A Mumbai cocktail..

My love-hate relationship with Mumbai which was bordering on hate a while ago has been changing towards the love side of late. The hate bit had been triggered off by a house hunting spree. Visions of finding a tiny little nook where we could see trees and perhaps a bit of the sea if we looked out and curly-haired kids playing in the park if we looked down was rapidly replaced by the grim reality. If such places indeed existed in Bombay, we would also have to add visions of both of us starving to death and clinging onto our jobs in order to pay the steep EMIs. The only part of that visual that was true was the bit about the ‘tiny nook’. Houses in Mumbai can be so tiny that they end even before you can step into them properly.

Anyway, after coming to terms with the fact that we probably won’t own a house here and that we should be lucky to be able to rent in a decent place, life has been much better. This has also meant that we are free to do non-house-hunting stuff in the weekends.

It started with a trip to Muhammed Ali road during the Ramzan period. I discovered the world’s best Phirni in Suleiman Mithaiwala’s wonderful sweet shop. It had just the right balance of milk and sugar and a gentle sprinkling of dry fruits, all of which made one mouth watering spoon after the next. The festival season ended with a walk among the Chowpatty crowds dipping their Ganeshas into the sea and having a jolly good time of it.

In between this, came the trip to Lakme Fashion Week. Three times now, courtesy a friend who works in the right place, we have been gawking at minor celebrities and well shod and well clothed people. Suddenly you feel like you are in touch, however barely and briefly, with the Page 3 stardust that most of Mumbai breathes every morning, and experience a cheap thrill from knowing that you can never experience this in any other city. After all, spotting a Deepika Padukone is not the same as spotting, say, a Malini Ramani.

The biggest discovery has however been the concerts at NCPA. I have never been a music person and apart from avidly putting together a collection of Kishore Kumar songs over the years, have not developed any kind of taste whatsoever. Yet, having NCPA so handy, it seemed almost a sin not to experiment a bit.

First stop was at a jazz concert by Joshua Redman. Was it mindblowing! It did not matter that the music and tunes were totally unknown. For a good hour and half, I sat engrossed and mentally decided to attend more jazz concerts.

That successful outing lead to grabbing an offer to accompany a friend to the SOI concert of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music. Said friend ditched at the last minute and I found myself seated with D right in the front row. As it turned out, the performance was middling and by half time I was quite fidgety. Which is not a good thing, when you are in the very first row. One feels the pressure to show mild interest, if not rapt attention.

I was quite worried about how the next performance – the Opera – would go.

D and I had attended a free session on ‘discovering the Opera’ at Crosswords. The audience had largely comprised hundred year olds. This was not encouraging. Even worse was the poster of Tosca that showed a sixty year old man with his face buried in the generous bosom of a fifty year old woman. Surely, this could not be the lead pair, which going by the story of Tosca should have been in their early twenties. Despite these misgivings (and the warnings of the above friend that opera is just people wailing iiiiiiiiiiii and eeeeeeeeee all the time), I was still keen to go. After all, it is a word you have heard so often and associated with elegance and grace and fluttering fans and so on. If it was going to be played in the neighbourhood, I was definitely not going to miss it.

As it turned out, I quite enjoyed myself. Firstly, there were sub titles running on top of the stage. So one could catch the witty dialogues and the light jokes. Secondly, the performers were pretty good. They were clearly forty year olds (thank god, not sixty year olds) playing twenty year olds. But for someone used to pretending that the likes of Sivaji Ganesan, Rajini, Kamal, Dilip Kumar and Sanjay Dutt are twenty-year olds, this leap of imagination was not too tough. And finally the music was very very good. There is a good reason for these compositions to have been popular and the occasional goose pimples explained why.

In the midst of the culture overload, we watched the Marx Brother’s completely irreverent Duck Soup. I totally love that Shemaroo stocks all these movies and delivers them at my doorstep.

And, so I am beginning to see that the glass is half full and contains quite a heady cocktail.

Now if only there was a roof under which to down the cocktail…

Various ways to love books

I must have started reading quite early since I cannot really recollect a time when I did not read. Of course, considering my earliest recollection is of reading the Noddy series (which back then only 5 year olds read), I assume my memory is nothing great. I am however told, and was once upon a time shown proof as well, of books literally consumed as a child. Expensive books about happy families who lived in colourful pages and talked about numbers, colours, alphabets and other such things the average two year old may find interesting and their parents brain numbingly boring.

At some point in early childhood, began a love story with books.

Anytime, anyplace is a good time and good place to read a book.

Like reading at the dining table. Something I did not realize was an impolite thing not encouraged in most decent families. Unfortunately in ours, since both the parents had a book each in their hands at every meal, the two of us kids followed suit.

Or reading lying down on the bed or sprawled on the sofa. Apparently it never occurred to the said parents to warn us about spoilt eyes.

