It Is A Lovely Weather...

After days of stifling heat and humidity, the deluge has begun.

Complete with darkling skies, thunder, sheets of rain and that strange grey light that accompanies Indian monsoons. And only yesterday, I was trying to explain to a colleague the beauty, the absolute wonder, of the monsoon. Thank you, universe, for listening.

My flat is not made for rain-spotting. No grilled balconies where the spray comes glancing in, which is half the fun. But through the time I was growing up, I had a balcony to sit in. Cosily wrapped in a ragged "kantha", sitting in an "easy chair", with a mug of steaming tea and a couple of books balanced on the arms, I could watch the heavens burst open. A book would lie open (and forgotten) on my lap, and my senses would swell with the smell of wet red earth, as I watched the rain streak in dirty lines down the sides of once-white houses. Little puddles would form in the "maat" in front of our house, and swell to rivulets that would wind their way through the mud. Occasionally, a hapless cyclist, desperately trying to shield himself with the aid of a garish green plastic sheet, would go by, leaving deep squelchy ruts in his wake, and the rivulets would wind through these. Shivering crows would take shelter in the eaves of the balcony, or in trees.

And the sound! Everything else was drowned out by the companionable pattering of rain interspersed with bouts of rrrrrolling thunder and cracks of lightning. And you could just sit there and watch... and watch... and watch... and let your thoughts drift and your train of thought run away into far-away lands.

As a seasoned rain-spotter (no, I'm not sorry!), I knew when the rain was going to begin, and when it was going to end. And once the clouds had spent their fury, and the rain slowed down to a the occasional big fat drop, all the neighbourhood dogs - and the kids - would come out, to jump around in the mud and run around screaming, exulting. The air would have cooled, the skies grown a little lighter, and there would still be the occasional rumble of thunder, like the muted sound of someone's indigestion, promising more rain to come.

Not strange at all, I suppose, that of the thousands of songs that I learnt through years of singing classes in school, the one that sticks in my brain the most has a line that goes, "it's kind of nice when rain falls."



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Update:

I wrote that last bit while I was still safely ensconced inside office.

Then I stepped outside. Traffic lined up for miles. My usual roads home awash with water, the rain pounding down so hard that even at the fastest wiper speed I could barely see. Driving through ocean-sized puddles that my temporarily-opaque windscreen had rendered invisible, making sheets of water rise from the wheels like the parting of the Red Sea. Crawling through foot-deep puddles and patting the wheel of the car reassuringly, murmuring, "Come on, Bootle, don't let me down now," looking at all the cars that had got stuck and praying it wouldn't happen to me. The world outside looked like this:



But I got home, finally, and opened my door to the rain, and stood in the doorway for a while, cradling a mug of hot tea in my hands and watching the rain, and all was right with the world again.

And In Other News Tonight...

Shubho Bijoya (a trifle late, but I'm not fond enough of worms to be the early bird).

The spammers have found me. Apologies, but this blog has no option. Spam-protection in the form of word verification is now enabled here.

A wonderful, restful week at home, with home food and dogs and peaceful afternoons and my room filled with green leaf sunshine. That particular shade of sunshine. This is what I know, I kept thinking, a city I can negotiate in my sleep, old hangouts and friends and conversation that range over the impossibly important and to the completely inane. Cups and cups of coffee and tea; phuchka (distinct from and far superior to both gol gappas and pani puris) from the phuchka-walla outside my house who greets me fondly each time I return. Pujor abhawa - a sense of mild festivity and goodwill towards all in the air, and children in spanking new clothes walking down the road, foodstalls selling fish fry and kochuri and radhabollobi and ghugni on street corners and in parks, ferris wheels and hurdy-gurdies and Chicken a la Kiev at Mocambo with catching-up conversation glinting in the lamplight, and warm doggie fur against my leg as I sleep, and warm breath on my face as one of the doggies tries to stare me into waking at 5 in the morning.

No wonder, then, that email and blogging were ignored and put aside for later while I wallowed in peace.

But we're back now, and making resolutions and doing things. This blog will come to those, in due time. For now, though, the rutted roads and darn traffic of Bangalore are already driving this blog to road rage. And this blog has some paperwork to do as well.

Ah'll be beck.

I get by with a little help from my friends

I might have moped all weekend. I could have sat in my hotel room, mournfully, eaten inedible micro-wave dinners, watched TV and fallen progressively further and further into utter and complete gloom while the world draped itself in sinister shadow and rattled its bones in the chill wind and under the darkling skies ghosts shuffled along paths laid with dead leaves.

