How often must we confront ourselves in our past?

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They announced that the exams would be cancelled for classes X and XII, I think? One of those X standards anyway. Exams were the fucking bane of my life, man. I am not academically inclined, perhaps you’re surprised, perhaps you’re thinking, “Oh M, you read so much! You have random information about random things! You KNOW ALL THE FONTS!” To which I say, yes, but they never taught that shit in school. School was… oof, even writing the words “school was” is bringing back all these memories of how much I hated it. I’ll try to articulate it a bit more: school was a lot of focusing on the stuff you couldn’t do, without enough leisure to explore what you could. They didn’t know how to teach maths at my school, which was Sardar Patel Vidyalaya, SPV to those who know it well, and the reason I say this is not because I think I would’ve been great at maths or whatever, I don’t think I’m that-way inclined, generally, and also I think I am slightly dyslexic when it comes to numbers, when there are a lot of them they all swim up in front of my eyes and become interchangeable. (I am never the person calculating the tab at a table, unless it’s a straight splitting-it.) But before SPV, classes 1 to 5, I was okay at maths. I was never a Young Genius, but I was fine, you know? No one ever said, “My god, she sucks” even when I reversed all my digits when I wrote them down. And I did okay enough on the entrance exam to get into the school and then I did okay enough for the first year—they were too busy tut-tutting over my terrible Hindi and Sanskrit, see, they had Hindi-medium classes until class 6, so I was catching up to all that also—and then stuff just started to go downhill.

There should be more to school than mathematics and there were plenty of extra-curricular activities, but those were neglected by my teachers. All they cared about was the damn mathematics, and I grew more and more unhappy, I didn’t even really have FRIENDS, I just had people I hung out with which is very different as you know, and my teachers let me slip through the cracks, because as a non-star-student I was not very important to them, and everything was falling that year, like dominoes, because I spent so much time gazing at those maths textbooks, I neglected everything else, and I got worse and worse at everything. (Except English, I loved my English teacher, she was the only one who seemed to see me as a person.) I was never any good at sports, and the only compulsory extra-curricular we had was sewing, which also I was terrible at. They must’ve had a school magazine or a drama club or something, but I never joined, I was too busy playing catch-up with my friends, who all seemed older than me even though we were all the same age, they just knew things that I didn’t, and I was too busy trying to stay in remedial maths, and do okay on my tests, and try not to feel ashamed when I had to leave the regular class and join my own class of stupids.

I don’t think a lot of Indian teachers know how to teach. They didn’t in my time, I hope they’ve gotten better now, but what it was for me and my peers growing up was: the people who had a natural ability got taught, the ones who didn’t, got told that they’d fail a class, that was the big threat, you’ll fail, you’ll fail, you’ll fail. Which I did, by the way. SPV was concerned about their board exam scores the next year, so, because I did pretty terribly in maths and physics, they made me repeat class 9. And that is when my life changed.

I was so humiliated at having to go back to class nine, with the babies one year junior to me, while all my friends went to a different wing entirely for their more serious class 10 stuff. that I begged my parents to send me to boarding school. I wanted to get away from Delhi, start anew somewhere where no one knew who I was, the Remedial Maths girl, the one falling behind. They listened, I went off to The Lawrence School, Lovedale, where I realised I was smart again, thanks to repeating the year, I already knew all the theories of the maths stuff, and though I had to work after hours with the maths teacher at Lovedale as well, he was so nice about it, he even sent a letter to my parents saying how hard I was working, and how much I was trying. God, what a difference from the maths teacher at SPV, who everyone called Cobra, because of his sudden and violent temper! And because my teachers encouraged me, it was a small class, and the teachers got a chance to know the students, I tried out for everything, and made it into most things: choir, debate, drama, the school paper. (Sports were still my bete noir, but I gave them all a go before giving up.)

 

Two years of this and I was ready to come back to Delhi and finish school there, which I did. I went to DPS, a school I have literally zero feelings about. People call it the Factory School, because it’s so big, so I went from being one of twenty girls in my batch, to being in section R (the classes were sectioned from A all the way to S, so you can imagine), because there were so many students. It was an anonymous school, I made a few friends, I hung around with them, went to one or two parties and I was happy because I had finally finally finally managed to shake mathematics off my feet and I was ready for a career in humanities.

It’s funny, failing class 9 felt like the End of the World, it was my first trouble, one of the biggest ones I’ve had, so stressful, but would I go back in time and fix it, fix myself? (How though? I still suck at maths) If I fixed that, I’d probably stay in SPV, never go to boarding school, if I didn’t go to boarding school, I probably wouldn’t have the confidence I got from being on stage, from writing for the paper, from writing for myself, if I didn’t do all that, I wouldn’t have enough in my extra-curricular portfolio to apply to a good college on the Extra Curricular Activities quota, I wouldn’t have gone to the college I went to, wouldn’t have made the friends I did, because they wouldn’t have been in my batch anyway, I don’t know if all paths would have led me right here, to writing, I assume they would, but the other way would have taken a lot longer. If I ever mastered up the courage to be something more than a “failure” which I’m sure SPV would have found a way to brand me with, no matter what. This is not an indictment against SPV. Many people thrived there, many people loved it. I am not one of the kids that school was made for though. I think that’s important to know.

There’s something flawed about the Indian educational system, that’s for sure. When they can take so many smart children and make them feel so stupid—and I’m not the only one this has happened to—when they can tie up your entire self-worth in one subject? My god, I really hope things are different now. I don’t have any friends who have pre-teen kids struggling with school, but if you do, if you are one of those parents, I want you to know that it only seems like it’s the end of the world. It’s not really. In the end, things have a way of working out. I spent too much time of my short youth thinking about exams—worrying about them, studying for them, stressing about the results etc etc etc—if I could time travel, I’d change all that, I’d visit myself and I’d say, “Listen to this weird adult who has accosted you out of nowhere! Fuck the exams! You’re never going to be a 100% type of student! Go do something fun!” Ahhh, I probably wouldn’t have listened back then, but I like to think I would, I like to think all things being equal, that I’d go back and make myself have more fun doing the stuff I liked to do. I’m very happy for all the students right now who feel as I did then. I’m glad their exams were cancelled. I strongly believe that unless you’re desperate to be a doctor or an engineer or something, you don’t need exams at all. Fuck them. Exams-schmexams. Let children enjoy their LIVES.

