A rose by any other name...

Name is a peg to hang our identities on. It is the wind to fly our personalities, the rainbow to color our lives, the anchor to stabilize our erratic natures. It lends a uniqueness to our individuality and creates those indelible first impressions. It differentiates a Rose from a Lily, a Lily from a Jasmine, a Jasmine from a Daisy, a Daisy from an Aster and so on, if you get my drift. But the Bard said, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” He might just have been befuddled with all those names he had to deal with – Romeo, Juliet, Montague, Capulet, Mercutio, Tybalt – you can imagine his confusion. There is also a behind-the-scenes rumor that he wanted to take an underhand jab at the not-so-optimal sanitary facilities at the Rose Theatre. But then, I digress.

In short, to me, a name matters. So when I come across bland names, unimaginative names, curiously unfunny names, tongue-twister names, names that make you squirm, for which I have enough opportunities in the work I do, I tut-tut in my mind. Here are some examples. Sometimes I find action words used as names, often provoking a mild snicker – Mr. Sweat, Mr. Boring, Mr. Leaking, Mr. Hunting, Mr. Pershing, Mr. Peed, etc. (the title of “Mr.” is just a totally subjective gender preference). So are body parts and physical attributes common among surnames – Mr. Head, Mr. Hand, Dr. Skelton, Mr. Cheek, Mr. Balls, Mr. White, Mr. Black, Mr. Big, Mr. Little, Mr. Brown, etc. ad infinitum. Tongue-twisters are usually a legacy of foreign names. When a Ukranian can give his beloved son a surname as unpronounceable as Krzyzrwski or Mraynczak, an Albanian will name his daughter Shqperije with least concern for so many conflicting consonants in conjunction. An Indian will gladly go by the name Balasubramaniam Kunchithapadam thus threatening to tie every foreign tongue into knots whereas a Chinese will look at you in askance if you are not able to decipher which is the surname in a totally baffling trio of names such as Yick Ng Yee. Yet, he/she will just as nonchalantly mispronounce a seemingly innocuous two-syllable name such as Roopa and wonder why you don’t respond to your own name when spoken to. Which brings me to the crux of my pet peeve – my name.

Roopa had been a pretty safe name, a bit too commonplace no doubt, but I quite like the rumbling R and the soothing “oo” – a nice juxtaposition, I had always thought. Until I reached a foreign land. Here, I am more often called Aruba, and my efforts at educating the populace that Aruba is an almost invisible island in the Caribbean Sea have been ineffectual, to say the least. And with my name closely resembling the vernacular for “forget” which is “lupa,” I often have irritatingly funny moments when people actually believe that I have forgotten my name. My name, come to think of it, is indeed quite forgettable.

To add to my woes, I have totally confusing names that go along with it. My surname is the maternal family name of “Madampath” (being a matriarchal matrilineal Nair to boot), which is not a bad surname as surnames go, but with my father’s name of “Sreedharan” as my second name, matters do get complicated. So I have a girl name as the first name, a boy name as the second name, and an obsolete ancestral family name as the surname. And to make matters even worse, in the cobwebbed recesses of Calicut Passport Office, these three names have inexplicably switched around, and now for all official purposes, my first name is Sreedharan, second name is Madampath, and the surname is Roopa!!! Now each time I travel, I have to look into my passport to verify my set of names before confirming them, more often than not evoking suspicious glances in my direction. Some sympathetic customs officials do tut-tut. I try to look unperturbed. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” I echo the Bard. He does have a point there, after all.

(Rekz, I am sorry I am using the same title that you had used in one of your posts. But since we are both echoing the big S, I guess it is okay. He wouldn't mind.)

Hand in hand

I see your hand resting on the smooth cushioned couch – pale ivory on olive green – almost limp, but like a wild cat on the prowl, waiting and watching. You are hairy, I think, perhaps for the millionth time. The hairs near your knuckles curve around in a matted heap and they are subtly alluring. I inch my hand closer and I compare mine to yours – a harsher brown to your ivory, older looking with spidery blue veins and whiter nails. Your hand still waits in hushed confidence.

I rub my pinky slightly against your thumb, an invitation to touch. I comb out those wiry hairs and trace their length. You flex your thumb straightening the creases, an almost undetectable pulling back. I am not disheartened but rather emboldened. I coquettishly draw lines on the back of your hand with my index finger. The nail is slightly long, not manicured, and it makes a faint grating sound against your dry skin. With a sudden shake, your hand makes a fist and lies still in brooding dominance.

A little impatient, I hold your wrist firmly with my left hand and open your fingers one by one. Your little finger eases open without resistance, teasing me to move on. I prize your other fingers open too and each one leads me on, revealing just a little more, like a tantalizing treasure hunt. And my hand, the covetous hunter, the greedy pig, bumbles along, intoxicated with success and tripping over itself in eagerness. Your hand waits in mute power.

Like smoothing out a crumbled piece of paper, I iron out your hand with mine. Your hand is still obstinately lifeless, my treasure still hidden, and I am desperate. I tickle it. I pinch it. I shake it. I squeeze it. Your hand still taunts soundlessly. I am dejected. I finally give up. I place your hand quietly back on your lap and withdraw mine slowly.

And then you pounce. In one fell swoop, my hand is engulfed in yours, your broad palm rubbing the back of my hand in an almost indecent show of strength and closeness. You interlock my fingers with yours and give a tight squeeze. It is as warm as a caress, as intense as a kiss. I shudder with pleasure. Come with me, you say. My hand is ensconced in yours and happily your slave. Hand in hand, we walk, intimate and loved, in loquacious silence.

(This is in response to a tag by Usha. Sorry for taking my own sweet time with it, Usha. But then, what better time to respond to a tag on “holding hands” than Valentine’s eve?)

Words are all she has....

A four-year-old’s take on things. Sincere effort has been made to stick to the conversations as they were spoken, but a little leeway has to be given to inadvertent changes from the original, mainly due to limitations of hastily jotted records and a truant memory.

On pets:
Mom: I want a dog, a golden retriever, that is my dream.
Dad: I wouldn’t mind a fishbowl.
Daughter: I want a small alien, sweet and cuddly.

Huh what!

On beauty:
Daughter: I want you to wear that pink thing on your cheeks and that blue thing on your eyes. Mothers look beautiful that way.
Mom: I don’t think so.
Daughter: Yes, they do. All mothers wear them but you don’t.

Sigh!

On pretend play:
Daughter: Pretend this is your hand.
Mom: This is my hand.
Daughter: Pretend this is hot water.
Mom: That is hot water. (Some decibels higher) What are you going to do?
Daughter: Hot water doesn’t know this is your hand.
Mom: Put that hand shower down!

On earth:
Mom: (In a fit of love) You make my world go around, do you know that?
Daughter: World like earth?
Mom: (Rolling eyes) Yes.
Daughter: What is good earth?
Mom: Earth where there are good people.
Daughter: What is bad earth? Earth where there are bad people?
Mom: Yes.
Daughter: And super earth?
Mom: Enough.
Daughter: If you have anti-fairies, it will be anti-earth?

What the heck!!

On time:
Daughter: We are just in time.
Mom: What is just in time?
Daughter: 11 minutes and an hour.

Oh yeah?

