For Home

For you have been at the back of my mind,

and the front of my mind,

for years,

and for you the city is no more home

than it is for me,

for we both wandered there,

or away from there,

for reasons sometimes sentimental.

For going home is a process,

for peace of mind and a piece of memory to check on,

once in a while.

For you complete me,

you with your way of changing,

ever so often.

For you are home.

The poetic and the prosaic

I went to a Landmark today, the Fox Books in India these days, it seems. My dad was promoted recently; what this translates to, in real terms, is among other things a car-and-driver at disposal. Anyone's disposal. The per day mileage limit is so huge that Lucknow could not possibly use it all up. We've even been to Kanpur and back.

Anyway.
So I had the car today, much to my discomfort; not being used to royal treatment and all. So I had to deliver my day's plan to the folks first, before I could just up it and go, like I could if I didn't have to see if the driver had time for lunch, etc. etc. etc. But let's not look a gift horse in the mouth.

My first stop was Wave, a mall on the side of my house closer to Polytechnic and further from Hazratganj, where I was headed next. I went up to Landmark first, with Kundera on my mind. I just finished Ignorance, and after The Unbearable Lightness of Being and now this, I wanted more. As it happened, I found The Art of the Novel, which had been recommended. When I read the blurb, and the first few pages, I put it down. Sadly, this is exactly the kind of stuff I don't want to read right now. As if Terry Eagleton is not enough, not to mention Gauri Viswanathan, Edward Said, Raymond Williams and countless others whom I have to read as part of the English Hons. syllabus.
Then I didn't pick up Life is Elsewhere, [although come on, that's such a lovely title; like The Sun Also Rises. Sigh.] because I have an ebook version. Free.
There was also Testaments Betrayed, which was just a tad too obscure. Even for me.

So I wandered around.
Then I remembered S mentioning a book on Delhi, something that had gone out of and come back into print. Of course I had no clue what it was called.
So I go to the counter and ask the woman there to run a search on all books with "Delhi" in the title. She says But that'll show you even travel guides and stuff. I say Fine, I'll look. The list wasn't very long anyway, but nothing familiar showed up.
I call S, who is mercifully not asleep at 1 pm, and ask

- So what is that book on Delhi?
- City of Djinns.
- [No. Geez.] The one with kabootarbaazi in it (why it had been mentioned in the first place)?
- Oh, um, er.
- [Great.]
- No, wait.
- [Uh-huh. Lovely. Balance running out. Roaming charges. Drat. MTNL phones can't be recharged in non-Mahanagar towns.] Author?
- Er...Aijaz Ahmed...
- Can't be!
- No, no, something like that...
Something about...um...
AHMAD ALI!

The woman looks, finds it,
Twilight in Delhi! J and S yell.

Sigh of relief. Ok, got it.

- It's not in stock. You can place an order though.
- Does that mean I have to buy it?
Tough. I like a little leeway, man. That's why I hate the college Reference Section. You can't browse.

So I place the bloody order. There are by the way 3 hits for this search, Rs. 95, 195 and 295. Naturally I want the first one. Turns out that was from the 1993 inventory. So now it's either 195 or 100 more. No prizes for guessing which one I picked.

Khair, still undaunted, I continue to browse. After looking through a depressing Non-Fiction section which is full of terrorism and religions of saffron and all other colours, I return in the general direction of Kundera, and then decide to spice up my life by going to the other side of the same shelf (which you can't lean against, by the way, it just slides away!).
Then a board boldly declares, POETRY, so I look for Emily Dickinson, whom I didn't buy in Daryaganj last time; I spent my last bit 150 bucks there on a jacket instead. No, poetry does NOT keep me warm.
I don't find her, but stumble instead upon Jeet Thayil, whose name I had heard [here] only recently, not knowing he was a poet. So to create serendipity, I opened These Errors Are Correct and found a poem called 'My Paris'. I read,

