A Tid and a Bit

I went to the movie halls after a really long time and looked forward to the experience. The light on the screen came on and the images began to roll. Not five minutes had passed into the film than a couple of youths in the adjacent row began to behave as flagrantly as white Tata Sumos with ruling party flag on their bumpers do on roads.  Catcalls and whistles abounded, but were permissible of course.  When they began to loudly throw comments about the hero a wave of irritation and anger rolled over the audience yet no one protested.  The hero was coming close to kissing the heroine and these boys hooted, “Yes, yes, go on, just do it buddy, we are all here to support you etc.” I must admit that the thought was funny and a few of us even laughed. But when they got down to literally echoing every dialogue that came on screen, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I chucked my bag angrily on the floor and stormed up to their seats. “HELLO!! What the hell is going on here? If you must comment, by all means do so, but amongst yourselves ONLY. The remaining 300 people here need not be posted on your views. Get it?” I shouted in Tamil and in a voice so loud and nasty that it deserved to be put to use in the Indian Parliament.  Everyone froze in their seats except my husband and children who continued to watch the film, happy that their quota of sound bytes from me got exhausted elsewhere.  I stood there glaring at the nuisance makers a moment longer than necessary and returned to my seat.  Much to my surprise the Tata Sumos stopped at my red signal with their flags down.   Some 15 minutes passed peacefully before another group in another end of the hall began to get noisy. I was loathe to repeat my drama once again, but thankfully it didn’t seem necessary for a voice rang out from behind the garrulous boys, “Are you all going to shut up now or shall I call that lady here?” (pesama irukeengla illa anda lady-a koopdava?)  And immediately there was silence.

Needless to say I was very proud of myself and all that. Only my husband who was cool and indifferent till then began to get that ‘do-you-all-see-what-I-suffer’ look on his face.

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My friend wanted me to accompany her to Chennai University to finish some boring paper work and I resisted because a) I had not cooked anything for the day and b) When I picked up my M.Phil certificate from there in 1995, I swore never to return to that office that was decidedly highbrow to students, a shocking contrast from the sucking up students receive from admin staff at JNU where I studied M.A. Nevertheless I went as my love for her won over my vow. Once there I realised I was freaking hungry. I called my maid Valli at home and requested her to cut some veggies so that I may quickly fix something for myself when I returned. The poor thing must have been on her way out, when I caught her on the phone with this additional task. I came two hours later weak with hunger and my friends’ ranting. “I surely am going to die before my stupid cooker finds its whistle,” I groaned and sauntered into the kitchen and what do I find!!! Valli has made chappathis, rice, dal, karela curry (my favorite), salad, rasam and vadams!!!!!! My god! What a spread and it is not even part of her job profile to cook for me!! Total humanitarian gesture for a hungry soul. Oh! It was not just my body that felt nourished that day. 

Inaugurating with ribbon pakodas

I find it extremely ironic and funny when people call me to cut ribbon to inaugurate some event or give a speech or hoist a flag or simply accept a first invitation to a wedding or such. I am neither a celebrity, nor a sponsor or some inspiring personality like our good friend Vijay Siva the Carnatic musician (who sweetly taught me this life changing English Pallavi “Complaining mind is always unhappy/Ooooooo/What you lose when you complaint/ You lose your good health and brain”).  Yet my social calendar is steadily getting filled thanks to readers who are operating in the true spirit of loony life by inviting me to be a chief guest. What the hell, I don’t even photograph well.

“You mean to say people are actually buying you a ticket to travel to their place, just to hear you speak?” my aunt asked disbelievingly.

“III A/c in train. Not cattle class like Shashi Tharoor,” I replied.

 “Remember? Once in your nervousness you sang the national anthem instead of the prayer at the beginning of a program and lot of people who entered the hall just then thought the program had ended and left immediately leaving the hall half empty,” she smirked.

“Yeah….I know. But I include that incident in my speech and it is very well received. In fact it is so funny that people think I made it up,” I said evenly.

“What about that time when your father’s typewriting institute was inaugurated and just when the ribbon was about to be cut, you loudly begged the chief guest to just untie it from the door so that you may stitch that satin ribbon onto your dress. So now…..do you cut the ribbon or sneak it to your house to stitch it to some blouse?” she asked icily.

“Instead of satin ribbons, I demand ribbon pakodas and “cut” them with my teeth to inaugurate. That is the latest trend I am setting. Since the organizers are putting their mouth where the money is, I commence the event with my mouth and they all clap,” I snapped.

“Excellent. You should have been born in England,” said the mean lady and left.

But come to think of it, all this is very ridiculous even to me. I was once called to distribute prizes at a nearby school. When I entered the auditorium with the Principal, all the children stood up in greeting. I wondered what a tyrant the Principal must be and how despicable that her students had to get up whenever she came into their presence.

