Indian Writing

Indira, woman sarpanch of Mohoikola village in Chatarpur, Madhya Pradesh.

Sukari, of Chora village near Ranchi, Jharkhand.

Urmila, of Kundapatana village in Jajpur, Orissa.  

Shyama, of Bagli Nagar, Madhya Pradesh, a former teacher. Refusing to give up. 

It’s a long, long struggle for women.

People sometimes ask me why I get three daily newspapers at home. I reply that it makes life feel like a box of many-flavoured chocolates. You never know what you’re going to find when you wake up every morning.

Today’s HT Style, for instance, has Yuvraj Singh saying, in one headline, "Me, a metrosexual? Nah!" The article tells us how terse and laconic Singh is. The piece is accompanied by a list entitled "Take 5: Other sports stars on the ad scene". The list consists of Rajyavardhan Rathore, Sania Mirza, Narain Karthikeyan, Vishwanathan Anand, and "the new man in Neha Dhupia’s life, the squash player.." - Ritwik Ghatak.

Yes. 

(For those who haven’t been following the lifestyles of the hot’n'happening - it’s Ritwik Bhattacharya that they meant. Not this other Bengali.)

One Web Day: September 22, 2006.  

…where the year really begins for us, every year, in the first weekend of January, as we walk down the winding lanes of Walkeshwar…

Here, in this corner steeped in history and faith, where legend says that Rama’s followers, on their way south, built a sand Shivalinga, a Walluka-Eshwar; and where Rama shot an arrow into the water to draw out the Ban-Ganga, the Ganga of the Arrow, from the dry earth.

This is one of the few places in this part of the city with a real sense of community. Where the doors are kept open in the evening, women smile and chat as they gather up the dry clothes from the line, and children dart in and out of each other’s houses, carrying thin paper kites, trailing twine, tinsel and laughter.

Where people can buy fresh dahi and buffalo’s milk daily, farsan and bhel, just outside their houses. And Makara Sankranthi kites with pictures on them: Amitabh Bachchan, Priyanka Chopra, Mallika Sherawat, even a picture of a puppy and a kitten together.

Through an open doorway I see a man lying on the floor, watching television; beside him, in the little room, are two cats seated in the typical meditative pose of cats, what the Bengalis call "beral-tapasyi".

We pass dozens of temples. New temples; old, decaying and deeply lovely temples. Temples inside buildings, inside houses, on the seafront, on the walls, under the trees. A wide-eyed, orange Hanuman. A lamp smoking before Walkeshwar. Chappals outside the Parashuram temple. A roadside shrine, a swayambhu stone deity painted with orange paste and flowers.

A peepul tree rises before us like a cloud of tiny green birds.

As we turn into the area just before the Banganga tank, affable policemen look at our passes and point us to the entrance. We step carefully down the red coir carpet that has been stretched tight across the stone steps of the tank. We’ve brought a dhurrie, the same blue chenille that we’ve brought along to Banganga every year for all these years; we used to bring cushions, too, but now we come too late to get the good seating along the walls.

The halogens dim. Hundreds of little yellow lights strung up along the branches and walls brighten up the darkness. Across the dark waters of the Banganga tank is the dais for the musicians. Long ropes of marigolds and jasmine are draped all the way into the water.

From open windows all around, from houses and temple balconies, men and women lean out to listen and take in the notes of a Pilu on the flute, a sweet Pahadi, a deeply reflective Puriya Dhanashree. White birds float on the dark water; above us, an owl floats past in the air.

And then the sounds of the city float in, too: the ringing of temple bells, the squawk of a bird, the shout of a child, the barking of dogs, even the hiss of a pressure cooker from a nearby kitchen. But none of these sounds are out of place. The music surges and encompasses them all, takes them along in its great rush, takes us along on an unending journey across the centuries.

*****

(first posted Jan 2006) 

…whose blog has surely given courage and support to cancer survivors, caregivers and everyone else who read it regularly. Tarun’s is a narrative of faith and optimism, and baby Koby is surely one of the smiliest babies ever!

My dog came with us to the FBD book sale this morning. It’s a treat for him to go out on the street, since our building has a large garden and so we usually don’t risk taking him out into the street. But Sunday mornings are mellow, and he likes to smell all the interesting smells on the road, so we took him with us. I told A~ that we could take turns waiting with him outside the exhibition hall, but when we reached, the FBD people – who know us well – waved their arms and signalled to me to bring Whisky inside.