Maybe on the Metro
singing my three and a half songs

I like this line so much (and of course one of the songs I knew, but anyway) that I wanted to copy it down. So I take out my handy pen and notepad and begin to write.
As finish writing Maybe, this chap in Landmark sanctioned uniform comes and says

- Madam yeh allowed nahin hai.
- Kya?
- Copying.
- Are you serious?
- Yes, Ma'am, yeh allowed nahin hai.
- So you mean I should memorize this?
- Memorize kar lijiye...
- You realize you're killing any creative impulse.
- Ma'am...
- MAYBE ON THE METRO
SINGING MY THREE AND A HALF SONGS. Not going to forget this anytime soon. [Fume and storm out happily]

Yes, it was unnecessary. I agree.
Perhaps I just needed to vent somewhere.

Now what's eating me is that S was the one who recommended The Art of the Novel, which I didn't like, and S who recommended Twilight in Delhi. Hmm. Hakuna matata.

Did I mention I also bought much-needed new shoes today? And also much-needed second pair of jeans?

So not a wasted day after all!

उन्होंने मस्जिद गिरा दी, ना

[
Much as I wanted this account to be as honest as possible, it didn't seem right to extend that transparency to the lives of those about whom I was writing. The details about my family are all true, anything marked with an asterisk (*) has been changed to protect the identities of those mentioned.
The issue of why I felt the need to make this change can fill many more posts!
]

Seher Khan* is a remarkable woman. I don't know her maiden name, in fact I don't know much about her at all; you wouldn't think she was anything special if you went to her house, because it just isn't done, talking about oneself, and one's experience(s) to strangers, especially if you are the lady of the house.
But even then, I know aunty is remarkable, because I know her daughter. To call Sabah* my best friend would be understating our relationship greatly. Sabah and I grew up together, both feeling slightly out of place in Lucknow; I had come from Lagos and she from Bombay. Our baby pictures look exactly the same, uncannily so; we were both born of displaced urban confusion, unlike most of our classmates here.
I knew some things: aunty knew how to make hummus, she used to watch Happy Days and The Bold and the Beautiful on TV, read novels before bed. When I went to their house for the first time I discovered a Turkish cook-book. She and her siblings had grown up in Saudi Arabia*, where her father was working then. As kids, things tend to become exaggerated in our heads, I always thought (until recently) that she was Arab*.
She was different, but not evidently so, she might have just been a cool mom. Meanwhile Sabah, her sister Sameera* (whom I have never managed to call baaji or aapa, she's just a year older than us), her younger sister Shazia* (who has played, literally, in my lap, when she was little) and I got to know each other.
I don't know how prudent it is to put up such an account on the internet, or whether I have any right to give details, but I cannot tell her story without her name, her identity.

[This post has subsequently been edited]

So let me put it this way; I know from Sabah's accounts (from the spoken or the unspoken?) that her mother has been a tower of strength and support for her daughters through some trying times as far as their education is concerned, and had managed to yet create and re-create herself: she recently finished her BA in Sociology by correspondence, she is more in touch with current affairs than most people from my generation or hers, she keeps herself on her toes, notwithstanding the trouble her back gives her.
Sabah is not home these days, she is in the second year of her BA at a reputed college* in Mumbai; we will not graduate in the same year, since she, like so many others, dropped a year to prepare for Medical. Needless to say, she is not in that line of work now.
Amma and I went to her house the day after Id, we didn't get a chance to go on the day of the festival. Aunty and Amma, we've always felt, (Sabah and I), have some connection - they seem to understand each other. Perhaps simply because two things not equal to anything else may be equal to each other...
On Id, your identity is so much more pronounced. It is not a simple matter of going to someone's house, Id milna for me (and I think Amma also feels this way) is a powerful statement, one that we will have failed in making if we do not manage to do. It was after the Delhi blasts too. I don't remember how the conversation started, or where it was heading, but she began to tell us of her days in Delhi right after she got married: she was talking about 1984, the riots. How it was unbearable, the stifling atmosphere, shops shutting at 7 pm, not a soul on the streets. How it could be me next.
We were in Nigeria when Babri Masjid happened, Appa had just been posted to Lagos, we had moved there in September, 1992. It didn't mean much to us, I think. I wouldn't know, I suppose, I was very young, but I think it's pretty telling that I hadn't so much as heard of the riots till I was maybe 14 or so, an certainly not of the demolition till a little later still. I saw Mani Ratnam's film Bombay I think in 2005, and couldn't believe my eyes. And Bombay is not, mind you, a very scary film, in that its ending is so very idealistic. Even Amma mentioned once that till they saw the movie, the magnitude of the massacre had not registered..

