Today in Photo

Let it not be said that I practise favouritism in my photographs, it's just that taking a good photo of a black cat is HARD and has to be timed exactly right. That's why contrast and HDR filters are turned up to high on this photo of our sweet Squishy. He came to us as a foster kitten called Mr Noir (which is a great name but didn't suit him at all) and was insistent that we were his family, Olga and Bruno were his siblings and this was home. I mean, seriously. I have never seen a kitten more confident of his place in life. He took to climbing up our legs with his very sharp claws, leaving me with total kitten PTSD but he was so sure he was going to be petted at the other end, no amount of "Squishy, no!" had any effect. He is a very affectionate cat, very into people and attention but also very sure of his boundaries and so if you pet him longer than he likes, he will attempt to scratch or bite you. Which is not only very bad manners but also since he is roughly the size of a small dog, it can be painful. Over the years though, we've learned to identify his Asshole Ears, and push him away when they move into that position. #blackcatsofinstagram #squishy #rescuecat #adoptdontshop

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Having pets makes you think about mortality a lot more

This came out on Asiaville a while ago

There are three of them inside the house—and one outside, softly sleeping in a long planter where we laid his ashes. For several years, he was my only cat, a large ginger tom, and then he was gone, and then I took his ashes with me when we moved into our new house, and left them in a corner of my study. Finally, many years later, I was ready for closure, to lay him at rest at last, at last, and I think of him now as it's raining into that same planter, the baby vegetables are tentatively putting out new leaves, and his grave is a great green growing thing.

But the three that are alive—still with us—they have always outnumbered us. None of them has ever been an Only Cat, poor things, and none of them has known very much of a life without four walls and a ceiling above them. Two are siblings—the grey tabby Bruno and the calico Olga, they spent a few months in a park in a part of Delhi I had never been to before, they were handled so carelessly and so often by the neighbourhood children, they do not like us to pick them up at all. Bruno will kick like a rabbit, Olga will make sounds of distress. Even though we've had them all their lives, except for those three months, two in Bruno's case, when they belonged to everyone. But those two months were everything.

In the case of our large black tom cat, the alpha of our household, even though he came into our lives after our ginger died, after Bruno and Olga already banged out their dynamic, he upended everything. He is the Cat Of The House, he picks on Bruno and adores Olga, he likes nothing more than to walk from lap to lap at parties, sitting for a while on each person, as they hold their breath, a cat sitting on their lap! What an honour! He likes to roll on his back in the balcony, and when you thump him as you pet him, which he adores, a fine cloud of dust emerges from his fur, he's like Pig Pen in the old Peanuts comics, he's such a very dirty cat, not like Bruno and Olga with their immaculate white paws, but he doesn't have any white on him, except a tiny bit near his tummy, so it doesn't matter. He's magnificent, all muscle and built like a miniature panther, but we called him Squishy when he was a kitten and it stuck. Squishy suits him once you get to know him a little.

I think a lot about when they will die. I'm not doing it to be morbid, it's more of a way of preparing myself—one day, these three creatures who I love almost out of reason, will be dead. Ashes in planters. This cat, this cat extending her chin to me so I can tickle it, that cat, blinking appreciation at me, this other cat, sitting on my hip while I read on my side on the sofa, all these cats, one day they will be dead. Having pets reminds you of the way life ticks on and on. If you love a thing that is an organic life form, you love a thing with an expiry date.

I don't allow myself to love strays too much, when we foster kittens as we sometimes do, I don't love them either. We look after them competently, we send them on their way. If you wonder how you keep from falling in love with a kitten, try having five cats in the house. You can't love everybody, even though you have the best intentions. I've only ever actively disliked one of our foster kittens though, for no other reason than his meow was annoying, and his face was strange, too white, his eyes looked like a rabbit's. We called him Julian, after Assange, and I was glad when he moved on to a new home, and not just glad for him either, glad for me.

You can't love everything, especially when you know they're going to die one day. It's a lonely feeling. I see why people might be tempted to have children, unless things go very wrong, your children will outlive you, and you can die happy, knowing that the creatures you love are safe. How many cats will I bury before I die? There's probably an exact figure written down somewhere where the universe keeps all of our secrets.

On the internet, cats rule. If I'm bored, I'll Instagram a picture of one of them, add a clever caption, watch the likes come pouring in. It's almost like you've worked that day, and being a freelance writer means you're either always working or you never are. Olga likes to drape herself across my desk, which sounds very poetic, but because of my mess and her bulk, things are frequently falling off it. Still, they're good company. Like a proud mother, I compare them to other cats I see on the internet, surely none are as good looking as mine, so shiny-furred, so original in their escapades, so large and healthy looking? I even started a cat group on Facebook, primarily so I could talk about my cats, and it turned out everyone wants to talk about their cats, I get about twenty new joining requests every day. People post about their cat troubles, and cats up for adoption and all that, yes, but a lot of it is also people posting one, two, three, four photos of their cats. Sometimes we all join in in the comments section, and it's the biggest love fest I've seen on the internet in a long time, all of us just going, “Cat!” at each other.

In Vietnam, where we were last year, circumstances led to me sitting with a grandmother and her two grandsons. We none of us spoke each other's language, the boys looked at me shyly, twining around their grandmother. I took out my phone, and opened a picture of Squishy, lying in his classic pose, back on the floor, four paws in the air. I showed it to the older of the two boys. “Meo!” he said, which is the delightful Vietnamese word for cat, and one that I knew as well. “Meo,” I agreed, and we spent a happy half hour, looking at the three cats, far away in Delhi, Park Cats once, Road Cats, and now Helping Me Navigate A Different Language Cats. Like the Little Prince and his rose, I only know my three cats, and to me that makes them the best cats in the whole world.

Today in Photo

Gave a friend a homemade birthday card yesterday. I felt like drawing a bearded dragon and since he ALSO has a beard I thought it was appropriate. You're all going to get homemade cards from me which you must all treasure. (it says happy birthday on the back) #animalsketch #whatidrewtoday #painting

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Would you, like Edmund Pevensie, sell your soul for Turkish Delight?

(I think this came out in The Indian Express? Not sure though. Read ANYWAY.)




