Travel Diary Part Three: End notes from Vietnam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 ANYHOW. That was our trip!

Travel Diary: Hoi An, Nha Trang and more Saigon!

(Yes, this was a newsletter I sent, but this is also my travelogue from our massive Vietnam trip last year. Read if you haven't already, or hey, re-read for shits and giggles.)

“Where you from?” asked everyone. If I didn't answer immediately, they made it into a longer question: “where you fro-hom?” I said, “India” and to my surprise, some people looked confused. India! Your biggest neighbour! (China-Schmina.) It was only in Hanoi that I realised that the Vietnamese word for India is “An Do” which doesn't sound anything like the crisp short “India” that I use when I'm travelling. Do we all have a travelling accent? Mine gets slower, more enunciated, like I'm meeting the Queen or something. “Pardon me, but do you happen to have the time?” (Not quite that bad.) However, a few days in Saigon, and I was sign languaging with the best. I waved my arms around to gesture “big,” I scissored my pointer and middle finger to indicate “walking.” I became, in short, a French person. (“Zis is 'ow you say, a leetle worn no? Maybe you give me a bettair praaice.”)

Another reason I was culturally confusing though, was because K is a tall, European-ish person. Most often, the answer to the “where you from” question would be met with some head scratching. “You're from India, okay, I get it, but this tall person with the facial hair?” Then he'd say, “Germany” and the relief was palpable. “OF COURSE! HE'S GERMAN! IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW!”

In Hoi An, we sat in an empty soup shop and the little old ladies who ran it watched a Hindi TV serial over my head, full of fair, big eyed people, dressed in full Bollywood, and I waved my hands around, “IT ME!” but they just nodded and smiled politely, and shot, “Ignore the crazy lady” looks at each other. Indians are confusing though, ethnically speaking, don't you think? Not everyone “matches” each other, and unless you move in a crowd, it's hard to tell exactly where we're from. It's sort of nice, being confusing, I like answering where-you-from questions, I like that not many people guessed. I felt like an International Woman of Mystery for a bit there.

***

At the Cu Chi Tunnels back near Saigon, our one and only guided tour experience, we met a group of single travellers from the same hostel—a Dane, a Taiwanese and an Indonesian. They stood by, amused, when I went into the tunnel and immediately retreated out again, pushing past the line of people that had formed behind me in my panic. The tunnels were basically an underground network for guerilla warfare, and it's pretty neat how they're done, but they are very small and dark. The Cu Chi tourism board has put in electric lights, so it's not pitch black, but there's an underground earthy smell and the walls are thick, and you have to drop to your haunches and squat-crawl through them (our thighs hurt for three days afterwards.) I don't think I'm so much claustrophobic as I am prone to very sharp and vivid flights of imagination. This time, I was wondering to myself casually, “Oh, what would this be like if I were claustrophobic?” and boom. Panic. Plus like the crowds pressing in behind you etc. Also I misheard the guide. He said there were two routes: 40 metres and 20 metres, and I thought that meant the caves went down 40 m or 20 m, not the distance travelled, you know? I didn't want to go further underground! But I finally crawled my way through, and was very pleased when it ended swiftly. It's quite something, plus there's all sorts of War Things that people into War Things will be pleased about, examples of bamboo traps for instance, or holes where bombs fell into. And if you feel like playing soldier-soldier, there are real guns to shoot at a firing range including an AK 47 and so on. (You have to buy five bullets at a time, and you can't share.) (Guns are LOUD. I retreated to a far corner of the rest stop and ate an ice cream instead.)

***

After a few days of hectic tourism (and dodging scooters), K decided to find some more “hipstery” areas of Saigon. We didn't get super far, but we did manage to make it to this old building with an empty lift shaft and four floors that mixed little boutiques and coffee shops with actual homes. We wandered all the way up to the top, and sat at a little cafe called Mockingbird, empty except for two Germans with a Lonely Planet (so much for hipster), and recovered there.

Why recovered? The night before, we had actually met up with two of the three people we saw at the Cu Chi Tunnels tour, completely serendipitously. My cousin's wife introduced me on Facebook to a friend of hers who lived in Saigon, so he took us out to eat a large seafood meal, heavy on the snails. (Interesting, but I think I prefer more mainstream seafood myself.) After which, I asked him to take us to a nice dive bar, and he picked a roadside place, unnamed on Google Maps, but where they made their own rum. “It's very mild,” he kept saying, so we ordered like five bottles of the stuff, while he made his farewells sensibly by midnight, and we kept going, drinking that “very mild” rum. (The next morning, oh god.)

This friend had the cutest dog, who he brought with him to dinner, a little toy poodle called Chuon Chuon (for dragonfly), and we all had to sit her on our laps and pet her, and she put up with it with a big smile on her face. SO FLUFFY. If I ever got a dog, I'd like a Chuon Chuon myself, except my stupid ethical policy of adopt-don't-shop, get-animals-indigenous-to-your-environment etc means I'll never get a Chuon Chuon, so I might as well content myself with cats. (Think of the Instagram photos of my own Chuon Chuon curled up with the cats. GOLD. MINE.) 

On the night bus to Nha Trang

We decided to skip the Mekong delta, because it looked sort of lame. No offence to anyone who's been and thinks it was amazing, by the way. We just looked at a few of the suggested itineraries for that area and it was all, “stop at coconut candy factory” and so on, and I don't really want to see a coconut candy factory. It seemed very much like one of those bus tours to Agra where they stop off at a “marble factory” which also has a shop and you have to go in, even if you don't want to.

Instead we did a night bus up to Nha Trang. A couple of things: there's this open bus pas in Vietnam which is a good deal, but ONLY IF you know your itinerary well in advance. If you don't, it's not worth the price, because you have to tell the driver/agent your stops at least 48 hours in advance, so don't bother getting the pass even if the agent tells you it's cheaper, it's not going to make your travel any more flexible.

We booked online ourselves, and got a nice luxurious sleeper bus. I say “nice and luxurious” which it was for little old 5'2” me. For 6'3” K it was like if you or I had to spend the night on our old school desks. With padding, of course, but still, about that size and width. I stayed up most of the night reading anyway, and between his height and my reading problem, by the time we got to Nha Trang, we were both equally shattered at 6 am, and the hotel didn't let us check in till 8. (We paid for an early check-in, otherwise we would have had to wait till 2 pm, standard check-in time across Vietnam, and they're not usually cool about you reaching early.)

