हल्दी

आज मेरे हाथ से हल्दी की डिब्बी छूट गई,

देखो, शायद मेरे हाथ पीले हो गए.

कहाँ कल तक आप मुझसे पूछा करती थीं

कि खाने में क्या बनाऊँ.

अखाड़े में काई जम गई है, अम्मा,

अब वैसी धूल ही कहाँ, जो हमारे घर में

सिंकते बैंगन से उड़ती चिंगारियों की तरह

उड़ा करती थी.

यह रसोई पता नहीं किसकी है.

आँगन से कुछ बच्चे न जाने क्यों मुझे उसी नज़र से देखते हैं

जिसमें मैंने शायद आपको बहुत साल क़ैद रखा.

इस बड़े से घर में मैं भूखी हूँ;

कहाँ घर के हर कोने में बहस की वजह छुपा करती थी.

Memoirs: My last trip to London!

THERE AND BACK AGAIN

(This was a report I had to give in to ITC, my sponsors, to which company I had pledged brand loyalty until I started reading Marxism in college! I unerathed this at home, while looking for something else in a CD promisingly labelled "PC Backup". I wrote this just after the trip, so that was sometime July, 2004. Funny.)

[ December 16, 2004: The first time I hear of the Grand Prize – a trip to London.

June 6, 2005: After a whirlwind experience at Mumbai and at Delhi, before I know it, I’m on a plane to London.]

DAY 1:

It’s an early start. At two a.m., half asleep, my mother and I board the British Airways flight from Indira Gandhi International and sleep through most of it.

Immigration counters, conveyor belts and 10 hours later, we are out of Heathrow and into the damp, cold morning. It’s London all right.

*

Our hotel in Bayswater turns out to be a lovely three-star inn on a tree-lined square off busy Queensway.

We are quite exhausted, but manage to walk along Queensway and later, along the famous Oxford Street.

A soak in the tub, some local FM and early bed.

DAY 2:

Ah, the day of the H-O-H-O (er…the Hop-On-Hop-Off ) Tour.

The weather clears up and it stays warm the rest of our stay.

We spend the day cruising the streets of London and Westminster in an open red double-decker bus; stopping at sites from the historic (St. Paul’s Cathedral, Trafalgar Square, Tower of London) to the curious (a pub called ‘Hung, Drawn and Quartered’, and monument called, well, ‘Monument’).

But the best part is when Big Ben chimes, “Come Back Whittington”.

Post tour I fall asleep in sunny Hyde Park with a bucket of strawberries by me.

DAY 3:

The Evan Evans Tours coach-bus starts its all-day journey to Oxford and Stratford through the charming Cotswolds.

Walking through Oxford University, both my eyes take in all the familiar names - the colleges of Trinity, Christchurch and Exeter- but my mind’s eye sees myself studying there someday.

*

We soon reach Shakespeare’s Stratford-on-Avon, listening to our guide quote effortlessly from Merchant of Venice. Inside Shakespeare’s Tudor home, we walk on the same stone floor as he must have paced, thinking, “To be or not to be”.

Nearby, Anne Hathaway’s cottage nestles among pretty flowers, housing the very bench on which Shakespeare proposed to Anne.

A nice touch is English Tea in the teashop outside.

Back in London and highly inspired, we call it a (wonderful!) day.

DAY 4:

We become celebrities for a day, walking the red carpet with our favourite stars and famous heads of state. No, not at the live8 concert, but at Madame Tussaud’s.

Next a stop at 221 b, Baker St., home to the great Sherlock Holmes, and now to a museum in his name.

The rest of the afternoon is the bit I love. A ‘Beatles Walk’ around town: the Magical Mystery Tour that ends at Abbey Road.

DAY 5:

A dream come true – the Evan Evans guided tour of Westminster Abbey is the most awe-inspiring and fantastic experience ever!

We walk among greats like Shakespeare, Newton, Auden, Eliot, Johnson and Churchill, and marvel at Queen Elizabeth and William the Confessor.

History there does not just stay. It lives.

DAY 6:

All too soon, I feel, it’s already time to go. Truly, London has some magnetism to it.

But on the way to the airport, as we look at the photographs, we smile and say, “Wow” because nothing else can describe the trip.

What’s left to tell?

We get home to India safe and sound and then back to Lucknow to family and friends eager to hear the tale firsthand.

*

So here I am, my feet back on the ground (finally!).

Still,

Nothing could match the feeling I had when London swept me away.

Standard Issue

[I would hesitate to call this verse. Khair,]


The drawing room is clean now
Little dolls' sofas
the mandatory glass-top coffee table
piles of scattered books have become
rows in a shelf

I know this house inside out
My mother phones me to find things
even with bifocals.
The first grating sound in the morning
is my grandfather's bathroom door.
Appa honks once, very softly , politely.
The doodhwaala and presswaala
are usually late
When Amma needs to leave
for work,
teaching at the school
where I spent nine years
searching for an identity,
learning stereotypes.

I can hear the squeal of the TV
before the sound comes on,
the yell of the Aquaguard.
I think I can hear dog-whistles too.
I could always hear better than most.
I conduct a choir,
is it a wonder?

But then there are places in the city
I have never seen
Places I have even heard of.
Places not too far either.
I know this house
(which belongs to our landlord)
inside out
But I managed to speak to
the boy next door
only this summer.

I have been
to the corner to buy bread, eggs, butter
to the chemist to buy an emergency dose
of sanitary napkins
to the shop to buy the supplies
that ran out,
noted on our tab; no cash required here.