On a pea
Mom: “Is she a real princess?” asked the prince.
Daughter: What happened to the pea?
Mom: “Yes,” said the queen, “she is a real princess.”
Daughter: Is the pea okay?
Mom: Are you listening to the story?
Daughter: Yes, yes, I am.
Mom: Tell me what is happening.
Daughter: There is a pea below all the mat-e-re-ss. Is the pea okay?
Mom: (Sigh) I guess it is.
Daughter: Okay. Fine.

On dentists
Daughter: I know how den-tist pull teeth out.
Mom: You do?
Daughter: He takes a long string.
Mom: And?
Daughter: He ties one end to the teeth.
Mom: Tooth.
Daughter: Okay tooth. The other end to the door knob.
Mom: (Eyes widening)
Daughter: And he closes the door. Bang.
Mom: Who told you this?
Daughter: I see it on TV. I want to go to a dentist too.

No way!

On moms and candies
Daughter: You are the best mom in the whole wide world.
Mom: (Gushing) Thank you darling.
Daughter: And this is the best candy in the whole wide world.

Okay. I get it.

On birthdays and wishes
Daughter: I want my birthday to be in January.
Mom: But you know when your birthday is, right?
Daughter: August. But I want it in January.
Mom: But you can never change your birthdays dear.
Daughter: I am just wishing. I wish my birthday is in January.
Mom: Oh yes, you can wish for many things.
Daughter: I wish I had wings also.
Mom: Me too (sigh).

On skin
Daughter: I don’t like my dark skin.
Mom: Black is beautiful, my dear.
Daughter: But I want to be fair like my friends.
Mom: But that is okay. Look, I am dark too.
Daughter: I want to be like you (hugs) but I want to be white.

Hoping she will understand some day….

Unequaled Music

One deceptively sunny morning, where defiant sunlight penetrated through dark matted clouds, mama decided that it was time for her little girl to start learning piano. The sun of course did not have any part to play in the larger scheme of things, other than in perhaps granting a deliberately vivacious mood to mama. She argued to papa that as they already had a piano, all they needed was a teacher to teach it. Mama knew piano was too grandiose a term. What they had in their house was just an old electronic keyboard, a present (or a hand-me-down if you will) from a generous friend, who was rich or ambitious enough to buy the authentic piano – the grandiose one – which had seven octaves, three pedals, and a shining black body. Mama painstakingly counted the five octaves on her dusty keyboard, noted the lack of pedals, and imperceptibly shook her head. But her keyboard was shaped like a piano all right. It had a wooden frame with three wooden legs and even had a top flap which opened on brass hinges. And mama knew that one didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

So mama called the piano teacher. She said she wanted her little girl to have personal piano lessons. The teacher was ready to come. They fixed the time and date.

The teacher was a soft-spoken lady. Mama liked her and the way she patiently taught the little girl. So after the first class was over, when the little girl rubbed her flexed thumbs and sore pinkies, and made faces, mama asked the teacher whether she can teach her too. The teacher was a bit surprised and asked why. Mama, perhaps a trifle too enthusiastically, explained that she always wanted to play Beethoven’s Fur Elise and Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. The teacher laughed kindly. Let us start with the C, she said.

For the next two weeks, mama and little girl practised bravely and monotonously the notes of C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. They tried it in all octaves to break the humdrum, but that was about the only variety they knew. The little girl started carrying a pillow to her practice sessions. Mama tried to sort out the intricacies of semibreves, minims, dotted minims, and crotchets, nursing an almost forgotten, two-decade-old memory of guitar classes, while the little girl took patient naps by her side.

Time to learn a song, the teacher decided after the first two weeks. Mama perked up. Teacher played “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” quite brilliantly on the old keyboard. And her voice was mellifluous too. If mama was a bit disappointed at the unpretentiousness of the song, she did not show it. The next week saw mama and little girl playing the rhyme ad nauseam much to papa’s consternation. He grumbled that he did not bargain for two cacophonic renderings of a stupid nursery rhyme, or else they could have had another child. Mama asked him to stop sulking and sing along. Papa feigned deafness.

Two weeks went by and a Baa Baa Black Sheep was added to mama’s meager repertoire. She boasted to the teacher that she had played guitar when she was in college. The teacher condescendingly agreed that that training would stand in good stead while playing piano. Mama beamed. Teacher taught her another song – Mary had a Little Lamb. Mama dreamed of being a Chopin.

That evening, papa came in all exhausted from drudging work and there was mama and little girl by the keyboard. Mama was gingerly playing the strains of the newly learnt song and little girl was boisterously singing along – “And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.” Papa kept his laptop on the table and joined in, giving in finally. “He followed her to school one day” – papa sang in an affected tenor. Mama closed her ears and laughed. The little girl danced along. Music is indeed the food of love – even if papa, mama, and little girl did not have a taste for it.

Playing God

“Snap! went the fox and that was the end of the gingerbread man.” I end the story lamely. I had fielded at least a dozen questions from my 4-year-old by then – “How can the gingerbread man run?” “What is gingerbread?” “Can I make a gingerbread man?” “Can I make him run?” “How can the cow drink tea?” etc. etc. I shushed her each time not because I couldn’t answer the questions, which I might have been able to with staid matter-of-factness, but because I wanted to finish reading yet another fantastical but predictable story.

When she closes the book and runs to ride her bike, I rummage through her rack, leaf through a bunch of books, and ponder – on fairy tales and life and magic and playing god. Granting life to inanimate objects seems to be archetypical in children’s stories – just like our gingerbread man who comes to life and runs out of the oven. Fairy tales are full of them. Take a look at Pinocchio. Gestappo, an average woodcarver, makes a marionette from wood and accidentally gives it life. After many adventures, some of them as tedious as they come, Pinocchio, with his inexplicably morally conscious nose, finally comes of age and becomes a real boy. Thumbelina grows out of a magic seed given by a wise old woman. We have magic oranges that become beautiful maidens, a metal pig who can run when an innocent boy sits on it, a toy tin soldier who falls in love with a paper ballerina, and even an entire clock-work marching up to defend their clock-maker. Even in Cinderella, there is a convenient fairy godmother making horses out of mice and chariots out of pumpkins.

Making inanimate animate is not restricted to children’s stories alone. Victor Frankenstein creates a monster, gives it life, and later pays a heavy price for his irresponsibility. Perhaps an allegorical novel, it nevertheless highlights our preoccupation with playing god. Or take the case of Pygmalion. The statue he carves is so beautiful that he falls in love with it. Cynics of the present day might write it off as an acute case of agalmatophilia (attraction to statues, dolls, etc.), but the fact remains that the statue did come to life because of the sculptor’s devotion.

We have our own Indian equivalent in many legends and myths. A lump of flesh can become a hundred sons and a daughter. A clay statue can transform to a god, a rock can become a beautiful lady by a touch, or trees can turn into young men.

It is intriguing that across cultures and across ages, man has searched, dreamt, and written about creating life and achieving immortality. Is the act of creating life and playing god so entertaining or is it just a rudimentary impulse in man which gives rise to these fantasies? The search for the elixir of life or that elusive philosopher’s stone is ingrained in man’s psyche. A tiniest portion of the elixir or ambrosia or amrut or dancing water or aab-e-hayat, call what you will, will rejuvenate you – nay, make you immortal. Man can be omnipotent. Man can be god.

Where miracles and fairies and magic and potions don’t work, ingenuity might. Life might still be created in a lab from nonlife. If scientists can induce life to a lab-made genome and make it grow and reproduce, how close are we to playing god? Or rather, how far? Can we, as a megalomaniac race, wait that long?