Reading on the pot is a wider activity I believe. But only very few institutionalize the activity by having a small book holder built next to the toilet roll.

Countless exams have been sacrificed to the lure of a promising book that just had to be finished. It would start as an innocuous break from geography or physics. The break would extend from ten minutes to half an hour till one realized when the last page came that there was not enough time left to study for the geography or the physics exam.

This unfortunate habit of wrong prioritizing grew into adult hood as well. When I managed to get an interview with an investment bank and was on the threshold of putting away the dreary corporate banking job I was doing forever, one would have assumed that I would prepare like mad. Instead, I chose to peruse the entire second book of the Krishna Leela series, a completely Hindi movie styled story of Lord Krishna, complete with romances and politics. Sure enough, at the interview I could only vaguely recollect concepts on valuation of a company. The fact that I had part 3 of the series to read threw a fairly largish ray of sunshine on the bleak job prospects.

I have been forced to carry books to work and hang around in the train station finishing it off before getting back into normal life. Or read in the bus, knowing fully well that this greed for one page would cost a whole four hours of feeling sick given inability to handle reading in a vehicle moving on the road. Under drastic situations, I have had to take the book to office and then read it in the loo, completely unmindful of the fact that I probably look like I have a really bad case of diarrhea.

Parents, sibling, various friends and now the loving spouse have all been told to defer conversation while I finished an interesting part of the book. Only the fact that most of them are avid readers themselves can explain why I still have all of them around. The only other time I have deferred conversation is when it is naptime or bedtime. Yet, even this sacrosanct schedule of my life has been postponed for the good cause of a good book. How can one sleep without knowing what Lata decided to do in A Suitable Boy.

The only thing more tantalizing than a book one is reading is a book someone else is reading. It has become a habit now to take a quick peak into the books of temporary neighbours on flights and trains. One can talk to perfect strangers because you know that they must be your kind of person given they are reading your kind of book. Or reading a book you have not heard of and which sounds interesting.

A true nightmare is when there is absolutely nothing to read. As a child, it seemed the easiest thing to do was raid the parents small bookcase. My parents preferred to borrow than buy given they moved houses every two or three years. And among the books they considered necessary to own at that stage was one on parenting. Which was good reading for the ten year old me, since I knew exactly what to advise them when they were handling a situation with me quite badly.

Of course this lead to a phase of life where certain books were not considered suitable for ‘kids’. The laundry list also included Sidney Sheldon, whose tantalizing scenes my mother decided was not for twelve year olds of those days. Back then, the only TV channel, DD edited out all scenes which involved two adults actually making any sort of attempt at physical contact. The sex scenes of Sidney Sheldon would have been a shock to the system. This shortly lead to my sister hiding her Sidney Sheldon behind a newspaper cover and reading it in the cover of late night.

Now there are no forbidden lists except by the government. This then leads to picking up a pirated paperback version on the streets of Mumbai, the best upholder of democracy.

But there is a rare situation where you are caught without a book. At the dining table when one is too lazy to go and get a book. Labels of Pepsi bottles or jam jars have been perused under such dire circumstances. There was one horrific flight where I was not carrying anything and did not have the time to visit the bookshop. I spent half the flight wondering if I should quietly filch my sleeping neighbour’s book and read it. To some extent, this shows (and I admit to it) slightly mongrel tastes in reading. But then, I have always maintained a true book lover is not defined by the high brow titles read as by the little acts that show a need to read.

Of course most days, other activities fill a lot of one’s time – going to work, talking to people, hitting the gym, watching TV. Yet at the end of the day I have to spend those ten minutes reading a few pages of the latest book I am reading. And then I am ready to sign off on the day and begin another day and turn another page.

Finding Mr Right

The first time I had to meet someone as a serious prospect to get married, I was totally stumped. Er…me…getting married? At a purely academic level, I knew this is what happened to girls when they reached the ripe old age of 23. However, sitting in my room off the hall where my parents and the eligible boy’s relatives sat, staring greedily at all the goodies spread out in front me but demurely desisting from eating them was as close to an out –of-the-body experience as I was going to get. In a short while, I quickly lost the demureness battle and begin munching the snacks in steady succession. Especially when the eligible young man opposite me launched into a long tirade about the Congress government’s appalling behaviour in the Shah Bhano case.

Crunch.. mind quickly thinking ‘bloody hell, who is Shah Bhano and what did they do to her..is it too early to help myself to the next thatai or should I make some sort of a remark at this stage to show I am not really that dumb?

And boy was I smart. Here I was, a freshly minted MBA from a Top B-School in India. The young man opposite me was from the same school as well, give and take a few years. He was also from my community and fit my and my parent’s requirements of a groom to the T.

In which case, why was I not feeling anything but a slight wish to escape the increasingly stifling confines of my room?