“The Queen let another drop fall from her bottle on to the snow, and instantly there appeared a round box, tied with green silk ribbon, which when opened , turned out to contain several pounds of the best Turkish Delight. Each piece was sweet and light to the very centre and Edmund had never tasted anything more delicious.” - C.S Lewis, The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe


Once upon a time in Istanbul, a sultan wanted to keep all his wives and mistresses happy, so he called upon a confectioner to create a sweet to keep them—well—sweet. (Or so says an article in the Independent, talking about the history of Turkish Delight). This was a thing that the confectioner invented, a gel of starch and sugar, sprinkled with nuts and flavoured with rosewater, a cloying, dense sweet, rubbery but not chewy. Nice, if you like that sort of thing, which I, disappointed adult, once childhood Narnia fan, did not.


There is an argument to be made about not re-reading your old favourite books as an adult. Your rational mind isn't supposed to stop and examine a problematic bit of prose, you're supposed to skim right along, breathless and caught up in the adventure like the heroes you're reading about. There should also be an argument about not eating food you've read about that has been exalted. Fish and chips were bland, kidneys smell so strongly of pee I just couldn't stomach them, and Turkish Delight was the unkindest of all—not a delight, not even remotely so. I was well into adulthood by the time I tried them, and with the first bite, I paused for a moment, with the second, I decided they weren't for me. No offense to Turkish Delight lovers, it was just that I realised in that moment, almond slivers catching on my palate, that it was no wonder that Edmund in Narnia loved them, they would please a child, achingly sweet, and only a child could consume so many in one go and not be sick after.


The first—and now, looking back, the only--time I read about the Sultan's appeasement was in The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, the very first of the Narnia books, which, if you're not familiar with, is about four English children who stumble through a wardrobe into a magic land and overthrow the evil queen who has been ruling there for many years. Before they can overthrow her, one of the children—Edmund—is lured into her power by the magic sweets she feeds him. This makes him silly and vulnerable—not unlike being roofied—and soon, he is her spy. While the Beavers and the children eat fish and potatoes, Edmund has been corrupted by the Turkish Delight he betrays his whole family for it, and is betrayed in turn.


“He had eaten his share of the dinner, but he hadn't really enjoyed it because he was thinking all the time about Turkish Delight—and there's nothing that spoils the taste of good ordinary food half so much as the memory of bad magic food.”


Now, in Lewis' time, Turkish Delight was the ultimate in imported confectionery, and in war-time England, when the book was written and set, sweets were hard to get. An article theorises that maybe the idea of Narnia under the White Witch where it was “always winter and never Christmas” led Lewis to think of it. After all, sugar rations were scarce during the time, and he probably drew parallels between that life and the one he was creating in Narnia.


 Originally, it was called rahat-ul hulkum, for “comfort of the throat” but in modern day Turkey, Turkish delight is just plain old “mouthful” or lokum. Edmund's betrayal has travelled around the world—Bulgaria, where it's spiced with walnuts; Greece where it's served with coffee instead of biscuits; Romania, where you don't really want to know what “rahat” now means; and North America and England where they coat it with chocolate as they do most sweet things.


In my imaginings, the TD was marshmallow-like, spongy and soft and ethereal. I was ready o make peace with the idea that it wasn't a real thing, just a made up name for something so wonderful it couldn't be described. I'm not the only one. In an article in Slate, the author imagines it “crumbly and buttery and warm, like shortbread with walnuts, just out of the oven, with a rich, molten filling inside.” But after tasting it: “It tasted like soap rolled in plaster dust.” Maybe that's where the mystery lies, not in what Edmund ate, but why he ate it, not the reason he was seduced but what he was tasting as he gave up his whole family. I suspect it'll always be a mystery to me.

Today in Photo

Finally, after Italy, I am ready to eat pasta again. I made some yesterday, was not as good as @margheritamvs's and never will be, I think, sitting in India with Indian ingredients and also I am not like the best chef, but it was not the worst pasta I have ever had and also the photo turned out kind of INTERESTING. Gritty not pretty. It definitely tasted better than it looks. Am I protesting too much? I had two portions. #foodstagram #tomatosauce #delhidiary

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Today in Photo

Maybe it's time to get Olga da Polga her own Instagram account. She does photograph as beautifully as an influencer. Her name, by the way, is from a lesser known Michael Bond book (he's famous for Paddington Bear), about a guinea pig called that, with the same calico markings, who likes to make up stories. I bet if my Olga could speak, she'd be telling tall tales too. #catsagram #calicocats #olgadapolga #rescuekitten #adoptdontshop

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There are many things I miss about Bandra but this restaurant is in my top five

(This appeared a long time ago on The City Story)

I've always been a Delhi-ite by fate and geography. A “Delhicacy” if you will. I never had my year abroad like all my friends seemed to do straight from undergrad to a post-graduate degree somewhere cold, where they learned life skills and how to speak precisely when they wanted something. I stayed fluttering and vague, making long jazz hands mixed with ballet arms when I couldn't correctly express what I wanted to convey. Delhi was where I moved to at three weeks old, after having been born in my mother's hometown in Hyderabad, and Delhi was where I stayed ever since—till the time I was twenty five.

And then I moved to Bombay on a whim. This was my “year abroad,” as foreign a place to me as Warwick or Hamburg or New York were to my friends. I entered the city with my eyes wide, gazing up at the big buildings where someone's light was always on, no matter what time of night. I learned to navigate a system completely alien to the one I knew. I was only one thousand three hundred and eighty four kilometres away from home, but it felt as new to me as it must have done for Vasco Da Gama arriving south of where I was a few centuries ago.

Of course I loved it. What 25 year old woman wouldn't? I was free, anonymous and cavorting about the city at a rate that belied my rapidly dwindling finances. (Turns out journalism isn't the kind of job that lets you not only live without roommates but also eat in fancy places, so Carrie Bradshaw lied to us all.) However, I had moments of abject loneliness. I dreamt real estate dreams—where one of the rooms of my tiny shared flat had a hidden door, and when I opened it, I saw more rooms, more space. Sometimes, I ordered kaali daal three days in a row, just for that Delhi feeling, only to get a Gujju, Maharashtrian or foreigner-spiceless version of it. I wanted the food I had grown up with, because sometimes you long for comfort food, and the only thing that can ease your homesickness is a kebab roll without a whole lot of masala in it—just a smear of green chutney, onions on the side, thanks.