Nha Trang

 

Our plan was to literally stay in Nha Trang overnight and leave the next day, but since we spent most of the first day asleep, we stayed for an extra day, just to rest a bit. We thought maybe we'd go snorkelling or something, but it was raining, and there were red flags all over the beaches, and another couple we met at a BBQ restaurant told us that the snorkelling was terrible, jellyfish all over the place.

Nha Trang on the whole was pretty disappointing. We rented a scooter and checked out most of the town, even driving far out of it, to some remote villages, but for the most part it was very very touristy, and those tourists were mostly Russians. So much so that the signs in the restaurants were also in Russian. So, like Morjim, basically.

HOWEVER. I did have one of the best meals of my whole trip in Nha Trang, at a restaurant called Lac Canh. It's a DIY barbecue place (not the same one where we met the couple, that was American BBQ), where they bring you a little grill and marinated meat and you cook it yourself. (They have vegetarian options too.) So good, we ordered two lots of meat. 

Onward to Hoi An!

We took a plane from Nha Trang to Hoi An, being the second-cheapest and most convenient way to travel there. We didn't have any other stops to make in the South, so it was up to the more communist North for us.

I had heard so much about Hoi An, how charming it was, and how we'd definitely want to stay more than two days, that we decided to book only one night at the hotel so we'd be able to move around. (This was not my idea, in fact, it stressed me out a little bit, but it turned out to be a good idea as you shall soon see.)

The first night we were staying at the Hoi An Villa, which was sweet, but I had neglected to check the fine print in the Booking.com details, and it turned out that for the room (which was not very cheap either, mind you) there was only a shared bathroom. Guys. There is a limit to how backpacker-y I can be. That limit is a shared bathroom. I couldn't. I just could not. Instantly, I fired up that Booking app, and I found us a nice semi-luxurious hotel which was just slightly more expensive than this shared bathroom situation, and had a pool and a large buffet breakfast and everything, and that is where my middle aged bones were happy. (Acacia Resort or something. Very nice, would recommend.)

And next time, I'll tell you all about Hoi An, including our drive up through the Hai Van pass to Hue!

Travel Diary part one: Kuala Lumpur and Saigon

Reposting from my newsletter, so this vacation is actually last year's vacation.

I've been on vacation, and you've been very patient about not demanding news from me, or is it just me that feels like I've missed an appointment by not writing to you? Either way, I've been on a Grand Odyssey around South East Asia, and am currently in our Bangkok hotel, where I remain till tomorrow night when we fly back to Delhi at an antisocial time, which was about 2000 rups cheaper than the regular flight and joke's on us, because we will pay about that much to engage our hotel for the day tomorrow, not wanting to be on the streets till midnight.

The Bangkok hotel is called Tim Mansion on the sign, but the wifi is Tim House, so you wonder when they upgraded. It's not a “mansion,” well, I suppose it's a large building with many rooms, but there's no silver tea service or a butler to hand you warm damp towels after a day of sightseeing, so I guess it's Tim House after all. My stories are many and varied, so I'm going to cut this up into two or three parts (lucky you, right?) and send them to you over the course of a few days, sooo if hearing about travel stories is not really your thing, feel free to ignore them and regular Delhi-based programming will return after these instalments.

Oddly when we got into Bangkok and unpacked, there was a strange driver's license tucked into K's bag—it's a backpack so easy enough to open while on the baggage conveyor, I guess—and it belonged to some dude from Canada, but Pakistani origin. I know this because I looked him up on Facebook, and while his name XYZ is pretty common, turned out that plus the Canada province he was from made him only one of two people. One of whom was posting excitedly about his trip to Hanoi and Bangkok. So I messaged the guy, but he turned out to be, well, not the sharpest tool in the shed, so despite my providing instructions and directions to the hotel, he kept saying, “I don't know” and calling me “dear” and “Meena” and I was almost glad he lost his license, because if there's one thing worse than being called “Meena” by someone I do not know (IT IS NOT THAT HARD TO TYPE OUT MEENAKSHI) it is being called “dear.” At that last “dear” I gave up trying to give him more instructions, and now he has left the city and the mystery of how his license got into our bags will never be solved.

But I'm going backwards. Let's return to three weeks ago. 

Malaysia

 

There are no direct flights from Delhi to Vietnam yet. I believe one is starting soon, but until then, you have to stop over in Kuala Lumpur (to get to Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon as I'm going to call it from now on, since I am also a person who says “Bombay” instead of “Mumbai”) or Bangkok to get to Hanoi. We'd never been to Malaysia either, so we decided to extend our stopover to two days so we could look around KL a bit, get a feel for the city, etc. Plus I have a cousin there who offered to put us up for a few nights, so everything worked out perfectly.

There's a certain joy in hanging out with your cousins as an adult. I'm sure people with siblings feel this way about them too, but with cousins, you sort of drop in and out of their lives—you stay in touch for a bit during college, ingrained with years of hanging out every summer, but then, eventually you sort of scatter, like seeds in a pod. Depending on how you are related, you will see each other at family gatherings, and make an effort to get together if you're in the same city. But, you know, life happens. On my mum's side, though, I've managed to stay relatively close to all my sibs-once-removed, we have a Whatsapp group and everything. (On my dad's side is my one-and-only female cousin, and that is a treat in itself.) Anyway, my KL cousin was the perfect host, and told us lots about the city and turned out to have the same approach to tourism as we did: it's best experienced through putting things into your mouth, so we ate everything.

KL is an interesting city. It's much more expensive than I imagined, like fancy Delhi prices for eating and shopping, but the food is varied and plentiful. I stayed away from biryani etc, though my cousin told me that the Indian food in Malaysia is not quite like Indian food in India and should be experienced at least once, but I rejected it in favour of Chinese and traditional Malay curries, which are kinda amazing. Picture me as a sort of Pac Man just opening my mouth and having food drop in, and you'll picture what I did over the last three weeks.

Of course, I went to the Petronas towers and took a photo of it from right underneath (check). Of course, we also went to the electronic mall and bought K a new laptop battery, and me an SD card. (Check.) I also went hoping to get a cheap deal on a phone I've been eyeing, but alas, the prices were pretty much the same. 

Actually, this reminds me of the First Day Abroad disaster. As some of you know, we got married last year (that's not the disaster), and for our wedding, we got some money in dollars as well (still not the disaster). The plan was to use these dollars whilst a-travel, because the rupee keeps crashing, better rates etc etc, BUT someone (me) very helpfully put all the dollars into different pouches in her locked drawer, for safekeeping? Or something? When we had our home invasion last year, the burglars had unearthed one of the dollar pouches I had (what? Don't you all have little baggies with a little foreign currency in it?) and left it on the floor (maybe they thought it was play money?) and so that was added to my stash, plus another envelope with more money, basically, long story short: instead of putting all the money together, I put it in separate locations and only carried one of the pouches with me, the Burglar one, so we had a lot less money than we thought we were going to have. (There's your disaster.) Also I thought I had somehow dropped the money between home and the airport, and that was freaking me out so much, I sat down at KL airport and wept. Anyhow, budget-schmudget, I finally said, let's just have a good time. 

