Newsletter: Five Nights In Delhi Edition

(This newsletter was sent out two weeks ago. To be more up-to-date, subscribe here!)

NB: this was going to be six nights in Delhi, but I had an unexpected cancellation and so I spent my weekend gloriously watching Project Runway and Strike and since I was watching Strike anyway, I decided to reread the last of the Comoran Strike books which I have no recollection of, having read it in a tearing hurry when it first came out. There's a new one out soon! I'd read JK Rowling's grocery lists to be honest.

Anyway, by some trick of fate, I had plans for every single weeknight this past week. This hasn't happened to me in a while--old age, darlings, old age, your friends' changing priorities, your OWN changing priorities, life, work, it'll happen to you too, unless you're one of those labrador retriever extroverts who cannot handle a night in, in which case, my advice to you is make younger friends. I thought I'd document this, a very social week in my life just so we can examine it a little closer.

Monday

"Who wants to meet a millionaire?" I said, giddy with my own wit, but K wasn't having it. He looked at me deadpan, he enjoys doing that and said, "EVERYONE is a millionaire, they're very common, what you mean is a billionaire." Well, who wants to meet a billionaire is not as fun and alliterative, I guess I could have said, "Who wants to bang a billionaire?" but most of them aren't that good looking. Much like Scarlett O'Hara, people seldom notice this about billionaires because they are taken in by their charms. In this case charm = money. Money gives you polish, an air of confidence, even if you're sweaty and your clothes aren't that great, you could buy better clothes, but like Steve Jobs, you like to stick to what you know.

The particular billionaire we were going to "meet" was a cryptocurrency blockchain abracadabra morewordshere guy who was coming to India to launch his company. I wouldn't have thought this was the kind of event I would be invited to, what do I know about wingardium leviosa? But the person throwing the party was a friend, and he said, "Come! There'll be drinks and stand-up comedy" and I am always curious about the rich and famous.

So the billionaire stood up and said things about his company, which sounded very interesting but also like they were in Latin, especially after three glasses of wine, and we settled in to watch Abish Mathew's set. He's "the other guy" from AIB, by the way. Like, you'd say, "that guy, that guy, that guy, oh and that other guy." If I'm not very much mistaken, he often plays the straight man to his friend's punchline, like not a literally STRAIGHT MAN although that too, but the person who asks, "And then what happened?" to make a joke go forward. Anyway, maybe I just don't get stand up but I have found very few people very funny. And in this post-Nanette world (PLEASE WATCH IT ON NETFLIX) it's a little dated to say, "The only privilege men have is to be able to go to the bathroom whenever they like." OH MY GOD MAN IT IS 2018 IT IS TIME TO RETIRE THAT BATHROOM JOKE.

We were at the Taj Mansingh, which is a grubbier and yet posher Taj than the others. It has not changed its decor since the 1980s I don't think. The last time I was at that particular rooftop was when you could still smoke everywhere, and Vikram Seth was launching one of his books, and there were LITERAL OYSTERS coming around on trays. OYSTERS. At a book launch! I had three, my first time eating an oyster too. (These were also the glory days of excess where a fashion designer's new store greeted me with about a KILO of caviar on ice which no one was touching because "fish eggs ew." I ate as much as I could spin out of that story.) Now however, we had to trudge down to Rick's, favourite haunt of Rahul Gandhi, which has a smoking room attached, I assume for the use of this sort of guest, but which I smoked in merrily.

 

Tuesday

 

 

 

Samit and I have been friends for so long, I don't even very clearly remember a time before we were friends. Okay, I sort of do, because when I first met him, I was 23, a young reporter with a chip on my shoulder about writing my book, time was passing and there I was with NO BOOK, and he was 25, a young writer whose first book had just come out to great fanfare. I was so spittingly jealous, I might have asked him questions which all had an ulterior motive, along the lines of: SOOOO HOW DID YOU DOOOO IT? Hmm? HMMM? Anyway, much water and many books have gone under that bridge since then, and now he is a support system and a co-moaner about this ridiculous writer's life we both seem to have chosen with no regards for the practicalities of it all.

He had a party, and I was lounging about on his sofa, drinking the sangria, talking about all those things you talk about at parties, everyone there was a good friend, so I let my thoughts stack up like a little pile of coins on the table. We got to talking about what it would be like to meet our younger selves at a party such as this one. My own twentysomething self would have rejected any words of wisdom I had to offer her with a pert "that will never happen to me!" and as Samit said we'd both have loud words, not like each other much and then go home and think about it for the next year or whatever. Ahhh but I'd like to think I'd like myself at 26, still so shiny eyed and optimistic, just as I think my 46 year old self would like me now and my 86 year old self would like all the other mes. No, actually, my 86-year-old self will be DONE with everyone's bullshit and will probably tell everyone to fuck off. (I aim to be an old lady in this regard very soon.)
 

Wednesday 

 

Summer House still endures as one of the trendiest places in Delhi. Partly, I think it's habit. We love to go to a place over and over again, till we know our exact order and the waitstaff and the table we prefer. But mostly, it's because it fits into that perfect triangle: location (Aurobindo Market is close enough to HKV to be cool but far enough away that it's not actually HKV which all the trendies have ceded to the rest of the city who wander around the village sadly looking for trendy people), pricing (not the worst + some sort of shitty happy hour + who cares, we're on daddy's credit card people come here the most anyway) and music (OUNCE OUNCE OUNCY-OUNCE OUNCE OUNCE OUNCE).

But the service is shitty, the food isn't that good, and really, you're just paying for the privilege of being in one of Delhi's more cool places. I liked to think as I watched all the waiters ignore us, even as they spotted us wave and cry, that this star too would fall. It's been more than two years though, and Summer House is going nowhere. AND, irony of ironies, when my out-of-town friend said, "Please suggest somewhere nice we can meet for drinks" it jumped into my mind precisely because of that triangle.

