And the Neem Tree said…

There I was, a young sapling growing free and wild

Looking into the balcony of a mother and child.

In a vacant lot, with other  trees older than I,

We grew in abandon trying to grow our branches high.

Once a brush fire set off a panic among us,

But the child’s worried tears stopped our fuss.

We were surprised and happy that she cared

And her prayers for our safety even her mother shared.

The fire dimmed and died out soon

Rains set in like a heaven sent boon.

Then one morning a year ago, on Raakhi day,

The tree-crusher machine inched up our way.

Crunch! As I heard the bushes and branches snap

I could feel the strength from me sap.

It was a school day and the child was away,

Who would send a prayer my way?

Then she appeared on the balcony and stared

It was the mother, towel-turbaned and teeth-bared.

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry in fear

When she screamed out to the tree crushers, loud and clear

Her voice carried over the din of the mean machine

And her wild pleas, and folded hands were finally seen.

Leave the Neem tree alone and let it purify the air,

Please leave it and let it grow, we really do care!

As she told them I was home for the birds,

They actually paid heed to her words.

They left me alone, and noisily went away,

Leaving me to live and see another Raakhi day.

And the child said “Thanks Mimi, you’re a crazy mother

But you are now officially the Neem tree’s brother.

So I still stand, a young Neem tree growing free and wild

Looking into the balcony of the mother and child.

A Raksha Bandhan story of a different sort

Lost it have I?

Been wondering what it is that makes me lose stuff. Why is it that I am forever scrambling to find my car keys, house keys, cell phones, hairbrush, scissors etc. and why do I lose things on such a regular basis? What makes me Amnesia personified on two feet? Not only do I drive people around the bend having them search for my things but I also send the divine into a tizzy. This in the form of frenzied invocations in Sanskrit slokas for Amarnath’s Bhole to prayers in the Queen’s English for St Anthony asking him to please please come down because something is lost, and can't be found.

Sometimes it doesn’t work and what’s lost is never found like the cellphone (yes another ancient that was a prequel to the iSmash), house keys, a favorite writing implement, driving license etc.

And sometimes it works – like when the security guards at office found my wallet with its entire content that validate and confirm my existence on paper (this included the new driving license that my father effortlessly facilitated, saving me from the excessive trauma one undergoes when trying to procure a government issued document).

I did try and blame my losses on a colleague in office and the kid at home, claiming that they were last seen around the lost objects. While the former said she sold all the items in the black market, the latter threw off all allegations. The rest squarely blame me.

“You’re plain careless.”

“You’re not organized.”

“You’re hyper.”

“You think too much.”

“You try to do too much.”

 “You’re growing old – it’s a natural process of decay.”

“Alzheimer’s?”

All of the above?

Or it could be the car – it’s eating up things that I leave locked inside it. Scrunch, scrunch and it’s gone!

Then there’s the WWW consoling us that we are not the only ones with all the above or menacingly attributing the memory lapses to some incurable unique degeneration of the self. After being told (again) that I think too much and that possibly much more than the mandatory six impossible things were crowding my brains and cramping my memory, I wondered if I was possibly attention deficit ( the WWW informs me adult ADHD exists). Just for grins sake, I took an online test that proclaimed “Mild ADHD possible”. Drat! Just a ‘mild’ and ‘maybe’ and not even a worthy enough reason that could justify to all around that it is not my fault?

Meanwhile, I lost my Sodexho coupons...

The Curious Incident of the Keys in the Afternoon

Right, let’s have another laugh at my expense. T’was a very hot Hyderabad summer’s day. We were setting out to meet best friends from Mumbai and Hyderabad not met for many years, in an attempt to relive some fun moments of the past. Going out in the midday sun is what Englishmen and mad dogs do but we aren’t Englishmen, and we aren’t dogs, but mad is an adjective that can be applied to us. Err…especially me? I lock the door, start the car and halfway ask the daughter, “Where are the house keys?” She informs me that she doesn’t see the keys in my bag, or in the car.

Panic sets in as I have more than once left the keys dangling in the door and my friendly indispensable neighbour has made it her business to take care of this frailty of mine but the problem is that she’s out of town on vacation! So I make an about turn and rush back home and almost simultaneously the phone rings, and guess what? We can’t find the phone, but we can hear it.