For the Khans, I cannot even begin to imagine what it was like.

I just phoned Sabah to ask her where they were in December '92, January '93, she remembers being in Bombay on vacation, they were living in Lucknow by then. They were at her naani's place, in Andheri. Sabah would have been about to turn 5 in a few months. She remembers talk of somebody's house getting burned down. She knows the stories of Hindus, the neighbours, going to camps at night, camps run by the Shiv Sena.
I don't know if I remember right, but I think Seher aunty was in Lucknow when she heard the news that the masjid had been broken; she and other women were supposed to stay indoors, at some safe place, in case things got out of hand.

In Saudia, she said, everybody was Muslim...your identity became "Indian". She never thought then that the kind of horrors that have been perpetrated in India now, were possible in India. It can't happen in my country.

When she heard what was happening, she thought, it can't happen in India, no, not if it's illegal, the law's in place, it can't happen.

उन्होंने मस्जिद गिरा दी, ना

It was a drastic loss of faith for me.

Later, she was talking about the visitors on Id, how they display their austerity, the stricter you are keeping every roza and praying religiously, the more your brownie points. You are looked down upon if the display in your house is less then that in your neighbours'. Tiny children are shown off if they keep fast.

I think my mother was a genius!
She says this laughingly, but the irony is not that her mother, Sabah's naani was a genius, but that she would never be ackowledged as one, not for her views. Her children were brought up learning the principles of Islam, they grew up following the tenets of Islam without knowing it. Then whatever rituals they choose to follow are that: chosen.
This does not mean Seher Khan is an iconoclast. I don't think she is. The customs in their house are not broken. But where is the scope for free thought within religion?

She fears she'll be next. My mother does too. They feel like targets, sitting ducks. Why? Because they are the liberals. They enemy within the home, the traitors. How does one have a balanced opinion without feeling threatened?

The Shiv Sena can catch me and put me in jail if I meet my boyfriend on Valentine's Day.

It seems to be hep to be an atheist. Or agnostic. Or one of those categories of unbelievers. What if I want to believe in GOD, and in a HINDU GOD, but still retain my relationship with my friends, people I love?

There are comments you hear, in your own house. There are BJP supporters in your workplace. There are Hindu children who know no better than to ape what they hear, and these children hate Muslims.
I remember a particularly self-righteous child, one year my junior, in school. I was in class 5, I think, so he would have been in class 4. We were in the choir group and the swimming team together. I was once (between song practices), describing दही चावल (dahi-chaaval, curd-rice, a quintessentially Tamil meal-ender) to somebody. Then for some reason I started saying that the South Indian Diwali is not on the same day as it is in Lucknow, because the culture is different there. In a way that only children can pronounce judgement, he said, snootily, "इनके तो cultures ही अलग होते हैं!"
Why have I never forgotten this? I know it is the nonsense of a ten-year old, but then I wonder. This is too silly to even be quoted, really. But I still wonder.
You are still a child at 14-15. There were children in the Bombay riots. Rioting. I'm not talking of the victims, although they are victims in a rather peculiar sense...it wasn't like only 50 year old पुजारीs (pujaaris, Hindu priests) were in the riot. It wasn't Hindu fundamentalists. They might have started it, but they didn't do it all. It was people like you and me.
Listen to your children. Watch out for what they say, because we often don't check ourselves before we make a prejudiced remark; we don't know we made it. Watch out for what they say, they say what we say. Catch yourself. Don't do it, don't look at the dashboard or the windscreen, from the inside of the auto-rickshaw, to see whether there is a 786 anywhere, or a Hanuman, a Jai Mata Di, or a Guru Nanak.

