Poppadom

The things I love about winter

2011-12-24T02:10:00.001-05:00

It's a very cold day here. I went out to stand in a patch of sunshine but a chilly breeze chased me back in. I have another six weeks of winter left. I was inclined to be gloomy about it, but well, that doesn't help anyone, does it? So I decided to make a list of the things I love about winter, to read over whenever the cold makes me grumpy.
1. There's a deep pleasure in sipping a hot cup of tea.
2. The wind stings my cheeks to a rather becoming pink.
3. Scarves! I love my multicoloured scarves, but feel a little silly wearing them in the summer.
4. Getting myself to go for a run in winter is especially hard, but once I do, I get the roads all to myself. And the cold air causes a weirdly pleasant brainfreeze.
5. Now, admittedly I haven't been to any this year, but still, bonfires!
6. Socks. I could write an ode to my socks. Indeed, I'm only just battling the urge. But never was an item of clothing more appreciated.
7. Winter vegetables. Everything is young and green and crisp in the winter. And once you've screwed up the courage to plunge your hands into cold water and wash them, they're a real pleasure to cook with.

I'm going to continue adding to that list, each time I find myself thinking nasty things about the cold. Sigh. It'll probably be a mile long by New Year's. Still, I meant what I said about the vegetables. Rooting about in fridge recently, I found a couple of ears of sweet corn. Now, roasted corn on the cob is delicious, but I wanted something I could dish out and share. So I took the extra step of cutting the corn off its cob with a knife.
Then all I did was saute it with a little salt, sugar and pepper. A squeeze of lime juice and a few coriander leaves for colour and it was ready. I do love sweet corn. I eat it kernel by kernel, and love how they burst in my mouth. There are a hundred different ways in which you can make this, of course. Chili powder, butter, chaat masala, mint... But I like simple best.

I have no real recipe for you today. Just saute your corn with a little salt, sugar and pepper, till it changes colour slightly, going from yellow to orange. Err on the side of undercooking.

Winter porridge

2011-12-20T09:19:00.000-05:00

The cold makes me very grumpy. For the past month, I've been surviving on large amounts of caffeine and a steady stream of cussing. This morning was no different. The dog woke me up at six and no amount of pleading or shouting would stop him from barking in my ear. I could've slept through that too, but once his barks hit a certain hysterical note I know I had better get moving. I dressed, attached the leash to his collar, and led him out, all the time cursing inventively. Indeed, the very colourfulness of my tirade gave me a grim sort of satisfaction. Panda danced beside me, quite oblivious while I blistered his ears.

Somewhere after the third block though, I finally ran out of nasty things to say and was forced to look about for inspiration. The street was very foggy; it was like looking through an out-of-focus lens. Strange then, how it made the tar road look blacker, the green of the ferns greener. Panda's whiskers quivered when he spotted a labrador ambling past, while the lab's owner wished me a cheery good morning. And at around that moment, I finally tired of being grumpy.

I came home full of good resolutions and I cemented them with porridge. Now, I've been on a bit of a health kick lately, and it has become my habit to eat some sort of porridge for breakfast. Usually quick-cook oats in milk with a swirl of honey hits the spot, but today, I wanted something more. I dug out Amma's stash of daliya (broken wheat) and soaked a couple of tablespoonfuls in hot water. In half an hour the grains were soft and chewy. I cooked them down with milk, threw in a few chopped almonds and raisins, and added a whole bunch of spice: cinnamon, freshly grated nutmeg, a pinch of cardamom, and a grating of orange peel. I sweetened the whole mixture with jaggery and it was ready.

Now, I'm the first person to admit the stuff is distinctly homely looking. It's clumpy and the jaggery turns it an uninspiring beige. But oh, it smelled so good that the dog stopped worrying the sofa cushions to sit at the kitchen door and whine. And as I finally sat down to my bowlful, wreathed in fragrant steam, winter didn't seem too bad.

Broken wheat (daliya) porridge (1 serving)
Daliya: 1 1/2 tbsp
Water: 1/2 cup
Milk: 3/4 cup
Nutmeg: 1/4 tsp
Cinnamon: 1/4 tsp
Cardamom: 1/4 tsp
Jaggery: 1-2 tbsp
Almonds (blanched) : 5-6
Raisins: a small handful
An orange

Boil the water and pour it over the daliya. You can also cannily use the same water to blanch your almonds in. After a half-hour of soaking, transfer to a thick-bottomed pot and pour in the milk. Boil on medium-high heat, while stirring continuously till the mixture thickens. This will take about 8-10 minutes. Once it is sufficiently thick (remember, it will continue thickening even after it's been taken off the heat) turn off the stove and stir in the spices, jaggery, raisins and almonds. Grate a little orange peel over the porridge and serve, steaming.
Note: I used jaggery because that was what I had on hand. I'm trying to stay away from processed sugars these days and I was out of honey. But I imagine honey, or molasses, or even maple syrup will be very good too.

Sweet. Always.

2011-09-06T13:15:00.000-04:00

Every year, no matter where we lived, we celebrated Pongal in true Tamilian style. Amma would wake us up at the crack of dawn, we'd bathe sleepily, wear new clothes, and watch a pot of milk boil over. The boiling over of the milk is to signify abundance, but at the time, it just seemed rather wasteful. And for breakfast, there would be pongal.

There are two sorts of pongal that Amma makes: the salty one or ven pongal, and the sweet chakkara pongal. Amma insisted that we eat both sorts, so I'd force down a minuscule portion of the salty stuff, and then eagerly reach for the sweet. For chakkara pongal, rice is cooked into a slurry with milk and ghee, while in another pot, jaggery is boiled with water to make a thick syrup. Everything is then stirred up together and the rice turns brown and sticky. Raisins are dropped in and they plump in the heat. Amma finishes it all off with a dusting of cardamom, ginger, and freshly grated coconut. I couldn't get enough of the stuff.

For a long time, it seemed almost sacrilegious to make pongal on any day, other than Pongal. So I'd wait for it on the breakfast table, each fourteenth of January, wondering if it would be as good as I remembered. It always was.

These days, we make it far more often. It makes for an indulgent weekend breakfast, and the leftovers are sublime, just eaten cold from the fridge. And really, we never bother with making the ven pongal anymore. Given a choice between salty and sweet, I pick sweet. Always.

A spice market

2011-08-24T15:33:00.000-04:00

After weeks of talking about it, Amma and I finally headed out to old Delhi, to see it all decked out for the month of Ramzaan. I have heard fabulous tales of exotic spices, fairy lights, music and roasting kebabs. True, most of those tales were for Charminar in Hyderabad, where I never managed to go during the month before Eid. Nevertheless, I was determined to recreate them here, in Delhi, when I can.

Amma's friend Uma aunty was our guide. She was born in Delhi and went to school and college here, and is past mistress of the art of shopping in Shahjehanabad's maze of gullies. She led us first to the Khari Baoli spice market, which is where I stocked up on lots of stuff that should all make eventual appearances here.
The streets were crowded as always, with the dry fruit vendors doing an extremely brisk trade. Every shop had gunny sacks and baskets filled with almonds of different grades, sticky brown raisins, large dats, small dates, dry dates and fresh 'uns, cashewnuts stacked in tall plastic bottles, dried plums, figs dried and threaded on twigs, and oh, so much more. I tasted, negotiated and bought, and then timidly asked if I could take photographs. The shop owner waved his acquiescence; he was already busy with his next customer.

In another shop, I snapped away as Amma bought a hundred grams of bright green cardamom pods. This stuff could be currency. I was already dreaming of steaming cups of eliachi chai when we passed a gunny sack filled with makhana.

Makhana are popped lotus seeds: basically Indian popcorn. We don't see much of it down south, but I've heard of how it makes a really wonderful kheer. Of course, I bought some. I told myself it was for the blog.

By this time, the spice market was getting rather crowded. There were men everywhere, carrying heavy plastic sacks on their heads. Barrows loaded with mysterious boxes were being wheeled hither and thither. It began drizzling and the sky looked moody. We adjudged it wise to turn back.

On our way back though, we passed the clothing and dress materials market, and of course we had to stop. I have only these two measly pictures: of the interior of a dress shop, and of mounds of freshly ground henna, that smelled really fragrant. I was too busy pointing, discussing, bargaining, buying, and my camera lay in my bag, forgotten.

Pink snow

2011-08-09T15:33:00.000-04:00

It's taken me a while to get used to this Delhi monsoon. It's a cycle we go through every few days. The days get hotter and hotter till the tar on the road melts and sticks to my sandals. Expeditions outdoors are invested with a sense of daring. Only the most intrepid brave the heat.

The evenings get very still. The disappearance of the sun brings no relief. The earth takes its time dispensing the heat it has absorbed all day. The air is heavy. It is at this time that troops of ants march relentlessly indoors, finding cracks in the wall to disappear into. Panda takes a break from lying panting on the floor, to paw at them investigatively.

We carry on like this for as long as six days at a time, and by the fourth day, take to predicting the rain, knowing it will come. Each time though, the rain takes longer, as if testing our faith. When it comes, it comes with almost no warning. The sky is no help. It continues looking grey and ominous while the sun beats down from it, and even after the rains it remains that way.

The rains bring some relief. The morning after them, Panda and I have great fun peeking at our reflections in puddles. While he shies away growling, I self-consciously check my hair. It is very pleasant on those mornings, just after the rain. But as the run goes higher and higher, it dries up all those little puddles determinedly. By evening, all that is left of them is a crust of mud along the sides of the road. And then it all begins again.

The one good thing about all this is that I'm getting a great deal of use out of my ice cream maker. Why have lemonade when you can churn it into a sorbet? Why drink coffee when you can eat gelato? Don't throw away that awfully grainy fudge, churn it into ice cream. We have contrived to spend these monsoons merrily indeed.

In that spirit, I hacked away at a watermelon, juiced its innards, strained and chilled it. I then churned it to pretty pink snow and ate it out in the garden, in defiance of the sun.

My pick-me-up

2011-07-15T12:18:00.001-04:00

Whenever he gets on the subject of filter coffee, Appa gets quite lyrical. He waxes poetic on how the decoction collects in a pool under the filter, drop by precious drop. How the milk is warmed gently, so as not to startle it, and then the decoction is poured into it in a steady stream. He describes how the concentrate blooms in brown ripples in the white milk. Then how the coffee is poured back and forth between utensils to warm it to tongue-blistering temperatures without allowing it to boil over, and to develop a thick froth on its surface. And then finally how it’s poured, masterfully, into a steel tumbler and must be drunk hot. Immediately.

But that is his description, not mine. For twenty three years, I’ve been able to take or leave coffee, as it comes. Indeed, my indoctrination into this coffee-drinking culture has been so subtle that I’ve only just realised it. But three months in Chennai, spent with relatives whose day doesn’t begin without a brimming tumblerful of coffee prepared just as described, made me appreciate its value. Recent events: an overload of work and a pleasant but time-consuming distraction, have made me cut down on sleep and so become more and more dependent on caffeine.

It has taken me a while and much experimentation, to decide exactly how I like my coffee. I tried it in Appa’s way. It wasn’t for me. His coffee was so hot I lisped for a week afterwards. Perima makes a smashing, perfect-temperatured cup of coffee, but she lives in Coimbatore: impractical for a weekday morning coffee run. Amma, with the best of intentions, is determined to make me drink as much milk as possible, and so adds far too much of it to my coffee. As for the cook’s coffee, ah, the less said, the better. I finally decided to take matters into my own hands, inspired by this recipe on Food52.

It was a weekend morning, humid and drizzly. Panda stared pensively out of the window while I boiled my water. We waited together for the decoction to percolate. When I finally had a little brown pool, I stirred in some brown sugar and a pinch of cinnamon. A generous clattering of ice cubes and a pour of milk later, it was ready.

I took a sip and I knew. I finally loved coffee.

Bestmilkshakeever

2011-07-08T05:48:00.003-04:00

I have a pretty deep aversion to milk. Apparently, this wasn’t always so. Amma tells me that when I was a baby I couldn’t get enough of the stuff. I’d stand up in my crib and point to the milk cooling atop the fridge, demanding a bottleful. However that may be, as far back as I can remember I’ve always looked upon milk with suspicion.

When we lived in Delhi last, we were in the thick of the White Revolution. Amma would send me to the local Mother Dairy outlet with a milk pail and coins jingling in my pocket. I’d stand in line to wait my turn, then insert a coin, and the milk would come gushing out from a hole in the wall.

I remember how Amma would place a tall glassful of steaming milk mixed with Bournvita before me, each morning and evening. I’d sit at the table and stare at it, watching with morbid fascination the yellow, glistening drops of fat that would float on its surface. The undissolved Bournvita would swim about in brown specks. As the milk cooled, a thin skin would form on and I would watch, unable to look away, and grow more and more disgusted.

Amma would catch me at it and scold. Finally, I’d hold my nose and chug it all down, only to breathe in immediately afterward and be hit by its full flavor. That sweet, almost animal scent would send me rushing to the sink to regurgitate everything I had just imbibed.

Ah, considering I’m here to tell you about a milkshake, I realise that wasn’t the best preamble. But bear with me, I'm getting to the good stuff. Of late, I’ve made my peace with milk. As long as its true nature is disguised I quite appreciate it. I grate cheese into my sandwiches, mix curd into my rice, and eat copious amounts of ice cream. I boil it and thicken it into custards and puddings, and blend it into milkshakes: my latest addiction.

These days after the dog and I come in from our morning run, he heads panting for his water bowl, and I head for the blender. I use milk that’s been frozen solid and so is quote odourless. It’s deeply satisfying to gouge away at that block of ice with a fork till I have enough chunks for a glassful. Then I add in whatever strikes my fancy. Some days it’s coffee and cinnamon, on others it’s mango chunks and saffron, and on the boring days, it’s simply cocoa. Of late though, it has been jackfruit jam, and it is ohsogood. Indeed, it’s so good that my words run in together whenever I try to describe it.

The jackfruit jam isn’t my own invention. It is something Perima makes for me. She does it in large batches: the flesh from ten jackfruits is piled into a giant mound and steamed in a pressure cooker till it is soft and slippery. Then, an equal quantity by weight of jaggery is added, and the mixture is stirred for hours, till it turns shiny and unctuous. This reduction can be added to coconut milk for a payasam I’ve had happy dreams about. It can be slathered on buttered toast for a very rich breakfast. It can be eaten in large spoonfuls, standing, with the refrigerator door open. And it can be blended with frozen milk and a grating of nutmeg, for the best milkshake I’ve ever tasted.

The nutmeg adds a whole new dimension to the shake, something that only when you taste it all together you realise was missing. It adds an exotic sort of warmth to the background, and pleasantly dispels any hint of milky or overly-jackfruity smells. Chugged down with a couple of shortbread cookies, this makes for a pretty spectacular way of getting your daily calcium.

Food and history in Old Delhi

2011-06-29T08:04:00.005-04:00

Old Delhi has been one of my favourite places to explore. I love the old-world politeness of the people and the narrow gullies that make up the most fascinating maze. I've seen it on cold, wintry evenings, when Nan khatai vendors do a brisk trade, and if you listen hard, you can hear the crackles when sweet potato skins burn and blister over red coals, sending up an irresistible toasty smell. I've seen it on burning afternoons, when the roads are crowded with rickshaw pullers and busy shoppers, oblivious to the heat. That’s the time when the lassiwalas powder ice by heaving cloth sacks filled with it at the road, over and over again, and then scoop up the powder into earthen mugs filled with frothy buttermilk, scent it with rosewater, and top it with a generous smear of cream. Nothing quenches thirst better.

But I longed to see it in the morning, a time when there would be few tourists or outsiders, and the roads would be empty, save for the chaiwallas and the pigeons.

Since I write a food blog, and am acutely interested in all matters gustatory, it made sense to combine my wish to see Old Delhi in the morning, with one for breakfast. So it transpired that I met up with Haifa, Rahul and Richard at the Barakhamba Road metro station, at 8 am last Saturday morning, with a plan of renting bicycles and riding them to Chawri Bazaar. The idea was awfully clever: We’d cycle the five kilometers to Chandni Chowk, thereby working up an appetite and negating the calories we’d then consume. It didn't work out quite that way though. There were cycles aplenty, but not a single one with air in its tyres. The stand attendant was sleepy and seemed confused and subsequently baffled by my demand for a bicycle pump. We gave in and took the metro.

The Chawri Bazaar metro station is three levels below the ground and as you ride up on the escalator, the sounds of the morning slowly become louder and clearer. We stepped out in the sunshine -below the familiar tangle of wires- to incongruously empty roads only populated by stray dogs and a few rickshawallas. I had a map and a list of places to go to, in sequence, much to the amusement of my friends. I led them straight to Shyam Sweets and without bothering with the menu, ordered us platefuls of bedmi aloo, halwa nangori, and earthen mugs, brimming with lassi. The aloo curry was thick and brown and spicy, while the bedmi accompanying it was crisp and fragrant. We broke off bits with our fingers and ate, with sighs of contentment. I tried not to estimate just how much ghee the halwa must have absorbed to turn just that shade of glistening gold, and instead scooped it up with shards of delicately crisp nangori. Cold lassi washed down a very fine breakfast indeed.

Noticeably slower, we walked up the Chanwri Bazaar road to the Jama Masjid. Richard, a history major, explained the mosque's history to us as we climbed up the steps to the massive entrance. We walked around the central courtyard -large enough that 20,000 people can pray there at one time- and then sat in one corner, to take it all in. The mosque was already filling with tourists and the devout, and the pigeons had a giant square, filled with grain, all to themselves. A pool in the center of the courtyard glistened greenly in the sunlight. A faint breeze was blowing, and flocks of pigeons swirled in the sky above us. We sat there contentedly for about half an hour.

As we emerged from the Masjid, right opposite the main entrance, I saw Mushtaq Panwalla, and had to stop. The owner was a smiling but not particularly garrulous gentleman in a pan-stained white kurta. I chatted away about how fond I was of pan, and how I hadn’t yet sampled a really good one in Delhi, at least not comparable to the ones in Hyderabad. He nodded sagely, smiled, and began preparing three meetha pans for me to take home. Once he began, I fell silent. There was too much going on. Bottle after bottle filled with strange looking ingredients was opened, quantities measured, and each placed precisely on giant betel leaves. I identified cardamom, sugar balls, coconut, rose water, chunna, gulkand, and saunf, but there must've been, oh, a hundred things more. Several onlookers joined us. I think we all released a collective breath we didn't know we'd been holding, when he finished. He rolled each pan up expertly, inserted them in paper cones, and put them in a bag for me to take home and share with Appa.

Still talking about the panwalla, we made our way to the Red Fort, paid our entrance fee, and walked inside. Now, this is a food blog, and I suspect my impressions on the fort are the substance of a full, rambling blog post by themselves, so I will content myself by saying that I could’ve spent all day there. In the blazing sunlight, filled with tourists with loud voices and cameras, stripped of its mirrors and precious stones and gold scrollwork, it was still incredibly lovely. The buildings had the sort of dignity that only comes with age and endurance. We walked through silently.

Once we emerged from the Red Fort’s spell though, it was back to gluttony. I was leading everyone unerringly (My nose was buried in my map, so I might’ve bumped into a few people along the way) towards Kake di Hatti, widely renowned to make the best paranthas in Delhi. We unfortunately paused at this small restaurant for cold water and Mountain Dew, and ended up sitting inside and ordering some of the fluffy bhaturas they were frying up in a giant kadai outside. The bhaturas were a disappointment, as were the unassertively spiced chole that accompanied them. It was a lesson to us not to venture into shops not previously recommended by those who know best.

The final stop we made was at Bade Miyan Kheer, a tiny shop without a board, with a cramped seating area and warm, smiling owners. Rahul and Haifa aren’t big sweet eaters and we were all still pretty stuffed, so we only ordered a single plateful. It came to us, tan and sticky, chilled to just the right temperature, in a small square bowl with four spoons. There was silence as we ate; the only sound was of our spoons scraping the bowl, again and again. The kheer was gloriously creamy and deceptively simple. It was rice, milk, and sugar, so masterfully treated that they had all fused together, to form a sum so much larger than the parts. The rice grains were visible but melted in your mouth. There was sweetness, but it was gentle and gave way to the subtler flavours of thick, fat milk and full, creamy rice. We ordered another plateful and polished it off in short order.

Then, deeply content, we boarded the metro and returned to the present.

All my research for this trip (And trust me, there were pages of it) was gleaned from this lovely blog written by Pamela Timms. She is inspiring, and each time I read her words, I want to race out, take the metro to whichever place she recommends, and eat till I’m surfeited.
I also got additional material from Rahul Verma’s columns in the Hindu. I want his job.

If you want the addresses to any of the places I visited, drop me an email or leave a comment to this post, and I’ll do my best to direct you there.

PS: In case you were wondering, the pan was delicious, and really as good as any I’ve eaten in Hyderabad.

Jewel tones

2011-06-24T02:31:00.065-04:00

Last week, Appa went to Bhilai, and brought back a giant basket, full of jamuns. They last for a hearbreakingly short season here; blink and they're gone. So a giant box full of these oblong, so-purple-they're-almost-black fruit was quite a jackpot. We washed them, and when they were still wet dipped them in salt, and ate them till our tongues turned blue. We gave away copious handfuls. Amma got on the phone with Perimma, and took down recipes for mor kuzhambu with jamuns in it. (A yogurt-based stew. Very good. I must learn to make it some time, and show you.) I spent a couple of blissful afternoons out on the lawn, with a book, a bowlful of jamuns, and a screw of salt. I'd offer from time to time to share my fruit with the dog, but he regarded them with suspicion.

After a few days of this, the basket was still half-full and I was beginning to miss the normal pink hue of my tongue. So, I decided to make a frozen yoghurt, with nothing but yoghurt, sugar, and jamuns. I may have been a little too enthusiastic with the jamuns. There was certainly far more jamun flesh than was seemly, but the moment the fruit touched the yoghurt, it created these deep purple rivulets in the pristine white, and I just kept shaking in more and more, to see how dark the colour could get. I churned the mix in my ice cream maker, and in half an hour it was ready.

I won't give you the recipe today, because, well, I didn't follow one. Besides, next time despite how gloriously purple it turns everything, I might add slightly less fruit and maybe even strain the mixture, so there are no distracting bits of jamun skin.
But I'll have to wait till next summer for that.