(Now that I am back in Delhi, I can tell you that the dollars are safe and sound, and very unhelpfully, still in my locked drawer.)

Saigon

The only research I have done for Vietnam is:

1) Recalled the Vietnammy bits in Forrest Gump.

2) Let K show me the first half of Apocalypse Now. (That movie is LONG.)

3) Watched the This Is Us Vietnam episode.

4) Watched the BoJack Vietnam episode.

5) Eaten a few meals at Little Saigon in Hauz Khas market, which I am pleased to report is pretty authentic.

Anyhow, so apart from those last two things, my Vietnam is mostly an American construct, war and poverty and guns and all that, and war is not a super interesting subject, says the child of peace times in her own country. Unfortunately, it is for everyone else, so it was hard to get an idea of the country that didn't involve the Great American War Lens of the '60s just like, hanging over it.

That Great American War Lens shattered as soon as we stepped out of the airport. Hordes of screaming teenage girls were waiting for a K Pop boyband, and since they were bored, they cheered for all of us, each time we passed the automatic doors. Finally, in a bustle of pink and glitter, the K Pop band emerged and walked swiftly past the fans, the screams rose to an almost chant, and I got a video of it for my Instagram stories, but we were in Saigon proper now. 

We stayed at The Tripwriter Hotel, chosen primarily because of the hotel sign, The Tripwriter spelled out in typewriter letters. Apart from that, it was a modest little hotel, small rooms, but clean, very close to everything, and a free breakfast in the morning, so can recommend if you're looking. The sign was hidden behind some ivy though, so even though we were dropped off right next to it, we spent another hour, walking with our backpacks through the heat and past the zillions of scooter drivers who are everywhere, even on the sidewalks, looking for the place, until we looped back and found it.

(There are 4 million people in Saigon, and 2 million drive scooters. This is a true fact that a guide told us.)

Everything in Saigon happens in District One. It is the Connaught Place of districts, if Connaught Place was somehow also Hauz Khas Village and Humayun's Tomb. We were staying in the Pahargunj-y bit, and every night, there were rows of bars, all competing with each other's sound systems, all with white tourists, mostly young, sitting in clumps at the entrance, looking somehow startled. Like, “Am I really in Saigon or just at my local with my friends?” Or maybe I misinterpreted their expressions. Maybe they were thinking, “Look at us here, now, so young, so unstoppable.” As you walked your way to the end of the Long Road With The Bars, you started seeing more local faces. Young Vietnamese also came to this part of town to party, and they also parked themselves at the entrance, watching the world go by, chattering at the tops of their voices. No murmurs for the Vietnamese, by the way. They are a country that like to communicate at the tops of the their voices, whether it's two in the afternoon or midnight on a night bus when everyone's trying to sleep or six am, right outside your hotel room. Even just passing a friend on the street.


I, on the other hand, am far more tolerant about people talking really loudly when I can't understand what they're saying. It's still annoying, but it's just regular annoying, not annoying in the middle of my brain, where I am woken up by my own head conveying to me what people are saying, you know? 

to be continued! 

 

eM's Quick Guide To Panjim

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Other eM's Quick Guides here.

“Holiday? Is like, what? I’m a hyperactive girl, so it may be boring for me to be on the beach doing nothing. I just need to find a place for three weeks and work but sleep in the morning, maybe write a little bit, have a glass of red wine. That’s my perfect holiday.” - French actress Melanie Laurent

  I have a new favourite city and it is Panjim. No jokes--I used to think that the only two cities I'd live in in India were Bombay or Delhi--sorry Bangalore, your water sitch scared me, but it looks like we're all in the same boat, so joke's on me! Ha-ha? (Also the Bangalore traffic, I know we have traffic in Delhi as well, but at least the roads are wider.) Anyhow, no longer! Now my number two choice of city (number one being our default home with our flat and our friends and our resources) is Panjim! So charming, but of course, I'd have to live in the Latin Quarters to feel that charm 24/7, the apartments are just apartments on roads that are just roads in small town India, nothing super charming about them.

But of course, you don't have to MOVE to Panjim to fall in love with it. You could experience it over a weekend like we did, leaving the home comforts of our friends' villa in North Goa to hunt out some City Livin' for the weekend. As a sign up in a coffee shop said, "The beach is boring." (Roxane Gay in this terrific piece sums up what we're all thinking also.)

Here's what we did. I strongly urge you to give Panjim a few days when you're next in Goa, it's almost like being abroad for a second, except with fish thaalis.

The hotel: We stayed in the lovely Latin Quarters (Fontainhas) where there are loads of little guest houses. We found ours on Booking.com, a really old house called Hospedaria Abrigo De Botelho. I chose it primarily for the long narrow wrap-around balcony that the room had on one side, the high ceilings and the ancient old bed. We looked out over tiled rooftops and there was a bonus mama cat with her kittens frolicking on a nearby roof, two of which looked remarkably like our beloved Bruno, so that was excellent.

Since it was pelting down with rain almost every day, I think we were the only guests (except a very noisy family who joined us for breakfast on the first day, playing loud Punjabi music on their mobile phones while the baby squalled. I don't know where they went after, but we missed breakfast for the next two days and didn't run into them again. Thank god. Murder has been committed for less.)

Rain check: It's so nice and quiet in Goa now. The last time I did a full-on monsoon trip, I was in my early twenties, and two girlfriends and I went to the Cavala resort in Baga beach and got SO wasted all the three nights we were there, someone tattled on us back in Bombay and I returned to long faces and lectures from the fellow I was dating then who was a First Class Fuckface (FCF). The trip was fun though, despite two days of hangover after thirteen tequila shots--uff, I will never be that young and that foolish again, which is a blessing.

We had already bought some raincoats--a  yellow button down slicker for me from Oxford stores (very well stocked, a grocery store after my own heart) and K stopped by the side of the road and got himself an orange poncho, which unfortunately also reminds us of the RSS, which is sad, that they've screwed up such a happy colour, but we should try and reclaim it. Just in time too, it rained hard all the days we were in Panjim, puttering about on the scooter.

