My Funny Valentine

Image Source: Amazon

“Open your eyes. Right about now will be good.”

She felt the warning signals before she could entirely leave sleep behind. It was like her mind had been fleeing, cluttered and troubled as it would've been, before her body could arrest it with the ruse of caffeine. As soon as she woke up, without habitually drawing the curtains to usher the morning sun in, with some degree of comic agility, she went into the kitchen.

Her skin tightened as she took in the frosty sight. First, she hears her voice. Tall and trembling, it seemed as if it belonged to a stranger. “Is that what you want? “Cos I've been waiting to walk out that door!” Did she mean it? Then she heard his. A pleading, calm voice. A voice that in its evenness bore resemblance to reason. Well, until you heard the words that escaped his mouth. “Fuck the roses. Fuck Pre-valentine’s. You always wanted it this way, didn't you, you fuckin’ control freak.”

Broken shards of glass. Liberated, lone petals slow-dancing in the wind with glass crystals. Roses on the table, still perfectly wrapped in their smug prettiness. Aha, these silent roses. Aren't they a perfect weapon of mass destruction? He’d got them for her, holding them by his teeth. “Pre-valentine’s is it? Do you have any idea how much this hideous bouquet cost me? No, you don’t! Cos you think you’re entitled to them, especially on days when they’re selling at airline prices, don’t you my precious?” She briefly thinks of the alarming frequency with which she went for his face with them. “How many times have you lied to me, you lyin’ piece of shit?”

She broke into a chuckle. A startlingly self-assured, upside-down kind of giggle. Before she knew it, she was laughing so hard that she collapsed on the floor with one hand on her jiggling belly, her knees scraping through the jagged broken glass. She was oblivious to the pain, to the oozing blood. She continued sitting there in a kneeling position, very still, in a brown lace negligee that was falling out of her slouched shoulders. Her brain often sent her signals of levity under intense pressure — didn't her therapist call it fear-grinning — as a voluptuous, unstoppable giggle. One that got her into trouble at funerals or on stage when speaking about something as morbid as sexual predators at the workplace. And there she was now, pretending this whole situation is just really a giggle explosion and it’ll pass. How long should she laugh about it, not moving from that ridiculous prayer position, not addressing the bleed, not pulling up her negligee, and not feeling anything? She could very well be sitting right there eating canned beans or frozen pizzas without a care in the world.

“The good news is I don’t have to clear this mess,” she announced to an invisible audience. The kitchen floor now resembled a crime scene with intermingled spats of blood, roses and broken glass, all the no-brainers to a crime of passion in a deserted, untidy apartment.

Three nights ago, over coffee, her friend had brightly suggested the idea of them spending Pre-valentine’s together. A couples’ soiree at her house. Valentine’s Day could be their private thing then. A fetching idea.
The conniving whore! Oh, she’d been so blind. The stolen glances between them, the morning shower humming, the sudden cell phone secrecy, the inexplicably vacant conversations and mood swings…He was having an affair with her, you dim wit.

Of course, she was no saint either. But she still held a shred of sanctity to chain all her possible betrayals in her mind. Fantasies, possibilities….wasn't that what separated romance from reality? If at right this moment, her ex-lover was to walk in and hold her in his arms, planting her with soft, comforting kisses, whispering carelessly-soothing words, wouldn't she have fallen sloppily back in love with him? Even if he had, a really long time ago, in a badly-fused moment, broken her heart into tiny, crystallized pieces? Would time matter? Does the space between her and her ex, with whom she’s not had a single exchange of endearment, for a decade, still hold true? Time and space — aren't they just optical illusions?

But she had loved him then. And she loves her long-time husband now. A little less today probably. And as she walks out that door, she’ll have wavering indices of love reserved for either of them with each passing day, and maybe just like that, one day she’ll snap out of it for both.

She took one last, long breath, coming a full circle in that position, staggering to her feet. Her long yogic limbs were strong enough to pull her out of any misery. A wave of nostalgia. Last night, after a heated argument and a grislier scene on a battlefield of a bed, they lay side by side one last time, sharing smoke and flicking ash all over her brand new red-roses satin sheet. She pictured wafts of smoke from a moving train. She wondered where she would go next, what she would do for a living, how her days would inch forward…

Climbing out of her languid life, she reaches for her trench-coat on the stand. Suitcases, change of underwear, lipstick…they could wait. It was a wintry morning but she could see the beaming sun in the horizons. Dramatic much? She walked out of her house, giving one last, longing look to House № 57. As she averted her face towards the dawn, she saw him from a distance sitting outside on a sunny bench, evidently at the edge of a rough night. The last time she saw him, she wanted to strangle him. She picked a pebble from the ground and pelted it at him. He ducked, even though he was nowhere close to getting hurt. They smiled. He screamed from across the street, “Come on now. I know you want to kiss me. It’s Valentine’s.” Strangely audible words to My Funny Valentine rose above the noise of morning clatters and revving engines.

And she knew she had no choice but to kiss him one last time.

The Day When Secret Stashes and Green Zombies Rose From The Graves

The eve of 8th November 2016 was a memorable one. As residents of India, wherever we all were, whether at a raving party or sitting quietly tucked under a rock chanting our way to the non-material, there came a turbulent wave of anxiety (of a very material nature) that shook us to our cores. I was at a dance class at that very moment sitting with four other ladies when one of us announced, "Ladies, check your Whatasapp. What is this announcement that Modiji has just made?" I looked at her a bit puzzled. Why would I check my Whatsapp for a political announcement? Well, that goes to show the power of word of mouth. As social media isn't quite immune to hoaxes and uncalled-for, nation-wide pranks, we instead turned to our wider LED screens to confirm.

Our grim-faced prime minister emerged on screen, dead-serious and unapologetic.

"Brothers and Sisters,

To break the grip of corruption and black money, we have decided that the 500 rupee and 1,000 rupee currency notes presently in use will no longer be legal tender from midnight tonight, that is 8th November 2016. This means that these notes will not be acceptable for transactions from midnight onwards."

Demonetisation was something I had read about in my textbooks years ago, on a dreary afternoon in an uninspiring Economics class. Is this really happening? Right here, right now? Am I witnessing history being made so dramatically that the roaring sound of it could be heard in every drawing-room, at chai-wala tapris and stock market rooms alike.

It felt unreal in the beginning.

But slowly began dull murmurs between us. Hushed-up calls were being made, secret congregations were happening in dingy, isolated hide-outs... Everyone had emerged from their houses to queue up at ATMs. People had stopped thinking straight. While standing in the ATM queue, a man asked my husband if he would trade an obscene, undisclosed amount of money for half its legit amount. It was hard to tell from his face if he was serious or joking.

The last four days have seen the urgent rise of pink-faced zombies and money stashes that could build lost civilizations from six-feet under. Wherever I walked, I saw people being worn down by a celestial spirit, the likes of Betal, wearing strings of 500-1000 currency notes around his neck, asking them the one stumping puzzle, "What will you do now? Pray tell." It was a question far-reaching and far from righteousness, but riddling nevertheless.

What had remained a murky mystery till now was out in the open. And I'm not even talking about black money here. No, I'm not talking about an irrational sum of corrupt money stashed away to evade taxes.  I am talking about the hard-saved secret "tijori" of women that had been cleverly hidden in kitchen jars, saree folders, lingerie and many other unimaginable safe havens and lockers that were hitherto unknown. "My husband gives me an allowance every week. I don't have to spend all of it. So I've been saving. A lot.", one of my friends confided in me.

I, being a freelancer and having an irregular income, had also got in the habit of maintaining a secret stash. But fortunately for me,  I'm also an avid shopper and cannot resist new shoe leather and hardbound leather alike. Thank God for shopaholicism! I had only 500 Rs left in my secret wallet, which I've now laminated to show my future generations what shagun before 08/11/16 looked like.