Thursday

 Standing and smoking outside PDA (Diva's new cocktail bar, which is on Zomato Gold, which I have been using practically EVERYWHERE #notanad) this group of Particularly Delhi Girls walked up. Now, my friend Shrayana, who I was out with that evening, and I are both Delhi girls as well, but long years of apologising or trying to make up for our city has made us a little more--shall we say--circumspect in public. Neither of us would walk into the bar talking at the top of our voices. It's not us, it says "LOOK AT ME YE MIGHTY AND DESPAIR." Now this lot, had no problem with us listening to every word they said, in fact, I think they relished it, like a stage show they were putting on. I know it, because for a brief time in college, I tried to be that sort of Top of My Voice As I Enter A Restaurant Person. Look at how much fun we're having, my conversation would say, and when other patrons turned to look at us, I thought it was envy in their eyes. (Now I know having been on the other side, that it's just plain old loathing. Do shut up.) "Get me nicotine patches," yelled Girl One to Girl Two who was standing right next to her, and Girl Two yelled back, "What happened to your vape?" and Girl One declares, "My Juul BROKE, ya!" And at this point, I exchanged looks with Shrayana, feeling about a hundred years old, and needed my martini desperately. (Note: PDA has such good drinks, we should all go.)

There has to be a word for this collective of Delhi girls, who say "bro" like they mean it, and who talk a certain way, like Valley Girls or the Sloanes, but Delhi-ish you know? Can any of you think of a name for their collective?

Friday

You know when you're with good friends and you finally manage to spit out what's been bothering you about something, and you finally articulate it in this golden sentence, and suddenly your brain clicks into place like you've had a really good massage and that night you dream about that problem so when you wake up in the morning and think about it, it's no longer aching? That was Friday night (and happy birthday to Niyati who hosted and listened!)

This week in stuff I wrote

Remember all the Deep Dark Hints I've been tossing around about You Are Here? WELL, the mystery is over because it is the TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY this year, and Penguin is rejacketing it and isn't it beautiful? It'll be out in August, and this version has a foreword by me, so please buy it for everyone and yourself. No events, but if you're in Delhi, let me know and I'll sign it for you at our mutual convenience.

 

In my book recommendation column this month on Mughal women and prize winning novels. (Plus I think the best book I've read all year.)

And in my Mythology for the Millennial column, are sages ancient India's Harvey Weinsteins?

Newsletter: Staycation Edition

(This is last week's edition. This week's JUST went out to subscribers. Want to stay current? Sign up here.)

I made this joke on my Instagram story and v pleased with it

For the last two months, I was burning the candle at both ends. As an idiom, it makes so much sense to me right now: imagining my life as wax drippy, long wicks, placed horizontally, and there I was lighting the end that said "work" and when that bit burnt down, lighting the other side which said "social" and letting all my rest, my everything else, be reduced to just wax drippings on the floor.

But this past week, I have felt like doing nothing except sit indoors, and think and read, and watch movies, my great movie watching plan is going very well, and I have done that as well. So, I don't have that much to report, except that I'm enjoying my staycation. I sleep about ten hours every night, and wake up refreshed. It's nice, no I'm not bored, or getting cabin fever just yet. I think I needed this.

My week watching movies: K just discovered an app for my desktop (rhymes with Schmopcorn Mime). I had tried this same app ages ago on my best beloved long lamented Macbook (RIP) (stupid cats), but it didn't work on it, so I gave it up, but turns out, it's rather excellent on Windows. K also--and I must give him all credit here, because I moaned and cried about all the door handles he was removing, more on that in a moment--fixed up the perfect movie watching AREA in his study, which is the only room in the house which you can successfully darken even in the middle of the afternoon, and as a result, it is the best television room I have ever had in my entire life.

So basically, we have a projector--it's a pretty cheap one, but it works--and he set it up so that it projects against the white wall to wall cupboards he has in that room. In order to do that, he had to move the handles so that they wouldn't be in the way, so now the handles are a little lower, but it means that I can lie on the sofa, fully stretched out, as is my preferred position, and watch movies while he works at his desk (and occasionally chimes in with some commentary.) Thanks to the app I just mentioned, things have gotten really easy to watch and bookmark, so I'm regularly watching two movies a day. The funny thing about watching films as opposed to TV, you never feel that brain numbing OMG HOW MUCH HAVE I WATCHED feeling at the end of it. Instead, you feel slightly... triumphant even. Dare I say watching a good movie is like reading a good book? How my attitude has changed from last week when I was all like, "Ugh movies will never be as good as reading."

This is what I watched this week (a mix of what's available and what's on You Know Where). I realised that I sort of followed a theme, even if I wasn't aware of it at the moment.

The Little Mermaid day:

Wonder Woman: nice but FULL of anachronisms, at one point, the Scottish guy goes, "guys." Now, "guys" as a way of saying "everyone" wasn't a popular manner of speech till much later, and would not have been in England during WWI at any rate. I feel like if you're going to spend so much money on a movie with sets and costumes and what not, why not get an accurate historian to go through dialogue while you're at it?

Moana: Which was faaaaaar better than Frozen, I don't know why people like that movie so much. Still Disney, so a little animal sidekick, and lots of songs, but I loved Maui, the demigod who helps Moana because he was such a very realistic douchebag. Nice to see.

The why am I different day:

Wonder: the book, oh my god, the book. I loved it so much. I was fully prepared to be manipulated into tearjerker-y heartwarmingness of the film, and STILL my tears were jerked, my heart was warmed. Very sweet movie, I thought, and THENNN *ominous music* I read this article about how whitewashed the disability was. Sigh.

Get Out: was actually dark dark DARK comedy, and no spoilers, promise, but the end was quite something. I think I love oh look how pretty suburbia is but WAIT there is a SECRET lurking behind the gorgeous woods.

The let's save the day day:

Paddington 2: OKAY, but, a) Michael Bond is the same author who wrote Olga da Polga, who I named our CAT after, so you see, I love him and b) Paddington is one of my favourite bears--Winnie is a bit twee, Rupert is too good to be true, I did a whole article on bears and Michael Bond when he died, here's a link.  Paddington 2 is delightful, but not as delightful as the books. There, that's that.

The Incredibles: a rewatch, but SUCH an underrated Pixar classic. Part two is coming out soon, so I had a sudden URGE to watch the original.

The teen movie day:
The Edge of Seventeen was a REVELATION. Really good in that teen movie way I haven't seen happen since the early noughties. Very real angst as well, and though you feel like shaking some sense into the main character, you're also nodding along like yup, yup, I would have reacted in exactly the same way at that age, because sometimes you forget you weren't born extremely evolved and enlightened.

This week in stuff I wrote: My book recommendation column got lots of views last weekend mainly because of the first book, almost fan fiction about a certain dimple faced popular writer in India and the publishing industry.