PS: I wonder if you've noticed, but I've done a little housekeeping around here. There's still lots to do, of course, but I'd love to hear what you think of the new look and name. Ooh, and the larger pictures. I've always wanted to post giant pictures.

Churn, according to instructions

2011-05-30T22:26:00.001-04:00

One of my earliest memories of Delhi is walking through the food fair in Pragati Maidaan. They sold ice-cream makers those days, giant buckets with rickety mechanical cranks, that would be placed in even larger thermocol buckets filled with salt and ice. You poured in your ingredients: milk, sugar, and flavouring, and turned it on and presto! Twenty minutes later, you had ice cream. Appa and Amma would wander through the other stalls, shopping for mundane things like cheese graters and knives, while I remained at the ice cream stall, mesmerised. It seemed like the coolest application of science, ever.

That was almost fifteen years ago. I've tried to find those ice-cream makers again, and once, even tried to construct one of my own. In physics lab, I would look longingly at the tanks of liquid nitrogen and think of how I could use them to make ice cream in minutes. In the meanwhile, I experimented with all sorts of techniques of making ice cream without the machine... breaking it up every two hours, adding pectin or jam to prevent crystal formation, upping the fat content, and sometimes, sneaking in a glug of vodka. Still, when K went to the US this time and asked for my wish list, the first thing on that list was a Cusinart ice-cream maker. And bless him, he brought it back.

My days since then have been spent in a very pleasant haze: dreaming up combinations I've always wanted to try, studying the science behind the cooling element, finding the correct voltage converter, and of course, making ice cream. So far, I've made a chocolate sorbet, a banana and chocolate ice cream and a mango and saffron frozen yogurt. I've been getting better with practice. The sorbet was fine, but a little grainy, the banana ice cream, ever so slightly- I'm afraid there's no other word for it- slimy. But the frozen yogurt, was sublime.

Having lived in the south all these years, I expect to be in the thick of mango season by the beginning of May. Up here in Delhi, that's taking a little longer. Each time I cut into a promising looking mango, I find disappointingly hard flesh, and a very passive flavour. They lack the tang the best of mangoes have. In this case though, the yogurt supplied all the tang I longed for. At the last minute, I blended in three strands of saffron and that was enough. They formed tiny orange pools in my yogurt and supplied their own, intensely floral perfume. My mix was chilled and then churned under my fascinated gaze. I knew the science, but it was still magic.

Mango and saffron frozen yogurt

Mangoes: 2 (mid-size)

Thick yogurt: 2 cups

Powdered sugar: 1/2 cup (You may need more or less, depending upon the sweetness of your mangoes)

Saffron: a pinch

Peel the mangoes and cut the flesh into a blender. Puree the mangoes till there are no visible lumps. Then, add the other ingredients and blend. Chill and churn according to the instructions on your ice cream maker. (Boy, I just love saying that!)

The carrot never stood a chance

2011-03-31T06:46:00.001-04:00

Amma is here visiting, and lazing on Sunday evening with my head in her lap, I asked her to make me something. The fridge contained exactly one beetroot and one carrot and from that she suggested a halwa. I perked up immediately and proposed we start. We peeled and grated the carrot and beetroot, staining our fingers pink. The raw carrot stood up well, defiantly orange in glaring contrast with all the pink. They were cooked together, in milk and there the beet asserted itself, staining the sides of the wok and dyeing the carrot pink, deep pink.

A shower of sugar made it sticky and a spoonful of ghee took care of the vaguely healthy smell that all vegetables seem to possess. I ate it then, watching telly, scraping at my bowl till I realized it was all gone.

Beetroot and carrot halwa:-

Beetroot: 1

Carrot: 1

Milk: 1/2 cup

Sugar: 1/2 cup

Ghee: 1 tbsp

Grate the beet and carrot up as finely as you can. You want to remove any hint of healthiness or signs of being made of vegetables from your final dish, so you want to give them a whole new character and flavour profile. cook the grated vegetables down in milk till they're soft. Then stir in the sugar and ghee and stir till the whole mass is sticky and smells decidedly unhealthy. I like to go one step further and cook it down till the sugar caramelises and clings to the wok in dark spots. Then serve, hot.

It's been a while

2011-02-23T21:00:00.004-05:00

Hello! I've missed you!
I've just crossed the six week mark in Chennai and have taken to skulking past my blog guiltily. I can't believe I haven't updated for this long. I've certainly been cooking, but it's mostly not particularly pretty stuff that gets eaten as soon as it's cooked. I've made bagara baingan with white brinjals driven in from Madurai and paneer bhurji with the biggest green capsicum I could find. I also baked brownies in a pressure cooker and helplessly watched my batter turn into tough-crusted fudge and then I baked an apple pie under what felt like a feeble tanning lamp. It's the pie I'm here to tell you about.
It was for my young cousin, a baking enthusiast herself who has touching faith in my limited powers. When she asked me to bake her a pie, I couldn't refuse. The pie itself was rather pretty, if I do say so myself. It had a very buttery crust with a hand-crimped edge and pale slices of apple peeked coyly from the lattice work I'd done on top. I rescued my Aunt's ancient oven from a precariously high, dusty kitchen cupboard, assured myself it was working and gently placed my pie inside.
I then sat down with a good book, congratulating myself on a job well done, smugly anticipating the praise I would receive.

About half an hour later, when I peeked through the glass top, my pie stared back at me lugubriously, looking just like it did when I put it in. No merry bubbling of the sugars, no browning crust, no swelling raisins, nothing. I touched the oven top and it was pleasantly warm, like a handshake on a cold day. It was not, however, the warmth needed for baking a pie. The oven was old, I figured it was simply taking its time and saw no reason to get all heated up about yet another pie. I went back to my book and didn't emerge for another hour. When I did, it was because if I screwed up my face and sniffed deeply, I could detect a faint smell of butter. My pie was baking at last! Or perhaps, baking is too strong a word... Basking seemed more appropriate, when I went to peek at it and the uncooked dough looked back.
I won't bore you any more with this. Suffice to say that when I caught myself crouched on the floor beside the oven at 2 am pleading, "Bake, please bake..." I knew it was time to stop.
The next morning, after about another five more hours of gentle heat, my pie browned slightly and it was enough. The crust, once a thing of beauty, was as tough as tree bark, but the apples inside were still crisp and juicy. My cousin was delighted.
The pie itself was too homely, but in a last ditch effort to save face, I whizzed it in a blender with milk and ice cream and ice and made it into a milkshake that we all very happily chugged down. Placed strategically before the large bouquet of flowers I received for my birthday, it looked almost pretty.

Apple pie milk shake
Apple pie: 1 slice (1/8th of a 9 inch pie) I'll tell you my recipe for the pie once I get it right in a less lazy oven.
Milk: 2 glasses
Vanilla ice cream: 2 generous scoops
Sugar: 1 tbsp
Ice: lots
Simply dump everything into a blender and whiz till it's almost homogeneous. Serve immediately. Don't wait to take photographs.

Moderation

2011-01-09T21:30:00.003-05:00

I'm sorry I haven't updated for ever so long. I've been traveling and internet and inspiration were both a little hard to come by. Hopefully, we can get back to our normal schedule soon. In the meantime, Happy New Year!

Ken came home last week. My big brother can be a nuisance, but the house sure is a lot livelier when he’s around. He teases the dog and sleeps half the day, argues with me and never ever hurries, unless it suits him to. Already, I can’t remember how we lived without him.

This time, he came home with an agenda: He had decided he needed to get fit, as quickly as possible. After a few hours of internet, he deemed himself expert on the subject of weight loss and treated me and Amma to a long discourse on the subject. We were briefed in detail over what his diet was to be and how we should do out best to create a menu worthy of tempting his appetite. He took a vow to eat nothing but fruit the next day.

The next day dawned and he woke at midday, full of righteous energy. He broke his fast with an orange. I, with my own prompting from the devil, chose to bake cinnamon rolls and their scent floated over his head like a halo. He refused to be tempted. After another slightly briefer talk on how he was feeling so much better and lighter already, with his intestines uncrowded by unwanted carbohydrates, Ken let me alone.

I’ve baked David Lebovitz’s non-fat gingersnaps before. His recipes are incredible. All you need to do is follow them blindly, for perfect results. I made them again that morning, close on the heels of the cinnamon rolls. They weren’t so much for Ken as for me; I like nothing better than a spicy gingery cookie with a glass of orange juice for a middle-of-the-day snack. Because my oven is tiny, I baked them in batches of nine, and the whole process took nearly two hours. Finally, I had a pile of chewy, brown cookies that glimmered with sugar crystals when the light hit them, and I was thoroughly chuffed.

It was only around dinnertime that I realised the stack had rather diminished in size. Over dinner, K announced that he was quitting on his decision to go on an all-fruit diet. Amma had convinced him, he said, that for a growing boy of 24, such deprivation was unhealthy. He would henceforth simply limit his indulgence, he said, and the excess weight would come right off. He made a good dinner, enough to make up for the missed lunch and breakfast. Then he turned his mind to dessert. He had heard me refer to my cookies as non-fat and the phrase had stuck. After polishing off about half a dozen in quick succession, he finally leaned back in his chair, contentedly. He sighed and said, “Moderation is key.”

The recipe can be found here. I simply substituted for the egg whites with another fourth of a cup of applesauce.

A sort-of white Christmas

2010-12-25T10:25:00.002-05:00

We've evaded the dreaded fog of Delhi thus far but today, on Christmas morning, it caught us right and proper. This morning when the dog and I slipped out, we had barely walked ten steps before a white curtain descended behind us and the house was obscured. It was eerie; it felt like we were the only two creatures in this suddenly white, smoky world.
We carried our world with us, like snails. No sooner did the white curtain before us part, that the one behind us fell and our world remained the same size, just large enough for the two of us. Trespassers came in the form of determined morning walkers and Panda growled menacingly at them till they passed.
We returned home shivery. They were pleasant shivers, not all due to the cold, but rather the sort you get when you stay up late in the night to finish reading 'Dracula'. Being so alone is only pleasant when you know, that right behind that curtain of mist, is home. Or in Panda's case, breakfast.
I had just the elixir to dispel the shivers, pleasant or otherwise. I had spent the hours between ten and one the previous night, reading, writing, and making cinnamon rolls. I had intended only to make the dough, allowing it to rest in the fridge, but I found myself rolling it out, filling it with cinnamon and sugar and butter and rolling it up again. The house was silent and everyone was asleep and I do love the scent of cinnamon, so I figured, why wait. Thanks to my midnight industry, I woke in the morning, smelling cinnamon on my hands.
So it was that I had a platter of rolls in the fridge, all proofed and ready to be baked. They swelled and turned rosy in the oven, as I whipped up a coffee-caramel-butter glaze to paint them with. Panda, surfeited with a giant breakfast, came sniffing enquiringly at the kitchen door. Two sticky rolls, that I unraveled with my fingers and shared with the dog, and a steaming cup of coffee later, it was a very merry Christmas.
The Pioneer Woman's Cinnamon Rolls
Step by step recipe here.

Magic

2010-12-17T06:44:00.002-05:00

The most magical thing about cooking is when you take a few, seemingly ordinary ingredients and then combine them just so, to create something extraordinary. There are hundreds of recipes out there that use mouthwatering ingredients and combine them in unusual pairings. But in all those cases, you know that so long as you don't mess up too badly, the dish you finally create will be rather good. I remember being very proud, when I was about ten years old, for creating cake truffles that were a combination of crumbled chocolate cake, chocolate chunks, condensed milk and coffee. They tasted fantastic and I floated on air as I stuffed ball after ball into my mouth. I sat before my family, awaiting an outburst of praise for my genius, but though they enjoyed the truffles, I only got tepid compliments. On prodding, everyone admitted they tasted good, "But how could they not?" as my father put it, comprised as they were of individually delicious ingredients. This is not the story of those truffles.

Have you ever heard of Tirunelveli Halwa? I first tasted this incredible stuff when we lived in Himachal Pradesh and an officer from Appa's battalion went home to Tirunelveli on leave, and brought us some back. It was sublime. The halwa was dark brown with a golden sheen, and it contained strategically placed cashew nuts. But the best bits in my book were the crusty bits of sugar that I would seek out with my spoon, again and again. Those bits were of sugar, recrystallized around ghee, crusty and yet melting with a flavour that could bring a dead man back to life. This is however, not the story of that halwa (Okay, I promise to stop doing this now.)

The internet abounds with recipes for Tirunelveli Halwa, but I know better than to attempt them. The story goes that the halwa gains its particular flavour from the water of the Thamarabarani river. Perhaps that is true, perhaps it's only folklore. I know that no matter how well I follow the recipe, I'll never be able to replicate quite that taste.

The last time my grandmother (Patti) stayed with us though, she made a halwa, that reminded me a great deal of the Tirunelveli stuff. It had almost the same texture and the same crusty ends of sugar. I scraped the kadai clean that time and then, my craving satisfied, forgot about it. But today, after a particularly cold morning and after getting soaked while washing the dog, I thought of that halwa again. Cue a long distance phone call with Patti. I discovered to my amazement, that this halwa only contains three ingredients. Three. Four, if you count water. It came out just like I remembered. I spooned it up straight out of the kadai and burned my tongue, but it didn't matter. This stuff, is good.

Maida Halwa
2 tbsp Maida (All purpose flour)
8 tbsp sugar
5 tbsp ghee
In a small bowl, combine maida and enough water to form an even slurry. It should be about the thickness of paint. Then in a kadai, heat the sugar on high, with an additional two tablespoons of water. a 1:4 ratio of flour and sugar might seem excessive, but trust me, it's necessary. In my first attempt, with a vague idea of making it more healthy, I cut the sugar by two tablespoonfuls and then spent a later five minutes cussing and stirring powdered sugar into my rapidly cooling halwa. Allow the sugar to caramelise lightly. Just when the whole syrup turns a bubbling amber, lower the heat and add in the ghee. Once the ghee has melted completely, pour in the flour and water mix in a thin stream, stirring continuously. It will cook almost as soon as it touches the sugar below. The whole mix will turn rather wobbly and gelatinous and clump together. Stir for a minute longer, till the ghee separates, then turn off the heat. You can now drain off the excess ghee.
I served this with chopped pistachios, more for aesthetics's sake than anything else. The halwa doesn't need them. Nor does it need a shower of cardamom, the ghee does just fine at making it smell swoon-worthy, thank you very much. If you can resist, let it stand at room temperature for about a day, and those glorious sugar crystals will form. When they do, warm the halwa up lightly and serve right away.

Pudding heart

2010-12-13T02:21:00.005-05:00

Last night was one of the coldest Delhi has experienced, so far. Panda, unconvinced, chewed on my socks and pawed at my knees till I finally gave in and took him out. The cold hit us like a blast. He pranced about happily, mouth open, puffing giant clouds of vapour into the frigid air and then sniffing at them suspiciously. He looked like a tiny black and white dragon, all smoke, no fire. I shuffled behind him, doing my best to expose as few of my fingers as possible.
Panda loves to linger on these walks of ours. To him, everything is interesting. The night watchman was a menacing spectre, to be barked at from a safe distance, the grass he'd bury his nose into was full of riveting smells, and the light bouncing off a tarpaulin was... well I don't quite know what he thought it was, but considering he spent a good two minutes staring at it, frozen still, I can bet it was fascinating.
Through all this, I stood by, my teeth lightly chattering and telling myself, "It's not cold if you don't think it's cold, it's not cold if you don't think it's cold," but positive thinking was getting me nowhere. So, I began thinking of rice pudding.
Then a pack of stray dogs ambushed us, blocking our return route and barking in challenge. These dogs are a regular part of our walks, indeed Panda for one would feel rather lost, if we didn't have these little encounters every once in awhile.
They stood in line behind us, their barks growing a little uncertain. Having cut our retreat off, they didn't quite know what to do next. Panda huffed and puffed at them, but he couldn't blow them all away. It took a decided "Shoo! Shoo" from me to scatter them, and we made our way back. Panda marched through them triumphantly, his tail as high as it would go, as I glared at any dogs that tried to come too close.
When we reached the last but one lamp post before home, by tacit agreement, we broke into a run. Panda loped ahead of me, doubling back every so often and getting us both terribly tangled in his leash.
We finally burst in through front gate and sat on the steps, laughing. I laughed -because I finally wasn't cold anymore, because with my dog, even an evening walk is an adventure, and because I was happy- in short breathless giggles. And Panda laughed with his tongue out, in huge pants, like a tiny, very amused dragon.

We finally went in and Panda soon collapsed on his bed. With him tucked in and the house quiet, I got out my pot and made rice pudding. Specifically, caramel rice pudding, which turned from white to a sticky looking beige upon the addition of caramel syrup. I watched it bubbling on the stovetop, big lazy brown bubbles rising to the surface and then exploding, releasing caramel scented vapour that I sniffed as avidly as Panda sniffed the grass.
As a final touch of decadence, I topped it with a sprinkle of demerara sugar and bruléed the top in the oven. More bubbles, more scents. Then I curled up in bed, with a good book and my pudding, and the cold was a distant memory.

Caramel Rice Pudding
Sugar: 2 tbsp
Rice: 2 tbsp
Water: 2 cups
Milk: 2 cups
Demerara sugar: 1 tbsp
Heat the 2 tbsp of sugar and a splash of water in a pan. Once the sugar has melted, avoid stirring. Watch the pan closely as the sugar begins to brown. It will begin to brown along the edges first. Once this happens, stir gently to allow it to brown evenly. Once it has reached a pale amber colour, pour in half a cup of water. Stir this vigorously, the sugar will tent to clump for a while, under the cold water. Once the lumps of sugar are dissolved again, remove the syrup from heat and pour into a bowl for later use.
In the same pan, now heap in the rice and add the remaining water. Allow it to boil until the rice is almost cooked and the water absorbed. Now add in the milk and cook it down, till the starch from the rice thickens the milk. Once it is sufficiently thick (the ideal thickness varies with taste. I like mine positively clumpy), add the caramel syrup, stir and turn off the heat.
Pour the pudding into heat-proof dishes and sprinkle demerara sugar over the surface. Turn the oven to broiler more at the highest temperature possible and place your dishes as close to the top of the oven as you can manage. My oven went upto 270 degrees C, and it took about 8 minutes for the sugar to broil.

The first of many

2010-12-09T04:07:00.004-05:00

I wonder if you've noticed the surfeit of puddings I've been writing about here. Indeed, there are several I'm yet to tell you about, like the caramel rice pudding that turned all velvety and toffee-like, and the chocolate and banana one, currently jostling for space in the freezer. Puddings are of course, lovely. On chilly winter evenings, nothing else hits the spot quite as well. But I had another reason for making so many.
For the past few months, I have been ovenless. Till recently, we'd always had an oven at home. Our first oven was a plump, round aluminum one that radiated quite as much heat as it trapped inside. Amma used to set it on the floor with her cake inside, since counter space was at a premium. I would be posted on dog-watch duty. Our dog, then a nosy Dachshund, would come sniffing investigatively, as soon as the cake began baking, and unless we were careful, he'd burn his nose on the heated oven lid.

The next oven we had, was my very own. I had by then scornfully refused all Amma's offers of help and begun baking on my own. She was very patient with all my baking mistakes, never once saying, "I could've told you so," when I forgot and burned my biscuits, or guilelessly halved the amount of fat in a recipe in an effort to make it healthier. That oven, which I bought with Appa from a Secunderabad canteen and clutched proudly on my lap through the drive home, participated in many baking disasters and triumphs. It had a light bulb inside, and I would spent hours with it on, staring at my creations as they rose and bubbled.
Whenever I came home from college, after hugging Amma and Appa and fighting down the dog, I would go into the kitchen and rapturously greet that oven. It was my companion on long nights spent baking goodies for wingmates, an activity that soon became a ritual.
Over the years, it grew old and stained and the light bulb inside it fused. Sometimes, it would forget to turn on a heating coil and my cakes would come out burnt on one end and uncooked on the other. I refused to accept it was growing old, instead insisting that it had character. But one day, early this year, I returned home from college for the last time, hugged Amma and Appa, fought off the dog and ran into the kitchen to find the counter bare. Amma had given my oven away.
I enacted a tragedy that evening. Amma was a recipient of darkling looks and whiny grumbles for quite a while. Even when I got over my loss, I would look at the empty counter space and sigh, long and meaningfully.
Last week though, finally, after much research and debate, Amma and I went to the store and bought me a new oven. This one is rather fancypants compared to my old one. It has chrome finishings and an automatic timer. I grudgingly accepted that a timer might be more handy than my old method of "Is it done yet? Is it done yet? Is it done yet?"
What I should bake with it first was the subject of much agonizing debate. I finally settled upon Mexican Wedding Cakes, because well, the lovely Jess of Sweet Amandine sold me on them. Really, with her description and stories and photographs, you feel like grabbing for them through the monitor.
I sang as I beat my butter, till it was fluffy and white. The dog kept me company, whining over the whir of my electric beater. He knew good things were happening. I toasted walnuts and mixed them in and mixed in the flour with my hands. I sneaked a lick and it tasted good, really good. The dog, who'd been waiting, licked my hand painstakingly and thoroughly clean.
The cookies baked quickly and turned faintly golden. After a dredging in cinnamon sugar, they were ready.

Mexican Wedding CakesFrom Sweet Amandine, originally adapted from Bon Appétit, May 2003

For the dough:
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, at room temperature (I used salted butter, because that's what I had)
½ cup powdered sugar
2 tsps. vanilla
2 cups flour
1 cup pecans, toasted, coarsely ground (I used walnuts)

For the sugar coating:
1½ cups powdered sugar
¼ tsp. cinnamon

Beat the butter in the bowl of an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Add the ½ cup powdered sugar and vanilla, and blend well. Beat in the flour, and then the toasted, ground pecans. Divide the dough in half, form each half into a ball, and wrap separately in plastic. Chill for at least 30 minutes, or overnight. (If you chill the dough overnight, you’ll need to let it soften on the counter for 20 to 30 minutes before you scoop it. Don’t let it get too warm; it should be scoopable, but still cold.)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Whisk together the 1½ cups powdered sugar and cinnamon in a pie dish or a large bowl, and set aside.

Remove half of the chilled dough from the fridge and, using one level tablespoonful of dough for each cookie, roll into balls between the palms of your hands. Arrange the dough balls about half an inch apart on the prepared baking sheet. Bake for about 15-17 minutes, until the cookies flush a shade darker on top, and are golden brown on the bottom. Cool the cookies for about five minutes on the baking sheet, and then gently toss them in the cinnamon sugar. Transfer the coated cookies to a rack and cool completely. Repeat with the remaining dough.