Now for a bit of an aside: Since I traded in the beloved iSmash for a snazzier phone, I have not been able to recognize its ringtone, or find the contacts let alone check my Gmail from the phone. In fact, once a colleague was calling me several times over and I kept wondering why the person in the TV serial that I was watching was not picking up the phone – till the daughter pointed out that it was my new phone that was ringing. Sigh! How I miss my iSmash! Anyway, my child who feels that I share the memory of Jason Bourne which obviously is not saying much about my retention capabilities, decided to customize the theme of the Bourne Identity as my ring tone.

So imagine my surprise when I stop the car and have Moby’s Extreme Ways play out from underneath! Talk about music from the depths! That’s when I realized that I was somehow sitting on the phone and the keys!! Obviously, I have hit rock bottom in more ways than one. What was even weirder was the missed call on the phone showed as “Home”. Hello- if both of us were in the car, and I had the keys underneath me, then who was calling from home? So we continued back, and this time Ayesha decided to open the door, check the house, lock it and bring back the keys to the car. I also, by then managed to check on the phone that the missed call from “Home” was from some days ago ( err…most likely on an occasion when I could not find my cellphone and had to call from the landline to locate it. Once I even had a colleague call till I finally found it left as a bookmark in a book that had been returned to the shelf. That's yet another aside)

We decided to leave the keys in the car and proceed for tea with friends. And we locked the car. We are sure of that because we tried the doors before we went in. After an evening of tulsi chai, apple and walnut pies, mangoes and vadas, (and more vadas in my case) we set back home after dropping off Mumbai friends and when we reached, we could not find the keys. Kid insisted I had it, and I insisted that she had it. The car did not seem to have it. The bag did not have it. It wasn’t anywhere. And as I said the indispensable neighbour with the second key was on holiday. The kid’s extra key was in her school bag locked up inside.

The keys had just disappeared along with the keychain which was an ornate filigree ornament from my eastern hometown that zamindarnis of yore stuck in their hips or tied to the end of their saris. Together the key and the chain would be impossible not to spot, but we just could not spot it. In the course of the search we cleaned up the car, tore up the lining of my mirror work jhola, checked our pockets and retraced our steps again and again. The Hyderabad friend set out to search her home, and the car park. The Mumbai friend had to check her bags. The watchman searched the car. The builder of the apartment complex, who was out on his evening smoke, puffed his way through the car with a searchlight. The keys were gone, and we were locked out completely.

By that time, daughter’s midget cricket gang had gathered around as they found our adventure way more entertaining and each of them had a suggestion – none of which were practical, doable, or remotely connected with reality. Then Puff the Big Builder asked Ayesha if she had bolted the balcony doors? She sheepishly admitted that she might not have locked it properly i.e turned the bolts to the side. The midgets got the adventure they wanted when a heavy duty metal step stool was hauled under the balcony. The watchman then used it to jump up and rock-climb his way into the kitchen balcony, cheered on by the midgets. The door of the kitchen balcony would not budge – after all the domestic help (lets call her Balwant Kaur of the folk song fame) had latched it with incomparable finality. The watchman inched his way into the main balcony used usually by the homeless monkeys to enter and check our fruit bowl. After more than a few nudges, the door opened. I cannot tell you how thankful I was for the careless Sagittarian daughter that I have!! We got inside our home and nothing could be more of a relief.

Of course, we haven’t found the lost keys of our kingdom. Or the key-chain. And as this is not the first key that had been lost, we only had a singular original one left. The copies made of it confused the lock mechanism so much that we’ve had to replace the locks. So anyway, you who have the keys, you can’t get in. If you had, there would be nothing for you – except one fantail goldfish, the orphaned iSmash, books of various genres, and a pile of junk that my kid calls treasure. Nevertheless, I often mull about this very curious disappearance and while we've been attributing all our maladies, moods and madness on the heat, it could not have possibly melted the key and the key-chain away. 

Hyderabad friend you are the reason: Whenever I go to her house I lock myself out of the car. This time it was the house!

Mumbai friend you are the bigger reason: If it wasn’t for her, I would be the house hermit that I am and still be firmly in possession of my keys. 