It was one of those Sunday afternoons, on a particularly blue Missing Delhi day that I discovered Khaan-e-Khaas. Maybe “discovered” is the wrong word, after all, friends had been feeding me their prawn biryani in the middle of the night for several months. What I wanted though was a Sunday afternoon feeling, and how do you translate that into a menu? Turns out you can. While perusing the dishes on offer (long before Zomato, I used the paper version that came with a bag of home delivery) I found Punjabi mutton curry. Two years of finding kari-patta in all my curries, whether North, South or Chinese had made me wary, but I decided to give it a go anyway.

Reader, I married it. Okay, not quite literally, but this, this was what my soul and my stomach had been crying out for. It was so authentic, I had probably only eaten versions at friends homes, it came with hot steamed basmati rice, and plump potatos cooked in the gravy, the mutton so tender, it fell off the bone. I ate a big lunch, all on my own, and then napped all afternoon, the humid air outside feeling almost like I was in the middle of a Delhi summer with a water cooler rumbling in the corner of the room, the evocative smell of khus making dreams even sweeter.

I held that mutton curry as a secret weapon when Bombay got too much, and if you've lived there for a long time, you know the too much I refer to. I grew to love the sound of the male voice on the other end of the phone when I called to order, “Hello Khaan-e-Khaas?” saying it almost musically. My friends stuck to the rolls and the biryani, and I didn't think that mutton curry was for sharing anyway. It belonged to my own personal private store of memories, home food when you're away from home, a South Indian lady with Punjabi cravings in Maharashtra.

Can you be a feminist and still need a handyman?

(This appeared a long time ago on The Week as my F Word column. Putting up some old articles here, do read ICYMI)

I realised how lost at sea I was when a faulty wire burnt out in our flat's adapter box. I was alone at home that week, because my partner was out of town, but it wasn't that which daunted me. I'm used to doing things on my own, but having lived with a man for the past three years, I got sort of into the habit of being on a team of two, us against the world, always someone to complain to when things at home are going awry. You get used to comfort so much faster than discomfort.

The faulty wire was just one in a series of small household disasters that had been hitting me that week. Due to move house in two weeks, we had gotten into the habit of not thinking very much about our current flat, treating it as a transient, temporary space. It was as if the flat sensed that and in retaliation, decided to fold in upon itself just the two weeks my partner decided to go away. The Jat agitation affected my water, and even though I tried to have a shower before the multi-peopled families in the rest of the building, often I was too late. Add to this a day-long power cut which wasn't a power cut at all, and some random bureaucracy by BSES and you have one very harried person.

It was then that I turned to my next door neighbour. Super capable and with the advantage of being a much more proactive person than I, she let me sit on her sofa and pour out my tales of woe while supplying me with the number of the best electrician I've met in my time in Delhi.
(And like an ill-fated romance, oh for us to meet just as I'm leaving your locality!)

I was all praise for this new handyman in my life to my mother when she came along with me to the BSES office the next morning, and it was then, mid-sentence, that I realised my whole Delhi Defence Mechanism (DDM).

We all have one—just substitute the city in which you've lived alone as a single woman. My DDM was one that had also served me well in Bombay—and I suspect would have worked anywhere in the world I lived. For such a strong, independent woman of the twenty first century, as I like to think of myself, my whole modus operandi was to be helpless and have someone “save” me. This worked not only on handymen, where you look sad and scared and lost, in the hopes that they won't rip you off (and, truth be told, it's a 50/50 thing) but also with auto rickshaw drivers, men in government offices and the other end of call centre lines and even on co-passengers on the train. It's ridiculous how well it works, and it's also ridiculous that thirteen years after I first left my parents house to live on my own, I am just now realising it.

There are two kinds of women who live alone in India. The first type is most of the women I know. They're capable and can change a tyre as well as a bulb, are on easy, first name basis with the plumber and the watchman and seem to have no fear even in the face of household disasters. Then there's the second category, into which I fall: slightly scatty, changing handymen as soon as one comes along with a cheaper price, dependent on household help and the kindness of strangers. Type one usually winds up mothering type two, which is a dangerous trap for both to fall into. For type one, this is bad because they'll often feel resentful, but will be unable to withdraw their help without feeling guilty and for type two, because with no one telling you how to figure stuff out, you're far more overwhelmed by common accidents than you have a right to be as an adult woman.

I've noticed it though. I'm addressing it. I'm looking it right in the eyes. And since that one week of disasters, I began to—step-by-step—get more hands on about things than I normally would. As a result, I'm far less stressed because things are within my control. It's still irritating when things fall apart, and I'm still too non-confrontational to do anything but accept the first quote I get, but I feel... different. I feel grown up.

Ugh, I hate the end of Deathly Hallows

This week I got into a passionate discussion with a friend about how much I hated the epilogue of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows. First: it's very unlikely that you fall in love and marry and pop out three kids with your high school sweetheart, I mean, okay, maybe not UNLIKELY, but definitely a little icky, right? Secondly, none of those couples had anything in common with each other. I'm not a Harry/Hermione shipper, but Harry told everyone more than he told Ginny. Mostly, his adventures were confined to co-adventurers Ron and Hermione, with no room for anyone else, even the girl he supposedly loved. And before that, he turned to a zillion people for advice: Dumbledore, Sirius, Remus, Hagrid, even LUNA, but he never seemed to do that much with Ginny except grab her and passionately make out in corners and rooms and whatnot. Out of this you're telling me that they should get married? Please.
Secondly, even Joanne HERSELF admitted that putting Ron and Hermione together was a mistake. What does whip smart Hermione have in common with an open mouthed, slightly bumbling fool? Ron is great, don't get me wrong, but he's really.. thick, and most of the adventures have Harry and Hermione doing all the work while Ron follows along behind, bleating. Now, I get that Hermione had this huge crush on him, so yeah, kiss him. Have sex with him even. Just don't MARRY him and have his babies.
Thirdly, who calls their child Albus Severus if they don't want their child to be bullied mercilessly?
Fourthly, I refuse to acknowledge the hot mess that is The Cursed Child. So there.
That's my HP Rant, just for you. For those of you who have never "got" Harry Potter, I suggest reading as a sociological experiment. Like, book one is a bit too childish, I agree, but he was eleven. It's a truth universally acknowledged that book three is the best of the books.
(My friend actually has a soft spot for Ron, but then she also supports Mr Bhaer for Jo, so what does she know, really?)