I don't know what my point is; or whether this was supposed to have a point.

The liberals, the fundamentalists, they're all the same. Bottomline, peer pressure doesn't happen only to teenagers. How far are we from being fundamentalists? How close to it?

I added this article [written by Samina Mishra] to my blog as an act of...solidarity? I don't know exactly how to say it. I didn't think the article was making any point. I told Sabah as much. But now I realise that it is incredibly difficult to make a point. To take a stand.

It has taken me years to write this; I have been wanting to write about my relationship with Sabah for so long. Why has is taken so long for me to write it? I'm a writer, after all!

When we were about 10-12, our group in school (it was a co-ed, but groups are one sex only!) had me (Tamil), Sabah (Muslim), Mouli* (Bengali) and Chanchal* (Punjabi). We were really proud of this. We knew we were different. We are, naturally. But we were happy about it. How strange it sounds now.

Why is Seher Khan a remarkable woman? I don't know exactly, but she certainly inspired me to write this.

understatement

We exist only in each other's arms,
as the world flies away, dustily,
mirror image memories of longing fingers and salty lips.

A long ride,
to the edge of reason and back,
to where convention will always bring us.

The choice was made
practicality over passion,
chance over design.
In other words, status quo.

Someday it may actually be expedient to love,
and our stolen,
intermittent meetings
will be cute.

We've been pessimistic, you know;
uncharacteristically so.

We did not meet by chance,
don't fool yourself,
The serendipity was all engineered.

What held us back?
Till you have the answer,
I am free, to love you,
incorrigibly.

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.

Leaving Home

To explain why I sing
may take (at the very least)
years.

The queen of the night is a flower
How can you expect me to forget its smell
outside the window.

Endlessly, we lived in this place that has
come to be called home.

Death, sickness, puberty. Children.
Loves.

We learned, unlearned
There are rules for everything.

We lived out of suitcases
cartons of unpacked magazines spawning new mice.

The bike does not run, the antiques are old.

Tradition did not give us longevity.

When she died they cut the gold bangles off her wrists,
with pliers.

I rode my bicycle (my aunt's, rusty)
through the cane chair
that was a wicket that day.

My memories are many,
Many kinds.

Six foot boy, scared of my grandfather at the gate,

Birthdays and custard-jelly.

The lamp is still lit twice a day,
even though she is dead.
He lights it now, having quit smoking at seventy, after she died.

I could have children by now.
The bread-wala will call me baby till the end of his days.

We came here, scrubbed the floor on hands and knees,
grew roots.

The city that (should have) meant nothing to me
or any of us
Tamil speakers, outcasts in Madras
The city I call home.

I sing,
I cannot begin to explain why

Unless you had seen the inside of the bathroom,
climbed up the rotting ladder to the roof
to find the carcass of a bird in the kitchen tank.

I can invite you in,
because I wiped the fungus off the sofas this morning.