China friend meanwhile says we make a serial on me. She also has a chat status that reads “If you are not living on the edge, you are taking up too much space.”

Trust me – am on the edge of the edge. Koi doubt maat rakhna.

Take a Call on it…

Three months into 2012 and it’s my first post of the year – terrible! If you want to know why I haven’t written in such a long while, it’s because I have been senselessly ragged and tortured and have had my creative juices staunched due to brutality over my phone and age. Obviously there is not much I can do about the latter but as to the former…what can I say? To near, far, dear and not-so-dear ones, I just seem to be archaic in all ways.

I live and work among family and friends who have a variety of cellphones: Apple iPhones and Android cellphones i.e. technologically advanced handsets that seem to run on bakery items like gingerbread, ice-cream sandwich etc. The fruit family has an additional representative in our very own Blackberry boy who is a girl, but seems to be on her way up (or is it down?) the android path.

As for me, I have the iSmash.

Once upon a time the iSmash was a brand new handset. All my colleagues had begged that I buy a decent brand - it reflected on them poorly whenever I whipped out a weather beaten Reliance LG CDMA handset, tottering on the brink, and hovering in the shadow of death. I was also duly informed that that I should not yield to a brand known for its washing machines and microwave ovens. Much good it did to me to follow the then Samsung brand ambassador Amir Khan's lead of "Next is What?" For me “Next” was woe.

The handset conked out in just five months ...took me to the dark ages for the want of a charging pin that could not be replaced. I was told rather insensitively, "There is water in the handset, madam." I had no idea a handset could be as thirsty as to get itself a drink. So equally insensitively, I accused my mother and daughter of sweating into my phone. They reacted by excluding me from family activities. Then I was told, "Madam, it is charging only, but it has to be plugged in at a certain angle." That was it. I am, as all my family and friends will tell you, not of the fainthearted variety (unless you send me to a beauty salon), so I upped the battle. While I began with acute-angled politeness, I drifted into much aggressive posturing, despairing, screaming, and shouting, till the Reliance people promised to deal with it and gave me a stop gap handset which had Playboy written on it. I think they really really wanted me out of the showroom as other customers seemed to be leaving just as I began Rajnikanth's dialogue of "Enna Rascalan...". The Playboy phone seemed to have none of the vitality you would associate with Hugh Hefner’s brand (may be it was from China – imagine an opium-tranced HH?). It just about had enough energy for the one last hurrah, the final phone a friend lifeline - just one call I had, like criminals arraigned for the first time in CSI.

I turned to the power of the pen and wrote an impassioned letter to a leading city newspaper accusing all and sundry of robbing me of my rights as a customer. While one colleague maintains that my letter published in English was Greek to him, it actually woke up Samsung regional heads who swung into action and actually fixed my phone. Good on them! It’s been a pretty faithful relationship since then.

However, it's totally another matter that I flung the cellphone down two sets of stairs in an extremely extenuating circumstance. I still remember it in the air very Matrix-Neo-like as I hurled it and watched it land on the floor, make a smooth suicidal slide towards the long flight of stairs...bump itself on many a step...till my daughter rescued it at the bottom of the stairs, and held up its smashed display with her usual incredulous look. Oh well may be the phone had enough of me too.

Amazingly, it not only worked better than before, but also gave me the unique tagline:
The iSmash – coz I smashed it!

So I have this just one of a kind cellphone, personalized to perfection. Even though I say so myself. Others usually greet it with:

Oh, do they still have phones like that? (STARE)

But aunty, you had this cracked phone at Ayesha’s birthday last year, too! (So, your point is...?)

Yours is the only phone that can take a photo and the output is a readymade collage! (STARE HARD)

You better change that cracked display before you have pieces of glass inside your ear. (FYI: My hearing power is better than yours)

It actually has a camera? (STARE HARDER)

You can’t find your phone? No worries, no one would want it – it must be where you left it (This at a crowded wedding – and yes, I found it, and yes it was where I had left it)

To add to my misery, my daughter has joined the Android Adda. She puts her phone next to mine and pointedly says, “The Samsung Y(Young) and the Samsung O(Old)”

Then the counter cry is raised, “O for Old? It should be P, for Prehistoric!”