If you had a sleepless night on 08/11, the morning of 09/11 brought its own domestic confusion and catastrophes. My maid walked in, panic-stricken and heaving, "Bhabhi aap log ne hi toh diya tha woh paisa. Ab humko jail jana padega kya?" [Bhabhi, you had tendered to me 500-1000 rupee notes for salary. Now would I have to go to jail for drawing salary in cash?] Apparently all the fearmongering through Whatsapp and their own circles had got them thinking they were criminals. I sat her down and explained to her the procedure for exchanging her real-life money- that was now about as valuable as fake Monopoly cash- for legitimate cash. She still looked restless. I gave her money to make it through the day.

But calming the f-down seemed a shore too far in a country where money was being flushed down the toilet and being used as fuel for bonfires.

It's been four days since the fear of God struck the country. People are washing their hands off capitalism and embracing socialism by taking to the streets to distribute money to the poor. And for once, you witness the beggars guarding their katoras and bargaining, saying that they will accept Rs. 10 with showers of blessings but not anything that even remotely looks like 500-1000 currency notes. "Humko bhi raat ko sona hota hai saab." [We too have to sleep at night Sir.]

09/11/16 - a day when justice was blanket-delivered, when corruption began to lose its far-reaching grip. But for kitty parties and domestic India, it was the day that the most popular adage went abruptly out of style  - "Nope. Don't save it for a rainy day. Not in kitchen jars, at least."

Image Courtesy - Quartz India

Your Love Is A Slow, Sweet Poison

Your love — it comes to me like a slow, sweet poison,
Creeping under my skin, latching itself to my bones — light, unseen,
Smoothing me with its luscious, bittersweet kiss of melancholia,
Ruffling me with liquid desire — the highs of first love, feverish and pristine.

Your love — it gives me away, bit by bit, unravelling the yarn of my existence.
Set to motion, my longings run asunder, from my soul to meet your body in midsummer.
Call you repeatedly. Kiss you in dark alleyways. What's to hold me back?
The air between us is made of fireflies, blazing with our locked lips, fulfilled then, now unremembered.

Your love— it is a potent drug; it has me living on the edge of reason,

And off your caresses, your tender words, your signatures on my body’s blank canvas.
It is a white onion, peeling away its stinging layers to reveal nothing but itself,
While undressing me slowly, stripping me of all that was mine, in a state of tingling otherness.

Your love — its first rain on me was an unexpected shower in midsummer.
The taste of it was everlasting, dripping like honey, unctuous to my quivering mouth.
It lay me gently on a bed of thorns, hooked on a feeling, wrapped up in my own arbitrary nothings.
Your love — it came to me like a slow, sweet poison; its perfume still clings to my fingers, to my black shroud.

Leaves Of A Fall

Photo Courtesy: Daddy Dearest

A balmy rustling within my cold heart.

The red and yellow leaves of a fall painting me in an undulating gloom,

flowering where once grew pink roses in full bloom.

We Have A Map Of The Piano

When it comes to music, I think all of us have a map in our hearts for plucking the songs that speak to us and the ones we send back into planet oblivion. For some people, it’s about the bass or the guitar strings that make the heartbeat of the song. Others look for the help of words to define the soundtrack to whatever marks the theme of their lives — the rush of new love or heartbreak, prosperity or decline, melancholy or exhilaration, death or life. Music sometimes finds its way to trace our roots, our lineage, our individuality and sometimes it is just a bump on a long road to getting to our identity — as something we’d never confess in public to have liked. (Grand Confession: I am still rooting for Dido’s come-back.)

And yet, when I think of what defines my carefully-curated, indispensable playlist , one that I've been listening to for what seems like an eternity, I'm stumped. There was a time when I ditched it for months at a stretch, living off borrowed music from my husband and friends, well until I heard something as shadowy as Muse’s Starlight play in a cafe at sunset which made me go, “Wow…I do miss my playlist.” My collection of music is eclectic, mostly R&B, indie, Sufi songs, electronic and alternative rock. These songs have been transferred from desktops to laptops to phone memory, synced to death… Jogging without my playlist is an ordeal, an uphill climb.

As an experiment, I decided to go without it for a while, opening my ears to new artists, unexplored roads and shoreless depths of sounds and moods. As a result, I watched my playlist grow and expand, ushering in new artists I’d never heard before like Arctic Monkeys, Interpol, Sona Mohapatra, Gurdas Maan…

But it goes without saying that my old playlist had already grown on me and could not be done away with.

Regardless of what’s mainstream or crowd-pulling, we all go through our own evolution in music. There are your all-time go-to jams and there is that music we grow out of — you know the kind you played to insanity in the backdrop of Math sessions and midnight conversations and that, perhaps, are definitive of a phase that you've let go. There is that music that profiles you. “Babe, don’t mind me saying this but your songs…they’re just so angry! Are you going through something?” Then, there are songs that you hate just cos you’re forced to listen to them with family and friends and every time you hear them, you wince a little. (I don’t think I can ever hear a Boney M song without pulling a face.) And then let’s not forget there are those songs and artists that you ignored on principle. But you end up accidentally hearing them on the radio and you can’t help but sing them in the shower, being sucked into the quicksand of their rage and popularity. [ “Is it too late now to say sorry?”]

I like the idea of having a constant playlist — of course it’s one that I’d never play at a party or in any gathering, for I know nobody would understand it. These songs probably didn't enjoy the same glory that songs today attract. Playlists today have a shorter shelf-life I think. If you get to hear that one song fresh out of the studio, chances are that you’ll join the millions of people screaming from the rooftops about it, share videos on social media… They’ll make for water-cooler conversations. They’ll pass through several filters, including the most-popular feminist filter, before it gets ingrained into pop culture. You’ll hear that one song in everybody’s playlist along with the noise surrounding it, until everyone tires of it and it vanishes altogether to be replaced by another scintillating chart buster.

My playlist, however, is in a fairly equitable ratio of greatest hits and obscure songs, equal parts hippy-happy and permission-to-bawl-your-eyes-out gloomy. I have no clue how I arrived at it and from where I hand-picked these songs. Maybe I didn't pick these songs after all. Their ratings picked it. Maybe, I hopped from one artist to the other with Amazon’s “You may also like….”. It’s also possible that I added some songs that I heard on my favourite shows as a way to retain their best moments with me. (Case in point: Grey’s Anatomy, One Tree Hill.) Perhaps I read a reference to a song in a novel and wanted to listen to it and it just stuck. Maybe, one day, I was on my way back home waiting in the bus-shelter for the rain to stop when a cute guy came by, smiled at me, and stood close enough for me to vaguely make out the words of the song playing on his Ipod. And it became a part of my playlist. It may as well have been made up of some of those songs that got circulated at the office. (Did someone say American Pie?)

There is no way of knowing what really makes up our playlists. But the taste of it, perhaps in all its nostalgia, is so sweet that there’s no running away from it. I may ignore them for a while in a ruse to class up my taste in music, to find the same rush and familiarity in new artists, but every time I come back to it, I fall in love all over again.

It goes without saying that we all have a map of the piano and nobody can take it away from us.

Do you update your playlist occasionally? Or do you take comfort in listening to the same songs over and over again? Can you figure out which songs make you tick instantly? I'd love to hear from you, readers.

Dear Diary - Where Have You Gone?

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea cozy.” 

With these first words of my favourite novel, I Capture the Castle, unlike any first words that I’d previously read — well, I should say at the time I read mostly heavy classics — I found a brand new meaning to literature. I stumbled upon it pretty late though. I guess most people I know had read it in their teens but I devoured it as an adult on my bus journeys to my third job at a corporate IT giant of a firm. I read it every morning. And then before bedtime. And then again with breakfast. It was an unstoppable urge to go back to Cassandra’s private journal with her whispering by your side, pouring her heart out in witty observations about her peculiar family but shrewdly reserving her own feelings to herself. Cassandra, the protagonist of the book, comes of age in this medium through her extraordinarily real, matter-of-fact voice. She brings beauty through her blithe words to mostly decrepit, decayed surroundings. And poverty. The novel is achingly poignant. It gives you a sense of the romance that is to unfold — and to get complex —  with the narrator falling deep into the thick of things by getting her own feelings intertwined in unrequited love.