Kutti Papa Part 2

I had started telling, about a month ago, the story of my liaison with the kids at Ehsaas, the NGO that SK and I volunteered at this summer.
We heard of it by word of mouth, it was SK's idea to go check the place out. We made an appointment with Shachi Singh who runs it, and turned up at the Charbagh branch. It was there that we really got to know what Ehsaas does.
Charbagh is where the railway station is in Lucknow. Like most railway stations in India, Charbagh is home to many who are homeless. Among those are hundreds of children, either abandoned by uncaring parents, runaways from homes they were better off without, or sometimes just lost. The kids are all lost, actually. Until someone comes to take them by the hand and lead them away from a place where their highest role is fetching tea and happiness is drowning themselves in sollusann [solution, whitening fluid solvent, inhaled to get a high].
Ehsaas is a four room outfit on the roof of the Transport Building, a strangely apt place to house these kids. This is a halfway-house for children literally hunted out (with the help of the Peer Group and those who can spot a new face soon) and brought to the NGO. Their final destinations vary.
By and large, they will go through some basic haphazard schooling here, then move to the Vikas Nagar branch, where they will have better food, clothes and lessons. stage three is joining the school system.
Some who are lost are escorted to their homes, as far away as even Calcutta. Of course, some are too small to know their address or hometown. Like Ganesh, the new kid who wrote his name in Telugu while the others who could write all wrote in Hindi on the backs of their drawings. We drew a lion that day. I went crazy, it was a big clue they had missed, the people who had picked him up didn't know where he was from at all. Shabana and I then tried many versions of "Where are you from?" in Hindi, which he seemed to follow. After some teasing out, what he said was "Begumpet". I nearly died. For me, and my obsession with coincidences, this was too much. "Begumpet is in Hyderabad! He's Hyderabadi!" He didn't know Hyderabad, though. He did know his house was near a municipal school. I managed to find out his parents' names too, which he had apparently said before. Well no wonder he understands Hindi, and no wonder he can't speak it fluently like the others.
Ganesh is the most adorable child. He has that twinkle in his eye. Smart kid. Very smart. I stopped noticing his face and his feet after the first few minutes. He has feet that are curled, as if they were trying to make a fist. His head has some sort of little growth where a punk mohawk would be, as if he was born conjoined and then separated. He's what, five? Beautiful child. I brought Amma to Ehsaas one day, she wanted to make a donation and meet the kids and all. Since she speaks Telugu I wanted her to talk to Ganesh. She asked him where he lived, he said he lived at the station, in I think a shop with somebody, or something like that. When she tried to ask where he had come from, he only repeated that for a while, and then finally said his parents had left him there. He didn't cry, he didn't flinch. It scared my mother a little I think. God knows what goes on in a child's mind. He has a sister. And a grandmother in Bombay.
I was born in Hyderabad. It's always been to me like somewhere I need to go back to, like the place calls me home. My grandparents were living in Begumpet when we were moving to Lucknow. That flat in Mount Santoshi Apartments is the last memory I have of Patti (my grandma) in her house. She didn't live very long in Lucknow, in the house we waited six months to be allotted, because it has a garden. She loves gardens. She was dying, we didn't know it. Now if anyone tells me somebody is not eating at all, I'll tell them to rush to Oncology.
SK and I were in Lucknow only for a month or so more, Shachi didn't want us to get involved in the main teaching work. We were to do some craft, music, things like that. Maybe a little general knowledge, teach a little on the sly. I have no idea what we did finally, I doubt if we did any good that lasted longer than two hours every other afternoon.
One day SK brought a globe. We were trying to tell the kids how when it's day here, it's night in America. Yes, they know America. Amreeka. Like we know Elysium. They come up with the most random versions of the Universe, as it were. Well, if you've been fed only myth about how god (I forget which, N tells me Brahma) created the world, you believe that, right?
Then when I found some books in English on nocturnal creatures, one on dinosaurs. So strange, to tell them we descended from the apes, I could be Darwin incarnate. I felt, again, only too keenly, the acute language problem that had never let me be. Although I'm beginning to realise that language is not English, Hindi, Tamil, but the peculiar parole of your own unique experiences, which when they are so very different from your interlocutor, can be only a barrier to communication, instead of the common ground you hoped it would be.
Washim. Pronounced Vaseem. I know I should not have favourites, but I fell in love with Washim. He reminded me of my little brother. Not that I have one, nor was he like any of my three cousins. He really needed to go to school. Oh, I've slipped into past tense. Well, by the time we left, they were to join school anyway. But he is just too smart for the others. He's a Bumbaiyya, as they call him. From Bombay. Dry humor. Couldn't have been more than 11-12. He'd take my pen and sketch endlessly. He had already drawn all over the walls. I really wanted to be his friend. I don't think he wanted to be friends with anyone.
Of course, Congress (Kaangrace, more like; and no, I don't know why the name) was really not interested in making friends. Poor guy, he's very mixed up. I don't even know what to think...he must have been through something so ugly to talk like that. Navin was aloof, it was fine till they got into their maara-peeti vaale moods. With so much pent up energy, so little space, and so little love, they do start fighting often.
One day I took the guitar. Sanoj, from the Peer Group, he liked it a lot. He also thought I looked like an Angrejin, a foreigner. I think it was the skirts. Or maybe the short hair. I found it very funny. I told Sanoj I get that a lot. Sanoj makes great tea. The kids are a storehouse of outrageously inappropriate Bhojpuri songs.
They were watching Sasura Badey Paise Wala. How to translate this! Let's say Ma Homie's Got Lotsa Cash. My dad was really pissed off when he heard this. N also said, How can they subject the children to this? I don't know why, but even knowing that it's probably no kiddie movie, I didn't see the harm. I wouldn't give it to my kids to watch though. Why not? How are the kids at Ehsaas any different? Other than that they won't be rich, spoilt and living in the lap of luxury. Then why the difference in what they watch on DVD? I'm still trying to make sense of all these questions.
I tried an experiment one day. Four katoras [bowls] of poster colour, red, green, yellow, blue. I shut the doors, the room was dark. Made the kids calm down, sit and be quiet first. Then asked them to close their eyes. Lots of titters, peeping through one eye. Then when they ad settled down, I didn't want idly shut eyes to dream up something horrible. I asked them to think of a time when they were happy. They when they opened their eyes, I asked them if happiness has a colour.
They picked their colour. Washim was quite disdainful of this whole exercise. I'm sure he saw through me, I was just playing by ear.
Then I wanted them to play around with the colours, so I asked them if they had one thing to choose as their favourite in the whole world, what would they pick?