I really like my phone. I’m really attached to it and it doesn’t bother me that its display is cracked and the buttons are worn down. Sure it might not be a very smart phone or much of a status symbol, but why would I need a phone to make a statement? I just need a phone to make calls.

Besides what’s with these touchy-feely smart phones anyway? Once when my daughter’s phone rang, all I wanted to do was receive that call, but this green arrow on it kept insisting ‘Move to the right’.

Choking on their laughter, the Android gang asked, “So you moved yourself to the right, did you?”

No I didn’t, thank you very much, but why should answering a call be like a dance number:
Move it to the right, and take a call like this
Take it to the left and end a call like that…
You can bump it like this
And tap it like that… and the dance continues…

And the other day, I was at a PTA meeting and somehow, something touched the phone to dial the family doctor who was about to walk into a surgery.

There’s an Apps for everything except one that can earn you money without working. There are a variety of keyboard that are unfathomable to me. They have voice assistants who get muddled up at the sound of my name and announce me as incorrect data.

To have the world at their fingertips is such a high; never mind that their fingerprints are eroding in the process, never mind the constant texting, and twittering, never mind the fact that one is more in touch with the phone than the spouse. Hail the whole new breed of Android Loyal Web-bers* out there with worn out fingerprints, and burgeoning collections of Apps trawling the internet till kingdom come, until what will exist one day is the myth of fingerprints.

All I need is a phone to call family, friends and Basha the vegetable vendor and hallelujah, at the moment, I can!

*The credit for this nomenclature being duly attributed to Ayesha;)

The Curse of the Wandering Spoon

There is something in a spoon that belies its actual potential. It is not as unpretentious as it seems. Be warned - it is a dangerous thing and often scoops up more than what is adequate for you. And then of course, there’s the spoon that wanders…

It makes audacious appearances in your child’s plate under the charitable social guise of not wasting food. It nonchalantly makes a business of popping into dishes to check if the salt is right. Inadvertently, it slips into your mouth when you are packing remnants of a meal into leftover boxes. It slips in surreptiously to avail extras for desserts. Sometimes, unabashedly, it plonks itself directly into the family pack ice cream carton all in the name of a bad day. It wanders into the different lunch boxes when you sit together to eat lunch at work. It makes a quick dash into your colleague’s lunch plate on the pretext of gauging the ingredients in the recipe. Then it meanders into the next plate, and then the next…

When you finally stand on the machine that is famed for ruthlessly reducing the self esteem of people ranging from the reigning celluloid diva to the humble homebody, you are catatonic once you shriek, “I could not possibly weigh that much!!”

Yes you do - it’s the curse of the wandering spoon under which you vehemently assert that you have but just eaten small spoonfuls of this and that. It must be the weighing scale that is wrong. So the wandering spoon moves on as mysteriously as god, adding increments to your already burgeoning vital statistics, regardless of whether or not you follow the metric system.

You can wage many battles with the wandering spoon, but if you make it shun carbs, it delves into the protein. If you deny it the sweets, it makes a dash for the snacks. And more than often, the wandering spoon so trains your fingers that they treat themselves as extensions of the spoon. A case in example is the matchless sister-in-law who comes back from office and finds herself in the snack pantry because her fingers willed her there. So immersed are her fingers rummaging through packages and boxes pretending to be spoons, that she wakes from her reverie only when her daughter discovers her there! Being felled by the spell of the wandering spoon myself, I have tried all possible tricks. Then, I found Rujuta. Most see her as Bebo’s size-zero diet guru. As a friend said, “No wonder people who consult with her turn size-zero, after paying her, they have nothing to eat!” I decided to buy her books as they are a cheaper option and recession is still on in my life. To me she is the antidote to the curse of the wandering spoon. Anyone who knows me, also knows that I can quote from both her books. Of course I quote her, she’s the one who reined in the wandering spoon and made it legal to begin the day with a mango!