But N came over Friday night, bearing food for the stomach, beer for the soul and conversation for the brain. And M and V followed on Saturday, and whisked me off to warmth and laughter and home and family till I more or less totally forgot that I was far from everything dear and familiar and felt like I was home again, and completely confused all my "here"s and "there"s.

Bless them, bless 'em all.

There are more impressions forming, but for now, while I'm still drunk on weekend contentment, let them rest. Peace on earth and goodwill to all; I hope you had a wonderful weekend and managed to get your hands on the Half Blood Prince.

A Life Gone By

My grandparents lived upstairs from us - 1 floor up - in an old-new house in the centre of the city. So much in the city that if we kept the windows open during the day, all the dust from the city blew in and settled inside the house, and we walked about in a layer of grime half an inch thick. Our house was on the main road, and if you stood on the verandah, you could count the cars going by (for every white car that went by, you got extra points). Or add up the numbers on their number plates to see who got the highest numbers. The noise was deafening - especially in those days, with that impossible traffic. So impossible that I have distinct memories of the family getting in the car one evening, trying to reverse the car out of the house (onto the main road), and eventually giving up after sitting in the car for two hours, driving the few feet back into the garage and going back upstairs, to where the noise and dust of the traffic still got us, but at least we could sit under the fan. Or shut out the world outside (starkly lit by fluorescent tubes, replaced over the years by sodium vapour lamps, soft and luminous) and watch my parents dance to Valentino Tangos or Burt Kaempfurt or Fausto Pappetti.

My grandfather was tall and dark and handsome (really). He had silvery white hair, and white teeth that laughed out of his dark face. He drank gin with bitters (Angostura), and smoked several fascinating pipes, stuffing them with tobacco out of a soft green pouch. By the time I knew him, he had long retired. He surfaced at 5:00 a.m., almost before the sun, and drank his tea, while my grandmother did her morning puja. When she finished, and she'd drunk her tea, he did the "bazaar", then returned home to have breakfast - tea, toast, butter, jam, cheese, fruits. Whenever I had breakfast with them, he cut my toast (pink with lightly spread jam) into tiny pieces - more fun to eat.

Every afternoon, after their siesta, my grandparents would drink afternoon tea (with Britannia Marie biscuits) in their verandah (1 floor above our's), where they had made their peace with the noise of traffic that often prevented them from hearing people at the door. If I went up in the afternoons, I would have to hammer on the verandah door leading off from the dark cool landing, sometimes for up to 15 minutes before they heard me and let me into the cool-warmth of the balcony, afternoon sun sloping through the grills, my grandmother slowly perspiring flakes of Ponds dreamflower talc like snow against her white skin.

Of course, I bonded primarily with my grandfather. He was more fun. He took me swimming. We walked together to the park every day, where he waited and watched while I quarrelled with other kids to take rides on the huge elephant-trunk slide and see how high I could take the swing, then bought us groundnuts (roasted in their shells, that you had to snap open to reach the warm red-brown nuts) and chocolate on the walk home. I sat on his lap all evening, watching TV with them (we didn't have a TV at home, 1 floor down). He got me my first dog - a puppy that someone picked off the road - and kept it for me when my parents refused to let it into the house.

My grandmother was another story altogether. She wore thick glasses that magnified her eyes to about 5 times their normal size. And against her short and generous build, and unbelievably white skin, they seemed a hundred times more frightening. She scowled and scolded a lot more, she frowned over huge boiling pots in the kitchen (eventually producing the world's most delicious dishes) and told me not to "sit like that" and "do that" and constantly reminded me of what ladies should and shouldn't do (and mostly, what I did wasn't ladylike). She pushed me to the end of my short temper, and didn't allow my beloved dog into her puja room (but didn't god make him too?). But in the soporific heat-drugged afternoons, after her hectic mornings of directing the cooking and putting away the bazaar and scolding and scowling and frowning, she sat on the sofa reading, her starched cotton sari limp from the heat and her sweat and smelling faintly of talcum powder. And when I deigned to lie on the sofa, head on her lap, she told me stories - about avatars and rakshasas and gods and kings. Greek and Roman mythology, I read in Tales From Long Ago. Indian mythology, I heard from her, begging her to tell me that particular story again and again and again, drifting off to sleep in the familiarity of the words, the genial comfort of her lap, to be awoken for afternoon tea at 4:30.

My grandfather was tall, dark, handsome; my grandmother - short, fair and once, quite a stunner. I can close my eyes and see them still, sitting there in the cane chairs (that once were rusty-red, until someone had them painted a hideous sky blue), in the still afternoon, drinking their tea and watching as the world goes by, the traffic roaring by their windows (three floors up from the road), the dust settling more and more firmly around them.