Hold onto any leftover cinnamon sugar for quick touch-ups before serving.

Store these cookies at room temperature in an airtight container, and they’ll keep well for several days. Possibly up to a week, though I’ve never seen them last that long.

Yield: About 40 cookies. I rolled mine a little smaller, and ended up with 53.

Fever food

2010-12-03T07:07:00.002-05:00

Besan payasam and I go a long way back. I was fourteen and severely afflicted with viral fever. Having been afflicted with childhood asthma, my illnesses are always made a big deal of. All I'd have to say was, "Ma, I'm sick," for Amma to pack me off to bed, tuck me in with a book and between intervals of taking my temperature, make dish after dish to tempt my fitful appetite. My fevers always begin with a nasty sore throat, rise to high temperatures and end with a remnant hacking cough. That one was no different.
I was promptly declared ill, plied with sour plums and banned from school. After three days of luxuriating in bed, I knew I was much better, but wasn't prepared to show it quite yet. So it was that when Verma Aunty, our neighbour, came to visit, I assumed an expression intended to convey deep suffering bravely endured, and replied in a small, weak voice while she clucked over me. Aunty, a fabulous cook, pronounced that I should be fed nutritious, sick people food and she gave Amma her recipe for besan kheer.
It sounded very interesting, so the moment she left, I sat up in bed and demanded that Amma make me some. She obliged and soon I was eating spoonful after spoonful of thick mustard coloured kheer and it made me forget my fitful appetite.

It is the sort of kheer worth faking sickness over. I should know, I've done it, many a time. Eventually, Amma caught on and now, she makes it for me, whenever she's particularly pleased. You can always tell when Amma's in a good mood, there's a pot of payasam bubbling on the stove.

Besan Payasam
Now, technically, this is supposed to be called Besan Kheer, but well, Amma insists that it ought to be called payasam, and that it was a south Indian recipe that she knew even before Verma Aunty told her.
Besan (chickpea flour): 2 tbsps
Ghee/ unsalted butter: 1 tbsp
Milk: 2 cups
Jaggery: 1 cup
Cardamom: 2 pods
Fry the besan in the ghee, on a low flame, till it smells toasty and turns deep and golden. Once this is done, add the milk bit by bit, stirring vigorously to prevent lumps. Once this mixture starts leaving the sides of the vessel, add the jaggery and stir till it's dissolved. Now turn off the heat and stir in powdered cardamom. Serve warm, garnished with toasted coconut, if you like.

Wobble

2010-12-01T07:05:00.004-05:00

“Here I am, bag and baggage,” she said briskly. “Mother sent her love, and was glad if I could do anything for you. Meg wanted me to bring some of her blanc-mange; she makes it very nicely, and Beth thought her cats would be comforting.”

“That looks too pretty to eat,” he said, smiling with pleasure, as Jo uncovered the dish, and showed the blanc-mange, surrounded by a garland of green leaves, and the scarlet flowers of Amy’s pet geranium.
“It isn’t anything, only they all felt kindly, and wanted to show it. Tell the girl to put it away for your tea; it’s so simple, you can eat it; and being soft, it will slip down without hurting your sore throat…”
- Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

I've fantasized about giant wobbly towers of blancmange ever since I read the Wishing Chair stories, by Enid Blyton. I still remember how I got the book. I was seven and enamored of my roller skates. We had a pair each, Ken and I. We'd strap them on as soon as we returned home from school and spend hours whizzing along the corridors of the house, crashing into walls and scaring the dog. Even when Amma sent us on errands to the neighbourhood kirana store, we couldn't bring ourselves to take them off, so we'd skate to the store on the tar road of our colony, sounding like miniature thunderstorms.
One afternoon however, as I was rolling blissfully about the house, with the dog barking at me from under the bed, Ken came speeding in the opposite direction and the edge of his skate went neatly under the nail of my second toe.
The nail hung on determinedly for the next couple of days, by a mere scrap of skin. Under my interested gaze, my toe swelled up to twice its size and turned a rather garish purple. Finally, Appa took me to the hospital, to have it professionally dressed. The nurse there said she'd have to remove the nail for the wound to heal properly. So Appa held me down and the nurse got out a nasty looking pair of pliers, with which she seized my nail and yanked it out. I didn't cry. It wasn't from any particular form of bravery, events were just moving too fast for my seven-year-old mind to grasp. By the time I understood that they wanted to pull out my nail, it was already out and the nurse was efficiently bandaging my toe. To cry then seemed a bit anticlimactic.
But Appa was thoroughly impressed with my courage and I encouraged the idea. He drove me straight to a bookstore from the hospital and I emerged from there with "The Wishing Chair" proudly clutched in my arms.
I was doubly triumphant over the book, both because I had already convinced myself that I had been incredibly brave, and also because it was a fairy story, the sort that Ken would disdain, and consequently, would be entirely my own.
It was in that book that I first read of wobbly chocolate blancmanges. The pudding finds mention in other novels, Little Women being one. Each time I read of it, I longed to recreate it, something I finally did today.
With the slight erudition of taste that is the difference between seven and twenty two, I chose to flavour my blancmange with orange as well as chocolate, imagining the flavours would play well against each other.I also accessorized, rather unnecessarily, with a pour of my crunchy chocolate sauce, a recipe that I'm still working on and will share with you once it's perfected.
Blancmange really isn't for everyone. I can't countenance eating any other flavour of it besides chocolate, it is too weak tasting, like food for the sick. But when you add copious amounts of cocoa and a spoonful of marmalade, freeze it stupid and embrace its wobble, it tastes like childhood, all over again.

Chocolate Blancmange flavoured with Marmalade
Milk: 2 cups
Cornstarch: 2 1/2 tbsp
Cocoa: 1 1/2 tbsp
Sugar: 3 tbsp
Orange marmalade: 1 rather generous tablespoon
Boil the milk. Whisk together the cocoa and cornstarch. When the milk is bubbling, spoon some into the cocoa-cornstarch mixture, enough to reduce it to a thin, gruel-like liquid. Pour this liquid back into the milk in a thin stream, whisking continuously. The milk should thicken almost immediately. Working fast, stir in the sugar, turn off the heat and then stir in the marmalade. You can also add in a scant handful of walnuts at this point, like I did, but they are unnecessary. Immediately pour the mixture into a wetted mould, taking care not to leave air bubbles on the surface.
Set in the freezer for about two hours, then turn out on a serving dish. Cut into pieces and serve, if you like, with a pour of chocolate sauce.

Fruit of the hills

2010-11-25T01:09:00.005-05:00

After a Diwali spent bursting 1000 in 1 bombs at 3 in the morning and eating far more than was good for us, our whole family hied off for Yelagiri, a hill station five hours away from Chennai. Armed with the dubious experience of having lived in Himachal Pradesh for three years, I appointed myself authority on hill stations and spent the drive making contemptuous statements about how we call the hills of the south pebbles, up north. My cousins, to their eternal credit, didn't sit on my head.
The road up to Yelagiri wound up the hill, taking a total of fourteen hairpin bends, each of them a novelty and a tourist spot. We made impressive preparations for car sickness, armed with an array of pills, spices and paper bags. Thankfully none were needed and we made it up the fourteenth bend, cheering.
Yelagiri was lovely, with its winding roads and sprays of honeysuckle and romantically decaying buildings. It didn't offer much by way of dissipation; musical fountains and paddle boating across a man-made lake were its star attractions. When we made our way to the boathouse though, we found it very crowded. Every other tourist there had apparently the same idea. So we abandoned visions of paddle boating and elected to walk around the lake instead, pointing out water snakes to each other and poking at touch-me-nots.
Amma and Chitti espied a nursery along the way and rabid plant hunters that they are, immediately made a beeline for it. I followed them and spent my time chasing the nursery cat among the daisies. After making our purchases, we emerged and saw a woman sitting on the pavement, selling wood apples.
I have no childhood memories of eating wood apples. I remember being introduced to them only about five years ago, when Amma bought them at the Sunday vegetable market, with what I considered undue excitement. But after I tasted the pachchadi Amma made from them that day, I understood the excitement, which is why on the Yelagiri hill, I clutched Amma's arm and pointed and nagged.
Amma refused to buy them that day; we were going onward to Coimbatore and by the time we returned to Delhi and our own kitchen, there was a good chance the fruit would spoil. That didn't stop me from throwing a tantrum though.
So imagine my surprise when, on her return from Coimbatore, two days after me, Amma extracted two round little wood apples from the bottom of her bag. She'd remembered my little scene and scoured the city in search of wood apples for me.
Cracking the wood apples in my opinion, is the most fun part. you can be unscientific and throw them hard on the floor till they split, or you can have at them with a hammer. Both are very satisfying. I immediately opened one of mine and proceeded to make a pachchadi, under Amma's directions.
It tasted of the hills.

Velambalam Pachchadi
Wood apple: 1
Jaggery: 2 tbsp
Mustard seeds: a pinch
Fennel seeds: a pinch
Curry leaves: 1 tbsp
Salt to taste
Amma's rule of thumb for selecting wood apples is to shake them, next to her ear. If you can here the insides rattling about, it's ripe and ready to buy. If you can't hear anything, the fruit is probably still unripe.
Begin by cracking open the wood apple and scraping out all the seeds and flesh. Mix in the jaggery till it's as homogeneous as you can make it and add salt by pinches, till you have it where you want it.

In a teaspoonful of oil, pop the mustard seeds, roast the fennel and toast the curry leaves, till fragrant. Mix in and serve.

On cold nights

2010-11-12T01:36:00.003-05:00

I spent Diwali in Chennai and then Coimbatore, for the first time in my twenty two years. I spent it playing foozball with my cousins and watching a slasher flick from behind a pillow. At intervals, we lit lamps, learnt how to decorate the floor with kolams from Patti, exclaimed at fireworks and ate a great deal more then we ought. After balmy Chennai, Delhi seems colder than ever. Indeed, all I've wanted to do since I've returned is to curl up under a razai, emerging at regular intervals for food.
And the sort of food I've been craving after my Diwali excesses has all been simple, comfort food. So I made a hearty sambhar one day, soup the next, and of course, chocolate pudding. (What, did you think I'd give up on sweets after three measly days of eating myself silly?)
Now, although I love elaborate desserts with multiple components, I'm painfully aware that I lack both the skill and the tools to create them. Instead, I stick to what I can manage, simple puddings, Indian sweets, and I'm constantly looking for recipes that let me have dessert on the table in under half an hour.
My recent foray into making rice pudding, while intensely satisfing, got me wondering. In the pudding I made, the part I enjoyed best was the silkily smooth custard during the consumption of which the chewy rice grains seemed almost unnecessary. So I figured, why not eliminate the grains altogether and quarter my cooking time in one fell swoop, and thus was born rice starch pudding.
Now I've made cornstarch puddings hundreds of times, in the standard military dessert of custard with fruit, to dress up towering trifles, to make a reluctant and thick hot chocolate and every so often, just for its own sake. If I was going to convert to rice starch, I needed a good reason. So one evening, after dinner, I set out to make them both side by side. I made exactly the same quantity of both, used the same flavouring and attempted to compare textures.
When still warm from the stove, the rice pudding seemed more substantial, it was thicker and more weighty, while the cornstarch pudding seemed a little too insubstantial. No sooner did you spoon it into your mouth before it was gone, leaving just a lingering memory of chocolate behind. That is of course, a great way to go, but at least on chilly winter nights, I like pudding I can swirl around in my mouth and watch as it falls from my spoon in big glops.

The next morning we tasted the puddings again, this time they had both been chilled in the refrigerator overnight. The cold had done wonderful things to the cornstarch pudding, making it thicker, with a dark and shiny skin. It was smooth light, and seemed just cold enough for me to appreciate the winter morning sunshine better. The rice pudding too, had held up well, but in the morning light, its homeliness was working a little against it. Since I had powdered the rice myself, some of the powder wasn't too fine and so formed slightly unsightly lumps on the surface. But they vanished under a grating of nutmeg and provided a certain, not unwelcome chewiness.
On the whole, I am forced to conclude, that rice starch or corn, it's impossible to go wrong with pudding.
Rice starch pudding
Rice: 2 tbsp
Milk: 2 cups
Cocoa powder: 2 tbsp
Sugar: 2 1/2 tbsp
Raisins: a handful
Nutmeg: as much as you like

Begin by soaking the rice for half an hour. Once it has turned from opalescent to white, drain the water and pat the rice dry on a towel. Then powder it as finely as you can and sieve the powder. (I was lazy and omitted the sieving, but I do recommend it. It gives you a far smoother pudding.)
Mix the dry ingredients together in a heavy bottomed vessel, saving the nutmeg and then add the milk. Once the solution looks uniformly if a little dingily brown, place it on medium heat and bring it to a boil, stirring continuously. As soon as the milk boils, the pudding will thicken and turn glossy. To check if it's done, run your finger across the back of your stirring spoon, in a line. If the two walls your line made remain fixed and do not attempt to flow towards each other, the pudding is done. Remove it from heat and serve warm.

For cornstarch pudding, substitute the two tablespoons of rice starch for cornstarch, all other quantities and the procedure remain the same.

Hello, Winter

2010-10-28T01:18:00.001-04:00

Winter is slowly creeping into Delhi. I know because when Panda jumps on the bed and tries to pull the covers off me, I grumble at him and snuggle deeper. I know because driving in the nights, you can see the fog, like wisps of chilly smoke, swirling before the car's headlights. And I know because I've developed a deep craving for rice pudding.
It was a couple of nights ago; only the dog and I were at home. He had been fed and walked and now with his cold nose digging into my palm I was left with the delicious conundrum of what to make for dinner. I was tired and sleepy and wanted something warm and soft, that I could ideally cradle in a bowl while reading. So bloomed the idea of rice pudding. I defy you to find food more comforting. I began with a handful of rice and cooked it risotto style as the rice thirstily absorbed more milk that I had thought possible. Panda distracted me for a few minutes, nibbling the tassels off a cushion and I had to descend upon him to exact vengeance. By the time I returned to my stove it was smoking ominously and the sides of my pristinely white pudding were burnt brown. Now I belong to the school of thought that insists that rice pudding must remain white, white as snow. Rather than discarding my entire pot, a gesture that seemed excessive, I sought to disguise my mistake. Hence, the chocolate. I stirred in a tablespoon of cocoa and made the whole pudding brown. I grated in nutmeg, to add a different spicy dimension to the depth of the cocoa. I sang as my pot bubbled merrily, and Panda came sniffing at the kitchen doorway; he knew good things were cooking. When my pudding was finally done, it was thick and creamy and the rice still had a bit of a chew. The raisins inside had plumped up nicely and they stayed hidden inside the brown hued pudding, like the best surprises.
And I ate it, a whole bowlful all by myself, with my feet tucked under a wriggly dog and my fingers wrapped around a warm bowl, and winter seemed quite jolly.
Chocolate rice pudding
Milk: 4 cups
Rice: 2 tbsp
Sugar: 3 tbsp
Unsweetened cocoa powder: 1 tbsp
Raisins: a handful
nutmeg: 1/2 tsp
Be warned, this is a time consuming recipe, albeit very simple so long as your house isn't ruled by a mischievous dog. Begin with two cups of milk and add the rice. Boil the mixture until most of the liquid is absorbed, stirring continuously. Add the remaining milk, half a cup at a time, stirring very often. Check the rice time and again, to see it it's cooked. Cooking time will vary with the type of rice you use. Before you pour in the last half cup of rice, stir in the cocoa, sugar, nutmeg and raisins. Pour in the last half cup and check the rice for doneness. For me, this took about 40 minutes. Once the rice is cooked, give it a final boil and turn off the heat. Serve warm, but not too hot.

The colour of sunshine

2010-10-25T03:16:00.023-04:00

Starting from now on, I've decided to make Colours a food blog. You see, I began my other blog "In Pursuit of Happiness" thinking that I could write the same sort of miniature epiphanies and happenings there and that the two wouldn't overlap. Time proved me wrong. So from now on, I think I'll save most of my musings for the other blog and focus here, on the food. Do excuse my photography, I'm really not very good at it. I do try though.
Yesterday, Amma and Appa threw a lunch party. I, of course, threw myself into the preparations; I do love entertaining. The dessert course was my sole responsibility and I decided to experiment upon our hapless guests. This here, isn't ice cream. It's frozen yogurt. And as I learnt, the sooner I stopped expecting it to taste like ice cream, the better I could appreciate it for what it was. And it sure was delicious. Yogurt is a combination of curds and water, and mine was the pure thing, with no additives. Also, I didn't have an ice cream maker, so there was no way my concoction was going to be silky or smooth. It was however robust, with minuscule ice crystals that rubbed up against the tongue and melted, leaving behind a slightly sour tang. I flavoured it with saffron, which gave it it's sunshiny hue and gussied it up with some honey, which added a floral kick. Here's the recipe if you want to try it at home.
Saffron flavoured frozen yogurt
Yogurt: 1ltr
Powdered sugar: 1 cup
Saffron: 1 large pinch
Milk: 2 tbsp
Chill the yogurt in your freezer until it sets along the sides of the bowl and only the centre is still soft. Boil the two tablespoons of milk and add the saffron, to release its flavour. Add the milk and sugar to the yogurt and beat, either with a whisk, or a blender, till the entire mixture looks thick and homogeneous. Freeze for about two hours. Repeat the beating, to break up the ice crystals. Freeze for another two hours, then serve.

Five Years

2010-02-08T02:30:00.000-05:00

Having felt the beginning twinges of nostalgia, I'm loth to let go. So this week, I plan to devote Colours to an outpouring of sentiment, memories of my five years here in IIT, that as I scan the archives, I notice I've written precious little about.
So I'm set to embark upon this entirely selfish enterprise now: to chronicle, disjointedly, memories of my time here. It is to be the written equivalent of looking through a box of snapshots, some are bent at the edges, some lack proper focus, but they all tell a story.

Nostalgia

2010-02-08T01:28:00.001-05:00

Of late, I've worried myself quite a bit. I'm now in the last four months of my stay at IIT, this place where I've spent suck a large chunk of my life. Yet, try as I might, I haven't been able to scare up so much as a hint of nostalgia for my years here. I got a trifle emotional when some of my friends left last year, but IIT itself, events like the last 'Surbahar' or the last 'MI' passed by and left me quite cold. But last night, my nostalgia finally rose from a rather unlikely source.
I had a keen interest in western music when I first came here, it seemed so much cooler than my Karnatic swaras. So I attended the semester's first meeting of our western music club, 'Staccato,' determined to be pleased. I listened mouth agape as they discussed Iron Maiden and guitar riffs, using a profusion of four lettered words, and returned that night with a firm crush on the club convener.It's funny how many decisions I made that year, just because I liked a boy.
I determined to sing in 'Unplugged', the first major Staccato event of the year, and to become the best club member I could be. As a freshman, I was selected to be a backup singer for a Corrs' song and I was humbly proud. The night before the event was spent doing publi: painting a giant cutout that advertised IITB Unplugged in giant blue-black letters. I smeared my jeans with paint, giggled whenever my convener spoke and so, blissfully spent my first nightout at IIT.
The big night came. I'd been thinking of it all day, scarcely listening to a word that was spoken in class. The stage was a pool of light, before which the seats of the theatre rose. When my turn came, I went down there and tried to peer beyond the harsh light and recognize the shadowy forms of my friends. They were all there, to cheer me on. I don't remember much of that performance; I know I stumbled through my part, forgetting half of my carefully figured harmonies, with a curious sense of unreality. I remember trembling so much, my earrings kept hitting my cheeks.
Performance done, I accepted the kind comments of my friends rather numbly and sat there watching as the next band took the stage. My friends left soon, they had only come to see me, but I sat there in the darkness, watching people make music below me, in a circle of light. I sat there till the final piece ended and the slightly-off-key voice of the final singer faded. I watched the floodlights come on, banishing the shadows from where I was seated, causing me to blink in confusion. We posed together for a photograph, about twenty of us, standing in two rows. Then we carried the instruments back into the music room and called out our goodbyes.

Last night, I sang at 'Unplugged' for the final time. Since that first year, I haven't been much of a member of Staccato. I'd discovered in the interval that Indian music suited me better, and that writing was even more fun than music. But when some wonderfully talented juniors asked me to perform with them, I agreed, without much thought of last times or nostalgia. We did one song, rather rough around the edges. I sang the lead this time. Then I sat back in the shadows again and watched other people playing in that circle of light. It was a pleasant night and I thought back to my first Unplugged without much sentiment. But then quite suddenly, something inside me seemed to shift. For a second, the people sitting there last night seemed inexpressibly dear to me, as if they were a part of something I didn't quite want to let go of yet.
Perhaps I've just been numb all these months, but last night was a little like an awakening. Five years is the longest I've ever spent in a single place and as they come to a close, I'm finding myself quite restless. But I can't just walk out of here, without any parting words. These five years have been among the best in my life.
So now, I'm only just beginning to say goodbye.

The best of '09

2009-12-18T09:26:00.000-05:00

Shop where you spent most of your money.

Shallow as it sounds, I think it'll have to be on shoes. This year I discovered the shoe stores of Bandra and Irla and went at them with a vengeance. I even blogged about them effusively here. But aren't shoes just marvelous? The look pretty, their designs can be incredibly inventive and I for one, can spend hours effusing on them.

The best of '09

2009-12-17T09:24:00.001-05:00

A word that encapsulates your year.

Restless

Rush

2009-12-17T08:02:00.000-05:00

I did a few adventurous things this year. I got dumped in the ocean in Goa and had to be rescued. I climbed mountains and stepped on a snake. But the biggest rush I got was when I stood before an audience of poets and writers and recited my hastily cobbled verse.
It was at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, in February. The event was called Poetry Slam and we had to recite our poems. One girl acted her poem ouy, while wearing her collar mike. Another guy recited a haiku that had me clapping till my hands stung. Then it was my turn. I could see the sheet of paper I held trembling as I took the mike and butterflies were fluttering about frantically in my stomach. I took a deep breath and recited my tepid verse. Somehow, the moment I began, my voice magically firmed, my hand stilled and I felt eerily out of my body.
I didn't win that day, but it didn't matter. The poets that did were far better. For me, getting on that stage was enough.