I take out my daughter’s Play-Doh. I make a clay man similar to our gingerbread man, with shining black eyes, a red nose, and a wide grin. I even make two buttons for the coat. I make him stand up and I sit back. I am waiting for him to run.

Being Janus-Faced (also a tag)

Another year has started. Time to start brewing new wine in my old bottle, inside my drab little cellar, using the same old recipe, with a bunch of sour grapes, sweet sugar, and fermenting yeast. Come, taste my wine. Smell it, sip it, roll it around your tongue. Call it light, full, round, or flat. Call it woody, earthy, soft, or complex. It might be sweet, bitter, sour, or just insipid to you. I brew it to lighten my days, and yes, I admit, for that little bit of intoxication, where reality gets smudged with illusions. But foremost, I brew it to keep you happy.

Let me start my year by playing Janus, that two-faced god who forgets to live in the present because he is always looking backward and forward – the past and future. And let me start by doing an almost-forgotten tag (tagged by Usha) about yesterdays and tomorrows.

Your oldest memories

It is a formless landscape out there in the corner of my mind. Fuzzy and hazy. More tangible are those first impressions rather than concrete memories – of stories told and fables recounted by loving voices and fertile imagination – of an ekadashi kakka (the crow that fasted during the eleventh lunar day) who fell into a well and found treasure, of a kunjattakili (a small bird?) who learnt it the tough way that only hard work pays, of Cinderella who ate dosa sandwich and who went thrice to a ball dance, or of an onion that was crowned the king among vegetables. It was a happy childhood where loneliness was a strange word impossible to relate to.

I did have a bout of nostalgia about four months ago when I raked the dried leaves in my mind and lit a bonfire. If you haven’t seen it already and would care to, you can find it here.

What were you doing ten years ago?

Ten years ago – the beginning of 1999 – when I was in what I would call the prime of my life, when time still laughed at wrinkles and gray hair – I was in Pune, working as an English Language Trainer for a company. Living in my uncle’s spacious bungalow, relishing my aunt’s exemplary culinary skills, I was getting plumper. It was probably the first time in my life when I had fun – fun of the immediate, spontaneous, unthinking kind. There were four girls and four guys in our group, and we picnicked and danced and drank and gossiped and laughed those five months away. Many among us fell in and out of love. And when one of the trainees proclaimed that he had fallen in love with my eyes and thus excused himself for being the dumbest in my class, I was young and gullible enough to blush. Thinking about that life, it has a dream-like quality now. When I left Pune, my friends gave me a gold ring with a clover embossed – for love and luck. I still wear it.

Today

I don’t look at today. Remember, I am Janus. I can only reminisce and predict, I cannot just be.

What do you see yourself doing 14 years from now?

I look into that crystal ball and see a little turbulence, a little sorrow, a little boredom, amidst all that happiness and contentment that I would predict for myself. Perhaps it is a yearning rather than a prediction to let life live its course steadily and surely. It is an anticipatory bail against any forces of nature or man that might bring a disaster. I do not resist change or the passage of time. But let it just flow by slowly, unobtrusively.

If you build a time capsule what would it contain?

I would have a Noah’s Ark and a Library of Congress installed in the capsule. And put myself in too for good measure. When I finally disembark from it to a new civilization and a new culture, I would remake the whole world just as I know it and be the new-age Noah, Hippocrates, Socrates, and Galileo all rolled into one. That is a dream worth dreaming about :).

The tag is now done. It is open to any and all readers, whosoever wants to share his or her past, present, and future.

Santa Was Here!!!

M: Lugging around a ten-ton Christmas tree is not my idea of fun.

R: It is good exercise. Set it in that corner. That is perfect.

M: You said that about the last corner too, before we shifted. A house shouldn’t have these many corners.

R: Now all we have to do is fix the branches and get the decorations all up.

M: Well, that is work for a whole day.

R: We have nothing better to do.

M: I have.

R: Now you don’t. Okay, let us get cracking.

M: A metal and plastic Christmas tree! Where is the fun in that!

R: At least we don’t have to feel guilty about cutting all those evergreens. Anyway we don’t have a choice here, do we? We don’t get natural firs here.

M: Maybe it is ordained that people in the tropics should not decorate Christmas trees because there are no firs.

R: Who ordained it?

M: God?

R: Well, you don’t believe in God, so you can’t use that argument.

M: Okay okay. It is just pain in you-know-where.

R: I very well know where, thank you. Just a few more branches and we are done.

M: Hmmm. About time.

************************************************

(Two hours, some bad mouthing, and a couple of band-aids later……)

S: Shall I help, shall I, shall I?

R: Of course, you can, dear. Just bring those decorations one by one and hang them anywhere you want.

S: The star day-co-wa-tions?

R: All of them, one by one.

S: Do you know, Nadia has a bigger tree.

R: Hmm hmm.

S: Do you know, she has lots of presents under the tree too.

R: Okay.

S: Will we have snow?

R: It doesn’t snow here San.

S: It does snow with a snow spray.

R: Oh okay.

S: I want a snow spray.

R: That foamy stuff might be dangerous.

S: It is not it is not. I saw Praniti touch it.

R: Oh okay.

M: We will get you one, don’t worry.

S: Goody.

M: There are enough decorations here to cover a 20-foot tree!

R: Don’t exaggerate. These are all from previous years’. We didn’t spend a penny this year.

S: I want to keep the star on top.

R: You can’t reach that high, darling.

S: Acha, lift me.

M: Here you go.

R: Now we have a crooked star.

M: Matches a crooked tree.

R: Now the lights.

M: There is about of a kilometer of that here.

R: Just twist it around the tree.

M: And he said, let there be light, and there was light.

R: There wasn’t. There is a loose connection.

M: It can be fixed. All in good time.

************************************************

(Days later, on Christmas Eve…)

R: Now that San has gone to sleep, let us start wrapping presents.

M: There is no “us.” You wrap, I watch TV.

R: There are at least 20 presents to wrap. We have a party to prepare for. If you don’t switch off the TV right now, the remote goes out of the window.

M: What is all the fuss about? Do you think those Magi wrapped their presents?

R: I don’t think their presents could have been wrapped. Frankincense? Myrrh? They don’t sound very wrapping friendly, do they?

M: Nor are these cups, bags, horribly shaped pens, odd-shaped chocolate boxes – and what is this? A silly-looking mirror? A dust bin? You are crazy!

R: Those are the prizes for games. Less questions, more work. These are your set of wrapping papers, bows, scotch tape, and scissors.

M: &%$#@%&*

R: What?

M: I didn’t say anything.

R: Do we need to wrap San’s bike?

M: You must be mad!

R: I just asked. At least some tassels and ribbons?

M: No. It looks beautiful as is.

R: Okay okay.

M: I don’t think men are genetically inclined to wrap gifts.

R: Get to work, will you? Don’t blame your DNA.

************************************************

(About an hour and more bad-mouthing later….)

R: It looks beautiful, doesn’t it?

M: It does.

R: I am leaving the balcony door a crack open.

M: Why?

R: Perhaps Santa Claus will come.

M: Hmmm, I think I can hear the jingles.

R: And look, there, beyond that faintest star, do you see a red glow? That might be Rudolph’s red nose.

M: Let us get to bed.

R: Yes, let us.

************************************************

(Christmas morning, bright and early)

S: (A delighted squeal) Yippie! Santa was here!

When things really came to a -- wherever

Things really came to a head a couple of weeks ago. Well, I think I should appropriately rephrase it as “things really came to a rump,” because to be precise, the unmentionable hindquarter is where things finally came to.