Coffee/cozy: If you get caught in the rain, make your way to Bombay Coffee Roasters, which is part of the Old Quarters hostel. You can't miss the building, it's got a mural outside made to look like old tiles. They do this hot chocolate which is a massive square of chocolate, about the size of a baby's fist on a stick which you dunk into hot milk. Oh my god, you guys. The sitting, the hot chocolate, the rain, you'll die of coziness.

Another great place to go for coffee (and breakfast if you're up early) is Bodega. It's up a hill and behind a temple, set inside an art institute. It's essentially a courtyard surrounded by three long galleries, and it has coffee, eggs and things AND baked goods. However, do not be fooled by the fancy siren call of Eggs Benedict. I refuse to believe anyone actually loves eggs benny for the sake of eggs benny, you know? You all just think it's a damn posh breakfast or something. And sure, it's pretty, and it's time consuming to make, all that poaching, all that hollandaise, but can we just admit it's sort of... gross? Meh at the best of times. Don't @ me eggs benny lovers! I am ON TO YOU. K ordered it, because we both were slightly hypnotised by it as we always are. Eggssss Benedictttttt. It's like avocado toast, you know? The breakfast you know you should want because it's trendy and fancy but in the end, you should have just stuck to your regular toast and regular eggs.

(That ends my lecture on Eggs Benedict.)

Fish thaalis: On the first day we were there, we wended our way to Ritz Classic. Now, Ritz Classic is the place you tell people in Panjim about and they go, "Ah, Ritz Classic, obviously." It's like when someone comes to Delhi and tells you they've been to Moti Mahal or Pandara Road. You shrug like a Frenchman and go, "But of course."

From what I found out, there are several Ritz Classics, the Classicii as it were, but we went to the one Google Maps sent us to, an air conditioned place with uniformed waiters and knee deep in tables. They had put in seating everywhere, and yet there was a long line (thankfully after we were seated) and sharing tables and people just kept coming, even close to 3 pm, when the restaurant officially closes. It was worth it. The Ritz Classic thaali should be on an Intro To Fish Thaalis course, it is the baseline thaali, it is the thaali that should set expectations, only to shatter your hopes bitterly when you realise what an exception it is. On the plate: prawn curry, TWO pieces of fried fish, each so big, you'll only be able to eat one (and a half if you're lucky), a separate fish curry in a sort of recheado sauce, crabs, mussels, sol kadi, kheer--did I forget anything? Obligatory veg and that dried prawn onion thing. I ate slowly, but I did not eat it all.

On our last day, we went to Corina, another institute, but one that was so dingy it even challenged MY adventurous spirit. It's what the Panjimians call "a taverna," like the Greek (even though Corina is one of the few places that does food), so it smells of old alcoholics, and even had several tables occupied by men drinking busily. It also had the pong of a room not aired out, so while it was clean, it was not exactly appetising, even though the thaali was very good. Go here only if you have the stomach for it and would like feel like one of the locals. There was a mural outside of a man with yellow eyes and that broken vein nose of alcoholics, which I thought was very fitting.

Not a fish thaali: Just down the road from us, a fun little ramen place called Mamarama. We had passed it the day before, in the shadow of a church. We walked in the next day for lunch and heard a loud hallooo. "Guys!" and from behind the counter emerged a Delhi/Bombay/Goa friend who managed the place! Although not biased because of him, Mamarama is super cute with fun food (miso shrimp in butter mmmm) and also breakfast and coffee options if my rant about eggs benny has put you off Bodega (which it shouldn't because it's also lovely. Plus the chef there also consults here so all one umbrella really.)

Draaanks: First: Joseph's. The trendiest little dive bar, and it should be, overrun as it is with people from 99 Springboard (or is it 91? The co-working space is what I mean anyway) and in December, the entirety of the Serendipity Arts Festival descended on it. "A 100 to 200 people," another friend said, shaking his head, "They were spilling out all over the road." As they had to, Joseph's is teeeeny tiny, and that's AFTER they got rid of their taco making tenants next door and added another little room to their establishment. Joseph's is the only dive bar I know in Goa that actually sells Black Jewel and Greater Than gin, and also has Susegad beer on tap and Simba in the fridge, so okay, not very dive bar at all, except the size, the history and the bathroom, which is GENUINE dive for all you tourists, sharing space with a storage room, damp and with a hole in the ground, ominous lightbulb swinging overhead.

Joseph's doesn't do food, so the first night we set out for Clube Nacional. Newly refurbished because a year ago the roof caved in, I remember a couple of years ago, and we were charmed by how old and dingy it was (sensing a pattern here). Now though, it's like a sports bar, everything is newly done but in a bright! loud! way, so even the old uncles drinking (so many old uncles all over Panjim wanting to explain things to us. Mansplaining, Panjim edition) looked a little shell shocked in the light. The food is still really really good though--all these little stuffed pois with things in them, especially the smoked pork, mmmm. Oh, the choriz pao. What a beauty.

One night we went to Pinto's to meet friends and eat and drink as well, and there we had an excellent meal as well, but special shout out for the feijoada, which is this Portuguese dish made with kidney beans and sausage, Goan-ed up with choriz and rajma. Pinto's has a special sausage supplier, so their Goan sausages are light on the vinegar and with a more smoked flavour, and this feijoada is brought in from a nearby home, so it's a special family recipe, I believe. SO GOOD. We also ate it with a different kind of bread than what we'd been having before (I think Clube Nacional also had it). I forget the name, but it had a hard crisp shell and a steamy soft inside, and we were quite greedy about it. Almost like a dinner roll, they served it to us piping hot and you broke the bread in half along the crack on top.

Shopping: Not this time, but when we did our Panjim day trip I went to this little boutique called OMO (recommended by a friend a while ago) and got myself this incredible skirt which I am, of course, being me, saving for the right occasion which is so silly, I should just WEAR it all the time, but I want the first time to be special, you know how it is. Maybe next week when we are in Bangalore? Or maybe the week after that, back in Delhi. I love this skirt, I love its swoopy samurai shape and its high waist, so sexy and how I feel half warrior princess half ballerina. But OMO also has incredible fusion-y type clothes, the kind that I wear often, so if you're into that, definitely go check it out. (there's a Blue Tokai in the back to sweeten your deal.)

OKAY! That's my Panjim list, as always I'd love to hear your feedback, but like, not in a needy way, just in a "oh how nice that someone is reading this thing" way. No links this week, EXCEPT two that I wrote myself.

My mythology column! Last fortnight's theme (and my first) was on Mohini, Vishnu's female avatar. (New one coming out next week.)