Today in Photo

This palm was a set of two we bought when we first moved in. One died sadly a few summers ago, but this guy has thrived so well on the balcony he's making his indoor debut as was always intended for them. I've always wanted a house filled with plants both indoors and outside and since our gardener is essentially a genius with green things, we're slowly making our way there. (I'm not great with plants myself so huge respect for people who are.) got some smaller houseplants here and there, but this monster is the most dramatic looking so far. #plantsofinstagram #indoorgardens #cateracterumpalm

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Today in Photo

Really into doing this Bad Insta Poetry thing now. Less controversial than my child free poem, but also a sincere rant against time. Sigh. When did we get so old? #poetry

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Thursday Miscellany

(This was sent as a newsletter last year or thereabouts. Like, most of this stuff is older writing now anyway, except for the Today in Photo. I suppose my newsletter has turned into my blog? But I still archive things here because there are still people who prefer it. So there is that.)



 
I have had a slow week. Last weekend, I had two house parties in a row, this is rare, because who hosts parties anymore? There was a time in Delhi where your weekends would be spent flitting from one house party to another--and I don't just mean sitting around with three people in a living room having civilised conversations. No, these were party-parties, sometimes you'd see the same five people, but in different combinations, sometimes the only person you knew was the person taking you there, not even the host, but it didn't matter, because you carried that bottle of Old Monk tucked under your arm as an offering, just as someone carried it to your house previously. Anyway, it is fun going to parties, especially unexpected ones, and making conversation with unexpected people, but you are required to be on in a way that is taxing, if you're not used to having conversations with other people apart from your partner, your employees (maid and gardener), and now your German teacher. (And with him, your conversation is about German, if not in German just yet, but it's a process.) (I have had only three German classes, scheduling has been hard recently, but the other night I dreamt of two German words--ich nicht--which means "I not" which is not a sentence, but in my dream it kept echoing in my head: ich nicht, ich nicht, ich nicht.) (Probably because they sound sort of the same.)
This week in movies: I did leave the house once though! Went to watch the premiere of Manto in the cinema with my friend Naila. The movie was great--a biopic of an Indian writer, done well and sensitively, and I'd recommend you watch it, but it's much clearer viewing if you've actually read some of Manto's short stories, because they're woven into the narrative. It could be confusing if you've never even heard of the man, but once you have, there's a thrill at watching him loaf around Bombay with Ismat Chugtai, that pre-Partition writer life, you know? I've seen biopics of writers across the world in a specific time period, and this was my first time watching something set in India. It was really very cool.
My only quibble is that it seemed somehow disjointed, like several different scenes as opposed to one long story, and also that he spends a lot of the second half feeling sorry for himself and gazing moodily into a whiskey glass, which okay, I suppose he might have done in real life also, but I would have liked to see more of the effects of drinking rather than the drinking itself. Watching someone get high in the movies or on television is very boring unless it's done really, really well.
Also, my Feminist Voice kept popping up in my head, no matter how many times I said, "Shhh! Just watch the movie!" "If Manto was a woman," said my FV, "Then he'd HAVE to get it together after Partition and keep his family together. He's only being so self-indulgent because he's a man." My FV keeps it real, she is the antidote to my usual Pollyanna-rose-tinted-glasses situation.
This week in make in India, I think?: A couple of weeks ago, I bought myself a large bar of Amul dark chocolate, which was surprisingly so good, that I bought another bar, and now I can't stop eating it. Amul, a gift for someone you love, Amul, the butter guys, were never very good at the chocolate, sort of hard and chalky compared to Cadbury's (which I actually like the Indian version of more than the British one). BUT! This dark chocolate is kind of perfect. And so CHEAP, guys. It's a 100 bucks a bar or something, and this is a big bar I'm talking about, not one of those piddly little ones. 
And while we're on the subject of Amul, please also try their gouda and emmental line of cheese cubes, which are heavily processed, but still tasty. They're not any kind of gouda you will be familiar with, but they still make a nice snack for between meals.
This week in books:  Got sent the new Robert Galbraith Lethal White, and all I will say about it is that it is a) massive, and if you read in bed, you'll have to keep tossing and turning to get your wrists aligned properly and b) SO GOOD that you should probably clear your schedule for as long as it takes for you to finish it. (This Digested Read column about the first book Cuckoo's Calling is snarky and hilarious though.)
I just finished Lark Rise To Candleford, which is this semi-autobiographical life of a young girl in England during the 19th century. I have this other set of books which I love which begin with A London Child of the Seventies (that's 1870s, by the way) and this feels like a country counterpart. Lark Rise is also famous as a BBC show, which I just watched the first episode of, and it is VERY BBC period drama, so obviously I love it already.
Meanwhile, Galbraith put a spanner in my plans to finish reading Sapiens for my book club yesterday, but I mostly enjoyed that too. It's quite dense, but so many insights into what makes us human beings--how we work, how we think, how we operate. Plus written lightly, so it's very readable. Give it a whirl, except don't try to speed-read in three days like I did because then the only whirl will be inside your own head.
And last night, I began reading Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London at midnight, and by the time I finally was like, "Enough! Go to bed!" it was 2 am, so yeah.

Before you read The Testaments, here's why India is very much like Gilead

(A version of this appeared in Scroll)

There's a reason dystopian fiction is so addictive to read. Like a ghost story, or a murder mystery, it draws you in. There but for the grace of God, go I. An authoritarian government, the poor at the very bottom, the rich at the very top, measures that you should be outraged about but aren't, for fear of retribution; or just plain old apathy. This could be us. This could be us today.