It was something about the way Dodie Smith threw together a conventional story shuffled in bits of Cassandra’s written journal and her narration that gave it such an endearing appeal for me. Reading I Capture the Castle renewed a sporadic, heavily-inspired relationship with writing. Back then, I was not in the least pressed with work and I thought it’d be a good way to explore my own voice by keeping a journal. If nothing of consequence happened during the day, as is the norm with people in nine-to-five jobs, I’d sit outside, a small girl in the open, vast campus of Infosys and write my reflections on strangers —  characterizing maybe a bit too artificially their restrained smiles, grey suits and forced conversations. Going through my old journal now, ten years later, gives me the sense that I'm trespassing. Reading somebody else’s voice. Somebody who badly needs — how do I put it delicately — a chill pill. I get the sense that my cynicism, my cruel generalizations, my rushed-up feelings of false despair with humanity were meant for an audience. “What am I doing here? In this well of grey shirts casting a dark shadow on blank faces”, read my journal on a mid-March afternoon. I can only assume that I wrote these patchy, vague sentences to add a touch of poeticism but here’s the bummer. They didn't give me any insight on my life. They seemed to me scraps of writing borrowed from Ayn Rand, Franz Kafka, Kate Chopin and Emily Bronte but for the life of me, I couldn't place any fitting tragedies or massive heartbreaks at the time that would cause such a stir in feelings.

It kind of brings me right to the start. When I was a teen, I had one of those cute, pink electronic journals with icons and word limits. The idea was merely to summarize the occurrences of a day in sparse words and move forward to the next. For that reason, reading it later would probably be like wandering through a cryptic maze. I had to name-code everything — my crush at the time, close friends, arch enemies… I recall coming home and diving straight into it with a cup of tea and french fries, typing furiously 500 well-meaning characters, cataloguing my dog days almost as enthusiastically as my eventful ones. I kept it hidden for the longest time and when I moved back to India, it got shuffled among other life-altering possessions so it got left behind. I was all nerves for the longest time. What if someone read it? What if they figured out who my crush was and told him how psychotic I was to go on and on about his glasses and faded blue jeans? Well, I'm sure on reading it now, it wouldn't be half as scandalous as I made it out to be then. In fact, there’s a good chance that it’d seem trivial with its half-hearted Haiku of birds on window perches or dull rainy days or war logs with acne. It was a huge loss nevertheless for it seems to me that it has eroded away that significant period of adolescence, which unfortunately, can now only be salvaged in sudden bursts of memories.

I sometimes wonder what made me keep a diary then and what’s stopping me from keeping one now? It’d be great to start one today as it’ll exercise my writing muscles better. But it seems like such a redundant occupation. A bad investment of time. I mean I have a blog. Why would I pour myself out on pages that are not meant for a wide audience, right? In times when everything from no make-up selfies to reclusive vacation mornings are meant for wide screening, what purpose would a modest diary with a lock serve? Do I write it with half an eye on future prospects or do I share excerpts from it as I go along?

The beauty of keeping a diary seems lost on me today. Probably, it just seems like too much effort with other literary ambitions emerging to take their stake on my time. Even if I keep one, I think it’s going to be incredibly hard to write one without visualizing an imaginary audience for it in the future. Barring my teen diary that I have little reflection of, I think I've always written for someone — life lessons for the next gen, love letters to my future spouse, career advice for people in large firms, menstrual sanity guidelines for working women…

Even so, in the months to come, I'm going to take on the more complicated experiment of writing for nobody but myself. I am going to write one as a way of arresting memories, instead of resorting to photographs that seem far too posy to speak to me. I am going to write one as a way of finding myself. I am going to write a diary to the point of futility about observations to life as it happens. Hopefully, I’ll learn to tune out of myself and capture the colour of rain on cobbled lanes instead or document every little innocent remark my daughter and her friends make, like the time she told me how I should order food at a restaurant. (“Mommy, if it had a face, don’t eat it.”)

“Dear Diary, I don’t know what happened there. But I'm going to make up for lost time.”

Did you keep a diary as a teen? Do you think of your blog as a diary? I'd love to hear from you, readers.

Coming Up For Birthday Notes - From Beyond the Thirties

Believe it or not, I'm not big on birthdays. Sure, I may exaggeratedly start building up to the big day, like a week or two prior, detailing out every little thing from the logistics of midnight surprise cakes to soiree moods. But on the day itself, I'm a total buzzkill.

Oddly enough, I find myself dwelling more on the what-ifs than the what-is. With each passing year, I make fervent resolutions to get going and catch up with the race of life, only to be repeatedly assured by loved ones that life is happening right now, in the moment. And since that sounds straight out of a Deepak Chopra non-fiction and seems really, really far away from the realities of my chaotic mind, I never quite got to fully appreciate what that means.

Coming back to birthdays. My birthdays as a grown-up, as everybody else's perhaps, have been about carefully-curated surprises, a home deluged in gift wrappers and flying pollen with the day gone by in the company of loved ones and in attending phone calls from the rest of the loved ones. As time goes by, some phone calls fade into oblivion, some are replaced by social media texts and a lot of them come as welcome additions from new members to the boisterous circle of family and friends.

As fun as my grown-up birthdays are, I can't help thinking of a time when I could happily dive straight into the white and brown mess of a cake with my tiny mouth and blatantly lick the extra cream off the cake box. While now, it's maybe a guilty, lone slice or two, savoured and swallowed with violent promises of an additional 3 km brisk walk annexed to my fitness repertoire. I think of the time when unravelling birthday gifts, ripping apart bright and cheerful gift wrappers, were an after-party ritual by themselves. The surprise element was so crucial to that ceremony! And now, it's about hoping that our not-so-subtle hints have been successfully decoded. Or let's just skip the gift-wrapping part. We'll save paper. Take me birthday shopping beforehand, will you hubby dearest? Hahaha.  I reminisce the time when birthday pictures were ill-timed, out-of-focus, random and blurry. And now, they are posey, air-brushed and staged for the benefit of everyone.

I should say that, as much as I was prepared for this evolution of birthday as a grown-up, there were some things about this birthday that I had not anticipated - that just took my breath away. You see, I don't quite recall a birthday where I was swept off by the feverish excitement of a four-year old girl who let me in on all the juicy details of the big birthday surprise she'd been planning for me. I don't recall lending my helping hand in wrapping MY birthday gift only to hear her whisper in my ears, "Shhhh, it's going to be a secret surprise." I don't quite remember a birthday morning that started with someone casually walking in on me in the toilet with a proud grin across her face holding an awkwardly wrapped newspaper across a book that was lying in the depths of my bookshelf. While I continued to perform my private morning ritual. I can't place the time when a little girl in her high-pitched voice kept yelling "Surprise!" every ten minutes during the day, staging how my birthday cake is to be kept and how many candles I'm going to blow and going through every clichéd proceeding of a birthday, re-packaged in a whole new bottle of energy and enthusiasm. I don't remember seeing a four-year old finding more joy to freshly-baked home cakes than shop-bought , baked-to-perfection masterpieces. I don't think I had a birthday that involved making art on paper while waiting on our orders in a fancy restaurant setting , random uninvited bursts of dancing on the restaurant floor and playing hide-and-seek in party clothes, making the most of blue ambient lights.

And I don't remember a birthday ringing in with so much unadulterated joy and sweetness, at least in the last ten years. Well, beyond that, my memory fails me :P.

Nope, still not ringing a bell.

Surprise!

Do you have a favourite birthday? I'd love to hear about it.