 

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: May the odds be ever in your favour

(Last week's newsletter. This week's just went out so you know what to do.)

Pop quiz #2: This week's newsletter title is an easy guess, but humour me anyway. (If you're curious "Some Pig" is from Charlotte's Web, which features my favourite literary rat character (even more than Rat in Wind In The Willows) a wisecracking every-creature-for-himself glutton called Templeton.)

This week in the Lives of People Who Are Dead Now: I am very late to the Nancy Mitford party, but I just began reading her very thinly veiled "novel" about two young girls in Britain living the U-life (U meaning upperclass, a thing that was being written about in Mitford's time, vs. of course, the Non-Us). There's a reference to the Us and non-Us in The Pursuit of Love as well, as the children belonging to this large extended family are all daughters of lords, so they get to have an "Hon." before their names, and so form a society: Hons vs Counter Hons. You don't have to be born an Hon to be an honourary Hon, a hon-Hon if you will, but Counter Hons say things like "notepaper" for writing paper and "dentures" for false teeth.

I looked up Nancy Mitford yesterday, and while she was quite fascinating, what I found most interesting was the life of her sister, Unity Mitford. Unity VALKYRIE Mitford, a first world yoga name if I've ever heard one. Here is a picture, she was quite lovely.

 
If you've watched The Crown on Netflix, you know that every old established rich British family has some Nazi lovers closer than you think. In the Mitford sisters' case, there were about three of them who were reasonably sympathetic, but Unity really took it to a new level. If she had been born today, she'd be dangling off Trump's arm, talking about white pride with gusto and poise on television, but since she was born in 1914, she took up a pro-Hitler stance, primarily just to get some attention from her family, being a middle child.

However, she traveled with a sister to Germany, and there she saw Hitler and decided to take her fandom to a completely different level. She basically found out all his hang out spots and went and sat at the same cafe as he had lunch at every single day. TEN MONTHS LATER, Hitler finally asked her to join him, so this was a pretty dedicated case of stalking. He was completely charmed by her, her Aryan good looks and her connection to Wagner, who Hitler loved. (Unity's grandfather was a close friend of the composer.) Anyway, Hitler was quite superstitious so he considered Unity a sort of "sent from heaven" reward or something, and also, was quite happy to play her off against Eva Braun, because it's not enough to be a monster, you must also be an asshole boyfriend.

She wanted very much for Hitler to reach some sort of deal with Britain and threatened to kill herself if a war ever happened. War did happen, and she shot herself with a pistol, only she survived the impact and the bullet stayed inside her skull, after which Hitler paid her hospital bills and arranged for her to go back to England. She was changed, apparently, a bit like she had had a stroke, incontinent, like a large child, but she still remembered being a Nazi, and said she wanted to have many children and name the eldest son Adolf. Eventually she died of meningitis because of the swelling of her brain around the bullet. She was 33.

Here's another interesting fact about Unity: she was conceived in a town called Swastika, Ontario. I wonder if she thought about that and about the Nazi party and decided that was the way her life was going to go since she was born to it.

(There is a biography of the Mitford sisters that looks quite good: The Mitford Girls by Mary S Lovell, which is on the Amazon store in India. Will get a copy and let you know how it is!)

This week in stuff I wrote: My review of Yashodhara Lal's How I Became a Farmer's Wife. "Was it really that good?" asked someone to me skeptically, and yes it was. I'm not polite at all in my reviews, if I don't like something, I will say it, as you will see in a review that should be out next week. I do sometimes try and find a redeeming thing though, and there usually is a redeeming thing.

Excerpt: Lal is, by her own description, a “romance” writer, and this book is meant to be a sequel of sorts to her first, which was similar fiction-ish, memoir-ish story of the first years of being married. Romance writers can definitely plot, even if they are somewhat condescended to by the greater literary establishment.

This week in television I recommend on Amazon Prime: I made this list for Twitter, but I'm finding my engagement on that platform is way down from even a few months ago. No retweets at all, and maybe one or two likes? It's odd, because nothing else has changed, not my tweets, not my follower count, so I'm just putting it down to faulty algorithms and not just that people aren't finding me interesting any more. (the horror!), So I thought, let me just migrate the things I would tweet about to this newsletter, and give up on Twitter for a little bit. Of all the social media I use (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter) I'm getting the least interactions out of Twitter, so I think I might start to wind down there mostly. Are you having the same problem or is it just me?

1) Parks & Recreation: brilliant, government office mockumentary with one of the FINEST feminist protagonists you'll ever see on television, Leslie Knope. In the same vein, and inspired from, The Office (US) also on Prime and it is also amazing.

2) The Magicians is a subtle satire-y sci-fi show that just goes from strength to strength every season. There's pop culture, there's magic, there's humour, there's pathos, you'll love it.

3) Parenthood: If you liked Gilmore Girls or Brothers and Sisters or anything with a big messy family and their interactions, this is a MUST MUST WATCH show.

4) Friday Night Lights: It is about American football, yes, but I, an avowed sports hater ("so boring ya!") am still binge watching it like it is going out of style.

5) The Mindy Project: will take you two or three episodes to fully get into but after that it is just like candy. So funny and refreshing.

This week in stuff I read on the internet that was cool

I have a Dom character in my new Girls of the Mahabharata book, so this long read (and winner of a journalism award!) about a modern day Dom was truly fascinating.

Excerpt: Mithun spends hours performing the back-breaking work of sifting through mountains of ash to cull tiny pieces of melted gold and silver - remnants of jewellery the deceased were wearing - to later sell for a meagre sum of money. Out of respect for their dead, families leave the jewellery (often a necklace, a few bangles, a gold nose-ring, or a gold tooth) on their relative before performing the last rites. For the Doms, the competition to find these tiny, precious pieces is cut-throat. As soon as the ash from a burned out pyre is swept into the river, an army of men - with pants rolled halfway up - rush in, wading through the murky water. To reduce the competition, some throw in broken glass and razors to make the process more arduous for others.

My mum (whose birthday it is today, happy birthday!) has a copy of Cook and See which she procured with great difficulty, and I've always found it ridiculously charming. Here's a piece on learning from it.

