the river to the South Bank. Several parts of the lower building were covered with protective material and scaffolding, for restoration work. It was no preparation for the interior. Combining the ornate richness of a Baroque palace with the scale of a Gothic cathedral, it is simply overwhelming in its decoration. Strange then, that it felt so empty. Despite the tourists walking about, despite the scaffolding, despite the sounds echoing through, it was empty. Perhaps it was because everything echoed; because we were all like minuscule ants marching dazed in that gargantuan work of art.

But, after all, it is doubtful that Christopher Wren ever wanted the cathedral to seem accessible. It was to be the great cathedral of the great city; it was to replace the already great cathedral that had existed before the Great Fire. Cathedrals are not supposed to make anyone feel at home; they are usually intended to evoke awe and wonder in their magnificence. It is embellishment in combination with form that makes St. Paul's the cathedral, a vast museum in the guise of a church. Vast enough to overawe; embellished enough to exhaust.

I wandered around the main floor very slowly, trying to take all of it in at once, the painting, the stone-carving, the metal work. There was a sculpture that could only be by Henry Moore; there was the Light of the World, a painting we have all seen a thousand times, in all its variations of Christ about to knock on a door, the lamp in his hand lighting up the rest of the picture; there were the beautiful iron and gilt gates into the quire. Past the huge, beautiful pipe organ, I walked into the ambulatory, standing momentarily on one of the huge circular golden gratings in thefloor, looking down into the crypt beneath. There in front of me was a marble statue of a man in a shroud. In a moment, I had a dozen thoughts - flashes of the college library where I had first read John Donne's poetry, of the smiling motherly face of the woman who taught my class to understand what he said and to appreciate it, of J. who loves it, of a hundred lines from so many of his poems. The memory of why he stands there in a shroud brought a wry smile to my lips; he posed for the statue in a shroud, and kept it beside his bed during his last illness, as a reminder of his own mortality. The statue trumphantly survived two falls into the crypt, during the Great Fire and the Blitz, because it has no arms to break off.

Behind the high altar stood the roll of honour for the Americans who gave their lives in World War II. Children thronged the glass case with the great book, looking for their own names and surnames in the light coloured by the stained glass in the windows and the light from the glass chandelier above. Their voices were very far away, even in that relatively confined space.
The three death's heads above the entrance to the crypt made me shiver involuntarily, carved in marble and seeming almost like real skulls.

The crypt itself did not initially bring death to mind. It was uniformly bright and cold, painfully, almost chillingly, male, a military shrine with some other inclusions. The huge stone caskets for Nelson and the Duke of Wellington, one dark, one light, dominated the space, surrounded by memorials to those killed in what seemed like a hundred wars, though the only names I recall are Gallipoli, Korea, the Gulf and Afghanistan. Further down there were statesmen, and I noticed a memorial to Florence Nightingale among them. Those "who made shapely the stones" of St. Paul's were commemorated above the tomb of the architect himself. These memorials held little flavour of the past; they were sealed, safe and sterile, in their own underground tomb, with not even the dignity of dimness. They reminded me of over-shiny tombstones, in over-bright cemetaries, cruelly thrusting forth from the earth, as if to remind those left behind of a painful loss not long ago. Only those memorials and tombs that had come through the Great Fire were blurred with age, time making death distant and therefore beautiful.

It was a relief to leave the crypt and walk out into the grey drizzle. Perhaps if I had climbed up into the viewing galleries in the dome on that day, the air and light and view would have dispelled the disquieting stillness of the interior. But it was almost time for the next service, and we had to leave that for another day.

St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London

2006-08-17T04:47:00.000-07:00

June 2004

Muted sunlight through two levels of windows in the church lit up the chamber ensemble, as they struck up. The music immediately soared and climbed to the high vaulted ceiling, reaching a crescendo and then doubling back again. As the 'cello anchored, the violins sang out a sweet melody. The audience sat rapt, as bows caressed strings into the sounds that filled the church, throbbing into every corner, under every pew, into the galleries on either side of the nave, and into every little crevice in the dark woodwork. The notes counterpointed briefly, changed key, with motifs repeating like the gilded plasterwork on the ceiling, varying, yet the same, coming from the instruments held at the centre of the church by students of the Royal College of Music.

Yet, despite the church's sober, almost drab, Georgian character, all cream and brown, the ardour, ecstacy, and youthful triumph in the music did not seem out of place. The Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields faded quietly into the background as the music took over. Only the music mattered; only the sound that reverberated subtly off the walls. We sat there, bound by the magical strings stretched on the polished violins, violas and 'cellos, their vibrations soaring and swooping down again in our ears until the performers had put down their instruments. I heard the piece, Mendelssohn's Octet for strings in E major, Op. 20, faintly and suddenly in my mind over the next few weeks -- and even now, its sounds linger.

That lunchtime concert appeared to be only one of the aspects of London that the city itself takes entirely for granted. We had entered the famous church with its soaring, elegant steeple, through its portico, after climbing the steps leading up from St. Martin's Lane, and had then promptly gone down to the crypt via a little wooden staircase. There, in the darkness and cold grey-black stones of the crypt, the church was running a flourishing restaurant. The steaming hot pasta and the vivid reds, greens and purples of the vegetables on the shiny white ceramic plate seemed to mock the rubbed and weathered memorial stone laid in the floor near our table, its lettering almost unreadable. Further down, in an incongruously bright area of the crypt, crowded with children and their parents, was a museum to one of those quintessentially British pursuits: brass rubbing. On the whole, the crypt of St. Martin-in-the-Fields seemed like no self-respecting resting place for the dead.

The reason, of course, is simply too much history. For those whose history goes back a mere three or four centuries, everything is to be preserved; for those who have so much history that they cannot keep track of it, it has to update itself or perhaps be destroyed. London takes its history for granted, or so it seemed. And perhaps that is necessary in order to remain a living city; perhaps it is not only necessary, but also fitting. The river flows on, as it has through the centuries, but its banks are not as they once were. Perhaps the city itself has to change continually, and some vestiges of the past have to either fade away, gathering grey dust and silver spiderwebs in the vaults of memory, or be reinvented to see a new day in a new avatar. Truth be told, it was not hard to digest that lunch, even if my thoughts wandered occasionally to the souls of those buried there.

Wandering out onto Trafalgar Square, consulting the ever-valuable A-Z guide, it was difficult to imagine that St. Martin's had once stood "in the fields" and that cows and sheep probably grazed placidly around the spot where Nelson's Column rises. Red double decker buses rounded the corners, tourists took pictures, workmen bustled around scaffolding at the National Gallery, pigeons fluttered around. The fields have long been paved. Only an evocative name lives on.

(Previously published elsewhere as part of a travelogue)

Yorkshire

2006-08-15T00:58:00.000-07:00

June 2004

I will never be able to hear a low-flying fighter plane again without going right back to the afternoon J. and I spent at Malham Cove. Right back to the pebbly path we walked on, a pale ribbon curving through the green of the grassy terrain. I liked those paths, with their little double spring-gates, so neat and orderly without requiring even a hint of cement about them. They were everywhere we went in the countryside -- running on over hills and around rocks, into shady little forests, crunched underfoot by the thousands that walked them and had walked them and enjoyed the land and the open sky all the way to the horizon -- or just as far as the next hill that obstructed the view. A path is only a path until you understand that such public paths, carefully mapped and maintained, do not exist everywhere. And indeed, one reason why we were able to go to several places was, no doubt, because the paths were there and nobody could have stopped us walking on them; as J. informed me, we could have walked right through Madonna’s estate and she would have had to let us do so, as long as we stayed on the path.