The Handmaid's Tale is one of the most quoted examples of this genre, and rightly so. Margaret Atwood, the author, can write circles around anyone else, even when she's describing female friendship or placing a novel within a novel. But it is Atwood's dystopia that stands out, whether it's the more recent Oryx and Crake (climate change in a strange new world) or back to basics, back to the book that defined a female-centric dystopian fantasy: The Handmaid's Tale. It seems funny that there was a time I'd never even heard of Atwood, and that it took the urgings of my partner, then in our heady nascent early dating days, to push The Handmaid's Tale on me, and how when I read it, devoured it, it was an act of falling in love on two levels: one with the man that brought the book to me and the other with the author of this book. Then I read it swiftly and speedily, I couldn't wait to finish and put together the jigsaw but I re-read it again recently, all anticipation for the TV adaptation of the book, and this time I went slowly, and what I read along the way troubled me. Increasingly, the narrative was sounding like a true life report, something that is actually happening today in India.

The Handmaid's Tale was published in 1985. I was four when it came out, and now looking back over the years, the 1980s have taken on a sepia-tinged look, cycling down alleys, organic food before there were any other options of food, but 1985 was the year Air India flight 182 was blown up over the Atlantic Ocean, with all passengers aboard dying. It was the year the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act was passed in India, claiming that a person suspected of terrorism could be imprisoned without a trial or any formal charges, removing a defence of free speech. In the United States, it was the Year of The Spy, because a number of arrests were made on Russian spies in the US.

“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course [...] but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The news paper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others.” - The Handmaid's Tale

One of the big issues in the fall of the United States as we know it in the book was the loss of fertility. A nuclear fall out or some such had resulted in infertility and as a result, those up top, in power, could call upon “Handmaids” or women who were known to be fertile to come to their homes and lie with them and produce a child for them, after which the women were shipped off to another posting, and so on and so forth until their ovaries died out. Offred, our narrator, named so because she belongs to Fred who is a “Commander” is one of these women.

In 2017, in India, there may not be a decline in the birth rate, but the RSS is claiming that you can get “customised, fair skinned babies” by following a few rituals. The Garbh Vigyan Sanskar project claims to have delivered 450 of these “specialised” babies so far and has plans to have “thousands of such babies by 2020,” according to their spokesperson. They're born by following certain rituals, yes, but also complete abstinence after the baby is born. Compare this to the Ceremony in The Handmaid's Tale, where the Commander, fully clothed except for the essential part, has sex with Offred, also fully clothed, minus her underwear, while she lies between the legs of the Commander's Wife. (Also, needless to say, fully clothed.) When there is a birth, the Wife sits above the labouring Handmaid, pretending to give birth as she does. These are all aided by certain rituals they all do—especially the night the Commander and the Handmaid have sex—to ensure fertility.

The Commander's Wife—and her particular, peculiar sexless marriage—reminded me a lot of the Indian mother-in-law. The Handmaid is in the Wife's domain, and it is the Wife who decides her fate. “We fought for it,” the Wife tells Offred, when she emphasises that her husband is hers alone. A majority of the dowry deaths in India have the mother-in-law as the murderer, and in a country where the husband lives with his parents, it is to the mother-in-law that the new wife has the closest relationship. She may not literally be the third person in the bedroom, but her spectre is looming close by. Plus arranged marriages? They abound in Gilead—the book's fictional world—as well as in real life right here.

I turned to an article by Neha Dixit in Outlook published in 2013, and find that the women in RSS training camps have similar ideas about their segregation. Motherhood is held up as the ultimate ideal. To quote from the article: “We are not feminists, we are family-ists. We believe in ‘dampatya’ (conjugality) where a man and a woman together need to bring up a family.” The modesty the Handmaids have to always employ is echoed in this other quote by a Samiti member: ““Besides unemployment, there are two major problems that need to be addressed”, [..] “One is that young girls must be stopped from putting their pictures on social networking websites like Facebook. They risk their honour and then their pictures are morphed into n

ude ones and circulated.”

Offred is lucky to be a Handmaid, she's frequently told. Less viable women are Marthas—cooks, maids, general dogsbodies. Others marry lower soldiers and are Econowives, the Handmaids still occupy a higher status than them. The women in the book are not allowed to read, and there are frequent heartbreaking flashbacks to Offred's previous life where all her freedoms were slowly taken away.

It begins, as these things often do, with constant surveillance. The old government is overthrown, a new one promised, but never delivered, people with differing beliefs asked to leave the country. Do you see echoes now as I did? Do you see the Aadhar card being used to keep an eye on you? Do you see new media like Republic TV becoming the norm, because what that's what people want to listen to? Do you see how they get rid of anyone with a dissenting voice? Do you see how this is happening all over the world?

“Ordinary,” said Aunt Lydia, “Is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.”

I attended Delhi's first International Cat Show and lived to tell the tale

(A version of this appeared in Scroll, a long time ago) 

(Photos also by me)

Chulbul yawns delicately and blinks his eyes—one blue and one amber. He's so bored of all this, even the medal wrapped around his neck is not enough of a plaything to distract him. His owner Shyampriya picks him off the top of the cage and hands him round to the crowd of people who are gazing at him, making “awww” noises. “He's for sale,” she says, and then gestures to the pile of kittens—Chulbul's siblings—inside the cage. “They're for sale too.” She's just explaining to me that Chulbul's mother, Gravy (an Indian street cat not at the show because she's too aggressive) won a beauty contest where she wore a dress (I take a moment to imagine this in my head) and his father is a purebred Persian sitting in the cage next to his offspring, when the MC announces the kitten class. Chulbul has already won a small medal for “Most Playful,” but there are other cups to be won, and Shyampriya has a whole cage full of kittens. 

The International Cat Show of India is not a new phenomenon. Maybe not as popular as the Indian Kennel Club shows, but nevertheless in its seventh year now. This is the first year it has been hosted in Delhi (previous editions have been in Mumbai and Bengaluru), and as a cat owner myself, I'm feeling birthday-ish as I skip up the stairs of the Vishwa Yuvak Kendra in Chanakyapuri where it's being held. I'm even dressed the part—small golden cat heads dangle from my ears, my tights feature pixellated cat versions of Batman and the Joker. I almost wore a shirt with Mrs Cat embroidered on the breast pocket but rejected that as too much. “It doesn't look very full,” says my partner, K, to me, looking sceptical. I'm too excited to be brought down, and when a car rolls up next to me asking for directions to the cat show, I wave and point at the building like I'm signalling to a plane. “See?” I say to K, “There are probably loads of people already here.”