Excerpt: How hot was Mohini? So hot that she had an off-again, on-again thing with Shiva in several tales — not quite Ross and Rachel but definitely some Jamie and Claire from Outlander vibes, where Claire's husband left behind in present-day Scotland is Parvati. There are at least three different stories where Shiva either spots her or asks Vishnu as a very special favour to produce her. In most of these stories, he's so overcome that he ejaculates immediately and his semen falls on the ground.

My book recommendation column! This month: privilege and its consequences. Very exciting books.

Excerpt:  I read one-and-a-half sports books for you, dear reader, even though the Organised Sport genre bores me to tears. Early on in Nick Hornby’s football classic Fever Pitch, I was yawning so hard I almost dislocated my jaw. [...] Here is my takeaway: Life is too short and there are too many good books in this world to bother ploughing through something that refuses to hold your interest. Move on and abandon it with, well, abandon.

Newsletter: Goa, baby

 (A little behind on posting here, so this edition is two week's old. For the latest, subscribe!)

What can I say about Goa in the monsoon that you're not already picturing in your head? It's slow, slower than usual. There are fewer people on the road, and most faces are brown. I'm just eating and sleeping and working--a lot of deadlines this past weekend meant that this newsletter is a late one--but I feel more relaxed, just by being somewhere cool and rainy. It's funny how even as a modern day human, we're as affected by the weather as our caveman ancestors. Delhi is a boiling circle of hell, at least it was when I left it, and that definitely knocked on to my mood and my energy levels. Constantly an Irritable Sloth, basically.

It's not even raining that much yet, just a few showers to punctuate the day. Over the weekend, we've booked a hotel in Panjim, and we're going to spend a few days there, but for now, we're staying with friends, lounging about on their sofa, watching the World Cup.

Yes, I am watching football! I don't know why the World Cup is the only exception I make to watching a sport game match on television, because sports = boring, there's only two outcomes: you win or you lose. There's no middle ground with sports, no shades of grey. I find that very dull. But with the football world cup, I think I invent little stories about the teams, imbibe each time with qualities of the country, plus it's quite a quick game, so you can use it to while away an hour and a half, building camaraderie and all the things one builds when one is watching a team sport. I also have made it more fun for self by picking a team out of each group, and have an ALMOST perfect score (Germany let me down). (My picks are on Twitter!)

This week in my occasionally pish-posh life: The first week we were here (last Monday? Gosh, time really HAS slowed down) K's mum was here as well. My mother-in-law, that makes her, but that is such an adult relationship--a HUSBAND, a MOTHER-IN-LAW, holy shitballs, and me only nineteen years old! (I don't think I'll ever be old enough in my head to have actual children.)

She had booked out this amazing Airbnb called Villa Josephine, somewhere in Mapusa. And if you're familiar with Goa, you're going to be like, "Mapusa? Really?" but evidently the area has some quiet roads besides the teeming main market, and Villa Josephine is one of those homes. Part of it is an old house, renovated, the other part is new made to look like old, and there are four bedrooms, which include two ENORMOUS suites, and a palm leaf shaped pool outside, and it was all very pretty and delightful. (Zero internet though, so finish your deadlines and go.)  K's mum specifically picked it because it accepted pets, so began my Month of Dogs, with Lily The Rescue Spitz, who is now a pish-posh dog in her own right.

[The other two dogs are Meghna and Ralf's--Simba the Rottie-Doberman (Roberman? Doweiler?) and Jango the indie. We have all grown very fond of each other, although I am still *slightly* intimidated by Simba, she's just so powerful looking, and her face has this stoic expression that means you can't really tell how she's feeling. However, she does like to sit next to us when we work, and she does that dog thing of sticking her tongue out and then pulling it back into her mouth, which I always associate with great contentment.]

[How are the CATS amidst all this? Well, we have left them to Najma, our housekeeper, who loves them and is used to them, so she pops by once a day to see that everything's cool, no one's starving or dying from lack of water etc. I think they'll be fine, I left TC, my old ginger cat, alone by himself for two months while I went to England with just a maid popping in and occasional friends to see that he hadn't died or anything. He was fine too, and these three have each other, although Bruno and Squishy do fight, I hope our absence means there's less to fight over.]

This week in fish thaalis: Vinayak fish thaalis, though once beloved, have seriously gone down in quality. NOT very nice. I assume the rest of the food is still good, and we are planning on going there for lunch today and trying something else, so let us see. And hope. BUT! Thanks to a prior recommendation from friends Mrig and Akshay, I remembered that there was a place in Mapusa called Spice Goa that was meant to have amazing food. ("Like Goa's Swagath," was Mrig's description.) So we went, it was super busy, but the fish thaali was elaborate and large and delicious and introduced me to the delicate lady fish in a rawa fry which was delectable.

 Eldou's while pretty has also got a not great thaali, but Goan Spice (like Spice Goa but reversed!) continues to be amazing. We have not yet ventured to Catherine's Corner, it being too rainy to go very far--also we'd have to drive by our old house and I feel this pang of jealousy when I think of someone else living there, even though we broke up with it FIRST--but we did go to Mum's Kitchen in Panjim when K's mother was here, and that was really good food too.

Panjim, on the whole, has some interesting food options, and I look forward to exploring them all over the weekend, most especially a place called Pinto's, which has not one single vegetarian item.

This week in stuff I wrote: I was hoping that my new column (!) would be up by the time I wrote this, but alas, it is still not published. I'm doing a series called Mythology for the Millennial (or something along those lines) where I take ancient stories and look at them through a modern lens, but in a chatty, pop-culture sort of way. It will be out on Firstpost! So look out for it there and I'll share a link next week.

Also my review of Sumana Roy's Missing is out in Open magazine.

Excerpt: If it is possible to make someone vanish by just talking around them, that is what has been done to this character. The more the reader learns, the less, paradoxically, do we know. It is as if Kobita is being bricked up behind a wall of description. Who is this woman, why did she leave, will she ever return? We are as helpless as Nayan, waiting for news to be spoonfed to us.

This week in stuff other people wrote

Very tempted to become an Instagram Influencer but a) don't actually want to approach people with a "HEY PLEASE GIVE ME FREE SHIT" b) it's probably not as easy as just messaging people for free shit and c) it sounds like it's damn annoying. (Also hidden caveat d: you can never bitch about anything if it's been given to you for free.)