If I liked the paths, I liked the wayside as well -- not least the eccentricity by the roadside as we had walked up towards Malham Cove. In the wooded area by the roadside, the only wildlife we observed was all of papier-mache -- a snake and a horse, painted to look astonishingly like durable reincarnations of somebody’s carpetbag. Their cousin, according to what I had been told a few days earlier in Bath, stood alone in a field somewhere in the south of England -- a camel.

Misplaced installation art apart, it is hard to exactly define my feelings about that day. It was, I think, that Yorkshire was beautiful that day without being terrible, but without being superficially pretty or welcoming either. There was nothing around us that would have made it to the top of a chocolate box, unlike some Alpine pictures under blue skies, with many-coloured flowers in the meadow and sun blazing down. It was a dour day, the sky as grey as the coarse, weathered stones that were packed together to make the dry stone walls that irregularly criss-crossed parts of the landscape, living feats of practical engineering.

It was quiet in Malham Cove, despite the chatter of the people who were there, walking through and peering through telescopes at the peregrine falcons that nested on the cliff. No human voice could fill that vast hollow; only an imperceptible whistling whisper hinted at what it might be like in high wind and heavy rain. The high limestone cliff curved around one corner, stony ledges cascading in grey-striped striations towards the ground, like a petrified waterfall. As I later learned, it was indeed a waterfall that had crashed and gushed over the edge to shape the cliff’s contours after the last ice age, and the cove had actually been a cove so many thousands of years ago.

At the foot of the cliff, past the little stream that flowed out alongside the path, among great boulders, all sound was sucked away. Birds wheeled in the sky over the cliff, screaming through the unquiet stillness that lay in the shadow of the great crag. From below, I had to crane my neck to look up at the sky, beyond the plants growing in clumps out of the limestone. Minutes later, as we were walking back along the path, a low rumble started in the distance from the sky, and one fighter plane after another flew through the thick grey cloud cover. Their roars boomed through the cove, and it seemed to shudder slightly with the reverberations, almost as though the water that had seeped through the porous limestone had broken the bounds of the cliff and was rushing towards us -- but of course, it wasn’t. It was a pleasant walk back the way we had come, the path twisting under a few trees, disturbed by nothing more remarkable or terrifying than a cheerful tan Labrador.

I am still not very certain why I kept hearing Bach in my head all the time we were in the Dales. His “Air on the G String” seems to suggest some restful place, gentle, with blue sky and white clouds, free from all rain or storms, and I have no doubt that the loudly complaining sheep penned up at the side of the road leading back to the village would have asked for a place unknown to shearers. Nothing before my eyes reflected that suggestion. Yet, Bach’s calm pastoral scene repeated itself over and over in musical notes, even if the landscape didn’t seem entirely appropriate. The only possible reason is that the undulating terrain, grassy banks rising and falling unevenly on all sides and into the distance, trees affording shelter here and there, reminded me oddly of the mounds and lines of a cupped palm. The universe in God’s palm? I can’t be sure. Perhaps it was merely because the only day I was there was a day on which the weather held, and I didn’t see a day of miserable rain and wind.

Nevertheless, it made me think that the appreciation of a warm, safe sanctuary would be tremendous for anyone in the Dales, especially in the worst of weather -- and that such a haven would always be there, somewhere. The peregrines found it on the cliff, and I could imagine the sheep finding it under boulders and crags that were nearly caves. Plants seemed to have rooted themselves steadfastly at the foot of stone walls. This was a place that would love home as much as it loved the great wideness thrown open unto the skies -- but that thought was probably just my own restless urban self delighting in the first real countryside I had seen in a very long time. It could have just been the parched Indian yearning for green surroundings and rain. It might even have been all James Herriot’s fault!

So, at any rate, I heard Bach. His music was no louder at Malham than it had been at Bolton Abbey earlier in the day. Bolton Abbey certainly connoted rest and peace. In fact, given a warmer day and a thinner cloud cover, it could have positively been a cliché. With ruins by a river, it was both picturesque and civilized. The view from across the river is easy to recall—glimmer-glass with brownish tints flowing through, bridge and square-shaped stepping stones to cross, sandy strips on either bank, and the ruined section of the Abbey only a few metres above with a few rows of faded gravestones to the right.

Long after Henry VIII’s actions changed yet another priory into a half-crumbling, roofless set of beautiful greying old walls, in what must have been a sudden violent destruction, the ruined section of the abbey was lovely and mellow in its decrepitude. A large arched opening on one wall that must have once held the largest stained glass window was empty, and who is to say that the stained glass was even half as perfect as the view across the River Wharfe that it now held? As I told J., it was actually a wonderfully romantic spot for a wedding; I ended up getting another taste of British madness when she remarked that it would have been, if not for the law that made it illegal to have a wedding without a roof overhead.

Part of the old church was complete and still in use, and to my Portuguese-church accustomed eyes, it seemed rather bare, all in brown tones. At the door was a boot scraper, a novelty for me. In the churchyard lay some of the stones marking where the walls of the priory buildings once stood. The sheep in the yard were placid; the buildings behind and to the side, belonging, like the Abbey, to the estate of the Duke of Devonshire, were neat but distant. As we walked back, I was still looking at cloud shadows.

I know it was a revelation for J. when she realised that I could not get over what to me was the miraculous beauty of what I called “cloud shadows” but were really abrupt moments when the sun shone brightly through gaps in the clouds. For a few precious seconds, the light would change the hues and shades of the land on which it fell, a sudden high trilling of notes of colour and brightness in the simple sameness of sombre green reflecting grey above. The gap in the cloud above would move as the wind blew and then it would close—below, every possible shade of green and yellow would mix themselves together kaleidoscopically and move across the ground before fading or swiftly vanishing altogether, the standard deep green appearing again. You could rub your eyes and miss them altogether -- these moving Impressionist paintings.

I could never have seen them in Bombay. They need clouds that are high enough with different parts moving at different speeds, clouds that remain without necessarily raining down. They need gentle hills, so that you can see them, because they would not be visible on flat ground unless you were on a higher level. Most of all, they need open land and great depth of field, a place where you can easily see into the distance without obstruction. I had seen actual shadows of clouds moving across the hills at home, but never anything like this. I watched them play and dance not just in Yorkshire, but under a setting sun, bringing on twilight later that evening in the Pennines, and the next week, for one achingly beautiful minute, one of them painted the Cairngorm in glowing, moving colours amidst a landscape of otherwise unmitigated grey as I watched from Aviemore in Scotland. They were part of the magic of the trip, and life could never be quite the same after such magic.

Thus, I was enamoured by clouds moving at Bolton Abbey. There were cows in the foreground. They were black, white, and brown, plump and minus their horns, looking stupidly docile in comparison with the often gaunt, sharp, highly intelligent-looking cows I was accustomed to at home. They were all standing, some grazing, and then within a blink, they were moving. I have never seen cows behave like that, and neither had J., for we were both laughing helplessly by the time the next few minutes passed. The cows started by chasing each other around, galloping furiously, stopping and starting again. Then some of them tried to push some of the others down, leaning against them with heavy shoulders pressing one to another. It was, in fact, pandemonium in the herd and if any of them had their horns, it would have been bloody murder too. They were all quite evidently cows, so it couldn’t have been rough foreplay -- the only explanation that we could find is that they were bitch-fighting for some reason best known to themselves. The pastoral mood had been effectively dispelled before we departed for Malham.

