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.

A Brief History Of My Childhood In Reading

I wish I could remember learning how to read. The old family lore is that my mother used to try and make mealtimes palatable to me by reading aloud and so I picked it up myself. I was an inordinately picky eater as a child, and required many distractions to shovel food into my mouth. This was 1983 or thereabouts, we didn't even have 24 hour programming on our small black and white TV set, that's how old I am. Anyway, so my mother would bribe me into taking bites by showing me a book, but as time went by, the meals got longer, the books grew from just one chapter to two or three books per meal, I'd trot off and bring my selection, and then sit back to be fed and entertained, opening my mouth at intervals like a little queen. I must have absorbed some of this, because by the time I went to school--a Montessori school on Hailey Road, which still exists, I think, called Shiv Niketan--it was very easy for me to slip from being read aloud to to reading aloud to myself. So easy that I don't remember it happening, and I have vivid memories about my childhood. I remember being toilet trained, for example, the feel of the plastic potty under my naked bottom, how I used to drum my fingers against it, I remember thinking as a child that I could go back to being as young as I wanted once I was done growing up just by climbing into one of the big cupboards installed into the walls of our flat. I remember the way the sun looked filtering through the stone lattice work of the building. (Asia House on Curzon Road as it was known then, Kasturba Gandhi Marg to us now.) I remember two water pumps I used to call my horses, Big Horse and Little Horse, and how I used to bring them grass to eat. And yet, for all of this, I cannot remember my first time looking at a page and realising that one letter connected to another letter, and being all "Off I go!" into the story. The first book I took home to my mother, thrilled with the fact that I read it myself was The Enormous Turnip, a Ladybird book about a farmer and his wife who grow a turnip so big--so ENORMOUS--that they can't pull it out of the ground themselves and have to ask all sorts of animals to help. I remember sounding out that en-or-mous and the thrill of satisfaction I got when I got the word right.

Shiv Niketan was the sort of school where you weren't tested every week or moved up traditionally and so on. Instead, me and another classmate (whose name I coincidentally heard over the weekend after about a decade, so if his ears are burning this week, you know why) were quietly shifted from the nursery to a higher grade. I was born in December, so that's where this whole thing starts, being six months younger than my classmates, in some cases, later, a whole eleven months younger. (I made up for this early burst of prodigy by failing class 9 spectacularly and being pushed back into the batch I had originally been a part of, making me older than everyone else for the rest of my academic life, but it didn't matter, because the scene had been set and I always acted younger than everyone else by then.) When we were shifted, I heard the Hindi Aunty having a loud argument with the class teacher about me, telling her, "But she hasn't even reached my class yet!" I think this is always why I was bad at languages too, god knows I tried, and if you grow up in Delhi your Hindi is Delhi Hindi which is pretty good  okay okay not BAD in my case, if a little rusty, but not as good as people who speak it fluently and frequently. So broken Delhi Hindi, mixing up my grammar, always being taught Hindi as a task, always having a Hindi teacher who sort of hated everyone who couldn't speak the language properly, you see how I longed to read my (English) books all the time and forget the world where things were difficult and abstract. I just wanted to stay with the things that came easily and naturally to me. After all, I was rewarded for those things once by being told how smart I was for Reading Already.


It wasn't long till people started telling me not to read all the time though. All my life this has been a battle, people want me to put down a book and make conversation and I... don't want to. Especially on trains, god, the number of uncles on trains who will make loud remarks about how much I read. I feel their insecurities then, why participate in an activity that implies I am better than them. In many ways, the advent of everyone having a smart phone has been so good for my reading life, I am not the only one looking at a screen or a page all the time. We have all embraced our inner selves! My cousins, I remember, used to nag at me all the time in the summer holidays, "Don't read, Minna, don't read." My grandfather on my mother's side would take great offense to me carrying a book to the dining table, but I still find it hard to eat when I have nothing to look at. This banishment of books from the dining table just meant I ate slower and slower, or littler and littler and then slipped off to find my book again.

How old was I when I read Roald Dahl or Ramona Quimby? I don't remember, so for a friend's child's birthday, I bought The Twits and Fantastic Mr Fox but another friend tells me four is too young for Dahl. I believe though that if you read indiscriminately to your kid, any good story, forget it having big pictures on every page, just keep your kid engrossed, that the love for the story will seep in, that your child will start longing to know more about the books he or she is experiencing through you, that it will set off a need for "just one more chapter" and once you have that need, you know you're a reader for life. In many ways, we were lucky growing up, no internet, no TV, all we had were books, and it's so much easier to form a reading habit when there's nothing else competing with it. But I think if you offered your child the reward of a book instead of screen time or what have you, that if you equate reading with a Good Time, you'll have the reader you want. Of course, your kid should see you reading for pleasure too, so there's that. But nothing like an Family Read Along, whether it's Enid Blyton or Roald Dahl or Harry Potter. I know, I don't have children, but like many people who stay connected to their Inner Child as it were, I feel inside my soul like the six year old I used to be. Along with nineteen and twenty six. (The only age I don't feel connected to is 37, and this year is almost over.)
 
More memories, flying thicker now: going to the World Book Fair and ordering a set of the most gorgeous children's encyclopedias, and then waiting at home for them to be delivered. The way it taught you things through a story: I remember one about a picnic and a storm, and the safest place to be during a storm. (Your car, apparently.) Living in Trivandrum, my parents' friend coming to visit and bringing me a dense small printed copy of Little Women. "Don't be put off by the print," she said, but it took me a year and some boredom before I pulled it off my shelf. I have that edition still, much loved. Daryagunj Sunday book market, taking a tonga home with our book piles. So many Amar Chitra Kathas, which we bound into fat volumes so I could read them over and over. One red letter day, finding all of the Little House in the Big Woods series, just there on the pavement. Anne of Green Gables on one long train journey, my mother skipped the Mrs Rachel Lynde Is Surprised chapter and led me straight to Anne without waiting for it, a wise abridging, because I read the chapter myself years later and it was never that exciting a way to get into the book.