It all started with M coming down with a high fever, which adamantly refused to respond to the good old acetaminophen, coupled with a certain hesitancy to sit down and bear weight on the said hindquarters. When his walk also began to resemble that of a tired and maybe slightly inebriated penguin and my overused ear thermometer refused to record anything below 102ºF, I overrode his habitual denials and took him to a doctor. The diagnosis was quick enough – an abscess on the – ahem – aforementioned rump. The surgeon was consulted, and although we had a little heated debate about the location of the abscess – perianal vs perirectal – which might have led to a misconception on his part that I am medically enlightened and which made M’s eyes roll in impatience, he was unequivocal about the treatment required – an incision and drainage of the said abscess as soon as possible.

The next day saw us at the hospital at the wake of dawn, where an I&D was performed in under an hour and M was wheeled out sleeping like a baby, still knocked out after general anesthesia. The surgeon, still under the probable misconception of my medical prowess, rattled out a series of instructions to me on how to care for the wound, which in retrospect I should have paid more attention to, while I was more interested in squeezing M’s hand in a fit of connubial love.

That night, back at home, our first hurdle loomed before us, quite literally. We looked at the mountainous pile of dressing materials in front of us – surgical alcohol, Betadine, cotton swabs, alcohol wipes, gauze, surgical tape, cotton buds, a huge box of gloves – and all we needed to do was change the dressing. I assured M that I could do it with my eyes shut and that he was in good pair of hands. About ten minutes into the process, I sincerely began to wish that I had more than a pair of them – hands, I mean. Because, as a layman, you are simply not trained in your daily life to hold the Betadine-soaked gauze on a curved space, tear the surgical tape off an excessively adhesive roll, and tape it in place without any of your fingers, hair, or items of your clothing getting stuck in between, all with just two hands. M offered to help which ended with his fingers getting in the way too. Finally, after half an hour of intense effort, a Betadine-stained sheet, half a roll of surgical tape, a very sticky – ahem – rump, and really choice expletives, we managed to change the dressing. The battle was won, but the war was to last at least for another two weeks.

The rough edges did smoothen out with each passing day. Although there were still instances of taped butt cheeks or a glove getting stuck to the end of the tape, thus giving rise to many butt jokes and extremely hilarious moments (for me at least; M stoically offered most of the jokes), things that came to a rump were slowly receding, so to say. The wound was healing, in spite of my administrations, and that was a huge deal. The war is not yet won though. We still have things to worry about – a curious four-year-old who will stop at nothing to find out what “dressing change” her mom and dad are doing behind closed doors, a bacteria which does not look to be effectively annihilated, a thermometer that still shows erratic numbers, and a woozy head – mine – that still feels faint looking at a wound.

But yesterday, the surgeon commended my nursing skills. M says he just has a crush on me. I gloat, either way.

A Butterfly to Share

I got a beautiful butterfly yesterday. It is not as much the beauty of it as the thought behind sharing it that makes it all the more treasurable. Thank you, Usha. It truly means a world to me.

Let me share it with the people whose blogs have guided and entertained me, both in more or less equal measure.

1. Ganga - My mentor in the world of blogging. My old schoolmate. She opened doors to this vast and exciting world that I never knew existed. She writes with a sensitivity that touches your heart strings. Her words flit around like butterflies, playful and enchanting. Here is a butterfly to the master butterfly-maker :).

2. Rekz - Thomas Hardy gave us Wessex, Faulkner gave us Yoknapatawpha, and Rekz gives us the extremely fascinating feline world of Moggies - a fun world of threesome, where she is the alpha cat, where mutinies, fights, victories and defeats are a way of life and rib-tickling laughter is always at hand. Here is a butterfly for making me laugh so wholeheartedly.

3. Arch - Our stations in life are a whole lot similar in that we both have impossibly naive three- to four-year-olds who make our lives as colorful as a rainbow. The only difference is that she etches that rainbow so vividly in her blog, where every hue is brilliantly painted with the mastery of an artist and the sensitivity of a mother. Here is a butterfly to you.

Now, these are the instructions I received from Usha, my patron :).

1. Put the logo on the blog. [I saved the picture first and later added it to the blog.]
2. Add a link to the person who presented it to you. [I couldn't really add the link. So I have just mentioned the name of the person who presented it to me.]
3. Pass this one, and link other bloggers that you'd like to share it with.

Hope you will accept this little token of gratitude and appreciation.

Hair Woes - A Sequel

I realized it was time for another of those unsavory experiences of my life – a haircut. My readers, who have been following my torments because of my rather insufferable keratinous growth, would remember how I detest haircuts. For those of you who are still unaware of the fact and have the time and inclination to suffer through one of my sagas, please click here.

I walked into a salon a little bravely this time because I presumed I have mastered the language enough not to be a guinea pig to an ambitious hairstylist’s restless fingers. After shampooing, again one of those heavenly experiences, I sat down and looked confident.

The hairstylist materialized out of nowhere with a trolley of dangerous-looking equipment. I looked at him in the mirror and inadvertently let out a gasp. I had an Emo character straight out of some hardcore punk band. He stared at me quizzically through his visible left eye. His right eye was quite hidden behind all that sleekly brushed bang of hair. Weren’t his T-shirt and jeans a bit too tight? Would their seams burst under the strain? How well can he cut hair seeing through just one eye? I wondered, a trifle panicky. He smiled beatifically though.

“Saya mau gunting.” (I want haircut)

“Style apa?” (What style?)

“Mau layer Pak. Tapi sedikit pendek. Saya tidak mau panjang.” (Okay. I will quit showing off my vernacular prowess. What I told him was that I wanted my hair cut in layer, a little short and not long.)

He set to work. I busied with a magazine, skimming through impossibly thin models sporting quite abhorrent hairstyles.

I looked up hearing a sympathetic clicking of the tongue.

“A lot of your hair is white,” he said dramatically.

“I know that, you dummy.” I muttered.

“You want to color your hair?” He asked hopefully.

I said a definitive no. I sulked. I didn’t obviously like that gray hair comment.

He went about his task without offering anymore comments. I risked a glance at the mirror and again let out a gasp. My hair was too short and standing up at all ends!

“My hair is too short!” I cried.

“Madam wanted it short,” he countered.

“Stop cutting,” I ordered, my voice bordering on hysterical.

He stopped. “One-eyed moron,” I cursed under my breath, which was quite unlike me. I usually reserve the choicest epithets to swear at myself.

Seemingly quite oblivious to my recalcitrant state of mind, he plugged the dryer and began blow-drying each hair of mine painstakingly. I again submerged into the obnoxious magazine, vowing not to resurface again.

“Madam hair is very thick,” he offered placatingly, after a while.

“Hmmm,” I was still non-conciliatory. “It falls terribly.”

“It is still very thick,” he affirmed.

I thawed a little.

After about half an hour into styling, he switched off the dryer. I forced myself to look up. I had two fringes on either side which he was proprietarily arranging to perfection. If I had looked like a poodle after my last haircut, I looked like an Afghan hound now. I creased my eyebrows.

“Madam is beautiful, this hairstyle is good,” he gushed.

Do you think so? I inwardly asked.

I smiled. I squinted at the mirror again. Maybe he can see what I can’t see. Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, I thought conveniently. My universal bonhomie returned and I sauntered out of the salon after parting with an exorbitant tip. And if my styled bangs lost a little lissomeness by the time I reached home, predicting what lay in the immediate future for my hair, I did not blame my Emo man.