Outside, in the village, we had bumped into J.’s friends, whom we had visited the previous evening on their narrowboat. I had a feeling of inexpressible delight when I spotted them—who doesn’t feel that way when in a strange country, if they bump quite by chance into someone they know? And it had been an extremely pleasant evening we had spent on the boat with them, the sun lowering itself outside lazily, the evening gleaming golden in reflections on the canal’s green water. Inside, it was cosy, and coming from someone who has seen homes smaller than that boat, “cosy” is not derogatory. It was obvious that they took great pride in the boat, and I was impressed to see it fitted up with a bathtub! As J. chatted and dinner was brought out, I was thinking about caravans and boats as opposed to “proper houses.” We had dawdled -- and then we had to run, J. driving along towards Haworth, where we were to spend the night.

Apart from running up and down the cobbled road up the hill to the parsonage in the dark, and peering at a few shops windows in the dim light, we did nothing of note in Haworth, except find ourselves surrounded by teddy bears at the bed-and-breakfast. Some rain had put paid to the idea of walking on the moors, and we had gone instead to Bolton Abbey. After Malham Cove, we did again dawdle, true to form. We took a train from Settle to Appleby and back, on one of the routes that is described as one of the most spectacular in the British Isles. But it was the first and last thing I did on the entire trip that underwhelmed me completely. Perhaps we had driven and walked in prettier places that day, or perhaps it was that I automatically compared it to the truly magnificent train journey through the Sahyadris at home, in the monsoon, a journey I could never tire of. Perhaps we were just tired by then. But I looked out and thought it was lovely, though not spectacular, and reinforced my admiration for the Dales, rolling away into the distance, dotted with trees, sheep, and the occasional houses, as the train moved on and stopped at red-brick stations. The most astounding feature of the entire journey was our realization that the quaint sloping-roofed station buildings opposite each other at Settle possessed niches that housed figures of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, for no better reason than because they had been dug out of a snowdrift. We never did find out how they got into the snowdrift in the first place.

The next time I did hear a fighter plane, I was smack-dab in the middle of an area of Bombay that I know and love. The sound made me feel bizarrely homesick, and in a flood of nostalgia, I ended up buying a book I didn't really want, just because it was set in Yorkshire. Yes, that James Herriot has a lot to answer for. And so does J.

The Royal Opera House, London

2006-08-10T12:45:00.000-07:00

J. and I wrestled with a ponderous, heavy revolving door at the front of the Royal Opera House; we were being treated to a special backstage tour there. It was with absolute glee that we walked round to the stage door entrance in a side street. This was, without question, a theatre -- there were the framed posters, of ballets and operas; there was a cast member from one of the ballets coming out to collect his mail from the desk there, leaning over it with a fluid movement and unconsciously elevating one leg as he did so; there was a woman in complete late Victorian costume, skirt swishing down at her feet and bonnet tied securely on her head, coming out to ask what the gentleman at the desk thought of her outfit and makeup. It was the excitement of going somewhere I'd never gone before, except, again, in a book.

We walked about that morning with our guide in the labyrinth of corridors that the Royal Opera House contains. In the darkened wings of the stage, so deep that it seemed endless in the darkness, we could follow the music director's movements on a black and white monitor as he conducted a dress rehearsal for 'Faust'. But the voice and the music seemed distant until we had stepped into a gallery of the auditorium itself, feeling our way round in the dark, unable to take our eyes off the stage. A man sang, and then a woman - I think his name was Robert Alagna and hers was Angela Georghiu - but all I can really say about it was that as their voices rose and fell in that empty theatre, they transformed it into a place where all that existed was what was on the stage, and not even the stage itself was real. There was a brief moment of silence after they had both finished, and then that stage world disappeared as everyone applauded.

The rest of our tour took us behind that world which is presented on stage. We stepped into the orchestra, looking up at the stage through the grating over half of the pit, sheet music left open on row after row of stands arranged in front of us, notes waiting in the yellow light to be translated into sound; then we even stood upon the wooden floorboards of the stage for a brief, thrilling moment, while the footlights shone out at us, the theatre behind filled with empty seats.

More corridors led to where the gargantuan sets are stored, in a room that seemed three stories high, at least, while we walked round those ingenious deceptions that fill the stage with the physical semblance of a different world. Higher up in the building, we peered into a room where the shoes of every member of the ballet company are stored, right from the prima ballerina to the most insignificant of dancers in the chorus. There, a woman painstakingly sewed a wig onto a canvas base, one strand of hair at a time, while another styled a wig for use. We saw the huge vats in which every costume is dyed to the desired shade and colour. The costumes and accessories were not even two feet away from our eyes, and suddenly, the measure of authenticity and careful work that must go into what is to be looked at from afar became apparent, along with the elements of artifice that allow for freedom in performance; A crown must gleam like metal without being heavy. Here exist costumes in the strict equality of playhouse storage -- ballet and opera together, hanging on racks.

Most breathtaking of all, we watched as two dancers practiced for the evening's show, scrutinized by a dance director, every angle, every strain and every tiny movement visible in the mirrors lining the room, under stark white light. Other dancers lay sprawled on the floor and couches, stretching tired muscles, at a height overlooking the London rooftops, under more glass and great windows to allow in air and natural light. The upper floors of the Opera House were in complete contrast with the lower floors; down there near the stage almost everything was plush, red, Victorian, dark, almost stifling -- up on the higher floors where people worked busily to fashion the assistance to performance, it was ironically as if they wanted to remove every bit of makeup and lighting and work in a world as bright and real and beautiful as the sunlight itself.

As we stepped out again into the street, up above us, the Bridge of Aspiration joined the Royal Ballet School to the Royal Opera House, from student to accomplished performer, in what can only be described as a square captured pirouetting in slow motion, every movement frozen in a glass curve. Across, on the pavement, a little girl stretched nervously in front of the door to the Royal Ballet School, waiting for an audition, ready to cross her own bridge.

We returned that evening to the ballet for a performance of 'Onegin'. And sitting in the darkened theatre, eyes fixed on the stage as the curtains lifted, everything we had seen that very morning seemed to suddenly make sense. The backdrops were now made up of thousands of little brush strokes. Every prop had been carried down from where it had been made, stored in the huge room we had seen. The drapes had been hemmed somewhere upstairs where the costumes had been stitched and dyed. As the two dancers we had watched that morning performed the same passionate scene we had watched them rehearse, I could hear their feet on the wooden floorboards of the stage, and the sound brought back the effort of their rehearsal, changed into pure grace and agility now, the effort perhaps not noticable at that distance and under the shadows of stage lighting. It was a perfect synthesis of endless labour from so many, concentrated in a dancer floating across the stage under a spotlight.

2005-08-27T05:00:00.000-07:00

And in the evening,
do nothing. Just sit there
quietly, on the lawn.

The grass does not prickle
through your skirt.
You won't gaze
upon the sun
glowing rosy orange
in the west.

Pay no attention to
the pinkish wisps of sky
amidst the deepening blue.

Do not kill the mosquitoes.
There is no pain, provided you ignore it.

Hear nothing.

Not the faint traffic over the wall
outside this place.
Not the muezzin as he calls out
in words that bend and turn
into a cry that means
nothing.

Not understanding what he says,
that is the gift.

The dragonflies do not exist
for you.
Gold tipped illusion.

There is
no garden smell.
And no breeze to carry
that lack to you.

The trees have not moved,
not for a thousand years or more.
They are of black stone now.

Nothing is, except you.
Be nothing but silence.

Forget about breathing.

Only when nothing is,
only then will it sound.
You must not listen.
It will come.

There is no use in looking.
No use in waiting, either.

The evening does not wait.

It is now night.
The sky above
is in its eternity.
And you in yours.