Books held me in my later years. No matter how bad it got, I always had my books. Briefly, books were trendy in the 90s, we'd read Sweet Valley High, not out of any great joy about the prose, but because they were a) like a soap opera and b) our parents disapproved of them. What could be more alluring to a preteen girl? My old friends are still here, still on my shelves, and though I have re-read all my childhood favorites so many times that I can no longer tell you early memories, just vague feelings about them, layered on top of each other, it's nice to know that when the world is garbage, some things still hold. I wish you (and your kids if you have any) the same joy.

Newsletter: Grey skies, happy heart

(This went out as my newsletter this week, sign up here for the latest one!)

I have a little clock which I have set on the bookshelf facing our bed, and I glance at it before I hop out of bed, to see whether I've slept in or I'm waking up early, you know, the usual time-things that take over your life from the moment you open your eyes. Beats having a cellphone next to me though, all that horrid light, all those people clamouring to be heard, no, it's better to deal with the world when you've gotten up and made your coffee and are sitting down at your laptop. (Not that this stops me having a quick look at my notifications after I get up though. I just want to make sure no one has died or the world hasn't ended while I was asleep.) Anyway this morning, I read the clock wrong, but the good news is I got an extra 45 minutes out of this day, which I am spending writing this newsletter to you. (It takes about an hour to two hours to put together this whole thing--I make notes during the week, directly on to TinyLetter's draft page, and I collect links and then the writing of it is where I join all the dots and tell you what's been happening. Fun! But a little mind-space consuming which is why programming has been slightly erratic, I'm trying to finish the edits of my book by the last weekend of this month, and it's a chore and a half, so in procrastinating and then doing, all my brain is occupied with thinking about that.)

Obviously I was doing something else the day they had the time management class in college, because I also, in addition to doing more edits, have to finish reading a very dense (but very good!) new non-fiction book for my books column this week, and once again, my week is fully booked every single evening, so it's a grand old life, but it is a busy one, not so much room to be all like, "Oh, I'll do it in a couple of hours."

This week in memories: I went to the market the other day. I don't go to the market, I prefer the market to come to me, via Grofers or Big Basket, but we were having friends over, and I suddenly started thinking about a big bowl of sliced cucumbers and carrots with a cool dip. It's the kind of snack your friends with full-time help put out all the time, and also, your friends who PLAN these things in ADVANCE, but as you know, I am neither of those groups, but our cook had just come in and we were planning to order in for dinner anyway, so I volunteered to go get that kheera-gajar (not mooli. NEVER mooli. Mooli is always the last thing on the plate after everyone has eaten around it, all the carrot-cucumber is gone, and there's the radish, left mocking you. Friends, if you want to bulk up your veggie selection and are a little short, do a batch of french fries, put out small tomatoes with olive oil and salt, roast some cauliflower, ANYTHING except the mooli which only belongs in a paratha or in a pickle. No, don't argue with me. You know I am correct.)

There are two veggie sellers in the market: the big Safal guy and the littler, more posh, private guy. It's not a big market, as far as colony markets go. There is no ATM for example, but there are two general stores and one chemist. No electrician but a dry cleaner. Two kinds of co-ops (Mother Dairy and Safal), one momo guy, one chaat guy (eh, he's okay, I find his stuff too sweet and I haven't yet dared to try his gol gappa.) One florist who is pretty good. One cigarette shop, which is useful to know. And when I went, one bhutta guy had just arrived, cart full of corn, fire not yet lit.

I asked him to make one while I finished my shopping and when I bit into that bhutta---I can't describe it. What is that nostalgia you taste with your tongue? What is the word for a familiar food that tastes exactly the same--so few things actually do--when you were six or eight or eighteen or now, at thirty six? I was all those Meenakshis at the same time, I was aware of them like Matryoshka dolls, stacked inside of me. Even Delhi, even this city, which I don't know whether I loathe or I love, probably a mixture of those two, even Delhi suddenly became filled with Context. In the monsoon season, we eat bhutta, in the winter, we eat sweet potato chaat, in the summer; well, I never really had a summer snack, so you'll have to tell me. Jamun, maybe? Mangoes? But those are not street foods, not the way that corn is, or the ridiculously tart amrak they serve with shakharkandi.

I skipped along home, eating my bhutta, devouring it, passing people who looked at me with hostility or consternation, I ate every last kernel. (I don't know why the default Delhi expression is set to "hate." Even when you go to a bar and you go to the loo and run into another woman, she'll give you this expression of pure loathing. Why? What do I remind you of?) (Except for the little girl underneath my mum's apartment yesterday. We were pulling into the parking space and she was standing there and we waited for her to move and she looked me straight in the eye and smiled. Just a smile. For a stranger. It was nice.)

This week in cool things friends are doing: Ameya is heading up Indian Express's audio division and it is A-MA-ZING. She's hosting a water podcast herself (monsoon, rivers etc) but there are other subjects too if water isn't your thing. Check it out, they're adding new shows all the time so keep an eye out! 

This week in Cool Stuff I Read On The Internet

 

I love all of this article on #MeToo and growing up in the '90s and how the latter sort of enabled the former.

 Men in that decade’s pop culture tended to be harmless – think the goofs of Seinfeld and Friends. One of the bestselling American books of the early 90s, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, reassured readers that resolving miscommunications between the sexes was actually easy, if we just understood how to do it. Solutions were big then. A couples therapist named Harville Hendrix sold hundreds of thousands of copies of a guide called Getting the Love You Want, which unravelled “the mystery of romantic attraction” and answered “humanity’s yearning” in just 384 pages.

Who makes those very, very specific T-shirts on the internet? (I keep seeing ones that say, "It's an LSR thing." (btw, you should subscribe to The Hustle newsletter, it's great.)

There’s a whole subreddit (r/TargetedShirts) with 29k users devoted to the weirdly specific t-shirts that show up in Facebook users’ feeds — shirts like “I love ANIME but JESUS always comes first,” or “I’m a VET who EATS BEEF and sings KARAOKE.”

The internet was a fine and dandy place until BLOGS came along and totally broke it. (I miss the old blogging days sometimes, but, WOW, design was so CLUNKY.)