Dancing Lessons

There are things you invariably learn before, during the course of, and after a classical dance performance. Some lessons are born inside you, some are learned through painful and painstaking experience, and some – to echo a bard – are literally thrust on you. But these lessons are by nature ephemeral and quickly fade off if not penned for posterity. This is an unpretentious attempt at it.

If you are not ready to lose at least 500 hairs from your otherwise fast-depleting hair treasury, think twice before sitting down for that tight bunching up of hair to the left side of the head, where it will resist gravitational pull with the help of a bottle of mousse, hair spray, and at least two-dozen pins. The immediate side effects are a splitting headache, a crick in the neck because of all that unbalanced weight, and a permanently arched right eyebrow. And of course, the lost hairs.

Never forget to wear your bangles when you dance on stage. There is nothing as unsightly as a pair of unadorned wrists amidst all the finery.

Alta (the red ink worn on hands and feet for dance) runs and smudges when you sweat. Permanent markers in red also have the same propensity. There are two options – don’t sweat or don’t touch your white costume when your hand sweats. Or you will have a white costume with red blotches. Yes, it does disguise your cracked feet and your callused hands to perfection. But don’t forget to tell your four-year-old that it is not blood.

Backstage managers are angels in human disguise. There is obviously no other explanation to their endless toiling in the darkness of the backstage – wiping sweat off your brow, arranging props, straightening jewelry, running to get Pocari Sweat for you, listening to your constant grumbling about your hair, costume, and lights, and a thousand other unlabeled tasks – for absolutely no personal gain.

Resist the urge to stop your dance and wave when you hear a familiar trill from one of the front rows, “acha, that is amma in blue” (Dad, that is mom in blue). Remember there are 300 others watching you.

Also resist the temptation to wonder whether your husband has captured you on camera when you are posing as a sinuous vine – what you consider as your best posture in the show. You will forget your next dance move and that can end in disaster.

Always remember it takes huge talent to produce a show and only a modicum of it to dance in it – especially when you are the only adult classical dancer (self-proclaimed) other than your teacher in a 50-mile radius. Also the audience who later tell you that your dance was brilliant are genuinely nice people who are either myopic or do not want to use the word “average.” You know this because you have already seen the dance video that your husband has meticulously recorded and you know that your dance was not “brilliant”.

Nevertheless, at the end of it all, you enjoy yourself tremendously. The huge success of the show somehow rubs a little on you too. And there will be some things that always make you laugh. In my case, it was this press coverage that we got for the show. I reproduce the exact quotes:

“…..with the melodies of the percussion ensemble interspersed with couple of haunting songs sung by two ladies.” (Our male singer, who has a rich baritone, went into paroxysms of frustration reading it. We are still looking for the ghosts of the two ladies who sang haunting songs.)

“…..performers took turns dancing to the music, playing with the metallic ringing produced by the bracelets on their red-striped feet.”

That alta always spelled disaster!!

November arrived...

November arrived ineluctably, all too quickly. Dawn broke. There were ominous clouds gathered in the horizon. Feeble sunlight filtered through, apologetically. I whined as wispy morning sleep gave way to wakefulness. I stretched, yawned, rubbed my eyes, cracked my knuckles, counted the fallen hairs on my pillow, swore under my stale breath, and made my way a little unsteadily to the bathroom. My husband smiled dreamily, adorably. A far-away thunder prophesied a wet weekend. I kept that needling thought at bay.

It was a busy weekend by our estivating standards. For one, our high-spirited four-year-old was still in the thralls of her previous day’s Halloween party. A credulous part of her mind believed that if she tried hard enough, she could make her toy broom fly. And she fervently clung to the notion that trick or treating extended through the weekend and carried her bag around for more candies. Our helper did a vanishing act yet again and so there were chores to take care of. And I had dance rehearsals on both Saturday and Sunday, two days of back-breaking dancing for our show next week. There was simply no place for that needling little thought.

Of course, we feverishly followed the US elections and the final F1 race. And the weekend was full of it. The messianic figure who apparently spent four years of his childhood in this archipelago got my support whereas a world champion who deserved the title did not. Among wins and losses, merciless gossip, irrational favoritism, and baseless speculations, we spent a weekend arguing, laughing, and shaking our heads, and I almost forgot that needling thought.

Come Monday and the busy week started again. Monday is reserved in my calendar for unabashed, uninhibited fun. It is the day when half a dozen of us thirty-somes gather together and learn what is quite unsurprisingly termed “Bollywood dance.” For an hour or more, we subject our pelvis and our acetabulum to various degrees of torture, at times even threatening a dislocation, all under the excellent tutelage of a teacher who is young enough to call us “aunties.” We dance without restraint, we talk without boundaries. And we go back to our homes rejuvenated. On such a Monday, I had no time for that needling thought.

My husband gave me a surprise present – a trifle early, but then, that is how surprises work – a beautiful little statue of a dancing girl carved in ebony. I fell in love with it and narcissistically thought that the svelte figure looked like me. My daughter let slip that there is a little printout of Blue’s Clues in her room that would transform into a card. It is getting harder to keep away that needling little thought.

Today, my ever-ebullient husband proclaimed that as the surprises were all over and done with way before the actual event, he would cook a special dinner for me tomorrow. “On your big day,” he rubbed it in. “Oh goody,” I said uncertainly. I have the faintest suspicion that I would be the guinea pig tomorrow yet again, like the other times when he made me the much-touted celery salad with roasted peppers or his very special avocado dip for tortilla chips. He has already enquired about balsamic vinegar and Brussels sprouts, so all I can do is keep my fingers crossed and quieten my mutinous tummy. Anyway, I have given up pretending that I don’t think my needling thought.

Because I think of it all the time. In this rush of minutes and hours and days, tomorrow is my birthday. If I had started traveling at the speed of light the moment I was born, I would be playing ring-a-ring-a-roses with Pleiades now. Okay, that might be a gross exaggeration. On a closer approximation, I would have simply reached Arcturus. But suffice it to say, I feel old, old as the stars. And that is the one thought that doesn’t make you starry-eyed – to say the least.

Things that fall apart

Everything around me is broken, torn, bent, rent, shaggy, sloppy, unkempt, muddled, messy, dirty, overgrown, dried, dusty, rusty, loose, falling, leaking, shaking, crooked, withered, or old.

My computer table definitely shows symptoms of confirmed Parkinsonism. My laptop has senile dementia. My headset squeaks and my mouse has a mind of its own. My webcam has warning signs of hyperopic astigmatism. My internet connectivity is capricious, to say the least. My toner is always dry. My chair goes down whenever I sit on it – perhaps something to do with my weight, but I would rather blame the chair. A jumble of wires at my feet lies open like spilled guts and leads to nowhere in particular.

If I take a walk around my room, I see a DVD player that does not work, a defunct TV antenna that attracts static, a dozen pens that have run out of ink, a book rack that is overburdened, a dustbin that does not close, a fan that undoubtedly suffers from an acute bout of borborygmus, and at least two burnt-out bulbs.

My bathroom does not have a shower curtain. The flush makes banshee noises, scaring the bejesus out of whosoever has the temerity of touching the lever. The hand shower socket is loose and can leave an indelible mark on your head at any time. The washbasin gets clogged. The door only closes with a bang.