Excerpt: Strangely I can hear my dad in this book, perhaps because “third rate” is a word he uses quite often. And also because the book reminds me of his particular brand of “strict reassurance” – this will annoy you but this is ultimately good for you. For instance, there was a time when my father would find me dreaming serenely on Sunday afternoons and attempt to break my reverie by asking me stuff like, “what is 167395 minus 578?” His is a lifelong mission to make me alert, either by shocking me with mental mathematics or dark warnings of potential accidents that would most certainly occur thanks to incessant day dreaming.

Gorgeous piece on a man who turned his entire house into a shrine and a work of art.

Excerpt: When visitors come, they often cry. Others are overwhelmed by inspiration, or a sudden feeling that everything makes sense and they know just what they need to do. By the end of their visit, they want to speak to, confide in, or be counseled by Wright. It feels like there is a magnetic air of wisdom around him that you can’t help but want to feel close to. Wright listens and hugs, he understands.

Since 40 is three years away, here's a fun piece on how to get there. (Note: I feel a midlife crisis coming on just at the thought of it.)

Excerpt: What have we aged into? We’re still capable of action, change and 10K races. But there’s a new immediacy to the 40s — and an awareness of death — that didn’t exist before. Our possibilities feel more finite. All choices now plainly exclude others. It’s pointless to keep pretending to be what we’re not. At 40, we’re no longer preparing for an imagined future life. Our real lives are, indisputably, happening right now. We’ve arrived at what Immanuel Kant called the “Ding an sich” — the thing itself.

What would a world without Star Wars look like? I'm really not into the franchise, but it affected things that eventually brought me Netflix, SO yes.

Excerpt: At the end of the decade, Vice President Al Gore edges George W. Bush in one of the closest elections in American history. Observers credit his win to the positive influence exerted on his campaign and the election by CNN — which is the only major 24-hour news network. Rupert Murdoch watches from the United Kingdom; he’d failed to find a solid entry point into American media in the mid-’80s, Fox having collapsed years earlier, and his dreams of a conservative challenger to CNN remain unrealized.

When EB White wrote Stuart Little there was a librarian who basically RAN the children's book industry and she was not happy with him. This article should be made into a movie.

Excerpt: Today, children’s book publishing—an industry richly described in Leonard S. Marcus’s excellent new book, “Minders of Make-Believe”—is one of the most profitable parts of the book business. But that industry exists only because, in much the same way that the nineteenth-century middle class invented childhood as we know it, early-twentieth-century writers, illustrators, editors, and publishers—and, most of all, Anne Carroll Moore—invented children’s literature. It would be convenient if White and Moore stood on either side of a divide between antimodernist and modernist writing. But things don’t really sort out along those lines. A better way of thinking about it might be to say that Anne Carroll Moore did not like fangs. She loved what was precious, innocent, and sentimental. White found the same stuff mawkish, prudish, and daffy. “There are too many coy books full of talking animals, whimsical children, and condescending adults,” White complained.

I'd watch all these Sex and the City in 2018 plots.

Excerpt: Miranda arrives late to brunch because one of her favorite male colleagues was just fired, following #MeToo accusations. She’s conflicted because, despite her feminist convictions, she loved this guy and isn’t sure the accusations warranted his dismissal. Samantha says that she, too, is being sued by a former assistant for sexual harassment, which she doesn’t feel is warranted. Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda share their #MeToo stories, and Miranda is particularly horrified to recall several experiences she had as a teenager — the same age her son, Brady, is now. Miranda reconsiders how she’s raising her own son; when he tells her he’s taking a girl on a date, she insists on a sit-down with the two of them, during which she goes embarrassingly overboard and scares them out of their date.

And finally, Prayaag on football, his football-averse partner and the fact that their first child is due during the first week of the World Cup.

Excerpt: Perhaps fitting, given her deep distaste for the sport, that my wife is scheduled—if all goes well, please keep your fingers crossed—to give birth to our first child in the first week of this year’s World Cup. She’s happy because she believes this means I will not be able to watch any of the games. I’m happy because I believe this means I’ll be able to watch them all.

Living in Bandra East (not THAT Bandra)

(Wrote this for a city newspaper)

I still remember where I was when I decided to move to Mumbai. It was a cold winter's evening, we were in a friend's flat in East Delhi and I was grumbling about how everything was the same-- much of a muchness. Sure, I was due to start a new job with a magazine very soon, but I had grown weary of Delhi, the city I had grown up in, and continued, it seemed, to grow old in.

This party was a combination birthday/farewell do for our friend, who was moving to Mumbai with a new job. “How lucky,” I sighed, and he said, “Come with me.” I might have laughed disbelievingly—one didn't just give up house and job and life and move so easily on suggestion—but the idea turned in my mind from a ragged broken piece of bottle to smooth-edged sea glass, and by the next morning, I called him and said, “Okay. Okay, if you're serious, I will come.”

I'm not going to get into all the minutiae of moving, but suffice it to say, when I joined him, suitcase in hand three months later, I had not only a room, but also a neighbourhood. All brand new and ready to call my own. This was Bandra East, a firmly middle-class residential colony, a seeming hold-out from the already rapidly gentrifying West, a stroll across the train station, a neighbourhood where Bal Thackeray was our “down the road neighbour” and the only food delivery option was a Mangalorean sea food restaurant down the road. Our flat was part of a set of buildings called “MIG Colony” or “Middle Income Group” and apart from our landlord, who had moved to South Bombay ages ago, everyone else there owned their property.

These were conservative people who kept to themselves—my friend had told the landlord we were a married couple to save appearances, and this we laughed about later when once he came to visit and asked why we didn't just move both twin beds into one room for our convenience. (Later when my friend moved out—another city, another job—and I moved two girls from my old college into his old room, we told the landlord we were having marital problems, something he probably already guessed by our lack of shared bedroom.)