The Internet at the time was largely populated by academics, professionals, and college students. Not everyone had the desire to publish their angsty poetry, sexcapades, or surfing habits on a daily basis; the other limiter on chrono-content was the sheer time and energy it required. Diarying was a helluva lot of work. First you had to have something to say, then write, edit it, format it, add clip art, edit your index.html, edit any prev/next links, check those links, and lastly, upload the files.

What it's like having a luxury wedding.

Celebrity performers were novel just a decade ago, but now they’re something of a norm. John Mayer, Katy Perry, and Chris Martin have all been hired to perform at private weddings. Earlier this year, both Mariah Carey and Elton John performed at the wedding of a Russian billionaire’s granddaughter, while Mark Ronson DJed. Sarah actually blames her Russian clients for the trend “because they are the people who started hiring them for everything: 18th birthday parties, 21st birthday parties, wedding anniversaries, not just weddings. They diluted the uniqueness of that. Now we have weddings where one headliner isn't enough; they need three or four. Then you hit problems as to what order do you put them on in.” Tell a big name that she’s not the headliner, and she’ll drop out.

And what it's like being a crime reporter in Mumbai. (Sidebar: No, I have not watched Sacred Games yet.)

A police officer in Dadar once told me that his biggest nightmare is the mangalsutra theft. No matter what the status of the complainant, a mangalsutra robbery is always reported. “Because the Indian Penal Code doesn’t record emotions and relationships, only crime. We then have to listen to the stories too,” he had said, of the many times he has had to comfort a crying adult, who believed the theft was a bad omen.

I normally don't link to friendship hacks because every relationship is unique and beautiful, but I loved this guide to showing up for other people so much I'm going to be borrowing from it for my own friendships.

If they tell you about a personal experience, avoid interrogating them or taking the devil’s advocate position. (The devil doesn’t need more advocates!!!) Become known as the friend who says, “I believe you.”

Newsletter: Making a cup of memory tea

(This week's fresh newsletter goes out TOMORROW to subscribers. Here's where you can sign up.)

This week in mysteries: My staycation would be nothing without detective novels--no, it's true. I lie on the sofa in my study, which is not a very comfortable one for lying on, since it's too small and invariably gives me a kink in my neck, but it's there, you know? And these days, keeping me company is Deborah Crombie. I've mentioned her to you before, she does this series about two detectives called Duncan Kinkaid and Gemma James, but since the last time I wrote about her, I've read at least seven more books in the series and now I feel like I can talk about Crombie's oeuvre as it were, more efficiently.

So--these are very British books. Primarily set in London and nearby, the two detectives, Duncan (always referred to as Kinkaid) and Gemma (who gets a first name, in what I'm not sure is slightly sexist or because Crombie is fonder of her) work with Scotland Yard and the London Metropolitan Police respectively. Here's the odd thing: Crombie is actually American. Now, normally, when an American writer tries to Britishify themselves, you can tell with one giveaway or another, but she seems to have completely subdued her own Americanism to write EXTREMELY British scenes. (This is as far as I can tell, but maybe a true native would be able to nitpick further.) From the biog at the back of the books, we know that Crombie spends a lot of time in London, researching each book, and so, the central theme of each book is usually sprawling. For example, there's the mystery of the Olympic rower who was murdered and then there's pages of meticulous detail about belonging to a rowing club and what that means. There's stuff about the monks in Glastonbury and automatic writing and spiritualism, which is also amazing, and my own personal favourite, Dreaming of the Bones, where the murder of a famous poet back in the day leads to a more current murder, with lots of "excerpts" as it were, from the fake book.

But besides the research, what's truly addictive about Kinkaid/James is their own relationship. Soon enough, they start sleeping together, soon after, there's this big blended family, and watching the two solve their own mysteries while also connecting with each other in the end, it's a relief after all those stories about lonely fucked up detectives who "only work alone." It's soothing, like an Agatha Christie, but the scope is wider.

This week in thinking about old hobbies: Was reading this article about the Capital City Minstrels, a choir based in Delhi, who I used to sing with, back in school/college. I really did enjoy my time singing, this is before karaoke night became so ubiquitous, and I had been in a couple of school choirs before, so I was full of confidence in my singing abilities. In school I was an alto, taking the lower notes, but the director of the choir then, a man named Nowshad, took me through the scales, and we discovered I was a soprano after all. I hit notes I have never been able to hit since--blame smoking? And my moment of triumph was singing Ave Verum Corpus where the soprano section got to hold the note high and sweet and long while the rest chimed in.

I miss rehearsals, I think, whether for plays or choirs, I miss the camaraderie, the tea and snacks, the sense of accomplishment after a good session. For a while, Lushin Dubey and Bubbles Sabharwal used to run a kids theatre camp every summer, where they put on musicals. Nayantara and I auditioned for Matilda, and we both got in to the chorus, which stood in the orchestra pit of Kamani auditorium. There was a boy....

But he was so much cooler and older and wiser than I was, he was seventeen, but he may as well have been twenty seven, and I was fourteen, but I looked around eleven, so there was no chance, NO CHANCE, but I still gazed at him every night, his beauty, his voice. And when the play finished, I wanted desperately to get in touch, but I wanted him to get in touch with me, not just the needy tagalong, but the girl he finally saw for her Inner Beauty as it were. I spent so many of my teen years yearning, which is a great hobby for your teen if you're looking for them to never get into any trouble at all, because all they are doing is daydreaming of that perfect evening, where he calls and then he takes your hand and he tells you how special you are.  I was heavily into the occult as this point, remind me to tell you someday about my brief brush with Wiccanism, so I used my homemade Ouija boards to ask for his phone number, and wrote it down, and never dialled it, and one afternoon, my dear patient friend and I called all the His Last Names in the phone book so we could ask for him.  By page two, it still wasn't his number, and we gave it up.

I wonder what it would have been like to come of age in today's world--Facebook and Instagram making it so easy to stalk someone, to tell them of your interest. Not so much fun, but I think if you offered it to me back then--here is a magic machine on which you can tell what your object of interest is doing AT ALL TIMES--I would have taken it in a heartbeat.

Thursday link list coming to you courtesy of a slow week:

 

Cardi B at the Met Gala, but also so much more.

