No longer skirting issues

So, last week, I went and bought myself a skirt. Which, if you know me at all, is just mind-boggling because my legs haven’t actually seen the light of day since, oh about 1995 which was my last year in a school uniform.

I don’t know whether this is a result of spending all those years in rape-capital Delhi, but the Skepticus sisters have always been modest (and I’m being kind here – the correct description would be ‘severely retarded’) dressers. If you have ever caught a glimpse of above-the-ankle Skepticus-girl-leg, it is almost certain that you are either a spouse, a sibling, or a parent of the sisters (and we shall not mention the boyfriends of the youngest Skepticus girl (aka, yours truly) because even in those cases, as LONG as her clothing stayed on, it was perfectly modest, thankyouverymuch).

Now while this bizarre sense of fashion would've had the sternest Taliban elder brushing away proud tears from his rheumy eyes, it rather confounded everyone else. The Skepticus parents had never imposed a dress-code on their daughters, so this concerted effort to drape themselves in shamiana-size attire was quite a mystery. They consistently wore shirts three sizes too large, skirts that routinely swept the floors and salwar-kameezes that would have sent maternity-wear-designers rushing for their sketchbooks.

”Show some forearm, woman!” was the kind of exhortation a Skepticus girl got from friends, when she was worrying about boys not noticing her.

This extreme modesty also parented the invention of the Emergency Skirts that prevailed in the Skepticus household through every summer through the ‘90s. The thing was, Delhi summers were non-conducive to the sisters’ Victorian ideas about dressing; sweltering limbs do not a comfortable Skepticus girl make. Now there was no choice as far as public appearances went (because the world couldn’t EVER know they had legs!), but within the confines of their home, they felt liberated enough to don shorts and t-shirts, provided there were no non-family people around. But this created a curious problem, for if all the sisters were thusly attired and the doorbell rang, how would they answer it? So the girls procured a bunch of ankle-length, elastic-waisted skirts in various patterns, with the single common feature that they were all uniformly ugly. Their only redeeming feature was that you could slip them on in half a second over whatever you were currently wearing.

Now the Skepticus mom, being the Skepticus mom, found this fervent modesty hilarious, and proceeded to tell all her friends all about it. Which might’ve been okay, if said friend-list had not included Mrs Chauhan – a lady with the lung power of a particularly accomplished Wagnerian valkyrie (with a pucca UP accent, that too) and a complete and utter lack of tact.

The aforementioned Mrs Chauhan one day decided to call upon the Skepticus household. Finding the door locked (unusual for the Skepticus home), she stood at the doorstep armed with her iron lungs and yelled, “Arre kapde pehenne ki zaroorat nahiiin! Main hi hooooon!” simultaneously scandalising and deafening all of F-block, the sisters and particularly poor, grey-haired Mr Satija (their neighbour downstairs) who forever after looked at the sisters with suspicion and a wee bit of wonder. (The man had four sons – enough to worry about without the disturbing revelation that the house upstairs was home to wanton nudists.)

But age, perspective and the absence of loudmouthed neighbours are slowly bringing about a change in this attitude and it is no longer so unusual to catch a glimpse of Skepticus-girl calf (as in, part of leg, not baby bovine) or even inch-above-the-knee leg. You might even run into a Skepticus girl who is actually wearing a top which leaves no ambiguity (!) as far as her gender is concerned.

And then yesterday, I went and bought myself a halterneck top, effectively laying to rest the ghosts of Delhi in the '90s, four completely daft sisters and the very loud voice of one Mrs Chauhan.

Say hello to the world, shoulders (and legs)! You're going be seeing a whole lot more of it.

Normal Programming Resumes

Despite my incessant kvetching about my parents’ looniness, I had a relatively sane childhood. No, really. I was fed (rather well, for which I blame them to this day), clothed and not forced to break rocks in the burning sun for not doing my homework (an incident which occurred with distressing (for them, that is) frequency).

It was only during my adolescent years I realised, that all this endless parenting (have I mentioned that I’m the fourth of five?) was making the needle on their sane-o-meters oscillate dangerously. The following incident will illustrate how.

The parents had apparently, early in their lives, nursed in their hearts the desire that one of their children would grow up to be an engineer. Not just any engineer, mind you, an engineer from IIT. Their first three offspring being more inclined towards the life sciences and art, the mantle was passed on to me – their one child who showed no inclination towards anything in particular.

