| My latest book is The One Who Swam With The Fishes.
"A mesmerizing account of the well-known story of Matsyagandha ... and her transformation from fisherman’s daughter to Satyavati, Santanu’s royal consort and the Mother/Progenitor of the Kuru clan." - Hindustan Times "Themes of fate, morality and power overlay a subtle and essential feminism to make this lyrical book a must-read. If this is Madhavan’s first book in the Girls from the Mahabharata series, there is much to look forward to in the months to come." - Open Magazine "A gleeful dollop of Blytonian magic ... Reddy Madhavan is also able to tackle some fairly sensitive subjects such as identity, the love of and karmic ties with parents, adoption, the first sexual encounter, loneliness, and my favourite, feminist rage." - Scroll |
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Dearest Tender Coconuts,
What’s the name for a booze shop where you are? Like any good Delhiite, I say “theka” but I know what it means when K calls it an “off-license.” In Bombay, it was the fancy “wine shop” as in “There’s a wine shop down the road that delivers past midnight.” If I know my American pop culture, I think they say “liquor store” which also sounds fancy. Actually, everything sounds fancier than “theka” which, I literally just learned from Quora, means “licensed” so basically K and I are saying the same thing in different languages! This is like that Colin Firth storyline in Love, Actually, any minute now K will have to dive into a pond to rescue the typed pages of my manuscript which I have foolishly not made a back-up of, I will be so moved, I will go to his little German village and ask his father for his hand in marriage even though neither of us understands what the other is saying. Who needs WORDS when you have LOVE and other ridiculous things that movies would have you believe are True Feelings.
This is the Internet Personified, these are the alphabet series, and today I’m leading you down the Merrie Roade of Drinke, because that’s right, it’s D is for drinking.
Like everyone you know, maybe even you, I started experimenting with alcohol in high school. It wasn’t that hard, the thekas don’t ID you, even if you do look a bit sneaky and a bit giggly while you do it, and once we drank a whole bottle of Lady Di1 gin, in my friend’s bedroom while her parents were at work and my other friend got so sick we had to stick her in the shower and give her lemons to suck on, because we heard lemons sober you up. Later, I would avoid gin for many years until I re-discovered it in my thirties just remembering the sickly sweet smell of that Lady Di mixed with Sprite, because we thought light drinks should only have light mixers. I’ve never liked Sprite though.
At high school parties, I chose vodka, but frankly, I’d have drunk whatever was given to me, no matter how distateful I found it. Once, rebelling, I went to the home of a friend of a friend, a little room that this friend of a friend had rented for themselves (he was not much older than me, and we were six people in the room, so it’s not as shady as you might imagine) and he had no drinking water—he’d have had to buy water or boil it—but he had six cans of extremely cold beer, which he offered to me, and which I drank, throat moving gulpgulpgulp not tasting it at all, but it was so cold and so refreshing. I’ve never liked beer, but I remember the feeling of thirst quenched.
A pleasant high, that’s what I went for. A mild buzzing in my head, a slight tilting of the world as I stood up. I was not getting drunk in high school, and if it came down to it, I usually finished my night off with just a straight up Pepsi or Fanta.
It had never been that much fun before at high school parties—primarily because the school I was at for classes 11 and 12 was huge, and so going to a party was seeing two or three people you know. I was “dating” a boy from a different school, so I didn’t even have reason to enjoy going to these parties, the one or two I was invited to anyway. They all seemed like more of the same, a lot of people talking about a lot of people I didn’t know, and me, awkwardly in a corner, attempting to be light and funny and cool. (Come to think of it, not a lot has changed. Hmm.) I had two friends I hung out with, they were sometimes more dazzled by the experience than I was. All Delhi schools have this one tradition of the “conti” party, not “continental” you understand, but “continuation” like a continuation of your graduation. We didn’t have one single graduation ceremony, because all of our final board exams finished on different dates, but all schools had the eleventhies throw a party for the twelfthies. I don’t remember ours, but I do remember that I got asked to the CJM-Colomba’s2 conti party because of my various friendships across the city, quite a coup for me. I remember going too, because I had to sneak around and do it. Not the actual party, but the sneaking around stays firm in my memory.
