On lockdown rituals

 A year ago, the world went into lockdown. I was in India, on what was supposed to be a ten day vacation, and what had turned into a two-week quarantine. My flights back had been cancelled, my work had gone remote, and so I had decided to stay back - for what I thought at the time would be a few weeks.

That first month, all of us started doing all these zoom calls, with different groups of friends. We caught up with more people in that one month than we had in a year. Those fizzled out after a while, when we realised this wasn't ending any time soon.

But one sustained, and has continued.

My father used to play bridge with his friends when he was in college. Over the years, he didn't keep up with the game, save during the occasional getaway they did once every few years. A couple of his friends have stayed connected to the game, at varying levels of interest. So at some point during those early zoom calls, someone suggested hey, why don't we all start playing bridge online?

So this group of 60-something men, all with varying levels of comfort with technology, sitting in different countries and continents, started playing bridge online. Four times a week, without fail. 

My mother and I watched, first with amusement, then with some consternation, as our daily schedules began to revolve around his bridge calendar. Meals, shows being binged, evening walks or drives, calls with the brother and SIL - they were all planned so that the bridge was not impacted.

A few months later, he discovered that another friend has a whole other group of online bridge players, and he asked to get in on that. So suddenly, he was playing every day, and was beginning to juggle these two groups of fellow players. The mother meanwhile started texting with the wives of his college gang, with debate over whether an intervention was required as yet.

It got to the point where we ended up creating a shared Google calendar, the parents and I. He faithfully goes in every week and enters his upcoming games, and we have continued planning everything else around them. Even now, being back in the US for three months, while my parents and I do try and do a call a few times a week while I'm having breakfast and they're having dinner, I check the calendar before calling him, because God forbid I call in the middle of a game.

With his college gang, a fair amount of drama has taken place of the past year of bridge. They started by having video chat on at the same time, which some people found very distracting, tried doing just audio calls for a while (some people didn't like that either), and now just do text chat apparently. Some people in his college gang seem to be a problem child, and are a source of great personal amusement to me, because they very much remind me of certain problem children the gal pals and I have had to deal with in our own time.

The father, being a diplomatic sort of chap, will never overtly bad mouth this person, even to me. But he lets drop enough hints for us to catch on when things are more cray cray than usual. I understand there was a huge brouhaha between this problem child and another friend a few weeks ago, bigger and more dramatic than usual, leading to friend leaving the group I think? And said friend has refused to play with problem child anymore, so I think they have now split into two groups, and alternate between the two who had a fight?

This morning, they called me while I was making my chai and toast, and they were prepping dinner. And the conversation began like this:

"Your gift arrived! Trust you to think of this!"

"Hain? I haven't ordered my gift yet?"

"Then who sent him this book on Bridge?"

Apparently someone has sent him a gift for his upcoming birthday, but we don't know who. So that's a puzzle we have to solve. 

For the next hour, we ate, we chatted, I rolled my eyes only a couple of times. After a while, I started hinting that we should end the call. 

"Why, are we boring you? Do you have things to do? What time is it? Oh GOSH, it's 8.30! I have bridge in half an hour! Ok bye!"

On the fear of loss

If I think about my favourite Bollywood movies from the last several years, there are two that stand out - Piku and Kapoor & Sons.

I've only watched Kapoor & Sons once, in the theatre, with friends. And I'm fairly certain I sobbed through a good chunk of the second half. I've never gone back to watch it a second time, for some reason, despite loving it so much. I've watched clips a few times, and it's on my watchlist on Amazon, but I've never gone back to it.

Piku, on the other hand, I watch at least twice a year, if not more. Once, when I need something playing on Netflix as I potter around the apartment, at least once when my parents come to visit and we can't agree on anything else to watch together, and potentially again, a day or two later so my mother can see the second half because she fell asleep halfway through the previous time.