The father is an engineer. Now you may assume that this would qualify him to decide whether or not I had an aptitude for the profession, but you would be wrong. Apparently, when you become parents, things like logic, and the ability to see what is staring you in the face, take wing and fly out the nearest window. And so it was with my parents. It was decided one cold day in December, that I, their one child who showed less of a talent for mathematics than your average amoeba (actually amoebae are better off, they can multiply without help. Get it? Get it? Ha ha ha!), would become the next engineer in the family. And this despite the fact that I had, in all my years of primary education (save one - the year of my grade ten board exams), displayed a lack of left brain activity that could only be described as uncanny.

To be fair to them, I did, in the eleventh grade, confuse them a little. I signed up for that deceptively named subject – Engineering Drawing. “If that isn’t the sign of a future engineer, we don’t know what is!” thought my parents. What it was, was a simple case of selective vision; they saw Engineering’ and went “Aha!”, I saw ‘Drawing’ and went “Oo fun!” So while I drew three types of rivets and the occasional cross-section of a crankshaft (without knowing how any of them actually worked), my parents smiled at each other knowingly and dreamed.

As a result of this dream, after I completed the twelfth board exams (with abysmal grades in maths, mind you) I was signed up for those IIT entrance preparatory classes. “But I don’t want to be an engineer! I want to do an English honours course.” I said to my parents. “No,” they replied, firmly yet lovingly, “there are no jobs for English honours students. What will you do once you graduate?” Being, back then, of the species known as Teenageria Cluelessium, I had no answer to that and agreed to the classes with the warning that they were wasting their money. As expected, it fell on deaf ears.

Typically, at this point in the story, the girl’s left-brain awakens with all the force of an active volcano and dazzles all with its brilliance, proving to the world that all parents are always right and gosh! The world might just have its next Einstein! To which I will only say, “Right. And life is a Karan Johar movie.”

I realised after about a week of attending though, that these classes weren’t quite as hellish as I had thought they would be. I still didn't understand a word those teachers said, (except for that one jolly old Punjabi gentleman, who would upbraid his students with a cheery “Hiyou bilaady fooool!”), but I did understand that in a class of twenty-five odd (and some of them were very odd) boys, H and I were the only girls. H was already seeing someone, which left me with sole ogling rights to Jaspreet Randhawa.

Jas, in that entire class of twenty-five young men, was the only one who did not wear glasses, did not dress in clothes his mother might’ve bought for him, did not have his oiled hair in a neat side parting and did speak in grammatically perfect English with all his articles ready and present (ref: grammar, you pervs). It also helped that he stood six-feet-two inches tall, had the softest brown eyes I had ever seen and a smile bracketed by dimples you could drown in. Pretty as Michelangelo’s David, but alive and umm…more substantially clothed (which was sad, but you can’t have everything. Also, Delhi winters, ‘nuff said).

So Jas and I got to doing what awkward teenagers did back then, which was, avoiding each other like the plague. This continued for about two weeks until one morning, as I was walking from the bus stop to class, he stopped his bike and offered me a ride. From then on it was but a small step to chatting in all the breaks and drinking chai at the tapri around the corner.

It would be nice to say that we walked off into the sunset holding hands (no actually, it would be crap. And a bunch of lies) but soon I got into the College of Art and we fell out of touch.

So, although nothing ever came of it (the pretty boy and me, i.e.), my parents did learn that attempts to play puppet-master with my academic/professional life were more likely to backfire. Their subsequent tries at spreading the loony were limited to showing me resumes and photographs of eligible (by their standards) men who were all, by some bizarre coincidence, very religious, hirsute and balding.

Now? They just bug me to make babies. I’m not sure if that’s an improvement – the sane-o-meter self-imploded at grandkid number 3.

So, what was I saying again? Oh yeah, parents. Don't you just love 'em?

With Apologies to Nike

So. In my mother’s endless quest for more grandchildren than she knows what to do with, I have been instructed to buy a panchang. For those of you in the dark (from me, who has had an occasional glimpse of light and winced) a panchang is a Vedic calendar based largely on the phases of the moon with an occasional nod to the sun, the nine* real planets in our solar system and two mythical ones (Yes, we have mythical planets. Don’t you?).

The panchang is pretty much the how-to-live-every-day-of-your-life guide for all good, religious, Hindus (I score exactly zero out of three). It has every single day of (however remote) religious significance marked out on it and if you’re even borderline familiar with Hinduism, that is a LOT of days. There is ekadashi, which happens once every month – I know some people fast on this day, there is amavas, which is essentially a moonless night, so I’m assuming people switch on the street-lights this day, and a whole plethora of other days which I have no clue about. All I know is that some involve fasting, some involve feasting and some involve wearing yellow clothes and feeding cows (unless this one of my mother’s twisted little ways of getting a laugh off her children).

’What does this have to do with my mother’s potential grandchildren?’, you might ask.
‘Apparently, lots’, I will say.