In this world where being lean is in, where every woman wants to be the yummy mummy, where you blast the fat, with this and that – be it by nibbling on some sort of exotic berry or downing a soulless cabbage soup – Rujuta says EAT. Eat what makes you happy. Eat what you have grown up eating. Eat the moment you wake up or at least within 30 minutes of waking. Eat the samosa. Eat the chutney with the idli. Eat the puri with the chole. Eat the carb, the protein, the fat, the omega 3 fat, and the amino acids – just eat. Just make sure you train that wandering spoon to dig in more when you are active, and less when you are lolling around. Wake up early, ensure you get at least 30 minutes of exercise, have an early dinner and go to bed early. Eat every two hours from the time you wake till the time you sleep – begin with a fruit, have a generous breakfast, a sensible lunch, a light dinner and intersperse these meals with snacks like for example a block of cheese or a handful of peanuts.

It’s another story that friends and family do not want to hear what Rujuta says. “What’s the great discovery in this? That’s the way your grandparents and us have always been living our lives. It’s just that you chose not learn it and banished the breakfast”, says my mom. Daughter has drawn a picture of me with a bubble over my head that reads, “Rujuta says...”. Colleagues turn away the moment I begin to quote and cut me short with warnings and threats to rename me to match the nutrition guru. Out of a lot of love, I parted with my copy of the book “Don't Lose Your Mind, Lose Your Weight”, and left it with sister-in-law – I still do not know which page she is on, or for that matter, if she has at all turned a single page. Probably, she’s lost somewhere in the snack pantry, with all the weight and the mindless snacking. As for the snacking part, since Rujuta doesn’t strictly lay down what exactly is a handful, some interpret it to be an amount that would be a handful for the Incredible Hulk. Then there is the lovely lady who only read the “Eat every two hours” bit and ate a full meal every two hours with disastrous effects. Rujuta also does not mention when to fit in the 5Star, but since she hasn’t banned it, I give my 5Stars the respect they deserve.

The wandering spoon has been reined in. Since it has so much access to food every two hours, it’s tiring out a bit. However, my sincere efforts to enlighten the masses that the curse of the wandering spoon is no urban legend and needs to be tackled with what Rujuta says is met with reactions of the lines of “My spoon never wanders, it goes from the plate to my mouth, and never misses” or “Would it help to use a fork? Anyway it is leaky and can’t carry as much as a spoon?”

Look what I have to live with – around me the motto is lose the mind, not the weight…what a tamasha!

Expect the Unexpected

We’re already one month into the New Year (which did not feel very new what with routine work/school, and no vacations to herald it). Me thinks I should get in one post at least with the run down of what happened in just the very first month of this New Year:

The highlight of the last day of last year was a poster scrawled with wishes and autographs of daughter and daughter’s classmates – I believe their class managed to get an exam postponed citing the fact that it was their dear classmate’s mother’s birthday. Considering that it is a day I share with the Dark Lord (You-Know-Who), I am not sure how it could be made out as momentous enough for the teacher to cancel the exam, but cancel she did and even signed her wishes. Adopted family supplied the cake, the music, and the songs to drill in the message of the infallible frailty of youth and the unpredictability of life.

Then of course, life likes to reiterate the message once or twice with live examples. To what I would like to attribute to thinking a bit too actively about too many impossible things at breakfast, I locked myself out of my car on the third day of the New Year. This was for the fourth time. To make matters worse, the house keys were also in the car. To make matters even worse, the guardians of the extra house keys could not find it. So there were the duplicate car keys so safely locked in the house that even I, the rightful owner, could not get to them. After making frantic last minute arrangements to have child picked up at the bus-stop, a call to the emergency car services ushered a smug mechanic who unlocked the door (I tell you it was a lesson in car-jacking that I can now perform very easily if I had the tools), and sniggered that he would give me a discounted fee, as is due to a repeat offender.

While smirking kid informed me that I had broken the three-time jinx and got locked out for a fourth time so now that opens up the field for many more lockouts, colleagues lost no opportunity in proclaiming age-related memory decay. They sent me off to an in-house Ayurvedic health camp where the doctor in all solemnity declared that fire being the dominant element; a need for some calmness was in order. And for the record, nothing’s wrong with the memory or the head…just too many things in it

Too many things, like for example, how to occupy a teen during her 10-day Sankranti break when she is already miffed about a cancelled holiday to Tadoba Tiger Reserve? Work from home and call over kid’s friends – woe is me! Struggling with deadlines, cooking an Italian order, and startled by the sight of young girls in blue and purple wigs, numerous bangles, and painted faces and flowers on their fingernails. We hadn’t thought of pasta with basil and olives at 13 and our moms had stunted our nails with a simple stare!! Things have evolved so much that “Arre whaat re, arre?” is rolled out delicately as “Aw rei , wha’ re…aw rei?!”