The best of '09

2009-12-16T09:22:00.000-05:00

The best tea

I'm not much of a tea drinker. K's dark premonitions about addictive substances made me wary of even something as innocent as tea. But it was August and it was raining like it would never stop and I had a bad case of the sniffles. So I ordered myself a glass of elaichi chai. It came in a glass tumbler with froth on the top. And boy, did it taste good.

The best of '09

2009-12-15T09:21:00.000-05:00

The best packaging.

This one I remembered immediately. It was a tiny heart shaped box that A gave me, for no reason, just like that. It was covered in red gauze with gold-wrapped chocolates inside. I still have the box, it survived even my minimalist streak.

The best of '09

2009-12-13T06:44:00.001-05:00

Q. What's the best change you made to the place you live?
I moved back into my hostel room this August, after six weeks away. I used to drive 20 kilometers everyday to work during that internship on a very old but determined scooty. It gave me a lot of time for thinking. I returned to IIT determined to de-clutter my life and that's just what I did. I threw away all the flummery, no wall decorations, no posters, no tubes of moisturizer I never use, no stacks of papers and old movie tickets preserved for sentiment's sake. It felt good.

The best of '09

2009-12-12T12:34:00.009-05:00

I'm participating in Gwen Bell's Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. It's an opportunity to look back and appreciate the year gone by. I'm getting into the game a little late, but don't intend to miss any more of it than I can. Do join in on the action if you like. I think it's a brilliant idea and it's very cool of Gwen to host this.
Today's question: New food: You're now in love with Lebanese food and you didn't even know what it was in January of this year.

I can't claim knowledge of Lebanese food yet, but the cuisine I sampled this year for the first time was Goan. N, P and I jetted in from different parts of the country to meet up with our BITS friends for three days of mad, merry fun in Goa in May. Compulsive as I am, I had cobbled together about forty pages of research about Goa, a map with all the locations I wanted to visit marked out in colour and a checklist of thinks I wanted to do before leaving. I wanted to see forts and beaches and perhaps work in a waterfall. I also wanted to visit the floating casinos, sit at a shack and try adventure sports. Pappu had other ideas. When I dug out my 40 pages, he looked stunned for a minute then said, "I thought we'd get high, Re." Turns out, it was possible to do it all, simply sacrificing a little sleep.

I had read a great deal about Goan cuisine and was eager to try it. The thing was, the food there is mostly seafood based and we vegetarians have pitifully few options. Seriously, in most menus, there were perhaps two vegetarian dishes, thrown in at the end like palpable afterthoughts. Still, I managed to sample the Xanuti: boiled vegetables in a mouth-burningly spicy coconut curry. Goa's traditional sweet, the Bebinca wasn't available in any of the restaurants we visited on those first two days.

Finally, on the day we were to leave, N and I marched out in the 11 am sun, in a quest for breakfast, brightly coloured dresses and Bebinca. The breakfast place we went to didn't stock it, though they did have thickly buttered and crackly paranthas which ate dipped in thick curd. The nice waiter there told us of a bakery about a kilometre away though, that did. So we trudged through the blistering May sunshine, pausing often in cloth covered stalls to ogle beach coverups and chunky jewelry.

Finally we reached the Imperial Bakery, a pretty little place on the main road with potted plants and marble tables. There we ordered ourselves a slice of Bebinca. It came on a pretty glass plate with two silver forks. Such ceremony seemed apt. It was delicious, at least I thought so. N, sweet as she is, isn't much of a dessert person, but I had no problems demolishing that slice, layer by sticky layer. We trudged back afterwards and though the sun had only risen higher, I was thoroughly satisfied. I could tick the last box off my checklist.

Written snapshots

2009-12-07T01:56:00.001-05:00

In creative writing class, we discussed an essay by Margaret Atwood where she points out that one can never actually meet the writer of a book one has read and loved. By the time the book has been edited, published and distributed, the writer has moved on. He has evolved and grown older and changed into someone else.
It's a fascinating thought isn't it? That every piece you write is like a polaroid snapshot of you, as you are then and never will be again.
I've realised lately, that the written word is my favourite method of preserving memories. So, I've started a new blog, here. The whole point of the new blog is written snapshots, of everyday moments that made me happy, that I want to squirrel away. The point of Colours is different. I wondered once, why it was I blogged. I know now, that the point of Colours at least, is analysis. It's a place to capture a few of the hundreds of little epiphanies that happen to us each day, thoughts that are often felt rather than voiced. Ans while my new blog is about chronicling experiences, Colours is and will always be a place for thoughts and for watching them change.

Dust to Dust

2009-10-14T04:58:00.005-04:00

They're scraping the old paint off the hostel walls today. I was here when they were painted the last time, transformed from dreary blue to shocking pink. We were outraged then, pink for a girls hostel was such an annoying stereotype. That pink faded from shocking to mildly surprising and then to inoffensively pale. The walls are now a rather depressing pinkish-white, pockmarked with holes and covered with the scrawls of students over the years- timid vandals seeking to leave their mark here in some small way.

I left my mark too: my name scrawled in pencil in painstakinly miniature cursive, next to my door. It's an obsession for me, doodling my name. I scrawl it everywhere, on the backs of notebooks, in pools of sauce on plates and this once, on a hidden corner of the wall. K used to tell me that I must have an identity crisis. He said it half-jokingly but he might just be right.

The labourers scraped my name away along with all the others. All our small rebellions. Now they are a fine layer of powdery pink dust all over the floor, flying up in clouds and marking our footsteps as we walk past. By night, it will all be swept away.

One month late, but still...

2009-09-06T23:31:00.003-04:00

This post should have by all rights, gone up on August 7th. But what with Convo and the flu and a whole other bunch of other circumstances, it didn't, and Ravali's birthday went uncelebrated here on Colours. We celebrated in other ways, with orange cake, pink champagne and a silver tiara with green feathers (it was certainly colourful) but I wanted to give this bestest of friends and my most avid reader, a celebration here too. So here it is, one month late.

Ravali turned twenty three today. Twenty three isn't a particularly significant year. She was old enough to vote five years ago and could have been legally drunk anytime in the past two. But birthdays are after all, a time to sit back and think about the time past, a comma, so to speak, in the sentence of time when you take a breath, take stock and change your tone.

I met her four years ago, in our tiny, pink walled room. We sat facing each other on our beds. She couldn’t stop talking, I stayed mostly silent. We were both very nervous. We were exceedingly polite to each other, those first few months, but our conversations rarely went beyond common courtesies and tepid gossip. We had our own concerns and problems and the fact that we shared a room didn’t seem reason enough to share them.

She decorated her side of the room with a pink coloured poster of a bunch of chubby babies and insisted that everyone who entered the room had to sign on their favourite. I thought her crazy but signed on one anyway. The baby I signed on made me laugh, ducking away like it did behind a pink bucket full of pink roses.

There were always people in that room, friends of hers, arguing loudly, gossiping and sharing. I used to tire of the noise and of cleaning up after they left, but I never told Ravali. It didn’t seem polite. Then slowly, I was drawn into their conversations Her friends became mine. The noise became pleasant. She does that.
A vast number of her friends are mine now, wonderful people whom I might have never known otherwise.

We grew close slowly. I don’t quite know how. We shared secrets and stories. She took me to the hospital and stayed with me when I had a high fever but was terrified of doctors. She would clear my bed and smooth down the covers for me to collapse on when I returned in the wee hours of the morning from music practice. She would scold me when I didn’t study and coax me out of my sulks. She would attend every tiny performance I ever gave and always cheer the loudest. She often shamed me out of my own miserly tendencies by her sheer generosity. She always gave her possessions, her time, and her sympathy freely, to anyone who needed it and I learnt a great deal, simply by her example.

We’ve come a long way from that tiny pink room where we had our first awkward conversation. Four years of giggles and tears, of moments of high drama and those quietly shared, of conversations on everything from movies to mathematics. Four years of life that I shared with her in a way I’ve never shared with anyone before.

Our lives are changing now, very fast. We pause on days like this and take stock. When I pause and look around, I'm comforted to see you there, right by my side.
Happy Birthday Rava.

Singin' in the Rain

2009-08-19T13:15:00.004-04:00

I just spent two miserable weeks fighting off the flu. I don't know if it was swine flu or just a run-of-the-mill influenza. As the doctor at the IIT hospital informed me (a little too cheerfully for my liking) they were all the same.
Whichever it was, it certainly wasn't pretty. I worked my way through stages of sweats and fevers and feeling too hot and then too cold and not being able to keep any food down and losing my voice. But worst of all, the world looked depressing. I'm generally an annoyingly cheerful person, A compares me to the character Alec Baldwin played in his guest appearance on Friends and I have to admit, there are some similarities. But through watery eyes and racked by the shivers, the world looked unrecognizably bleak.

Today though, I popped my second-last antibiotic pill and sang an only partially husky version of "Singin' in the Rain" to my mirror. It's good to be back.

Rain

2009-07-07T02:44:00.005-04:00

The rains are finally here and sitting in office is becoming harder than ever. You see, our garden is calling to me, and it is never so insistent or alive as when it rains. Gnarled trees thrive on those grounds along with prickly lemon bushes laden with gleaming fruit. There's a fish pond with tiny black fish swimming about busily in circles and pale lilies with the most glorious perfume. There is a family of cobras that you can sometimes see disappearing into bushes and brightly orange pomegranate flowers that look like miniature traffic cones.
All of this will be singing today. The leaves will collect little pools of raindrop till they droop with the weight and spill their bounty on the earth, then they'll spring back up and collect some more. The fish will swim about even more madly in a wild game with the pattering rain.
The earth, oh, the earth will smell so lovely today, and the gravel will get all crunchy and the soil brick-red. And the trees will swing wildly in the wind and do their best to look intimidating. And the grass will gather all the rain, beaming an electric green, and squelch delightfully when walked on. That big, blowsy red rose I saw yesterday will be battered by the drops till all the weak and drying petals fall off and only its pure red heart remains.
All this will be happening, while I sit in this air conditioned office and try to listen for the rain.

Morning Song

2009-06-22T05:11:00.004-04:00

This morning, as I washed the sleep off my face, I heard the children singing their morning prayer. Our house shares a wall with the Army School, and at around seven thirty every weekday, you can hear the children sing. Six years ago, I was one of them.

In all Army Schools and Kendriya Vidyalayas around India, we sing the same song at morning prayers. It is a bhajan whose words have been carefully scrutinized for secularism. I first learnt the prayer in Jammu, where I’d transferred to the Army School because it was the only school at any reasonable distance from out house. Prayers were scheduled at 7 am and so K and I would leave home on our cycles at 6:40. I had inherited K’s old cycle, which was a miniature boys cycle, perfect in every tiny feature. I had however refused to learn how to ride it until it was painted in baby pink and K would wince every time he saw the desecration.

Winter mornings in Jammu were bitterly cold so I'd wrap myself in layers of sweaters, a scarf, gloves and woolen socks. Still, the wind would find a way in, whipping the tails of my scarf about and stinging my face to a hectic red. I would race to the school, to get out of the wind as soon as possible, determinedly pedaling my pink cycle as the wind tore at my pigtails.

I'd park my cycle and rush to the classroom, where my friends would be waiting. We would hold hands and try to get warm. The boys tumbled each other outside, the exercise keeping them warm while we girls shared our warmth and traded gossip. No matter how icy I was after that cycle ride, there would always be someone to rub my fingers and bring back the circulation.

Then a bell would sound and we'd all troop out for the assembly and there we would sing our bhajan to irregular beats on the PT drum. We would sing lustily in an effort to distract ourselves from the cold. Then we would recite our pledge, cold red fingers stretched ahead in a salute. Then there were excruciating readings of the news and the "Thought for the Day" before we were finally commanded to stand motionless during the national anthem.

I don’t think I ever really understood what we were singing then. The song is carefully chosen because it never takes any one God's name. Instead it asks a pretty generic God for gifts of knowledge, love and patriotism. The tune was a little tiresome, each stanza sung in exactly the same way. Our voices uplifted in chorus, were hardly melodious.

That school was built from modified barracks, with asbestos roofs and no flooring. After reading about how asbestos can be carcinogenous, I used to anxiously examine my skin for lumps. I was rather hypochondriacal those days. A line of termites spread over the walls of our classroom; the boys used to poke at them with compasses in an effort to gross us out. Snakes were common and their appearance in classes made for fervid lunch hour discussion.

That was the first government school I ever went to. Till then I had been to an elite kindergarten school and a public school where the children were rich and everyone spoke English. In Army School. I made friends with many people far less privileged than I. Looking back, I was often thoughtless and vain those days, but those friends still stood by me and accepted me for what I was. It was cold, sure, but there were always smiles and pleasant voices to warm me up.

I've learnt many songs in many schools: Christmas carols, patriotic tunes, catholic hymns, complex classical pieces and even Irish drinking songs. But the song I'll always associate with my childhood is that monotonous bhajan I sang on a stony field in Jammu, as my feet turned numb with cold.

One Year

2009-06-12T01:12:00.009-04:00

It has been over a month since I last posted here. I felt my posts were getting more strained, summoning up the same energy seemed more of an effort and so gave I it up entirely for a while. It is impossible to be dishonest while writing. I can exaggerate, indeed hyperbole is one of my pet techniques, but at the core I have to believe what I am typing, or my sentences turn convoluted and displeasing.
So, instead of lying, I chose not to write at all. I sat in my sweaty little room, staring at my computer screen, I went shopping and bought smart new shoes, I baked apple pie and joked with friends, all the time with a niggling feeling inside me that I couldn't quite explain away.
I haven't found an explanation yet, this post is just a start, a confrontation if you will. I sometimes think my teenage is catching up with me now, in my twenties. All the rebellion and confusion and lack of identity I should have felt then sometimes overpowers me now. We never really escape our demons.

I handle it like I handle everything else in my life, by pushing it and everyone away. Like Scarlett O'Hara, "I'll think of it tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day" is my philosophy. I don't know if that's the best method. It is the only one I know.

I remember when K and I were in kindergarten, to make us eat our favourite uncle would promise us that if today we ate out curd rice, tomorrow we needn't. Uncle wrote it on my slate and propped it up on a chair. So every day we would choke down that rice waiting for the tomorrow when we wouldn't have to eat it any more.

I'm back home now. We celebrated K's birthday and I baked a cake. We called it 'Everything But the Kitchen Sink Cake" because it contained everything he liked: raisins, walnuts, cocoa, chocolate chunks, dates, coffee, rum and bananas. We ate tiny slices with chocolate ice cream. K left the next morning. The remaining half of the cake is still lying in the fridge. None of us want to touch it.

This coming year seems a godsend. Four years aren't enough. Not to figure out what you want to do with your life. Hell, a lifetime isn't enough. But I have one year. I gamble on it like Scheherezade gambled on the dawn. My story isn't finished yet.

Travel in a city

2009-05-08T14:04:00.005-04:00

I do love traveling around Mumbai in an auto. Autos are just the perfect height above the ground to see the dust flying when a humid breeze blows. I can look either way to catch everyday scenes of this city I've learnt to love.
From either side I see pan-stained sidewalks, but if I just hunch the littlest bit, I can see gorgeous mannequins under neon lights. Close enough to count the ribs of panting stray dogs and to see the glistening skins of mangoes stacked high on fruit sellers' carts. Close enough to see brightly coloured polythene bags clogging open gutters and the red high heeled shoes of the woman in Chanel sunglasses waiting for the valet to bring her car.
Fast enough that I feel weightless while we race down a flyover, narrowly avoiding potholes, yet slow enough for me to read all the billboards.

25 things about me

2009-05-08T03:48:00.005-04:00

I've been tagged with this particular meme several times, and today, finally decided to respond. While I'm hardly reserved about myself on this blog, here's a list of things I might not have mentioned about myself in the past three years. By the end of the exercise I realised, it's hard to come up with 25 remotely interesting things about oneself. While I'm not tagging anyone in particular with this meme, if you're reading this, do feel free to consider yourself tagged.1. I dislike stuffed toys. I find them pointless. I'd much rather have a real pup warm and wriggling in my hands, instead of felt ones with cotton insides and plastic eyes.
2. I don't really like listening to much music. I find it distracting. I obsess over a few songs and listen to just them over and over again, driving everyone around me nuts. I add only about 15 new songs a year to my playlist.
3. I'm never bored if I have pen and paper in hand.
4. I used to read prodigiously. Since coming to IIT though, I don't anymore.
5. I've trained for several years in classical dance and I thoroughly enjoy dancing. Sometimes I tap my feet under the table, because I can't keep them still.
6. I absolutely love baking and plan to study pastry sometime in my life.
7. I get into my own head far too often for my own liking. I try to observe myself from different points of view and find myself an endlessly fascinating subject.
8. I'm rather self-obsessed.
9. I publicly declared my hatred for poetry, but I can still cry over a good poem.
10. I sometimes cry over poetry, songs and books, but only very rarely and in private.
11. I'm a closet drama queen. I love drama, but constantly suppress that side of myself, although it sometimes sneaks out.
12. I dislike children and don't intend to have any of my own.
13. I will however make a smashing aunt.
14. I'm a master procrastinator. If any job can be postponed, I will postpone it. I'm not proud of this habit of mine and intend to make a push to break it, someday soon.
15. I very rarely get into arguments with people. I'm not quite sure why.
16. I find it hard to not smile at people- even perfect strangers- when I pass them on the street.
17. As a child I wanted my hair so long that I would trip on it as I walked. Now, I only crave hair so short that I'd never have to comb it.
18. I've recently discovered that I really like shopping.
19. I love blogging, but constantly wonder if I'm crossing the line between honest and too personal.
20. I love making caramel and spinning shapes with sugar. I can play with burning, boiling sugar for hours on end.
21. I used to be a rather mean kid- always looking down her nose at people. I really hope I've changed.
22. I dislike puns. I've met very few puns that I thought funny. I think them pretentious.
23. I used to have the disagreeable habit of humming to myself under my breath all the time. I only stopped when one day on the bus, a lady asked me why I was crying.
24. I'm usually attracted to older men.
25. I have a horror of settling down.Maybe my views will change as I grow older but permanence or commitment of any sort frightens me.

image from cuteoverload.com

Mangoes

2009-05-03T03:10:00.005-04:00

I am notoriously fickle when it comes to picking my favourite fruit. My favourites change with the seasons, in winter I favour crisp apples with ruddy skins and faint green veins running through their flesh, but before they have time to wrinkle at the approach of spring, I will have shifted to green, bursting grapes. But year after year, as the grapes grow brown and slowly fade away from the bamboo basket of my favourite seller, I scarcely spare a moment to mourn the loss, because mangoes will finally be in season.

Gloriously yellow flesh with the sweetest smell imaginable, through the months of May and June mangoes hold prime position in my heart. I've eaten all kinds of mangoes in every way possible. Giant golden ones eaten while sitting on newspapers so I won't get the floor dirty in Perimma's house, with the juice trickling down my arms, tiny green ones from Atthai's garden to get at which I would gobble down my curd rice with scarcely a chew, sliced into translucent pieces and eaten with a fork at formal lunches, or sliced into giant wedges and eaten leisurely during long and heated post-dinner conversations on the best way to cut mangoes, with the family.
After hearing Appa reminesce about his favourite cafe in Pune where they would serve giant bowls of mango pulp every summer to hungry young cadets, I made my first mango pulp. It was possibly the first dessert I ever made, filled with lumpy mangoes inexpertly peeled and a giant mound of garish tuitty-fruity on top for decoration. Appa, bless his heart, praised it to the skies. Since then I've experimented more and more daringly with this versatile fruit and have always been rewarded. I bake mangoes into buttery pies topped with crystallized sugar, a scoop of ice cream and my trusty toffee sauce. I cream them into souffles, light as air. I stew them into spicy jams that will make pretty sandwich cookies. And with every dish and every day, I fall a little more in love with this glorious fruit.

(Photo courtesy thailandholidayhomes.co.uk)

The simple things

2009-04-15T04:10:00.004-04:00

I've cautiously refrained from posting much this past month, because somehow my words have been spitting venom. Put me in vicinity of a keyboard and I fall easy prey to my new found cynicism. It is so easy to criticize, so hard to praise. Even now, at a time when many things are ending and new beginnings seem far away, I find myself announcing relief instead of reveling in the memories behind or grieving at the unavoidable partings ahead. Such a state of affairs can not continue, no matter how poetic and romantic it may seem. Indeed, I loathe people who sit and criticize the world around them, wrapped safely in their mantle of superior cynicism, yet I am in great peril of becoming one such myself.

So instead, let's return to the simple things. Today was lovely. After weeks of stifling heat, there's a light breeze. Not enough to dispel the humidity, but it does contain a whispery promise of things to come. I saw clouds in the sky yesterday, timid, translucent clouds. They tried vainly to shield me from the sun. I don't need them, I have my SPF 30 sunscreen. Still, where there are clouds, there will soon be rain, I hope.

I made yet another cheat sheet today. I've lost count of how many such sheets I've made. Certainly, I've developed a skill for them. My masterpiece was a sheet for Quantum Electronics in February, in which after filling both sides of an A4 sheet almost solidly with microscopic blue writing, I proceeded to write in the milimetres between the original blue lines, in black. More wonderfully, I deciphered it all in the exam. Sometimes I surprise myself. In any case, it's good to know my cheat sheet making days are numbered. I can't think of a real life application where the skill of fitting unlimited amounts of text onto limited paper could come in handy, yet it is one of the many things IIT has taught me.

Four more exams to go. Then it will be time for lab experiments, blisteringly hot days, new faces, beach trips, ice cream cones, goodbye hugs, project deadlines, torrential rains, computer screens and a lonesome room.

Preserving Illusions

2009-04-10T16:48:00.004-04:00

Of late, all my nights have become a haze of jumbled voices, uttering every form of profanity, filled with uneasy, drunken laughter, as I watch through rising clouds of cigarette smoke.

I don't know how I could have been so naive. Till two weeks ago, I honestly believed that a valfi was a time for memories and laughter, for honesty and closure. But this year as I watched closely for the first time, all my little illusions shattered one by one. I watched as people brought out the character flaws of their friends -things they disliked about each other but never had the courage to point out- disguised them clumsily as jokes and read them out into a microphone, on a stage, for all the world to hear. I watched as they spoke disrespectfully of friends and used words I had never heard of before and wish I could never hear again. I sat through many readings trying hard not to listen, too cowardly, too unsure, to get up and leave.