You see, since my mother has realised that mere badgering has done nothing to increase her tribe, she has switched to plan B i.e. tempt your daughter with the promise of “super” offspring. Apparently, doing the deed on days specifically earmarked for er…such activity will ensure that the resultant bundle of joy will be the kind of bundle of joy that is the very epitome of joyousness. As they were wont to say in shady seventies Hindi movies, “Heera hoga, heera!!" (He will be a diamond, a diamond!).

But it’s not as simple as it sounds. You can’t ‘just do it’ (sorry nike) on the days circled in red marker. There is A Process. The two parties involved must first have gone though a period of celibacy (ten days, I think). On the designated day, when the clock strikes the magic hour, both parties must bathe, wear clean clothes and light a diya in front of bhagwaan-jis of their choosing. They must then invoke their individual ancestors, inform them of their intentions to further (deepen?) their gene pools, seek their blessings and then get down and do the dirty.

Because of course, *nothing* gets you in the mood like the mental image of an audience of stern-faced gods and grey-beard ancestors watching you as you get it on.


*or is that eight now?

Reeling

I dodge behind a pillar when I see them approach. I wear sunglasses and avoid eye contact with anyone once I step outside the building. I even take the stairs if I see that the lift is already occupied by one whole person.

You never know whom she’s gone and made friends with.

No, I haven’t suddenly decided to enter the gumshoe business, nor am I practicing writing a bad spy novel. What I am doing, is reeling in the aftermath of the four-foot-ten-inch hurricane of friendliness and outgoing that is my mother.

She was here for two days. Two measly days. And in those two days? She went and befriended, advised and made life-long devotees of everybody within a ten-mile radius of my life.

My frequent admonitions through gritted teeth as I tugged on her sari aanchal, were of no avail. No amount of - “Ma! Stop smiling at strangers in the lift!” and “You don’t have to make conversation with the sabziwalla for christ’s sake!” or even “Please ma, let him drive his cab. Do we really need to know which part of UP he’s from?” - helped. And now she’s gone, and left me to fend for myself against this sea of super-friendly strangers.

Somedays I am convinced that I am a victim of a baby-swapping episode.

In the last one-year, all my lift rides had been spent in a peaceful contemplative silence during which the lift-attendant and I conducted in-depth studies of our personal footwear. I wondered whether my shoelaces were tied into perfect bows, how the pink swoosh contrasted nicely against the dark blue background, whether the soles were bouncy enough…you know? Lift thoughts. Now? I am suddenly and without warning being addressed as ‘baby’ ('baby'??) and asked solicitous questions about whether the house-keeping staff turn up on time, whether my bai is doing her work well and that if I ever need anything, I only need to inform security to send ‘Manoj’.

Every gaggle of aunties I meet now, accosts me with friendly cries of “Hello beta! You must tell your mummy that the boy/medicine/yoga exercise she recommended for my young-female-relative/age-related-ailment/random-joint-pain worked wonderfully! She’s getting married! / I’m cured! /Look at me do cartwheels now!” At which I can only smile weakly and reply, “Yes auntie, I definitely will” because I have no idea who these women are.

The sabziwallas now all flash friendly smiles at me, conduct conversations in Bhojpuri, which I don’t understand and offer me vegetables I don’t know how to cook. When I tell them I cannot understand a word they are saying, they laugh and say, “Achcha aap nahin samajhti hain? Koi baat nahin. Apni mataji ko hamari taraf se namaste kah dijiyega.”

The neighbours, whom till today, I only knew as the people who shifted their furniture at odd hours of the night, now stop me and tell me what a nice, friendly, social lady my mother is.

I have to fight the temptation to lean against their shoulders and brokenly sob, “You don’t know the half of it!”

I’m sure my real mother is a quiet, reclusive academic, who lives in a small, secluded cottage in some remote hill station. And then I wonder how she must cope with her unintentionally adopted miniature hurricane.

***

Update on the Baby Front:
The only thing more horrifying than your mother telling you to start making babies, is when she starts telling you how.

Excuse me while I go and pick up my ears. They sort of melted off the sides of my head while she was talking.

The Mommy Returns

Be afraid, be very afraid.

I've been practicing the eye-rolling and the exasperated sighing, only this time, the problem is likely to be slightly bigger than grimy masala bottles or recalcitrant maids.

I am being interrogated as to why, after a whole year of being married, I do not have anything substantial (i.e. a baby. or two, or three) to show for it.

My mother is strangely obsessed with babies. Strangely, I say, because people, she has had *five* of her own. Five. And like that's not enough? She now has four grandchildren. It seems that no matter how many babies there are in her immediate vicinity, there is always room for more*.