2005-05-17T13:15:00.000-07:00

When I was younger, the curtilage of my building included not just concrete paving for the cars and a nicely maintained garden space, but also a large backyard which grew wild apart from the coconut and other trees. It was just dry mud with long cracks in it for much of the year, but in summer, it would be covered with wild grass and some wild plants (the names of which I am ignorant of -- they were the "kujli plant" and the "pitpit plant," according to us), and there would be dragonflies and butterflies everywhere.

In the rainy season there would be puddles, huge puddles. Inevitably, there were frogs all over the place then -- they'd leap out of particularly deep puddles if you stepped in them, and every evening, after dark, they would sing, sing out what we called "the rosary," answering each other.

There's been concrete put in, covering half that area for 8 years now, and the rest of it has been made into a "propah" lawn. I haven't heard a single frog here since. On the other hand, neither have I seen a snake, and no frighteningly huge bandicoots have run over my feet in dark corners near the boundary wall -- but I miss the frogs. The earthworms that come out of the cracks in the concrete to play in the rain get a bit lonely, I think; they must miss the frog chorus too.

As for the tumbledown old bungalow that was in the nieghbouring plot of land, with no boundary wall, and almost all of that huge piece of land just covered in wild plants, Ashoka trees, and purple morning glory, there's a 20-storey building up there now.

This is depressing. I would rather choke my last breaths on pollen, not concrete dust.

Souvenir List

2005-05-05T00:09:00.000-07:00

No, no, nothing for me.
Get what you like for yourself
so that you remember
everything.

What? Let me think.

The first air to escape
a newborn's lungs --
air as sacred as the last breath
from one of your parents,
but not as sorrowful.

The sound of a single word
("love," "adventure," maybe "purple")
said just so. So that it feels like a petal
of that red rose... or no, not that.
Like the untanned skin
on the inside of your lover's wrist.

Liquid darkness.
The cool, sweet darkness
inside an unopened coconut
lying on the ground somewhere
remote, waiting for someone
to open it.

Of course, to go with that,
the light that
enters a violin
in the morning through
its f-holes.
It's more delicate and more difficult
to pack and carry
than the light that comes through the skylight
at precisely half-past three.
But it looks better on you, really.
So much better.

I'm sorry. I was distracted there.

Rice, dal and sprouted moong.
Cooked on a stove
with any orchestra sitting all around it
playing Bach. (Yes, "Sheep May Safely Graze.")
It doesn't have to be the
New York Philharmonic.
It is only important
that at least half the musicians
have had a good breakfast
or like to lie in grass, looking up
at a summer sky.
And that they love
both Bach and their instruments.

A raindrop,
perhaps that which landed
on the crushed petals of the hibiscus
you had just trampled
without noticing.
Or the other, that one, you remember it;
it was the first to fall that June
on the dusty windshield of
our old Ambassador car
and penetrate dust to clear glass
like a bullet.

A pillow
filled with the warmth
of a sleeping dog's chest
rising and falling.
I cannot tell you how
to use it. You already know.
You will scoff at my suggestion,
but you agree with it.

A chance to touch
hair of the exact length
and the exact tensile strength
of mine when I was five years old.
This is so that you can pull it hard
and scientifically
to see if I will cry
and how fast that tear drop rolls
down my cheek.

Finally,
the sound of salty sea breeze
eroding sandstone sculpture.
Bring it back with you.
We need to remember that, both of us,
and everyone else.

You really want to bring me something?

Oh, very well, then, for myself:

The answer to 29 across
in last Sunday's cryptic crossword.

A half-woven saree,
the colour of the North Atlantic Ocean,
with that last leaf I stepped on
in the shadowy fragrance of that rain-steeped forest
-- yes, it has been woven in
somehow, somewhere.
No blouse piece.
If I ever learn to weave
so that I can complete and wear it,
it will be directly against my skin.

And the taste of Himalayan snow.

2005-04-09T00:14:00.000-07:00

I am going to Delhi this weekend, said a friend of mine today. You were in Delhi last month. Did you go to Old Delhi?

I had gone. I nodded.

Old Delhi. It stands piecemeal and brittle-boned, trailing its innards almost flamboyantly in a labyrinth of little lanes and wider roads, flaunting its liver spots and wrinkles with indecent relish under a noonday sun. Amidst the perennial crush, the sounds of moving wheels, feverish shouts, and the shuffling of thousands of grimy feet rise through the air; they buttress the buildings that seem to have just grown fitfully, not been built along the road, grown like lichen on an old stone wall.

It can give you the impression that if everything were to be silent and still for a second, instead of rushing around loud and dirty, it would just collapse and crumble with a shuddering sigh into powder: into a little grey-black mound of dust traced, surprisingly, with the faintest of silvery veins.

And then the next minute you are not sure of this impression and think that it is playing tricks on you; that it is really as solid and immune from time itself as the huge Jama Masjid at its heart. That the birds wheeling in measured slow motion high above around the minarets are looking down on something you cannot see: maybe on some quiet, elegant shadowy crannies, perhaps on the old city's very skin stretched over delicate, once-proud bones. That it is jealously, knowingly hiding away some secret, unknowable grace.

Why? Perhaps because you are a stranger. Because the veil lifts only for those who wait patiently and show themselves to be worthy kinsmen. Because the longest time you will stop there as a visitor is a mere minute's worth of sand in the tarnished but ornate hour-glass of its centuries.

Yes, my friend; I will nod again at you. I went to Old Delhi.

But no, I was not really there, not in the sense that it exists. I have no way to know for certain that there was more than what I saw, but this I know.

2005-03-12T23:28:00.000-08:00

For a long time, you nearly forget.

And then, one Saturday morning, you look at the calendar and see the date and catch yourself thinking about buying them flowers because it is their birthday in a couple of days. Then it hits you that they're not there -- and you cry, if you can.

If you can't, you don't. You go about your business, but the memories trip you up when you're walking down the street, they befuddle your thoughts, they invade your reality. Suddenly you are not sure what is real anymore. Your nose, your eyes, your fingertips, your ears -- they all conspire to throw you back into what it was like when they were there. You seem to hear their voices, you can smell their skin, you turn a corner and expect to see them sitting in an accustomed place there, you wake up in the middle of the night dreaming that you are little again and sitting in a long-gone lap, reading storybooks. Suddenly you remember that they taught you to read and you cannot read anything, not even an ice cream menu, without remembering them. You think about the silliest things and the most profound; that you and they were supposed to go to Italy together this year, that they would have liked to meet a particular friend you have now, that they would have been proud to see you do a particular thing. And you struggle, because this is the past -- because you know it is gone.

You may try to tell yourself that there is nothing more real; there is no longer time; then is now, and you are not, you will never, truly be alone, not as long as you can remember. And in truth, you know that you remember because you were happy then and that happiness cannot be lost.

But it often feels like being alone; that is the difference.

City

2004-12-03T01:11:00.000-08:00

There were once seven islands that were largely ignored by everyone in India, except for the Koli fisherfolk who inhabited them, some Buddhist monks, and one forgotten maharajah.

Then, a Portuguese ship sailed into the deep natural harbour of one of these islands, after which the inevitable conversions began, and the churches with fortifications were built, stone by bloodied stone.

Eventually, the islands were passed along to the British as part of a princess’ dowry and leased to a group of ambitious merchants. They built first docks, then a fort, and then a city, stealing land from the sea, drawing in a chaotic blend of cultures, religions, and languages, polishing out of it the gem of cosmopolitanism, and setting it at the centre of a web of trade and commerce that was pure gold.