The house now seems empty without them. For days after my grandmother passed away - just over a year after my grandfather - we felt like peas rattling around in an empty can, intentionally increasing decibel level to fill up the unfillable emptiness their absence left behind, moping over a pair of spectacles, an expression captured on film, the contents of of a dressing table as familar to me as the palm of my hand. A briefcase, a stool, the view from the verandah, and inside my head, my grandparents drinking their tea in the noise and thrust of an ever-lasting summer afternoon.

I like to be here when I can...

So I moved to my new place on Saturday. Spent all morning packing stuff to move, and then the rest of the weekend unpacking it and putting it all away. The real impact of all the hours of packing is felt in these situations, when one moves from one side of the railway track to the other - if you move cities, at least you feel like you've moved far away, and the time spent packing gets lost in the larger picture. Not so here.

But the larger picture, in this case, is that I finally have a place of my own. Yahooo! I feel like emitting red Indian war whoops and leaping over the furniture in the office in some kind of demented obstacle race. And, it must be said, any yearnings I have for leaping over furniture must be taken care of in office, cos at home, there's no furniture. (My minimalist leanings finally see the light of day.)

But back to the house. First, something I hadn't realised before, it's windows overlook a small airstrip - for a flying club. Gliders and choppers taking off and landing all day. I'm faintly disappointed that the airstrip is not a Coast Guard thingie (I was rejoicing in old, forgotten Famous-Five driven fantasies of catching smugglers red-handed, with the coast guard arriving just in time to pat me on the back), but the charming thing about growing older is that one sees more possibilities in other things also. The flying club that operates out of the airstrip offers intriguing possibilities too... At worst, I can always go and hang around there, offering to carry water for the pilots and do odd jobs around the place until, some day, I'm forced to take a plane up on my own for some earth-shatteringly important reason (national security will be at stake, naturally). On this occasion, I'll fly the aircraft brilliantly, save the planet from total destruction, and then crash land (and totally wreck) the aircraft, and be banned from the airstrip forever. (*Sigh* Not even my fantasies go right.)

I also suspect that I'm directly under the glide path for aircraft leaving from and heading towards Santa Cruz airport - the only traffic I hear are flights taking off and landing. (Oh, I LOVE how that sounds - so totally elitist. "So where do you live? Oh, you can hear ROAD traffic? How down-market. Now, where I live, darling, there's only air traffic."

But, generally, all I can hear is bird song. There's a huge tree outside my window, full of clusters of white flowers, and humming with birds and insects. It's wonderful, wonderful, to wake up to the sound of bird song, instead of traffic.

For that alone, this move has been worth it. So here's to my new house, where you can't swing a dead cat in the loo (not that I've ever wanted to - and if you're the kind of person who wants to do that, you have no business visiting my blog), but which is still a happy, happy place.

Oh, and house-warming gifts are more than welcome!

A Home at the End of the World

That's the name of a really freaky book I picked up from Crossword the first time I came to Bombay. I was 18, fresh out of school, applying to colleges in Pune. Bombay was this vast ocean, waiting to be explored. I was thrilled when I found my way back from VT to Pedder Road all on my own, even without being able to read Hindi numbers (on buses) to save my life. I thought I'd conquered the world. I wanted to exult, scream, dance in the streets.

And last night, for some reason, I felt the same way. Perhaps its because I paid my token deposit on the house? :)

I've been house hunting for the past couple of weeks, and by the end of it all, houses were beginning to blur in my mind. (Much like 4th term at IIMK, when I took 10 optional courses, and had to read up 5 cases per day, on average. I used to transpose facts and figures freely from case to case, much to my professors' total mystification!)
And finally, then, I came across this place. The perfect place - it spoke to me! A large room on the third floor, overlooking greenery, with a fully functional kitchen and loo. Lots of light and air coming in. Just off the main road, so close enough for convenience, and far enough not to be disturbed by traffic. Comes with some stuff (fridge and gas, sofa-come-bed (like a big mattress), etc. And a big chair, in which you can lean back peacefully and read. My only worry now is a place to hang wet clothes to dry, and how I'll be able to get a piano up those stairs into the room!

So. Paid the deposit. Drank some tea with the landlady-to-be. Came home prancing in the rain. Settled into my brand new bean bag. I was just so kicked with the idea that I'll have my own place again that I couldn't stop smiling!

This will be my home at the end of the world.

Meanwhile, if you can get a copy of "A home at the end of the world", by Michael Cunningham, please read it. :)