When I was told that it was time to bite the dust like all Indian girls my age, I handled it the only way I knew – making a list of all desirable characteristics in a guy and then throwing numerous tantrums pointing at every shortfall in every potential groom paraded in front of me.

If I thought that my parents where picking out the worst specimens on earth, was I in for a rude shock when I signed up online.

Looking for fair, luvely girl who will be my best friend for life

I come from an educated and broad minded family. I am open to both Iyer and Iyengar girls.

I would like who will help me soar into the sky to reach my ambitions.

Our son is fair, IIT-IIM,,cooks well, is an investment banker who lives abroad and any girl marrying him will the luckiest person on earth

Option A - Archies cards inspired freak
Option B - self-deluded bigot.
Option C – What about me, you MCP?
Option D – ‘No girl is good enough for my son’
Option E - die alone eaten by Alsatian dogs a la Bridget Jones diary

What would I choose from the above?

Option E,E,E

Yet more and more friends were leaving the singleton brigade and walking into the gloaming, glowing.

Another list zeroed in on the various reasons that the right guy was eluding me

1. I belonged to the wrong community. Everyone in my community is an MCP. (Ha, like any other community in India is any different)

2. I was too good for everyone (MBA Pay – check, decent looks – check, intelligent and well read person - check)

3. I was not at all good for anyone (dusky complexion and taller than the average Indian male – check, independent and outspoken – check, on the wrong side of 27 - check)

Sigh. Getting into B-School had proved easier. Being shuttled around like a football in between all these reasons was my ego which had rapidly began shrinking to the size of a tennis ball.

Finally I gave up the search in futility. Various relatives had stopped asking my parents about my wedding and had concluded that I would burn in singleton purgatory. Instead of feeling like the family pariah, I felt nothing but plain relief wash over me.

Why was I so happy instead of anguished?

Time for more lists

I was thinking of getting married

1. because it was the right thing to do when you reached the correct age

2. so my parents would not stand out like social misfits in a culture governed by the progression towards spouse, house and progeny

3. so my ego would be satisfied knowing I was not so repellant that not a single guy liked me

Conclusion – I am not getting married since the above reasons seemed completely inane.

So began a happy existence getting to know the long ignored me. It turned out I loved travelling, hanging out with friends, trying my hand at new stuff and basking in the pride of being an independent woman. And finally when I got to know me better, I realized after all that I would like to give marriage a shot someday because it seemed like fun if you were with the right person.

Of course, that meant getting back into the game. But no more looking for The One like a desperate Dan Brown character looking for the Freemason’s secrets.

It would be more like reading or travelling – something I would enjoy doing but which would not consume my life. The really fun part of my thus-far distressed love life finally began.

Dating, it transpired was not the shrewd psychological game designed to assess a person’s suitability as a life partner over the course of an iced tea at Barista. It could be just plain fun and anyone who seemed intelligent and interesting was fair game for a movie or coffee.

So it was when D came along a long while later. He was definitely intelligent and interesting and probably at an earlier period would have had me stressed about not meeting every single criteria in the Mr. Right list. D also turned out to be smart, kind, fun and we had a vibe that no list could have predicted or I could have missed entirely by being focused on the end result rather than the person.

So it was that we got married.

Of course it turns out that ‘happily ever after’ is a state not caused by marriage but rather by two people working on it. But then, that is a whole new story in itself…

Hong Kong tales

Long before I went to Hong Kong, I had two contrary images of the city. The main one was that of a largely western city, firmly holding onto its colonial past, filled with smartly dressed bankers from all over the world. Infact, a sort of twin to Singapore.

The other impression had been formed by Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express. The lanes filled with food stalls. Sea creatures awaiting the axe in the bubbled tubs outside the stalls. The shrieking chatter in Chinese. The quick paced, compactly built Chinese men and women hurrying to their compactly built homes.

As my cab drove into the heart of the city, I was shocked by an entirely unexpected aspect of the city – its sheer height. Hong Kong itself is a hilly island. On top of its natural height, the city had sprouted thin, multi storeyed buildings that made you understand why skyscrapers are called so. Despite being a tall Indian among the short Chinese, I felt strangely dwarfed by the city.

One impression was dispelled though. Hong Kong is not like Singapore. It was definitely efficient, had big roads and like Singapore, had Asians dressed in top line, smart western clothes. Yet, there was a feeling that it is a Chinese city, with cabbies who sometimes needed to hear your destination from the bellman in Chinese and the occasional food wrapper that wouldn’t have dared to float around in Singapore.

Our first tourist stop brought us in touch with its Colonial past. Victoria peak, one of Hong Kong’s highest (and home to it’s poshest homes) points offered a panoramic view of the island. Grinning Chinese couples stood in the chilling air flashing smiles and ‘V’ signs. We followed suit caught up in the general excitement.