 

Excerpt: “Okurrr!” added a few members of Cardi’s team, filling the room in the Carlyle Hotel with the sounds of an avian chorus. (“Okurrr,” with a trilled r, is one of Cardi’s signature exclamations. The association of Cardi with “okurrr” has become so strong that the hotel embroidered the interjection on one of her room’s pillowcases.)

This guy pretended to be a high schooler so he could take advantage of the American college system.

 

Excerpt: The things about him that raised questions—he wore suits and ties sometimes, he had an accent—were readily dismissed as the strangenesses of any new student. When someone would ask why he talked funny, Asher would tell them he grew up "in the Russian-Jewish neighborhood down by the river." When they asked where he'd been before ninth grade, he said he'd been homeschooled. When an instructor asked him why his name had changed to Asher Potts (he'd improbably started freshman year as Artur Samarin), Asher joked: "Because I'm a Russian spy." But for the most part, in the way of all high school students, the suspect details were mostly met with a shrug. American teenagers, to his great benefit, were naturally incurious. No oddity was worth paying attention to more than their own. And so he became one of them.

Why everyone should talk to their kids about rape, and maybe also take them to protests

Excerpt: Some parents travel with their children to foreign countries to expose them to different cultures. Others take them to libraries, book readings and panel discussions. I take my son to protests where he hears and sees strong women of all ages come out to talk fearlessly about violence, misogyny, poetry, anguish and love. He sees women laugh raucously, dress whimsically, and express their opinions unhesitatingly. As he grows up he will realise that it’s a world where he will be welcomed as an equal if he accords them the same respect.

The Juul has made smokers out of non smokers

 

Excerpt:  Juuling and scrolling through Instagram offer strikingly similar forms of contemporary pleasure. Both provide stimulus when you’re tired and fidgety, and both tend to become mindless tics that fit neatly into rapidly diminishing amounts of free time. (You can take two Juul hits and double-tap a bunch of pics in about ten seconds. You need an inefficient five minutes to burn a paper tube of tar and leaves into ash.) The omnipresence of Juul on social media has undoubtedly made kids overestimate the extent of teen Juuling—young people tend to think that their peers drink, smoke, and hook up more than they actually do. And it’s all beyond regulation: the F.D.A. can control the behavior of companies advertising nicotine for profit, but it can do nothing about teens advertising nicotine to one another for free.
 

Why take a round trip bus across Delhi? Because you cannnn.

 

Excerpt: In a city like Delhi, one can live 20 years, and still be perceived as an outsider. There are still locations and settings which are alien to you and where you stand out, even when you try to fit in. Great cities, I realised on that Mudrika, are like lovers— you know them intimately, but you will never know them entirely. You will be well-versed with certain terrains and landscapes, and one day, the unforeseen raises its head.
 

Hello, Khaan E Khaaaaas?

(This appeared in The City Story a while ago)

(Here's another post (sorta) about Khaan e Khaas as well)

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.

Newsletter: The Birthday Recollection Edition

Next week, my ride on this big ol' planet will have circled the sun thirty six times. THIRTY SIX! Can you imagine? I'm just about wrapping my head around the 90s not being day before yesterday, let alone acknowledge the fact that people born in 2001 can have actual opinions. No, you may not. You are an embryo.

I fear I'm turning into one of those older people I always hated, slightly patronising, slightly looking-down-upon-you-all from her great age and experience, and yet, I resent these same qualities in someone who is 40 or 50.

When I was very young, one of the big things we did for my birthday every year was to get a "shape" cake from the Nirula's bakery in Connaught Place. Every year, about a week or two before, my mother and I would trot down to the bakery, and every year, we'd explain in great detail how we'd like the cake to look. One year, we had a merry-go-round where the horses were 3D and edible, a crowning glory was the Hansel and Gretel cake, the witch looked truly terrifying, and in a great show of bravery and birthday confidence, I grabbed her and bit off her head, saving the day. Sadly, I can't find photos of those cakes, so here, have one from my first birthday when Appu the elephant mascot of the Asian Games of 1982 was all the rage, and so he lived on my cake.

 

I am the child in the white, my gaze refusing to be torn from my cake, no matter how often whoever was holding me tried to make me look at the camera. I would not look. The Cake was the Goal. Also on the menu, from what I can make out: vadas, puris, some kind of pulao? and I don't know what those round things are to the right of the cake.

Here is also a photo from a fourth or fifth birthday, which I have included because this was also my expression this morning.

 I call it my "leave me alone, I'm eating" face. I think my grandmother was visiting, which is probably why I was dressed so fancy. In fact, I think I remember this little lehenga, she brought it for me with a matching one for my Cabbage Patch doll. I loved that doll, she was brown skinned and had a dimple and an adoption certificate (I think her name was Joanne?) but I don't think I ever made up stories with her as much as I did with my other toys. Joanne was great, but she didn't leave very much to the imagination, she already had a name and a back story, unlike my beaten up teddy bear: Red Rose (and his little brother, Yellow Rose.)

Red Rose was also a birthday present, from this same Appu birthday as pictured above. The girl next to me seems like she was very clingy, she's in all the photos. She's probably married with kids now, and we wouldn't recognise each other if we passed on the street. "Gosh," my own baby face is saying, "Why can't this chick leave me alone so I can go back to playing with my NEW TOYS." The perils of popularity. (ETA: My mother tells me actually this girl and I shared a mutual love for each other and any time she wanted to find me, she'd go to this girl's house and ask, because I was usually there, but I think the photo speaks for itself. There's a time and place for everything!)

Anyway! Nirula's. So, the last time I ordered a shape cake from them was an Asterix and Obelix one, where I had to take my comic book there to show them what I wanted and explain how the writing had to be on the menhir and that, I think was age 10 or something. A few years later, I return for something or the other, and there in their "what cakes we can do" catalogue book were ALL MY CAKES. PLAGIARISED. Not a word of credit. I felt very betrayed, especially since random Nehas and Karans had their names all over my birthday cakes.

I'm thinking specially about the 80s, because this year I'm having an 80s-theme birthday party. Tonight, in fact. Just as a way to embrace our ages, and how far I've come since clutching Red Rose at a birthday party and trying to get a random girl to stop kissing me. (Wellllllll....) We're dressing as--actually, I don't want to ruin the surprise, but there will be photos on Instagram if you'd like to FOMO along with us. (To my friends who read this: please don't expect something fancy. We have cobbled together outfits from bits and pieces lying around at home. The costumes will definitely have a, um, homemade vibe.) (It was a great party, please scroll down to find a photo of me and K as Mario and Princess Peach respectively.)