In the beginning, Bandra (E) (even the bracket pulling me away from the lure of the West and its fanciness) didn't mean much to me in terms of where it was located. I was still Bandra, wasn't I, still in the thick of things, still trendy and cool with a posh address. (Nowhere but in Mumbai—and maybe certain pockets of South Delhi—does your address so quickly become a shorthand for whether or not you can be friends with someone. Live close enough, and there's an instant relationship, but live two or three unfashionable suburbs away, and even if you get along like a house on fire, it's unlikely you'll hang out all that much.) It took me a while to cotton on to the full extent of exactly how residential we were, how tucked away from everything else. For those not in the know, Bandra (E) began with a long tree-lined road, with the flats tucked away in side lanes. So quiet, you couldn't even hear traffic, so quiet that even getting a rickshaw at 9 pm was impossible, unless you walked all the way to the main road. As a result, our rents were at least 30 per cent cheaper than our neighbours in the West, but the price we paid was living in provincialism, so to speak, while all around us, Mumbai exploded with the cosmopolitan lifestyle I had moved to the city for.

Eventually, I moved to the West after all—and it was everything that it promised to be. From a morning woken up by crows in the coconut trees outside my window, I'd be jolted awake in the middle of the night by kids in their daddy's cars, racing down the drag of a sea facing road. In just five minutes, I could walk to any cuisine I desired, and my friend were suddenly accessible, next door, I didn't even have to plan my evenings to set out at a time when public transport would be available. It was ideal—and yet, and yet, when I think about Mumbai, I think about MIG, and being ensconced in that world, a slow world that rocked me into the idea of living somewhere else. If my friend had taken a different decision when he picked our shared real estate, I might have been a different person today, but as it was, there we were, and now on my visits back to Mumbai, I feel a stab of fondness for that street when I pass it. Once, it was home.

Why a dress code is not feminist (I mean, duh, but still)

(This appeared as one of the F Word columns I used to do for The Week.)

Everyone else in my class 8 section loved Ragini Ma'am (not her real name), except for me. She was a bit like Miss Jean Brodie as in The Prime Of. She liked my friends; cool, popular girls who never needed a minute to find their tongues, and if they couldn't come up with a good comeback, they giggled. My friends then were rowdy, fond of disrupting classes with silly questions and undeniably popular. I—even though I tagged on at the fringes of this group—was quiet and tongue-tied mostly. She had no patience with me, but with them, she often could be seen sitting at her desk, a circle of young heads around her, leading the discussion with high, pre-teen voices rising up and down as they bantered with her.

Why am I thinking about Ragini Ma'am? Because today someone shared a post on my Facebook which had a rant by some teen girl's mother. The post essentially said the daughter had been written up and disciplined for wearing the wrong coloured bra. Why does the school have a right to check the colour of our children's underwear, asked the original poster, and suddenly, like a time warp, I was hurtling back to being twelve and being asked to go on ahead to my lunch break while all my other friends were called up to Ragini Ma'am's desk. If my memory serves, I was lingering in the hallways waiting for them, but in another trick of memory I am inside, listening to Ragini Ma'am myself. “Girls,” she is saying, “Don't wear these kind of bras to school.” She avoids looking at all of our newly sprouted breasts. We are proud of them, we wear them like a badge of honour. Most days, I put on my white school shirt and admire the outline of the bra underneath it. Look how grown up I am! “It distracts people,” she said, or was this what I was told waiting outside? Everyone blushed and giggled and carried on, and Ragini Ma'am put away her desk register, a smug smile on her face.

Who exactly did our bras distract? Our shirts were white, so opaque but not transparent, so in order to get a good look at a lacy training bra, you'd have to be gazing pretty damn close at our chests. Okay, so we were pre-teen girls in a co-ed school, just coming to terms with our sexuality, if you can even call it that. Some of us were getting our period for the first time, others were filling out from straight up and down to more curvy shapes. But, if the boys we went to school with cared about these details, they wouldn't have said, surely? It would be like us complaining about their hairy legs underneath their shorts (which they had to wear till class 9), or the smell of their sweat (why couldn't they carry deodorant if they were going to be playing heavy games on a hot day?). Therefore, by omission, it must have been Ragini Ma'am herself who noticed our bras and was distracted by them, so distracted, she had to forbid them.

This was the first time I had heard of a dress code in terms of “modesty” but it wouldn't be the last. Another school I went to had a regulation skirt length for the girls—these were all co-ed schools and all obsessed with keeping only the girl students in check. If your skirt was shorter than an inch above your knee, sometimes you'd get called up to the principal during assembly, and she'd have one of the teachers take a pair of scissors and slash at your hemline in front of the entire school. All day, you'd have to go around with your skirt in two different shades of grey, sagging about below your knees, and this was apparently an appropriate punishment. Who were the short skirts supposed to harm? Not us, we found a way around the problem by rolling our skirts up at the waist instead, easy enough to let down in front of authority figures. If the boys were scandalised by our knee caps and thighs, that was surely their own problem.

It was, therefore, in school, the place meant to mould your young mind and open your horizons etc, that we learned to cover up our bodies, even the bits of our bodies that were covered up anyway. It was there that we learned that bosoms—even twelve-year-old bosoms—were not something you were proud of. We were meant to be the gatekeepers for the boys, and the adults who might have been disturbed by our teenage flesh, it was all resting on our shoulders—keep everything locked up, locked away, hidden from sight, no one can know you have a body.

Dress codes are still going, there are still colleges and schools telling girls how to dress. After a while, it stops becoming something you even think about: when you're out in public, you automatically cover up, head to toe, wrapped in as much fabric as you can bear. And your lacy bras are a secret now, between you and your underwear drawer.

It's My Party And I'll Try If I Want To

The measure of a person is in their house party.

I wrote this as orderly preparations went on in our home, preparing to receive far more than its capacity, but which we were optimistically hoping will stretch to accommodate as many people as are expected. Like a local train or a lift going down from an office at 6 pm, it may not be super-comfortable, but we hoped to find niches and spots and “adjust.” (Astoundingly, our flat not only held all the people we invited, but had enough room for plus ones and various sundries.) (The next morning though... oof, what a bombsite. I was happy to be leaving it in our help's capable hands and fucking off to Bangalore.) 

I was going to begin this sentence saying I've thrown house parties ever since I lived alone, but that's not true. I've been throwing them since I was old enough to have friends over who could have activities unsupervised by adults. It all began with my thirteenth birthday, my very first “grown up” house party, where for the first time, I wouldn't have games or prizes, but a professional sound system and speakers, rented for the evening. Along with—my father went a bit overboard, caught up in the excitement—and also got three strobe lights, one red, one green and one that pulsed and caught your eye until you weren't sure if you were blinking or just closing your eyes in time to the beat. We were trying desperately to be grown up, newly minted teens, I banished my parents to their bedroom, and waited for my guests, all dressed up in a short black tube top and a black and white striped top, the most adult outfit I could find. I even got Canada Dry, a special Sprite-type soft drink trying to launch in India back then, because the bottles looked like beer, and my party would be all the more grown up if we had grown up drinks.