So Whisky went to a book sale for the first time in his life. No, he didn’t buy any books – we did that – but he met two very cute little girls, who came up to him and patted him continuously for the half hour that we spent in the sale. The older girl, who must have been ten or eleven years old, told me that she has three parrots, Sweety, Rocky and Mithu, and would like to have dogs. Then she added, with the cutest smile: Maybe we’ll have a farm, and then get some horses too! That made me think of my childhood, when I would curl up in a corner of our garden with those horse books by Christine Pullein Thompson, and dream of having a horse one day..

Then this little girl told me all about her parrots. She only knows the age of one of them, it’s one and a half years old. They got the other two as already grown birds, with their wings clipped…so the two other birds don’t fly. But the youngest does. I taught him to fly, says the little girl proudly.

All three birds can speak various words, though it’s the youngest that can speak the most: Mithu, Thank you, Hello, How are you, Naughty, Hello…

Whisky is great with children, and loves attention, so he just wagged his tail endlessly like the god Lab that he is, shook hands lazily as if he was dispensing favours, and grinned at all and sundry, like some royal canine waving to the plebs.

What did we buy? Far too many books, as usual, including The Baburnama, with an intro by Rushdie.

***** 

I have discovered the meaning of life. It is a slow roundabout in the traffic around Crawford Market waiting for a place to park. It is a saucer of cut papaya. It is chilled falooda. A bunch of lichees. Bengali food at Howrah restaurant. A crate of Fosters from Shah Wines, Devgarh hapoos from the market.

Yes, heaven must be something like this twenty-four thousand square feet display of fruit, vegetables and groceries (I’m leaving out the meat, being a vegetarian). If you’re squeamish, or snobbish, go back to your aging supermarket bhindis. If not, you can make a morning of it at Mumbai’s largest produce market. Lauki, cauliflower, cabbage, padwal. Gnarled yams, bearded carrots. Tangled kadipatta, snarky hara mirch. A wall of fat purple brinjal. Feel free to touch, but don’t press.

Stalls decorated with tinsel and cellophane, lined with glitter paper. The mushrooms that my husband loves. Pale green and orange pasta shells for sale by the kilo. Cheese, olive oil, khakras and Granola bars. And my beloved Tamil vegetables – Madras onions, snake gourd, and even the smooth violet banana flower. The only thing I’ve never found here is the kind of pale green stubbled squash I used to get in Bangalore, oddly known as the Bangalore kathrikai or the Bangalore brinjal.

Inside the market, you’re walking inside a part of history - and you don’t even have to navigate a shopping trolley. The building was completed in 1869 and donated to the city by Cowasji Jehangir. It was named after Arthur Crawford, the city’s first municipal commissioner, and later renamed after the reformer Jyotiba Phule. The architecture, which includes a clock tower and steeple, is a quirky mix of Norman and Gothic in brown Kurla stone with red stone from Bassein.

At the main entrance is a frieze designed by Lockwood Kipling, father of the novelist, who lived in the School of Art campus just down the road. The stone fountain, also designed by him, is now dry. But the roofs are high, and sunlight pours in from a glorious fifty-foot skylight awning.

In 1892, this building was the first in the country to be lit up with electricity. It feels as if they’ve never switched off the lights since then. Luminous naked bulbs spill generous pools of yellow and neon-white light over pyramids of oranges, apples and chickoos. In the grand hall, however, is the piece de resistance – the Alphonso display. Mango heaven.

I love this curious mixture of smells: the sweet, warm scent of hay, the woody fragrance of fruit boxes, and the intoxication of mangoes. The chatter of voices, the roar of traffic, the barking of dogs, the silence of tired hamals asleep inside their baskets, all combine to form a symphony that plays ceaselessly in the background as you wander from one lane to another. The voice of a child becomes a trumpet entering the music; the song on the radio becomes a violin adding another nuance to this living composition.

*****

(In Mumbai Mirror, May 2006) 

From "Borderlines" by Czeslaw Milosz:

…It was so interesting to be moving, to give the horses their reins, and wait till, in the next valley, a village slowly appeared, or a park with the white spot of a manor inside it. And always we were barked at by a dog, assiduous in its duty. That was the beginning of the century; this is its end. I have been thinking not only of the people who lived there once, but also of the generations of dogs accompanying them in their everyday bustle, and one night— I don’t know where it came from— in a predawn sleep, that funny and tender phrase composed itself: a road-side dog.