I step out of my room to see a digital clock that always runs 10 minutes slow. The last time I tried to correct it, its alarm started ringing at 2 AM for seven days in a row for no perceivable reason, each time adeptly clearing the cobwebs of sleep from my head. My mobile phone is carelessly thrown on the sofa where it gives desperate beeps of low charge. I shrug at its erraticism. I look out on to the balcony and see a withered curry leaf plant, my foliaceous elixir, threatening to die out on me.

My kitchen tap requires two grease-free hands to open it. The flex box fumes and sputters when there are more than two appliances connected to it. My fridge sounds like faraway thunder, not catastrophic but still threatening. My kitchen stove smells of gas and I am convinced there is a leak although the gas company vouches that it is safe. I run my hand through snack jars that do not close properly, a fruit basket that is falling apart, an oil dispenser that is too sticky, and kitchen cabinets that cannot remain open or closed.

I walk back and I catch myself on the dining room mirror. I see the light from the hanging lamps glinting off my fine gray hairs. There are blatantly perceptible crow’s feet around my eyes. And a new, perhaps not yet immediately noticeable, kyphotic stoop to my shoulders. I try to hold myself straighter.

“Can we dance, amma?” My 4-year-old asks, much to my surprise. My diligent readers might remember my daughter’s lack of fascination for anything that requires rhythm.

“To what song?” I ask.

“Mamma mia.” She replies without even a thought.

I walk quickly past my lethargic clock, my finally silent cell phone, I bang my bathroom door to shut out the shriek, I bend down and manually close the lid of the dustbin, walk past the burping fan to my demented laptop, kick away all the wires, and open iTunes. At least some things work.

And when we jump and dance and laugh, I almost do not notice the arthritic creaking of my left knee.

Vacation Exhaustion

When Ramzan holidays started last week, there was a song on my lips. I counted eight days (including both Sundays) of delectable mornings, lazy afternoons, and exciting evenings with a wonderful husband and an adorable daughter. Even though needling thoughts of my full-time job (I did not have a holiday), an in-absentia cook/helper, and household chores which have a knack of piling up crossed my mind, they did not ruffle the calm waters of anticipatory bliss. And thus the holidays started. I did not have an inkling of what was in store for me.

I learned one thing soon enough. Two is too much of a crowd in the kitchen. My camaraderie with my wonderful husband soon gave way to scuffles over who should cut and who should clean and who should throw the garbage out. When our constant bickering led to our daughter’s insistence that we zip our mouths, we decided to do something about it – cook less and eat out more. That foresight helped us ward off a potential Armageddon.

Holidays are constant reminders of chores not done. This holiday warned us of an imminent inundation of junk if a spring cleaning was not done forthwith. Thus a nerve-racking day was spent on sorting out clothes, toys, books, papers, and other miscellaneous household artifacts, and then finally stowing them all away in boxes for future decision-making, due to emotional, practical and procrastinatory forces at work.

We also realized that 4-year-olds accumulate back-breaking chores as they walk and talk. And a 4-year-old with hyper-affinity towards water is double trouble. Our daughter wanted to swim every day of the holidays. My anticipated lethargic mornings were thus replaced by getting into an extremely uncomfortable swim suit, finding towels, goggles, armbands and floaties, applying gooey sun-blocks, and desperately trying to stay afloat in water and cramping my leg in the process. Needless to say, I am a very bad swimmer. But my exploits at the pool will merit a whole blog by itself and are prudently being withheld from divulging here.

The times that our daughter condescended to remain at home, she wanted constant entertainment. As her present addiction is Monopoly, we ended up playing the rather tedious junior version of the board game at all timely and untimely hours with a total spoilsport who did not fully understand the basics of the game but still stubbornly insisted that all money transactions be made in her favor. I am always unlucky with money (play money was no exception) and both father and daughter routed me with devilish glee in all the innumerable games that we played. This did nothing to my already dampened mood.

Then my dance teacher decided, like a responsible teacher that she is, that extra practice sessions were warranted during these holidays to prepare us for our show in November. As we, the senior students, were doing a mohiniyattam piece along with the usual bharatanatyam items, we, more than anybody else, needed the practice. I am familiar with mohiniyattam, having learnt it during my younger years, and I was only too ready to show off. After a couple of days of intense two-hour practice sessions, I realized that mohini-esque swaying movements might not be meant for a woman past her prime, for there was not a muscle or a tendon in my body that was not sore. I longed to get back to my safe zone of bharatanatyam, an emotion echoed by the other senior students as well, which did help with the pain and embarrassment a little bit.

Holidays, if you get my drift, were becoming a pain in the neck and all the other unmentionable areas.

Thankfully, there were only eight days of it. The cook is not back yet, and with all the fettuccine con funghi and four-cheese ravioli, we might have gotten a little heavier around the middle – I still suspect that diabolic weighing scale of ours – but life is slowly limping back to normal in this household. And if I were to distrust holidays for a long time to come, I am sure you will understand.

Tears on the Pillow

There is never a disconsolate moment in your life. Your days are filled with work, friends, children, reading, interminable phone calls, piquant little arguments – you live each day uncompromisingly. Night comes, bringing with it a pervading gloominess and somber thoughts. And there are tears on the pillow.

You are sitting in the manicured garden amidst falling dusk. A brisk wind has picked up, promising rain and fecundity. The fishes are swimming in the pond and the children gather their toys to go home. You unwittingly think of great lovers, some historical and some just products of imaginative minds – Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, Shah Jahan and Mumtaz, Lancelot and Guinevere. You brood over trifles. You take a walk down the meandering jogging track to shake away the gloom. The swimming pool water, ruffled by the wind, laps at the edges inviting you to jump in. You traipse back to your apartment, lounge in front of the TV, get into bed earlier than later. You lie down on your soft king-sized bed, and there are tears on the pillow.

There is somebody playing piano next door. The hesitating notes reach your ears in fits and starts. It can be a Beethoven, you think – perhaps the Moonlight Sonata. A composition of love. There is no bright moon outside. The city lights have dimmed too. You listen harder. The notes, feeble and stuttering, make no music. Then for some unaccountable reason, it stops. And there are tears on the pillow.

Your husband is far away. He has his job. Your rational mind weaves a nest of reasons and justifications. You are cradled in that nest, soothed by a rocking ever so gentle, and you almost drift off to a dreamless slumber. But a memory ignites, your heart elates for no palpable reason. A wisp of a scent, a recollection so fragile, and your legs are out of the cradle. Your body slips through and you fall. There is a bump and there are tears on the pillow.

A close friend relocates, moves far away. She has been your sister, your counselor, your mentor in a foreign land. You are not sure whether the relationship will stand the test of distance. You just know that you will miss her terribly. You say your goodbyes, blink away uninvited tears, and go your way. But at night, there are tears on the pillow.

A friend tells you that he loves you. He has been in love with you perhaps forever. He asks for nothing in return. You try to scrub the emotion clean. You label it nostalgia, romance, madness – something that can be flicked away. You instinctively know that you have lost a friend but you painstakingly maintain the charade. At the end of it all, there are tears on the pillow.

Life is muted in this month of Ramadan, the month devoted to God, purity, and forgiveness. The pale eyes and dry lips of a fasting populace vouch for their rectitude and their silent strength. You do not fast, it is not in your custom to fast, but you still feel a subtle sense of shame lurking somewhere in the corner of the heart. And when you go to bed, it might be with a full stomach, but the mind is starved. You wake up before dawn to a muezzin’s call and the pillow is still a little wet – vestiges of those tears on the pillow.