Excerpt: Besides people-spotting behind the pseudonyms, there’s also fun to be had by finding real-life names (Hi, Nilanjana Roy and Janice Pariat!) as well as a whole description of partying at the Udaipur Literature Festival.

And this week in stuff other people wrote which I liked:

A ghostwriter might be talking to you on Tinder

Excerpt: “There’s no question about it,” reads one chapter, “women want to date the alpha male. They are naturally drawn to the ‘leader of the pack.’” Valdez elaborates later in the manual: “The alpha male is the selector, he chooses… he is not chosen.” But how do you present yourself as an Alpha? “Never compliment her without a qualification,” he writes. “Let her know what you want in a woman and make her explain why she fits those criteria.”

Since I'm watching some superhero movies, this one about the Avengers in general and the idea of an American hero in particular was interesting.

Excerpt: Yet even as the films restore a sense of heroism to a war that has become bureaucratic, they also betray profound anxiety about that war. This emerges through a peculiar feature of the Marvel movies. The heroes confront threats of all sorts, but time and again, they fight their doppelgängers. Iron Man takes on other scientists in metal suits. Ant-Man’s enemy is Yellowjacket, who is, like him, a shrinking technological insectoid. Captain America battles serum-enhanced supersoldiers (“What kind of monster would let a German scientist experiment on him to protect his country?” he asks, winking). Often, the heroes simply face their relatives, as when Black Panther fights his cousin, Thor fights his siblings, or Peter Quill, the leader of the Guardians of the Galaxy, fights his father (while another Guardian, Gamora, fights her sister). The Hulk’s antagonist is the Abomination, a similarly sized creature made with the Hulk’s own blood. And SHIELD, the shadowy governmental organization that runs the Avengers, must face HYDRA, another shadowy governmental organization that has infiltrated it.

Hey did you know Aatish Taseer once dated a royal? Did you? Did you?

Excerpt: My own enduring memory of the Windsors was of constant cutbacks and reduced circumstances. To fly with royalty was to fly EasyJet. On the flight back from Sardinia, a velvet rope cordoned off the first row alone, behind which Their Royal Highnesses—Prince and Princess Michael—sat with Ella and me. A moment of silence ensued, then there was a dull roar on the Jetway, and a planeload of lobster-red British tourists poured onto the flight, muttering, “Wot’s this, wot’s this?,” as they rushed past the grandson of George V, Emperor of India.

Cape Town is fucked. But there's the very merest glimmer of hope because society.

 

Excerpt: Wealthy South Africans, traditionally, have had fastidious cleanliness standards, a way of distinguishing themselves and of tapping the vast labor reserve of cheap maids. Now, being able to show a visitor day-old urine ripening in your toilet bowl, proving you do not flush, is a proud moment. Body odor is less taboo. Many women have radically adjusted their haircare routines: embracing natural curls to diminish the need to wash and style, shampooing only once a week or, as one woman told me in a discussion on a community-run drought Facebook page, “experimenting with spraying my hair lightly” with a plant mister. Others chopped hip-length hair off into bobs or Sinéad O’Connor shaves. A queer friend of mine complained she didn’t know who to hit on because “there are queer haircuts everywhere.”

How to have a conversation with a grieving friend (or a friend in trouble, even.)

Excerpt:  Sociologist Charles Derber describes this tendency to insert oneself into a conversation as “conversational narcissism.” It’s the desire to take over a conversation, to do most of the talking and to turn the focus of the exchange to yourself.

A conversation with the woman who was raped by Mahmood Farooqi

 

Excerpt: The decision to press charges against a person is never a onetime event. For me, it was a decision that I had to make repeatedly day after day as pressure to drop the charges surrounded me – some of it even coming from well-meaning people attempting to protect me from further pain. It was a decision that I questioned daily because I was never quite sure if I would have the strength to survive the process. Reliving your trauma time and again to strangers, a necessary requirement of partaking in the judicial system, is – in a way – beyond explanation. It is hard and it is heartbreaking. But in the way of which it breaks you apart, the act of being heard, of having a voice also made me grateful. It allowed me to have hope that I could put myself back together again. It reminded me that I am still alive and able to fight for myself. Of course, I hadn’t anticipated being socially ostracised by groups of people I had considered friends, both in India and America, that was perhaps the most difficult.

Newsletter: Wake me up when April ends (hey!)

Subscriber list is growing, guys! Sign up and get this newsletter on the day it goes out. 

This week in accomplishments: This newsletter is coming to you one day later, because I finished writing my book--okay, I finished writing the first draft, anyway. I read this author interview somewhere, where the author was like, "There aren't that many rewards in the writing life--it's often lonely and isolating and thankless--so you need to take your joys where you find them, so take a moment to celebrate when you finish writing a manuscript." I have taken a moment. There's this one glorious golden bit, where your book only belongs to you, not to readers, not to editors, not to the whims of the publicity department, just to you, and it's yours, for whatever it is. And that is the moment I took, just to pat myself on the back and think, "Okay! Look at you! You did this!" I haven't done this for previous books, so I never remember the very day that they were done and how I felt (good, I assume) before self-doubt started creeping in so with The One Who Had Two Lives, I'm marking it.


After this weekend (when I am taking a nice break from anything work related), I will read the manuscript again, make some edits and send it off to the publishers, and then will begin the long back-and-forth editing process, until the book is ready to see the world in its final form. I don't much enjoy edits, but they are extremely necessary--both your own, and the outside eye--to make a book into something other people will enjoy reading, which is why we're doing this, right?

This week in leisure: I was having a conversation with K the other day, and I realised I could not call to mind any favourite movies. Isn't that strange? It's been a regret of mine for some time that I'm just not into films, they don't interest me like books, they don't move me like music, they don't hold my attention like TV shows. But then, films are more accessible now than they ever have been, so many choices, so many streaming services, and it's sort of weird to be a creative, thinking person with such a gap in my cultural knowledge. So I decided that I would watch movies when I normally would turn on some show or the other to binge watch, and I made a list after going through all the streaming services I subscribe to (Netflix, Hotstar and Prime) as well as a few more that I acquired elsewhere. It goes (just legal streaming):

Netflix:

Still Alice (86% Rotten Tomatoes. Loved the book.)
Steel Magnolias (69% Rotten Tomatoes, women bonding in a small town salon PLUS Julia Roberts.)
Breakfast At Tiffany's (88% RT, can you believe I haven't watched this yet?)
To Kill A Mockingbird (91% RT, ditto)
Sense And Sensibility (98% RT, watched this last night, see thoughts below)
The Meyerowitz Stories (92% RT, Netflix Original that I am curious about.)