There's a scene in Kapoor and Sons where one of the protagonists sulkily tells his brother that their parents have always loved him more, seen him as perfect, while he himself can do ever do anything right in their eyes. His brother tells him not to be silly, all parents love their children equally. This line is followed by a beat of silence where the two look at each other, and both burst out laughing, because you know that's just not true.

There's a scene in Piku where a get together of family and friends is taking place, to honour a woman who dies before the movie begins. The protagonist places a bottle of ghee on the table, Jharna ghee to be precise. The first time I saw this movie, the week after it released, in a theatre full of Bengalis who had all flocked to take advantage of the 50% discount offered by that theatre for Indian movies on Wednesdays, the lady in front of me and I simultaneously exclaimed out loud during this scene, "Jharna ghee!"

There's another scene in Kapoor & Sons that is described far more eloquently by Raja Sen in his review of the movie - the family drama that goes on while in the backdrop a plumber works diligently to try and fix the pipes. [UPDATE: Shakun Batra, the director of the movie, did this delightful video that was shared with me after I published this post, on how this scene was constructed.]

Years ago, when my parents were building their first home, they would... disagree on how certain things should look. It took them a while to realize that when the contractor would excuse himself for a cigarette break every few minutes he would time it just when he could sense a storm brewing, and would step out so my parents could come to a decision before he returned.

The protagonist of Piku spends half the movie yelling at her father, out of sheer concern and exasperation at his behaviour. But minutes after squabbling with him, she laughs and starts singing a Bengali song with him.

A while ago, when my parents were visiting, we were driving home one evening, and my mother was munching on the snacks I keep in the car for my evening commute. I found myself turning to her at one point, and saying exasperatedly, "Will you stop eating so much? You won't be able to eat dinner if you snack so much now."

After watching Piku, as we walked out of the theatre, I was commenting that almost every character in the movie reminded me of someone I know. There are pieces of people I know and love in almost every character in the movie. A friend, who at the time was months away from his wedding, to a Bengali girl, sheepishly admitted his future father-in-law was quite similar to the father in the movie.

Both Kapoor & Sons and Piku struck chords with me, more than any other movies in recent years that I can think of. There are daily lives and tiny anecdotes that shine through these movies and remind me of episodes from my family in the past. There are moments that make you smile, then sniffle, and then potentially start sobbing your heart out, but only because you know someone who's gone through something similar.

And both movies showcase the fear, and the reality, of losing a parent.

This is one of those posts that has been sitting in my Drafts for a few years now. Every few months, I pull it open, reread it, tweak it a bit, save it, and then close it again.

When I first started writing this, a couple of articles had gone viral on my timeline. Rohit Brijnath had written a heart wrenching piece on parents' mortality, and the constant fear those of us who live a world away from our parents learn to live with. And then Jai Arjun Singh had responded with a piece that reminded me it's not that much easier to watch it happen in front of you, either.

A few weeks ago, someone shared a website called See Your Folks, that asks you to enter your parents' ages, and how often you see them a year. It then throws up a stark number on just how many times you have left in this lifetime to see them. I may or may not reacted somewhat... emotionally to this site, and ended up doing a bit of a twitter rant about it.

https://t.co/sb0Y8eWU3e

This has got to be the most absurd and depressing site I've come across in a long time.

— a traveller (@a_traveller) October 30, 2019

The last tweet in that rant was posted almost four hours later, after a two hour marathon call with the parents. They weren't told about this site, but given at least one of them stalks me on Twitter and follows this blog, it's possible she knew, or will know when she wakes up in a few hours.

(Chill, Ma, I'm not stressing. I'm just rambling. And trying to distract myself from these impeachment hearings I've been watching for the past week (and mayyyybe from some of the daughterly stress I've felt after the last couple of This is Us episodes).)

But to end this post on a sufficiently emotional note, here are two songs I had on loop after I spiraled about that stoopid site, for your listening pleasure.

On distractions

The mother is a strong believer in the power of distraction. When the brother and I would start squabbling in the back of a car as kids, she would suddenly say excitedly:

Look at all those trees! Let's count how many we go past!