Imagine this, but with fewer grown ups.

And we danced, I can still see the room if I think about it, girls in oversized sweaters over stretch jeans, clunky bangles on wrists, the boys with ironing creases down their pants, everyone smelling freshly washed. Until someone said to me, “Wow, you put a lot of effort in,” and I was suddenly full of doubts. Was it not cool to make an effort on your birthday? Was all this—the strobe lights, the speakers, the drinks---just showing how much I cared, which was the opposite of cool when you were a teenager? “Great party!” said someone else, but I was still thinking about that offhand remark, so I shrugged like it was no big deal.

In my later years, I think that remark led to my style of hosting. You wanted casual? I was OTT casual. I handed out a bag of chips, ordered in rolls, pulled out some rum and coke, and called that a party. I made the opposite of an effort, I was so laid back, I was almost sideways. And people still came, especially in my twenties, when I shared a flat with a friend who had the same attitude to parties I did. She even went one step further and kept the expensive booze hidden in her room, so she could top herself up whenever she wanted. We might have squeezed in a hundred people at a party, but that was only because we had no furniture, apart from a beanbag.

And now, I'm invited to elegant dos at least once a month, where the host has put in an effort, that uncool thing, and pulled out the stops. I'm faced with table linen and home cooked meals, and fancy wines. “Wow, you made a lot of effort,” is said with awe now.

So, for the party we're having this weekend, we've struck a happy medium. Lucky for us, our co-hosts are as relaxed about hosting as we are. With everything ordered in, guests told to bring some alcohol to add to our supply and a party playlist cued on nothing more fancy than a laptop and a set of bluetooth speakers, we may not be winning any Martha Stewart awards, but I'm closer to my thirteen-year-old self than my 23-year-old avatar.

(A version of this appeared as my column on mydigitalfc.com)

Random memories triggered by songs on NOW That's What I Call The 90s

* Gangsta's Paradise by Coolio: This was in that Michelle Pfieffer (fffer? Something) movie! The one with the kids who came around to her way of thinking after she printed out Bob Dylan lyrics and passed them round. The kids eventually loved her. You know what happened to me when I tried to be all teacher-y for like two weeks with an NGO programme? I almost had a nervous breakdown. Kids are not easy man. And no one is singing fun songs.


* I Can't Help Falling In Love With You by UB40: You need to read my whole essay over at Ladies Finger to get my memory of this song, but mostly, there was a boy and he wrote this on his t-shirt as a sign of his love.


* Wannabe by The Spice Girls: ZIG A ZIG AH! Also we were in South Ex the first time this song came on the radio and we sang along, and felt Spice Girl-y ourselves, so that was nice. This was right before the Spice Girls Explosion, and you wanted to be Posh or Baby, sometimes Ginger, Sporty too asexual, Scary too Scary, plus her hair was all curls and we were Dally girls and curls were only a post-bath thing, except for me, and I brushed my hair straight so it stood up with static. Poor Scary Spice.



* Cotton Eye Joe by Rednex: Okay, first of all, FIRST OF ALL, I did not realise the singers of this fine earworm were called Rednex. REDNEX! Holy appropriateness, Batman. This was the night I got very very stoned in Goa with just another acquaintance for company and all the trance music turned into Cotton Eye Joe and I wandered through the crowds searching for the DJ to ask him to change the music. (I'm lucky to be alive.)

Do you remember the time?

(This post began as an alternative to a listicle I was doing for POPxo. I do some writing for them, mostly top ten lists and so on, and they had suggested I do one on a male bestie to an accidental boyfriend. I couldn't think of what to say, so I turned it into a story instead, which was useless for them, but I thought I'd share it with you guys instead.)

When this post was originally suggested to me, I wasn’t quite sure how to tackle it. I mean, I’ve had boyfriends, but “accidental”? How does that work? Plus, while I enjoy men and their company, I’m a girl’s girl, cultivating my rich, deep friendships with women, more than men, though I have no problem with being “one of the boys” when I have to.

Then I remembered Gaurav (name changed), from all those years ago. I was seventeen, he was a younger fifteen. We met on ICQ—remember ICQ?—where I went by the jaded moniker Sugar Coated Pill, and his handle was [cool rap lyric]. We started talking randomly, you could add anyone you liked on ICQ if you had their “number”, like a BBM pin.

“Fifteen,” I thought to myself, dismissively. What does a fifteen year old know about life? We went to different schools—I was in a large, teeming co-ed, he was in a smaller, more elite boy’s school. We had hardly any chance of running into each other in real life—no common friends, not even in the same neighbourhood, and so I guess it got easier to talk to him online. Every afternoon I’d come home from school and log in, and usually, there he’d be. Waiting. For me.

I had just moved back to Delhi after two years in boarding school, and was finding it sort of hard to make friends this time round. I had fallen in with the popular kids when I first moved, but we didn’t click, so I allowed myself to drift apart from them. I had some new friends who I sort of hung out with, but again, it was a strange, drifting feeling, like we were hanging on to a liferaft, and only talking till the ship came to rescue us and take us home. With Gaurav, I could let go.

The funny thing was, he was nothing like me.  We came from completely different backgrounds and had completely different interests. I was a “good girl” who stayed out of trouble, and loved to read, he was the “bad boy” who never cracked open the spine of a book in his life. It was a strange friendship, but it worked.

It didn’t hurt that he was cute, either. Like 90s boyband cute. Easy smile, floppy hair, charming, the first time we arranged to meet, I took one look at him and thought, “Oh no.” Because it wasn’t easy. We spoke every night on the phone—he was my best friend, and I was his, except, except, I loved him, and he didn’t.

Accidental boyfriend? Yes, and he knew it too. And when the other girls came in, because he was fifteen, then sixteen, then a cute teenage boy in Delhi, and of course there were other girls. I felt him drift away, though always with a backward, apologetic smile, like, “You know this isn’t really me, right?” He even fixed me up with a friend, who I dated for a little while, and then broke up with all of a sudden, leaving him bitter, saying, “You like Gaurav, why don’t you just admit it?”