Amazon Prime:

The Edge of Seventeen (95% RT, new young coming-of-age movie)
20th Century Women (88% RT, not quite sure about this, but the premise looks fun.)
Wonder Woman (92% RT, because everyone went on and on about this one so much.)

Hotstar:

Deadpool (83% RT, because I like snarky smart superhero movies, not the ones that are super earnie)
Moana (96% RT, I will watch a Disney movie over another movie any day.)
Hidden Figures (93% um, hello, the first black women to work at NASA? How could I NOT?)

Other movies that are not streaming anywhere but I am still looking out for:

Election (93% RT, on a recommendation by Mansha, watched yesterday, see thoughts below.)
Pan's Labyrinth (95% RT, seems to suit my Mahabharata frame of mind.)
Remains of the Day (97% RT, very much enjoyed the book.)
Blade Runner (90% RT, because I am feeling open minded about cinema in general.)
The Post (87% RT, STREEP AND HANKS IN A NEWSPAPER STORY)
I, Tonya (90%, because of a vague interest I have in Olympic figure skating.)

LOVED Election--so funny, so sharp, so based on a book by an author I love (Tom Perrotta!) I think if I had watched it a decade ago, I would have disliked Reese Witherspoon's character a lot more, and sympathised with Matthew Broderick a lot more as well, but in this age of #MeToo, even the nuances of this comedy stick with you. I'm not saying any more because spoilers, but yes, very good.

Sense And Sensibility is, would you believe, an Austen I haven't read (that and Persuasion) and the movie was so good I immediately went to Gutenberg and got my free Kindle file to read. Excellent. I was enthralled till the end. Critics online call it the best Austen adaptation ever made.

Anyway, that is my list. Please send recommendations if you have any. I do not like violence, too much bloodshed and gun or drug stories, plus movies that spend a lot of time in dark, not well lit rooms. I like twisty personalities, sharp dialogue, and movies that make you pause them and go, "WAIT A MINUTE...."

This week in all play and no work: I am actively looking for freelance work, by the way, if you are or know someone looking. I can turn my hand to most kinds of writing and editing. Erm, I feel like I should have one more line here so: yes! I am good! Hire me!

This week in stuff I wrote: Vice India has just launched and I did a fun piece on the most interesting girls of the Mahabharata and their place in the modern day world.

Excerpt: But even if you take Hidimbi at face value: she’s a cannibal sent to lure the five brothers back to her brother, Hidimba, for his evening meal, but can’t go through with it because she falls so madly in love with one of them. Raised as a rakshasi in a forest, perhaps only knowing her brother (I haven’t read about a whole tribe of them being there), there’s a certain Flowers In The Attic appeal to Hidimbi’s story. Two siblings, outcasts from “civilisation”, existing in their own little world. I imagine Hidimba would have been a loving, kind brother, but I also imagine he would have wanted to preserve their world because it was the only one he knew.

This week in where I'm spending my money: I had heard of Bookchor before but only in an abstract sense, and then I read about them in an article last week, so I checked out the website, and it was pretty cool. Second hand books, good prices, pretty good selection, I ordered a bunch of books, and was so pleased, I will be using them again, even though my shelves are now literally groaning. Not very responsive on social media or to email though, so you'll just have to wait for your order to arrive and not, like, ask any questions.

Also, I went out for lunch with my mum yesterday and we got me an I-Finished-My-Book treat, which was a nice new pair of blue jeans from Levi's. Haven't been to Levi's in SO LONG, turns out they only have two styles for women these days: straight and skinny. I bought straight fit, which are actually a little skinny? But I only have one pair of comfortable jeans and those are jeggings, the others are all too small, too tight, too thick, too something. If you travel, you need jeans. It's just the way of the world. Don't ask me, I didn't make the rules.
 

Friday link list!

Two con stories for you this week:

1) The woman who pretended to be a fancy New York socialite and took all the reporter's money (tsk):

Excerpt: The vacation was Anna’s idea. She again needed to leave the States in order to reset her ESTA visa, she said. Instead of returning home to Germany, she suggested we take a trip somewhere warm. It had been a long time since my last vacation. I happily agreed that we should explore options, thinking we’d find off-season fares to the Dominican Republic or Turks and Caicos. Anna suggested Marrakech; she’d always wanted to go. She picked La Mamounia, a five-star luxury resort ranked among the best in the world, and knowing that her selection was cost-prohibitive for my budget, she nonchalantly offered to cover my flights, the hotel, and expenses. She reserved a $7,000/night private riad, a traditional Moroccan villa with an interior courtyard, three bedrooms, and a pool, and forwarded me the confirmation e-mail. Due to a seemingly minor snafu, I’d put the plane tickets on my American Express card, with Anna promising to reimburse me promptly. Since I did this all the time for work, I didn’t give it a second thought.

2) The man who pretended he wanted to marry a lot of women in India and took their money (tsk TSK):

Excerpt: His strategy with the women was similar: He posed as an IRS officer who worked undercover. This helped him explain away tricky situations like why an office wouldn’t acknowledge his employment, why he needed to keep his identity secret, why he carried an identity card in another name, or why he couldn’t make money transfers from his bank account.

 

Tell me again why you killed all your girl babies? THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS

Excerpt: India, a country that has a deeply held preference for sons and male heirs, has an excess of 37 million males, according to its most recent census. The number of newborn female babies compared with males has continued to plummet, even as the country grows more developed and prosperous. The imbalance creates a surplus of bachelors and exacerbates human trafficking, both for brides and, possibly, prostitution. Officials attribute this to the advent of sex-selective technology in the last 30 years, which is now banned but still in widespread practice.

 

How does my voice assistant know what I'm saying?

Excerpt:  Voice recognition and responding to voice commands are really hard problems computationally. And we’ve made amazing strides forward but there’s still a fair way to go. Accents, for example, are still really hard for these kinds of systems, and complex commands are really hard for these systems.

Don't be this guy.