Or:

Why don't we count how many Maruti 800s we pass on the road?!

Quite a few, as it turns out, when you were driving in Delhi in the 1990s. So by the time we got bored of counting, we would have forgotten what we were fighting about, or even that we were fighting at all.

The brother and the sister-in-law visited me this past weekend, and at some point the three of us got into a heated debate over something while waiting for our desi Chinese takeout to be prepared. I can't remember what we were arguing over, but it was quite clear the three of us were not going to agree anytime soon. And suddenly my brother turns to his wife and exclaims:

Look at all those red lights! Let's count them!

His wife stared at him utterly confounded, as I burst out laughing. By the time she understood what her husband had been trying to do, an entirely different argument looked likely to erupt.

Luckily for my brother's life and marriage, our food was pronounced ready at that very opportune moment.

On feeding and being fed by friends

On the rare occasions I invite friends over for a meal at home, I tend to make sure it's planned in a way that I'll have time to cook before they arrive. If not, then I just order takeout, and I'm very clear that I'm ordering in. And I'm guessing I do this because growing up, having people over for a meal meant my mother would spend pretty much all day in the kitchen, cooking close to a dozen dishes - that's just how things were done, now matter how much we rolled our eyes and said we don't need so many dishes. But everything was always ready, just to be heated before serving, prior to people beginning to arrive. At the most it would be the luchis or the rotis that would need to be made, and if anything had to be baked or something.

I don't offer as many options when I host - because let's face it, my cooking capabilities are fairly limited, and why put both myself and my friends through so much unnecessary trauma? But still, I do try and have things ready before friends arrive.

Which is why I feel pretty puzzled when I'm invited to someone's place for dinner, and I arrive to find that they have every intention of cooking while I'm there. And this is usually fine if what we're doing is barbecue or something, where I guess the cookout is supposed to be part of the experience or whatever (although I will never understand people in this country who on the one hand complain about the heat, and then decide hot days are best spent outside by the pool - never in the pool, but just lying by the pool). But I feel completely lost when this is done by desi people, for Indian food, which, let's face it, typically takes quite a bit of time to prepare.

I think this is also partially because a lot of Indians tend to eat late, which again was not something that happened at home growing up - we usually ate by 7 or 8 pm latest. So if I have folks coming over at, say, 7 if it's a weeknight, I'll assume that they'll show up by 8 because Indians are annoying that way. So I'll have appetizers ready when they show up, and move to dinner by let's say 9.

Compare that with a friend I visited the other day. We got to her place at 6, on a Saturday evening. I hadn't eaten all day, because I had woken up really late, and then run around trying to get errands done before getting to her place. So when her husband heard that he brought out the samosas and namkeen pretty quickly, by 6.30ish (mainly because he knew I wouldn't drink till I had eaten something). Then around 8, he made some pizzas and served those. Which was great, and I felt pretty full, so I made them bring out the sweets I had brought from one of my recent trips. But then around 9.30 or 10, he suddenly started making pasta for us, which was apparently the main course of the evening.

And this has happened every time I've visited them, or other friends too. There's be snacks, followed by a mini-meal which feels to me like a main meal, and then suddenly there's a second main meal. And the second meal is usually made while we're there.

Which maybe is a nice and informal way to do it, but still always feels a little bizarre to me.

So am I the only person completely bewildered by all of this? I was talking to S, who feels the same way as me, and we were trying to figure out if we're just anomalies in this respect. Is this a generational thing, and we just happen to do things the same way as our mothers did, a Bengali thing (she's as probashi as I am, except maybe a little better at being bangali than I am), or just something else entirely?