That’s my story. My accidental boyfriend, who didn’t really know how he tripped and fell. I’m not quite sure either, but it was fun while it lasted. Oh well. RIP Old Relationships.

But where do you belong?

The song of the dial-up modems, the krrrrgneeeeshhhhh of it before it went online, the lights blinking, the way it would sometimes disconnect if someone picked up the phone?

The phone, the rotary dial, the way the receiver felt in your hands, heavy if you were making a call you didn't want to, weight-wait-weight-wait? Dial a number, here, dial 9, watch it make a full circle and register in your ear. 9 more than a button, 9 was the last hole.

That there were no cars--there were some cars and some people who had big cars, you crawled into the sofa backseat of a Contessa, you bounced at the edge of your sweaty Ambassador seat, but mostly you sat in a Maruti 800 much like your own parents had and it whisked you away to the edges of Delhi, where there was nothing in Saket except your friends house and a mall that your friends and you sometimes visited, which was only novel because it had all this food in lines and you could wheel out a shopping cart and you only shopped because of that shopping cart and your friend's birthday was your favourite, because her mother let you buy anything you liked?

And do you remember the first McDonald's, the hopes that centred around that McDonald's, not just for the food--the food! a real burger that wasn't a potato patty!--but also because your neighbour and friend had gone on the internet and met two boys and she wanted you to come along and meet them? And you tagged behind, because one of the boys asked if you were her younger sister and you were trying very hard to grow up as fast as you could, but it seemed that the boy she didn't like was stuck with you and you just wanted to go home but you also wanted to watch what your friend was doing with the first boy, how was she flirting? Is that how you flirted?

Do you remember the game you played where you all sat crosslegged on a bed with a piece of paper with the alphabet on it and a coin and asked "Any holy spirit passing by please enter this coin" and you asked and then the coin would move and answer questions for you, and you were never the one who pushed the coin and you always believed sneakily that there was a holy spirit, but there was always one girl who looked amused and you kind of thought she'd done it but she professed to be amazed? You never wondered how exactly the holy spirit would know so much about who liked you or what you should say when you saw them, it just made sense that they would be as obsessed with your life as you were.



Do you remember the feel of a Walkman under your fingers, clipped to the loop of your jeans? Do you remember how to use the rewind and fastforward button, how expertly you could go back to the beginning of a song and listen to it over and over again? Do you remember how sometimes an old tape deck could eat your tape and you'd hear the first of it getting stuck and you'd have to tug it out carefully, carefully and wind it up again with your pinky finger? Do you remember swapping tapes, do you remember the first time you learnt how to record something? Do you remember how you learnt a new skill without Google to guide you?

Do you remember how your parents first looked puzzled then annoyed--what kind of Indian childhood is this? You're losing touch with your roots!--then resigned to this new-ness. Do you remember being the first generation to embrace a different sort of world? The first generation to whom jeans were more comfortable than salwar kameezes? The first generation that had to learn a whole new language, a whole new world, as it was laid open in front of you? You whispered of boyfriends, your parents accepted the boy-girl parties you went to, you dreamed of your first kiss and not your marriage, you accepted that you either had to jump on the bandwagon or be left behind and god forbid you be left behind.

But then, here you are, and some people were left behind and some people clamour about the old ways and the old days, regretting, bitterly regretting that the new ways were introduced without taking the old ways feelings into consideration. There's a country of left-behind-ers and you feel guilt for being who you are, your computer so thin you can catch it up like a clutch, your books no longer paper, your music on a credit card sized device or even, not existing anywhere anymore, it just comes piped through the air. You accept, because you always have, that this way is bad, it's privileged, and privileged is bad, if you're a thoughtful person, and you've tried so hard to be a thoughtful person. You know you can write about your first Walkman and your first kiss, your first time someone chose to dance with you at a party, and the way your heart beat with joy, in tune to the music, and you can say something about the music, and how happy you were. You can talk about trying to reconcile your body image to the bodies you saw on TV, how you longed for straight hair and to be less brown, but not because you hated brown, but because you couldn't understand how to look good if you weren't white. And when you speak of these things, people look upon it as an indulgence, it was your childhood but it wasn't everyone's, and yes, you say, I know it's not everyone's but is that a bad thing? Can it still be mine? You want to apologise for your liberal upbringing, for going to a co-ed school, for never even thinking about another India besides your own until you were older.

Do you remember when it was okay to not think about other things? Do you remember being able to revel in your good fortune without immediately wondering about the backs of others on which your good fortune was built? Do you remember not having to take offence at silly things in the international media--I mean, yes, haha, very funny, Indians can't spell, English is not a first language?

Do you remember when you grew into a person of the Liberal Elite? Do you remember your first guilt? Your first time apologising for what you had--both inside your head and outside? Do you remember the first time you were angry that everyone didn't see the world fairly? Do you remember when you stopped feeling bad about the beggars at your car windows and instead felt irritated? Do you remember when you felt guilt for that irritation?

Do you remember when a simple do-you-remember post didn't have to include a whole speech about your confusion?

Somebody left the gate open, you know we got lost on the way

(listen to the song as you're reading this post)

At 28, I found myself back in Delhi, minus one fiancé and a city I still loved. Now, nearly three years later, I look back at that person with a certain wonder. I can remember the heartbreak, the emotional exhaustion, but it seems as if it happened to someone else, in a different story entirely. That wasn't really me. 

I like to say Bombay is my spiritual home, but it was in Delhi that I began to find myself once more, Delhi that smoothed the edges, Delhi that lent itself to dates and more work than I could manage and a full-to-bustling social life, even as I complained about the city, missing Bombay with more passion than I ever missed my ex. And it was in a small annexe in Delhi, an upgraded servant's quarters, that I decided to stop waiting for The Future, and make it happen right now.

Where I tell you a little bit about THAT YEAR

Don't delay, something tells me I gotta go away
Maybe it's the way we always stay when our hearts have gone
We can't hold us anymore, no, we've got to fold
Down to the floor, yes, I know it's cold but baby, our hearts have gone

 

It is one of those nights, tonight. Some night bird is calling out the fact of morning, I’ve had one, two, no, three drinks and it’s that strange hour when your sleep has past and you feel like you could stay awake forever. If there was someone else with me, I’d be confessing right now, I’d be spilling my little ol’ guts right over my coffee table, but after I fed a friend dinner and gave him a drink, he went home and so I turn to the internet and talk to it and tell it about what I’m thinking of.