The Koli fisherfolk had called it Mumbai, after their Goddess Mumbadevi. The Portuguese had called it Bom Bahia, the Good Bay. The British mispronounced both as Bombay, their name for their Urbs Primus in the East.

Three names, but only one city; three names separated in fact by only the slightest difference in pronunciation; a linguistic accident; a happy distortion of sound retaining meaning: the city.

My city.

2004-11-23T13:25:00.000-08:00

It's funny how both sides of my family seem to harbour serious film buffs. Serious film buffs who haven't been to the movies for some years now.

My mother is arthritic and can't sit for long at normal temperatures, let alone in an air-conditioned movie theatre. Therefore, she hasn't been to the movies since my sister, in a fit of R. D. Burman love, persuaded her to watch 1942: A Love Story a decade ago. My mother, my sister, our maid, and I went to see that movie, I recall, at Gaiety-Galaxy, Bandra (which was then only Gaiety and Galaxy, with none of the little theatres that have now mushroomed in that complex). It was quite an occasion. I devoured popcorn and watched open-mouthed as Anil Kapoor and Manisha Koirala ran around in the rain. Rhimjim, rhimjim.

My father, on the other hand, just doesn't seem to have the patience to go to a theatre any more. I also suspect that having watched movies for one or two rupees in the decades past, he doesn't feel like spending 60 now. He frequently announces that he will go to some film or another -- he showed interest in Farenheit 911 this year -- but doesn't end up going. I spent two years raving about the Lord of the Rings trilogy, trying to get him to go and watch the subsequent installments for the special effects and sound, but had no success. It is on record that the last movie he watched in a theatre was Clear and Present Danger with Harrison Ford, in 1994. He wandered in by accident, I think, and has never been able to get over the shock of Dolby Digital Surround Sound.

My parents' love for movies shows itself in their attachment to HBO, Star Movies, and the Sunday Mid Day's TV guide for the coming week, not to forget their melancholy at the loss of TNT and then TCM some years ago. Their attachment to Hallmark is occasionally worrying, but I guess we all need a little made-for-TV cheese in our systems.

And these two unlikely people, my parents, are film buffs?

There's proof.

My father, once living at Charni Road, used to be a member of what was known as the Metro Cub Club. This was a movie club for children, with a special matinee show at Metro a couple of times a month. He still has the badge. He also solemnly swears that he got permission from school to skip class on the afternoons when movies were screened so that he could attend. This seems more and more incredible when I think about it, but my late grandmother often said the same, so it must be true. In the late 90s and early years of this century, I bunked college to go to the movies; in the 50s, my dad had parental and school permission to do so. He wins.

My mother didn't skip class; she just went to the late night shows. In her nightdress. Several decades ago, the only theatre in Bandra was New Talkies. It was down the road and around the corner from where my mother and her family lived. Bandra was very different then. Between my grandparents' house and New Talkies, where there now stands a forest of buildings and a road overgrown with hawkers, were fields and palm trees and a little jungle, relieved here and there by cottages. It was all soon going to be developed, but even after it was, everyone knew everyone else or was related to everyone else. The only people you met on the road were people you knew (Note: This is still true when my mother goes out on the road in Bandra). Therefore, going to the late night show at New Talkies was a family outing, no different from going from the bedroom to the sitting room, or possibly out into the balcony. Since everyone was going to come home and tumble into bed anyway, and the little ones would fall asleep during the movie itself, it hardly made sense to dress up and then have to use up all that energy undressing again. The children all turned up at the movies in their nightdresses and pyjamas.

I have always been tickled by this idea of New Talkies as being the original "home theatre." And it certainly was. One of my aunts had made up her mind that she would hire it on her wedding day and have a special screening of Gone With The Wind for her guests. Another aunt will forevermore have infamy attached to her name, because she took fright on seeing the green face of the Wicked Witch of the East in The Wizard of Oz and insisted on being taken home -- thus causing another older aunt to miss half a critical hour of the film, since she had to ferry the baby home and put her to bed. Where were my grandparents? They were happily engrossed in watching the film. Obviously.

It seems only right and fitting that I watched my first movie on the silver screen at New Talkies. It was one of the last movies to run there -- Annie. I was very young then, maybe 3 or even less. By now, the memories of watching Annie so many times in later years have taken over. I can't actually recall what New Talkies was like on the inside. I only remember the rows of silver-clad showgirls kicking up their legs in the sequence of "Let's Go to The Movies."

My grandmother had a new maid then, a girl fresh from her remote village in Madhya Pradesh. My grandmother brought her along as well, with my cousins, my sister, and I, since it was as much her treat as ours. Poor girl, now long dead of malaria after years of faithful service and love for my grandparents. She had never seen an ice cream before and didn't know how to eat it. Somehow, she managed to eat every last bit of the chocolate covered vanilla ice cream. Then, she asked us where she should throw the wafer cone.

New Talkies sat empty for years, beside the Bandra Post Office. Then, some years ago, they pulled it down and started putting up a high new building, all glass and chrome and elegant curves, and so unwelcome. It was a shopping mall, they said. Only after the new shop, Globus, opened did we realize that the movies weren't completely gone. It had a theatre, high up on the topmost floor of the building. My sister and I went there for the first time with a cousin to watch Bend It Like Beckham before he went off to far-away Germany to study. And I went there again, more than once afterwards. I laughed. I cried. I ate the banana chips from Mahima Mangalore Stores across the street that my sister smuggled illicitly into the theatre in her handbag. I licked ice cream. I glued my eyes to the screen and its flickering images. I insisted on moving forward and sitting in the second row of seats, so that as much of my vision as possible was occupied by the screen. I bumped into people I knew. I screamed and melted inwardly as I watched the characters on screen. And yes, I went for a night show, though times have changed and I had to go properly dressed in a crowd of strangers.

My mother, true to form, cannot find her "movie scrap books." They're just another entry in the list of things she has managed to lose somewhere in the house over the years. Those scrap books were her record of the films she watched. They held pictures cut out carefully from magazines and newspapers, small reproductions of posters and movie stills, lists of those starring in the films. Each little collection sat on half a page of a large diary. I remember looking through them when I was small, getting my first glimpses of Hitchcock and Capra, Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor, Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn there, some in movies that I would later watch, some in movies that I am still waiting to watch. I cannot find my movie scrap books either. Of course, I had my own when I was younger. They were like my mother's. In fact, I sneaked out some pictures from hers when she wasn't looking. Oh, but she knew. She knew I was stealing from her little legacy and she didn't care. As long as I was enjoying the movies, it couldn't have mattered.

Some of those movies I watched in my grandparents' house, on their old VCR. We never had a VCR when I was small (in fact, we never did -- my parents graduated straight to DVD). We went over to my grandparents' to watch movies on tape. My uncle brought them with him when he came down on holiday from the UAE, where he was working. Sometimes we borrowed them from video libraries. And then, we'd sit down and watch and the whole household would join us.

Thank you, mum, thank you, dad. Thank you, Grana, thank you, Papa. Thank you, the brothers Lumiere. Thank you.

2004-11-22T01:56:00.000-08:00

On a day like today, with aching, bruised back and painful ankles, hobbling around the house, I desperately wish I had a bathtub. Fill it up with hot water, throw in bath salts, grab a book, disrobe and soak. Ah, blissful warmth.

Of course, like most people condemned to live in medium-sized two-bedroom flats in buildings dating from the 1960s, the only thing I have that's even remotely like a tub is a basin large enough to soak my feet. I wouldn't fit into the biggest bucket, sadly. And if I tried to get a bathtub, it would literally have to be either me or the tub in the bathroom, not both.