Of the week that was, #2

My week in recap:

• Found out a very dear friend is getting a divorce.
• Went on a work trip to New York which included having to watch a baseball game, excellent kathi rolls, and a couple of completely pointless meetings. 
• Lost a ring, which my mother had "lent" me a few years ago and I had never returned, somewhere in New York. I still don't know how it went missing, because unlike other jewelry I own and lose from time to time, I never take this ring off unless I'm at home. And it wasn't loose for me, so I don't see how it could have just slipped off my finger. The hotel tells me they haven't found it, and I haven't seen in it the bags I took, so there we are.
• Got back to the office on Thursday to deal with a crapfest that had been threatening to hit us for weeks and finally did. I spent the last two days dealing with nothing but said crapfest, and anticipate continuing to do so for the next several days, if not weeks.
• And then Friday ended with an email coming in that has given me a sliver of hope for something I had completely given up hope for, but I suspect I shouldn't really raise my hopes anyway because I think this is being done just for the sake of appearances.

On that vague note, I should now go and try to see if I can figure out why my washing machine is leaking every time I run it. Because putting it off for weeks means I really have no clean clothes left.

On how the news hits you

One of the continuing arguments I have with my mother is that she refuses to stop worrying about her children. When the brother and I travel, and now the sister-in-law too, she wants to know when we take off and we land. I'm very sure she has news alerts set up for whatever city or country we're in at any given time, because she usually finds out about any shooting or tornado warning or any possible type of calamity within, I don't know, a 1000 miles of me before I do.

Case in point, this Sunday morning. I received a text asking how bad the shooting in Orlando was. I had no idea, because between getting up late, realizing I had to wash my hair, and rushing out of the apartment to meet people on time, I hadn't really glanced at the news, twitter, or Facebook. But just as I typed that text back, saying I hadn't seen the news yet, I caught sight of a TV screen playing CNN. And stopped dead in my tracks.

I could go on and on about how the news these days makes me feel sick to my stomach. The Stanford rape case, the Orlando shooting, the US Presidential elections - none of it is pretty. And I can't blame my mother for worrying about me when I've written in the past about going crazy with irrational worry when anything happens back in India.

A few weeks ago, after yet another exasperatingly frantic call asking about my safety, I had snapped at her, "do you realize, if something had happened to me, calling or texting me would be useless, because I wouldn't exactly be able to respond if I was dead?" After a second of pin drop silence, I was witheringly told never to say anything like that ever again. The fact that I was already feeling the pangs of guilt for having snapped didn't count.


This afternoon, one of the tweets making the rounds about the Orlando massacre that hit a little too close to home was this screen grab of someone's post:

"as investigators are inside the nightclub, where many of the bodies are still where they fell, they have to tune out the nightmarish sound of all of the deceased phones' ringing constantly as loved ones try to reach them."

Shudder, indeed.

March musings

The parents left to go back home yesterday, after visiting me for a month.

That first evening alone, walking into an empty apartment, always feels the weirdest. And the hardest, even though you've spent a month rolling your eyes, complaining you can't find anything in your kitchen, and generally wanting just 30 seconds of me-time.

I'm never going to be able to live with anyone again, ever.

**************

Does it feel, after a point, that your parents kind of turn into your kids?

I mean, don't get me wrong, I was pampered for a month, being woken up with a cup of tea every morning, having oil applied to my hair, etc. But when you find yourself exasperatedly glancing back while driving home in the evening, and hear yourself saying "don't eat any more chips, you won't be able to have dinner otherwise!" it kind of makes you wonder when the tables turned.

**************

Just once I would like to be able to complain out loud that the mother is turning into the grandmother without the father or brother promptly pointing out, very helpfully, that I am turning into the mother.

**************

A couple of years ago, I wrote about, among other things, how I love flying, and love looking out of the window of an airplane. A month ago, I sent the father a link to an article I came across linking a certain medicine given to patients of epilepsy with birth defects when those patients become parents.

I sent the article to the father because I had epilepsy, as a child. And was on medication from the age of 8 to the age of 13. And while my medication was changed several times over the years, I faintly remembered being on the aforementioned medicine for some time at least.