 

Which,  tonight, is JC. Specifically, when we ended, how we ended. No one, even people who love me dearly, can fathom exactly how unhappy I was in the last six months of 2010. I think back upon it and all I can remember is feeling my stomach in a perpetual knot, feeling like I was walking on glass, feeling like that same glass had somehow climbed into my throat, was resting in my eyes. I couldn’t blink, I couldn’t swallow, I couldn’t move. And yet. And yet, I loved him. And I think he loved me. Which is probably why we were so unhappy.

 

A night I just tweeted about, having a fight about god knows what now, and me in a hurry, pulling on sneakers and my tights and slamming the door ferociously behind me. I ran down Carter Road, feeling the pavement under my feet, ran, even though I’m not a runner, ran and thought and felt the hot almost-rain on my face, yes, it was almost monsoon time then, wasn’t it? I wanted to scream, I wanted to yell above my iPod, just go AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA until I couldn’t scream anymore, until the glass in my throat fell out finally, but Bombay is a crowded city, and I didn’t want to cause a scene or have people stare at me funnily and this I think, is my basic problem.

 

Just because there once was love
Don't mean a thing, don't mean a thing
Just because there once was love
Don't mean a thing, don't mean a thing

 

A friend came to meet me, and tried to say soothing things, like you would to a horse that’s threatening to bolt, but the fact of him, the fact of us, in that small, hot flat, the fact of his things happily married to mine, the fact of our lives so intertwined now that I couldn’t even begin to see where I could start to unravel it, it just made me so, so tired. I didn’t want to go on. I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to squat on Carter Road forever and just NOT DEAL.

 

I was so tired that whole period. If I could have stayed in bed forever, I would have, but then who’d run the house? Who’d make sure everything was on the up-and-up? And by slapping a brave face on it, I could escape and meet people and pretend like my life was just FABULOUS DAHLING, MUAH MUAH. I don’t know how much people were fooled, I know when I moved here and began to breathe normally again, people said, “Oh, you look so relaxed now.” I didn’t think strain would show on my face, but I felt like I had Botox, my eyes didn’t move, my mouth turned upwards in small degrees, my hands—I’m a big hand-mover in conversation—stayed static or curled around my glass of wine.

 

Why am I thinking about this tonight? It’s so far in the past, that we’re even at the point where we’re having friendly-ish conversations, JC and I. Thinking about it closes my throat up again, it’s so not a pleasant memory that I’ve blocked most of it. Occasionally, one or two incidents will swim up, like this night, but mostly, nothing. I’ve been on the occasional date, other boys’ numbers are on my cellphone and they have the power to make me laugh through a text message.

 

But it’s that kind of evening. It’s 3.30 and even my night bird has given up and gone to bed like a good night bird should. If this was a real life conversation, this is where my throat would be sore and parched from talking so long, I’d say, “You know?” a lot and touch your wrist, I’d top up our drinks, you’d look at me in sympathy, but mostly you’d want me to stop bringing up such depressing things like my last breakup, GOD, will you get over that already? For the most part, this is me telling you, “This is where I’ve been! And this is what happened. And this is why I am.”

 

…. now that my heart is gone.

You put the one-one in two oh one one

So Jezebel had a post up that pretty much succinctly described my previous year. Fuck you, 2010. Yeah. It was a shitty, shitty, shitty year and if my Facebook feed is to be believed, I’m not the only one who felt that way. My friends’ and random old classmates’ statuses read from, “Thank god, 2010 is over” to “2011, prepare to be owned.” For me, it says something that my two biggest life lessons from the year gone by are also pretty unhappy ones: 1) Lying awake in our bedroom in the UK, staring at the ceiling, wondering if I was ever going to be happy again and promising myself that I would NEVER EVER EVER let someone make me feel that low and 2) having really, really, really low expectations of people and things so that now I’m all, “wow, that turned out better than I thought.”

 

I used to be an optimist, 2010, but now I’m really not. Now, no matter how sunshine-y I try to think, little cynical thoughts keep invading my mind. I’m no longer pure optimist like I was, nowadays my optimism is as about as real as a fake orgasm, and about that satisfactory too. Have you ever read that poem by Elizabeth Bishop? The Art Of Losing? Well, it describes my present status to a t, especially the lines:

 

“I lost two cities, lovely ones. And vaster,

Some realms I owned,two rivers, a continent,

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.”

 

I was in Delhi for New Year’s Eve, my first time Not In Goa in like, four years. Ah, Goa. I found myself searching for the smell of sea and unwashed hippy and hashish. And Bloody Marys. The winter somehow doesn’t make Bloody Marys as satisfying as they are on a nice summer’s day for lunch. Now I’m also idealising summer. Having not seen the sun in over a week and a half, I’m having pangs of what I suspect is Seasonal Affective Disorder (with its very cute acronym: SAD. Awww.) and yearning for sun, bare brown shoulders, even sweat sounds good to me right now.

 

But, let me tell you about my New Year’s Eve. You know I’m all like “what you do on New Year’s Eve is like a PORTENT for the rest of your year”? In that case, this is going to be an excellent, excellent year. A couple of friends and I, all with no plans, decided to call everyone else who had no plans and drink a lot. Previously mentioned Low Expectation Life Lesson From 2010 made me delighted that a couple of lovely people showed up, we cranked up the party mix on my iPod and danced like crazy people. Then around one, everyone prepared to go to other parties and I too, was whisked away to some fancy government bungalow for party number 2. This year clearly is going to be my year with old and new friends, making my own parties wherever I go. The year of not depending on other people. The year of being free.

 

Maybe there’s some hope of finding my lost optimism and in the process, my lost mojo along the way? I hope all your years are filled with success (because we all need money) and fulfilment (because money isn’t everything) and love (even if, like me, one of your main sources of love is a pretty awesome tabby cat). And because we don’t want to be all OLD! and BORING! before our time, dahlinks, I hope this is also a year of great stories and interesting times. Whaddaya know? The optimism is seeping back after all.

eM’s first Christmas (that she can remember)

So back in the 1980s, before globalisation and the internet and cable tv, Christmas was just another holiday, a day off school and I didn’t really expect much to be going on. My American cousins spoke about a TREE! and SANTA! but for me, eh, the good times ended on my birthday, and Christmas was just another of those foreign things, like Kit Kats, which only happened on the other side of the world.