In more recent birthdays, here's what I was doing last year.

And I will see you on the other side of birthday week! It's Wednesday, December 13, should you want to, oh, say happy birthday then. I'm STILL excited. Can you believe it? Maybe you only outgrow birthdays when you have a kid, in which case I'm safe.

On that note, let's move on to the Saturday Link List!
 

A quick Google search throws up multiple news reports about massive drug busts involving residents of Tilak Nagar (which also boasts over a dozen rehab clinics). It seems the neighbourhood – along with more infamous Delhi areas like Khirki Junction, Paharganj and Seemapuri – has become one of the hubs of a major trans-national drug transit route that connects poppy fields in Afghanistan and Myanmar with drug markets in Sri Lanka, Africa and Europe. Few escape untouched. Prabh tells me about Abu, a childhood friend whose addiction pushed him into a life of crime, and who spent years in Tihar Jail for murder before succumbing to an overdose. “I tried to get him a job at the place I was working at, thinking that then he wouldn’t have the time or energy to go out and do drugs,” he remembers, chuckling. “Five minutes into the interview, he’d grabbed the guy by his collar. He didn’t get the job and I got fired too.”

The crazy back story of Prabh Deep, the "next big thing" on the Indian rap scene.

In June 1873, a year before the Ingallses arrived, a mystifying cloud had darkened the clear sky of southwest Minnesota on “one of the finest days of the year.” Like a demonic visitation, it was flickering red, with silver edges, and appeared to be alive, arriving “at racehorse speed.” Settlers were terrified to realize that it was composed of locusts, swarming grasshoppers that settled a foot thick over farms, breaking trees and shrubs under their weight. They sounded, according to one unnerved observer, like “thousands of scissors cutting and snipping.” A young Minnesota boy was in school with his brother when they heard the locusts coming, around two o’clock in the afternoon. As they started for home, cringing under a hail of falling insects, the boys had to “hold our hands over our faces to keep them from hitting us in our eyes.”

I don't know how many of you have read the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder (DO IT), but the locust scene from On The Banks Of Plum Creek was one of the scariest things ever. Here's how it affected America.
 

Seemingly overnight, we're now at #1,456. The Shed at Dulwich has suddenly become appealing. How? I realise what it is: the appointments, lack of address and general exclusivity of this place is so alluring that people can’t see sense. They’re looking at photos of the sole of my foot, drooling. Over the coming months, The Shed's phone rings incessantly.

This guy turned his GARDEN SHED into the top rated Tripadvisor restaurant in London and this story is HILARIOUS. (I also suggest clicking on his name and checking out his other hi-jinks)

Comparing Lily’s life and Merope’s existence is like comparing that of a princess and a peasant. Pretty, popular, smart, and kind, Lily was near universally loved in life and practically deified in death. Even the few who dared to dislike or mistreat her (Voldemort, Death Eaters, and blood purists aside) only did so because of their negative reactions to her perfection: Petunia cut contact with her out of jealousy, and Snape called her a slur partly out of frustration for his unrequited feelings for her—feelings that became his single motivation in life even after she married one of his tormentors. Even in death Lily surpasses Merope; the former was honoured with a memorial statue dedicated to her and her family while the latter probably was buried in an unmarked, unmourned grave.

Analysing the tragedy of Voldemort's parents.

We’d been getting along okay, these two cats and me, since the deaths of their two other housemates, last winter. The pair of them are very different, one businesslike and aloof, the other a laid back counterculture icon in cat form, but they exist in a state of pleasantly reserved friendship, with little aggro or drama. They seem to agree on all the main political topics of the day and favour sitting no more or less than fourteen inches apart, silently chewing over whatever in their minds happens to be most pressing at that particular moment. With these two by my side, I have not felt any desire to go out and get another cat to replace those I lost in quick succession a few months ago. Besides, Ralph - the horizontal and chilled of the remaining two - offers a love roughly commensurate to that of three or four normal cats. There is the sense that, were I to totally abandon my daily domestic duties - gardening, housework, laptop, cooking, bladder relief - he would remain permanently glued to my chest, determinedly attempting to make dough from my skin while looking deep into my eyes with the fervour of a deranged superfan.

I love cat writing, especially when it's good cat writing, but this is sort of a ghost story, a rescue story and a mystery set in the deep English countryside which is level up.

It started in the pilot, when Leonard and Sheldon invite Penny over for their very first bonding session. Despite opening their fresh Chinese food containers on camera, all of these containers are nearly empty, and the characters immediately partake in an eating technique that has since defined the series: The “mix around air in the hopes it looks like food” move.

Lighten up with a set of gifs that shows how terribly the cast of The Big Bang Theory "fake eat."

I Want To Live In America: On The Appeal Of The Babysitter's Club

(This appeared on Scroll ages ago.)

Their names were something generic—something you'd call your kids when you birthed them far away from everything you knew, and they probably had really pretty “real” names, but I knew them as Pinky and Minnie and they lived next door to my aunt when I visited Nashua, New Hampshire at 11. It was my first trip abroad—the one I had done at two years old didn't count, because then I was just an accessory to my mother—and this was a trip I had made by myself, an unaccompanied minor, walking behind a series of very kind stewardesses, the last of which deposited me straight to my aunt waiting at Boston airport. I was small, shy and gawky, thick soda bottle glasses and uncontrollable hair, which my mother insisted on cutting in a “boy cut,” so she didn't have to deal with it.

In many ways, I was young for my age, and even though I had read Anne of Green Gables and Little Women by then, my mind stayed childlike, undisturbed still by the faraway murmurings of puberty. I had to go give a talk as a “person from India” to my cousin's first grade class, and once the class let out, I found myself in a sea of children my own age, but they were giants, and they knew so much more than me, and they seemed so confident, that I sat with the six-year-olds for the rest of my day there.