Excerpt: “Everyone with a Facebook these days is an influencer,” she said. “People say, I want to come to the Maldives for 10 days and will do two posts on Instagram to like 2,000 followers. It's people with 600 Facebook friends saying, ‘Hi, I'm an influencer, I want to stay in your hotel for 7 days,’” she said. Others send vague one-line emails, like “I want to collaborate with you,”with no further explanation. “These people are expecting five to seven nights on average, all inclusive. Maldives is not a cheap destination.” She said that only about 10 percent of the requests she receives are worth investigating.

Good solid writing advice. I don't know why people get so pissed with advice articles. Just don't take the damn advice if it doesn't apply to you, no?

Excerpt: Many people are familiar with this kind of procrastination pattern — suddenly, the chores we’d typically die before doing become irresistible and urgent, because there’s one thing we’d rather do even less: work. I think people in most careers experience this, but writers tend to pathologize it, claiming “writer’s block” and, like, an absent “muse” or whatever.

The ugly Indian tourist. Much has been said about this phenomenon, but while much of the article is true, I think the onus of change lies with the Goa government and not with the tourists who are just coming to have a good time. Don't want people shitting everywhere? Put up free public toilets. Don't want dirty uncles on the beach? Put more cops on patrol. I mean OF COURSE the Indian tourist also has to change, but sometimes these changes have to be forced. There's no way a lot of these behaviours are going to change from within.

Excerpt: Many domestic visitors these days are what Sardesai calls ‘drive-in’ tourists. Arrivals in buses and jeeps are increasingly common for long weekend holidays. They eat food they cook themselves on stoves brought along, sleep in their vehicles or on the beach, and use the fields as toilets. “These people don’t contribute one bit to the economy,” says Sardesai, “They only clog up the beaches and streets and dirty everything. We have to stop this sort of tourist from coming in.”

Delhi's gold diggers. Um, not quite as glam as you're expecting.

Excerpt: “The gold dust gets mixed with the mud outside the workshops. We earn our living from the gold that was otherwise going to be wasted. It is quite similar to a barber’s shop. When the barber walks out of the saloon, he is bound to carry some hair on his body,” said Mohammad Salil, one of around 200 men engaged in the occupation.

A football player on being poor in his childhood. (It reveals how little I know about football by saying "a football player," he's probably really famous.)

Excerpt: I wanted to be the best footballer in Belgian history. That was my goal. Not good. Not great. The best. I played with so much anger, because of a lot of things … because of the rats running around in our apartment … because I couldn’t watch the Champions League … because of how the other parents used to look at me.

Newsletter: Alexa and hula hoops

As always you can subscribe to this newsletter in your inbox in a timely fashion over here.

This week in New Household Members: We are Smart Homed! Well, a little bit anyway. My dad had an Amazon Echo speaker, which he really only used to ask the question "Alexa, how old is Mammootty?" Which is a great party trick, but he found he had no other use for it, so on a recent trip to Cochin, he passed it on to me. I did some research about stuff you can do with Alexa here in India, and while they range from ordering stuff on Amazon to booking a cab, I find myself using it for two things: 1) when I say "Alexa, good morning" she reads me the news from three different sources and ends with a weather report, which is a great way to start your day, especially if, like me, you don't get any newspapers. 2) I've discovered how much I miss having a steady stream of music in the background all day, and so I just call out "Alexa, play ambient music!" (Ambient or baroque is what I use to write to, it's easier when it's music without words and sort of gentle that you can tune in or out of.) but usually I have on a radio station called Radio Paradise, which has been a revelation.

The Echo can pull up music for you from both Amazon Prime music as well as TuneIn, which is an internet radio app that collates a bunch of different stations from around the world (including all of the Beeb), and when I searched online to find the best station on there for a work day, a bunch of people on forums said Radio Paradise was amazing. It is, actually, kind of amazing. We've had people over a lot the last week, and Radio Paradise has been the background score all through. They play a mix of jazz/rock/country and folk. Yesterday, the RJ said that Alexa had integrated Radio Paradise as one of the skills, so all I have to do now is say, "Alexa, play Radio Paradise" instead of "Alexa, on the TuneIn app open Radio Paradise." Oh, and I'm also very pleased with the fact that I can say, "Alexa, volume up!" from across the house and she does it. I have fully drunk of the Kool Aid, and K is so jealous despite the fact that he banished Alexa to my study because he "didn't want Jeff Bezos to listen to all our conversations" that he has built his own Alexa from scratch, which is very impressive, but not as nice as mine.

Oh, and if you're looking for a cool station to listen to at work, Radio Paradise is also streaming. It's not just algorithm driven music, it's real people choosing a playlist which means the music is all very good.


This week in New Fads: If you follow me on Instagram, you will have no doubt seen the extremely dorky video of me trying to hula hoop, while my friends Rosalyn and Janice manage it with ease and panache. However, it was great fun to do---Rosalyn brought over her hula hoop to show us, as she had just been converted into the cult by our friend Mrig in Goa. And I was so inspired, I made an impulsive drunk purchase and bought my own, which should arrive next week. I do like to TRY all the exercise forms possible, before I decide they're not for me. No one can say I don't have an open mind, I'm just very very lazy and also tend to lose patience if I'm not amazing at the new thing within the first two days. Hula hooping could totally be my new thing though. I'm optimistic.

Meanwhile, I've been sorta kinda doing yoga again with the help of an app called Down Dog, which I recommend highly. You can set your experience level, how long you want to do it for, what areas of your body you want to focus on and so on, and it's free! I got bored of our old yoga teacher, and this for about 12 to 20 minutes a day is more challenging, plus we don't have to make small talk. How soon before I completely forget how to talk to new people, do you think?

Last week in travel: Since we last spoke, I was in Cochin for a very brief trip to speak at the Krithi Lit Fest. I had a lovely session talking about women and mythology with Namita Gokhale, moderated by my friend (and sometimes editor) Manasi Subramaniam. Later that night, we all went out to dinner with my father, who took us to the Seagull Club in Fort Kochi, which I recommend to anyone in that area. So lovely, the restaurant has a sit out that's right over the water.  Then the next day I came back to Delhi and I will be here for some time, even though little pangs about a holiday that is not lit fest or wedding related are happening. As soon as I finish my book!

Friday Link List For The Bored And The Weary

  Super Bollywood movie type story by Snigdha on a juvenile school shooter in Haryana who turned into a Don.

Excerpt: Akash was keen to return to “normal life”. In 2008, he came out of the observation home on bail. He was 15. His parents had moved back to their village, Bhamrauli, on Pataudi road in Gurgaon. In 2010, he took his Class 10 board exam from an open school in Faridabad. “Then, we admitted him to a regular school in Faridabad for Classes 11 and 12, but a friend of Abhishek’s joined the school a few months after, told everyone about Akash’s past, and the principal asked us to take our son out,” said Kamlesh, his mother. The family made a few more attempts at returning him to school. “They always found out who I was and struck my name off the rolls,” said Akash.