And whose job is it to fill up the empty-baby spaces? You guessed it! Yours truly.

Now, Yours Truly is rather partial to the creatures; she loves their little pudgy hands, their toothless grins and their small wiggly-ness, but has seen enough of them to know that babies are just little bundles of TNT, camouflaged in cuteness.

So while she might someday be persuaded to see her present life collapse like a house of cards, (only to be picked up, chewed, and drooled over), today is not that day.

And the next three years don't look like it either.


*You could stick my mother in a room full of babies and over the gurgling and crying and cooing, you would still hear her saying, "Send in the babies! We need more babies!!"

Of Ancestors and America

He was a sprightly old thing, my grandfather. Waking up at the crack of dawn, rushing through his morning rituals; the datun, the bath with cold water - and never mind that we were bang in the middle of a hill-station-winter - and the prayers.

The prayers were, to us, the funniest part of the process. We'd actually shake each other awake with urgent whispers,"Wake up! Nanaji's doing puja again!". He'd be putting on his shirt and coat, all the while reciting shlokas at rapid-fire speed. That done, there'd be the frantic whirling of the lit agarbatti in from of the assortment of small idols and photographs in the pasty-green-painted puja room.

We never understood though, what the rush was all about. He'd retired from practice (he was a lawyer) ever since we were old enough to know him, but come every. single. morning and there he was, popping out of bed like toast again.

By the time we'd be groggily sitting around the table for breakfast, he'd be all ready to go. In his black coat, and crisp white suit, wooden cane in hand and impatiently tapping his feet.

He was very proud of us, his 'foreign-returned' grandchildren and he'd show us off to all the acquaintances he'd meet on his interminable walks around the city. "These are my grandchildren. Do you know, they live in Nigeria!" as if living in Nigeria was something so fraught with danger and exotica, that the fact that we were alive was nothing short of miraculous.

But what I remember most about him, is the way he'd speak to us; always in English, and very loudly. Almost as if our inability to speak Hindi rendered us slightly deaf as well.

After we moved to India, he'd visit us once a year, and that one month would be filled with episodes of frantic-spectacles'-searches (which he'd manage to misplace at least thrice a day) and squeals of shock as we'd occasionally find his dentures by sitting on them.

I don't know whether I was his favourite grandchild or not (or maybe just the one who looked like she could do with a good dose of general knowledge, or hell, any knowledge) - he had way too many of them - but I was definitely his first choice when it came to discussing American politics. I use the term 'discussing' broadly though; mostly it would be him asking me questions in his booming voice, "Do you know who is the president of the United States of America?", and me meekly replying, "Yes nanaji, it's Bill Clinton".

He'd positively beam at that, and then go on to expound on the good things the Clinton administration had done for America in particular, and the world in general.

I wondered at some point if my grandfather had ever heard of the little episode with La Lewinsky - his complete and utter adoration of the man never waned in all the time I knew him, but with his generation, you never could tell, could you? The man had two wives and seven (!) children and I never, in all those years, heard him address my grandmother as anything other than saahib*.

He would have been a happy man today.

*Mate/Companion. Also, owner/ruler/lord.

The Secret of Eternal Youth

Hello blog people!

One is writing this post from up the wall, which one's maternal parent drove one up, in the three days that she was visiting.

While the said parent has left Bombay, and is now driving the Delhi-based siblings up their Delhi-based walls, one thinks one will just stay up here for a while. You know, just in case she has left behind the ghosts of her drive-your-children-up-the-wall personality.

(And while one realises that one is probably a horrid little thing, one has a rather interesting view from up here. For one, one can see the tops of all your heads. Ha ha!)

One still wakes up in the middle of the night with that measured-yet-menacing voice in one's ear.

"Why are your masala bottles so grimy?! Where do you stack the unironed clothes? Why doesn't the bai clean the dishes well? Why don't you ever tell her anything? What kind of household are you running?!"

And one is, once again, reduced to a quivering, crying broken shell of a woman.

An interesting facet of human behaviour comes to light though, that namely, all quivering and crying is done in retrospect. For the three days that the MP had the run of the household, one had automatically slipped into rebellious-teenager mode.

One did - with much aplomb, mind you - the whole exasperated-eye-roll, the I-can't-believe-you're-saying-that look of horror and the could-you-possibly-embarrass-me-anymore saucer-eyed-expression.

The poor pater, in his characteristically resigned manner, contented himself with talking to the SB about everything under the sun, and buying mountains of fruit*. And occasionally letting out despairing cries of, "Why isn't anyone eating any fruit??"