Pinky was a little older than me and Minnie was a little younger, girls of Indian origin that my aunt asked over to play with me thinking I'd be bored with her two boys—one six, one three. I was pleased to see familiar looking faces, and we all sat outside on the porch, swinging our legs while they peppered me with questions about India: did we have a cow? Did we have an elephant? And Pinky glancing at me sideways: do you have a boyfriend? I must have mumbled something and looked shocked, because she grinned, and left me with a copy of Hello Mallory!, book 14 of The Babysitter's Club and inadvertently introduced me to people I'd know for a long time.

The Babysitter's Club is quite tame compared to its peer group, the attractive Wakefield twins, who the creator Francine Pascal follows from childhood all the way to university and everyone has sex at some point, and definitely everyone has a boyfriend. In contrast, the girls in the BSC (as it was known to those familiar with it) are stuck at perpetual tweenage—the older girls are twelve and thirteen, the younger ones are ten and eleven.

Every book is a little bit like the old '90s show Full House—Very Special Episodes dealing with everything from racism to bullying to diabetes. You got a little spiel in the beginning: Kristy is bossy, has a step father who is a millionaire and an adopted baby sister from Vietnam, Dawn is the hippy from California, who is also a vegan and a health food nut which leads to a lot of jokes about how gross tofu tastes, Mary Anne is shy and sensitive but is the only one with a steady boyfriend and is stepsisters with Dawn, Stacey is big city cool and has diabetes, Claudia is a Japanese-American artist whose eyes get called “almond shaped” a lot and who eats a lot of candy and never gets a pimple. And the younger two: Jessi who is black and Mallory who is white, and that's pretty much how their friendship got described, apart from a few details about their siblings. A pretty diverse group of friends, whose speciality, whose passion even was babysitting the neighbourhood kids. So each book was somewhat formulaic—it led with the lead character of that book whose name would also be in the title (Kristy's Big Idea, The Trouble With Stacey, Jessi's Secret Language etc) and there would be a B plot which involved a babysitting problem but which also ultimately tied back in with the original babysitter's problem. But for some reason, they fascinated not only me, but a host of girls worldwide growing up with the same characters. However, navigating America as I did that summer, the girls provided me with a roadmap to US teens. I imagined their wholesome faces as I “did” the country, and in New York City, I even bought myself the BSC Super Special 6: New York, New York, so I could see the city the way they did. (Unlike them, I was never allowed to wander about alone, but it was still fun.)

Over the years, the teen readers grew up and the BSC began to get sort of fetishized as many things from the late '80s and '90s tend to do in this nostalgia-obsessed age. There is a blog dedicated to Claudia's many outfits called What Claudia Wore (which is now defunct, but was very popular till 2013). It detailed such gems as:

"Anyway, I wore the coolest tuxedo I'd recently bought in a thrift shop, including a silky, piped shirt and a bright red velvet cummerbund. I removed the shoulder pads from the jacket, which made it really slouchy (I love that look). Then I bought a pair of white socks with silver glitter. I decided to wear a pair of red sneakers to match the cummerbund. I swept my hair up and fastened it with a rhinestone barrette in the shape of a musical note."

Claudia—being Japanese American—might have been the most written about babysitter, with even a whole graphic essay dedicated to her being a role model for other Asian American girls.

We all had favourites—but mine was Mallory, considered by some to be the most boring babysitter, but I had met her first, her eleven-year-old soul was a kindred spirit, she liked to read and write, she had braces and glasses—Mallory, c'est moi! When I look at my collection now, the eleven-year-olds (Mallory and Jessi) have a majority of the shelf space, and obviously, my heart. Even as I grew up, I identified more with them than with the other girls (save maybe Mary Anne, who was quiet and shy and had an over-protective father). In America, I was learning, the girls got to go out on their own, look after other people's children, and make their own money without having to worry about silly things like parental permission. In many ways, the BSC were my first feminist role models—their business-like minds, their ingenuity and their independence.

I didn't hang out with Pinky and Minnie much after that one time, because in my innocence, I told my aunt about the conversation I had with them. “Do all American girls have boyfriends?” I asked, and she took Pinky to task about it. I even overheard her saying, “Things are different in India!” After that, I held my own counsel, but I didn't need Pinky and Minnie any more anyway. I had the BSC.   

Newsletter: Thinking about home

(This appeared as my newsletter not long ago. Want regular updates? Subscribe here!)

"Do you think there's any restaurant in Delhi that you would eat at every single day of the week?" K asks as we sit at Vinayak for lunch. My mother tells him there are a couple of canteens she used to eat at every day, before I was born, so like, the 70s? I'm thinking of the dhaba near the old Indian Express office in Qutub Enclave. They did delicious parathas--chicken and veg, and noodles, except for the one time that a baby cockroach was also served up, so my memory of it is both yummy and I want some more mixed with a faint amount of nausea. There was also a tea boy, who served really bad cups of coffee--all this before we moved to the newer office a few blocks away, which came equipped with a fancy canteen and coffee machines on every floor. Then, of course, all the office buildings there were sealed, and it was back to the ITO office for everyone else and off to a new job in Gurgaon with what became Ibibo for me. ("Ibibo" for "I build, I bond," something we came up with at one of the never ending meetings, was supposed to be a blog portal, a rip-off of a Chinese portal, but we didn't know then that blogs were on their way out.) Strange how some memories take you off on other ones.

This week in homes: Back when I worked at Ibibo is also when my friend Meghna and I shared a flat in another illegal building, a place called Anupam Enclave, not too far from our current home in Delhi. (Our friend Supriya had already moved out by then and we had a constant revolving door of flatmates who came and left.) This building was four floors, and we were on the very highest, which swayed each time a truck drove past. Such legendary parties we gave, Delhi will never see the like again. I'm thinking of all the walk-ups I've inhabited, not a single building with a lift, so my legs are always stretched, suitcases are always packed light, I'm out of breath if I've been away too long, sitting on the landing below ours and gazing up at our front door, so close and yet so far. In Goa, our house has a garden and only two stairs leading to the balcao, but it's large, so if you leave something in the bedroom, you have to traipse across the house. Not quite as much cardio as climbing all those stairs, but something to keep me from just sitting on my bottom at my desk the entire time. We've been painting, did I tell you this before? The mouldy bits of the wall are covered up with yellow, and just yesterday, we painted the Godrej and the remaining wall. They're now aqua, but I made a smudge, and covered that smudge up with a box, and since the blue wall is also our projector wall, everything gets a blue censored box if it's in the right position.