Excerpt: That’s probably all that needs to be said, but in case you’re reading this out loud at a bar or restaurant and your companions missed it because it’s so loud in there, here it is again: IT ONLY TAKES ONE PERSON TO RAISE THE VOLUME IN A RESTAURANT.

Newsletter: My endless wordcount days

Grooving to that Saturday beat

This week in domesticated companion animals: Bruno has taken to yowling outside the bedroom door (which all three cats are on the other side of because they like to party all night and we do not). He times these yowls just when I'm in the middle of a dream, so I haven't even finished my full REM circle, and when I wake up mid-dream I wind up just dozing for the rest of the night, until I am properly awake. Plus I have to pee. And when I get up to go to the loo, I may as well stay up because there's no way I'm getting back to sleep.

All that to explain why at 7.30 this morning, I lay in bed watching the early morning light at the edges of our blinds. Stupid cat.

When I wake up in the morning, I pad along into the living room and pull up the blinds there--I don't know how many more days THAT'S going to last, friends, we had the fan on all night for the first time yesterday, and I'm craving gin and tonics instead of red wine, my usual summer switch. Anyway, next door has a pet rooster called Lodhi, I feel like I've told you about him already, but recently they have added a puppy to their household. (I suspect this puppy is part of a litter we've been seeing on the road recently, very cute things in that fluffy confident way all puppies are, except with a certain insouciance of expression that only Indian street dogs have. One puppy had his paw run over, poor little thing, but seems to have either made a full recovery or vanished and this is another black puppy I've been admiring all the while.) Anyway, in a totally non-creepy way, I see next door's young daughter with her pets on the terrace when I open the blinds. Some days she just cradles the rooster and walks him around while the puppy follows at her feet, but usually it's just her sitting on the stairs with her mobile and the puppy curled up and asleep just under her legs. Today I saw someone else on the terrace, but the puppy was in his usual spot anyway. I'm still not even circling the idea of having children, but I do want a dog one day again. But only when we stop travelling and can stay still for a moment.

This week in the movies: It's the Oscars today, and while I've long given up the pretense that movies even have a fighting chance in my entertainment schedule  (books, TV, meeting people with the last two often sacrificed for travel) we did go to watch Black Panther on Holi, after all the festivities had died down and the roads were as empty as a hill station after a long weekend. The movie was great, not least because of the 3D glasses and the big bucket of popcorn, and all the other people instead of just being in our house. I could have lived without the girl next to me who was one of those people who insist on reading aloud stuff that isn't said by the characters. You know the type, the two characters are in front of a store and she's saying the name of the store out loud, the dialogue hasn't caught up with the subtitles so she repeats the last word and laughs. SO ANNOYING.

Anyway, a lot of people will be recommending Black Panther at you, so you shouldn't just take my word for it. It is a superhero movie, but also an utopian one, which I realise I haven't actually seen before, my world being peopled mostly by DYStopia.

This week in the writing life: I am working very hard and should be done with the first draft of The One Who Had Two Lives (the story of Amba and Shikhandini) by April if all goes well, and even taking into account the two days I will be travelling (going to Cochin tomorrow for the Krithi Lit Fest, but because I'm so ensconced in the book right now, for the first time ever I am not extending my trip longer than the one day I have a session so I should be able to get work done both before and after.)

Speaking of lit fests, here are my thoughts on the Gateway lit fest in Mumbai where I was last week.

And my book recommendation column is up for this month which also includes a meditation on bookstores in general.


This week in favours: This newsletter is only 15 (!!!) subscribers away from 400. It would be wonderful if you forwarded people this email or sent them a link to this sign up page. I like round numbers.  THANK YOU.

The mostly-bookish Monday link list!
 

(A reader wrote to me last week asking if I could change the formatting of the link list so that the excerpts came AFTER the link. It made sense, so I'm trying it. Let me know how you feel about it, if you have strong feelings at all, that is.)

* While we're talking about Black Panther, let's also gaze in wonderment at everyone's new boyfriend Michael with-a-B Jordan*

Excerpt: It goes without saying that Michael B. Jordan is hot. And he’s jacked. And he has a super-cute smile, I suppose, as well as maybe the cutest nose in the world. But there’s something more than all of that going on. What’s the science behind his rebranding as the shiny internet-at-large’s newest boyfriend? What has made this conventionally hot, anime-loving, lives-with-his-parents-in-New-Jersey movie star truly ascend into the pantheon of thirst?

Dammit Jojo Moyes, is there anything you write that won't make people cry? This story of her rescue mountain dog is not the exception.
 

Excerpt: It’s not without its challenges. The carpet shampooer is in frequent use — her weak bladder means she needs walking every three hours. She disapproves fiercely of cyclists, scooters, and, once (to our utter mortification), a motorized wheelchair. She fosters irrational dislikes and has to be shut away to stop her “herding” of the odd guest. She has nearly dislocated my shoulder and requires regular specialist grooming and glucosamine for her joints, and if she sits on your lap, you have twenty minutes before your legs go numb and start falling off.
 

This was a great reading week for me. I finished two books I'm recommending to everyone: Dreamers by Snigdha Poonam and Lullaby by Leila Slimani, a French writer who got so popular, they're asking her to go into government.

Excerpt: There is not a lot of great contemporary literature about motherhood. It is as bad as sex. We have myths, we have Bible stories, we have fairy tales, we have Peppa Pig, but it is not often that you open a novel and encounter people buying socks, picking glitter out of floorboards, putting away toys in plastic bins. Like Jenny Offill, Slimani can write ravishingly of female bodies, even postpartum ones (“her belly of folds and waves, where they built their house, where so many worries and joys flowered”), but “Chanson Douce” is not so much about motherhood as it is about what the cultural theorist Angela McRobbie has called the “neoliberal intensification of mothering.” An activity, not a state, mothering—along with its gender-neutral version, parenting—is competitive and outsourceable. Slimani tries to put a price on the anxieties, hypocrisies, and inequalities that arise from the commodification of our most intimate relationships.

 

I am Diane from Anne of Green Gables and I am fucking drunk (because there will never be an Anne thing I do not link to.)

Excerpt: Whoaaaaaaaaaaaaa! You gotta do it, go real low then stand up. Try it! Seriously! Oh my god, it’s like… WHOA, you know? Ugh, where is all the DICK! I’m so horny I’d fuck Fred — what’s his name? The pink-faced one? He’s like, ugly hot, you know? Like, you hate yourself but that’s part of it. Omigod, shut up Anne you’re gonna marry Gilbert Fuckin’ Blythe but the rest of us gotta eat, too. Is Ruby Gillis’s brother around? Still? Because I would. You know I would.

