For a beautiful soul...

Today is my paternal grandmother’s (a.k.a Patti’s) first death anniversary. Surprisingly I still miss her with the same intensity and force I had last year. So, today I dedicate this post as an ode to the beautiful soul who in her own way defined what I am today:

Her life:

• Eldest of the three daughters.
• Was apparently very smart and got a double-promotion from the third standard to the fifth standard decades ago. (According to her it was an achievement worth a Bharat ratna and unfailingly recited it at the drop of a hat.)
• Lived in Bombay for a while after her father passed away.
• Got married early and lost her hearing ability even before she was 20.
• Brought up five naughty kids of which my dad was arguably her favorite and the naughtiest too.
• Lost two of her daughters (equally charming souls) to health ailments.
• Was diagnosed with terminal illness and battled her disease until the very end with such grit and determination that shocked even the doctors.

Favorite and oft repeated dialogues:

"This is the only treasure I have. Nobody treasures it anymore" -Making kolams (colored patterns) are a big thing in our family and if I refused to learn them, she would dramatically gather all of her kolam books and say this with flourish.)

"Don’t put mug inside bucket. Don’t touch plate with your left hand. Don’t leave your hair open. Don’t wear shoes inside house" - Her rules were extremely complex and difficult to master. You were not allowed to touch your plate with your left hand, but you could lick fingers and slurp the rasam. Talking when eating was a big no-no, but she could read her 'tughlak' (which is a popular Tamil political magazine). According to her, leaving the hair open made girls look seductive. Hello! I live in a place which has more buffaloes than men, and the possibility of somebody getting seduced by Ms. Frizzed Up Always, seems extremely remote.

"Noodles is bad for health." - She was an authority on classifying food items into edible and fatal. Fatal things including everything she did not like and did not know how to make.

"I know English, Marathi, Hindi, Malayalam and Tamil. Everybody should learn at least five languages" - Honestly, she knew only Tamil. I have my own doubts about her other claims because I have heard her speak butler English and Malayalam in front of others and wished I could melt right there.

“Nobody saves electricity” – This comes from a person who never switched off bathroom lights. When confronted she would say, “I am old. Don’t mistreat me”

“You wear it today. Tomorrow it will become a fashion” – When I lost my hair band and she wanted me to wear an extremely ugly looking scarf on my head as a substitute.

“You are useless. Without doubt you will end up grazing cows” –When I stoutly refused to go out with that scarf on my head. This dialogue was also used very frequently on everyone including her sons, daughters, son-in-laws, and grandchildren.

I could go on, but to keep it short, she was a remarkable woman. She was a combination of warmth, love, kindness, good, and bad. The gaping void she left can never possibly be filled. I miss her.

Movies and me!

This weekend was the most boring I had ever endured in a while. I was in no mood for studying and the internet was cranky. So by this cruel twist of fate I decided to watch some movies with my bro. We actually watched a mallu, tamil and a telgu movie in less than five hours :) And at the end of the session, I realized:

1. They all start with a hero-introduction song!
2. The hero and heroine quite literally fall in love. The hero falls on the leading lady and they have the tumbling down the stairs/river bed sequence (with ear-splitting la-la-la chorus), ending with a sloppy kiss. The heroine blushes and voila, they are in love. If I were her, I would have probably been busy nursing my fractured bones because that’s what would really happen if a dunce weighing a hundred kilos suddenly decides to plant himself upon damsels.
3. All the good, innocent girls are homely, wear saris and look gorgeous with their hair open. (I tried the hair-open-in-the-wind part once, but instead of flowing across my face in lovely waves, they decided to frizz up and it took ages to detangle my hair). Also, they bear all atrocities silently and the only testament to their suffering is their sari pallu. The bad girls are the ones in skimpy clothes wearing red lipstick.
4. All songs (even the sad ones where the heroine is angry with the hero or his mother/best friend/anybody who is shown for five seconds in the first scene kicks the bucket) are shot in foreign locales. They all have matching embarrassing dance steps. Also this cruel death brings more sympathy from the heroine and she forgives the hero by the end of the song.
5. The lead pair romance around trees happily and the next scene is predictably: hero's mischievous smile - a door closing - camera pans up to the moon. And we are left to decipher that they are up to something naughty!
6. Yes the inevitable scene: The heroine pukes and her parents are shocked. Her dad takes the dagger out and the mother and daughter fall at his feet. The dad actually walks until the door dragging the ladies at his feet like a pair of mops. Not even for a moment do they think that the puking could have been just indigestion.
7. Then at the door, he drops the dagger with a loud clang and sits down. The whole family now huddles and bawls. The dad after hitting his head a million times with his hands; comes up with a brilliant solution for the disgrace his daughter has brought to the family. Consume poison!
8. The next five minutes is spent on zooming in and out of the poison bottle. The background music is the sad version of the la-la-la song. Finally when they actually start drinking it, the hero breaks the door open and starts a monologue. He talks about suppression of women, and how they should be given equal opportunity for selecting their partner. And this was the same dude who admonished the bad girl for wearing clothes not befitting a woman! Hypocrisy!!!
9. Then there are villains who try to kidnap/molest the heroine. The bimbette only screams and the hero is so overcome with rage that he single-handedly kills a bunch of henchmen. The police arrive only at the end of the fight and promptly arrest the baddies. In one movie, a policeman actually congratulates the hero and says he would love to get him as a son-in-law. Even my bro who actually watches pretty intolerable movies, groaned at this!
10. The bloodied hero unties the heroine, who is very conveniently bound with ropes and looks into her eyes deeply. She nods to articulate that she is okay. He grabs and hugs her. The dad wipes his tears and everyone is happy once again. Tada! Movie over.

Never for a moment will I ever regret my disinterest in movies :)

Silence is loud

Working late nights in office can be extremely annoying! Especially when:

• You have an unfinished chapter in that gripping book you have to complete, but left it to the twist of fate in the morning.
• There is a TV show in which your heartthrob is performing and you would not miss it even during a natural calamity.
• You Tube is blocked.
• You are gushing with hundreds of 'what an awesome day I had' stories to tell your roomie.
• You finally get to eat the yummy-looking dish all by yourself for dinner without having to feed it to a dozen hungry mouths. But it does not taste all that heavenly anymore.
• You miss the soft music from the manager's bay, incessant chatter from a guy who does not know what subtlety means, gossip and laughter from people around.
• Your creative juices have long stopped and all you can churn out is long essays that taste like cardboard.

My birthday and more...

Whoa!! I am still reeling under the fantastic birthday bash I had on Friday. I don’t usually celebrate birthdays; probably because they remind me of how closer I am to getting wrinkles, wearing bifocals, and growing gray hair! But this year, I cut three huge chocolate truffle cakes, got a dozen bear hugs and priceless books.

The day started with several calls and messages from friends and foes :). Yeah, anybody who calls me at 12 with the sole intention of waking me up gets segmented inside my brain as a foe automatically. My roomie included! But I did forgive her for the lovely bracelets she gave me.

I reached office to baby pink roses and a gazillion birthday wishes. I have never felt so pampered ever before. To top it all, I cut two surprise chocolate cakes and got my face plastered in chocolate syrup and slabs. All thanks to S’d and everyone else who chortled at the sight of me licking cake from my nose. The name on the cake was not very flattering I should say! One had a ‘Happy Birthday Geek” (I so hate Gau’mi) on it and the other one had a ‘Happy Birthday Pogo” (Apparently I look like a cartoon from the POGO channel. Some cheek!) . I also got a gorgeous green kurta and ‘Brick lane’ a book by Monica Ali. Thanks mates!

GP then called me up to say she wouldn’t be able to meet me today due to other engagements. I grumbled about it to Vamp, who suggested a visit to his new house to cheer me up. I readily agreed! All the way to his house, I kept a low profile, muttering vague things about getting ditched on a birthday.

When we finally waded through the impossible traffic, and reached his place, I opened the door to find GP, Kiki, Aks and most importantly another chocolate cake :). This time I am not even mentioning what was written on the cake! GP and her tricks. I always fall for them.