I miss the huge bathtub my grandparents used to have. Their flat was built in the 1950s, designed by my grandfather on the scale of the 1930s Art Deco flats you find overlooking the Oval Maidan. On the outside, it's strictly modern and functional, all severe straight lines and 90 degree angles. It has several unprepossessing balconies sticking out. On the inside, it is huge. It has none of the smooth curves of Art Deco, but it does have ghostly echoes of the fascination with airplanes and ships -- long corridors, series of rungs sticking out of the wall near the lofts, to climb up to them, balconies as large as small cabins on a ship. Everything is twice the size it is in my parents' flat. A living room large enough to be two living rooms, a dining room with the biggest dining table I have ever seen outside a movie, three bathrooms and a toilet, two kitchens, what used to seem like countless bedrooms, random little rooms that were "store-rooms." I could fit into the kitchen cupboards even now, seated; the wash-basins were large and sturdy enough to give a fat three-year-old a bath in; the lofts were high-ceilinged enough to stand upright in, provided you weren't too large yourself. The biggest bathroom was generous enough to hold not only a bathtub more than six feet long, but also a huge wash-basin and an enormous toilet seat, so wide that I used to be afraid of falling in when I was tiny.

Until I was five or six, my cousin and used to be given baths in that bathtub, the water only a few inches deep or not there at all, because if the tub had actually been filled up, we would have drowned. Or we would have learned how to swim.

Now the tub is probably gone, replaced, no doubt, by something modern and more space-saving. The house has a brick wall down the middle, and my grandparents live only in one-half of it. On the other side of the wall, in a space I will probably never see again, is one kitchen, two bathrooms and a toilet, three bedrooms and a couple of store-rooms. I don't think the tub still exists, either in the house or outside it on any scrap-heap. Sometimes I wonder how my grandparents have managed to adapt to living in half the space they were used to. My grandfather used to walk the length of the house a hundred times a day, for exercise. Now half the length of his daily walk has been taken away from him and made into a more modern, less gracious flat where he is not welcome -- and where he would not want to go. From the outside, his building is now a post-modern pastiche of columns and curlicues, with a few more floors tacked on overhead, where once was the terrace we used to play on and where my aunt had her wedding party. And downstairs, everything has been paved over -- there is no more a garden, except for the odd tree here and there. My sister's 1980s crush on a pop star, which I thought would remain forever immortalized in a blue-crayon scrawl on a faded tan wall -- "------ loves George Michael" -- is painted over.

Convenient? Definitely. In their old age, my grandparents do not need the worry of managing an entire building. Sad? Yes. Those days of grace are gone forever. Gone is my childhood and that of my mother. Gone is most of the furniture from then. The household corners where we hid when we played hide-and-seek have been re-shaped by new furniture and new placing of old furniture. Even the old clock that plays the Big Ben chimes every quarter-hour runs slower now, the sound comfortable in the sameness that has rung out through my entire life, yet no longer trustworthy. The accustomed spaces of my childhood have shifted so suddenly and so completely, my second home re-mapped to such an extent, that now I trip over objects there in the unfamiliar darkness, forgetful of change in the half-sleepy consciousness of the middle of the night. My cousin arrives on a visit this weekend, after a gap of three years. She might cry, I think, because she will be coming home to something that is alien, expecting what she once knew. It is not only the house that has changed -- it is my grandparents too.

Gone is the time when my grandparents were younger and stronger and energetic enough to look after and fill their own house. Now they are old. And from a vantage point of youth, I cannot see the same people who looked after me when I was small and needed them. Sometime in the future, I know not when, they too will be gone. And I do not know if I will be able to tell my children, if I have any, enough about that house and the time and people it represented. What they will see will not be what I tell them. They will look on what I say as sentimental nostalgia -- and indeed, it probably will be.

2004-05-02T11:08:00.000-07:00

It snowed in Kashmir a couple of days ago. There was a picture in the newspaper, showing the snowflakes blowing over the water of the Dal Lake, while a boatman tried to row his way through it. I have seen snow now, of course, after spending New Year's Eve in Shimla a couple of years ago, but when I was a child, snow was something unimaginable. I knew what it was supposed to look like; I knew that it was very cold. When I finally did touch snow, I was surprised at how blue my hands became, and though it may seem a trifle idiotic, I was surprised at the cold. Now too, I know that there are different kinds of snow, that the snow I touched was wetter than the powdery stuff on which people ski. In all, I am extremely ignorant of snow, and of winter, like most middle-class Bombayites.

I have a friend who spent her childhood in Srinagar, who went skiing in Gulmarg every year, who cycled along the Dal Lake to school. That was her Kashmir.

There was two sisters who I played with when we were small together, Jamila and Salma. Their mother's nickname for Jamila was 'Jammu'. Her sister, naturally, was promptly dubbed 'Kashmir' by the rest of us. Until I was about 8 years old, we had several drainpipes on the walls of my building that had holes in them. As a result, when a large quantity of water came down, the pipe would leak. Occasionally, if someone took a bath with a lot of shampoo or a very foamy bath product, we had huge clumps of foam lying on the concrete, slowly melting away into water. What did we call it? Kashmir. That was our Kashmir.

2004-05-01T23:58:00.000-07:00

I've just found out that the library is closed today, since it is Maharashtra Day. Therefore, I am not happy. The next chance I'll get to go in and exchange my books won't come for two weeks more.

The first library I ever patronised was my school library. Unlike most other government-aided schools in Mumbai, my school believed in letting children read. Since my mother also taught at my school, I do have inside information, and am aware that the government gave them little or no money to buy books. All the same, the nuns somehow managed to fill the library with a wealth of good reading. We had a 30-metre-long room that was filled with books, from floor to ceiling, with large windows at intervals to let in the sunlight and breeze. What did we have to read? Everything from Enid Blyton to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Truly. Everything.

Opposite my school, tucked away in a dusty little room next to a raddiwala's shop, was the library my sister and mother frequented. I went there mostly for trashy British girl's comic books from the seventies. My sister went there for Mills and Boons. The books were kept in piles, and pulling one out meant that about five hundred more would teeter precariously before finding their own equlibrium. I didn't gain much from there, except a dust-induced allergy. Sadly, Uncle Frankie and Uncle Freddie (I think those were their names) decided to close shop. I imagine the raddiwala benefited.

My college library was, in a word, heaven. Beautiful high Neo-Gothic ceiling, wooden partitions for each section that would not have been out of place in a church, unintentionally comic pictures of Galileo, Henrik Holm, Isaac Newton and Einstein. Was it Einstein? I forget. Long wooden tables at which to sit, and sometimes sleep, and sometimes gaze at the ceiling until hypnotised. The EPW corner, where bound copies of the Economic and Political Weekly filled the shelves. The large, glossy, coffeetable books on art, covering every period and style. Touching those pages was, perhaps, a poor substitute for the Louvre and the Guggenheim, but it was enough for me. The lending library, where I found a second edition of James Barrie's Peter Pan script for the play. Never have I seen so many books, in so wonderful a setting. We had an arrangement with the gentleman behind the counter in the Reference section. He would save certain sought-after books for us, and we would collect them late in the day, when the library was about to close, and we were allowed to take the books home for one night. What that library wanted was a proper, up to date catalogue, and better arrangement of the books. If I want a book, I don't want to have to dig around for it. That was, unfortunately, the usual way to find what I needed. After a while, I patronised the well-maintained Honour's section, and left the rest of the library alone as far as possible. I love browsing, but not if I have a lot of reference work to be done, and am in a hurry. I miss it now, though. I miss all that I held when I had access to it.