In which Supriya goes for a book swap blind date and hilarity and insights ensue.

Excerpt: I was bewitched, although I could not have felt flirty or romantic about the whole exchange any less had they been my own children. In any case, the atmosphere was not one of flirtation. The “dating” in this speed dating event was a gentle irony. Singles in the greater Bandra area are so self-conscious and narcissistic that, like the Zumba instructor I once had, we’re all at our best blowing kisses to ourselves in the mirror.

Movie rights are not always amazing, just ask these twenty authors who hated the film adaptations of their books. At least this is what I tell myself to feel better.

 

Excerpt: I went to the theater bought my ticket and popcorn, and found a seat. Then onto the screen came an insane fisherman carrying an ice hook. He wasn’t in my book. I thought, You know, this is a big complex; maybe I’ve walked into the wrong theater. So I was preparing to leave and then, no, up from below rolled the words “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” and I thought, That is my book, but who is that man and what is he going to do with that ice hook? Well, I soon found out. He was going to decapitate my characters. Their heads were flying off, and their blood was spurting, and everybody was screaming, and I was screaming. I was so horrified I couldn’t even open my popcorn.
 

I closed open DMs on my Twitter because all I got was young men saying "Hi." It's a global epidemic. 

Excerpt: t’s unclear who coined the term, or for that matter, how it’s actually spelled. Some go with numerous As (e.g., “fraaaandship”), while others disregard the D entirely (e.g., “fraanship”). Either way, fraandships refer to the kind of guys who randomly add people living in the West on Facebook with an accompanying message begging you to accept their request. They slide into your DMs on Twitter or add you to a giant group chat (usually featuring celebrities, brands and/or other verified people). They send adoring emails to your work account and tag you in all of their posts, regardless of their content.

This family was so tired of paying rent AND EMIs they moved into their Noida housing society and now they're the only ones there.

Excerpt: The towers are serviced by three lifts. At tower D, where Charu stays, all the three lifts are functional. She has organised a cab for her kids for their commute to school and back. The only activity one hears at the Sports Wood is the noise from other flats where construction is still on — finishing work on floors, windows and doors is still in progress in many apartments.

Newsletter: Year end recap edition

December 31st, and tomorrow is both a Monday and the beginning of a new year. It seems a bit silly to set so much store by a calendar date, but I'm sort of swept up in the global excitement. It seems like a new year is like a blank page in a brand new notebook: anything could happen. Anything could also happen on the first of September for example, but you know what I mean. It's also the day when you look back on the year that passed and do a report card for yourself. Ends of years are useful for taking stock, especially on a cold morning like this one, when the sun is weakly pushing through the fog, and your hot water bottle is warm against your belly.

I had a pretty good year. Some self-doubt crept in re: my writing, but I hope to conquer the little critical voices in my head and move on in 2018. After all, as a writer of fiction, you should exist only to please yourself and not the sales figures or literary festivals or what have you. Maybe there will always be self doubt, because there's always someone you compare yourself to, and we all, ultimately, want to be JK Rowling or Neil Gaiman, or failing that, Margaret Atwood. I'm grateful to my readers though, and everyone who has sent me a message or an email saying that they liked my books and what I do, it's very heartening, especially when you think you're going it alone. A few things will be recalibrated for me in 2018, but they are all baby, nascent ideas, and I'll tell you all about them when they are actually in practice. I will be finishing the next book of my Girls Of The Mahabharata series early next year and I have an essay out in a Penguin anthology which will be released in February, so I'm still writing, and writing makes me happy. (It's only post publishing that all the doubts start to creep in.)

Anyway, that's the bitterness of the pill, here's the sweet!

This year in life events: We got married! We were never very marriage-y people, but we came to the decision with the same certainity we've approached most things in our relationship: it's the right thing for us to do at this point. The boring reason: we wanted it to be easier to live and work in each other's countries. The romantic reason: love and all those other things. Our wedding was almost exactly how I wanted it to be (the only thing I would change was not being so tired after three days of partying--despite the fact that we had a "low key" wedding, we wound up having three parties anyway. Small intimate parties, but parties nonetheless.) Life has... not changed a bit. Most often, we forget we're married, except when we're using wedding presents around the house.


This year in bucket lists: I loved my month in Europe, even though now, five months later, it's taken on the dreamy quality in my memory of someone else's life. We went from Germany to Spain, from Spain to France, from France to Luxembourg, from Luxembourg to the Netherlands (via Belgium.) I got to see Europe by road, by train and by plane. I got to have expensive meals (at the beginning of my trip) and two euro steak and wine (at the end) and I loved all of it, even being broke, a little bit. Through my entire trip, I had this vague feeling of standing outside my body watching myself: pinch me, this is real, this is happening.

This year in writing: Many MANY freelance assignments. A few of my favourites: fancy book launches in Mint, how The Handmaid's Tale is relevant in modern India for Scroll, re-examining Marilla Cuthbert for Indian Express, on children's literature for Mint again, on reading the childhood memoirs of your favourite authors for Open, on why myth-lit is so popular for Deccan Chronicle. This plus several columns made my year one of heavy reading.

I also had a new book (The One Who Swam With The Fishes) out last summer, and read a lot more about the Mahabharata than I ever expected I would, and now I can rattle off back stories and sub-plots and literary analyses like a pro.

This year in little luxuries: My favourite money spend this year was hiring someone to do our garden for us. It was a bit expensive setting up, all the pots and soil and what not, but Ram Lal is a genius and I love that we barely ever buy veg anymore, since we have a steady crop of things to eat around the year. It has really changed the way I live my life, just the simple fact that we're growing FOOD. I now know the colours of the aubergine flower (purple, like the fruit), how pretty the lauki flower is in the hot sunshine, and how everything tastes so much better when you can just reach out and pluck it.

This year in habits: Getting K a compost bin for his birthday was changing the way we process trash in this house. We still put out a lot of paper and plastic (I blame Amazon and their easy next-day deliveries), but no wet waste at all, it all goes into our bin. He liked it so much, he bought a second one, and while I still find it somewhat icky, it doesn't smell, and the gardener uses it in our plants so it's all very circle of life.