City Girl

I sat by my window sill, in the quiet humdrum of a busy day, to the constant noise of cars, buses, motorcycles - their blaring sirens, their screeching tyres. Restrained stares greet each other.
A million dreams and aspirations whir by a narrow street in an organized madness, trying to make it through the mist of strangers to their higher purpose.
I looked on from a vantage point and wondered to myself, "The city takes so much from you everyday. To find meaning to your life here can be a fatal thing."
Faceless crowds pushing and shoving you into rapid movement when all you want to do is slow down and catch your breath.
Empty eyes in untold time follow you off-handedly until they lose sight of you in the blinding beat of the jarring city anthem.

I vividly remember walking along the streets of this city in the afternoon, as a new city girl.
Signs telling me where to turn, where to look, when to stop...
"I don't think I know how to get home." I feel the restless hustling but I don't quite know where to go.
At every turn, the city got bigger; all I carried within me is a tiny, microcosmic world of my own, a small speck in its jutting vastness.
The only thing binding me to it was the interwoven sunlight on my street, the corner Alphonso vendor and....
Ah! Just then I saw you from a distance wearing your usual flashing smile when you look at me — me, a tiny girl in her grungy tee and spacey eyes.
Almost immediately, I remember feeling hope — of knowing that I had just made it somehow.
Of course, you were just suspended on a loud billboard, coated in dirt, slowly being washed away.

Every time I step out in the city, I am flushed. I feel exposed. My rhythm is broken. My voice is muddled with anxiety. I don't want to leave home.
But for all you know, just once in a while, this city pursues you. Perhaps when you're in a rickshaw and you stop at the red-light signal long enough, let's say around twilight, and the city becomes your muse. 

I peered out of the rickshaw and saw little faces, breathing in the musty air, looking down from their matchbox houses.
Drafts of their evening cardamom chai-scented breeze reach out to me.
Homeless children sell balloons — they criss-cross through cars caught in a signal, moving from bumper to bumper. I follow the trail of animated balloons crowding into one another, grinning down at me from a distance.
Lovers leaned into each other in a side-walk, bright-red petals from broken flowers cling to asphalt, the smell of wet concrete in the air.
Stray dogs scavenge near garbage bins. Birds fleet home. Pedestrians rushing past the traffic, which was beginning to inch forward, let out fire with their protesting mouths, igniting a trail of city lights.

In the city, beauty lies in the ordinary, in the everyday.
I know nothing of wilderness and lush green fields. I know only of sparse trees decorating the city landscape.
I am not familiar with clear open skies and starry nights, fireflies lighting the path to constellations.  I am familiar with the dark depths of the ocean surmounted by hope springing up in the horizon as sky palaces reach for the stars.
I am at ease in the harsh anonymity of my existence in the big, bad city. I'm wary of friendly neighbours showing up at my door with casseroles and getting free baked goods at the local bread shop.
I  am  a  city  girl. I sit by my window pane, looking at life scrambling at every corner of this cramped urban jungle and I just know that this is my home — this is where I belong.

We're Not Moving...Yet Again (And Why I Think I May Be A Cat)

The month of May is especially a promising one for my family. It's one that hurls in a lot of changes in our vanilla existence, in terms of vacations, family bonding, foreign travels, exotic soirees, you know the works of social media prosperity. But there's one seemingly annoying upheaval that we find ourselves dealing with as we approach May. No, I'm not hinting at wedding anniversaries or the idea of being an old-er married couple. Anniversaries packaged in a travel diary are indeed one of my favourite things. To be able to see each other without gunky pores and crazy hair, in a brand new context, in a cleaner aura, is probably why marriage takes an exciting turn for us this time of year (well, at least for me).

May, as it happens, is also moving time, the biggest and baddest of beasts. The year-long lease for our apartment in Mumbai expires in May. We get an awkward yearly visit from our landlady who probably, for the life of her, cannot understand why we choose to stay on year after year in an apartment, which has been slowly crumbling into a shamble. It all started when my stiff-lipped, compact, two-bedroom house also added to its repertoire, inartistic clouds of seepage on the ceiling in various places. The grim clouds of peeling cement loomed over us as if hissing "It's time to let go." And in case I forgot to look up and cringe at the horror of it all, I was showered with some rather ill-timed concrete droppings on my freshly-shampooed hair every now and then. So, except for the lovely cross-ventilation that makes you feel you're standing on top of a cliff, there's no reason to continue living in this house really.

Nevertheless, we sort of developed a pattern of moving away from house-moving in five easy steps.

I. First was a step towards a new house, a fresh start. We start by loathing everything about our current situation - the damp patches, the over-crowded rooms, the lack of storage spaces... Add to that a visit from Liz the lizard every now and then and I was ready to move in with my neighbours that very moment.

II. The second step was proactive measures to look for a house. Telling brokers, friends, gatekeepers, Saanvi's four-year old friends, the lady with cats who looked like she could swing a knife at us, to intimate us about a "prosperous" house that we can potentially move into.

III. The third step was making it official. Telling everyone we know, including our house help (you know, to save her from the inconvenience of turning up one day and figuring out that we've moved to a new location) that we are indeed moving out. Soonish.

IV. The fourth step was the first giant step back. It was like a sudden infatuation  - you know the temporal state of falling irrevocably in love with someone and realizing no other person, however well he/she orders his/her wine, is good enough. So either the other prospective houses were not high-rise enough or the direction wasn't right or they came with their own set of baggages or absurd statutes.

V. The fifth one, the one that got us to renew our lease with the "I couldn't give a shit either way"  landlady, was a combination of nostalgia and well, the fact that moving is a huge pain in the you-know-what.

And so we renewed the lease to our apartment yet again. 

And as wise and insightful that decision may have been, it also woke me up to an alarming discovery.

Oh my god, there's a teeny-tiny possibility that I'm a freakin' cat! Sidenote: I hate cats.

OK, I realize this is going a bit off-track. I don't mean it like "Hey I'm a cat trapped in a human body and I'm going to get fake whiskers and oh, I'm also going to start meowing and purring." You see, staying away from home for almost a month made me really think about why I may have strong feline traits. Even though I still strongly maintain that cats are manipulative jerks. (And I think I'm still miles away from level 'pure evil'.)

Here's the thing. I hate moving. Sure I could be lazy. But I'm pretty territorial. So even in my house, I have my very own Sheldon spot. It's this corner with floor cushions that gets fresh monsoon breeze and has got a lil side-rest and a wide view of Saanvi's playroom positioned in such an angle that I can see what she's up to from an askance glance while watching TV.

And here are a couple of other reasons why I may be a cat (If you're still reading):

 A. I have mood swings (Like really dopey ones)

Yea, one minute I'm in so much love with you that I'm following you around everywhere, even on Instagram...The other minute, I want to literally tear you apart (or shave your head). I can't explain it. And from what I gather (from Garfield and friends with cat pets), you don't want to rub 'em the wrong way. Unless, you want some voodoo glances thrown your way with under-the-breath chants, "Die...just die!"

B. I am lazy (Du-uhh)

I mean sure, I am managing to run a house and stopping my baby from jumping out of my high-rise apartment and feeding my family four-square meals. And let's not forget, I am still writing. But I need naps to get through my day. Ask me to sacrifice one and you know, you're headed back to dealing with A. Yea, at least five days of the week are about hitting the snooze button and curling up in a ball with my tail between my legs. Figuratively. 

C. I like being pampered and doted over unnecessarily

Yea, sure I find the "beholden to nobody.", "I can get the door myself, thank you" ideal very inspiring and I am still striving to be that kind of woman in real life. (Must learn driving.) But I like it when someone offers to carry heavy things for me. I live for breakfasts in bed. I love people washing my hair for me or getting a back rub from my man. And from what I hear, cats need a lifetime of belly rubs and vain fussing-over and even then they'd look like you had the entire slice of chocolate mud cake in front of them without offering them a bite.

D. I am a wallflower

I am a cat married to a dog. My husband lights up at having company (even though he has obnoxiously high/weird standards.) Dogs are sociable, right? I mean if you throw them a ball, they'd throw it right back at you and nudge you to go on. They'd stick their tongues out in roaring laughter. They'd circulate at parties, sharing tried-and-tested dog humor and cool one-liner comebacks that gets everyone cheering them wildly. Cats? Not so much. You'd find them sitting in a corner at a party with someone safe...probably another cat. When cats like you and they wanna say they miss you when you're gone, they'd probably pretend nothing's changed when you get back. Or show you an awful temper. What they're not likely to do is throw you a surprise party.