“Tupit lady,” I thought and I swear she must have read my thoughts for she immediately said, “the students are getting up for your sake only.”  I nervously smiled heh-heh-heh and bade them sit down. I completely forgot that chief guests were accorded such respect.

But in all this the biggest joke is on me, because whenever some speaker commenced his talk with “respected blah-blah, honorable yada-yada, esteemed so-and-so and my dear friends” I used to giggle from the back seat at the hollow formalities. And yet I find myself saying things like “It is my privilege to be here etc.” I think next time I am just going to say, “Hi good people. I am going to talk now. Feel free to lift your hand when I get boring.”

And then there is that constant worry on “what to wear?” I always went with kurta over jeans and a stole to protect my virtue (heh) and it worked rather well for me until a cousin maliciously pointed out that a chief guest should look like she possesses atleast one set of good dress and should not look like she ran through a series of clothes lines on her terrace and emerged wearing whatever got caught onto her body during the run. 

Ode to Clothes

Cleaning out a wardrobe is never impassive, mundane activity. Rather, it is an emotional exercise. As I stare at the bureau which I share with my children, the sum total of my life stares back at me. Every piece of clothing is a memoir, a souvenir of the past, a trigger for memories to flood my heart. One, two, three, as I toss and sift the old from new, fresh from faded, the needed and the not-so-needed, I hear an inner call to simultaneously discard those turns and dimensions of my life that no longer “fit my current form”.

Colorful, chaotic, comfortable, well used, well loved, frayed in the edge, patchy in places, fading, gaudy, smooth, sober, silken, lacy and mostly bright, is how I can describe the contents of the wardrobe. But hey presto! The description matches my life too!

As I sit down to the task of folding and arranging three huge piles of clothes- my son’s, my daughter’s and my own, I feel I am being lead into a introspection of sorts on where I am headed and what my children are upto in their lives. Nine out of ten of my son’s pants are tracks and ten out of ten tops are smeared with cricket stains. One entire inner door of the wardrobe is streaked with personal adulatory messages to Sachin and Dhoni.  To my left is Gautam Gambhir “Going great guns” and above him is Muthiah Muralidharan “in top gear.” What the hell? Is the kid studying at all? Each and every good dress has been whittled down to look like “cricket wear”. I inspect the plump pockets of few pants. Wrist bands, suntan cream and even a blur picture of Gilchrist emerge.  I remember my son telling me, “Please, please improve. How can I take you seriously when you can’t tell a Shane Warne from a Mathew Hayden?” I leave a note for my son on the cupboard, “Your shelf- askew and confusing- like Malinga’s bowling action. I want to see a Kumble.”

My daughter’s pile is less intimidating. It is filled with shiny clothes, bunnies and teddies. She loves gaudy colors, frills and flowers. She loves to dress up and even puts glitter on her cheeks. Let her! I did not have the luxury to exercise or cultivate my feminity.  In my days I had to be a tomboy to be taken seriously. I had to fight to get permission to wear pants, which again I grabbed from my brothers’ wardrobe. I meddled with my long hair, cross dressed in my brother’s clothes, learned to ride a bike, and adamantly shunned all things feminine like bindis, bangles, bands etc.- all this to be heard and not merely “noticed”. My daughter’s world is different. She can dwell and indulge her girlishness and yet avail all rights open to her brother and vice versa.  She can even be the one to wear the pants at home.

By the time I attack my small pile of clothes, mostly consisting of jeans, sober color short kurtas and bandanas, I tell myself I should revisit my feminine aspect and try out bright colors and experiment with laces, yokes and trimmings and not just reach for khakis and browns that make me look like a gas delivery boy.  There is not one negligee, one lacy top, silken dress or party wear. Everything is sober, low-cost and no-nonsense.  I feel stumped here. Clothes have always been touted as our second skin, a physical reflection of our self identity, an “attitude wear”. Pablo Neruda writes in his Ode to Clothes, “Every morning you wait, /to fill yourself with/my vanity, my love, /my hope, my body.”  If clothes are indeed “us”, then why are my clothes plain, inexpensive and practical when I am not any of those?

When the butterfly died on me....

A dead butterfly is not earth shattering news unless the death happens in your house, under your purview and with two kids hinting that you caused the poor creature’s death. A monarch butterfly suddenly made its way into our home, a gorgeous black, red, white spotted butterfly, just when we were all leaving for Mysore. I thought it will fly out just as it flew in and left to catch my train.

Two days hence when we returned, we found the butterfly on the floor, in a room different from where we saw it last. Its wings were intact. Only its legs seemed bent, like a fractured green twig. Had the maid left the fan on and injured the butterfly on its way out? I placed the butterfly on a window sill hoping it would flutter out or make a leap to the tree branch which hung at some five feet from the window. I didn’t know how to help it. Soft silvery black powder that felt like eye shadow, stuck to my fingers. If there is anything called pixie dust, then this butterfly powder felt like it. As kids we believed that smearing butterfly-wing dust on our forehead guaranteed our immortality. I hoped the butterfly didn’t display its mortality in my house. My kids would freely cry for one week hence.