(Speaking of Meghna, she's now a qualified yoga teacher, and gave us her and our first session. She's very good.)

This week in home entertainment:  Since my mother has been here, we've been watching a movie almost every night. It's usually Hindi films from one of the streaming websites, we've watched Highway and Pink (Hotstar), Fan (Amazon) and Udta Punjab (Netflix). My objections to both Highway and Udta Punjab is how well they began, all these gritty films on difficult subjects and how they devolved into typical Bollywood romance in the second half. All the storylines need to have some romance in them in order to work, apparently, but they kind of ruined the film by just inserting the love story in there. Highway was a particularly bad example of this, at least Udta Punjab has three different storylines that intersect in interesting ways. But that's two Alia Bhatt movies for me, and I thought she was dumb thanks to the AIB spoofs on her, but turns out she's a versatile and talented actor, which is a ray of hope for the future of Bollywood films anyway. Pink turned out to be excellent, despite Amitabh's grandstanding at the end, and everything getting wrapped up very neatly, and Fan  was the creepiest of them all, even if it wanted to be an action movie with not one, not two, but three completely gratuitous chase sequences.

Besides Hindi movies, we also watched The Godfather (Amazon Prime), which both Mum and K had seen before, much to my surprise. (Not K, he used to work at a video store, so he's seen EVERYTHING, but I thought my mother was more like me, inclined to soft commercial releases with not so much Men Talking And Doing Things.) I understand many more things now that I have watched it, about pop culture references, but mostly about the bits in You've Got Mail where Tom Hanks is telling Meg Ryan about how everything in the world can be related to The Godfather and she's like, “Why do men always always always reference that movie?”

Also, not on any streaming website, but acquired elsewhere, an episode of Planet Earth II, the grasslands episode. Recommend watching all six for anyone interested in this great big world of ours, and how things adapt and live and thrive within it.
  

This week in hobbies: My Salim Ali Book of Indian Birds sits always at my left hand on my desk. This is because the bushes outside my desk attract a whole ecosystem of small birds. Once I got into naming and labelling them, I started to look everywhere, and now I have fifteen different species, all listed at the back of the book. The other day, our morning visitor was a large Indian peafowl (a peacock, to be less exact, but more descriptive) which K woke me up for. The peacock didn't knock, he just stood around the garden looking attractive, much like men in fedoras with artistic beards and skinny jeans do. If this peacock was a human, he'd be the one at a party, who, upon being ignored for five minutes, goes and picks up the guitar, playing a few chords on it, until polite people gather around him and ask if he can play, to which he'd reply modestly, “A little.” This is probably unfair anthropomorphising of the peacock, who has really done nothing to me, but probably also influenced by the fact that pick up artists call getting dressed and going out on the town “peacocking.”

This week in sports: Once again we are cutting down, quitting, attempting to stop smoking and so have turned to physical exercise as a way of controlling cravings and energy slumps. Badminton satisfies all those things, the thwock of a shuttlecock being hit perfectly fills a void inside of me. The cigarette void, probably. Either way, I'm getting very good at badminton, and sometimes we play it indoors. (Maybe not “very good” but I am fairly enthusiastic, which counts for something.)

This week in food and drink: Tried out new restaurant The Banyan for Chinese food the other night. The food was okay (and such small portions!) but it's built around a MASSIVE banyan tree that is really the most spectacular tree I've ever seen. Worth going for drinks and to gaze up at it in wonder.

Reading list:  If you can't come to Goa, Goa comes to you. On Delhi's new "beach shack" restaurant, Lady Baga. ** Karan Johar won't say those three little words. ** Bhutan had a ban on Indian chillies and now everyone is depressed. ** He's baaa-aack. Arnab gets a new channel to play around with. ** Scathing review of a food book just before I was about to buy it, so good timing. ** Morbid but fascinating: scientists on Twitter have been using #BestCarcass to show off pictures of dead animals. ** Sweet story about the habits of our close cousin species: the Neanderthals. ** Want a great relationship? You need to be kind and generous, duh. ** The British curry house and why it's become more white, less Indian. ** Why everyone in Bollywood is called Kaira, Ria or something like, and why they all have jobs like "photographer." (Kian was Kian before the Kiaans, and Meenakshi never had a moment.) **

Newsletter: Goodbye 2016, who could hang a name on you?

Just sent this out as my newsletter, but decided to cross post for once, because a year-ender is a year ender. You can subscribe to my newsletter The Internet Personified here.

Dear friends,

I imagine you all in various stages of preparation across the globe. Some of you are just waking up, others, in my timezone, are planning to valiantly fight New Year's Eve pressure and stay in with a good TV show and hot chocolate. Some of you are somewhere far and warm, and you're probably not even going to read this until it's 2017 already and you're back home and you're looking up at grey skies or blue with speckles of cloud, in the midst of traffic and you're wondering, "Now what?"

Now what is a thought many of us have on January 1st, even if you want to believe that the whole "counting down to midnight" is not really a thing, that it's just another day, that drinking on the night of is for amateurs, it's natural to want a whole new year, a whole new date to begin afresh. It's also somewhat tempting to think all new things will happen: now that 2016 is over, none of our beloved celebrities will die/politics will turn out to be less of the massive clusterfucks we've been experiencing/we'll lose weight/exercise more/travel more/quit smoking/finally do That Thing that we've been waiting to do. But ultimately, we're still the same ol' us. Is that depressing? Not really. The strength to change is within all of us all the time and if you want that change to happen in January, then by hell, go out and get it. 

Here are two of the things I wrote on New Year's Eve: more feminist resolutions for the coming year, and how to deal with Social Menopause, and resist social pressure to "go out and do something."

How was 2016? For me, it was a time of things FINALLY COMING TOGETHER.