There aren't. The place wears the deserted look of a birthday party where a lot more guests were supposed to show up. Outside, there are stalls featuring the sponsor cat food as well as a very well groomed toy poodle advertising her owner's pet grooming salon. Inside the hall—thankfully air conditioned—the volunteers are handing out cat cages: an iron frame work with a very thin stretch of chicken wire to cover it. Surprisingly, even though I brace myself, there is no acrid smell of cat urine (which, once burnt into your nasal glands, never fully leaves). The hall is also almost completely silent. 

I'm not sure why, but most people who have a “breed” cat in India, gravitate towards the Persian. Perhaps it's because the Persian with it's punched nose face and grumpy expression has made it to a lot of cinema, perhaps because they're docile, or perhaps just because everyone else has one. Whatever the case may be, the hall is almost 90% Persian (including kittens and mix breeds) with one or two stand outs, like a family of Bengal cats (which look like a tabby crossed with a wildcat) or a Siberian kitten. Most people I talk to say the Persian they're gazing at lovingly is their first cat. “Just like a dog,” says one of the owners, stroking her powder puff Persian kitten, Lola. Lola went on to win third place in the kitten category, and I get to hold her while the owner is off somewhere, and for several blissful moments, I want to replace all my three Indian cats with soft cloud-like kittens like this one, who submit to being held. Until I let her go and spit out a hairball's worth of white fur.

Mostly everyone is also an amateur, except for Deepika Kaur. She's showing the aforementioned Siberian kitten, who looks straight out of a cat food advertisement. Kit Kat may be young, but he's already won seven cups in Bangalore, which Kaur has propped up on top of his cage, along with plastic flower barrettes to make it look prettier. She started with importing two Siberian cats, and Kit Kat is now third generation. While we wait for the judge to make her decision, she whips out her iPhone and shows me photos of Kit Kat's relatives, all prize winners. Kaur has come specially from Bangalore for this, and is with a friend, Lola's owner, to whom she gives tips. “Don't fluff her up,” she tells her friend, “They'll just run their fingers through her fur and make it sit down again.” There's this ointment called Goop which international cat showers use to make their felines look extra groomed and soft, but Kaur says the judges see through that instantly. “I thought the show was tomorrow, otherwise I would have bathed her,” says Lola's owner, glumly. 

Cat people, I decide after a while, are very nice. There's this whole myth about the “crazy cat lady,” a spinster with a hundred cats, who take over her home and her life, but as the species gets more popular (the most popular pet in the United States), cat owners are becoming more mainstream as well. While the show has mainly women with their kitties, there are not an insignificant number of men as well. In my own personal life, I am the administrator of a cat group on Facebook with engagement rates that would make other more mainstream groups envious, and work closely with a cat adoption group called Everything Meow. Some of the women who run Everything Meow are at the show, and we greet each other warmly, asking after each other's pets. “You should have brought yours,” one says to me, “We could have all watched him while you wandered about taking notes.” Cat owners may be considered more selfish and less social than dog owners, but there's a sense of owning an underdog (apologies: undercat) pet, that makes us all hail-fellow-well-met and we're-in-the-same-boat.

After a while of watching Persian after Persian be presented by the judge, who is using a mic to explain what to look for, I'm thinking about breeding in general. As someone who has Indian cats or “desi billis” as the Whiskas representative calls them, I'm against breeding as a whole. For one, it's a bit like playing God, getting exactly the kind of creature you want, and the kind of creature everyone at this show seems to want is a upturned nose, deep inserted eyes face with enough fur that most of them resemble alpacas. Some of the cats don't even look very well under all their fur, and some are being displayed by unethical breeders, who use the cats as kitten machines. Not surprising because a Persian kitten goes for anywhere between Rs 8000 to Rs 35,000. Unlike dogs, cats are bred not for their service (although there are some character traits unique to a breed: Persians are docile, Siamese are talkative, British Blues are easily trained ,etc.) but for their looks. Which seems to someone like me, an Indian Cat Advocate, as such a waste, when local cats all over the world are prettier and hardier than their fluffy counterparts. 

As a counterpoint, organisations like the World Cat Federation argue that without breeding, the best traits would go extinct. On the WCF website, there are a list of rules about showing a Persian with a list of faults that includes difficulty breathing and too flat a skull. With extreme breeding becoming a habit almost for dog and cat breeders around the world, it's good that these points are specified so that the animals, but not so good that the punch-nosed Persian (who needs an elevated bowl in order to eat without smothering itself and can't be flown in an aeroplane because of their breathing difficulties) is being encouraged as a breed in itself. Irina Sadovnikova, one of the international judges at the competition, was one of the breeding advocates. Even as she held up an Indian cat called Sandy (entered in the neutered section) she said it was a pity that this cat had been neutered because otherwise she could have been bred and an excellent kind of Indian breed could have emerged. This goes against everything animal advocates preach. 

 

But shows like the International Cat Show of India would not exist without cat breeds. Of all the cats there, only two were of domestic origin (something that made me wish I had brought one of mine—a large black tom cat, who is very handsome, even if I do say so myself) and one of the “desi billis” is a long furred ginger anomaly who is immediately classified into “Persian mix” despite his owner's protests that he was born of street cats who she knows intimately. In the end, the breed cats win, including, to no one's surprise, little Kit Kat, who takes off with first place in the kitten section. All is not lost though, because a prize also goes to the eleven-year-old Sandy, the Indian cat, whose pretty little face makes someone ask me what breed she is. “A desi one,” I say, proudly. She may be only a contestant in the neutered section now, but maybe in a few years there will be shows for indigenous breeds like ours—feral cats and dogs who have converted to a life of domesticity and who—despite having regular pointed faces and short hair—are recognised for their beauty and charm.