 

Until my American cousins mother, my American Aunty came to visit us in Delhi and decided that CHRISTMAS had to be CELEBRATED because I was a CHILD. (And it’s criminal for kids not to have a Christmas). I don’t know how on board my parents were with this idea, I was already quite a consumerist kid, the tooth fairy being one of my main cash suppliers (what? I lost a lot of teeth!) and the addition of Santa Claus into my universe was sure to crash and burn. But once the idea of Santa Claus had been explained to me I was totally on board with the idea. A man bringing TOYS? Two weeks after my BIRTHDAY? Duuuuuuuuude. Bring it.

 

What I had to do was make a list and give it to my aunt to give to Santa. Now, I was already a little bit sceptical, but it was explained that this whole process was magic and one never questions how magic works. (Side note: my mom once told me Wee Willie Winkie visited her while I was out and asked for a piece of cheese. I believed this story for an embarrassingly long time. I think it was the cheese. Good liars always add details.)

 

So for my Christmas list I asked for

 

A snake.

 

A dollshouse.

 

And a couple of other things which I can’t remember. The snake was my testing device, if Santa brought me a SNAKE I was willing to believe.

 

Come Christmas morning and joyfully I leapt up to go look at the potted champa tree that served as a Christmas tree. And there were my presents! Remember, India in the 1980s had very little in terms of what you could get in the shops, so everything that we got was pure innovation. It was there! My snake! A gorgeous stuffed creature made out of green velvet. Okay, so it wasn’t the REAL snake I was expecting, but since I didn’t specify real on my list, I was pretty sure Santa made a mistake. Besides, I thought, wisely, a real snake would have been quite hard to keep.

 

Also the dollshouse. Here my aunt’s imagination went full swing. It was made out of wood with an open front and divided into four rooms. There was also a little staircase covered with red velvet and a pointed roof. The front was covered in wrapping paper to make it look pretty and she had sourced (or had made) little furniture to go in all the rooms. It was perfect.

 

Santa, I believe.

 

I never had a Christmas like that again, my aunt never coming over around the same time of the year and my parents not really caring about the holiday process. I got a book, something nice each year, but it was made clear to me that my holiday loot would end on my birthday. Alas.

 

But today, just as I whisk off to make merry at a Christmas party, I think about my dollshouse and my champa tree, and I smile. That was a good Christmas.

 

I hope you and yours have very happy holidays.

Right back where we started from

Ah, back to my favourite city in the whole wide world. This may be surprising to people, but sorry Bombay, sorry London, you didn’t take me into your hearts when I was three weeks old and continue loving me ever since. See, Delhi is more my city than it is of the aggressive men, of the scared women, of the crimes. It’s my city because I love it, and it loves me, and when I am here a huge part of me just feels comfortable and relaxed and, and, home. It is of hot afternoons with the AC on and old books read, curled up in bed. It is of the incredibly stylish women, matched down to their shoes, it is of old haunts revisited and new ones discovered. It is walking into a Sunday brunch at a restaurant and being able to table hop, people looking up and smiling and saying, “Oh, eM, it’s so nice to see you again.”

 

I realise though, speaking of stylish women, that my own personal style has evolved far more than I had imagined. Now, I bum around the city in summer dresses and my silver calf length gladiators, very “Bombay”, as someone described them to me the other day. I didn’t really think a shoe could be one city or another, but as I look at them now, I see what he meant. Bombay loves OTT styles, the bandana, the bright belt, the quirky accessories, Delhi is equally stylish, but in a more put together way, cotton is worn in the daytime, jersey or lycra in the evenings, earrings are small, feet are in pumps or strappy sandals. This particular pair of shoes just beg for attention though, even in Bombay, they are not the norm, but while in Bombay, someone might say, “Nice shoes!” over here, they are given the eyebrow, maybe a subtle cough, but mostly ignored. If you can’t say something nice, say nothing at all, eh? Sadly, my beloved wedge heels, SO comfortable and SO “normal” have finally given up, and eroded, thanks to me wearing them and splashing around in puddles. I need a new pair of shoes—affordable but nice, comfortable but with heels. Where can I go?

 

Oh, but. I’m off to my favourite shopping place EVER—Sarojini Nagar—tomorrow, where I shall shop and shop and shop and come back resplendent with new things.I even brought a half empty suitcase for just that purpose. I hope the clothes are nice though, it’s purely a luck thing, some days you get brilliant stuff and on others, it’s quite boring. Also, since I am DONE with the empire waistline, but shopkeepers don’t know that yet, I’m hoping to see a lot more A-line and fitted things.

 

I managed to get a few of the much beloved Delhi houseparties done as well. I hold them up as a standard of living to people in Bombay, when I sigh and go on about how much I miss the house party, not just fifty people crammed into a tiny apartment, but one with loads of space and (sometimes, if you’re very lucky) waiters and a bartender and loads of food and interesting people. I went to two this Saturday (one of them actually with the fanciness I mentioned earlier) and I think I spent about half an hour at each place going, “Wow. You have so much space. Wow.”

 

I’ve been lazy about taking pictures, but starting today, I’m going on a photography spree. I basically called up everyone a couple of days before I left, with my planner in one hand and a pen in another, and I made plans for the entire week. I thought that was very organised of me, because mostly I get here, and I send a text and then, you know, people are busy, time is limited, etc etc. Now, I get to see everyone I wanted to AND it’s all written down neatly and managed in advance. Except for the daytime. Then I’m completely free, which on a day like today, when I’m sort of tired, is cool, but I want to get the most of this trip, so tomorrow I’m just going to take myself into South Delhi and sit at a coffee shop with a book if need be. On Friday, I’m off to Hyderabad, to see family and launch my book, so if you’re in that city, come to the Landmark bookstore in Somajiguda on August 14th at 6.30 pm.

Off now, to laze some more. I sense a lot more blogging (especially after I get all my new clothes tomorrow!) so watch this space.