It was crazy. The kind of things the kids said were everything from the absurd to the profound to the dogmatic.

I don't know what I was doing there. Pata nahin. But it was good. I'll go there next hols I think. To see. Maybe it didn't mean anything, who knows. I worry about Ganesh, Congress, Gunja who was the only girl there. I wonder and don't want to contemplate why so few girls were found, and what worse fate might have come their way. Washim. I saw a kid the other day, on the road, he looked just like him. Washim being Washim, he might have run away. It might actually be him. Ehsaas. I can't translate that. Something between emotion, sensation, feeling, and responsibility?

Kutti Papa Part 1

My friend SK and I were pretty jobless these hols. Well, I had my opus to compose, but let's not count that right now, that merits a fresh post!

It's in vogue to work with an NGO, isn't it? Social Work.

Yeah, you know the prerequisites for that scholarship aren't specific at all, they just say the applicant should have a well rounded personality and care for the welfare of his fellow being. That means NGO work, yaar. Kuch kar lena idhar udhar, likh dena [Do some little here and there and then just write] Worked with so-and-so for two months.

What?

I didn't do anything last year because I was a big fat yellow liver. I was scared that I would not be able to change the world. So I didn't do anything at all. In the last couple of years, due to drastic changes in scenery, I'm learning, slowly, to shed inhibitions that I've had so long they seemed irrefutable. I've been trying to befriend the keerhe [insects] that my mind houses!

Anyway, SK happened to hear of an NGO in Lucknow (where our families are, where we come home for hols). All we knew about it was that it was called Ehsaas and worked with kids.