This year in life lessons: A project that seemed super definite and like it was going to be a Thing, did not, finally wind up happening the way I expected it to, so I have learned to, um, curb my enthusiasm, so to speak. This is the year my optimism started to fade, just a little bit, and become tempered with realism. I think I'll always be a rose tinted glasses kind of person, but every now and then you have to take your glasses off and really look at the world.

And that's my report card! Let me know how the year worked out for you in the comments at the bottom of this. Happy New Year, and I'll see you all on the other side.

Narnia and the Outsider

A version of this with the angle changed to reflect more on the food aspect was published in the Hindu books section. Read that here. 

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

I forget when Narnia fell out of fashion and it became a party piece to tell readers that the author, C.S Lewis, really meant it to be a Christian allegory. “Don't you see,” someone will say to me earnestly, when I tell them the books were my earliest experience with fantasy, “The lion was Christ! It was a Christian book!” Then they sit back, ready to be smug and delighted by those facts dawning on me. They're not the first ones to tell me, nor will they be the last, and Narnia-defenders, like myself (or should I call us apologists?) have this bowed, wary expression even as we admit all the things we loved about the books. What was not to love? Talking animals! Magical doorways! Fauns! Little children who became kings and queens! Learning that the worst thing you could be was a traitor! (Second worst: coward.)

There is an argument to be made about not re-reading your old favourite books as an adult. Your rational mind isn't supposed to stop and examine a problematic bit of prose, you're supposed to skim right along, breathless and caught up in the adventure like the heroes you're reading about.

The first time I read about Turkish Delight was in The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, the very first of the Narnia books, which, if you're not familiar is about four English children who stumble through a wardrobe into a magic land and overthrow the evil queen who has been ruling there for many years. Before they can overthrow her, one of the children—Edmund—is lured into her power by the magic Turkish Delight she feeds him. This makes him silly and vulnerable—not unlike being roofied—and soon, he is her spy.

“She comes of your father Adam's first wife, her they called Lilith. And she was one of the Jinn.” The words used to describe the White Witch by the friendly Beaver, who is helping the children. Lilith, from the Bible, was, actually created the same time as Adam, but out of the same dirt as him—unlike Eve, who was created from his rib. In an excerpt from The Hebrew Myths by Robert Graves, Lilith was banished because she did not want to “lie beneath Adam” since she was created out of the same dirt he was, and didn't see why she had to obey him. She left him eventually, and became a demon or in charge of the demons, and was basically the first example of a woman who chose to do what she wanted. Jinns on the other hand, are supernatural creatures of Arabic and Muslim mythology, and it's mostly to this that the Narnia books take exception. While the Beavers and the children eat fish and potatoes, Edmund has already been corrupted by the Turkish Delight, he betrays his whole family for it, and is betrayed in turn. (In later books, the dark-skinned Calormen have many gods and are slightly ridiculous, and the hero turns out to be a royal Northern, beautiful and fair and ruled by Aslan, the Christ-lion figure).

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

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

I didn't like Turkish Delight the first time I ate it. I had conjured up something soft and sweet, a little like a marshmallow, but more exquisite, and the reality was a rubbery gel like thing, made of starch and sugar, flavoured with rosewater. Not quite something I'd betray one person for, let alone a whole country, but then, mine wasn't flavoured with magic.

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. 

Newsletter: Finished another book and other tales from a writer's life

(Again, putting up old newsletters here. This one's from October 15, but if you want up-to-date stuff, subscribe! If you'd like to see whatever else I've published on the blog, look for the "newsletter" tag under this post.)

The biggest "Winter Is Coming" this week is that we have finally turned off all our ACs. Even at night, maybe especially at night. With the window open and the fan on full, we even need the duvet we normally use with the air con. I love this time of the year in Delhi, except for the smog and pollution and pre-Diwali, post-Dusshera smoke. But if you stay in a lot, you're good. Like we are. K has been insisting on us using the metro more, and so we've done some long commutes and some short ones underground. The problem with the metro is that to get to one, you need to sit in an auto, which means exposure to the elements, but once you're on, you have the smugness that comes with taking public transport. Which reminds me of our Puzzle of the Week: You have to get off at Metro Station D and you're getting on at Metro Station A. Do you say you have three stops to your destination or two? I say two, K says three, and we've been having long and loud arguments about this with no common consensus. (Comment with your thoughts!) (Tomorrow is also our five year anniversary, which means we've been arguing about things like this for five years! Yay us!)

Major News of The Week: I have finished the draft of my SIXTH book, which is the first part of a YA series I'm doing on the Mahabharata, a text that has always inspired me. (So much preferred to the Ramayana which is kinda... boring.) My editor called me with NO NOTES, reminding me of a recent New Girl episode where one of the characters tells the other he has no notes for his new novel, leaving the writer in despair, because he has no idea how to continue. Unlike him, I am very pleased with my lack of notes, because I'm doing another big (non-book-related) project, which is also full steam ahead like these things often are.

A deer there was, a deer, a deer: I became very into Nature with a capital N while I was in Goa, and by "into" I mean, I gazed at things and wished I knew more about them. Well, this week, running a random errand, K was like, "Um, what animal is that?" and I looked up across the crowded road and saw... a young nilgai, just chilling on the divider, eating dusty leaves, completely oblivious to the world around him (and all the cars stopping to take photos.) I called Wildlife SOS as one does, who told me that if they tried to catch the deer he'd probably hurt himself and people around him, so to leave him alone and he'd go home eventually. "He keeps doing that," the man on the other end of the phone said wearily. It was like a lovely surprise from the universe. And in lesser wildlife, I took a Butterflies of India book from my mother to take back to Goa with me when we return in December, and have been having fun identifying common species on our terrace. Today, a common tit (hehe) and the other day, a common wanderer. Common, but beautiful. (I want to live like common butterflies, I want to do what common butterflies do.)

Song of the week: In celebration of the great Dylan winning the Nobel, here's a fantastic cover of It Ain't Me, Babe by Ke$ha. Yes, wake up in the morning feeling like P Diddy Ke$ha.

This week in stuff I wrote: As Aunty Feminist, on consent and who gets to decide the rules. ** In my relationship column talking about how important it is for couples to discuss finances. **

App of the week: The Merriam-Webster dictionary app. Was looking for a good phone dictionary and this one had the highest reviews, but also? It has super fun word games built in, which are super fun only if you're a word geek, but chances are if you're reading this, you fall into that category. Download here for iOS, here for Android.