* The home we had been working on all of 2015 was completed and we moved in in March. For the first time ever, there was an entire flat designed just for us. From the floor tiles to the particularities of the bathroom, to the kitchen we can leave open when we have parties or close against curious cats to a massive terrace that more often than not became our refuge. Plus all my books had a home in a writer's room out of a storybook: Jane Austen green walls, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a massive desk, lots of light--I got a lot of work done there. Just when we thought we'd never want to leave Delhi again, we went off to Goa for a month, having promised a friend that we'd dog-sit while she was abroad. And we said--driving down green roads, eating our daily fish thaalis--how nice if this was our life too, and for the first time ever, we made it happen. So now I have not one but two beloved homes, and we're making it work, as unbelievable as it seems.

* I wrote a LOT in 2016 and for a while it seemed like I was just writing into the ether with nothing really happening. I won no big literary prizes, I wasn't making as much money as I wanted to, but (another first!) for the first time in my ten year freelance career I was not just breaking even, I was actually making a little money, and this made me feel like it was finally worth it--all those days of being broke next to rich friends, of choosing the cheaper option, of skimping and pinching, and putting off till I got more money--it had turned into something concrete--a career, not just living on a pipe dream and parental handouts. I also signed three books with Harper Collins this year, and while I'm not happy about my editor and friend leaving the publishing house, I did manage to finish another book, the first in a series retelling the Mahabharata. I'm hugely excited about this as it's the first time I've attempted this kind of writing, a genre-shift for me, and the first of the Girls of the Mahabharata: The One Who Swum With The Fishes, Satyavati's story, will be out summer of next year.

* In all this, I also got asked if I wanted to write a web series. YES, I said, and then YES YES YES again, because I am greedy and also arrogant enough to believe I can do anything. The web series got bigger and bigger, and now Amazon has signed it up to be a long series to run on their Prime Video section. This is HUGELY challenging and also very new and hardworkhardworkhardwork for me, since I've never done anything like this before. Which is excellent, because I was getting sort of glib about my writing as you are with something you have practiced for so long it's practically second nature. It's a bit of an uphill climb for me, but luckily, everyone I'm working with has been super nice, so I'm hoping I'll emerge at the other end as a stronger, better writer. 

* Foolishly (and with the same arrogance), in January of last year, I signed on to the Goodreads reading challenge, putting my goal as 500 books, which as all of you know would mean I'd have to read more than one book a day to even get CLOSE. I realised my folly and pushed it down to 200, which was still a push and a half. After a lot of junk reading filled my summer months, and then a lot of re-reading which I didn't even document, thinking of it as cheating, I finally managed to reach my goal today. I loved a lot of them, which is saying something. Here's the link to all the books I read this year. Next year, I'm picking a manageable number like 150 or something.

I feel oddly guilty about liking 2016 so much when I know so many of you didn't. And really, that all boils down to the fact that this was a year just for me. It was a year of inward thinking and not looking at the outside so much. It was a year of coming to terms with the introverted stuff that's important to me: homes, books, writing, and making space for those things within my life. I had great times with my friends, I had great times with my family, and with my partner, and our cats, but ultimately, 2016 was the Selfish Year, the year when I examined the questions of who am I and where am I going a lot more than I did any other year so far.

I hope 2017 is full of new excellent experiences for all of us. 

Stringy cheese and the taste of childhood: On Nirula's and the 1990s

An NRI aunt came to visit us in Delhi after a long time. This particular aunt used to come to our home all the time back in the 80s and 90s, accompanied by my two cousins, and we always had a routine we adhered to. She had to hit up all her favourite eating spots—Hyderabad, where my mother's extended family lives was great for the home-cooked meal, but not so much with the eating out options—and what my aunt wanted was Indian food, your daal makhani, seekh kebabs and naan and Indian Chinese food. If they didn't have American chop suey on the menu, she did not want to go there, no matter how “fine dining” it may have been.

Well, lucky for us, her hosts, back in the day we had a one-stop shop we could take her to and keep us three kids happy as well. Nirula's was the answer to “shall we go out and eat tonight?” or where I went for my very first outing with friends from school—Jurassic Park and our pooled money going into pizza for after.

This is the very same pizza I order some weekends to chase away that gloomy Sunday night feeling. The weekend is over, you've probably had to much to drink the past few days, this is also the day your maid doesn't come to work, so you're sitting in your unmade bed, having watched television till the light outside your curtains turns from bright to dark. And there you are in your flat, still in your pajamas, with all the lights off because you haven't turned them on yet, and what could be a better pick-me-up than some nostalgia food from a simpler time? I guess that's one of the nice things about living in a city you also spent your childhood in. Nostalgia is always just around the corner. The pizza itself is not as spectacular as any of the fancy new delivery-only gourmet pizza places that have popped up all over the city, but the stringiness of the cheese, the crispness of the capsicum, the rubbery give of the mutton sausage, the weird in-between crust—they're all incredibly more-ish, even though that description makes it sound supremely unappetising.

I may have also had a weird anthromorphised crush on Michelangelo

Some people went for hot chocolate fudge (abbreviated coolly to HCF) but my heart belonged to that very underrated menu item—the ice cream soda. Vanilla ice cream, a squirt of the syrup in the flavour you wanted and topped off with foaming club soda, it was everything you wanted in a drink and dessert.

What my aunt wanted—which was to eat like she was in the 1980s again---we could no longer provide for her in 2016 though. There are about a zillion places to eat out in Delhi, but Pot Pourri, the “fancy” salad bar with paper placemats and table service has vanished. And definitely RIP the Chinese Room, with its dim lighting and crispy noodles and sweet corn soup with bits of shredded chicken swimming in a thick broth, which you spiced up using the vinegar on the table, thoughtfully scattered through with marinated green chillis.

What's going to happen to Nirula's then? One more piece of our past is breaking off, only to be glimpsed sometimes as “quick service” at petrol pumps, hospitals or the highway. And the last time I ordered pizza from there, my partner looked at me quizzically. “Really? This is the pizza you wanted?” he asked, as I tore open the mustard packets and added strategic dots of the condiment to my slice. It really wasn't the pizza I wanted though—that pizza is still stuck in 1989, when none of my family felt like eating “home food” and we went on an excursion to Connaught Place, placed our order at the counter, and the bubbles from the ice cream soda tickled my nose.