For the longest time, I've been terrified of kids in the same absurd, inexplicable way that you can feel about somebody you have a crush on. When my cousin A was born (when was that, now...1997?) I wasn't allowed to hold her. Heck, I was only 9 if it was 1997! No surprises there. When A was about two, I guess, that's when I saw her next and played and played endlessly with her, fell in love with her, the new sister baby, pretty little thing, smart as hell, making little toddler-quips all over the place. When we got back from Bangalore (where the Family Reunion had been), I couldn't remember her face.
For a while after that I tried to memorise faces; while going in a tempo with Amma to school sometime then, I saw a mountainous man with a craggy red-splotched face and sombre expression. I promised (myself?) never to forget his face. See, I can still remember it. Actually, that's not true. I can only remember my decription of his face. My mind also does useless things like attaching a likely red-and-white cotswool shirt to this person. Who knows, maybe it's not faces I'm good at remembering, maybe it's words.

Of course then there's the language thing. (Boy, I should be my own shrink!) When I came to Lucknow straight after Lagos, I spoke only English, and knew no Hindi to speak of, despite having begun Hindi at the Indian school I went to in Nigeria. I realised I spoke differently from the other kids, and so I probably thought differently too. I couldn't decide, at school, whether to try to mingle and become one of the crowd, or to be different. (I was chatting online with my oldest friend RR a few days ago; she is also an Indian whose early memories are of Lagos, and then the relocation from There to Here, to a home country as alien as any other. Funny, she and I both felt that we were so convinced we were oddballs that we never gave ourselves a chance to be normal!)
In senior school, during a free period, loitering around the grounds with other pubescent girls from my class, we'd often run into littler schools of small fry, scuttling along adorably to and from the swimming pool or the auditorium or the library. The other girls would invariably pet the little kids, coo in their ear, play with them. I wanted to sometimes, but never did more than once or twice ever, because I was convinced I spoke a language they didn't understand. For the record, by then my Hindi was certainly as good, if not better, than the average kid in my class who had trouble with comprehension, of any language, mother tongue or no mother tongue.
It's funny, when I think about it, it was only worse with Tamil-speaking kids we'd run into at big community functions that my mother and I would attend in those days; stuff like Ram Navami (the day Lord Ram was born, and the end of the Navratri fasting period of nine days). I stopped going to these things soon enough. When I discovered that you can be asked to sing. Bhajans, of course, what else. On a religious function obviously it's got to be a devotional song. I knew none. I knew only the school prayer songs. In Hindi. Which I was anyway not so confident of then, and would not be appreciated in a gathering of Tamil/Malayalam and the odd Telugu/Kannada speakers; a gathering which was the biggest Home Away From Home South Indian Social Reunion of the year in Lucknow, capital of the Hindi-speaking Northern Heartland.
I didn't know enough grammatically adequate Tamil even to speak a few sentences to the Tamil kids. So that was that.

Meanwhile, I loved kids!

After Nigeria, I don't remember going out to play with the neighbourhood kids (yes, there were some) or going to friends' places to play, barring a few stray playdays with NR or with that girl I didn't like, who stole my Hamley's toys and whose name I think was Anam.

Anyway, I really don't know why I am delving so deep. All I wanted to talk about was my relationship with children now.

Last year, I had a bright idea. I wanted to give back to my juniors in school all the musical gyan [knowledge] I had gained in the year I had been pert of the Western Music Society (WMS) in college. And I had learnt more in that year than I had in the last two or three put together. So I went to see my ex-Principal with my proposal. I had printed an ad and all, nice and catchy. For amateur voice lessons in the summer vacation, at school, free of charge. I was just something I wanted to do. I was really excited to teach 13-15 year-olds the next level of harmony; I remembered the laboured two-parts that we would devise when we were that age, and I thought it would be great to show them what real, beautiful, rich melodies could be woven together.

The Principal thought I was planning to teach primary school kids. I don't know why, it was just a miscommunication. She said, Ok, shall I put you through the In-Charge for Class 3? I just agreed. I'm not such a wimp now, but even a year ago, I was pretty wimpy. Ok was all I ever said.

Suddenly, my target age group went down from 14 to 8.

I had a class (a parody of one) of a floating population (literally, they went swimming and then came for Music Class) of five, plus minus two. And it wasn't always the same five either.