Today in Photo

Morning cat making it very hard for me to type. This photo is for Dog People who insist cats aren't loving, or sweet or affectionate. Bitches, please. You don't know the kind of Relationship of Equals affection cats give you, they tell you they love you when they WANT to, not because you command them to come closer and sit at your feet and gaze up at you adoringly. (nothing against dogs, which are a great species, but dog people can be severely narrow minded about any other kind of animal showing love.) This is Olga da Polga and she sits on my desk every morning and says hi with licks and purrs and then goes and cuddles with K every night, almost like she's distributing her love between the two of us. You wouldn't understand, it's a cat/people thing. #catsofdelhi #calicosofinstagram #olgadapolga

via Instagram

In Praise Of Marilla Cuthbert

(This appeared in The Indian Express a long time ago.)

What do we know about Marilla Cuthbert? We know she's an older single woman who keeps house for her farmer brother in the beginning of Anne Of Green Gables. Her age is never mentioned until once in Rainbow Valley, where Anne says sadly, “Marilla is eighty five.” By some back calculation, this makes her not younger than fifty something when we first meet her: “a tall, thin woman, with angles and without curves. [..] She looked like a woman of narrow experience and rigid conscience, which she was; but there was a saving something about her mouth, which, if it had been ever so slightly developed, might have been considered indicative of a sense of humour.” Remember that mouth as her creator L.M Montgomery wanted you to, there's foreshadowing in that mouth.

With Mother's Day just past, and a new adaptation of Anne Of Green Gables on Netflix, I got to thinking about Anne as a mother. She was a great mother, as her children will evidence, loving and warm and all those things. But it surprised me that she took so easily to it, where was Anne's role model? Her own mother, long dead, her brief stint as a helper for mothers with their children just left an impression of an impatient harridan and her brood of squalling infants. We never do learn much about Gilbert Blythe's mother, and Diana's mother is stern and inflexible for the most part. So where does Anne learn it? Some might argue that motherhood is instinctive, but I say your basis has to be formed on what you know. And what Anne knew was Marilla Cuthbert.

Marilla, fifty something, a spinster for life, a stern woman who knew what she wanted. Balanced by her brother Matthew, who you, reader, might remember more lovingly, because he shared an affinity with Anne, and was sympathetic to her needs. But remember also that it was Marilla who made the final decision that Anne should stay with them—even though she wasn't a boy, Marilla who gave Anne one of her biggest comforts: her relationship with God. So too was it Marilla who made sure the flighty, imaginative girl was taught household skills—something we might scoff at now, but which was a necessary accomplishment in that time. Anne teaches Marilla how to love, yes, but Marilla gives Anne a safe space in which to love. 

 

All this not to run down Matthew—he was lovely, but he was not a parent. He was the generous uncle Anne needed, a port in the storm, a place for unconditional love. Matthew gave her a puffed sleeve dress and listened to her talk and took her side against Marilla whenever needed. But Marilla, that spiky spinster, the childfree person who didn't even really want a child, she gave Anne a chance to go to college, and a place to come home to, and rounded off her raptures with old fashioned common sense. Marilla didn't want a child, not even the boy they asked for, he was meant to be a help to Matthew, but once she had one, she mothered her as she had been mothered herself. Unsentimental and supportive. Stern but loving. The first time we see her completely on Anne's side is when she goes to correct Mrs Barry's impression of Anne, that she was a child who “set Diana drunk.” Matthew would never have the courage to make that confrontation, and in this scene, all of Marilla's mothering comes to the forefront.

“Poor little soul,” she murmured, lifting a loose curl of hair from the child's tear stained face. Then she bent down and kissed the flushed cheek on the pillow.

We know the great tragedy of Marilla's life was her lost romance with Gilbert Blythe's father, but we do not know when that exact moment was that she decided she was going to be alone forever. Spinsterhood was thrust upon you in those days, when you were considered too old to be viable, and your options were limited. In Marilla's time, you couldn't even be a teacher, so you had to settle down and keep house, and if you lived alone with no independent income, you may not even have a house to keep. 

 

Children's literature does away with mothers to make heroes—think Harry Potter or Oliver Twist—but Anne with her imagination and her speeches would not have the same effect on readers if we didn't have Marilla in the background making sardonic remarks and always making sure that the whimsy was balanced out with the very real indeed.

Today in Photo

I got to thinking yesterday about this #whatiworetoday thing that I do. For all you lovely people who post encouragement and compliments, there must be people who hate follow me or think it's weird for a person to just post pictures of their clothes when that person isn't a Fashion Influencer or whatever. And then I thought ehhh who can be bothered with what other people think. There'll always be a voice in my head telling me that something I'm doing is offering someone else fodder to mock or deride (one out of office message I wrote when I was still in an office got forwarded by one of the recipients around the office, so amused was she by my earnest delight in being away.) Fuck it, let's be ourselves. But also sadly this is the LAST Sarojini dress and now we'll have to go back to my old clothes again. #sarojininagarhaul #streetshopping

via Instagram

Today in Photo

Brunch at the new Rodeo. Which is the old Rodeo but instead of a Texjabi rajma vibe, they're now Rodeo CANTINA all white walls and red roses. They have a brunch deal but weirdly, they had no tequila so we had to make do with Marys. Good enough, but not that sweet, terrible tequila feeling. #delhidiary

via Instagram

Today in Photo

Scenes from the Catular adaptation of Agatha Christie's The Body In The Library, featuring Bruno M. Ganz as The Body. #catsofdelhi #tabbysofinstagram

via Instagram

Travel Diary Part Three: End notes from Vietnam

* Every night was happy hour in the streets of Hoi An's Old Town. Women—and it was always women with the exception of a few places—called out to us. “Buy-one-get-one-free,” they said, standing in front of bars called things like Mr Bean and Funky Monkey (complete with a picture of a sad lab animal expressioned baby rhesus monkey). I wondered about the men, there were young men everywhere, sure, but I saw no one who looked above the age of 40. Where have all the middle-aged men gone? So exceptional was this lack of men that I made a point to notice the one middle aged man I met, a shopkeeper selling me a knock-off Superdry backpack in Hanoi. I took note of his greying hair, his portly dad bod, his wedding ring, and realised it was the first time I had been served by a man of his years in three weeks. In Ninh Binh, we took a three hour boat ride around the rock formations and flooded caves, and each and every boat was rowed by a tiny woman, often much older than us, all wrapped up with a conical hat on her head. Where are your men, Vietnam? And why aren't they working as hard as the women do?

