Tuesday, December 14, 2010

The back drive

My college has long driveways leading up from the main and back gates to the main porch. There are these short elevated stone platforms lining the entire stretch of the two drives for students to sit on. These drives, as they have come to be called, are arguably the backdrop of nearly everyone’s most enduring memories of their time in college. I do believe that these drives made all the difference in giving my college the kind of personality that came to be associated with it. The back drive in particular was the zone of simply letting go. It is shadier than the front drive because of the older, bigger trees there and it used to get filled up quickly with people during any kind of leisure break or unpopular classes.

My best memories of college are sitting on that drive and having the most engrossing conversations with my best friend, or sometimes just watching the world go by with a book in our hands. We were a part of a bigger group of friends and it was common for us all to sit out a few hours of the day on that drive. We were also always within earshot of the other groups of people around us and we would often see someone from somewhere else laugh out loud at something funny one of us had said, leaving the funny person feeling terribly pleased about her comic skills or hear someone else continue a song one of us had started to hum. I remember this one day when one of the many stray dogs that our college had adopted had a long loud sneezing bout in the middle of the drive. Everyone on the drive had gone completely quiet to watch him and cheered for him once he stopped. He sheepishly ran away from our sight, not knowing how to receive the sudden attention. I remember being able to sit back on that drive and letting go of all the small big worries that came when graduation started seeming more like a tangible reality than a distant hurdle and being able to slowly accept circumstances at one severe low point in my life. Most of all, I remember all of us being completely at ease with and totally unapologetic for the people we were and having a lot of fun together, perhaps much more than some of the others we knew. Some of the sweatshirts of our college had “God is a woman” written on them and that probably defines the highly charged air we breathed within the college walls.

Today, with a few years of Real Life having happened to me, I realize just how important that experience was. My friends from college are still some of the nicest, most motivated, interesting and happy people I know. It is hard to imagine that somewhere during all those hours spent giggling and discussing the most trivial of issues, we grew up emotionally. In the spirit of the person I was back then, I will not apologise for being judgmental now and admit that I now know of so many people who did not get that kind of growing experience for whatever reason that might have been and are now adults who have just not grown up, and that is not in an endearing “keeping the inner child alive” kind of way but are characterized with being annoying, stubborn and unable of processing new thoughts.
When I go to my college to teach every Saturday these days, I can still sense the unbridled energy and draw heavily from it to keep me going through some of the occasional difficult days the rest of the week. All of this is probably also a lengthy justification to myself on why sometimes I am such a wimp and think “Ah good, she’s found a friend” and choose to not say anything rather than point out that the class is being disturbed when that quiet girl in the corner talks to her friend with a wide grin on her face.

Tuesday, November 02, 2010

Revisiting the past


We are back from a trip to Hampi, which ranks high in my "Places marked for consideration of permanent settlement" list. I fell in love with it during my first trip there with my friends two and a half years ago and had jealously looked at all the European backpackers who had set up camp there for a couple of weeks to a few months, bicycling around the ruins with their Lonely Planet in tow, leading the life I had dreamt of for myself.

This time, I went with my significantly better half to show him this little town that had me thus besotted and to get his views on its qualification to the aforementioned list. Hampi effortlessly did her bit and I am happy to say that she's been given the thumbs up by the Mister too.

It is the way in which everything comes together - the history, the architecture, the abundance of places where you can sit down and have a splendid cup of tea, the friendly animals on the road(dogs, cows, cats sometimes) that, depending on the way you are hardwired, you come precariously close to abandoning any plans of a job and a career in your current field and turning over into a history junkie for life at Hampi. If the above list doesn't do it for you, one meal at the Mango Tree will at the very least, leave you with a slightly more positive outlook towards everything.

My back hurts a little from last night's difficult bus journey from Hospet to Bangalore and I have been slow at digesting all new information today thanks to all hopes of even a few precious minutes of sleep being chased away by the monstrosity that was the stretch of road for the first few hours of the journey. We are talking slowly today and have trudged through the day with difficulty but we have already promised ourselves one more trip to Hampi at the next possible opportunity.

(Photo by Trambak)

Friday, August 27, 2010

In a fit of midnight madness...

...I tried my hand at fiction. Below is the result, it hasn't been titled yet:

She ate the piece of chicken as noiselessly as she could. She tenaciously went at the last bits of meat near where the bone bends as they wouldn’t come off easily. She washed it down with cold buttermilk before picking up the stainless steel cup that contained one round scoop of badam halwa. This was a lot more food than she had prepared herself for. She took large bites and swallowed quickly. The last few bites came close to being painful as she could feel the butter in the halwa clogging up her throat. But there was no time to deliberate those trivial discomforts and she searched with her fingers along the surface of the cup to make sure there were no difficult lumps remaining. She could have turned on the light - they wouldn’t be able to see her from the first floor - but she chose to be discreet now that she knew her way around the house rather well.