Our exploration of heights continued the next day with a trip to the Lantau Buddha Island. The ferry took us past a coastline filled with the same tall buildings we had seen the previous night. Only now, the glittering lights had turned into plain, invincible facades, stern and solid.

The Lantau Buddha was a pilgrim and tourist trap. Wiki says that it “was the world's tallest outdoor bronze seated Buddha prior to 2007”. Despite all these qualifications to its magnificence, and the fact that there have been better and calmer Buddha statues we had seen, we still felt compelled to climb the 268 steps to get closer to the statue. An unwise choice.

The wise choice was eating the special vegetarian meal served at the nearby Po Ling monastery (Chinese vegetarian? Seemed like an oxymoron). The spread included yummy bean curd cakes, lots of leafy vegetables, sticky jasmine rice, watery soup and an interesting array of items that made one realise that there was more to vegetarian than paneer mutter and lettuce salads.

The absolute highlight of the Island visit had to be the cable car ride back to the city. Seated in carriages fully covered in a transparent material, we swooped like eagles, watching the trees, the wide expanse of sea and the roads pass slowly below us.

For all its spots on the tourist checklist, Hongkong’s biggest tourist attraction had to be its shopping and the restaurants. The city offered both high end brands and outlet malls and everywhere you could find something you liked. The locals bustled about stocking their wardrobe and appearing the next morning in offices in clothes found in the latest American magazines and sitcoms. The tourists made their contributions too, grappling with excess baggage.

The restaurants spanned every range and cuisine. Soho and Tsim sha tsui, both had choices ranging from Vietnamese to Italian. I discovered Shanganese food and realized it tasted a lot better than Cantonese food. A Chinese colleague ordered dishes for a couple of meals leading to a culinary exploration of fried eel (quite crunchy and nice) and chicken’s feet (delicate and light but admittedly a disgusting concept). D and I were adventurous on our own as well and ordered snails, cooked in continental style. They were rather like calamari, soft and chewy.

We also discovered Hongkong’s Chinese side in Kowloon and parts of Tsim sha tsui. These areas had made themselves inaccessible to foreigners by sheer virtue of the lingua franca on the streets. We took a shared private van filled with locals and went past relatively run down areas. The buildings were older and more tired looking and washing lines crisscrossed the apartment windows. The streets had Chinese signboards. The community grounds in front of temples were filled with stereotyped images of old men playing mahjong. Glamorous branded stores were replaced by stores selling day to day necessities of life – metal vessel stands, incense, foul smelling dried fish, discounted cosmetics. The ordinary Chinese, like ordinary people everywhere, lived in a relatively duller world, made edgier only in a Wong Kar Wai movie.

Hongkong was a smooth amalgam of both the images I had in mind and just that little something more.

Books I have been reading

When I started reading Pico Iyer’s Cuba and the night I had not expected it to be one of those books, I would read a few pages of and then finish a whole other book before coming back to it. His other book, Lady and the Monk which read in a similar vein – a sort of fictional love story – was an engrossing read from start to finish. This book is engrossing too but there is just something missing in the endless agonizing of the protagonist in sorting out his feelings for his lady love. Move on and stop being such a first world bastard, you feel like screaming.

The first diversion was with the late Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The book’s reputation had reached me before the book. The cover also tantalizingly promised that it was several layers more complex than the ordinary thriller. Which it definitely is, with its patiently drawn out story, characterization and a potent female protagonist that made me wonder when was the last time I had come across such a powerful, disturbed female character. Personally though, I thought that Larsson’s real skill is in describing. With every word, he managed to paint vivid images of Sweden in my head till I could feel the cold in my bones and see the blond heads bobbing in the street. A good read for a long rainy weekend.

The next meandering was into John Grogan’s Marley and me. The book chronicles the life of Marley the dog, who becomes a valued member of the Grogan family. It made me smile a lot and also secretly thank heavens for never having been tempted to own a dog. It is just too much effort! The only complaint was the long drawn out chapters on Marley’s last years of suffering, something incongruous with the cheerful tone of the rest of the book.

This was followed by a few more pages turned in Cuba and the night before jumping into Samanth Subramaniam’s excellent debut novel Following Fish. The essays cover a range of experiences associated with fishes – be it eating it for pleasure, or consuming it as a medicine or having it as an aside while drinking alcohol. For a country with a coastline as large as ours and a fish eating culture as predominant as our, I don’t remember having come across a book covering this topic. That and Subramaniam's ability to suddenly delight with a neat turn of phrase, makes this one quite charming.

I suspect I will leap into a couple of more books before finally wrapping up Iyer. I must admit though that I have quite enjoyed the parlay into all the books and somehow the guilt from knowing I am ignoring Iyer is making the interludes all the more delicious.