* Next to the Acacia hotel was a little bar, and since the happy hour in the centre of town got a little overwhelming—all that music, so many different choruses of Havana-ooh-na-na, so many drunk white tourists stumbling about—we stopped off there, even if it was a little inland. An Australian man ran it, almost completely deaf, we found out later, and his sole employee, a charming (young) Vietnamese man who poured out our drinks and smiled at us and told us which village to drive our scooter to the next day if we wanted to go for a long ride. I asked for something local and he pulled out three varieties of rice spirits, infused with jackfruit, pepper, coconut and honey/ginger. I had the pepper over ice, which was spicy and lit up my mouth like I was drinking a neat whiskey. A German man who had been in Hoi An for four months and counting appeared to make conversation with us. An English man who was drunkenly shouting at people passing by yelled at us, “Yay for inter-country marriages! Got a Vietnamese wife and kids at home!” I wondered if we looked the same to him, me and K, our marriage of equals, to this old sloppy-drunk man, and what I assumed would be his much younger wife. I wondered if I was being fair, assuming that only on the basis of watching old white guys with young Vietnamese/Thai women across the two countries. Assumptions, as we know, are ass-making.

* We parked in the Old Town and came back from lunch to find our scooter gone. Everyone laughed when we told them and directed us to the police station. Well, actually, they didn't quite say, “Go to the police station” that was just us asking for directions. There's only so much you can convey with sign language. One police station was on the outskirts of town, a large government building which was completely abandoned. We walked through the corridor, poking our heads into each room until we finally found two officers, bent over paperwork. They looked surprised to see us, but were courteous, despite our limited communication. They drew us a map to the other police station we had to go to, the traffic guys, where once again, everyone was on a tea break, but there was one (English-speaking!) cop there who told us to check with one of the big parking lots and not pay any more than 10,000 dong for parking. (The currency in Vietnam is so devalued that everything is in the multiple of 10,000, which makes for some confusing currency conversion, but eventually you get the hang of it.) K parked me at a coffee shop eventually, my short legs were tired, my brain was whiny, sometimes my body is just like a toddler's, and went off on an epic journey to find the right parking guy, who demanded 100,000 dong. Back and forth they went, until K finally agreed on 20,000, thanks to the friendly policeman. This was not the last of our scooter misadventures.

* The second of our Scooter Misadventures happened in the gorgeous town of Ninh Binh. Ninh Binh is where all the travellers “in the know” go instead of Halong Bay, which is the Vietnam you've probably seen photographed, huge rock formations in the middle of the ocean. But because of its popularity, Halong Bay is overrun with houseboats for day trips and night trips, and that's all there is to do there, go on a boat in the ocean. In Ninh Binh, called the “inland Halong Bay” the boat rides are shorter—three hours vs a whole day—and go through a series of underwater caves, which are very cool. (You can choose from four routes, a very popular one is the route that goes to the area where Kong: Skull Island was shot, but since we hadn't seen the movie, we chose the caves.) Anyway, also in Ninh Binh, driving about, our scooter's battery died, and we were stuck on a very remote village road, not a shop or anything around us, except for one house. Out of that house came a man eventually, and he waved his hands about and so did we, and finally, I pulled out the Google translate app (which is AMAZING), and wrote: “can you help us” on it, translated to Vietnamese and held it out. He held up his hand, whipped out his own Google translate app and wrote, “You have to get gasoline.” Through this back and forth, we established that K would ride with him, two kilometres away to get the petrol and I would stay in his house, across the table from his elderly parents. They looked surprised to see me when I walked in and sat across from them, but his father began to pour me lots of teeny cups of green tea and when he realised I did not speak Vietnamese, began to shout all his questions to me in the hope that I was just deaf, not an idiot. We nodded and smiled at each other, Father gave up and went back to his TV, I looked at my phone, and then the grandkids came in, and K came back, and I went outside with the kids and the grandma and showed them pictures of the cats on my phone and they laughed and said, “Meo!” which was the one Vietnamese word I knew (cat!), so I also said, “Meo!” and we had a grand old time saying, “Meo.” I ran out of cat photos so I tried to pull out a dog photo, but they were not that interested in the dogs. Oh well.

(The rest of the story is less interesting, we went to the mechanic, the battery was dead, we had left the scooter rental guy's number back in the hotel, so I Googled “scooter rental Ninh Binh,” we came across a number where the owner spoke English, and she knew who we were talking about and gave us his number. Phew.)

* Hanoi was amazing. I had an old acquaintance there from Bombay, and she took us to a speakeasy bar which she made me promise not to write about, so I won't, but it was amazing. We also went to Binh Minh Jazz Club, which is very popular and in the Lonely Planet, so I'm not ruining anything, but they have live jazz every night, which is very good by any standards, and nice wine for the first time on our long trip, so that was great fun. Hanoi isn't a very late night city, except for these random coffee shops which stay open till about 1 or 2 in the morning, everyone either super caffeinated or huffing on nitrous oxide from “happy balloons” which are a big thing all across Vietnam. (I did not try any.)

* It was also in Hanoi that we found board games—we bought five Chinese knock-offs of popular board games at a little shop we stumbled across. It started raining really hard the second time we want back (to buy more) (a game that costs 4500 on Amazon in India was 1200 there and so on), so we asked the shop clerks if they wanted to play a game while we waited, and made some new friends. The other instance was going to this board game cafe where the walls were lined with games, and they showed us how to play Splendor, which has turned into one of my favourite games of all time, and which, yes, we brought home with us.

* When we got to Bangkok, K fell ill with the flu, but not before we spent a day in the clothes mall, five floors of cheap clothes, overwhelming even for an avid Sarojini Nagar-er like me. We also made our way to the Bangkok Foreign Correspondent's Club, in the penthouse of a building (the Lonely Planet said we could go!), which was great fun, just for the people watching, and sitting in one corner of the oak panelled bar. Definitely fancier than the FCC in Delhi. OH AND WE WENT TO A CAT CAFE! Which was so fun, but all the cats were definitely dopier than our fellows back home, which meant they were happy to cuddle, but they seemed not very... cat-like? Drugged like the tigers or just inbred, do you think?

 

 ANYHOW. That was our trip!