Then? College. That’s where I learned to drink socially, as a way to connect and bond. I was still much younger than Delhi’s legal drinking age (25) but right next to our college was a cheap bar called The Supper Factory (they tried very hard to become a cool acronym—TSF!—but the most we could summon up for it was Supper.) It was a restaurant which served cheap drinks, so I don’t want you to imagine a bar. Imagine instead white and blue lighting, cheap plastic wicker tables with glass tops, four chairs to a table and sticky-feeling fake leather bound menus. I don’t remember what food they served, but they all served Indian Chinese. It seems to be the rule across the country, you want cheap drinks, you’ll get chilli chicken dry on the side. The Supper Factory had a morning deal, for alcoholics and young students at the women’s college next door—happy hours till 2 pm, two-for-one vodka shots at 40 rupees. I got so far behind on my attendance in my second year at college they had to send a letter home, all because someone or the other would suggest The Supper Factory at even the slightest hint of boredom. We were never bored now that we discovered liquor. Study sessions, four of us best friends or as close as, by the time the big hand and the little hand both met in an over the head namaste at noon, someone would say, “Oh, is it noon?” and someone else would break out the vodka, the friend whose house we studied at went downstairs for the mixers and the ice. “After all,” she’d say as I’ve mentioned before, “If it’s after twelve o’clock, we’re not alcoholics.”
My History of Drinking should really be tied up with my History of Sex. Many bad decisions, some of which, mercifully, I can no longer remember. Some close calls, for a young woman in Delhi, drinking as I did, till I had “fragmentary blackouts3” I survived to tell the tale about it. Sometimes my body just took over, I remember weakly saying “No no” to a pushy boy at a party and he kept pushing and saying, “Why not?” until I said, “Because I have to puke” and promptly did and he promptly left me alone. No one wants to kiss a vomity mouth, thank god. Another time, I only managed to get the man off me because he was too drunk to do anything other than vomit once I shoved him. Still, it was scary and burnt into my memory as you can see from the fact that I still remember.
It got to be a lot. I was always skirting close to disaster, and never reaching it. For many years, my late teens and my twenties, I drank to excess more often than not. My strong young body kept off hangovers for many years, and I could sleep for only two hours and wake up looking as fresh as a daisy. One of the scariest fragmentary blackouts I had was in Goa, with two other friends, when the last thing I remember was vomiting my several tequila shots into the bushes, just projectile vomiting everywhere, and then I woke up the next morning in my bed, one of my friends curled up at my feet. We tried to reconstruct what happened to us, but we were so sick, the hangover lasted two days, that we could barely put a sentence together. And I was with a very controlling man, who discovered my activities all the way from Bombay and everyone was very disapproving, complete strangers at our Goa hotel were looking at us like they’d never in their whole lives seen such unladylike behaviour. At least we got back to our hotel, in one piece, the only disaster being our terrible hangovers (and some tsk-tsk-young-people lectures.) Was that the last time I had a tequila shot? It might have been.