I can count these times on my fingers.
One hand, mind you.

There was a boy in school
Whom I was not allowed to meet
My father was not posted here,
My mother ran the house,
In fear.
I still don't know why it was not allowed.

Last year
(which was my second in college)
I went out on Diwali
to meet face to face
a man from Hyderabad,
a Muslim I had met online.
On Orkut.
It was allowed,
a faute de mieux
(This is a fancy term I came across
while researching for a compulsory essay
on Jane Austen-
it means "a decision for want of a better choice").
That time, I informed my father,
I did not ask for permission.

That boy from school-
Now that the burden of years
is on our shoulders
he has been crushed enough to be permitted,
I suppose.
He has an off day on Thursday.

Ten years of confinement,
not solitary confinement,
maybe that would have been worse;
Now I can recognise stereotype
like a font size too small or too big
in which my sentence was written.
In India
(and perhaps elsewhere in the world as well,
I wouldn't know)
it is not when a girl starts
menstruating
masturbating
becomes sexually active
gets married
has children
runs a household
goes to college
goes to work
rebels
acquiesces

that she grows up
It's much earlier-
The day she begins to fear
is the day she becomes Woman.

If I don't watch out

My mom says I roam around all day with a bottle of Colin (Reckitt-Benckiser's brand of cleaning fluid: I use no other). This is true.

She also says I clean so much that someday I'll swipe her clean too and never even notice.

This cartoon was just begging to be drawn. I haven't drawn in a while, here goes nothing:

Intermediate Technology

There ain't no such thing as Basic Infrastructure.
Infrastucture, by definition, is complicated!

Over twenty years ago, around 1981-2, in Kanpur, a decrepit town in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, when my dad still held a pilot's license, he and my mother met a couple of slightly older, much more worldly folks called David Drury and Asifa Kanji, who had been married a few years, while my parents were fresh out of honeymoonland. I believe the story goes that Appa was giving joyrides down at IIT-K and they met there, victims, I guess, of mutual curiosity, and one thing led to another and my folks invited home two extraordinary people who were to my dad, I can only imagine, one suspiciously well-read Yankee and one terribly intelligent and lovely young woman of unascertainable extraction.

One of the more memorable things Uncle Dave (yes, he's UncaDave to me) did during that stint in Kanpur was write some wonderful songs (well he finished his Ph.D. on the side, but who cares!). One of these, one of my favourites, was called (or has been called in retrospect) Talkin' Memsahib Blues.

As Arlo Guthrie would say,

"It's called, ya know, Talkin', 'cos it's a talking kinda song, ya know. And it's about this memsahib, ya know, so it's called the Talkin' Memsahib Blues. That's why it is that it goes by that name"

and so forth.

[I finally transcribed the lyrics from the CD that was made from the original tape recording from the 80s and found its way to us because we met David and Asifa last year (I met them for the first time, and finally heard live so many songs I had growin up listening to) after so many.]

Talkin’ Memsahib Blues

[D.D.: I'll try, we'll see what happens, it's the first time I've done the whole thing.
Ok, this is written from Asifa's point of view alright, this is her talking through the song.]

Ah yes, those happy hours I spent
When we heard about our research grant.
Six hundred a month is chickenfeed
But in India that means Memsahib,
Servants - cringing, crawling minions,
Gin and tonic on the veranda.

Well we made our home in Kanpore town,
The very finest place around
If you like dacoits, filth and thieves,
Flies and small-scale industries.

You mean you dragged me half way 'round the world to live in Cleveland?
Wouldn't you really rather study tourism in Goa?

Well I suppose if you have gone crazy m'boy
You'll need someone to take care of you.

Well we soon moved out from IIT
To the Bima Vihar Colony.
New red brick but just next door
Was the engulfed village of Lakhanpore,

The super-boonies:
Calling a goatherd to get your grass cut;

The milkman: the milkman brings the milk right to your doorstep
In the buffalo!

But life was never dull, you see
We had no lack of company
Toads and mice and fleas and slugs,
Lizards and birds and Kamikazi bugs-
Mega zillions of them
Dying gloriously in your food, your tea, your shoes, and your toilet-paper.
And like all fanatics, it's impossible to reason with 'em

To clean house, wash clothes and get to the station
You have to be a Master of Industrial Relations.
Bring your laundry in on Tuesday,
Pick it up again on Doomsday.
"Oh, you mean you wanted it this week?
I'll absolutely, certainly and pukka positively bring your clothes tomorrow.
Or the next day."

When the washerman quit and we fired the maid
My own two hands were all I had.
In my fondest memories I clearly see
The joys of Intermediate Technology
Like cooking dinner for fifteen people on a one-burner kerosene stove
Or whipping clothes off the line during a Monsoon downpour

Or turning on the tank so you can wash the pot to boil the water to put in the cooling jar to brush your teeth with.

I was choked to the gills with fear and trepidation
When the old man went out and bought his own transportation,
The old Lambretta he could barely get to run ,
And the author of the traffic code: Atilla the Hun!

Roads that look like they were recovering from recent mortar attacks.
We share the street with hand-carts, elephants, tempos, buffalos, camels and bicycles.
Kanpur has a zoo,
But the road is closer.

I'll give you a very useful driving tip if you're out that way, by the way:
Don't ever pull up too close behind an elephant at a long stop light.

Like life I could go on and on,
But what's the use?
And still I wouldn't trade that year for most I've had,
For a first time 'round, weren't too bad.

But you aren't about to hear me ask for a second round!

All in all, one good thing you've got to say about living in Kanpur:

It feels so good when you stop!