And I totally get that.

So, to conclude, we're not moving. And from my self-psychiatric analysis, it looks like while I call myself a dog person, I am a cat. A self-loathing one moreover.

I have to say it is not looking very promising.

Image Source:

Gemma Correll Illustrations

Andertoons

Tender Is The Night In Its Mysterious Pallor

It’s under the mysterious pallor of the moon that she comes alive,
When she lies in her bed carelessly, her legs suspended on her bedside window sill, as though to feel fragments of calming moonlight through her toes in her semi-charmed body,
When the savagery of words fades and all that she can hear is the voice of her soul, comforting her like a living hymn,
When she shuts her eye to the vivid details of the turmoil without, of her half-consumed grief, of her caged dreams, trapped in another’s world.

It’s under the mysterious pallor of the moon that she is untouched,
In her own neverland where her bare stomach breathes, her arms stretching on for eternity, her blooming body hers — and hers only.
She looks at herself in her wardrobe mirror; all she wants to do is wrap herself in a flimsy cloak,
Of rainbow colours and marshmallow embellishments; a failed attempt perhaps, to seize her slipping childhood in the confines of her nightly solitude.

It’s under the mysterious pallor of the moon that she is lost,
Naked as she came, resting in anonymity, stripped of her gender, color, religion, caste and class.
Oblivious to the unmatched, brutal labels the world gave her on saying ‘No’ — cunt, tease, slut, prude, narcissist, bitch, humorless, crude, brazen.
In the violet-blue veil of night, she need not avert her face to ignore the piercing eyes of the world, telling her that she has no right to her body, that it has already been contaminated no matter how much she tries to hide it.

It’s under the mysterious pallor of the moon that she is found,
Dancing to the tunes of her love ballads, swaying covetously with her hands up in the air,
Sometimes stopping, sitting, staring at her invisible wings, like a fallen angel.
Her will by moonlight wears the fluid fabric to her soul, clinging to her voice; a stark contrast to how it responds to her in daylight — frigid, limp, contorting and bending to the force of others.

And with the moonlight gone and the soft golden rays ushering in the dawn, to her what feels like a black glowering stare,
She rises reluctantly to the slow beatings of her purple heart, as a struggle against being drowned.
The day to her is the sea in tempestuous, tidal forces coming to rob her greedily of her physical manifesto, demanding her silence, illuminating all her fresh and fading scar lines — a one-way street to being a woman... never to be a child again.
Of course all she cares for is moonlight, where she is safe within her monastery of solitude — like a velvety lake, shimmering and still.

The Line of Beauty - In Between Waking Up and Stepping Out The Door

Half Make-up Face

I've reached a point in my life where looking at the mirror is just Step 1 of doctoring my best artificial self that make-up can buy. I can't really trace the beginning of it but it's sort of ebbing its way slowly into everything that I can touch my hands upon. Like this morning, as I was getting my daughter Saanvi ready for school, I noticed a prominent red rash on her left cheek. It itched my senses to see my little girl, with her flawless child-like vibrance, to be sporting something as nasty as a huge blotch on her cheek. But the first visual that crossed my mind wasn't really a Sherlock-like mental timeline to backtrack to its source (as with most mommies), but visual flashcards of tools in my make-up kit that'd come in handy to conceal it. I stood there debating if it's too early to dab some wholesome foundation on her pink cheek and then it struck me.

I have turned into a make-up junkie...an f-ing Kardashian so to speak. (Ahem, minus the fan following ofcourse.)

I guess it must've started in college. You see, I have pale complexion and sad eyes. I needed a better college face. In my quest for the perfect outer-world face, over the years, I have devised a morning routine that'll get me through the day without hearing the words, "Oh, are you not well?" "Are you depressed? Your eyes... they're doing that thing." or "OMG, did a cat scratch your head?" This magic routine, although not as hard-hitting on time, takes a bunch of hand-picked products and gadgets. Needless to say, even if one of them is missing, like them dominoes, it all comes crumbling down and I just know I'm heading for disaster. I can recount at least three vacation memories which, although very much intended for a state of nirvana, started with a spike in heart rate and anxiety levels, cos I realized that I don't have my make-up primer or the multi-plug extension cord to my blow dryer. (Read agony aunt.) 

My outer-world face is fairly predictable, like a uniform. I almost never look like I got a make-over (cos they scare the jeepers out of me). Sometimes, you'll see a pretty good crimson pout. On really good days, you'd see no kohl, hair worn off my face, earrings and dewy skin. And on really crappy days, an awful attempt at a winged eye-liner (picture my left eye chasing my right) or a nasty blotch of green all over my eyelids with a trampy lipstick. I mean if you ever look at me and feel tempted to ask me if my four-year old did my make-up for me, take my word for it. DON'T.

Elizabeth Taylor once said, "Pour yourself a drink, put on some lipstick, and throw yourself together." She got that right. Make-up to a woman (well, most women) is therapeutic. For me, the ritual of make-up is what I like to call my me-time, just some good ol' quality time getting my game face on and zoning out of the everyday grinds of an ordinary mum's life. For starters, it's an escape route.  Remember this? You're having a couples' night and you're not really having the wildest of fun, listening to the men go on and on excitedly about "the game". Et voila! One of your other girl friends, a freakin' mind-reader, goes, "I gotta go to the ladies room." And you say, rather too quickly, "Oh, I'll come with! Need to brush my hair." And the men at the table exchange these looks, smirking to themselves, "Oh, there goes an hour unexplained. We'll call you when the food gets here." And one of them makes this casual remark, "You know, you don't need to look pretty for us!" They don't get it. But that remark — it gets you really peeved for some reason. It makes you wonder, "Do I really wear make-up to get the attention of my man, to be noticed, to get first dibs at cocktails from the bartender in a crowd, in other words, to have it my way? Or do I wear make-up to put myself out there among the sea of beautiful young women, unknowingly batting their eyelashes in conformity with vague beauty standards that even a teenage Beauty Youtuber would demonstrate with her shiny, happy Disney beauty box?

I'm not even going to pretend that all those allegations are not partially true for me but mostly, I wear make-up to play with all the possibilities that, at least on the surface, my face can offer. Cos while I find it very hard not to be cynical most of the times, at least my face can help brighten things up for me. And I need not reiterate that it is a super-fun ritual. It has even lowered its mystical quotient, so that an otherwise klutzy woman like me, who cannot sit still for an eye-liner, can now draw a perfectly curvy line on her eyelids. Make-up is for everyone. Or so it seems. Even if you thought you could just go #iwokeuplikethis or #nomakeup on Instagram, there'd be at least two products/hacks you'd be thinking of exploring before you can dare to show your raw, carefully-curated, au naturel self to the world. 

But there are times, especially when you're sitting in a circle playing that self-introspective game, "If you could take only three things to a remote island, what would they be?", you have to ask yourself, "Can I live without making myself up? Can I bloody walk out that door, reacquainting myself to my bare skin in sunlight without having to feel naked? Can I revel in my dishevelled curls, small mouth, pools of under-eye darkness and all the tiny imperfections that make me who I am? Sure, maybe in a post-apocalyptic world, I could get used to the idea. Or when I'm lying down on the beach feeling one with nature, when a waterproof eyeliner just seems a bit much. (Then again, one of those aqua-coloured lines on the lower lids would look very zen-like.)

Nevertheless, I want to be able to teach my daughter, who's also a keen spectator of the art of face-painting, that it is important to accept who you are for every little detail that makes you YOU . I want to be able to teach her about the delicate balance between caring too much and not caring at all. Not sure if I can set a shining example though as I still struggle to come to terms with my real face. Maybe, getting to my mid-thirties, I also wear make-up as a war-paint against time, to be seen as I am, and not by the flaws that would take some wincing when seen on a reflective surface in bright lights. Maybe I wear it to save time from all the faux soul-searching with my mirror reflection, ones that start with, "Well, sure you've lost your natural twenties luminous skin. But look at what you've gained in wisdom."( Don't you hate wisdom?)