So it seems, that the secret of eternal youth is (insert portentous silence HERE), "Invite thine parents over for a couple of days" (and thunder and lightning...NOW!).


On the other hand, one wonders what use this transient youth is, if one is going to spend all of it perched up on a wall?


* Which is another 'father' thing. One is beginning to think that in dad-school, one of the first lessons they teach you is, "Nothing says 'I love you' to your offspring, more than a bowl of assorted fruit. Make that two."

A Letter

To the man who walked his math-impaired daughter down the perilous road from multiplication tables to differential calculus. The personal swimming instructor, raag identifier and consoler of weepy, red-nosed four- year-olds whose heroes have fallen. On celluloid.

That dresser-up of rag-doll-sleepy-school-goers, doll's-arm/leg/head-fixer. Tiffin-packer, chocolate-wafer-adder.

Patient-sitter-through of makeovers by six-year-olds, who think that salt-and-pepper hair in at least six bristly ponytails, with a minimum of three bindis on the forehead, is so him.

Photographer of horrific moments - like fancy-dress parties and clown faces.

Embarrass-er of daughters, by playing ancient recordings of said-daughter's-five-year-old-voice soulfully singing:

"Laila main lailaaaa! Aisi hoon lailaaaa,
Har koi chaahe mujhse, milna akelaaa!"

Hummer-of-tunes, never-singer, non-dancer.

Lover of books, The Beatles, and order. Watcher of every. single. news bulletin.

To the maker of the best chicken curry in the *whole* world.

Happy birthday, Papa. May this be one of many, many more.

Chicken Little and Other Stories

Ever since the bird-flu outbreak, the SB has sworn off poultry in it's many glorious forms - boiled/fried/scrambled/omelett-ed eggs, tandoori/fried/curried chicken and even pastries* which might have egg as an ingredient.

Nothing can convince him. Not the explanation, "But it's been cooked at above 100 degrees Celsius and everyone knows that 70 is enough!"; not the government's declaration of the state's bird-flu-freeness; nope, not even Sanjay Dutt in all his shirtless** (and arm wrestling with an animated chicken) glory.

The SB refers to this unreasonable, unfair rejection of normal-breakfast-food as being 'risk averse'; we, to send home a point, run around the house screaming that 'the sky is about to fall on our heads any moment now and we'd better take cover!'.

In adherence to the non-interference treaty of September '05*** however, he cannot stop, hamper or protest against *our* consumption of poultry. Except for frowning in disapproval whenever we cheerfully call up the corner store to send us a dozen eggs.

Which is why, it is even more fun to call him into the kitchen when we're making breakfast and say, "Look SB! Yummy fried bird-flu!", and watch him turn some very interesting shades of purple.

Such fun!


*Souffles and mousses (in which the eggs ARE RAW!), he is, inexplicably enough, okay with.
**An honour, previously conferred upon Salman the Unbelievably Lucky.
***"I will not presume to know better than you, what is good for you, so help me god."


***

In other news, we have discovered that we're quite terribly susceptible to the enthusiasm-bug. By which we mean, a couple of words at the right time, at the right place, and we're absolutely bubbling over with the stuff.

One (seemingly innocent) conversation with a certain somebody (you know who you are...Yes! You!) about the benefits of fitness, and we're thinking - "Hmmm...he has a point there. You DO feel better after a run...it would be great if we could fit into that pair of jeans again...Oh! Remember that slinky black dress*?! We'd forgotten all about it!! We could wear that!" - and from there, it's just one small step to showing up in the gym all shiny and happy and scaring-the-daylights-out-of-the-gym-instructor.

We are blinded by visions of shopping for doll-sized articles of clothing and slipping into them with nary a wiggle, and don't even notice the rest of the people in the gym, slowly backing off from the earthquake, the epicenter of which is us. We run up to the instructor after every couple of minutes, deluding ourselves that the look in his eyes is the 'you-go-girl! of non-verbal communication, when it is actually the okay!-crazy-lady-on-the-loose-people!-man-your-stations-NOW! of it.

The problem with the enthusiasm-bug is, it lacks foresight, or no wait, what it lacks is near-future-as-in-what-will-happen-tomorrow-foresight.

So now, while we *do* believe that fitness is a good thing, we're pretty sure that being this enthusiastic about it, is not.

Because today, we woke up, no closer to the body beautiful, but with a gait that bore a striking resemblance to the Tin Man's, pre-oiling. And feeling like a herd of elephants slow-danced over us the night before.

Ouch.


* Yes. We do own a slinky black dress. It is tucked away with all the other 26"- waisted (wasted?) outfits in the Wardrobe of Hope.