I frightened myself sometimes, so I began to ease off a bit. Maybe not get drunk every weekend. Maybe learn to love red wine and pour your own drinks at a party so you can control how much goes into them. Maybe put down your glass for a while and wander off in search of water and something to eat before you return. I still got drunk, but I learned to recognise the Right Before The Edge symptoms and stop. I no longer enjoyed sticking my finger down my throat to vomit so the room would stop spinning. (Okay, no one enjoys that, but as a life skill it does sober you up somewhat.) I was on the brink and I turned away, as many of my friends were doing, unbeknownst to me, and suddenly, when you went out for drinks with your friends, there’d be a point before last call, before the bar had to physically shove you out into the night with your takeaway cup, where someone would say, “I’m done, I should go, early morning tomorrow” and you’d find yourself agreeing, and you’d pay the bill and go home before midnight like civilised people. Or you’d be partying and someone would offer to buy you a shot and you’d look down at your half-full glass—a mojito maybe, you love mojitos—and you’d say, “Nah, thanks, I’m good” and they’d move on. Maybe once in a while you’d still go to TGIF with your friends, where they had a 1+1 Happy Hour on everything, and their Ultimate Margarita was the size of your head, and cost 500 bucks so if you went out with 1000 rupees in your pocket you could get four and be as drunk as a lord. The serving staff was downright rude by the end, you’d sit there for so long, four to a table, eking out your drinks as long as they took.
Now I’m a grown up, someone I might have called boring in my own youth, I know my four stages of drunkeness: the Chatty (everything is interesting and I have so much to say!), the Bolshie (wow, you are all SO WRONG about everything and I might call you all assholes in a loving yet firm way), the Maudlin (who will cry when I die?) and the Tired (k, I’m ready to go home now, I have hit the wall, if people keep talking to me they will encounter glazed eyes and a fixed smile like a robot.)
Anyway, tell me your tales—cocktail recipes, stories of drunkenness, your “I’m never drinking again” fables, I want to hear them alllll.
Have you seen that Substack now allows FOOTNOTES? Mine are at the bottom of this thing if you click the footnote number next to the word on top. It seems you can only view them in the web version though (boo) so click on the title of this newsletter to go to the browser edition.
Also please tell your friends about this newsletter if you haven’t already because it’s nice to know that people like it and tell other people to like it.
PREVIOUSLY on The Internet Personified Alphabet Editions:
C is for crush.
Links I Liked On The Internet:
I wrote this for The Voice of Fashion about bras and Mrs Srivastav, the Collector’s wife from English, August.
After reading this profile, I immediately began following @deuxmoi, the Instagram gossip account.
Related: ten long years of trying to make Armie Hammer happen.
The roommate from hell story.
Trying to do some research on all those gross fast cooking recipe videos that pop up everywhere.
Beautiful story about a little amusement park designed especially for children with terminal diseases by a Holocaust survivor. (I see Tom Hanks as a great lead for the eventual movie.)
Jeff Bezos and the Amazon-y world.
Ultra fast fashion is eating the world.
Lovely essay by Annie Zaidi about how consensual love is basically hated in India.
Palate cleansers:
Five facts about birds.
Bats are the new cats and I love them.
Have a great week!
xx
m
Where am I? The Internet Personified! A mostly weekly collection of things I did/thought/read/saw that week.
Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of seven books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.
Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!)
Got sent this newsletter? Sign up here to subscribe!
Forward to your friends if you liked this and to the hangover you now get after one measly gin and tonic if you didn’t.
Also, write back to me! I love to hear from you.
Okay, so the gin was not called Lady Di, I don’t think. It was royalty definitely though. Duchess? Queen? Or just plain old Blue Moon, still beloved by dive bars across India.) (Don’t drink it, it’s terrible and will ruin you.
St Colomba’s is a very popular Catholic boys school which shares a boundary wall, as many single sex schools do, for whatever strange reason, with the Convent of Jesus and Mary, a very popular Catholic girl’s school. They were called the “brother-sister” schools, Columba’s actually shared this honour with CJM and one other girl’s school, so they got two Conti Parties, but the CJM one was widely acknowledged to be the funner, “more happening” one.) (The St. Colomba’s boys—at least, the few I knew—had a particular honk they used to announce themselves—beep beepbeep beep beep, which was supposed to correspond to “pakad pakad ke chodh do” or “catch ‘em and fuck ‘em” for my non-Hindi speaking readers, so you have some context for them now. Imagine big cars exuding Isseymikayi for Men and cigarette smoke fumes rolling up to your door and beep-beepbeeping.