I was bugged at first, but then I was ok when I realised the only thing different is that I can't teach music to them in the same way as I had planned. What the heck, I was no slavedriver. I like to let kids play around. So after finding that trying for discipline in a random vacation camp-type environment was just stupid, everything went just fine.

So I pretended to teach, had fun with them. One day I saw a little dog of some pomeranian-esque yappy breed in the arms of a lady who had come to drop off her charges, two sisters (ages 5 and 7) at the Music Class. By the time I could ask her to wait, she had left. I asked the seven year old (I don't remember her name, but boy do I remember her face! And her voice, a very sweet voice. Very conscientious kid. Always looking out for her 5 year old sister, and, I later found, her baby brother as well) to bring her dog the next day, after asking for permission at home, of course, and laying down the disclaimer (that if her parents said no, she shouldn't get me in a soup).

So the two sisters turned up the next day, with this dog (a bitch who was called I think Lucy) that was very fit and frisky as hell, and what d'ya know, a St. Bernard pup called Rex, bigger than his full-grown friend, and a lazy lump. Then there was the baby brother, a sweet three year old who tried to lift the lumpy Rex to his feet, and was shorter than the puppy held up by its front paws.

We had our great Lessons in the empty auditorium, a veritable heaven for music, it has the most stage-y echoes when it's empty. I've spent countless lunch-breaks alone on that stage, imagining. I have always loved the stage. We go far back, you see. So when this dinky circus turned up, it was Play Day. We raced around the hall, slipping on its smooth floor, Lucy finally outrunning the overweight singers-to-be who were my pupils that day.
Another character showed up when it was time to go; she was a girl who looked my age, but I wasn't sure. So I used polite speech; she was the girls' aunt, just out of first year college, like me. She said now she understood why the girls liked my classes so much. I couldn't even believe it. It was such a strange, wonderful feeling, to realise that these kids could take to me.

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:

Phaalse Hain Kaale Kaale

If you've never lived in India, or, to be precise, north India, somewhere not urban enough to exclude pushcart-toting vendors (various wallahs, as our English masters used to call them) from the landscape, you have missed one of the most sublime joys of the Indian summer. It goes by the humble name of phaalsa and is a tiny little bluish-reddish-purple bruised-looking berry that grows on trees in clusters.

I Googled phaalsa but as often happens with phonetic spelling, it didn't throw up much. Then I went to the ole' Bible at home, Amma's ancient copy of Nutritive Value of Indian Foods (1976 Reprint), by C. Gopalan, B.V. Rama Sastri and S.C. Balasubramanian (yes, apparently Tam-Brahms got together and made a joint effort!) first published in 1971 by the National Institute of Nutrition, Hyderabad, under the National Council of Medical Research. This book was part of her curriculum while she was studying to finish a B.Sc. (Bachelor of Science) in Home Science, and has long been my polyglot family's way to cross-translate names of fruits, and spices between Tamil, English, Hindi, Malayam and occasionally even Gujarati, Assamese, Oriya, Bengali or Marathi (my grandad spent some time in Orissa, Assam and Gujarat; the rest is stuff picked up from here and there over the years ).

The phaalsa is just as much a part of living in Lucknow as travelling in a rickshaw, Hazratganj, chikan and the bad shaayari that all kids learn in school here.


// The pictures were taken in my garden. The voiceover is my mom! Must try to record the real thing sometime!

Starbright

I stood naked under the stars, swelling with the knowledge that no one could see me now - I was invisible, free, I was dust. Far from feeling aroused, I felt as if a dead weight had dropped into my stomach. The night and I, we were the same. Both came out silently when no one was watching, and joined each other in a sordid embrace.

Dayend

When you have stood namelessly in the afternoon as it slowly turns to evening to dusk to night, and watched the sky change to colours that make you want to paint; when you have felt the sultry breezeless twilight wrap about your neck and ankles with clouds of mosquitoes sharing your very blood, it is not possible to be closer to any man, to any city, or to your children than you are to Lucknow, your own.