I hope one day I can show her, through example, that a face untethered from such worries is usually the most distinct, most breathable, most gleaming. And what we should really be after is finding comfort in our own skin before we go finding 5 dupes for Priyanka Chopra's Oscar lipstick.

And I hope one day, I wake up to that piece of wisdom and take it with me as I step out the door. I can only imagine how liberating that would be.


"If you could take only three things to a remote island, what would they be?"

Have you given this a thought? I'd love to hear from you in your comments...

Winds of Past On the Subway

Image Source: Columbia.edu

She was getting by with just another start of day, assembling small pieces of a busy Monday in her mind, craning her head for the train in impatience.

She’s blinded by the gusting sea of people around, her olfactory sense, as usual, tormented by intermingled odours of sweat, greasy food and cologne.

And right then, from across the subway, she saw him, an old love, spring up from a corner of the concrete jungle, like an unexpected bloom in the midst of an autumn grey and gloom.

At first, she could hardly contain her vision. Is he for real? Is her past, seemingly bleeding into her longing to escape another day of dull prospects, illuminating a long-deserted road?

She looked at him again. All the details….His long black coat that seems oddly familiar, his insipid eyes that lit up at the slightest provocation, his anatomy narrating the passage of time in his evidently larger frame.

It’s as if she couldn’t look away. Far and farther, yet here they were, standing under the same blanketing dispersion of fluorescent. She drinks him in … in his becoming flecks of grey, in his receding hairline, in his frustration of getting somewhere, in his cascading bursts of smoky autumn breath.

And in that very moment, he looks at her, casually in a travelling glance. He looks away. But a blow of nostalgia strikes across his face and his eyes find her again in a raging agony of reconnaissance.

Their eyes meet and hold each other there. Twelve feet away. Strangers pass by in a blur.

The corners of his eyes wrinkle up to seat a warm, half-moon smile. He waves at her. He calls her name.

But she is frozen, unable to close that distance in time. Her mind is teetering to look past this moment into sweet oblivion or to amble through lanes of her past in search of him.

Just then, a wind sweeps across her face…ruffling all her unruly hair to veil her eyes. The train passes by snorting noisily in her ears, a yelping plee to awaken her. To feel this moment.

In its cacophonous haze, she stands there, transfixed by him.

And carried away in a wind of time, she recalls his soothing touch. His ode to her beauty. His careless whispers. Fast Car playing in the background. Drives in the twilight. Walks on a stranded road. Late-night calls that run through the fresh of dawn. Call-waiting. Waiting.
Sharp pangs of isolation. Of indifference. Of belittling words. Of hurried apologies. Of broken promises. Of peachy lies.

She tries to feel him in this moment as she felt him what seemed to her a lifetime ago. There’s a low stirring in her soul, a restlessness to get some place else.The train is now tugging slowly, as its motors brace to come to a stop next to her. Hurried passengers jostle against her in infuriation, in vain attempt to thrust her into motion.

And yet they stand still, in no man’s land, with no intention of closing the distance or going anywhere else. Words fail to fill up a trivial discourse. She looks at him; he’s locked out of the empress of her heart, long-hardened to his ways — a heart that was once all his. She is filled with an inexplicable terror of how vulnerable she used to be to his orchestrated manipulations.

The train pulls to a stop.

For a brief moment, the space between them is shrunken small as the passengers empty the subway to embark on their mundane life expeditions.

The lull of that moment fills her with an anguish of silence withheld for years. She’s standing on the edge. She can’t see the ground below.

And finally she awakens. She catches her breath as she amps up her feet, in backward motion, with a rising urge to break free. She sprints away from him, running as fast as she can; so fast that she sets the path between them ablaze. Tears stream down her face but she runs headlong through her daze.

Is she running away from him? Is she running towards a new dawn? Is she setting herself free?

I cannot say.

Into the Light... A Trail of Shadows Behind

"For better or for worse, till {cough} do us part."

Image Reference: The Book Thief (www.filmequals.com)

Pardon me? I missed the word after "till". You know that dreary, 'one-that-should-not-be-talked-about' D-word or [Insert Favourite Euphemism]. The part about [clears throat] death. You'd say that's a pretty morbid note to begin my blog with, since I'm meeting you after a long hiatus and considering this is technically, my first post in 2016. But something happened in the near family recently that drew me to this seemingly impassable, by-invite-only, eerie-looking door and my dread of mortality.

I first encountered Death as a soft-cushioned blow when I was nine years old. My grandma passed away, a woman who seems very shadowy now, but whose regal air and booming voice I can vaguely recollect, like a fading apparition. I really can't tell you how I dealt with her not being there on her armchair everyday. I am sure I must've got ghosted by her once in a blue moon. I don't recall if I hung on to any of her relics as a way of keeping her home. Her sudden disappearance into the shadows — it must've been quizzical but unfortunately, I don't remember anything about it.

But death went about its business and four years later, when we were sleeping, it came back for my mother. I remember being woken up to the sound of my loud breathing above my dad's anxious voice, as if somehow I had already felt its presence. I remember a ringing sound in my ears, like when an air plane dips in altitude all of a sudden. And I remember incomprehension. The haze of incomprehension lasted for months. We'd go out to play with our friends and come back and realize that someone irreplaceable is missing. We'd eat food without really tasting it — sometimes we'd complain out of habit but it didn't really matter. We were always huddled up in a group of friends and family who threatened to give us warm hugs and kisses for every little incident that reminded us of our mum. And yet there was a thick blackness within - through which the soothing, consoling words failed to seep through, one that made us feel lonely like never before.

I have felt the pervasive, all-consuming experience of bereavement more times in my close family than I thought I could take and every time, it took a piece of me to an alien land. To the stars, to another dimension, to another life form, to dreams - anything that promises a connection between the living and the dead. I lost my brother at a young age to malaria. We, as his family, and his close friends fell in a crumble of despair and agony at the invincible shock of it. I saw us rise from the ashes only to become a little distant, each one of us lost in his/her own unrequited longing for closure, for the finality of knowing that he's not here with us any more, of knowing that just like that, one day, against all odds, he's fallen out of life.

Every time I look at someone who's experienced loss recently, I know that they're wearing a façade, one that makes you think, "Oh, he'she's coping with it so well." "Oh, he/she's a fighter" or "How very brave of him/her." But the hard truth is there's no putting away grief. Unfortunately, grief strikes you in places that you thought were numb before and it takes its own sweet time to heal. Peels of the depths of  love and loss buried deep underneath a hard layer of shock come to surface gradually until you hurt no more, until you stop looking for signs that they'll come back, until you can finally say goodbye, until you can tell their stories, of your deep connection with them to the world with a brave smile or calm tears.

I've thought about Death every time I encountered it in the vicinity and over time, I've found some solace in mellowing the face of it. When I first chanced upon it in my family, it was a dark-faced stranger, inconsequential to my scheme of things at large. Its face grew more menacing as it paid us more unwelcome visits and I started dreading about whom it would claim next in its creeps. I still shake involuntarily when I hear of somebody else drowning in the unknown, leaving the other dots in their life circle to deal with the complications of life, that will only move on in uncaring gusts and torrents. I've thought about Death a great deal and learned (the hard way) that perhaps, it'd make it easier if we could give Death a more solemn, and I dare say, a less spine-chilling appeal.  I sometimes look at Death not as an impenetrable black shadow but as a gentle, Gandalf-like, white wizard dressed in opulent veils coming down on his white-horsed chariot to take you on another road, parallel to life, equally intoxicating and riveting, anything but ordinary. Maybe it's just more exciting to visualize your loved ones in an alternate world than to think they've turned into unchangeable stars. Maybe it's just comforting to think that death is merely a change of location that cannot be geo-tagged, isn't it?