Dancing to Her Tune

“Darling, why did you not dance during circle time today? I was watching you through the window.” I chided my daughter with deliberate casualness.

Her reluctance to dance was looking less and less like a passing phase of shyness that I was so ready to believe it as. It looked as if my worst fear was about to come true. She just did not like dancing.

Whenever I drop my four-year-old to school, I jostle with at least a dozen other proud mothers to peep in through the rectangle windows of the gym, and watch the children do their circle time. That is to say, half an hour daily of singing and dancing in a difficultly controlled and maybe slightly overbearing environment. Most of the children do indeed dance and sing – some do boisterous gimmicks, some dance happily, some hop around, some sing at the top of their voices, some talk, some cry, some bawl out loud, and a minimum few, like my little daughter, stand with their feet firmly rooted to ground and do half-hearted little shoulder-shrugs and hand-rolls.

“So why didn’t you dance, honey?” I persevered.

“Honey ha ha,” she giggled. She has learnt a new way of cupping her month and giggling away, her misplaced dimple barely visible on the left corner of her chin.

“Tell me.”

“Do you know, amma,” she said in a conspiratorial tone. “Portia smelled of fish today.” She made a silly face and the giggle came on again.

“Stop giggling now,” I said half amused. “You didn’t dance because Portia smelled of fish?” I persisted.

“Do you know? She ate fish in the morning and didn’t wash her mouth.” More giggles.

“That was not my question,” I tried again. “Why didn’t you dance?”

“Do you know? It is the same Portia who come to my ballet class.”

“Oh, is it? She comes to your ballet class too?” I asked without much interest.

“Do you know --” these days, all her sentences are prefixed by do-you-knows. They are as charmingly exasperating as her giggles.

“Tell me.”

“Portia doesn’t stand up and say good afternoon when ballet teacher ask her to,” she bent forward with the same conspiratorial air.

“Do you get up?” I asked suspiciously.

“Yes, and I say good afternoon Miss – I forget the name.” The giggles are never far off.

Now, to my indulgent readers, let me confess. In a fit of motherly anxiety superimposed by steely parental resolve, I enrolled my daughter in a ballet school about a month or so ago. My intention was quite simple. Like any self-deluding Malayalee woman worth – or maybe not – her dancing shoes (read anklets, chilanga, salangai, ghungroo – as the case may be), I want my daughter to dance. I want her to be a dancer.

“If she has inherited my genes,” my husband tried to argue, “she might not become a dancer.”

“And what will she be?” I asked petulantly.

“Perhaps she can play piano. We have a keyboard. Why don’t we start some piano classes?”

I assured him that that was in the pipeline too.

Meanwhile, we asked our now four-year-old what she wanted to be. “A drummer,” came the immediate reply. Reflecting on our thin gypsum walls and our even thinner tympanic membranes, we asked her to reconsider. I asked her whether she wanted to learn ballet, be a ballerina. She bargained for a pretty pink ballet dress and a matching pink hair band. I promised to buy her all that. I got a willing accomplice to my not-so-selfless dreams.

And thus she started her ballet classes, which going by her high enthusiasm levels so far, do not seem to be teaching anything other than rabbit jumps and frog leaps.

So, there she was, one month into her ballet class and still not showing any tendency to dance. “So, why didn’t you dance?” I asked her yet again.

“Amma, do you know –” she was going to prattle away again.

“No do-you-knows.” I admonished. “Tell me, because –”

“Because Portia smelled of fish.” She covered her mouth and giggled.

Now, what kind of an answer is that! I conceded, with reluctant amusement.

“My little dancer has two left feet,” I hugged her close.

The House at the End of Memory Lane

Memories are dutiful harbingers of nostalgia.

I have quite a pack of stark, lucid memories – one of the earliest is of my biting my twin in a well-justified bout of sibling rivalry and getting my first milk tooth loosened in the bargain. There is yet another one of both of us dancing a chicken dance (!!!), with a ruffled Dee at my side as a rooster because she did not get to wear the pretty pink dress of the hen. There are precious memories of Guruvayoor trips, Vishu kanis, a family friend bringing Gems packets whenever he came on a visit, our first dance teacher whose wooden stick (the talakkol) I hid behind our sofa because I had total conviction that she was going to beat me with it. My list goes on. We all have our memories. We all have our favorites too, the ones that we ruminate on, the ones that burn with an inner light, that can somehow make dark thoughts disappear.

One such memory is of summer vacations spent at our grandparents’ house in Madras (We knew it as Madras then, and Madras it will be). Excitement would start about a week before annual exams, which would invariably translate to terrible performances – mom remembers an instance where I came out of the exam hall barely after fifteen minutes of entering it, stating that the Math paper was very easy. Thankfully, I passed. According to mom’s memory, I just about did. Curiously enough, I don’t have any recollection of that.

We would pack a whole lot of things. Two suitcases, a bedding roll, a food container with hot idlis and chutney, a big water can – opening the tap and drinking water in its white cup was one of our pet pastimes in the train. By the time the train rolled on to the platform, our hearts almost ached with happiness and excitement. There would be fights for the window seat, over who drank water in the white cup first; there would be persistent questions about which station came next and the inevitable burying of heads when the train passed the Changanasseri tunnel.

After being rocked to sleep by the slumbrous jolting of the coach, we would wake up to mom’s insistent “Look, Integral Coach Factory, this is where railway coaches are made.” We would watch the coaches lined outside in fascination and have bizarre imaginations of how they are made inside. I think we knew Integral Coach Factory was in Perambur even before we knew that the sun rose in the east.

Our uncle would be there at the station – the one closest to our hearts (the uncle, not the station – though as stations go, Madras would be the one closest to our hearts), the one who considered us almost his own. We savored the haggling he would do in Tamil with the taxi drivers and then we rode through the big city, through the narrow T-Nagar roads to our grandparents’ house.

It was not a big house, but there was excitement lurking in its every corner – raisins and rock candy (kalkandu) in one of the bottles hidden away in a cupboard, an eccentric hand pump in the front that produced water at odd times, a big well in the backyard, a soap dispenser with red liquid soap, old moth-eaten albums, a dressing table with our aunt’s (the one closest to our hearts again) nail polishes, a black and white TV (which was Utopian compared to our TV-less Kerala days) and Shobhana Ravi reading news (on whom a younger cousin of ours, then aged two, had a crush), and most importantly, a big wooden swing on the first floor balcony, on which one could swing one’s heart away. We would go for walks with our grandfather, wear flowers on our hair, climb up the steps in the backyard to watch the Vaigai Express pass (there were rail tracks behind the house), go for interminable steel vessel shopping with the elders, visit Moor Market (which has since burned down), spend an evening at Marina Beach, and have the holiday of a lifetime. Funnily enough, I don’t remember any journeys back home.

After several years of growing up, the summer holidays lost their charm. Times changed. Our priorities changed. Our grandfather sold the house to a friend on the condition that they will take good care of it. Houses – and promises – are easy to break. I later heard that an apartment building has come up on the plot where our grandparents' house stood. We all speak of it with a hard-to-hide pang. But land is scarce and emotional attachments are tricky things. We just made sure that our grandfather did not come to hear of it and moved on with our lives.

I have memories that can bring a smile though. Maybe that will suffice.

Dear Time.....

Somebody very close to me lost her father day before yesterday. She lived in a faraway city and could not reach on time. She tried but still reached too late.