I received a note from the father after I sent him this article, which said, among other things, the following:

I was in an airport. Hong Kong. Returning from a PRC trip - my first. And I got the news that the doc has finally stopped the medication. Glad I had a window seat. And always love flying out of that airport..... One of those positive memories... there are some things always, to be thankful for....

**************

I was going through old posts, trying to find the one where I talked about my love of window seats, and found an older post, from four years ago. Where talk about the things I don't like about flying.

And given my current life, and the fact that I travel by myself every other weekend these days, I find that post so very ironic on so many levels.

Oh, if we knew then what we know now...

Flashes and flashbacks

Like with most things I am terrified of, I can pinpoint the exact moment lightning began to scare the bejesus out of me.

I was in my early teens, and the mother used to teach in a school that ended a good hour after the brother and I got home. So as the responsible elder child, I was in charge of making sure the brother and I changed after getting home, ate our lunch, and (ideally) started on our homework by the time she got home. Which of course meant that we would get home, put on the TV, dawdle over our lunch, and then squawk and change five minutes before she would actually get home. (Oh, like you didn't know this, Ma.)

Good times.

Anyway, one afternoon, we were having our lunch while watching TV. I can't remember if a storm was already ongoing, or if it sprung up out of nowhere, but I do remember that our sofa was against the windows, and the TV screen faced the balcony door. And that it got darker as the afternoon progressed. And suddenly, out of the blue, a streak of lightning flashed across our TV screen, all the way from across that long living room of ours. And I'm pretty sure I grabbed my poor younger brother and screamed.

Not so good times.

I love rain, and I'm quite fond of thunderstorms. But lightning, to put it bluntly, frightens the crap out of me.

Last night, as I left work, after hearing about tornado warnings coming and going in various parts of the city, I looked up at the sky and saw lightning continuously flashing in the sky several miles away. In the direction I was headed. A part of my brain said it looked a lot like when the particle accelerator exploded on The Flash, but the rest of my brain kept having flashbacks to that afternoon all those years ago.

Parental conversations, Part 2

This post is a complete cop out because I realised we're almost at the end of October and I haven't posted anything this month. Having said that, these gems have been collected here over the past year or so, just waiting to shared with the world. Characters, my parents are.

The father, on whatsapp, on being sent photos of wounded hand compared to the previous week:
"Looking much healthier.
Letting the nail polish show itself now."

************

Conversation between me and the parents before the mother came to stay with me for two months:
Me: Can Mamma's phone be fixed so it logs into her Skype account and not Baba's?
Mother: Arre we are ek jaan since 1983.
Me: Yes but if you're here and trying to call him on Skype you'll end up calling yourself na.
Father: Now that is a good example of a closed loop as used in circuit designing and programming languages. :D
Father: And. i will not be able to call M on Skype because... :(

I don't even know what the man means half the time. And he uses way too many emoticons.

************

The mother, seeing me the morning of her day of departure after a two-month stay with me:
"Are you dressing up so much today because I'm leaving?"

************

Mother: Listen, when you land for the wedding, there'll be just a week to go. You're not going to insist on going to China Bowl for dinner, are you? There'll be a lot of work to do.
Me: Yeah, but we'll still have to eat, won't we?

************

Late night Skype calls on wedding outfits:
Mother: For the sangeet toh I am going to buy.
Me: Everything else you're going to rent or what?

************

Over whatsapp:
Me: Look at these amazingly comfortable linen pants I bought. They're perfect for summers, do you want a pair?
Mother: No, I have plenty.

Two days later, on the phone:
Mother: I have to tell you what I did. I didn't want to spend money on new pants, so I got all my pants shortened and made them into capris.
Me: Well, what are you going to do in the winter then?
Mother: ....oh.
Me: Sigh.
Mother: Achha, I hope you know that when I said no to those pants I was just being polite.

************

Mother: Have you talked to your brother lately? Why is he losing so much weight?
Me: I *just* told you how much weight I've lost. Why do I not get asked that in such a tone of concern?