Five months ago, she had reluctantly left home, the warm familiarity of her sisters’ loud laughter and angry abuses to get on the bus and land here to look after the new-born baby. She had spit out her rage that evening in one long convulsive tirade against her parents and her sisters when it was decided that she would go take up the job of the ayah that their neighbor had informed them of. The five of them had sat mutely watching her burn herself out in her fury, as she cursed their neediness and their self-righteous selfishness that had made it necessary for her to go to the city to earn what to them would be her hefty salary.

As she quietly made her way to the kitchen sink to wash the dishes and remove all evidences of an insolent midnight feast, she looked around at the large living room, and the shadows left by the big bookshelf in the familiar, warm darkness. This was her main work zone during the day, where she spent most of her time feeding the baby and cleaning up after him and creating silly little games for him all by herself. She came back to her room in the corner beyond the dining area, where she ate her meals of roti, dal and vegetables sitting cross legged on the floor twice a day.

Decent folk, she thought, before getting on to the bed, but they need to know that a girl – she needs her chicken curry.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

We like them hairpin bends

Today, I waited for that final piece of furniture we had ordered for our living room to be delivered. Now that it is here, it feels just like it did when we placed that elusive last piece onto the 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle I used to solve in my summer holidays along with my mother and cousin.

A lot of life altering changes have taken place since I last posted. First of all, you will start noticing the nonchalant use of ‘Our’ on this blog. Secondly, I am back in Bangalore. Thirdly and a little more obviously, I have changed jobs.

I will always remember that snowball fight we (this is a different we – it consists of me, my flatmate and my neighbours) had on the 13th of Jan, my last night in Birmingham. We were afforded that opportunity thanks to the heavy snowfall in what turned out to be the most severe winter the country experienced in more than 20 years. That was my second snowball fight within a span of ten days and everyone believed they owed me one last experience of knowing how it felt to have a tightly packed fistful of snow landing on my nose with unforgiving force as there was no telling when I would next see that much snow again. I am convinced they also secretly believed they deserved an outlet for having to see off somebody who would wake up with the smug assurance of getting to see the sun every day. I would have probably reacted in exactly the same way if I were to spend a few more months sinking my feet into 2 feet of snow on my way to work and back everyday in that perpetual dim greyness.

This winter has been an experience in understanding orders of magnitude, among other things. While I had managed to know what it took to keep myself safe and warm during the last two winters, all my winter clothing proved to be acutely inadequate when the temperatures went more than 5 degrees C below the average winter temperatures. I even had frostbite on my toes while I was indoors, inside a sufficiently heated apartment! (This is unlike the indoor frostbite I suffered in the previous winter when I was living in what was a virtually unheated apartment that belonged to an ass of a landlord for which I was paying through my nose.) As absurd as it may seem now, I remember days not so long ago, when I used to crave to know again what it felt like to feel uncomfortably hot.

Cut to a month later and I find myself in a Kancheevaram saree on the hottest day in Bangalore in 25 years. And then I realised I didn’t like the heat either.

Apart from highlighting the extremes in temperature and adding my half a cent to the evidence of a messed up ecology to generations in the distant future who might find this blog hidden below a heap of cyber debris, this is meant to be a post to help me take stock and move on.

So here’s bidding an official goodbye to the plants in the balcony, to the purple orchid in my window that I ‘killed with too much love’, the lovely apartment in the city centre, to the canal that flowed beside it, to Victoria Square, to gorgeous Louis, my neighbours’ half Korean, one quarter English, one quarter French baby boy who gave me the most beautiful smile on the day I left, to being addicted to Top Gear, to being a banker in the UK at a time when the word evoked unbridled hatred, to being a doctor’s flatmate and listening to real stories of human lives being saved over dinner, to ploughman’s sandwiches for lunch, to accumulating copper coins with every cash transaction and carrying an unwieldy wallet, to impulsive train rides to Banbury and London, to scones and crumpets, to jacket potatoes, to mulled wine and finally, to all the snow which must have now melted. I loved it while it lasted but as I have said earlier on this blog, it is swell to be back home.

The last few months have seen me go through changes at a rate that is unusual in the normal course of events for a regular person. Looking back from the other side, with the dizziness behind me, I am now in a position to say that I am grateful for changes of all kinds that have sometimes just happened to me with me not being in a position to control anything about their timing or effect. They help provide reference points from which I can identify who I have become. There is also of course, all the learning that comes with change, even if sometimes, you are too dazed to register anything beyond the trivial lesson that when a snowball comes straight at you, all you have to do is duck.