I live far away too and this fear of inescapable calamities is gnawing at my heart. I want to strike a bargain with Time - totally delusional no doubt - but let dreamers dream and pathetic versifiers doodle away.

Dear Time

Do not race when lovers kiss
Let them have their moment’s bliss
Do not hustle and bustle
Let the leaves in the wind rustle

Do not hurry on a starry night
When a tired man sleeps so tight
But when there is a storm, never tarry
When there is a mishap, never harry

Dance away when I am lonesome
Run when I am sad and glum
But hang on when I am having fun
With my friends out in the sun

When I say “please,” You stop
Be it to read or sing or shop
And then when I say, “You may,”
You can get up and go your way.

And when my steps grow weary
Be at my side, all cheery
Then I will dance along with You
And sing the same song anew.

Sleeping Partners

She cuddles close to me with her right leg on my tummy and her right arm snaking its way around my neck. I adjust a little to make myself comfortable, but my nearly-four-year-old is a determined boa constrictor.

“Amma, read.” She demands.

“As soon as I take your hair out of my mouth,” I sputter.

She chews a little bit of my hair to give me company.

“Okay. Here goes.” I read from her favorite Critter book. She laughs through the antics of Critter’s little sister and states that little sisters are naughty. I do not comment. Nowadays, there are too many “little sister” moments and I do not want to add to those.

I close the book and look at her. I see a layer of sleep falling over her eyes, but as I turn to switch off the table lamp, she blinks and perks up again.

“Amma, paattu,” she cuddles closer. Her breath on my neck is like a warm hug.

I begin my nightly rendition of Harivarasanam tunelessly but carefully lest I confuse the wordings. She likes to correct me and is ever vigilant to spot my mistakes. As I sing the beautiful verses quite discordantly, the melody which can put even a god to sleep starts to work on my little one. Her eyelids close despite a protesting mind and she sleeps, or so I think. When I end the song all out of breath, I hear her mumble again. “Amma, another song.”

I sing Auld Lang Syne this time around, as tunelessly, to the only one in the whole world who can enjoy my singing, and sleep listening to it too.

She wants more songs, she is not asleep yet. She whispers to me that her birthday is on Tuesday. I shh-shh her and sings her favorite omanathingal kidavo. Some time during all this singing, M slips under the blanket too.

When we finally doze off to the faltering strains of Irayimman Thampi’s lullaby, I momentarily feel suffocated. I feel sectioned off. My daughter’s arm is around my neck and almost suffocates me, while M’s left arm is heavy on my breasts, claiming them his own. My extremely territorial little girl owns the flat of my stomach and refuses to budge her leg even in her sleep. And M is the undisputed claimant of anything below my waist and he proves it with his heavy left leg sprawled across my hips and thighs. I squirm a bit. I feel suddenly itchy. I need to scratch my back. I need to turn to my side. I need a drink of water. I need to breathe. I need my freedom. I sigh. Finally, I give in to the bliss of being so totally and irrevocably owned.

PS: My daughter will turn four this Tuesday, on August 26th. She will be a big girl. She has promised us she will sleep in her own room once she turns four. She will cuddle her Fluffy and Appu, and Piku, her favorite penguin, and go to sleep all by herself. We tell ourselves that we will make her keep her promise. I shudder inwardly. I am not sure whether I am ready to be disowned.

A bug-bite and an itch

A bug with an inclination towards gastronomic snacking seems to have bitten me. This might have happened during our otherwise rather uneventful return trip from the US. After coming back, there has been this persistent itch which I diagnosed as an overwhelming desire to cook and eat. As nagging as it was, I decided to do something about it.

Now, let me make a confession here. I am a bad cook. Or I should rephrase and say that I am an apathic cook. With a terribly limited culinary expertise, my lunches do not go beyond unpretentious rice and sambar and my dinners are limited to unyielding chappathis and potatoes. Although what I cook is reasonably tolerated by my family – who might have no other choice in the matter – there is not even an ounce of creativity that might add more variety to my meals.

Faced with such a handicap, I turned to my better, plumper half who professes to be a better cook, for a second opinion on whether I should pursue this new yearning of mine. He said he would support me through thick and thin, wins and losses, triumphs and disasters. And thus we started cooking.

The first one – a potato “bonda” – was a success beyond even my wildest imagination. The phone bill might bear the brunt of a painstaking tutorial from our mothers, but our congratulatory smiles were intact on our faces. M, who still cherishes a nostalgia for Bombay streets, got burger buns and made “vada paav.” We celebrated.

Our next attempt was a more ambitious fish cutlet. M took the reins this time, while I was relegated to making oval patties, which he criticized lavishly for their lack of evenness. The fish cutlets were excellent, and if I did not like tuna all that much, I did not bring the matter up. We rode the wave of success one more time.

Our next project was an even more complicated “murukku.” For one, the dough cannot be too hard or too soft. Two, the circular shape of the murukku is almost impossible to achieve with a cookie press that weighs a ton. Of course, the hard job of making the precise circular shapes went to my dexterous husband while I took on the less strenuous but equally sweaty job of frying them. The murukku came out well too. Three hits in a row.

Needless to say, our beginners’ luck was about to give way.

The next weekend was set apart for “uzhunnu vada” – medu vada or urad dal vada or black gram dal vada according to the language spoken. Heeding the warning that the dough should not be too runny, we set to work. Our mixer/blender has a disinclination to grind without water, and with the confidence of a veteran, I said we could add a modicum of water. And so, the water went in. The batter was smooth. I asked M to watch and learn while I wetted my hands, deftly took some batter on to my left hand, pressed a hole in the center and tried to put the dough ball into the hot oil. I knew something was wrong that instant. The dough, with a surprising doggedness, just clung to my hand, a gooey mess. M snickered. It was too runny, we deciphered. I had an immediate solution to it – add rice powder. We added and added, and added some more. Finally, the consistency was just right and I congratulated myself. We fried our vadas golden brown. And then we sat down to eat.

The vadas were, quite explicably, rock hard. I ate one, commented on the suspiciousness of the texture, while M, with more resoluteness, managed to eat about three or four. A little dent in our record, our spirits were undaunted still.

As providence would have it, M brought home a huge packet of cashew nuts last Friday. It struck our minds almost simultaneously that we could make “kaju katli.” With the groundwork completed, we set about measuring the ingredients and faced our first hurdle. Our measuring cup measured less exotic items such as rice and sugar and flour but not cashews. Mom had cautioned us against guessing. We should have listened.

The sugar syrup was our next hurdle. The instruction was to boil the sugar in water until we got a thread-like consistency. Thin or thick thread? M asked. I did not know. While the syrup boiled, M expounded on the hygroscopic quality of sugar and the existence of a Brix value that measured — well, something. He was just showing off. I said I will hurl a brick at him if he did not shut up.

The syrup boiled and boiled and had almost recrystallized by then. We tried mixing in the powdered cashew. It just became a lumpy mess. We should add more water, I impulsively decided and poured some. What was once lumpy now became watery. We quite predictably panicked. We added more cashew, more sugar, tripled the existing quantity – finally, when we realized that our kitchen was becoming unrecognizable in a deluge of powdered cashew and sugar, we gave up our salvage attempts. We decided to call it our very own cashew fudge. A fiasco of unmitigated proportions.

Our fudge is still inside our fridge waiting for reprieve. We still nibble at it now and then and console ourselves that it tastes good.

The bug-bite might finally be losing its itch.