Today, when I talk about my mum and brother, I notice I don't break into inconsolable tears but reminisce them fondly; probably that is the blinding effect of time over grief. I realize that without knowing, I've moved on. However, their worth in my life remains unfazed. I wear my mum's gold bangles and I carry one of my brother's last gifts to me, a pearl choker, in my purse. I finally know that I've reached a place where I can look at their memories as worth celebrating and smiling about, as was their life. As is LIFE. I may still look for traces of them in everyone I get attached to. I may look at old albums and wonder about how much I really knew them and grieve over pieces of them that I've lost forever. Some of their memories are still strong, clung to an old habit or mannerism, a brand of soap or the smell of food. It's strangely true then that while I have come to terms with my sense of loss, their worth in my life is immortal.

To all those who are experiencing the grief of loss in some form or the other, there's a passage that I came across that seems so true:

“You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn't seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”
- Anne Lamott

Here's hoping we learn to dance with the limp.

XOXO

Remember the Time - The 2010s Special :)

It's a funny time we live in. I look at my three-year old daughter and she's already surfing you tube for Peppa Pig by seasons and episodes. I type keywords for her to get to her source of five-minute undivided attention. One swipe of finger and lo behold, the world of short cartoon snippets and DIY playdough projects is unveiling before her. (Who has the time and attention span for the classic half-hour episode now, right?)

And I can only gasp and wonder what this generation will be all about. It'll be radically different from the world we grew up in, no doubt. As I wait for the slow miracle of water-heating in my bath, I catch her lounging on the couch, seemingly engrossed in saving the world from her phone.

I briefy lay down with her and look at the view from her eyes. (Oh but first we take a selfie.)

I see a kid whose vision and curiosity for learning is instantly gratified, thanks to magic crystal ball-like gadgets, assuring her of a less than ten-second waiting time. Hmm...no wonder then that patience has died a sorry death in the waiting line of virtues to be recognized by the 2010s born, or the Alpha generation.

The Daddy Dearest Selfie

Back in the day, when we were little—oh yes, I'm already saying these things—remember how electronic gadgets still had that exotic bird sheen and were completely off-limits? And you couldn't even rewind a videotape without supervision and when you were finally allowed to talk on the pricey cordless phone, you kept doing that goofy, enraptured hop to see how far your cordless phone would get reception outside your home? So of course it's still unimaginable to me that a three-year old can use my phone with an air of authority, talk to her grandparents at length, knowing fully well which window she needs to lean on to get network. She switches channels on TV, surfs youtube and dictates on-point wardrobe choices based on her whims and fancies. And she's already expanding her working vocabulary with an occasional  heavy-word shocker like "frustrated" and "tepid". And if I raise my eyebrow, she always has one retort. "Caillou says it." Psstt...[Caillou is an annoying cartoon character who makes me want to smack my phone to pieces every time he speaks in his whiny voice.]

Ok, not to say that our childhood didn't have any 'OMG, really" edges of its own. Sure, we didn't have Skype chats and virtual reality. We grew up playing the same games as our older siblings even though they were all about mass-homicide and getting pulped to death for no damn reason. (Umm...what else did you think happened to Mario every single time?) Coming from the age of free-range childhood when our parents really had no geo-tags telling them where we were all day, I can already see that there are some things that our kids could never claim to have that we did.

Like Goldspot. (Remember how good that was?) Like making pen-pals from another country and losing touch abruptly and wondering whatever the hell happened to them. Like getting blisters on your hands and feet from playing in the heat in the dead of afternoon without so much as a dime-size portion of sunscreen and day-time mosquito repellents to save you from radiation and dengue. Also, remember playing with a bunch of kids and bringing them home for snacks without even knowing their names? Best days ever.

Even then, I'm halfway through this decade and doing more double-takes on the antics, quick wit and observation power of my three-year old daughter than the number of times my dad threw his hands in despair at our practical jokes. His favorite lines were "Kya hoga tum logo ka" and the house-favorite "Apne bade bhai behen se kuch seekho". In my dad's defense, we were his second batch of kids and naturally his proclivity for dealing with our shit had deterred in quality, kinda like the latter seasons of Full House.

All these yesteryear reminiscences has got me thinking about how the children of 2010 — sounds almost as menacing as the children of the damned —  or the alpha generation, would recall their childhood.

So I thought I'll go ahead and create a list that stereotype a kid (and a parent) from this decade, one which Saanvi can read some day in the future and LOL at. But she'll probably say, "Mom, why couldn't you just use memes instead? Yea, I really have a lot of spare time.

Hey, remember the time:

1. "We played football all through recess...in the rain! And remember how you loved sneaking up behind me to splash mud balls at me. And then we forgot all about the game and just kicked mud at each other! Man we'd be so ewww if we were playing for real. Maxim Knightnemesis is still showering dude!"

2."Mom invited you for lunch and she had this epic menu planned out. But she kept torturing us by making us click pictures of tomatoes and some gluten-free crap. When we finally got to eat, after clicking a selfie with our little portions of pretty food, we figured there was no salt and the pretty goat cheese was pretty prett-ay stinky! So we ate take-out pizza instead, but pictures of our happy faces drooling all over little plates of food made it to Mom's instagram with hashtags #foodpornforkids and #theywipeditclean.

3. "We were forced to read the classics so we got hold of one of those travel-around-the-world books that sound exciting. Moby Dick, right? He lost me at Massachusetts dude... I mean who in God’s name refers to their friends as chums? Ewww... And why does everything have to be symbolic? Uggh...Bottom line: You should totally read a book by its cover. (The book jacket was f-in' dull and dated!)

4."We went on a roadtrip and dad gave us this whole long speech on how we have no taste of adventure cos we've never been lost. So he shut the GPS lady and off we went. And then he kept asking people for directions, and once we came round to ask the same guy twice and he said, "Dude, don't you have GPS?" I still don't get the point. But going on that isolated trail with a dead end was so badass!"

5. "Oh we were planning my ninth birthday and mum said she was out of themes. We'd already done superheroes, avatar, jungle book, the underwater thing, cars and everything. So mom said, "You know we really didn't have any themes when we were growing up." And bam, I got my next theme! It was the 90s. Everyone dressed up in tacky clothes with shoulder pads and dorky hairstyles and listened to awful music that we couldn't stop humming in class the next day. It was epic! Well for everyone except mom who wasn't too pleased about having to bake a cake by herself and cook all the food. How else would it be convincing, no?"

6.

"I think I was seven and we were at the airport waiting to board a flight to Bangkok. I went to get myself some water and saw a friend's dad from school and we started talking. He bought some cake for Sasha, who was waiting at another corner. I was about to walk up to Sasha with him holding my hand and leading the way when mom jumped out of nowhere and started yelling at my friend's dad on top of her voice. She talked fast berating me for walking off with Sasha's dad, who was a stranger to her. After she was done recapping all the horrifying viral videos she'd seen on social media thereby establishing Sasha's dad was a perv who'd spiked my cake, I told her in a soft voice, "Mom, you remember Sasha?  Sasha's dad." And then I watched her face go from white to red in under ten secs. Weird mom alert!"

7. "We went to a cousin's for a week and they didn't have Netflix and our laptops and iPads were off-limits. And by the time we got back, we were lagging behind eight episodes of GoT and when we got back to school, everyone started giving away spoilers, like really meaty ones involving Jon Snow.  That's a week of my life wasted watching commercials and women in Halloween costumes! I can't even...."

8. We were having a party at a friend's place and somebody sneaked in alcohol. We were 12 then. Neel's mom got home before time and complained to everyone's parents that we were drinking. We were all collectively grounded for two weeks, cut off from our cellphones so no whatsapp, insta and FB. On the fourth day, Neel got hold of his iPad from his dad's room and created a petition on FB to explain the situation and how we've been unfairly punished. And somebody shared that petition on his dad's wall saying "Please share if you agree that these poor victims of circumstance should be un-grounded!" Ofcourse, Neel was grounded for a whole month after that. But his petition got over 3000 likes!