I look at them and I shudder, thinking of the Facebook snippets my younger colleagues have exposed me to of the evolution of some 20 somethings. My jaw had dropped to see a pansy sitting there, posterior aimed directly at the world for a public viewing of another unimaginative tattoo in an unnervingly impossible place. My only thought at that time was that while she is at it, she could tattoo herself some underwear.

I prefer the blue and purple wigs for now and am prepared to expect the unexpected, like for example getting labeled as the Mad Hatter by the Alice and Cheshire in my family, especially since I thought I was oh so sane! Then there is the call late in the evening that frightens the daylights out of me till I realize it is a friend calling to inform me of a hermaphrodite designer in my hometown who shares my last name. And then in the night when something goes BUMP…yes I do still jump, but invariably it is daughter’s water bottle that has tumbled from its jauntily placed edge to flood the floor with water, and yes, I am the one mopping it up at 1am in the night.

So here's to expecting the unexpected – because things happen when you least expect it to and when you look at the bigger picture, the hidden pattern, the secret message, it’s all for the best. Or so I am told ;-)

For a G(J)em

He started off in my life as the elder brother who was too small for the role and who just could not understand why this thing that they insisted on calling his baby sister, had these bright beady eyes. “If I could only poke them a bit…” he thought, but was caught several times with a finger poised to stab at those optical illusions. Responsible adults, who reveled in the girl child, successfully thwarted each blinding attempt and I survived the need for glass eyes like the Nawab of Pataudi. Vision is still 20-20 (despite the age), even though I say so myself.

Not only was he the first born among all the grandchildren, he was born the commander in chief - where he led, we followed. Sometimes that meant scaling the rooftops of our granddad’s ancestral home. Sometimes it meant climbing the trees to rescue his priceless manja-coated kite string. It meant the breaking up of a Ludo game in case he was losing. It meant wielding the bat to face his fast bowling practice – and mind you, not with a tennis ball. It also meant being sidekicks in the shadow of the ideal eldest grandson. You could not resent him though, because he always had your back.

You needed that extra pen; he was there with it. You needed that math homework done he would do it. You wanted that extra chocolate flake on the ice-cream cone, even though you’ve eaten yours, he would give his to you. He would never hesitate to give away the matchbox cars he had collected to little cousins. He would save his pocket money and buy you that dancing doll you wanted from the toy store in the corner. So what if his idea of encouraging you to ride the bicycle was to take off the handbrakes - sending you skidding on the gravel, flying off the seat, and splashing into the garden pond? And to add insult to injury, he actually guffawed and called out for mom saying, “We got a spouting whale in the tub!” I was fished out by the gardener and got my own back by using the fighting techniques he taught me, on him with much satisfaction.

It was like growing up with Jem Finch – never a dull moment. There was always an adventure to tackle or a drama to stage, or a fight to win, or a loss to convert into a victory. In between, I learned from him about cricket, computers and carrying on all the values that everyone in our family stood for and still do. Diwali was always a blast thanks to his idea of collecting Granny taxes separately (for that matter uncle tax, aunt tax etc etc). Holi was a riot too and even now every family gathering he arranges for is a feast no one wants to miss. And I think of him always:

For toughening me up.
For getting me through math in school.
For teaching me to drive.
For the laughs.
For the sights of Washington DC.
For the microwaved ice-cream.
For the kick in the back.
For the endless support.
For so much more…

Jem grew up and destiny had him make his home in the Land of Liberty – but he’s never too far to be there when it matters the most. And he continues to touch our lives and make a difference in all the roles he lives out with aplomb, so here goes: Happy Birthday… to a father who will be unmatched always, to a husband who is a rock you can build your faith on, to an uncle who is always the best friend, to a brother like no other, and to a son who is a gem. Happy Birthday, Jem – we will send out the rockets in the Diwali night sky and have kababs on the table – from all of us who love you, and you know who we are.