I like my illusions, I don't want to lose them. I like to believe that I would never judge anyone on the basis of three pages written about them by their drunken friends, but sometimes, I can't help but wonder if there isn't a grain of truth behind some smutty tale. As I spend more time here, as I listen and observe, I'm frightened at my own growing cynicism.

Of course valfis like I always imagined exist too. I like to think my own was one such. It was 9:30 am on a weekday morning and we had all been in our chiffon sarees and heavy jewelery for over 12 hours. We had spent the night reading, reminiscing, laughing, blushing and crying. The morning was quiet, the sun shone, but the terrace hadn't yet turned uncomfortably warm. I was surrounded by people I loved and respected. I couldn't have asked for more.

So it is that I am able to fight off the romance of an overpowering cynicism and still preserve a shred of my old naivety. Some illusions must be preserved. I still need something to believe in.

Heat

2009-04-01T17:52:00.006-04:00

It is 3 am and I am still awake, thanks to an ill advised coffee. The heat is quite stifling. Every year I meet the Mumbai summer with fresh surprise. Every year, I can't recall it being quite this bad. I've never faced a summer quite as potent as Mumbai's before. I've seen warmer climates with higher temperatures, but what gets to me is this humidity, which makes every breath an effort and covers me in a sheen of perspiration half an hour after a bath. When you emerge from an air conditioned room, it slams you in the face like an unyielding wall.

Smells seem more intense in this dense, warm air. Yesterday A, G and I went for a walk. We saw a butta seller fanning the flames of his tiny coal stove, in the dusk. He stood in a circle of shimmering sparks as a most delicious smell spread around. Roasting corn on the cob is definitely another of my favourite smells.
A few days ago, Amma and I paused before a jasmine seller at a railway station. The buds were small and hard, but their fragrance spread around the station, almost intoxicatingly sweet.

The heat makes me languorous. Waking up in the mornings seems pointless, till the sticky warmth forces me to shift. Every movement is an effort, every thought a strain. I procrastinate and laze inexcusably and glibly blame it all on the heat. It is of course fitting that this is one of the busiest times of the year. April is here and the semester is wrapping up. Project deadlines loom, valfi profiles have to be written, exams have to be mugged for. My caffeine fix is perhaps a godsend, I can use the time to do something productive But I know I won't. Like Scarlett O'Hara I whisper to myself, "I'll think of it tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day" and take myself off to bed.

PAF

2009-03-27T14:08:00.005-04:00

I tucked away yet another dog-eared script in my cardboard box today. It is a box I've had since my first semester, in which I keep symbols of times I consider worth preserving. It holds a movie ticket from my first ever date, one earring from a pair I once wore everywhere before I lost its mate, a few scribbles, and four scripts: one of each PAF I worked on.

After eleven hours of near-oblivious sleep, I feel human again, albeit rather displaced. It's strange to not have to bolt my food and rush for practice, or to open gmail and not have to send a mail deciding meeting times. Last night after the PAF and dinner, we broke off reluctantly, our good nights trailing. After weeks of working, eating, dozing and thinking together, such a parting seemed too final, too concrete to accept. Today, ever since we woke up, we find ourselves gravitating towards each other's rooms with snippets of memories or to relate familiar jokes.

Every PAF I've done has a special place in my heart. There was Kharashein, where after weeks of sticking newspapers together and painting endless rolls of chart paper orange, I got to stand on the first floor of our chawl and at the high point of the PAF, scream. Ashaayein, where I would wait for hours and hours to sing harmonies to the theme song. U Turn where I finally learnt to what levels of perfection a PAF's background score could be taken, and then yesterday, Nazaffgarh Express, where I got to work with old friends and make some new ones. I discovered afresh how incredibly talented and modest people can be and was both shamed and inspired.

At a time when I was desperately afraid of growing cynical and misanthropic, this was just what I needed. Now it's time to carry on, faith reaffirmed.

Of shoes and ships and sealing wax...

2009-03-08T04:06:00.004-04:00

It's strange to feel old at 21. But I suppose college does that to you. Last night, after yet another 2am walk up the length of the campus, I got to thinking about how familiar things seem now, after nearly four years in IIT. I'm unused to such familiarity, it throws me off. I'm far more used to packing up and leaving, confident that I'm leaving whatever messes I've made behind and am proceeding to a new place and yet another fresh start, with brand new messes waiting to be made. It is far harder, I realise now, to stay put and work things out. I'm not very good at it.

Last night's walk had almost a sense of deja vu. The night air felt as cool as it always has, in my countless such walks in the past four years. There were the usual puttering autos that slowed down hopefully when they spotted me. The customary bunch of drunk students singing loudly as they walked back to their hostel. Flexes fluttering in the wind, advertising events from musical nights to quizzing competitions. The scraping of plastic chairs outside the Coffee Day Express as a final bunch of students scrambled to get their caffeine fixes before closing time. The lamp post casting a yellow glare on a bunch of tired freshies with a ladder, putting up yet another flex. The familiar canoodling couples outside my hostel gate. And of course, the watchman fast asleep, with his feet up on the table.

There is comfort in this familiarity. I have closer friends than I've ever had before. Perhaps as A remarked last night, if we weren't living together in the same hostel, sharing the same mess and foozeball table, we wouldn't be friends. But seeing as we are, we accept each other, faults and whimsies. I wonder if I'll ever find such complete acceptance elsewhere.

I thought such sameness would tire me or grate on my nerves. But instead, I find myself clutching at moments, intent upon making them memories before they slip away. This next year is to be just that- a time for rest and contemplation, for dreams and ambition and most of all, a time to remember. Before I'm once again flung into the world outside.

Moments

2009-02-21T11:24:00.004-05:00

I've now been alive for twenty one years, four days, twelve hours and thirty five minutes. But I choose not to measure time in standard units. Time should be measured in moments. Moments, silly, sweet, bitter, happy... that burn themselves into your memory and make you who you are.

I remember the moment when a priest shaved my head in Tirupati. I fought so hard, he cut my scalp. Appa held me down while the priest finished. I didn't speak to Appa for a week after that. I still have photographs of myself at the time, in a frilly green frock, staring dejectedly at the camera, with a dome shaped scalp that reflected light.

Then there was my 1st Standard play- I was the sun and all my classmates were flowers basking in my light. I had gleaming yellow robes and a giant, pointy crown. It's a wonder I didn't burst with pride on that stage.

My first and last TV recording, in a sleepy studio in Delhi. I wore a green satin dance costume and my hands and feet were dyed red. The skit was based on a fable about the lives of jungle animals and the pond was a circle of blue painted on the floor. My head hurt with the tremendous weight of fake hair, jewelry and plastic flowers. I wished it would end soon.

Then there was the moment when V, my best friend in Sacred Heart High School, whom I had called to say goodbye to, told me on the phone that no one in my class regretted that I was leaving. They all thought me awfully stuck up.

The moment when Race, our German Shepherd, who was bathing in a river, got carried away by the moving water. He wasn't yet fully grown, and not strong enough to fight the current. He disappeared behind a giant rock and I ran after him desperately, only to find him perched on another jutting rock, shaking the water off his coat.

The moment when Appa brought Race's body back from the Veterinary Hospital. I didn't believe he was dead till I touched him. He was cold.

The moment when I held hands with my first ever crush, on a train back from Agra. After hours, our plams grew sweaty and slowly slipped apart. I remember thinking that it was unfair that they never mentioned things like sweat or dirt or acne in romance novels.

The moment when I waved my parents away, and stood at the door of my hostel, alone for the first time in my life.

The moment when I stood before an audience of 600 people I didn't know and sang. My hands were trembling and my heart hammering, but still, somehow, my voice was clear.

The moment when I ran in from the rain and didn't care that clothes were soaked or my shoes squelchy, because for the first time ever, I was in love. I forgave the romance novels then- they knew what they were talking about.

The moment when I first realised that I was never bored as long as I held a pen and paper in my hands.

And then today, when I proudly looked over a pile of shoes, clothes and accessories, and discovered that, despite what I've said in the past, shopping is a great deal of fun.

Life is full of so many such moments, all in turn silly, sweet, bitter, happy, embarrassing... These are but a paltry few of all those thousands of memories I have acquired in my twenty one years. It's nice to pause sometimes, to simply think about the past. Not to learn lessons from it or to air regrets, but simply, to remember.

Sweet Cigarettes

2009-02-14T02:21:00.003-05:00

We lived in Delhi for three years, from 2nd standard to the end of fourth. Appa was a Lt. Col then and accommodation was hard to come by. So, we spent the first 6 months of our stay, living with Mummy. Mummy was the mother of one of Appa's course mates and had graciously offered to take us in while we were house hunting. Everyone called her Mummy, I've never learnt her real name.
She was tiny, with a tongue like a whiplash and jet black hair that she dyed every Sunday. She taught Amma north-Indian cooking (for which we will all be eternally grateful) and she communicated her love for mushy Hindi movies to me.

On weekends, Mummy used to bribe me and K with money, to help her out with the dusting. After a morning spent carefully dusting Mummy's drawing room china, I would hurry out importantly to the general store outside, a five rupee coin clutched tightly in my palm. Five rupee coins in those days were giant and weighty. I couldn't close my palm around one. There was so much you could buy with five rupees in that general store. Poppins in violent colours, coated with crusty sugar. Giant toffee eclairs that didn't quite fit in my mouth. Heart shaped lollipops that I could never lick on patiently and would simply crunch down in a jiffy. But my favourites were the cigarettes. Long white cylinders of sugar, with a vermilion tip painted at the end.

Those cigarettes were fascinating. You could literally smoke one- the stub would get shorter and shorter as the sugar dissolved in your mouth until you finally reached the tip which you then crunched down. I don't think they ever tasted really great- they were rather chalky and bland. But that didn't matter, because they came in a proper paper pack that you could flick open and hand around to your closest friends- they were the essence of cool. Winter time was the best, because then you could blow out in the cold air after pulling at the cigarette, and the condensation would form 'smoke'.

I don't think they make those sugar cigarettes anymore. I haven't seen them around for years. But thanks to my seven-year-old, knee sock wearing, chubby, earnest self, they'll always be the first thing I look for in a general store.

When's my turn?

2009-02-11T08:10:00.004-05:00

Appa visited me over the weekend. He gave me flash-fiction-story ideas, helped clean my room and fixed my fan. Last time he visited, he fixed my veena and bought me a toolkit.
Every time he visits, he fixes something. Often, things that I didn't even realize were broken. When my turn comes, I hope I'm half as good.

My Style Icon

2009-02-03T14:13:00.004-05:00

I was trying today to write this article about a person whose style I admire. I cast over movie stars and designers, college friends and girl crushes, for several minutes, till suddenly, I knew.

Amma has always been the epitome of chic Army wife. She slides into and out of the role with so much grace. She wears cotton sarees for coffee mornings, chiffons and light silks for evening tea parties and gleaming Kanjeevarams for dinner nights. Ever since I can remember, on the nights when she and Appa would go out for a dinner, I would watch her getting ready, fascinated. She would open her closet revealing sarees piled high, arranged according to importance and occasion. Despite the several score sarees in there (whenever we moved, we always needed two trunks just for them) she could always tell me exactly when she got which one. Sometimes she would let me select for her and I would agonize over finding the right saree, a matching blouse and perfect jewelery.

She would let me play with her makeup and jewelery as she dressed. I would carefully paint my face in rosebud shades and try on elaborate gold necklaces, but I could never manage to look like her. I would watch as she deftly formed perfect pleats and tucked them in and carefully folded the pallu and pinned it to her shoulder. Often, she would tuck a rosebud Appa had given her, in her hair. As a final touch, she would mist herself in jasmine scented perfume and then stand before us for our admiring inspection. At times like those, she was a perfectly beautiful woman with a lovely smile and rosebuds in her hair, but she always seemed so unfamiliar. We knew Amma was in there too, but she was someone else then- standing erect, all five feet of her, next to Appa's lounge-suited, towering frame. She and Appa would leave for the party after many exhortations to us to sleep in time.

When they returned, she would always come quietly to my room to check if I was asleep and kiss my forehead. She smelled of night air and jasmines, of roses and warmth, and then, she was Amma again.

Teacher's Pet

2009-01-24T07:39:00.003-05:00

A few days ago, on my way back from class, I saw the children from the local KV practicing their Republic Day march past on the street. A red-faced PT master was shouting out instructions, while the children stamped and shouted "left-right-left" energetically, but without much synchronization. One chubby little girl at the front with two oiled pigtails and big red bows however, was concentrating furiously and trying her best to catch the master's attention with her marching. She really reminded me of myself.
Through most of school, it was very important to me to be the teacher's pet. I loved being held up as an example. When teachers would say things like, "Why can't you be more like Nithya?" or "Sit next to Nithya and learn how to behave," I would flush pink with pleasure. This naturally made me rather unpopular with my classmates, but I was too busy gloating to notice.
I did change eventually, my friends began to like me (I hope), and I discovered the joys of sitting on the last bench- reading novels and passing chits. But that energetic little girl brought it all back, for a minute. I hope she grows out of it someday too. Being a back-bencher is far more fun!

The Perfect Man

2009-01-13T15:29:00.002-05:00

By the age of sixteen, I had a very clear definition of the perfect man for me. He would be tall and handsome, of course. He would also read prodigiously, dance and play an instrument. I wasn't very particular about the instrument, but I did hope it would be the violin. We would spend quiet evenings reading books in companionable silence before he brought out his violin and I sang for him. To vary the monotony, some evenings we would put on slow jazz and dance for hours on end. Did I mention that he would also be a splendid dancer?
Of course my practical side would kick in then- after all some of these talents were rather emasculating. So, I threw in sports for good measure. He would play proper, rough, manly sports like football and basketball while I cheered him on from the sidelines. Then we would return home where he'd help me cook dinner and then he'd write a gloriously romantic sonnet to my eyes and secret it under my pillow for me to find in the morning.

Then college happened and my perfect man started seeming more and more unreachable. I let go of each of his little perfections reluctantly, one by one. Maybe he didn't have to dance... Maybe he could learn the violin after we got together... Perhaps I would settle for someone not quite so formidably well read...Maybe a writing me a sonnet was rather soppy...

This went on for over three years until today in a random 2 am conversation, A asked me what qualities I looked for in my ideal man. I thought about it for a really long time and finally came up with, "I'm not quite sure..."
The starched up vision of perfection that I had doesn't seem at all right now. I always thought I was reluctantly letting go of my visions of the perfect man, and gloried in the doleful romance of the thought. But, now I get that all I was doing was growing up. Indeed such an embodiment of perfection, if he even existed, would probably be impossibly hard to live with.
Still, now that I've come face to face with reality and stripped all my visions bare, I'm feeling rather empty. I know that new ideas and dreams, far more real and precious, will come in to fill that void, one day. But right now, as the culmination of three year's wisdom, I cling to only one standard- no matter what else my perfect man does or doesn't do, he will not write poetry.

Friendship

2009-01-08T15:58:00.007-05:00

All through my childhood, we moved from place to place. Every friendship I had, every relationship, was necessarily short. Oh, I had best friends wherever I went- there was Riya in Delhi, Kittu in Jammu, Vasudha in YOL, Parul in Jabalpur, Ruchika in Secunderabad... But now, all I remember about them are their names. I never really thought about it before- but by the time I was about 10, I knew better than to get too close to anyone other than my family. Too soon, we would have to leave and it would hurt. When the last day of school came, my best friend and I would hold hands and promise to write each other all the time. For the first few, I did write letters and they wrote back. But the letters would become fewer and further apart till they finally stopped.
Even now, I find it hard to get really close to people. Oh, I talk and joke and giggle and share secrets, but still sometimes feel essentially alone. I never fought with any of my friends. I always thought it was because I never really found anything worth fighting about. Now I wonder if it's because I didn't feel secure enough to believe that my friendships would survive the battle. I've never really fallen in love. To love someone is to give them rather frightening control over your life- something I'm simply not prepared to relinquish yet. I once came close, but he left and I find myself surprisingly dispassionate about it.
But now, after three and a half years of shared rooms, classes, clothes and secrets I have friends I truly care about. Friends in front of whom I can lose my temper and act selfish but know that I will be forgiven. Friends with whom I can really talk without worrying about being tactful or politically correct.
It's taken me three and a half years to get here. Now I have another four months with them. Then they leave- to jobs or far off universities. All these years, I was the one who left, but this time I'll be the one staying behind. They're already slipping away- they've entered this world of offer letters and university applications, renting flats and buying business suits- that I'm not a part of. I'm not ready for them to leave, I don't want them to go. I'm jealous of their new life that is taking them away from me. We will always be friends of course, we've been through too much together. But it will never be the same.

I'm sad to leave

2009-01-02T02:42:00.005-05:00

Another year has gone by. I'll soon be a whole year older, but not a whit wiser. Time's passing always makes me pause and spend a few moments in thought; that's why I act all retrospective during New Year or on birthdays. But now that 2009 has already begun, I'm finding it rather hard to take a step back and look at the vast carcass of the year I leave behind. So, I'm just going to focus on this past month and hope that by writing of it here, at least some of the lessons I learnt in December will stick.

I worked in a newspaper: technically, I'm still working in the newspaper. Today's my last day and I've finished and filed my final article and I have nothing left to do. I learned that newspaper work can be a really adrenaline pumping job- you do have to get out a fresh paper every single day. There are hardly any holidays and people are always busy. Still, every single person I met, took out the time to smile and speak kindly to me- a bewildered intern. Everyone seemed rather bemused that an IITian would be interested in newspaper work, but they often went out of their way to make things easy for me.
Lesson 1: Be nice to people.

I also learnt that press people are treated pretty well out there. Every event I attended, I was plied with tea and offered free gifts. It can get to your head quite easily. I hopefully, haven't been around long enough yet.
Lesson 2: Don't let it all go to your head.

The work is always fresh; after all, you're constantly looking for a newer angle, a better edge, to make your piece stand out. Deadlines are tight and have to be met, no excuses.
Lesson3: (Most Important) Don't procrastinate. There's no time for it in the real world.

The news is always different and as a reporter, you get to meet new people everyday. There were amusing (WTF) moments and rather tiresome ones.
Lesson 4: Don't ever lose your sense of humour.

All said and done, I really don't want to return to Quantum Mechanics yet.
Can't I stay just a little bit longer?

Confused

2008-12-29T08:23:00.004-05:00

Last year, I spent Christmas in Chennai. It was blisteringly hot all day on Christmas eve but I was is the acid green Haptics lab poring over code, so I didn't notice. That night, Chitti was expecting carol singers from her church so we sat up waiting for them, dozing on the living room sofas and occasionally taking a crack at the exceptionally hard smowman cookies my cousin and I had baked.
The singers came at around 4 am. Around 10 of them wrapped up in sweaters and mufflers for protection against Madras' mincing winter. They were blustery and cheerful as they handed out hymn books to us and made us join them in their carols. We sang hymns about God's forgiveness and the goodness of mankind, all of us in different tunes while an energetically played guitar kept us vaguely in scale. Then the minister gave us a sermon asking God to bless us, every one, and everyone yelled Amen whenever he paused.
All the people in that room seemed so happy, so secure in their faith.
Last week Amma, Appa and I took a walk to the local Ayappa temple. The aarathi was about to begin when we entered. A priest closed himself in with the idol in the central chamber while we waited outside with about 50 other devotees listening to this strange music they played- all mridangam beats and nadaswaram. As the music rose to a crescendo, the chamber doors were flung open and we saw the deity in fresh golden robes, encircled by leaping flames, while the priest blew on a conch shell.
Despite my professed atheism, I was intrigued. True, it was a ritual designed to impress and done mostly for effect, but for the brief time that it lasted I felt a strange kind of kinship with the fifty other strangers in that temple.
My mother has a small corner in the house where she keeps a motley collection of photographs, prints and figurines of various deities. Every evening she lights an oil lamp before them and reads a shloka in stumbling Sanskrit- a language she does not understand. She follows this ritual every day.
I remember a school project we had in 9th standard. We were all to write what we thought was the greatest evil in the world and why, on a chart which was then put up for display on our classroom wall. People wrote of unemployment, illiteracy, pride, prejudice... I wrote that religion was the worst of all evils because I believed that it was at the root of almost every dispute.

I don't believe in thousands of Gods in human form with all the weaknesses of mankind. I don't believe in beings of infinite patience and forgiveness who were crucified for mankind's sins. Nor do I believe in long winded ceremonies that no one understands, done in the name of faith. But there are times when I crave that simple peace that I see in Amma's eyes when she lights an oil lamp in front of a faded print. I long for something to believe in.

W.T.F.

2008-12-20T10:05:00.004-05:00

Today, I was sent to cover a press meet held by the World Telugu Federation. All the members I met referred to the federation (quite seriously) as WTF.
When my editor gave me the project I asked him rather dubiously if I was the right person for the job, seeing as I don't speak a word of Telugu. He reassured me saying that since it was an international conference, it would be in English. He couldn't have been more wrong. I was handed a two page press note densely printed in Telugu as soon as I reached. An elderly man was holding forth to a bunch of TV cameras in chaste Telegu. Everyone else in the room spoke the language and they were nodding sagely and laughing at his jokes. From what I could gather, he was holding forth the youth wing of the WTF (I couldn't help giggling whenever he said WTF. I got a lot of frowns).
Gradually, a sense of the ridiculous dawned on me- I'm an Engineering student who's studied nothing but Physics for the past three years, working in an English newspaper, attending a conference in Telugu- a language I don't understand- which is presumably about the preservation of a culture I don't relate to. How did I get here?
After the press meet, I found a kind faced gentleman who was nice enough to sit me by his side and translate what happened.
It has now been two weeks of worrying over punctuation, peering closely at comp screens trying to fit small articles into minuscule spaces, poring over google maps, making innumerable phone calls to strangers and reading up on matter that ranges from anti rabies vaccines to employment portals.
Life can be crazy, but it sure is fun.

Blogathon :(

2008-12-14T16:00:00.005-05:00

The fates are conspiring against me. I type these words with my last few minutes of battery power. There's a power cut here. I'm still going to try and stay awake for another half hour in the hope that electricity returns, but if it doesn't, well, that just sucks.
Especially since the essay's finally starting to come together. Also especially since there's a very green, very scaly frog locked inside my bathroom and now alone in the darkness, I'm going to have nightmares about it escaping into my room.