Vamp gave me the whole ‘Lord of the Rings’ collection. After a yummy dinner with 10 others, I crashed at Procky’s place. Me and Kiki encountered a cockroach that flew around the house. Kiki kept running from one corner to another with a broomstick in hand. The sight was so hilarious that I started laughing uncontrollably. The cockroach wiped my smile away by settling down inside my handbag. Later, with an Outlook and Baygon spray we finished the job.

I ran home next day morning, to find an unnamed package. ‘The Black Swan’, by Nissim Nicholas Taleb was inside it. Before I could go into the dreamland of some unnamed mysterious caped crusader, who would sweep me off my feet, by surprising me with unnamed packages, Mom asked me to check with Unz. When I did, I realized that it was indeed Unz who sent it. So much for my dream, but nevertheless, thanks a bunch for the brilliant book!

At the end of it all, I felt immensely lucky to have such friends. It takes a lot to organize surprises just to make my day special. After all, my friends are the best! :)

Phew!

It is only 7.00 AM in the morning, and I am already wiping away tears with the back of my hands. I splash cold water on my face, willing the tears to stop, but they don’t. I curse and continue peeling onions. I need to get an edible curry ready before Dad and Bro bring the place down with their claims of how they have never been late for work/school.

“We could have got something from Nilgiris!” grumbles Dad, scrubbing the kitchen sink. “Breakfast will be ready by the time you finish your bath”, I announce in my most-reassuring cheerful voice. Dad shakes his head and storms out of the kitchen.

Sigh! It has been more than a month. Thanks to Mom, who is enjoying her extended vacation in her hill-station cum hometown, I have been confined to the kitchen walls on all weekends. Sundays included!!
A typical weekend starts like this.

SATURDAY:
I come home after a crazy, breathless, impossible deadline achieving work-week to this mess. After a hurried dosa-making session and packing lunches, I return to the kitchen for a round of washing and scrubbing vessels. The Pooja room is a mess. The lamps have turned green. This according to Dad is because of some chemical reaction between oil and copper. He illustrates with a formula that he makes up at the spur of moment. I scratch the formula out and write in bold letters, ‘This reaction would have never happened if you cleaned the lamp.” He goes back to polishing his shoes muttering about how he could have grown paddy in the fields and helped poor farmers instead of wasting time giving birth to me. I want to point out a fundamental mistake in his time-space hypothesis of making children and growing paddy...But I keep my mouth shut.

After a couple of bear hugs, both of them leave the house. I start with cleaning the kitchen. Mom has a particular order in which she arranges her vessels, and anybody who messes the order will probably get hit in the head with her favorite wooden ladle. So I fix the jigsaw and wash clothes. Our washing machine thinks it is a pet animal and works only if Mom is around. The other members of the family do not exist in its world. So I end up washing clothes manually (White-turned-brown clothes are surprisingly more in number than colored ones). After trudging the million stairs to my terrace, I dry the clothes out, hopping from one foot to anther, to avoid roasting my poor legs completely. Then I start sweeping, mopping and dusting the house. By the time I finish it is already time for lunch. I mercifully gulp down the rice and rush upstairs for a nap.

I wake up after an hour to make coffee, and start my usual round of washing vessels. Bro returns and I have to make another round of coffee and wash vessels. Dad comes back, and I have to make yet another round of coffee and wash vessels. I cut veggies and make dinner. Of course, there is another round of washing vessels.

All of us eat dinner and thankfully this time, Dad washes the vessels. I quickly check mail and reply to the ‘Are-you-dead-or-what?’ messages on Orkut. All of us tuck in for some bedside reading and Bro sleeps off with his book open. I hardly get through three pages and groggily ask Dad to switch off the lights.

SUNDAY:
All of us wake up only by 8.00 AM. I get the customary call from Mom, and I almost ask her to pack her bags and get back. The goodness of my heart and the angel that I am; is the only thing that makes me say, “I am having fun here. You come back whenever you want.” I also nicely let the ‘I am not cleaning the house today’ fact, slip in between our conversation (In my classic ‘Am-I-not-your-bundle-of-joy’ voice). “Varsha!” she says. The only time she calls me by my name is when she disapproves of what I am doing. Otherwise I take the names of various species of cattle depending on her mood. She tells me if I make this a habit, what will my future in-laws think of me? “Fine”, I grumble and go back into the kitchen. I hope she never finds out that I blogged this conversation. Her daughter ruining her own prospective marriage alliances is not something she can digest!