The American Centre Library is one with which I am sadly disillusioned. They charge a very nominal fee, no doubt. However, when I last went there armed with a list of books about America in different wars, I found, out of a possible 28, only one volume. Some of the other books on the list are thought of as important texts in modern American writing. That didn't mean the library would stock them. I think it might make some sense for them to increase the memebership fee, and actually buy some of the books they should have. The last straw came when I once went there with my SLR camera, not realising that I would be expected to put it through the X-ray machine. My camera is more than 30 years old, so I wanted to take no risks. I asked if I could put my bag through the X-ray, and walk through with my camera. The security staff threw a fit, and yelled at me. They yelled so much, and made such a fuss, that they provoked me into yelling back, which is no mean feat. Eventually I went off, with my camera safe, and a perpetual grudge against the staff who would not listen.

Now I am a member of the British Council Library. It is large, and has thus far not disappointed me when I have gone looking for a particular book. It has an excellent section on literature, and good ones on travel writing and history. I have no complaints, but I wish they were open on Maharashtra Day.

2004-04-30T11:19:00.000-07:00

Last Monday, we voted. It was the first time for me, the first time with the voter's card, the black ink on my fingernail, the electronic voting machine. I was lucky. My name was on the list, unlike the names of 50,000 other people in Mumbai who went out to vote and came home feeling cheated.

I am not sure what the outcome of this election is going to be, and I can't talk politics. I just think that for a moment there, I really felt like a citizen of this country. I pressed a button, and the loud beep informed me that my vote had been cast. I had my say.

Before this, the only time I have felt like a citizen of India is when looking at my passport. The navy blue matte cover, with Ashoka's three lions on it in gilt. It gives me some odd sense of a national identity.

If not, I feel like an Indian, I feel like a Mumbaikar, I feel like a Goan, but it's a vague, hazy kind of feeling. It wants a piece of paper to legitimize it. What do I know of India? What do I know of villages in states like Rajasthan and Bihar and Meghalaya? Nothing. Except that we are all supposed to be Indians. But how can you have a country, when we speak different languages, eat different food, pray to different gods, dress in different clothes, live lives of a difference so great that it is almost impossible to comprehend?

I don't know. Sometimes, I wonder if it is real, or if it will all collapse tomorrow in a cloud of dust.

On other days, I am just grateful for it. Better not to think. Better not to wonder. Better to just have and just be.

2004-04-08T13:27:00.000-07:00

It is rapidly getting hotter and hotter, and as I sit in the bus these days, reading, I can feel the tiny drops of sweat trickle lazily down the back of my neck into the small of my back. In the sticky afternoons, the myriad diamonds glittering on the surface of the ocean at Haji Ali invite me to close my eyes and drift downwards into that which simply must be cooler and dimmer than the intense burning glare of the sky. And so it is, but not in the way my imagination hopes it would be, for the sea is actually grey and murky and sooty at close quarters.

I remember the first time I walked along the seaface at Marine Drive and saw stone steps leading off, leading to some delightful place where it would be possible to dip one's feet in the salty ocean and wash off all the grime of a humid evening in sandals. When I walked down, I found instead garbage bobbing about near the last step, the water soaping it and occasionally leaving behind what it took from Girgaum Chowpatty beach a few metres away.

Yet, at the height of the afternoon, a group of laughing boys plays in the water at Haji Ali, diving off the flight of stone steps that leads down into the water, wet bodies burnished by the sun, sweat-soaked children made happy fish in the sea. It's a picture that is, oddly, just as idyllic as if it had been on some tropical isle where the sand was soft, the water clear and blue and the forest thick with palms, monkeys and exotic birds, perhaps because neither the passengers in the vehicles on the road that skirts the ocean, nor the pilgrims at Haji Ali's dargah that sits at the end of a narrow causeway into the bay, would ever think of actually stripping off their clothes and joining in. It belongs, in that sense, entirely to the children and to the fisherfolk, and it is no poor inheritance.

I once heard someone speak of a group of small orphans she had taken on a tour of Bombay. They visited all the tourist sites, exhausted themselves playing in a park, and finally, hopped off the bus at Girgaum Chowpatty for a look at the sea.

All the little boys went silent, and some had to do their best to hide their tears. Eventually one of them found the control to say, in a voice carefully timbred with nonchalance, that they had heard so much about the sea and had seen pictures of it, but this was the first time they were all standing in front of it.

I think that perhaps they stood and watched the waves move towards them and then move away again towards a distant horizon, nothing but water between them and the end of the world, the sky suddenly more vast than it had ever looked before. It was a first glimpse of infinity itself.

The sea does not have to be beautiful, to be, as it is always, the sea.

2004-04-07T11:14:00.001-07:00

Sorry:

No talking to cashier.

No smoking.

No fighting.

No credit.

No outside food.

No sitting long.

No talking loud.

No spitting.

No bargaining.

No water to outsiders.

No change.

No telephone.

No match sticks.

No discussing gambling.

No newspaper.

No combing.

No beef.

No leg on chair.

No hard liquor allowed.

No address enquiry.

And now, no Cafe Bastani. Pack up the elegant bentwood chairs. Eat the last cake and the last biscuits. Wash the chipped teacups one last time. Throw the checked tablecloths into the laundry basket. Keep one of the menus as a souvenir. Take down the picture of Zarathustra and wipe off the dust of years. Chase the cat out. Wash every one of the huge glass jars that held the biscuits and put them in storage. Sell the place to someone who will tear out the wooden pillars with their mirrors, remove the wood and glass cases that held the cakes, get rid of a piece of history as easily as one of the perpetually grumpy waiters could wipe a tea-stain off the glass-topped table. Then, put away that memorably rude signboard that made everything illegal, except spending money.

Sorry: No Irani restaurant here.

---------------------

Quoted in The Telegraph, Calcutta, August 15, 2004. They called me an anonymous male blogger. Incidentally, sometime afterwards I decided to repunctuate this piece.

The Armenians in Chennai

2003-07-29T23:43:00.000-07:00

June 2003

Armenian Street, like the rest of George Town, is a dusty swirl of activity on this sunny afternoon. Hawkers sell everything from plastic remote control covers to leather goods, cycle-rickshaw-wallahs pedal past furiously, horns screeching, people throng the entrance area of Sangeetha Fast Food, waiting for lunch, and a dapper young man balances his huge motorbike with one foot down on the ground in the middle of the road, combing his hair back carefully. This was once the most famous address in Chennai's old business district, at a time when there were still Armenian merchants trading here, and their power and contribution to the area as well as the city as a whole was great enough to name the road after them.

We cross the road with trepidation, and I momentarily wonder what some of those Armenian merchants would have done, faced with the disorderly traffic. The first of their ilk came overland, through Persia, Afghanistan and over the mountains of Tibet to enter India in the 12th century, risking the journey in order to take back spices, muslin and precious stones to Europe and the Middle East. I still suspect that they might not have liked Chennai traffic very much. It is a relief to get to the other side, and climb the few steps leading up to 60, Armenian Street, where a uniformed watchman stands before the huge Burma teak doors through which we enter the only Armenian building that still remains in Chennai - the Church of the Holy Virgin Mary.

Walking in, it comes as a shock to discover that the huge doors do not open right into the church, but rather into a short dim corridor that leads into the churchyard. The walls facing the street were high enough to prevent us from seeing what lay behind them, so I had assumed that the church grounds had been lost over the years to the city, or had never existed at all. The churchyard stands before us, and as the great doors behind close with a faint squeaking sound, they shut out also all the din and clatter of the street. We are alone, in the silence of the Armenians, the silence, perhaps, of a tomb.