A note on fragmentary blackouts, in case you’re curious:
The two types of alcohol-induced blackouts, en bloc and fragmentary, are very different from one another and are not to be confused with passing out — an experience of falling asleep or going unconscious after drinking alcohol. In en bloc blackouts, a person experiences a complete loss of memory for the drinking episode; they are often awake and functioning but have no memory of their actions the next day. Perhaps even more frightening is the fragmentary blackout, which involves partial memory loss, sometimes retrieved with cues; leaving a drinker to piece together bits and pieces of hazy information from the night before.
Blackouts occur at high rates among social drinkers and binge drinkers, alike; but one of the largest groups impacted by blackouts is college students.
My Unusually Green Salamanders,
You are in WEEK THREE of my grand TELL MY LIFE STORY THROUGH THE ALPHABET series! (Weeks one and two here.) I was just about getting into my stride, when the letter “c” floored me. It’s not that I couldn’t think of any words beginning with “c” it’s that I could think of too many. Here are some discards:
C is for car: I’d tell you about my history with cars—the first one I drove, the first one I owned, my sudden, inexplicable driving anxiety, that came upon me “slowly, and then all at once.” I’d also tell you about road trips, about sitting on people’s laps in the backseat and the whole car smelling like Cool Water or Isseymiyaki, and the night being young like we were and all of us singing along to the music at the tops of our voices.
C is for cat: All my beloveds. Internet cats and my cats and the internet.
C is for clothes: Going from someone awkward to someone who tried to follow every trend no matter how unflattering and finally, someone who came to terms with their own style and how I love clothes, and putting them together sometimes is like an art project, and browsing shopping websites is sometimes what I do when I need to calm my mind, just browse and add to cart, very rarely buying anything. And my tailor down the road, and what having “personalised” clothes means to me.
C is for coronavirus: MY GOD, HOW MUCH MORE IS THERE TO SAY ABOUT THIS? I’m kinda done. Are you kinda done? I don’t even want to explain/not explain myself anymore, this is the way the world is right now, and this is how I live in it. THE END.
Instead, this week I’m going to talk about one summer when I was fourteen, when my friend and I decided to join a kid’s musical theatre workshop which would culminate in a play, and we spent all day rehearsing with other teenagers, and it was, perhaps, one of the funnest summer holidays I’ve ever had. What do teenagers need but a chance to be themselves around other teenagers? And unlike the S-word (School), everything we did was fun. It was extra-curricular! And there were very few adults: maybe three? or four? for all thirty or forty of us, so no one was breathing down our necks and yet, we didn’t “get up to anything” because we were trusted, and given responsibilities and if we broke the rules, whatever rules, the unspoken rules, we would be cut from the workshop and the play and that would be no fun. Yes, I believe even now, many years since I was last a teenager, that the best way to raise a teen is to give them clear consequences that they respect, and something you can stick to, and then let them loose with each other, and watch them blossom like so many flowers.
To get to my large C-is-for-Crush, I’m going to have to give you some background first. Because, while he was a Crush, he isn’t even the whole reason I remember that summer so vividly. I’d had crushes before—my first was on a classmate, at age 11, yes, I started young, but I had no other way to define the sudden flutter I felt in my stomach when he passed me, or the humiliation I felt for him whenever he got scolded by a teacher. He was an insouciant, sporty boy, with his floppy hair worn in a ‘90s do, that is, it was parted in the middle and fell on either side of his face like all the boys on our newly installed cable television had. Before that, or perhaps simultaneously, I had seen a young singer called Joey Lawrence on MTV, who sang what would be his only hit: Nothing My Love Can’t Fix For You, Baby. Joey Lawrence sang for me and me alone, he smiled at me from the television set, he pranced around with models on his music video, but his eyes made me a promise—I see beyond your buck teeth and your awkwardly cut hair and I’m waiting for you to grow up and come find me.