“What can we feed it?” my son asked worriedly.

There was no honey in the house. What about ghee? I thought and placed some ghee beneath its feet (remember butterflies taste with their feet?)

After a while my daughter reported excitedly, “Dit is get-upping.”

I rushed to find that my stupid ghee idea had merely made the butterfly uncomfortably entangled in the viscous substance. Since I had caused its discomfort, I felt karmically bound to help it. I browsed the net on how to help a wounded butterfly and a website instructed me to put the insect in a box with some green in it and place a sponge soaked in sugar solution for food. I did all that and even helpfully placed its feet on the sponge. In less than twenty minutes the butterfly was dead. The very same creature which had survived two days without food, died within minutes under my helpful attention.  My children glared at me with disgust.

I spent the entire day mooning about how the road to hell is paved with good intentions and also how I would have been more careful and prompt in my action if the creature was little bigger like a squirrel or a puppy.  Small and gentle creatures are almost always forgotten or brushed aside. It is as if the lower you go on the food chain, the less you are respected. Strangely the butterfly reminded me of a gentle uncle of mine, who never spoke a single harsh word to anyone but was almost always sidelined because he was neither rich nor had a job. His deep affection and humble outlook to life was always submerged amidst opulent, garrulous crowds of relatives. In a world of shark eat shark, what did we care for the meek and poor? Amidst loud actions and words where was the space for small and gentle considerations?

As I put the butterfly into a box for burial, I began weeping for all those tiny, gentle (and eminently endangered) gestures like smoothing the hair of a spouse of twenty years, of saying thank you to the man who collected garbage, of not hurrying a child through its meals, of listening to people fully without glancing at the laptop every two seconds, of allowing the other person to hang the phone first….of just remembering that there are many mute and small creatures like the butterflies, which nevertheless have pixie dust on them.

Lunch at Twilight, Dinner at Midnight

I love nights. I love the shroud of silence and contemplation nights throw on my mind.  There is an involuntary stillness that enters my heart, as I find nature tucking in for the day despite human beings’ frenzied activity around them. Crows start turning to their nests at the stroke of sunset, trees fold up for the day and draw their leaves tighter around themselves like shawls, self respecting insects (unlike mosquitoes) disappear for the day. A while later children’s eyelids start getting heavier despite the TV and homework.  As the night bleeds and spreads its black fingers over lamp shades, the mist of sleep overpowers thoughtful minds and restless hearts.  It is time to draw the curtains, not just on the day but on the rerun of events of the day in our minds. Nights are for rejuvenation, reconsideration and revival. In simpler terms, when the moon appears at your window it is time to hibernate, shut down or do an Alt+Ctrl+del.

For me, the beauty of nights has much to do with the color black- the hue of absorption, mystery, seduction and death. As I look up at the fickle moon bobbing like a ball on the dark November sky with stars flitting around like fire flies I wonder which ignoramus labeled nights as the hour of the demons. What can match the cool beauty, subtle fragrance and deep sexuality of the night? Mornings and noon explode with activity and shake you up for necessary and unnecessary actions. The nature of light is such.  It demands movement. Aristotle hypothesized on the nature of light as “a disturbance in the element air”. But as light wanes and movements subside, mind and body seeks its nest and the heart searches for love.  If day is a factory to feed your body, night is the spa for pampering yourself.

When I was breaking into my teens, I used to feel a ravenous hunger in the pit of my stomach at exactly the stroke of sunset and I would gorge.  Noticing my habit, my mother’s music teacher mentioned in passing, “only rakshashis eat at sunset.”  What was stated intentionally to shame me out of the habit in fact had the opposite effect. I fell in love with idea of being a rakshashi and “fuelling myself for the night” at sunset, which I supposed was dawn for rakshashis.  In fact as days passed I not only had “lunch” at 6 pm but also “dinner” at the stroke of midnight. Amma shaking her head would leave rasam and rice for me. At midnight, while the house was dunked in dark slumber, I would toss the food, top it with pickle and pappad shreds and go into the balcony. We lived in a Government quarter then, on the seventh floor and the dining table was in that open balcony of sorts. I would sit, not at the table but on it. As the wind whooshed through my hair, as I watched the distant city lights and supped on the delicious gruel, I used to feel an incredible high, an insatiable thirst to “create”, throughout the night. On those special nights when I wrote particularly well, I understood it as a “female night”, a Rajni, a Nisha and not just another ratri.

I heard this lovely story about Adam and his first experience of night. It is Adam’s first day of being born. He feels comfortable in light but fearfully anticipates the sun set as he would be left in dark. But as night approaches Adam sees the moon emerge with her stars, the evening flowers bloom exuding their fragrance and the creatures of the night materialize to sing their nightly songs, Adam discovers life in the dark and falls in love with night too.