Blogathon

2008-12-14T14:42:00.001-05:00

We've moved into this huge, very old house. It's a house that the British built and once lived in and is simply lovely, but far too big for just the four of us. The ceiling is so high, the slightest sound echoes. So, we spend most of our time tiptoeing around, trying to make as little noise as possible.
Amma recently acquired this huge pendulum clock for the living room. It's impressively varnished and has a giant gold pendulum that swings importantly from side to side. Amma is very proud of it, she thinks it lends a certain air to the room. Unfortunately, the clock displays a sadistic nature quite unexpected from its ponderous appearance. Every hour it announces itself with a tune. And not the same tune, mind you, for that would be so passe, but a different tune each hour, which seem to grow longer as the hour lengthens. And when you lie in bed with your pillow over your head and wait for the tune to end, the clock still isn't done with you. For, once the tune ends, the clock tolls the hour- in great ringing notes that echo in every room of the house.

Blogathon: Terror of the night

2008-12-14T13:14:00.004-05:00

Thre's a frog in my bathroom.

I dropped my toothbrush and when I bent to pick it up, found myself staring into a pair of intensely black, beady eyes. I did not scream. I'd like to claim that was because I remembered my hard working and tired parents asleep in an adjacent room, but I think it was simply because I was paralyzed with horror.

I stared into those eyes and they stared back at me. Then the creature gave a horrid little gurgle and jumped at me. I ran out and double bolted the door from the outside.

Now I can never enter my bathroom again.

And the essay's barely begun. I'm still recovering from a serious case of jangling nerves.

It's gonna be a long night.

Blogathon!

2008-12-14T13:00:00.003-05:00

Okay, I have an essay to write folks, and I've pushed it as late as I can. So, I'm gonna pull an all nighter now while bemoaning my stupidity. But, nightouts at home simply aren't as simple as nightouts in IIT where you have company at all hours of night. Amma and Appa are already asleep and the whole house is dark and silent.

So, this is what I propose. I'm going to blog once every hour until I finish my essay. Having made this public declaration, I'm counting on my pride to make me stick to it and hopefully keep me awake till I finish. A written chronicle of how painful a nightout is might also perhaps serve as a reminder to me to plan and do work in advance (And the cynical half of my brain is going "Yeah, right")

It is 2339 by my comp's clock, so see you again at 0039!

Never Again

2008-12-03T07:59:00.004-05:00

I've tried to blog several times this past week. I thought I had something to say, about terrorism and fear, the killing of innocents, the pointlessness of it all... I wanted to write a tribute to the heroes who died in the encounters, to speak of the photos I saw of CST, its floor smeared with blood or about the candlelight vigil I witnessed where strangers stood together and paid homage to those who were gone.

As I sat in my room, trying to understand everything that was happening, to frame sentences of the flurry of thoughts in my mind, someone let off a firecracker outside. Immediately, I froze. For one brief second, I was afraid it was a grenade, that a terrorist had found his way into our campus. I held my breath, waiting for screams and gunfire.

That moment of terror made me furious with myself. For it was conceding victory- to those terrorists who went from room to room in the Taj hotel shooting the guests they encountered, to the terrorist who dropped a rucksack with a bomb in a marketplace in Ahmedabad that was picked up by a four year old girl, to all those mindless, faceless cowards who resort to violence against defenseless people in the name of religion. They had made me afraid for one brief second.

This blog has always been about the simple pleasures of life, food and travel, love and epiphanies. Tomorrow, it will return to that. But today, I vow, never to be afraid again.

My Happy Place

2008-11-15T03:59:00.007-05:00

I have traveled quite a bit around this country of ours, but whenever people ask me my favourite place, my reply is always the same- Himachal Pradesh. Perhaps it was because that was the first posting of Appa's I was old enough to remember clearly, perhaps the wild, cold beauty of the mountains appealed to something in my impressionable ten-year-old soul, but I have always known that some day I will return there.

We lived in a house on the side of a mountain. A road wound in lazy spirals around the entire girth of that mountain, hedged by wild honeysuckle that bloomed in giant sprays of pink and yellow. The valley was almost a sheer drop from the side our house was on, with only one steep gravel path leading down. A stream flowed in that valley- icy cold in the winters and angry red in the monsoons. The sound of that stream was a constant in our lives, I came to associate the sound of running water with silence. The view from our terrace was breathtaking. There were giant mountains all around. the nearest one was just across the valley- terraced mustard fields dotted with yellow farmhouses. Behind it were dark green mountains covered with fuzzy pine trees. And further behind was a giant, craggy peak always covered in white, even in the summer.

One winter Appa, Ken and I set off in quest of snow that we could see on that faraway peak. But the further we trudged, the more distant that elusive snow capped peak seemed. We walked through the pine forest and discovered a forgotten pool in its heart. We imagined leopard treads and collected pine cones to take home for Amma to exclaim over. We kept expecting snow, just after that next peak we'd cross. We stood in the middle of a cloud on a mountain peak and looked at the mountains around us, in the winter sunshine.

We never did find that snow- the fog rolled over and we had to turn back.

When I was writing that article on life in the Army, Appa hunted out a few photos of the Kangra valley for me. They reassure me that the valley is indeed as beautiful as I remember it.

The King is dead. Long live the King.

2008-11-14T07:17:00.003-05:00

I first read that line in an Asterix comic, I think. I never thought then, that it would apply to my life. Of course, I was six years old and not really worried about philosophy. My primary obsessions were food and dogs at the time.

This is going to be one of those ranting, self deprecating, insecure posts, I can feel it coming on. Lately it seems that no matter how much work I do, there always seems to be more. Just as I finish one giant task, another one looms up, too urgent to be ignored. A great deal of this is my fault, I agree. I can not seem to make myself do work ahead if time. Don't get me wrong, I'm great at planning. I can make excel sheets and calendars with the best of 'em. It's the doing that always fazes me.

But eventually, when my sins catch up with me, I have nothing left to do but put my nose to the grindstone, surfacing occasionally to write rant filled posts on my blog. This here's the first of what I gloomily predict will be a long series.

Clawing my way back

2008-11-08T01:05:00.001-05:00

It's been a week of suspended reality. Home was wonderful, as was Diwali. Unfortunately, even after I returned the suspension continued. Have you ever felt like you're caught between two worlds and you're not really sure where you stand? You wake up in the morning and wonder why you should ever get out of bed, brush your teeth and face a new day. Now however, I'm reluctantly wiping the mists of the past few days away and returning to this which is my life.
At times like these, cake always helps. More so, when the cake is the exact colour of sunshine. Our new house has a plethora of lemon trees, so Amma and I went scavenging one afternoon and returned with scratched arms and four gorgeous lemons still warm from the sun. So it is that in this, the last of my food posts for a while, that I bring to you the lemon pound cake I baked for all my friends at IIT. The cake is long gone, but the pictures remain.

Dessert

2008-10-28T11:29:00.001-04:00

A better view of the dessert I made. Pound cake, coming soon.

Apple Galette

2008-10-28T02:11:00.001-04:00

Galettes are rustic french tarts. This was the first time I made then and I'm in love. Their rustic appearance belies the richness within. A salty, crumbly buttery crust filled with juicy apples, cinnamon and raisins. Utterly toothsome.
Lemon pound cake coming up next. Stay tuned.
Oh and if anyone wants the recipes, leave me a comment.

Home cooking

2008-10-27T00:29:00.000-04:00

I'm at home for the next two days folks, so Colours is to become a food blog. You see, I've always wanted to become a food blogger, but sitting in a dusty hostel room, that wasn't really an option. So expect daily posts here on all the stuff I'm cooking.

Yesterday, Amma and Appa were to throw an official lunch. The spread was lavish- four starters, three main courses and two desserts. I was in charge of two starters, one main dish and of course the desserts. We had two cooks to help out, so everything went pretty smoothly. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to snap pics of the final dishes- I had to sit at the table and concentrate on not dropping my napkin as the waiters brought the food in. I did snag a few preparation photographs though. Please excuse the bad quality- I'm new at this.

One of the starters was tandoori vegetable- speared on toothpics and baked in the oven. This is the first time I tried them- I had to play about with the masala a little to get it right, but these little morsels were absolutely delicious.

Here the tandoori vegetables are baking in my trusty little oven alongside my other starter- cheesy eggplant. Eggplant was rubbed with lemon juice, smothered with creamy cheese and spices, then coated with breadcrumbs, spotted with butter and baked. I didn't get to taste these, 'cos none of them returned from the service.

My main course dish, in preparation. This was actually the filling for this trusty little invention of Amma's that we simply call bread dumplings. The recipe's very forgiving. Just throw together any ingredients you like, stuff the mix into moist slices of bread to form balls, and smother with spicy curd. This one's always a winner. The filling I used yesterday had pomegranate, coconut, ground peanuts, green chillies, mint, sultanas and roasted almonds. Yum!

Stuffed capsicum- this was made by one ofthe cooks, but the capsicums looked so pretty and shiny with their paneer and corn stuffing, I couldn't resist posting a picture.

The table looked pristinely lovely with all its cutlery and flowers. Again- not my work.

And finally- one of the desserts. This was actually the one that required the least work. It's coconut barfi and jangris from Pahalwan-di-Hatti in Jammu- they make the best jangris in the world. Appa brought them back from his recent trip to Udhampur, especially for me. In the centre is homemade rabdi, and it's dotted with tuitty-fruity, simply to provide a colour contrast.

The other dessert I made was a sophisticated take on the standard brownies with ice cream. I decided to turn the dessert topsy turvy, making it a scoop shaped brownie atop a square of ice cream. This was then topped with rum- caramel sauce and a chocolate coated hazlenut. The brownies were my old favourite- trusty cocoa brownies. They always bake up densely fudgey with a sugary crust. The caramel sauce also came out shiny and deliciously boozy. Unfortunately, since I wanted the brownies hot and the ice cream cold, I had to serve these up quickly and couldn't pause to snap pics.

Do visit again soon. I'm baking apple pie today with the Kashmiri apples Appa brought.

The Festival of Lights

2008-10-23T08:41:00.000-04:00

Up till 10th standard, we would write essays in Hindi class about our favourite festival. I would always pick Diwali, mostly because I knew that essay by heart. But when you pause to think of it, A festival of lights... how wonderfully evocative that sounds. Even if I was a foreigner who had never seen Diwali before, that description alone would let me picture it. Homes lit up with glowing lamps, skies brightened with sunbursts of colour, music, laughter and sweets.

This is a really wonderful country we live in, isn't it? We have festivals of light and colour, of harvest and rain. We have music festivals that last for months and dances for every one of our thousands of Gods. We have more languages than states, and poetry in all of them. But, I digress from Diwali.

We celebrate our Diwali in the Indian style, with some allowances for Army traditions. We wake up early in the morning and bathe. Amma does her puja while K and I take turns ringing a little brass bell. Amma then force feeds us Diwali marundu (A mixture of herbs sweetened with jaggery, said to help digestion. This is served during Diwali in anticipation of all the feasting to come) We then sit about over a leisurely breakfast, wearing brand new clothes and awaiting our guests. Amma and I will have spent the past week slaving over the stove, and as a result the kitchen will be full giant plastic and aluminium tins holding fascinating things. Then our guests will come and we'll wish them and make small talk and exchange sweets.

Afternoons will generally be spent by K and me in a sugar coma, while Appa and Amma go about doing their social rounds. In the evening will be the military fireworks display, an event that takes weeks of preparation and planning. The first fireworks are timed to go off with the last rays of the sunset. They will be closely followed by wheels and snakes of fire, giant flowerpots and multi-colored sparklers. While the display continues, we delicately nibble on cakes and sip lemonade while trying to make polite conversation over the explosions.

Night time is my favourite though. When we return home and have seen off the last of our guests, we go to the roof and stand there watching the fireworks, just us four. It's like a giant show especially for us. We point out sunbursts to each other and exclaim over misfires. Gradually, we fall quiet and simply watch.

Happy Diwali everyone!

One from the archives

2008-10-21T06:30:00.002-04:00

This is a post about a performance I gave over a year ago, that I'd blogged about but not published then. Now, when I read it though, I can still remember that sense of perfect calm I experienced that day.

Yesterday was a small triumph of sorts. I performed on stage after practicing intensively, for a lot of rather snarky reasons. But up there, with a spotlight glowing on me and my voice booming from huge amplifiers, I had a sudden moment of clarity. I couldn't remember my reasons coming here and singing any more, and I had to think up some new ones quickly, because the audience was waiting. So I took a deep breath and began to sing. My voice was shaky at the start, but it smoothed soon, and for the first time in my life, I experienced the novel sensation of singing without a single thought in my head. I didn't think of the sound or of how I was sitting, I didn't worry if I would forget the lyrics or try to pose to show the best angles to my face. I just sang. And for the first time in a very long time, music made me happy.

I should do this more often

2008-10-18T23:27:00.000-04:00

This morning I woke up rather early and since there was no LAN yet and as usual, I had rather do anything but study, I decided to go for a jog along the lakeside. For company, I loaded the iPod with songs from Kandukondein Kandukondein and set off. Morning air is generally something I catch a few whiffs of while gnawing on a piece of toast and hurrying to class. Today, as I tripped down the steps by the guesthouse leading to the lakeside, I breathed it in deeply and it was strangely uplifting.

There were a few people around and lots and lots of trees. The Mumbai rains may be annoying but I could forgive them anything for the glorious wash of green they've given to the landscape. From lime to olive to emerald, every shade of green danced on leaves and blades of grass and mosses. The lake itself was very still with the occasional ripple from an adventurous tadpole. At its edges, the skyscrapers looked very small and far away. For a while, it was easy to forget I was in the most populous city in the country.

The music in my ears was the perfect accompaniment. The title song of Kandukondein... is this lovely soaring melody, the chorus covers a complete octave in each line. But more than the melody itself, I fell in love all over again with Hariharan's voice. I'm both jealous and mesmerised by his voice- of how he can so effortlessly sing the most complex of gamakas. For a singer, your voice is your instrument, and he has such complete mastery over his, I can only listen in worshipful silence.

So I stopped and stared at the lake and the grasses and the egrets and let the music and his voice wash over me. Then I turned around, climbed the steps up to the guesthouse and returned to reality.

Wondering

2008-10-16T06:19:00.000-04:00

Someone I could have loved has left. I might never see him again. We were very different- the two of us- and yet so alike. He'd pore over Mechanical Engineering text books, but always look up when I spoke. He'd always hold doors open for me and never let me stand in line. I'd drag him to concerts he couldn't understand and he'd come amiably and even tell me he enjoyed himself. He'd crack terrible jokes and then stare at me expectantly till I laughed, more at the expression on his face than the joke itself. He'd talk to me about his bike for hours but never get annoyed when I yawned. He loved cooking too and we'd swap recipes and plan the meal we were going to cook together someday. He'd listen patiently, with a smile, while I explained the meaning behind hand gestures in Bharathnatyam and he taught me how to do Fourier transforms in Matlab. We'd talk about our dogs and our families, then go on to talking about our plans for the future. He taught me to think of possibilities I never even knew existed, of how wonderful life can be if you do what you love.

But now, we might never again run together laughing, for shelter from the rain, or stay up all night talking of life and philosophy. Now he writes to me of far away snows on mountains I might never see, while I write to him of traveling in autos and my literary ambitions. Between us, there was always this possibility. A delicious possibility neither of us chose to explore in our brief time together, in the fear of ruining what we had. But now he's gone, and I'm left... wondering...

Adventure Camp

2008-10-07T00:35:00.001-04:00

I've finally finished that article on life in the Army that was harrying the life out of me. It took almost a notebook full of notes and two nightouts, but is still pretty terrible. It somehow reads like a bad recruiting brochure.

However, writing and researching it dredged up some long forgotten memories. Thanks R for that long reminiscing chat, it really helped. I recalled my experiences at the Young Lions Adventure Camp, that I attended in the summer vacations when I was 10 years old. I had quite forgotten about it (and this might've been my trauma response) until our chat that night. The camp was for the children of officers, to give them some experience of life in the wild. It lasted ten days, but after three, I called home and bawled so loudly, my parents came to get me. Three days were quite enough for me though K- trooper that he is- stayed the whole ten.

When they said the camp would provide hands-on experience, they weren't kidding. We lived in tiny tents pitched on grass. The facilities were rustic, to say the least. During the welcoming dinner, we were asked what our favourite music was. Everyone yelled either Ricky Martin or Celine Dion which were both names I hadn't ever heard of then. Their reason for asking was apparent the next morning when we were woken up at 4 am by Ricky Martin proclaiming his love for Maria. We had to rush, bathe in icy and not very clean water and then report for PT in the ground by 4:30. The end of some pretty vigorous exercising was proclaimed (rather ironically) by Celine Dion informing us soulfully that her heart would go on. It was in camp that I conceived my deep and lasting hatred for that song.

Breakfast would comprise muddy toast and a strange looking poha before it was off to the field for different sessions and workshops. In my three days, we had workshops on fire safety, horse riding, rope climbing and most interestingly, knot tying. Knot tying was most interesting because the first half of the workshop comprised only a lecture by this old JCO. He constantly mispronounced knot as nut. So, I spent the first half hour of the lecture wondering what thumb nuts were, till he finally whipped out a piece of rope and demonstrated.

Evenings were times of peace and quiet in the camp, we would gather in this communal tent and socialize. I made many new friends there, some of whom are in touch with me to this day. Camp wasn't all that bad, though I was horribly homesick and wanted my mother, after being woken up at 4 am two days in a row. Still, the event that pushed me over the brink was the snake's visit. On the second day, when we returned from morning PT (Celine echoing that her heart would go on) there was a tremendous commotion in the girls barracks. A snake had been found in a tent. Soon, these brave looking officers came running with pitchforks and killed it. After breakfast, the snake was displayed to us with its head cut off. We were all invited to touch it while an officer told us with relish that it was a harmless grass snake and that it would make a tasty meal on the field. I took the time to be quietly sick in a corner. That afternoon, the snake was cooked in gravy and served for lunch. That evening, I called home and bawled till my parents promised to come and get me the next day.

I was told that the day after I left, they demonstrated how to kill chickens. You're supposed to flick your wrist while holding a live chick by the neck, till the neck breaks.

Something to look forward to

2008-10-03T09:16:00.001-04:00

Life would be so colourless if we didn't always have something to look forward to. There are the tiny things like birthday cake and weekends, and the bigger things like going home or the end of exams, but I always like to have some small secret pleasure tucked away in the recesses of my mind. Then, no matter how bad the day has been or how tired I am, I know there's the promise of something pleasurable ahead.
I'd love to know what you look forward to. Do tell me in your comments.

Where to begin...

2008-09-30T10:30:00.001-04:00

My nose is a lot better now, thank you. It drips a lot lesser and is only a faint pink today.
On the other hand, the ennui of the past few days is costing me dearly, I'm running behind on pretty much everything.

I've been asked to write an article on life in the Defense services. You'd think I'd be overflowing with words on the subject, I certainly thought I would be. But I'm drawing a strange blank. I have pages and pages of notes, points to mention, anecdotes, but no structure and no place to begin.

How do I describe in 800 words, a way of life so alien to civilians? A life where every man who sees your father on the road snaps his heels together and says "Jai Hind Saab". A life when you transfer schools every year making new friends each time, some of whom you discover ten years later on orkut, changed beyond recognition. A life in which your father goes away when you're eleven for Operations, and you aren't told where he's gone or what he's doing. A life where a huge community of women left alone with their children in a military camp, spend their time cheerfully organizing Coffee Mornings and Welfare Meets.

I love the Army life, it has made me who I am, and it has given me a tremendous respect for these men and their families who have such indomitable spirit.
Still, none of this is getting me any closer to a smashing opener for my article, and the clock's a ticking.

I Hab A Cold

2008-09-29T12:51:00.000-04:00

My body's a little strange. Generally, you're supposed to have a cold, which you carefully nurse so it develops into a fever that then merrily runs its course and leaves you with a hacking cough as a parting favour. This season, my body went all topsy turvy on me, beginning with the fever last week and waiting till I was almost recovered to launch the cold on me. I bet the graveyard cough's just around the corner too.

I've sniffled so much in class today, I annoyed myself. I've sneezed seven times in the past 30 seconds (Yes, I counted) and my eyes are watering so badly, I can hardly see what I'm typing, so please excuse any spelling mistakes. I slept this afternoon with my nose pillowed in a handkerchief, because it's been dripping like a broken tap all day. I've lost the ability to pronounce certain words properly and the moment one nostril gets unclogged, the other one fills up. I've given up hope that I'll ever be able to breathe freely through my nose again. My entire outlook on life has changed, it seems hopeless and filled with hours of shivering, red-eyed torture.

I had a bunch of whimsical posts about frivolous things like Mumbai autos and south Indian food lined up for posting here, but none of them suited my mood. I know this blog generally contains the 'Stars are God's daisy chain' type of posts, but I'm only human. I really needed to rant. And now, I'm off to bed. At ten thirty. Life can really suck sometimes.

My pillowcase

2008-09-22T04:53:00.000-04:00

Yesterday in one of my rare fits of cleanliness, I cast around for a rag to wipe my table and mirror clean. The only one I could find was an old, ripped pillowcase. The pillowcase happened to be one I'd embroidered about 8 years ago, as an anniversary present to my parents. Looking at the faded cloth and trailing stitches brought a whole wave of memories.

Very few of you know that I once did a great deal of embroidery. It was in the summer after 5th standard, and Amma was at her wits end with two rambunctious children always in the house. So we were unceremoniously packed off, K to basketball and I to embroidery and music. We lived in Yol then, a tiny military camp next to Dharamshala. Summers in Yol were sunny and carefree. We lived in a house on the side of a mountain. The top of the mountain would be covered in snow every winter, but in the summer, green things grew and honeysuckle covered everything. If you peered down the side of our mountain, you would see a grumbling stream cutting through the valley. On the other side rose more mountains, covered with pine forests and further away- with snow. One of our favourite walks was to wade across the stream and lose ourselves in the pine forest. Whenever Appa was free from his Commanding Officer duties, we would take long hikes to try and reach the snow covered mountain we could see from our terrace. We never did though...

But I digress. I have always admired embroidery and the lovely things you can create with it. After those classes, I also learned to appreciate the tremendous labour that goes into it. But for my restless 10 year old fingers, it was too much to ask to sit patiently and set stitch by tiny stitch. I raced through all the stitches, from the basic chain stitch to the herring bone and shadow work. A cross stitch tablecloth plagued me for two whole months before I gave it up in disgust. Amma was showered with embroidered handkerchiefs that summer, they were the only things I had the patience to make. Appa was also proudly gifted a large white handkerchief with a violet in the corner. To his credit, he carried it around for weeks.