MONDAY:
My boss asks me in a cheerful voice, “So how was your weekend?” and I am tempted to reply, “Squeaky clean”.

Acrobatic lizards and anxious lasses

It has been more than three weeks of peak workload, leaving me very little time to blog, mail, or even read. So, when I did get some time to leave a bit early, I decided to work myself out of the 'Will-I-end-up-like-this-for-the-rest-of-my-life?" mood, by cleaning the kitchen.

So, I started with the stove. The stove in our common kitchen is buried under layers of spilt milk, noodles masala, burnt rice, dust, grime, and dirt (Of course it is not all that bad, but I love making embroidered statements). So I painstakingly removed layer-by-layer of the dirt, until I saw the first glimpse of the silvery aluminium.
Satisfied with my handiwork, and egged on by the gleaming aluminium, I ventured to clean the trivet and burner of the stove. The burner successfully transformed the kitchen sink into a dark hole, and I ended up cleaning the sink, only to find my scrubber turn jet black from light green. Then I washed the scrubber, to find my hands turn into a ravishing shade of grubby brown.

It was only when I started cleaning the trivet, did the dramatic, or rather a swift termination to my cleaning spree come. I pulled the trivet out, to find a lizard hanging upside down from it!!! As expected, I screeched as loudly as possible and put it down. The acrobatic lizard with the mighty swung, got back to its feet and scaled to the top of the stove smoothly.

I couldn’t but appreciate the impudence it had, to stay there quietly amidst all the clatter I had created. Before even it could think of doing something funny, I slowly tapped the stove with the gas lighter, silently urging the dear Lizzie to back off.

Yes. I named the lizard too, in the middle of all the commotion.

Lizzie did not budge. I hit the stove harder. This time she only backed off a few steps. (I decided the lizard would be a 'she' because she was captivated by the kitchen stove and exhibited unusual daring). Then I began a slow rhythmic tapping against the stove. Lizzie moved into a trance-like state, inching backwards with every tap, and before I could stop her...She slipped and fell into one of the holes inside the stove.

I swallowed hard. Did I kill her? I pictured headlines in the 'The Creepy Crawly Times'. “Chef Lizzie burnt to death. Lizzie, a successful chef and also the co-author of the book, '100 Tasty Insects And Where To Catch Them' was cruelly hypnotized by a two-legged slaughterer and burnt to death inside a stove. Investigations revealed that the two-legged being is still on the prowl, brutally putting an end to all the successful career-minded woman lizards. "She is a shame to the two-legged community. She is an obstacle to the empowerment of lizards” said the spokesperson of ‘The lizard on the wall’, an NGO for displaced woman lizards."

In a second I had become a serial killer, shunned by the lizard community. Still panicking, I peeped into the hole for any sign of life. Gradually I could see two beady eyes glowering from inside the hole, admonishing me for my deed. A wave of relief spread over me as I watched Lizzie slowly clamber over the hole, struggling to find a hold. And when she finally did, she fixated a stare at me. It was an acutely piercing angry glare. No doubt.

I muttered a hurried apology and quickly switched off the lights.

Random thoughts...

When I moved out of my house a year back, I packed a few dresses, kitchen utensils, and a few essentials...All that fit into two small bags...When I got onto the waiting bus, the conductor grabbed my baggage and effortlessly shoved them under a seat. 20 years of existence packed into just two bags. I strangely felt offended. For a minute it seemed like I was the one being shoved.

It also fetched me the revelation that; all I ever owned was in those bags. I felt eerily buoyant. I felt there was nothing to hold me back, except maybe a pair of bags. I immediately text messaged my silver-lining to one of my friends, who asked me to stop the drama..., and the same friend, just a few days before, said he wanted to get rid of all his belongings and carry only a pair of bags, before he left India for good. With the beach sand dancing to the music of the waves at my feet, I could only muster a weak smile. How things you say come right back to you :)

It would be nice to leave the world beholden to nothing.

Unrelated thought: I am listening to Cliff Richard's 'Theme for a dream', and it sounds exactly like 'pal pal pal' from Munnabhai MBBS 2. Disgusting!!!