Oh, I had strange pop culture crushes. At one point I loved the villain from The Mask, I really literally cannot explain myself there. I just looked him up—I didn’t even know his name until right now, can you imagine? His name is Peter Greene, he’s a character actor known for playing villains, and this is what he looked like in that 1990s-Jim Carey starrer.
I liked this Peter fellow so much, I had this whole elaborate daydream of him coming to India and then going across schools to give talks about his craft and winding up at my school and noticing me, this discerning, precocious person who was the only one in her whole entire SCHOOL who appreciated him for who he was. (My dreams never went further than them singling me out, I was precocious but not that precocious.)
At fourteen, I looked twelve, twelve with a bosom that had suddenly rapidly developed overnight and did not at all match my round face and my earnest expression. (I was shortsighted, have been for most of my life, but I refused to wear my glasses regularly because of vanity. So I peered at people or looked dreamy, mainly because I couldn’t see what was going on.)
Kidsworld was a theatre programme set up by Lushin Dubey and Bubbles Sabharwal, and every year, they put up a big musical performance, usually something Andrew Lloyd Weber, at Delhi’s most famous auditorium: Kamani. These performances were large and big budget, I don’t want you to imagine just some kids with homemade costumes running around, nope, the music was live, the costumes were professional, the cast committed and talented. And everyone was between the ages of twelve to seventeen. I remember watching Jesus Christ Superstar and also Starlight Express. I auditioned for Cats, and either never got in or had to go somewhere. Oh yeah, not everyone got in to the auditions. They were professionally run, you had to sing and also say a piece. They tried to find everyone a space, but it wasn’t always possible. I was looking for some background on Kidsworld to write this and I came across an interview where Lushin says, “We took kids seriously when no one else did.” And they really did. Which is why—and I keep harping on about this, but seeing as I’m now closer to how old they were instead of how old I was—it all had such discipline. If you were late, you were late, no one waited for you. If you didn’t want to come, you didn’t, but it was impressed upon you that you were part of a team, and if you flaked, then you’d be letting everyone else down. Oh my god, is that what playing organised sports feels like? I just suddenly got it.
The play we were doing, the one that me and my friend signed up for, was their version of Matilda by Roald Dahl. The same book, the same story, except the songs were in Hinglish, so “Yeh thi kahaani, chhoti Matilda ki, small though she looked, she turned out a star.” (This is the story of small Matilda etc etc). Unlike usually, this play had an option to just join the music section. This is because they were trying a little experiment, where the actors just acted, and the choir would perform the songs, sort of like a Bollywood movie. They’d have to lip-sync in time to our songs, but this meant Bubbles and Lushin were free to focus on the best range of actors, not just look for someone who could act and sing.
Later we were called “the Pit,” as in “stop all that giggling from the Pit!” because we’d have to sit on the floor in a little area beneath the stage at Kamani, the orchestral pit. The instruments were to our left, we were divided into altos and tenors and sopranos and based on our singing skills, either made to sing in chorus or on our own. My friend was a much better singer than me, so she got a solo or two, I think. I say “I think” because my eyes were only on the boy to the left of her, a lovely curly haired boy with brown eyes and a sudden sweet smile, and a voice that could melt chocolate. He sang for us sometimes: Unchained Melody or Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You, soft ‘90s anthems of yearning that seemed to sum up my feelings for him. Of course, he did not know I existed, I mean, he probably did, we were a very small group, but I never spoke a single word to him. Even when he was being kind, and for a sixteen-year-old boy I remember him as extraordinarily kind, he probably said, “Hi” and I grinned wildly, and blushed madly and stared down at my lap until the whole interaction was over, and my friend, not held back by unrequited love, had perfectly normal, friendly conversations with him, which I envied so much.