So when my parents' anniversary came around, it only made sense to embroider something for them. We were big on DIY gifts then, and K and I would always compete on who could make the better present. Most of our presents were shamelessly mercenary like cardboard furniture for Barbie or friendship bands, but they were always received by Amma and Appa with exclamations of joy and pride. Monogrammed pillowcases were the way to go, I decided. They would put K's bookmarks to shame. I ruffled through my embroidery book and found a lovely rosebud pattern. I decided "His" and "Hers" would be too much effort, so reasoning brillliantly, settled upon a giant "A". It could stand for either Amma or Appa for weren't they both as one?
I worked late into the night and set the stitches for a huge, curving "A" with yellow rosebuds in the side. The next morning, my parents found the pillowcase gift wrapped and ready on their bedside, and they made several very proper exclamations.

That pillowcase travelled with us, from Yol to Jabalpur and to Secunderabad, then to Meerut and then Secunderabad again, and finally with me, here to Mumbai. I gave up embroidery long ago, but I could still point at that sweeping "A" and proudly tell people that I made that when I was twelve. Now though, the pillowcase has lived its life. It was finally used to wipe my mirror clean yesterday. But it deserved one last hurrah here, before it went. You see, I embroidered it.

It's raining again

2008-09-02T07:08:00.000-04:00

Mumbai weather... I've lived here three years now, but I still can't predict it. All I can do is always always carry an umbrella with me, between the months of August and October.
This morning, sun rays from my east-facing window woke me up at an unearthly hour. Now, at 4 in the afternoon, it's dark and rainy and the sky is rumbling like it ate something bad for lunch.

My moods are very attuned to the weather. If it's sunny, I feel sunny, if it's cold, I'm rather sniffly. Rain- that makes me reflective. I've wondered about my purpose in life, about how much I can procrastinate the mountains of work I'm reluctant to do, and generally contemplated my uselessness. (This is not a hint for you to leave reassuring comments contradicting me. I'm not that desperate) In short, I've thought about just about everything these past three hours, but Nuclear Physics. God, give me some concentration!

PS: It's definitely a sign that I'm out of ideas if I dedicate an entire post to the weather. But I had rather blog than mug, so bear with me.

Time and sticky sweets

2008-09-01T09:42:00.000-04:00

Two topics that would seem hard to link together in a metaphor, right? But somehow I managed it today in semiconductors class, in that half a minute before I jerked back to attention again.

Time sometimes feels like those brightly coloured sweets you see in shop windows. You pull and pull at it and end up swallowing a great chunk. It isn't possible to delicately nibble, you don't get the flavour or enjoy the sweetness. They come in all colours, from vermillion red to emerald green, to sickly yellow and burnt black.

Classroom notes

2008-08-27T03:45:00.000-04:00

Over the past couple of years, it has become a habit for me to trace the wanderings of my mind in boring classes, by scribbling on the last pages of my notebooks. Now, as I distractedly attempt to study for the midsems, I find myself flipping to the last pages of every notebook, to see what I've written. Some of the jottings don't make any sense to me, some are quite surprisingly profound. There's a smashing idea for the start of a story in there and several abortive blog ideas. Here are some of them, for you to make of what you will.

The sky had been a sulky gray for days, the ominous silence only interrupted by a few grumbles. Finally, all that frustration burst out in a deluge of rain. But although everything is soaking wet, from the trees to the buildings to me, the sky's anger doesn't appear much appeased...

This was written in a rather blue mood, all the world was wet, I was annoyingly damp and the class just wouldn't end.

There's apparently a difference between logic and commonsense.

I can't remember what happened to make me scribble this, but every time I try to think about it, I get a headache.

Some of my greatest feats of composition have been accomplished in some of my most boring classes.

I've gotta admit, that's spot on.

My room smells of termite medicine. Chunks of the wall covered with gauzy fungus, float down dismally, at regular intervals. A whole bunch of dead insects lay in front of my monitor this morning, probably poisoned by the medicine and somehow thinking of the glowing screen as their salvation... I'm allergic to the fungus, it makes me sneeze. Everything I've eaten has smelled like termite medicine. If I was a bird, I'd be really worried about laying eggs without shells right now.

This was one blue mood. I later made it into a rather more optimistic post.

Everything about Mr. Chatterjee droned boring. His clothes were boring, his voice was boring, even his face was boring. Skin neither fair nor really dark, a bulbous nose and small bored eyes. A thin, greying moustache with short, bristly hairs that still managed to droop. His handwriting on the board was boring. Round letters ran into each other as if they didn't think it worth the effort to spread apart. The chalk squeaked in an excruciating monotone, as he dragged it listlessly across the board.
Whenever I sat in his class, I felt my senses suspend, my eyes slowly close and my mind wander off into far more interesting places.

I thought this was an excellent beginning to a short story, but I could never get beyond this point.

The difference between the elderly and the young- when an older person asks you to email him, there's a hint of triumph in his voice.

She had a tendency to put everything in quotes. So, she would talk about the "strength" of the "forces" being "short-lived". As a result, you never quite believed what she told you.

This scribble was for an interesting character in a short story, somewhat inspired by a prof this sem. For other hilariously inappropriate quotation marks, check out this blog.

I'm back!

2008-08-24T06:13:00.000-04:00

It's been nearly four months since I last posted here. There's no earth shattering reason for my lack of posts, I just couldn't summon up the energy to type up a decent post somehow. I have 11 new drafts though. That doesn't mean these haven't been an awesome four months, they have. But now I'm back here in rainy Mumbai and everything is comfortable and familiar.

The hostel walls are still a shocking pink, although thankfully, a little faded now. I'm in a new room, in an opposite wing, but the lizards and monkeys are just as sociable. This room's shocking pink too, and the walls clash horribly with my orange sheets.

The whole hostel's having a seepage problem and a termite infestation. Talk about a homecoming. Until last week, there was a nasty brown line snaking across one wall of my room, proof of termites feeding off the cement. Talk about ewww! The exterminator who came last week told me reassuringly that I needn't mind these little critters, apparently they don't bite. He then proceeded to curdle my blood with stories of other species of termites that crawl over people's skin leaving a trail of rashes behind. Of course, after that I refused to enter the room until they were gone. So a whole bunch of exterminators came in and drilled holes in every available corner and filled them with vile smelling medicine. Now, all that's left of my termites is a light brown stain. But, as the exterminator warned me in his parting shot, they might be back.

I mentioned seepage, didn't I? The termite medicine might have been poison to the termites, but it was like Boost for the fungus. Great clumps of filmy white fungus sprang up on my walls almost as I watched. When I switched on the fan, delicate white flakes flew down to settle on my keyboard.

Stifling my disgust I liberally papered the entire wall- which come to think of it, is quite convenient. Now, all I need to do is look up to read of anything from Michal Phelps' gold medals to picking the correct bathroom tiles.

It's good to be back.

Ah, life

2008-04-22T22:32:00.000-04:00

I had an epiphany this morning, as I sat at 7am outside my room, trying to blow soap bubbles.
James Herriot said of the veterinary profession, that it offers you innumerable opportunities of making a total chump of yourself. I found myself thinking of his words this morning as I watched a particularly large bubble pop.
Since I've come to college, I've done a huge number of things I never in my wildest dreams planned on doing. I've run barefoot around the deserted Open Air theater in IIT at 2am, behind a stray dog that had stolen my shoe. I've I've spent infinitely many arduous hours making 'cheat sheets' and constantly marveled on just how many words you can fit into a single A4 sheet, if you just write them small enough. I've acted in a play in which I mouthed the dialogue, "I'm dying, dammit! I'm dying!"
I have also walked barefoot along the entire length of the IIMA campus, while carrying a Veena, thanks to a broken sandal strap. I have driven a 20 year old, rickety kinetic honda at 60kmph in blinding rain, while pulling along a laughing foreigner on a cycle. I've fallen passionately in love with my bed, and for once, in this relationship, I'm the more communicative one. I've made one serious attempt to choreograph a classical-style shadow dance, to a piece of music that opens with heavy breathing that merges into hip-hop beats. The dance was thankfully never performed. Once a year, I wear ridiculous clothes and practice my 'come hither' look on a bunch of screaming girls, for the honor and glory of my wing. I've painted my face white and blacked out my eyes to look like a zombie for the department Halloween day celebrations, only to discover that I was the only person in costume in the entire class of 60.

Every ridiculous thing I do is chalked down on the slate of experience. At the very least, some of my friends did have a good laugh at my expense. So, I disagree with Herriot. It isn't only the veterinary profession that offers you infinite opportunities of making a fool of yourself- it's life itself.

PS: This post was actually begun on the day of filming of the InsIghT spoof video, in which we were doing a mock 'soap'box, which explains the bubbles.

My gilded pen

2008-04-01T09:22:00.000-04:00

Today in class, my trusty ballpoint pen ran out of ink. Since I greatly pride myself on the accuracy and speed of my note-taking, I hurriedly begged around for another and R handed me her fountain pen. Writing with it brought back a whole well of memories. Fountain pens have individual characters, something our modern day ballpoints and rollerballs and technotips sadly lack. In most fountain pens the ink doesn't flow unless you hold the pen just so, and each pen has its own 'just so'. Shake a temperamental fountain pen too violently and it'll leave angry blotches of ink all over your notes.

I remember that we were only ever allowed to write with pencil till the fourth standard in school. From fifth standard, we made the drastic switch to fountain pens. I couldn't wait for the first day of school to start, I had such a beauty of a pen. It was made of a heavy metal and was painted bright gold with engraved geometrical patterns. It had a smooth long golden nib and a cap that closed with a most satisfying click. But its crowning glory was a giant plastic diamond, perched cockily right at the top of the cap. when you unscrewed the bottom, there was a tiny little well into which I would fill indigo blue ink with a dropper. My handwriting never looked better than it did shaped from that gilded pen. All day during class, I would secretly practice different signatures on the back page of my textbook.

When I broke the nib of that pen on the fourth day of fifth standard, I had to bite my lips to stop from crying. Big girls of ten don't cry over fountain pens. Back at home that evening, a comforting mother promptly took me to the stationery store where under my critical gaze, the shopkeeper replaced the nib. But somehow, the pen never seemed the same again. It grew more and more temperamental, spewing unsightly blots of ink at the slightest shake and always scratching the paper when I wrote. Still, I bore it all patiently, so infatuated was I with the pen's appearance.

Then one day, a notebook was returned to me after checking and it didn't contain the usual 'neat' comment from my teacher. If you've ever been in fifth standard in Army School Jammu, you'll know how much that 'neat' meant to us schoolgirls. We would gloat over our notebooks and compare the number of 'neat's and 'good's that we got. Losing one because of a giant blue blot that percolated three pages deep was too much for my loyalty to that pen. So in it went to the deep recesses of my pencil box, while I moved on to the safer and ubiquitous Chinese pens that had tiny pert little nibs that coyly peeked out from a plastic body.

The pen stayed there for several years. The shiny gold paint got scratchy and then wore out, the diamond chipped. Once in a while in a fit of pity, or when all my other pens had run out of ink, I would give this one another try. But it would always hold out for a sentence or so, before starting to scratch paper again.

As I grew up, I turned more impatient. I no longer had time to patiently refill ink in pens every evening, or keep experimenting with a fountain pen till I found its sweet spot. I discovered roller balls and gel pens, which would smoothly release ideal amounts of ink while displaying no personality at all. My relationship with my pens became more and more impersonal. Pens no longer have characters, they're just instruments that you take notes with. But today, holding R's fountain pen in my hand and coaxing rows of neat sentences out of it, it all came back.

panegyric on Grapes

2008-03-05T05:31:00.000-05:00

Grapes are perhaps the most perfect of all fruits. They're so easy to eat too, you just pluck them off and chew. There's no business of peeling or removing seeds. There's something quite decadent about eating them off a bunch. It brings visions of Arabic princes surrounded by houris, puffing smoke from hookahs while being fed grapes.
And look at the structure of a grape, especially the long waxy green ones we see. Faintly blushing, they have incredibly taut, delicately thin skin. They're the perfect size too, to just fit in your mouth one at a time. Then when you bite, the skin explodes in a positive eruption of sweetness, with just enough tartness to make you smack your lips in delight.

The final hours

2008-02-16T12:23:00.000-05:00

The clock on my desktop reads 2253 as I type this. In another one hour and seven minutes, I will officially be twenty years old. I catch myself looking at the clock with a kind of dreadful fascination.
Twenty... that's an age that once seemed almost impossible to reach. I am no longer to be a teenager. I'm to be a responsible adult in every sense of the word.
I have lived through two decades, and watched history being made. I've lived through the Kargil War and September 11th. Ten years from now, I will be able to tell children reading history books that I saw it all happen. They will stare at me open mouthed and wonder if I've lived forever. I used to do the same with thirty year old Aunties...
I've completed seven years of teenage and not done one crazy teen-like thing. The maximum trouble I've ever given my parents is to go off in a fit of sulks at an inopportune time. Parent's pet, teacher's pet- I've been priggishly, revoltingly good.
Though it certainly hasn't been a bad life to lead- quite the contrary actually- I can't help but regret that I've never done anything honestly crazy or wild or stupid- the kind of thing that a teenager is expected to do. And now, I've lost the chance to do it. Atleast, I can of course do something incredibly stupid anytime I choose in the blink of an eyelid, but where's the fun in that when you're twenty with all the world's cares hanging upon you?

Look at me right now- the last hours of my teenage are slipping away and I'm sitting in a stuffy hostel room writing in my blog. As I think about it though- that wild side- getting bubblegum highlights and a pierced navel- who am I kidding? That's not me, it never could be me, try as I might. I don't like pink and I've heard navel piercings really hurt. My idea of a fun evening is being curled up in bed with a good book, or practicing dance, or baking cookies in the kitchen while listening to music. I guess I was just born grown up.

But thinking about it... I don't think I would have it any other way.

Two weeks in Chennai

2007-12-24T19:49:00.000-05:00

When I first decided to come to Chennai for a winter project, the thought did cross my mind that I'd get a few good blog posts out of it. But well, the two weeks end today and I'm yet to post about watching Bharathnatyam performances or eating at Saravana Bhavan.
Its been a wonderful two weeks, the kind of holiday everyone should have. I must admit, I was very reluctant to come to Chennai because the last time I was here for any long period of time, I fell very sick. But then I decided to give the city another chance, and boy, did it redeem itself.
Where else can even security guards spell my name perfectly? Where else do women dress up in Kanjeevaram silk and diamonds to attend a music concert? Where else do people speak exactly the same language (Tamil) but with so many accents as to be quite unintelligible to each other?

Its been two weeks of moments snuck away from work to attend concerts, of reading Kutcheribuzz everyday and sighing over the wonderful performances I'm missing, days and nights spent in an acid green lab poring over code, two weeks where the weather gravitated from school-closing-level floods to thirty degrees in the shade, of learning that "Parrottas" are very different from "Paranthas" and that people find my ignorance on this point laughable, of stopping my scooter whenever I saw a deer in the IITM campus and wondering at the innocence of their eyes, of teaching Sanskrit to my little cousin and discovering how much Geography I've forgotten, and of meeting wonderful new people who know so much and work so hard, they both shame and inspire me.
This post is perhaps too brief to give anyone a true idea of the impression Chennai left on me. I leave for home tonight, once I'm there I promise to write much more. There are so many tales to tell, freezing in the Central leather institute, traveling on a bus where the conductor refused to let me buy a ticket, a dance performance that gave me goose pimples, the caterer in the Staff Canteen who spoke French, and so much more.
But in the meantime, Merry Christmas everyone!!

Melodrama

2007-12-24T08:23:00.000-05:00

In Scrubs there is an episode called 'My Drama Queen'. Watching it recently made me think, aren't we all, men and women, drama queens to some extent? I have two friends, very deeply in love. They constantly bicker and I've often wondered at it. Now I realize its because they enjoy the spice a bang-up quarrel lends to daily life.
We all have a love for the sensational. Some of us love it so much that it leads us to be impractical. My love for the melodramatic doesn't always manifest itself in visible form, but there's a lot of stuff going on in my head. For example, when I'm waiting to cross a busy street, my mind can jump from what would happen if someone was run down by a car, to how I would ride with that person in an auto to the nearest hospital, to frantically trying to remember all the first aid I know, all before the traffic light changes.
Sometimes, I wonder. The stuff that goes on in my head is so interesting, I don't think I notice too much of the real world. I guess I'd better start paying more attention when I cross the street.

No fun, no games

2007-12-24T01:48:00.000-05:00

What’s the point of life
If risk is just a board game
You roll the dice
But you’re just hoping that the rules change

Hugh Grant -Dance with me tonight

What if life itself is just like a board game? I find the idea infinitely depressing. Even if you take your biggest life changing decisions based upon the rolling of a die, you're eternally doomed to go round and round and round in endless circles about the same board. Then when you're finally tired of it, you fold the board and everything you've ever achieved- money, property, titles, family... slithers to the floor in a heap of cheap plastic.

My Favourite time of day

2007-11-20T02:00:00.000-05:00

When I was in school and all through junior college, my mother used to make me strictly adhere to a bedtime. By 9:15 I was to be tucked in and by 9:30 all lights were switched off. Almost always absorbed in some fascinating book, I'd beg heartrendingly for five minutes more which God bless her, she'd always grant. Most days those five minutes would suffice- except for really absorbing books which I would then carry to the bathroom and read there with a towel stuffed under the door to hide the line of light visible from outside. But most days I'd curl up contentedly in bed and dream till I slept off.
Those ten minutes of bliss were and always have been my favourite part of the day. Dreams are so wasted on sleep. However vivid they were, when you wake up all you're left with is disappointment, that those images that seemed so real in your sleep, turn so pale and lifeless in harsh daylight. Its like some horrible art thief replaced the van Gogh in your mind with a faded watercolour. But dreaming when you're awake- thats a whole new picture. You get to pick your fantasies and live then snuggled cosily in a warm bed, while drifting off comfortably to sleep.
Each night I would pick my fantasy, I could be a Spanish princess or a WWII nurse or a busy careerwoman. I could decorate dream homes, travel around the world, own and raise hundreds of dogs. I could be an Ayn Rand heroine staring at New York's skyline or Elizabeth Bennet turning down Mr. Darcy. If I was bored of fantasies revolving around me (and this happened, about once in a blue moon) I would live out all my favourite "if only" moments. If only Scarlett had realized she loved Rhett earlier, if only Tess hadn't been seduced by Alec, or Angel had found the letter she wrote him, if only Elfride Swancourt had lived. In all my stories they always had happy endings (Except in Elfride's case where I wasn't really sure what would have been a happy ending. I don't think Hardy himself knew, which is why he killed her off in the first place) Each morning when class got boring, I'd plan what I would dream about that night.
Since coming here, I don't have a bedtime anymore, I only sleep when utterly exhausted, leaving scant time for dreaming. More often than not, I fall asleep watching a sitcom or cramming desperately for a quiz. All this has left my quite dream-starved, and now as I look back, it has made my life considerably poorer. After all, isn't it like your very own Neverland, where you always stay young and if the ending isn't happy, it just means the story isn't over yet. So now I shall go to bed, turn off the lights, snuggle cosily under my warm covers and in my Neverland, go wherever the night takes me.

The perfect Cookie

2007-11-12T10:41:00.000-05:00

This time when I was home, I hadn't really intended to do any baking, having truckloads to mug. But I'd forgotten N's birthday and the only way I could thing of making it up to her was by baking her a batch of "I'm sorry" cookies. I decided to become daring and create my own recipe. Perhaps it was the mood that seized me, I felt I simply couldn't go wrong. The first thing I espied on entering the kitchen was a pot of sparkling honey. I promptly appropriated it for my purpose. I beat together butter and sugar until the mixture became wonderfully light and fluffy and then poured in a stream of golden honey. As the flavours fused, I could feel further inspiration rising. Gazing around the kitchen I found freshly powdered dried ginger, an intensely spicy, slightly bitter scent that paired perfectly with the floral sweetness of the honey. In it went after a delicate shower of whole wheat flour. The result was a lovely buttery dough that simply begged to be kneaded.
The oven reddened in anticipation as I shaped plump little spheres and rolled them in almond slivers. I jealously watched over the cookies as they cracked open in the oven's heat, revealing delicate yellow honeycombs under a honey brown crust. As the almond slivers baked to a crisp brown I opened the oven and took them out. The scent filled the air and pervaded the entire house. While baking always smells good, this scent was extraordinary. Out they came aided by my eager fork and I set them out to cool and harden. Hot from the oven, they were wonderfully cakey and they began to harden as they cooled. Two batches later, everyone in the house was asking for a taste but I had managed to fill a carefully guarded box for N.
My greatest problem when it comes to baking cookies is that sometimes I simply forget they're in the oven. My concentration this time held out till the very last batch, when distracted by an interesting conversation I totally forgot until a rich scent of roasting ginger filled my nostrils. Then I ran to the kitchen to find my final batch deeply browned and certainly not giftbox worthy, but still safe. Another minute and they would have been inedible.
Hours later, I returned to the now cooled oven and prised out a blackened cookie. I inhaled as I bit in and the flavour hit me full force. It was a rich buttery, spicy, sweet scent condensed in one intense mouthful. The flavours had time to settle and fuse and the product was enchanting.
None of the cookies survived for me to photograph, they all vanished mysteriously during the night. I will be making these again really soon though, the very next time I go home. Now, if I could only remember the proportions...

The Journey Home

2007-10-23T13:42:00.000-04:00

"Your picture of social triumphs is quite fascinating, Phil, but I'll paint one to offset it. I'm going home to an old country farmhouse, once green, rather faded now, set among leafless apple orchards. There is a brook below and a December fir wood beyond, where I've heard harps swept by the fingers of rain and wind. There is a pond nearby that will be gray and brooding now. There will be two oldish ladies in the house, one tall and thin, one short and fat; and there will be two twins, one a perfect model, the other what Mrs. Lynde calls a `holy terror.' There will be a little room upstairs over the porch, where old dreams hang thick, and a big, fat, glorious feather bed which will almost seem the height of luxury after a boardinghouse mattress. How do you like my picture, Phil?"

"It seems a very dull one," said Phil, with a grimace.

"Oh, but I've left out the transforming thing," said Anne softly. "There'll be love there, Phil -- faithful, tender love, such as I'll never find anywhere else in the world -- love that's waiting for me. That makes my picture a masterpiece, doesn't it, even if the colors are not very brilliant?"