Next time you take your laptop to a coffee shop, maybe don't.

Excerpt: Logging in for two hours of free Wi-Fi requires the user’s email address, which goes onto the Rose’s mailing list — and while people can log right back in, the expiration reminds them that it might be time to order another round. Servers circulate to ask if they can get something else for a customer tied to his electronic devices. And Wi-Fi service ends at 5:30 p.m., to signal that the workday has ended and dinner service is about to begin. [... ]Mr. Neroni tried extending the Wi-Fi until 7 one night, “as an experiment,” he said. “People looked up and figured we forgot to turn it off. And it was ‘Oh, boy,’ and a line of people carrying their open laptops into the dining room so they could keep working.”

Related: how remote working may not be as incredible as it looks.

Excerpt: The desire to live cheaply abroad while remaining part of a like-minded social group makes a certain amount of sense. But how can you be confident that a random collection of fellow travelers won’t undermine your productivity and happiness, to say nothing of being fun or intellectually stimulating? Maybe I just have a bad attitude, but in my experience, most people are a little annoying, even the ones with good hearts and minds. Think of any coffee shop you’ve been to and how elusive productivity can be—with patrons talking loudly, lingering at the register when there’s a line, piling their personal effects on adjacent tables that others might want to use.

If you want to keep believing in magic, don't look at these behind-the-scenes photos of the Harry Potter movies.

Excerpt: Most people are (well aware that Robbie Coltrane isn’t actually as tall as Rubeus Hagrid. He’s playing a character, and with some simple movie magic, audiences can be led to believe that Coltrane is actually a half-giant wizard without a single shred of doubt. Still, though, seeing him out of costume seated beside a stunt double in a half-giant Hagrid suit doesn’t feel right. What’s worse is that the double is holding a dummy of Harry Potter, and Coltrane is gently rubbing its chin.

While I continue to love This Is Us, this parody is very funny.

Excerpt: JACK: The way you know I’m great is that everyone keeps insisting how great I am.

REBECCA: How are you so perfect, babe?

JACK: Let’s do this activity before I die, which is absolutely going to happen.

I love this project called The Museum of Material Memory founded by Aanchal Malhotra which gets people to write in with their family keepsakes.

Excerpt: In those days, it was customary to include a cabinet for dolls in a bride’s wedding presents; this was at a time when most brides were no more than ten or twelve years old. The doll’s showcase possibly travelled with many child brides, across paddy fields and city by lanes, keeping pace with palanquins and jostling on boats across Bengal’s wide rivers. For these child brides, the doll’s showcase served as an antidote to homesickness, as a pacifier to deal with the pangs of separation at a tender age. In a strange new life, it was a vestige of the familiar and the known, a reminder of a home so far away. And though my grandmother was no child bride, custom demanded that a doll’s showcase follow her to her affinal home. Complete with a set of miniature silver utensils- the wooden showcase found pride of place in one corner of the marble floored drawing room in her new house. But my grandmother dreamt beyond the roles of domesticity that the young owner of such a showcase was generally relegated to. She wanted to fill this wooden cabinet, with its glass paned doors and rounded patterns, with dolls from across the world. And that’s just how it came to be.\

Newsletter: Where did you come from, where did you go

This morning, turning on my laptop, sitting in a hotel room with my half-packed backpack on the floor next to me, I was mesmerised by this video of how ubiquitous our travel Instagram really is. I saw the video only AFTER I posted this photo of a sunset from my hotel room yesterday.

No one likes to be a cliche. Sometimes as I walk behind people boarding a plane, and I see a lot of them stop to take a selfie with the plane behind them, I wonder, "When are you going to look at this photo again? Why is this moment something you want to remember?" But then I am jaded, especially recently with too many plane journeys, my back has had a crick in it for the last two MONTHS which I haven't been able to get rid of, and the blame for which I lay entirely at the doorstep of air travel.

I'm in Cochin! I realise I forgot to mention, and if you didn't really pay attention to my list of travel destinations in my newsletter last week, then you're probably really confused right now. After we got married in October last year, I promised my father he could have a party for us in Kerala with his whole fam. (We limited our guest list for our Delhi party as much as we could, so no craziness, and I got to hang with everyone, even if it was just for fifteen minutes.) This was also the first time K was meeting THIS side of the family, but I think he's really gotten into the Malayali thing--he certainly likes the food, and he wore a mundu for the wedding lunch and then everywhere else after.

Anyway, we had a super time. After the Day of the Parties (lunch and dinner) we took off with two of my cousins to a beach resort called Sea Lagoon on Cherai beach, which is the closest one to Cochin and surprisingly clean despite being basically a city beach. It was a strange beach though, not like I've ever seen before--very high tide, a thin sliver of sand and then just rocks, so if you wanted to walk, you either hugged the rocks or got your clothes wet. Odd! But no one was complaining. Sea Lagoon had an infinity pool overlooking the backwaters, and I had a full on first world problem about deciding between a massage and a swim and I KNOW, my life is VERY hard. (I decided on the swim in the end, followed by Bloody Marys. An excellent choice.)

The next day we went off on a backwaters cruise, making a stop along the way for prawn and rock fish ("modso" in Goa, "moda" over here), which the cook fried up and sent out for dinner and we made absolute pigs out of ourselves just stuffing our faces, until 8.30 rolled around and we were so sleepy because of all the eating and the movement of the water and the sun...

I do feel quite refreshed now. I was a bit blue earlier this month, I don't know why, maybe just general ennui or malaise, and now all my ennui has flown away and I am ready to be cheerful and more mainstream rom com than French art house film. Only a little though, I still enjoy hating people.

This week in speaking engagements: I have mentioned this before, but I am off to Bombay this evening to attend the Gateway Lit Fest over the weekend. The schedule is up and I have to moderate one very exciting panel with Baby Halder, Nandini Sundar, Rana Ayyub and Nalini Jameela. Unfortunately, I don't know enough Hindi to do my very complicated questions justice, so I will also have an interpreter on stage, which is a little embarrassing if you look at it from one angle, but from another, it means it's a more inclusive panel than the rest, because now the whole audience has two languages in which to understand what we're all saying. (I'm hoping Nalini Jameela, author of Autobiography of a Sex Worker, originally written in Malayalam, will also know enough Hindi otherwise we'll have to get TWO interpreters on the same stage.) Still: exciting panel, right? I have lots of very good questions to keep conversation going freely--and I wrote them all down and then promptly lost the piece of paper I wrote them down on because I apparently still live in a pen and paper era, but not to worry, I remember most of what I thought. Anyway, you should totally come. I also have a panel on the third day when I'll be talking very fittingly about writing in English and whether it's "limitation or liberation"? My view? Neither. It's just the way I communicate.