The eyes linger on the beautiful free-standing square-based domed belfry, before we turn our attention to the church to its right. Small, and unimpressive in height, it breaks with Armenian Orthodox tradition in possessing a flat roof, rather than a pitched one and its three largest domes are flattened, but the cross rises from a typical cone-topped tower. The sunshine plays on the warm stone columns in the porch, the colour of sand on the Marina Beach, as we try in vain to read the tombstones that pave its floor, all inscribed in Armenian.

The church seems to be closed, but we are reluctant to leave this quietness. We read newspaper reports about the church that are posted on noticeboards at the eastern end of the porch, and then begin to read entries in the battered guestbook that lies there. The trees that form a canopy over the graveyard behind the belfry rustle - a faint breeze blows through. In the distance, it seems that someone is playing loud music; muffled sounds penetrate into the peace of this place. I decide to climb into the belfry and nearly trip over a sleeping woman who presumably does the cleaning. She waves me on, and I climb up the one flight of stairs, where I crouch low to pass below the bellropes. 6 huge bells hang there, the lowest two marked with the name of Thomas Mears of London, and the date 1772.

The first church built by the Armenians in Madras was within the ramparts of Fort St. George, a wooden structure completed in about 1668, when a community large enough to require a church had settled there. By 1712, a new, more permanent building had been built, but it was demolished by the French when they wrested Fort St. George from the British for a short while. 60 years later, the present church was consecrated, built on a plot that had housed the private chapel and cemetary of the wealthy Shawmier family. Its fortress-like walls shut out the fear of destruction and desecration, but they also shut out the world.

The porch of the long building that looks out onto the street, to the right of those great doors, is a modest picture gallery. There are painstaking charcoal drawings of Christ, of the Virgin Mary, of the Armenian Holy See at Echmiadzin, each one neatly framed and carefully hung. The lovebirds in a cage at the far end twitter as I walk along, stopping to read the beautifully calligraphed words of the Armenian-American writer, William Saroyan. "I should like to see any power of the world destroy this rare, small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their houses and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia."

A few steps later, Christ is in agony in Gethsemane, the lovebirds fall silent, and the psalmist's plaint echoes down the centuries, "Out of the depths I cry to thee, O Lord..." The pictures on the walls are the work of the former caretaker of the church, George Gregorian, who died last year at the age of 89. Gregorian grew up in India, before leaving for England after the end of British rule. Twenty years later, he returned to Madras, and was appointed caretaker of the then dilapidated Armenian Church. There remained only a dozen Armenians in Madras at the time, and it took years of work for Gregorian to restore and repair the church, as well as work through piles of paperwork and litigation.

Ten years ago, he was the last Armenian left in Chennai. He was the Keeper and Custodian of the Faith, and he was utterly, completely alone. His wife was an Anglo-Indian woman, and it seems that as age overtook him, her company was not enough - and certainly not enough to build a New Armenia. His misery was that no one knew how to speak in Armenian anymore - no one, except the 350 tombstones among which he lived. There he must have sat after the day's tasks were done, in that dimly lit porch, looking over the pictures on the walls, wondering if his prayers would ever be answered.

Out of the shadows, we stand near the belfry and talk to Michael Stephen, who came down from Bangalore and took over as caretaker from Gregorian in 1995. Stephen tells us of the history of the Armenians in Chennai. We talk of how it was Armenian merchants who discovered the tomb of St. Thomas the Apostle here and led the Portuguese to it; how Khojah Petrus Woskan owned 46 houses before they were confiscated by the French, and how he refused to shift loyalties from the British, but politely told them to give the proceeds of his property to the poor, as the French would certainly not be so impoverished as to require his assets to bolster their own; of the bridge he built across the river Adyar to Saidapet, a bridge which is still in use; of the first Armenian journal that was published in Madras in 1794 by Fr. Haruthian Shmavonian; of the dreams of statehood that inspired the "Madras Group" which was a contemporary of the revolutions in France and America.

Stephen takes us into the church, its modest wooden altar gleaming with the colours of a series of paintings of the life of Christ and a few small icons under lamplight. Coming out again, we talk then of the Baghdadi Jews and the Parsis, two more dying communities who left their philantrophic and historic marks on urban India, who cling to their cultural and religious heritage just as the Armenians do. We talk of how the Armenians of Calcutta had until recently a rugby team that was highly respected in Asia and of how the descendents of these mercantile migrants comprised almost the entire Indian national team. We talk of how emigration to North America, Europe and Australia, in search of better opportunities, has whittled the Armenian community in India to a mere half-dozen in Bombay, two in Chennai, ten in Bangalore and about a hundred and fifty in Calcutta, of whom most are old and feeble. He tells us how he rings the 6 200-kilo bells every Sunday morning to keep the church alive, and that when services are held, two or three times a year, the priest and congregation have to be brought down from Calcutta.

And so we come to the future. Four families from Armenia are expected to migrate by the end of this year to India, coaxed by the diaspora to swell their numbers. The church is soon to be restored, after restoration of the Calcutta Armenian Church is completed. And, most significantly, more than a hundred children, all orphans or from underpriviliged families in Armenia, are presently in Calcutta, studying at the Armenian Humanitarian Academy, a school for the community. The children will live here for ten years, and it is hoped that after their stay here, some of them will decide against returning to Armenia. Already they are learning to like Indian food, and their English is improving. It is a pity that Gregorian did not live to see his prayers answered -- there came a flock of children, as if sent from heaven, who could speak nothing but Armenian.

--------------------------------

Also published by Lonely Planet.

Worthless Original Urban Haiku

2003-05-03T01:22:00.000-07:00

inside a rickshaw
looking into the rainbows
of oil in puddles

red, green, yellow, blue
lights dancing as their
reflections shatter

colours in the drops
of rain on the windshield glass
sudden rare jewels

lights and reflections
a teardrop catches them all
upon my lashes

2003-04-16T01:35:00.000-07:00

Running through my head yesterday was a story my grandmother often used to tell me, about one hot day in April, 1944, when the earth shook, windows shattered, gold literally fell from the sky and everyone thought that the Japanese had attacked Bombay.

S.S. Fort Stikine, a ship loaded with explosives and ammunition for an Allied attack on Japan, had exploded in Victoria Dock, after a fire started on board. 27 ships berthed in the dock were wrecked, more than 700 people were killed or missing, and about 1500 were injured.

Among the injured and killed were several of my grandmother's neighbours who worked at the docks. My grandfather, who worked very near the docks, arrived home four hours late to find everyone in a panic, because they thought he was either dead or badly injured.

The city survived. It still does. It has to.

2003-04-11T01:40:00.000-07:00

I'm going to close my eyes on this unbearably hot night and imagine myself at K. Rustom's Ice Cream Parlour, in the shadow of Brabourne Stadium on Veer Nariman Road, Churchgate, with the sea lapping away at Marine Drive a short walk away, and the honking of the taxicabs loud and annoying, refusing to melt away, even in the heat.

I lean on an ancient and utilitarian freezer, enjoying the steely chilled smoothness touching my palms, calling out to the Parsi lady who will eventually give me something delightfully cold. It doesn't really matter if it is ice cream in a cone, or ice cream between two thin wafer biscuits, or flavoured yoghurt, or something else listed on the handwritten menu that hangs on a wall where the paint flakes gently and grime dims the colours. Everything here is hand churned and creamy and delicious and as unpretentiously wonderful as only those sure of their gifts can be.

I walk over faded mosaic tiles and choose a seat from the row of plastic chairs against the wall; here I can breathe vapour for some moments over an ice cream, as I would in the frozen heights over snow, and forget the steamy afternoon framed by the rust on a creaky metal gate.