Reading list: Blossom's, my favourite used books store, has just opened up a second location, which is great news in these e-commerce times. (That being said, if Blossom's went online with their catalogue, I would be SO HAPPY.) ** Why I'm voting for Trump: inside the average Trump supporter's mind. ** Facebook shut down a bunch of accounts belonging to Kashmiri youth. ** On the rap scene in India and classism. ** Not quite Black Mirror, a man spends 11 hours trying to get his WiFi kettle to boil. ** My favourite essay in a while, on writers, ambition, and the writing life. ** Shweta Bachchan Nanda is all, "Please leave my kid alone" and at first you're a bit eye-roll-y, but then you're like, "You have a point, Shweta." Good insights on being a famous kid and the mum of a famous kid.

eM's Quick Guide to Bhutan

(This was my newsletter the week I returned from the Mountain Echoes Festival in Thimpu, Bhutan. Subscribe here for regular updates in your inbox every weekend.)

Hello, friends, warriors, fellow earthlings,

Bright and sunny morning after days of waking up to grey skies and rain. Now that I no longer live in Bombay where it rains for days without taking a breath, I've come to appreciate rainy mornings, from the time you're lying under your duvet and looking at the light behind the blinds to see how bright it is, to drinking your coffee while you're watching the clouds move, or just the general ahhhh-how-cozy-I-am feel of being indoors and snug and dry while outside everything is being bathed just for you. 

Sorry if you have to commute through it though. Then there's nothing romantic about it at all.

You know where else it was raining? BHUTAN. Where I just returned from. Let me tell you all about it:

The festival: Mountain Echoes is in its sixth year now, and a pretty major part of Thimpu's social calendar. Of course, Thimpu is "the size of Khan Market" as one writer put it, but still. Bhutanese travelled from all over the country to attend. But it was quite small for all that, so really very intimate, which means most of the talks were pretty well attended. (Unlike other things I've done where there's like five people in the room including the organiser, who is giving you pitying glances.)

My own stuff: My panels were quite fun. I moderated Ira Trivedi and a Bhutanese writer called Monu Tamang in a talk about writing about love, and Monu, though he kept "ma'am"-ing me and being very shy, came out of his shell quite a bit to talk about "night hunting" which is apparently how some traditional Bhutanese men date. (At night. Hunting. But in a consensual manner.) I take full credit for his expounding on Bhutanese sex and dating because of my excellent moderation. (He also said there was no gender disparity in Bhutan at all. I turned to the audience and said, "Raise your hand if you agree with him" and there were crickets. CRICKETS. Later, I met the young Bhutanese girl handling the media for the festival and she was like, "Dude OMG he's so wrong." Paraphrasing of course. Better than India anyway.)

My second panel was a little less lively, probably because we were the second last session to speak to a room full of teens who had been listening to talks about literature all day. However, happy to report, fully sold out of Split, and Cold Feet, my beloved neglected darling, did a brisk trade as well.

The food:  For the first day, I ate whatever Indian food they had organised at the various buffets, feeling very sorry for self, but then I realised I could actually LEAVE and go get something to eat. Huh. Another writer and I set off, and he was already feeling intrepid, so he suggested we eat at a dive bar. We stopped at the least bleak looking one, where the woman got us some beef, chilli and cheese curry, some daal, some rice and some kimchi. She also produced home made pickles from her own tree. Everything was excellent, even an older man pressing his phone into our hands asking us to video chat with all his relatives. (We waved and smiled, smiled and waved.)

That evening, emboldened by my dive bar meal, I ordered some pork momos at our hotel, and because I was in a rush, only managed to eat them much later at night right before I went to bed. Alas! My stomach could not handle this or perhaps the meal from earlier, because I woke up at 4 am with the most agonising stomach cramps and basically got Delhi belly in Thimpu. Thimpu tummy? It was owchy anyway.

Oh, and I ate at Cloud 9, which is this teeny, very fancy establishment known for its burgers and its homemade ice cream. Run by an Australian woman married to a Bhutanese man, it seems like a place everyone would be at, but no locals seemed to know it. Some of my fellow festival goers had every meal there and after one delicious anti-national beef burger, I wished I had thought of it too. I also had gone on a different day and had cold coffee and homemade Rocky Road and mmm. MMMMM.

The drink: Three words: Bhutanese. Peach. Wine. Actually, the local brands were pretty tasty, from the red wine to the Raven vodka to all the whiskey to the beer. (Less posh is the local EXTREMELY potent saunf-based drink which I could not have more than two sips of, even after diluting) I just rolled along with my peach wine, which tastes sweet and desserty but packs quite the punch as you realise later when you're arguing with Famous Writer. *sigh* (Argument totally warranted though.) The festival did most of its after-hours drinking at a small pub called Mojo Park, which had a live stage, exactly ONE bartender who started handing out post-its when he couldn't handle all the orders and all of Thimpu's trendies hanging about outside in the smoking area. What's that you say? Smoking is banned in Bhutan? Um, that brings me to...

The smoke: (Listen ya, sometimes I smoke because it just makes my good times even better, ok. I don't smoke at home very often and I don't do drugs or drink to excess or pop pills so whyyyy can't I just sit with my cigarettes? WHY? Argh. Very conflicted about this as you can tell.) Disclaimer over, I decided to take some cigs to Bhutan, because all the emails were all, "You won't get cigarettes ANYWHERE" etc etc. It was also very exciting because you have to declare even 14 cigarettes (that's how many I had), pay their exact value, and have a permit made. (I forgot all about my permit after I had it made, but no one asked me.) After day 2, several people ran out of cigarettes, but an Intrepid Reporter friend asked some locals where he could buy some and they took him to a shop and he returned with cigarettes. Also I totally saw Kelly Dorji smoking, so he must get from somewhere.

All told, everything was amazing. I wasn't introduced to the Queen Mother, because I skipped her dinner to watch Indian Ocean, for whom I will mostly cancel all my other engagements, but she seemed really lovely from a distance, attending almost all the sessions, and being engaged and asking questions and everything.

And that was Bhutan. Really quickly, here's what I wrote this week: As Aunty Feminist, how it's hard to be religious and feminist at the same time. ** In my relationship column, bad dates **.