I wrote that in Cochin. Since then, I finished off my lit fest (and three days of catching up with old friends as well) and am now back in Delhi, where winter left like a ghosting houseguest and didn't even bother to leave a note to say thanks for putting up with me for so long.

Last week in speaking engagements: The panel went as well as can be expected for somewhere where three people speak different languages. Turns out Nandini Sundar cancelled, but the programme still had her name on it, so I prepared for her and then she just wasn't there. Apparently she cancelled AFTER the programme was printed, which explains why the festival organisers didn't send me her book, not just an oversight as I thought.

I'm actually a pretty good moderator--is that okay for me to say about myself? I think it's because I enjoy reading so much--so I always read the panelists books before I get to my questions, and since I like reading, I like talking about reading, and the writing process. It's always a bit of a pain to be a moderator instead of just a regular participant, because you have to do all the heavy lifting as it were, but we had fun. There was a Malayalam translator for Nalini, and I used my v v v basic Hindi for Baby, while also asking Rana to jump in whenever I couldn't quite get the words I wanted. We had an interesting chat, all of us, and I remembered not to fiddle with my mouth or my hair. (This is what wedding rings are useful for.)

Anyway, I'm doing a whole Impressions Diary for Open Magazine, so I'll share the link with you next week.


Last week in former homes: Since we were staying at the Grand Hotel in Ballard Estate, we didn't venture to the 'burbs at all this trip. Normally, I spend a significant amount (if not all) my time in Bandra, but this time, I had to stay close to the festival venue, and also I was enjoying being a townie. I always forget how Gothic bits of South Bombay are, like you're in some other country entirely. Ballard Estate especially with its heritage buildings, but we were walking to the Strand book stall, to pick over its leavings like vultures, and we took a wrong turn and suddenly we were in this Parisian street complete with a beautiful old movie theatre which had a marquee even. (Which reminds me I should book my Black Panther tickets soon.)

Maybe we will move back to Bombay one day, and maybe this time we'll manage to live in Colaba or thereabouts, beautiful buildings and 3 am walks for inspiration. (Oh, who am I kidding? I'll be asleep by 11.) Still, the last time I lived in Bombay, I basically lived in Bandra, and there's so much more the city has to offer. Imagine if I had never left Nizamuddin for our current residence. Imagine not knowing the joys of this side of town, everything, except Khan Market, a stone's throw (and okay, okay, half an hour in traffic) away.

This week in stuff I wrote: My previously unpublished, specially commissioned essay is out in a new Penguin anthology called Eleven Ways To Love. It's called A Cross-Section of My Bad Boyfriends and I think it is both funny and wise. Don't just buy it for me, though. There's a bunch of excellent essays in there, all of which will make you think really deeply about modern Indian relationships. Buy here. 

I also have an essay out in this week's Open Magazine. It's called The Other Montgomery Girl and it's about Emily of New Moon, a character I enjoy reading about even more than Anne. I tied this up with how depressed Montgomery was in the last years of her life. Read the essay here and read Emily of New Moon free on Gutenberg here.

Monday link list

So is Kerala seeing a rise in literary festivals?
To begin with, unlike well-known major literary festivals organized in other parts of India, such events in a state like Kerala give space to regional writers and intellectuals, many of whom are household names but not as well known outside the state.
KLF had around 500 speakers, roughly twice the number of speakers at this year’s Jaipur Literary Festival (JLF), arguably India’s best-known annual literary event.

- Since I'm going off to ANOTHER lit fest in Kerala next week, here's why.

But what can we do? Since I started working, I’ve never felt in control of my emails, and that is how I ended up with 16,516 unread ones. When I tell Cooper, he sounds genuinely outraged: “That’s appalling!” When friends saw my number, their eyes widening in revulsion, I took a perverse pride in their horror. There was something delicious in the slutty slovenliness of my unkempt inbox; it was my anarchic rebellion against the tyranny of digital efficiency.
For years, this has been my “system”: if an email arrived that looked very important and required time and consideration for its response, I would decide to go back to it later, and mark it “unread”. And if an email arrived that looked liked junk, I would not open it, just leave it unread. Get it? The junk emails ended up looking exactly the same as the very important emails. Haha! Ah.

- On trying out the idea of Inbox Zero. (I don't actually get that much email that isn't just other newsletters.)

Writers, it’s safe to say, wish to be read. They wish to be heard. But they don’t necessarily wish to be seen. This decade has moved us on an ever speedier conveyor belt from the quaintness of blogging and simple Facebook updates to the more public and frankly manic live video posts on Facebook and Instagram, not to mention literary high-wire performances like The Moth and Literary Death Match. The question is, what does it mean for literature, and where is it going?

- On balancing writing and social media. (PS: please never forward your snarky thoughts about this little old newsletter to me because I will be DEVASTATED and I need to finish writing my next book, no time to devastate.)

What really startled her was that everyone seemed to think she’d written a romantic novel. She believed Rebecca was about jealousy, and that all the relationships in it – including the marriage between De Winter and his shy second wife – were dark and unsettling. (“I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool” hardly betokened love between equals.) The idea had emerged out of her own jealousy about the woman to whom her husband, Tommy “Boy” Browning, had briefly been engaged. She had looked at their love letters, and the big elegant “R” with which Jan Ricardo signed her name had made her painfully aware of her own shortcomings as a woman and a wife.

- On Rebecca, one of my favourite books of all time--on its 80th anniversary. I was completely oblivious to all the lesbian undertones.

Her stream of nonsense words becomes the turbulence out of which she lifts herself, like an aircraft with continent-spanning wings, into song. In under 2 minutes, the spotlight snaps off; the whole room is drenched in light; her audience erupts in applause as she begins to sing in Hindi. She is, in all respects, the woman destined to strike lightning into your heart. When she sings “Bijli giraane main hoon aayee”, you want to burst into applause too.

- Let's face it: we all thought Sridevi was singing "Bijli KI RAANI" Supriya's excellent piece on the actor before her comeback hit English Vinglish came out has been doing the rounds since Sridevi died.

Watch: If you're looking for a fun, feel-good show you can watch during the whole week and be done with, leaving you with a sense of well-being, look no further than Queer Eye on Netflix. You'll love it.