9."We went through different selfie obsessions - one with the duckface in different places - at a coffee shop, at the gym, in the closet. And then we shot the duckfaces (cos they were stupid) and moved on to moustaches. And then we started cloning ourselves. What would be without our selfies?  Apple pie selfie. Bae selfie. Cute streetdog selfie. (It bit me later so more like an ouchie.) Selfie's selfie. One time, I felt I'd had enough. I mean what's the point right? Look at me. I'm so cute even when I'm hideous! But I decided to take one anyway. It was the existential crisis selfie dude. Cos life's a selfie! Ooh that should be my next caption. "

10.

"Oh and we were chatting and you said something cheesy...and I really don't remember what. But I remember looking for the cheese emoji and spending the next five minutes looking for it and when I couldn't find it, I googled about it. I even tweeted to get answers.  But whoah! There's no cheese emoji dude!"



Got any fun "Remember the time" to add to the list? Be my guest and write below :).

Grandma's Desi Ghee Laddoos - An Epic Journey

"Many a hands have rolled me into life, folding me with their own legends to tell. Each pair of hands tries to recreate the same magic touch of their ancestors; they hushed into my ears a little heirloom secret. Some said, "My mama told me to wait for your essence to envelop the whole house in its earthy aroma before embellishing you with cardamom, sugar and nuts. Some told me how the cracks to my spell can be found in pure, unadulterated ghee and dollops of love, of course. Some hands held me unsteadily, not knowing how to bind me intact. Some trembled with a pallor, when I failed to emit that matronly glow that is oh-so-inviting. The hands that held me most steadily were the ones that were creased with the warmth of a million lines. These lines mapped the journey of a seed sown with love, laughter and care blossoming into memories that lasted a lifetime. And these memories live on in me with each pair of hands moulding me into their own happy place...into their own blessed childhood."

Source: Astropeep

When it comes to festivals and celebrations, it begins with the rolling of magic in your kitchen, doesn't it? Let's face it. As ladies of the house, we're just expected to pouf out floaty meringues and perfect parfaits and al dente gulabjamuns and flawless what nots! So God help me... In my first year as a mum, I was consumed by an overwhelming nostalgia - one that got me attempting the un-attemptable. Making besan laddoos. You see, before I became a mom, I never quite crossed over completely to the other side to switch places with my mum , mum-in-law and grandmum.  It just felt like such a sacred, high-pedestaled spot. Ah, the pressure of creating a memorable laddoo! What if it turned rock-hard and my daughter tossed it around in play instead? What if it crumbled to bits before she could put it in her mouth? It'd be as terrifying as watching an avalanche, I think. I could easily be the mom who created laddoos that should be tucked in a handbag along with pepper spray as defense weapons. So I wasn't really ready to be on the other side of life stirring a slotted spoon vigorously into a mountain of besan in a bronze-enameled pan, knowing exactly when to turn the heat off. Come to think of it, it was also my unusual way of remaining a kid.

Despite all that, I found myself struggling to untether away from the desire to add the epic to the epicurean laddoos, rolling slickly from generation to generation, also fondly known as dadima ke laddoo. Surely, everyone in a desi home would remember stuffing their face to the point of misery with these cheery little balls lodged up in glass burnees, way ahead of festivals. Some households have besan laddoos all year round with a generous dose of dry fruits. They say it serves as an antidote to every ail that dares to afflict a family with kids. My husband told me a story of how he and his cousins vacationed together every summer. Before they went out to play, their grandma would catch them by surprise at the door by unexpectedly popping laddoos into each one's mouth.  Of course, his grandma's laddoos were melt-in-your-mouth, roasted-to-perfection delights that would hardly meet with any resistance. She happened to be famous in every neighbourhood that she went to for that reason and people waited for her in gleeful anticipation when she travelled to other cities.

So considering how much of an emotional pull this plump confection carries, I just had to get on the phone with my guide and mentor, my mum-in-law, to unravel its mystery. As always, she made it sound incredibly simple and inspired me into my very first attempt. It sounded suspiciously easy-peasy to me. Anyway, I collected all the core ingredients, pulsed the sugar crystals into a fine powder, crushed cardamom pods into it and then ran assorted dry fruits separately through the same grinder. And then I began roasting besan in my holiday-food, giant-sized aluminium pan. I checked my whatsapp in between. I checked on my daughter. I resisted the urge of capturing the steps leading up to its epic-ness on my phone camera. I complained of heat. Maybe, I should have donned a flimsier tee for this task. And then I thought about women from other generations who did the same thing in a much-larger proportion...I mean did they get distracted and impatient like me too?

And while I was doing that daunting task of roasting besan in ghee that had now begun annoyingly lumping around my spoon, I was, rather abruptly, shoved inside another time capsule.

It was mid-afternoon in a seemingly old house with a terracotta roof.  It was of staggering breadths (and not just by Mumbai standards). Its vast rooms were decorated with ornate furniture and crotia table tops here and there. The women sat in a courtyard surrounded by potted plants — the presence of which helped in bringing down the villainy of afternoon heat some notches. The women sat in a circle near the kitchen. Three generations of women immersed in their share of tasks for the day. One sifted flour by vigorously tossing it in the air. Another crushed cardamoms and dry fruits in turn in a large mortar. Another lady in her late-forties carved out symmetrical rectangular shapes out of dense, caramelized coconut in syrupy-goodness spread out on a large thali. They worked closely with the head of the family, a grey-haired woman working in the kitchen. She was emitting beads of sweat, while engrossed in a swift, graceful rhythm of roasting every granule of a large mound of gramflour in a colossal bronze pan. They were all dressed in light cotton sarees, with their pallas cinched at the waist tight, neatly tucked out of their way for maximum productivity. The kids ran about the courtyard and their mums fussed over their near-accidents every now and then. At first, nobody spoke. But soon began a spurt of stories from reminiscences of bygone eras, to the sky-rocketing price of dry fruits, to period stains, to scandals in the neighbourhood. Every now and then, a glint of mischief passed through the grey-haired lady's eyes, who was now evidently flushed from the heat. I don't know much about these women. I don't know if they had aspirations to retire for an afternoon siesta instead or merely read a book in their pjs by themselves. I don't know if they were consumed by any other higher ideals of finding themselves that  directly conflicted with their mundane life.  But looking at them from a distance, I thought that that these ladies, with #no make-up and hair spruced up in awkward buns or #messybraids, were in their prime element here. They seemed most uninhibited in each other's company; perhaps the boundaries of rank melted when they worked together this way. They were happy.

And it occurred to me, that if there's anything missing in the so-called mythical quality of my desi ghee laddoo, it is this magic ingredient. Undoubtedly, our modern lives are getting faster and more cramped with virtual distractions. Our city-dwelling families are shrinking in size. This ghost of an era haunts us with a lesson that the joy of familial cooking was in teamwork and in the innocent pleasure of companionship. It was in putting down our phones and being there in the moment with everybody else. Making the perfect laddoos has never really been JUST about the getting the exact measures or making huge commitments of time and energy to give them an irresistible sheen of golden-brown. It's about the buildup to the laddoo. It's about the whole atmosphere of connecting with our primal senses and of the boisterous hustle-bustle of a family gearing up for festivities. Of stealing them before they can be offered as prasad and then feeling awfully guilty about it. Of sitting round the courtyard in a large family gathering waiting for your turn to be served.

It's no wonder then that I felt the immense pressure of recreating these memories. And while my culinary frenzy pitched high enough for me to create decent laddoos, it goes without saying that they were not quite the same.

But I take it in a bowl to my daughter anyway. And I hope that three decades from now, when she eats one of these, they'd be memorable enough for her to be involuntarily whisked away into a magical place of her own. For now, all she does is squeal "laddoo" before stuffing it in her mouth whole.

And that's a pretty good starting point if you ask me...