What else did I do that summer besides the play? I can’t remember very much. I do recall a few things, standing out in a starburst of memory. I remember our rehearsals were at a school, and we’d stand around outside, waiting for our rides. Not many kids smoked then, and so we stood around with nothing to do, almost. I don’t remember what we did with our hands, no cellphones, no cigarettes, isn’t that strange to imagine? What do you do when you’re standing around with nothing to do? I remember one boy gave as his audition piece, that bit from The Mill on the Floss where Maggie Tulliver cuts her hair. I hadn’t read it then, and five or six years later when it was a college text, I remembered him sitting on the floor and declaiming, “You’re going to catch it, Maggie.” I bought a t-shirt off him for 50 rupees, a soft forest green polo neck t-shirt. I had admired it, and he said, “Do you want to buy it?” and the next day he gave it to me, washed and in a bag. I had that t-shirt for years after.
One of the older boys in the group offered to go to the market next door for drinks and snacks and I said I’d come along to help. I said it boldly, and also a little shyly, because I didn’t talk to the boys, if I was a character in The Babysitter’s Club, I’d want to be Claudia, but I was probably Mary Anne. I want to be a Gryffindor but I am a Hufflepuff. I want my daemon to be a cat, but it’s probably a mouse. I thought we were going to walk and stopped short when he wheeled out his scooter. I’d never been on a SCOOTER with a BOY before. “Hop on, princess,” he said, grinning, and I didn’t hesitate a second, I jumped right on.
Later—much later—I kicked myself for not getting the phone number of my golden voiced crush. My friend had long ago returned to her life of school and friends and extra-curricular activities, I still waited for the cast party they promised we’d have. “Maybe she lost my number,” I said to my friend in August and in September, and by October, even I, incurable optimist, knew that cast party was never going to happen. Meanwhile, I had been busy, I had a phone book, and I had his first and last name, and I sat with my very patient friend and called up each LAST NAME in the book. It was a common one, think Singh, and think calling all the Singhs to ask for one particular boy. I even used an Ouija board to ask for the number, and wrote it down in my diary, dialling it with hot sweaty fingers, do you remember when we had to put one finger inside each number hole and turn it all the way round? Do you remember what the curled phone coil felt like, wrapped around your forefinger, as you twisted and untwisted, curled and uncurled, while you waited for the other person to pick up?
You know, as amazing as it is to have someone you like like you back, there’s something to be said about the Unrequited Crush. It’s just so pure. Most of the time you don’t want anything from the other person, just to be in their orbit. But the thought of them makes you smile, makes your heart beat a little faster, provides some nice figure for your daydreams. No real person actually lives up to all this, so the time you spend with your Unrequited is actually stronger than some of the men you’ve dated. You can project everything on to them—pretty stories, visions about the future, visions of a happier, more together you, just by virtue of them noticing you and falling equally wildly in love. It always seemed like my crushes went on forever and also for just one second. It’s never about them, really, is it? It never is.
Links I Liked On The Internet This Week:
Of course you have to read the rest of Plath’s Mad Girl’s Love Song that I used for the title of this post.
Who are the people marked as “Spam/Scam call” on your phone?
The unbreakable bond between humans and dogs.
I do a lot of crosswords (using the free Android app Shortyz, very basic but nice) so this set of tips on how to solve faster was very useful!
The morality play of pandemic shaming. (You know you’ve done one or the other.)
This is also a great time for me to (re)post an old drawing I did.
I am not reading much on the internet but I am re-reading (for the third time!) Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra (YES, I know, no, I haven’t watched it, I don’t know if I will) and trying to decide who is sexier in writing: Sartaj Singh or Ganesh Gaitonde. I think Gaitonde is just about scraping by into first place at this point.
Have a great week!
xx
m
Where am I? The Internet Personified! A mostly weekly collection of things I did/thought/read/saw that week.
Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of seven books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.
Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!)
Got sent this newsletter? Sign up here to subscribe!
Forward to your friends if you liked this and to the requited crush you always regretted if you didn’t.
Also, write back to me! I love to hear from you.