Anne of the Island- Lucy Maud Montgomery

When people ask me where I'm from, I'm still confused. Should I say Tamil Nadu, which is where my parents are from, or Secunderabad where I was born but have lived in for only a few measly years? Should I launch into a long winded explanation of how since my Dad's in the army I've never lived in one place for long or should I risk ridicule and say I'm from India without further details. The answers I give are generally one of these, though I rarely do the proclaiming I'm Indian thing.

My idea of a home is not a city or a locality or a house. I've changed too many of those. But it is the place where the people I most love are. When I came to college everyone told me I was to have two homes henceforth. I thought so too and indeed, tried very hard to make it true. But much as I love living here in a hostel, doing crazy things with amazing friends, I have never yet called it home.

I sing all the time for a week when my plans for going home get finalized. I have hour long phone conversations with Amma on what all we're going to do together as soon as I get there. When I finally do get there, the time flies by on wings, surrounded as I am by familiar objects and loving faces. My parents do everything they can to make every visit extra special. They seem to think I might not want to come home if Amma didn't cook all my most favourite dishes for every meal or if Appa didn't stock the fridge to bursting point with all my favourite sweets. They needn't ever be afraid of that though. Its home! How could I not want to come back again and again, or stay for ever?

When I finally have to leave, I never want to go. I've been doing this for two and a half years now, but still when the train chugs away and I wave at my bravely smiling parents, I feel like a part of me is being wrenched away, very painfully. By the time I return to my hostel and start unpacking, the feeling is just a distant memory. But reading this paragraph from L M Montgomery's book just reminded me of it again.

I go home next week. Happy Diwali everyone!!

My Roommates

2007-09-11T12:12:00.001-04:00

When I came to third year, I finally got a room of my own. I really miss the bedtime chats R and I used to have, but she’s still right next door. When we lived together, we never had many non human visitors. True we had a family of lizards (guaranteed to send R into hysterics whenever they made an appearance from their home behind the bookcase) and an occasional adventurous bee. But nothing on the scale I have now.

Since I’ve started living alone, I’ve been vividly aware of all the other creatures surrounding me. There’s the glossy black crow that raids the dustbin outside my door every morning. I often startle him when I open my door in a sleep dazed stupor, vaguely clutching my toothbrush. He immediately retreats to a nearby tree branch and from there caws reproachfully till I shamble away.

There’s the squirrel that comes to share in the crow’s spoils. He’s surprisingly tame and lets me get within an arm’s breadth without flinching. We’ve had a staring match, us two. One morning I caught him with an apple core in his paws sitting on an overhanging branch and staring at me with beady eyes. Fascinated, I stared back. He ruminatively munched on the core while never breaking eye lock. I broke our silent contest first; I remembered I was ten minutes late for class and so pleaded a rain check. I could swear he held his tail with a faintly triumphant air as he scampered away.

Other occasional animal visitors include a monkey that peers in at my door in a neighborly way from time to time. He appears to delight in startling me, baring his teeth in an ingratiating grin before running away. There are also a few shy sparrows that timidly peck around the mess that the crow makes of my dustbin every morning. There’s a cat that once in a very long while slinks past my open door like a shadow. Her coming up to our wing is an act of great condescension, she rarely pays social calls. I always stare after her in wonder; I’ve never seen anyone move more gracefully.

But all these visitors are from the animal realm. I entertain a whole host of smaller guests too, not all of them welcome. First there are the moths, drawn irresistibly to my tube light; they fly out at me from unexpected places startling me to no end. Then there are the strange brown insects for whom also my light seems to hold some magnetic attraction. They sit motionless on my wall, staring at it in utter fascination. I leave them be, they don’t trouble me and hey, maybe that’s how I look when I stare at my computer screen… I’m no one to judge.

Among my unwelcome guests are a line of termites, steadfastly marching across my ceiling. They defy everything I’ve ever learnt about termites. There’s no wood on my ceiling, still the line keeps growing every morning, inching closer and closer to my cupboard. I’ve even been as inhospitable as to regularly have their home sprayed with phenyl, but like all unwelcome guests, they stubbornly refuse to leave.

Then there are the odd mosquitoes that sneak in when I open my door in the evening. By morning they are fat and swollen flying about sluggishly, drunk on my blood. After years of practice, I can now tell which mosquitoes have drunk my blood and which haven’t. They ones who haven’t are shooed out through the window, but the ones who have are killed mercilessly, leaving dark brown smudges on my pink walls. I have my own ideas of justice.

But perhaps the strangest of all my strange visitors are the line of black ants. The line snakes across my room, often triumphantly bearing the carcass of a moth or a mosquito. I can’t figure out from where they appear. They just show up in the night in a huge black swarm, crowding my ceiling and within an hour they’re gone as mysteriously as they came. Now when I first saw them, I was hardly welcoming. Short of killing them I tried everything, including spraying them with deodorant (which they seem to rather like) and blowing at them till I was red in the face. But they marched on regardless, barely breaking ranks.

I’ve now grown quite inured to their presence and in fact am quite grateful to them. For you see, anyone who knows me is aware of the fact that I’m not tidy, but I am clean. This means that in my room, you’ll find clothes scattered all over the floor, but the floor itself will be spotless. You’ll find books and papers all over the place, but not a grain of dust on any of them. So the fastidious ants actually help me out. They’re a tireless army that keeps cleaning up, food crumbs, dead insects… Perhaps if I was tidy, I’d mind that there was a moving black line across my wall but ah well, I’m just clean.

These are just the most prominent of my visitors. I have said nothing of several other interesting sparrows, beetles, spiders and others I don’t know the names of. That is the stuff of perhaps another later post. But honestly, how can I ever be bored even if I’m the only human in the room, when I have so much fascinating company around?

On Blogging

2007-08-07T10:47:00.000-04:00

I've often wondered why I blog. I know for certain that I started this blog to put my poems up on. Silly me, I thought if I put 'em up publicly I'd be inspired to write more. But I haven't felt like writing poetry at all for a very long time now so instead, I just write.

I certainly won't commit the folly of saying I only blog for myself, that this is a private space where I reveal my innermost thoughts. I love reading comments on my blog, only laziness keeps me from posting more often, and nothing on it is in the least bit private. Hell, its a public blog. I post only when I feel I have to write something or burst, when I have a whole confusion of ideas inside my head, formless and shifting that I am desperately grabbing at before they get away... or of course like today, I write before a quiz since I had rather do anything but mug.

This blog could also be a chronicle, someplace where I can write my thoughts and experiences and watch them change as I grow. There are several stunted ideas in its few posts... snippets of things that might have been, had I only the persistence to continue. I've had ideas like posting reviews of the books I read, movies I watch, songs I sing, places I travel. Each resulted in one post and no more.

This blog has about three times as many unpublished posts as it does published ones. The drafts are ideas that didn't materialize when I tried to clothe them with clumsy words, or ideas that turned out too preciously private to be shared. So in a way this blog is also a grown up personal diary for me. I revisit all those drafts from time to time and see if I've sharpened my skills at all, if perhaps I can somehow find words less clumsy, for all those elusive thoughts. Some of them turn into posts months, even a year after they were first conceived.
Blogging sure is better than writing in a diary with a scratchy pen. Here I can embed photos, edit myself ruthlessly without untidy crosses; remove all the hundreds of unnecessary commas that always creep in and save it all for posterity.

But all in all, I don't really know why I blog. Its just another form of expression, I suppose, or another place to vent the thoughts that I can't immediately speak out for some reason. I think I'm going to glorify what I do though, by calling my blog a "delightful jumble of thoughts, the products of a random and abstract mind".

Ten smells I love

2007-07-01T08:28:00.000-04:00

I’ve only recently rediscovered my sense of smell. Earlier there were only good smells and bad smells, but of late I find perfumes, scents, aromas, flavours… there’s a whole new world out there. You just have to breathe in deeply and take it all in.

1 ) Blooming jasmine buds threaded together. There is something quite intoxicating about their powerful scent. In the olden days, kings used to wrap these garlands about their wrists while courtesans danced for them.

2) A dog’s fur, a day after a bath. I don’t much care for the smell immediately after the bath; it smells too much like the dog shampoo I’ve been applying. But a day or two after the bath, the hair’s still gloriously fresh and it has a smell so, well… doggy!

3) A warm mango freshly picked from a tree. This is a pleasure I recently discovered. The house we’re living in actually has a mango tree on the premises which this season yielded a grand total of twelve mangoes! I picked one of them myself and I couldn’t be prouder.

4) Old old books. They should be so old, the pages have yellowed. They have a delightfully musty odor, it’s full of things you vaguely remember, that you can discover all over again.

5) New books. I love the smell of ink and plastic and print that they all carry. They smell delightfully new, totally untouched, waiting to be explored.

6) The kitchen when my mother’s making Halwa. It’s a delicious smell, of flour cooking in ghee and unfailingly sets my taste buds tingling.

7) Talcum powder just after a bath. The smell mingled with that of soap and the feel of water droplets all contribute to such a glorious feeling of freshness.

8) Raat ki Rani. These tiny green star-like flowers bloom only for one brief night. By morning they are faded, their perfume blown away by the wind. But that one night of revelry is enough, to walk past this bush and to inhale their heady perfume is enough to transport me headway into the Arabian nights.

9) A mint bed freshly trampled on. At the risk of sounding like an aroma therapist, I’ve never smelled anything fresher. I get a milder feeling of the same sort from toothpaste; it’s the only thing that can wake me up in the morning.

10 The steam that rises when cold rain comes in contact with the boiling earth. I wish I could make a perfume out of it to carry around on scorching summer days.

Roots I never knew I had

2007-06-13T12:08:00.000-04:00

I recently went on a three day visit to Coimbatore, where most of my mother's family lives.
Since I was sulking all the way on the train I stared out of the window most of the time and had plenty of time to notice how the scenery changed. I fell asleep after having stared the entire evening at red soil, dry brush and scorched grasses. I woke up to a very different sight. Coimbatore lies near the border between Tamil Nadu and Kerala and the land of coconuts leaves its unmistakable stamp on this place. The scenery outside looked like someone from the heavens had- in a careless fit of largess- upturned several buckets of emerald green paint over the earth. Fields and fields of banana and coconut trees rushed past us. The colour was almost blinding... only once have I seen such a green before, in the young mustard fields of Punjab.

We reached the sleepy station of Coimbatore and there I received the impression that never quite left me through the trip. No one speaks anything but Tamil there and several men scorn to discard their veshtis for the more modern trousers. The flashy advertisement boards outside show the latest designs in silk sarees as cows walk placidly amid the traffic. The smell is a mixture of the sickeningly sweet odour of fresh cowdung, mixed with the smoke coughed up from the bellies of busy vehicles, tinged with the intoxicating perfume of the jasmine flowers all women there wear in their hair. The whole place is like a town that should logically grow into a large pococurante metropolis but is held back by a rigid orthodox people who cling proudly but desperately to a fast fading way of life.

Coimbatore overflows with relatives I never knew I possessed. Tamil is such an exact language that every relative has a specific name that I must call them by, not like English where Uncle and Aunt would suffice. My grandmother was one of a brood of eleven, three siblings and seven half-siblings (my great grandfather having remarried after my great grandmother's death). To complicate matters still further, my mother's sister married her uncle, my grandmother's half-brother. I'm informed that such marriages are quite common in Tamil Nadu where people are still painfully proud of their caste. Indeed love marriages are still looked upon very disparagingly. Several times have I been told things like, "She had no character, raced into a love marriage at twenty three!" or, "She was a good girl, she waited until her father found a suitable groom for her".
However that may be, I was drawn into a bewildering maze of relatives all of whom wanted to see me and remember when they'd seen me last in the days of my infancy, and to see how many of my mother's features I had inherited. These are all educated people, there are high school principals and chartered accountants and mill owners among their number. But in every house I went to I found that though at their work they might compromise to modernity, their lives had always been rigidly traditional. Several husbands I heard praised for being so lenient as to "let" their wives work. I was highly praised everywhere I went, not for getting into IIT-no... but rather for my singing, my alleged knowledge of cooking and the docility of my behavior. One aged relative very nearly risked receiving a plateful of sweetmeats in his face when he sampled my cooking and said by way of blessing me, "After all, what does a man need but a wife who cooks well and keeps the house clean." Now, when I have had time for reflection, the incident seems more humorous to me than anything else. A couple of years ago I would have impetuously exclaimed at such antiquated notions, and engaged him in an avid debate on the rights of women. I am, I hope, slightly wiser now.

Most women there are housewives, and even my mother- college lecturer that she is- is looked upon as a modern miss. The women begin their day with making breakfast and seeing their husbands off. The morning is spent in prayers, gossip, cooking and the ubiquitous Hindi soaps. Ekta Kapoor is an influence that not even the most stringent Brahmins have been able to keep out. The women may mot understand much Hindi, but come one thirty they are glued to the television. My Grandmother herself who speaks not a word of Hindi, told me the entire story of Tulsi and of all the persecutions that much maligned damsel has undergone. In the evenings when their husbands return, they retire grandly to rest, while the wives who have meanwhile dressed freshly and threaded jasmine buds through their hair, bustle about to prepare dinner. After dinner is a time for conversation before bed, which is in many households, still a sheet spread on the ground.

An outing to a temple is the preferred pastime of a Sunday morning and accordingly, I was woken up at 5:30 am to accompany Perippa to a temple atop a hill. Too groggy to protest my atheism, I listened to Perimma's animated description of the beauty of the idols. I was warned that I was in for a very thrilling ride as the route up the hill comprised several hairpin bends. What I was not warned of was that Perippa at his at his most dashing traveled at 40kmph on his Honda Activa. Conscious of me, a delicately nurtured female, as his cargo, he never exceeded twenty. As we drove along the sun rose, women washed doorsteps and buffaloes ambled past. When we reached the hill finally, Perippa slowed to almost a halt and we negotiated the aforementioned hairpin bends with hair-raising caution, tooting the horn loudly as we inched along while mules looked at us in mild surprise.

That evening I accompanied my Grandmother to our family temple. In Coimbatore, every street has atleast one temple. This one belonged especially to our family and believe it or not, only brahmins are allowed inside! As I made my way into the dimly lit interior, I was shown photographs of my ancestors as my grandmother told me of how when she was a girl, a hundred brahmins would be fed at a time inside that very same temple. She spoke of how musicians would sing there and my great-great grandfather would perform all the pooja rites himself in front of our family idol. Now, it is dark and silent. The priest lives in a room at the back with his wife and two young children. There is a smell of incense and grease, the very stones seem weary. Their time is past.

The next evening, my last there, was spent in a very different way. I was taken to Chennai silks, that Mecca of all saree buyers. They have floors for different fabrics, sarees in just about every price range and a bewildering array of designs. The attendants all speak only Tamil and patiently help as you sift through saree after saree. Women sit there for hours arguing over prices and fabrics and designs. I wandered over all five floors as my mother bought her favorite cotton prints.
That night I was taken to visit the last of my mother's Mama's. He had recently given his daughter in marriage and was extremely proud of the wedding video. Unfortunately he also owned a new fangled DVD player that he did not know how to use, as a result of which I was inflicted with the footage of the bridegroom's Kasi yatra ceremony three times. By the time we staggered out of there, three hours later, I was firmly determined that if I get married it will be in a registrar's office and no videography will be permitted.

As I sat in the train the next afternoon and watched that verdant scenery roll by, I thought of the past three days and of the blog entry I would write when I got home, of the relatives I never knew I had and of the life I was returning to.
But most of all, I thought of those people, clinging determinedly to a fading past and of watching the sun rise from the rear seat of a Honda Activa, as buffaloes ambled past.

Somewhere over the Rainbow

2007-05-18T08:26:00.000-04:00

Somewhere over the rainbow
Way up high
There's a land that I heard of
Once in a lullaby

Somewhere over the rainbow
Skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true

Some day I'll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far behind me
Where troubles melt like lemondrops
Away above the chimney tops
That's where you'll find me

Somewhere over the rainbow
Bluebirds fly
Birds fly over the rainbow
Why then, oh why can't I?

I watched You've Got Mail today, for something like the fifteenth time. Its definitely one of my favourite romances, I love the witty dialogue, the acting, the setting, the bookstore... Even now, I get a delightful little shiver down my spine when Tom Hanks hands Meg Ryan a handkerchief and says, "Don't cry, Shopgirl" with Somewhere over the rainbow playing in the background.

The Golden Bowl

2007-05-16T09:58:00.000-04:00

I've been reading Henry James' The Golden Bowl for the past couple of days and still haven't made it past the first hundred pages or so. I'm a pretty fast reader as a rule, its just that James is a lot to digest. I read The Portrait Of a Lady about six years ago and it was only my stolid determination never to leave a book unfinished that made me complete it. Standing in the bookstore last week, I thought perhaps he deserved another chance, I was after all too young then to truly appreciate what I was reading.
But as I read it now, I can fully sympathize with myself at thirteen. He has this extremely wordy, highly descriptive style that for my practical mind is somewhat hard to stomach. He uses what seem to me highly incongruous metaphors, all the time. For almost any other writer, it would seem like affectation, but somehow with James, it only seems like eccentricity.
In the past hundred pages, the story has progressed, but only marginally so. The characters have been described in tremendous detail, but in such a strange way that they don't seem familiar at all. I cannot really judge their actions yet, or decide whether what they say is true to their character. The dialogue too is extremely clever, but ordinary people simply don't talk that way. It is a pleasure to read but only, at least for me, in small doses. Perhaps as I slowly plough my way through this book, I will find some underlying allegory, some thread at which if I pull, the whole maze will unravel.

In love with an idea

2006-07-21T03:53:00.000-04:00

The waves crash around me
Seething, foaming
Walls of water.
Salt stings my eyes
The sea roars in my ears
My muscles throb in silent protest
At every stroke.
Then through the deepening mist
I see a beacon
land is near
No water can defeat me.

I walk through a desert.
the sun beats down relentlessly
No cloud to cool its heat.
My throat is swollen
I cannot speak.
My feel are blistered
I cannot walk
So I crawl.
Then from the top of a dune
I see the oasis
It is real, not a mirage.
Victory is still mine.

I stand on the top of a building
the wind blows against me.
It wants to throw me down,
this impediment in its path.
It tears at my clothes
It screams in my ears.
But I still stand.
In this silent battle
Far above the rest of the world.
Far beyond any of its cares,
I am the victor.

I see a man
his eyes are blue
not the blue of a calm sea
but the blue of a sea,
that he has calmed.
The sun shines on his hair
it glows in answer.
Gleaming strands
spun of light.
The wind blows agains his body
it serves to outline his shape.
The almost arrogant ease
in the way he stands.

I catch my breath.
I step forward, then kneel.
I kneel and adore
that which I can never defeat.

2006-07-08T09:50:00.001-04:00

This dialoue was actually an assignment given in an intensely boring english class. We were studying this poem called the "Talisman" by some indian poet. The gist of it was the story of a fellow who couldn't get a job anywhere. A palmist gives him a talisman; which is basically a screw of paper with some writing that he's ordered not to read; and promises him that his fortune will change. However, it doesn't and the bloke decides to commit suicide. Wanting to see what was written on the talisman, he opens it to find some encouraging message and lo! the next day he lands a job.
Our assignment was to write a dialogue between the unemployed young man and the palmist. I did just that, but unfortunately, this shall be a forever unfinished work, as my flow of creativity was stemmed by the ringing of a bell.
The unemployed young man is sitting under a tree and brooding gloomily over his fate.
UYM (sigh) : How unlucky I am.

He hears a voice that seems to rise from the bowels of the earth.
P: Luck is but a wandering thing,
Who knows when, what it may bring.
But palms they speak nought but the truth.
What fools may say, let them forsooth!
Cross my palm with silver or gold
And I will tell you all to be told.

UYM: I'm hallucinating! An effect of being turned down on five jobs in a row in one day, I suppose.

P: You do not dream my voice, boy
Nor is this game or ploy.
Turn your head and look around
And see all your miseries unfound.

UYM (He finally finds the palmist sitting on the other side of the tree): Ha! it was you all along. Who are you anyway?

P: Cleverness is not a quality my friend,
that you possess as I portend.
I tought my words sufficiently clear.
But you listen not to what you hear.
I tell your fortunes, bare your palm.
I am a PALMIST! Hey, just be calm.

UYM: Okay, okay, I'm fine. Only, you don't have to yell like that. Do you always talk in poetry?

P(smugly): It is a trick I rather fancy.
My clients seem impressed, so I see.
But words are wasted so let us begin,
Here's my pouch, just put the silver in.

UYM: My Mum told me never to trust fortune tellers.

P: That good lady must have been
Sadly incapacitated, so it does seem.
But then to have a son like you,
Would certainly addle her brain, mine too.

UYM: Well, I guess it can't hurt. (extends his plam)

P: The silver first...

UYM: You don't bother much about rhyme when talking about cash, do you?

P(patiently) : ...Or you shall be cursed.

UYM: Pooh! here.
(He gives the palmist some money. The palmist seems satisfied and begins to read his palm.)

P( After inspecting for a long time, looks up) : Your fortunes will improve,
The lines say so.
Your future is bright,
Now you may go.

UYM: What??? I gave you all the money I had left to hear something I left home to stop hearing?

P: Fool! My words shall not be repeated.
Oh, I an getting really quite heated.
You question me? A seer of such repute?
You are not worthy to polish my boot!
Move along or I might just
Grind you with my feet into dust.

UYM: Goodness Sir, do not get heated.
I beg you to please be seated....
Oh my God! I'm doing it too.

This is where I was stopped both by the bell and a lack of ideas. The young man could of course hang himself and do literature a service, but how to bring that about plausibly was beyond my imagination. So, incomplete it shall always remain.

Dance

2006-06-25T12:04:00.000-04:00

I spin
spin out of control
I don't need
to leave the ground
to fly.
Shimmering droplets of sweat
fall to the floor like teardrops
weeping for joy
the very joy of motion.

I stretch, I lunge,
I twist, I bend.
Pain, in its very essence
shoots up muscles like needles
yet all I feel is a driving greed
Don't stop.
Never stop.

Pain and pleasure melt into one
fused together,
I can no longer tell the difference.
Is this ecstasy?
I knew of nothing better.
Is this torture?
I knew of nothing worse.
I simply know this.
Don't stop.
Never stop.