(In all fairness, the brother has always been a stick who just doesn't put on weight, the lucky schmuck. And I'm... not like that.)

************

Me: Next time you call me on Skype at 6.30 am on a Sunday to watch a puja the entire khandaan is present at, can I get a 5 minute heads up so I'm dressed a little more appropriately? I had to wriggle off camera before I let anyone see me.
Father: I noticed.

The master of understatement, this man is.

Of recipes and memories

My mother has a bookshelf in her kitchen that has a number of cookbooks on it. Most of them are bought, but among them is a blue diary**, with yellow pages that are falling apart, holding a number of loose sheets of paper shoved in within its pages.

This diary has my Thamma's handwriting all over it. I'm not sure how my mother, the youngest bahu, ended up with it, but for most of my childhood, I remember that being the go-to book that would be spread open in the kitchen any time my mother was making carrot cake, or baked vegetables, or one of several other recipes.

I don't remember seeing it being used all that often in recent years - partially, I suspect, because I paid less attention, but also I suppose because some of those recipes have probably been used often enough to make referring to the actual recipe unnecessary.

I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good cook. I like the idea of cooking, and do it from time to time. But it doesn't come instinctively to me, and that frustrates me. When someone rattles off a recipe on the phone to me, it's pointless because I won't remember any of it. And when anyone tells me to add something "andaaze se", it makes me want to tear my hair out. I need to see a recipe to make anything, and I need to be told exactly how much to put in of every single item I'm adding.

I own one cookbook, and I have a number of recipes saved in my email or my browser favorites. But a few weekends ago, I found an unused notebook I had bought impulsively a couple of years ago (hello, cute puppy on cover of diary. come home with me, yes?), and never used more than two pages of. One of those pages was a to-do list, and the other page was a recipe. And just like that, without really thinking it through, I found myself spending the next hour painstakingly writing down the recipes for the ten or fifteen recipes I use on a regular basis, along with a few that I want to try at some point.

This notebook is now sitting in my kitchen, and has been referred to twice or thrice in the past few weeks. I'm hoping it gets used more often, and that it gets added to more often, and that eventually, I won't really need to refer to it that often, but that it will still sit there, waiting to be opened up and looked at.



** Update: The mother has emailed me to point out that I have my diaries all mixed up. Apparently the one with Thamma's cake recipes is a brown leather bound diary, while the blue one is something she herself used to save and scribble recipes in, and was originally given to her by her father-in-law so she could learn to read and write Bengali.

I was a kid, okay. But the point is the same, really.

No matter how old you get...

Yesterday, a friend asked if I wanted to go out for lunch, and then made fun of me when I said I couldn't because I had brought ma ke haath ka dal chawal from home, and had to eat it.

When I was in college, I took French classes on the weekend, and one of my classmates at the time was a woman at least 15 years older to me. She was divorced, a mother of two, and used to travel every weekend from a city that was at least three hours away by bus, if not more.

And every weekend, when we would go to the cafeteria or to the nearby market for lunch, she would refuse to buy anything because her mother had packed her lunch, and she couldn't return home without finishing whatever had been packed for her.

And we would laugh at how someone her age, who was seemingly so strong and in charge of every other aspect of her life, was so terrified of her mother.

And yet here I am, close to a decade later, sitting at my desk at work, and eating fruit - which I absolutely despise - because my mother is visiting, and has taken to packing me fruit as an evening snack because she's convinced (and partially correct) that my eating habits when she's not around are absolutely horrifying. And I can't return home without finishing whatever has been packed for me.

No matter how old you get, your mommy packs food for you, you eat.

Also, no matter how old you get, being woken up by your mommy with a cup of tea in the morning is the most amazing feeling in the world.

Parental conversations

Conversations with and about my parents over the past few months.

The mother: Why are you coming now if I can visit you in a few months?
Me: Umm, you do realize you're not the only reason I like to come to India?
*offended silence*
Me: There are other people and places in my life, you know...
The mother: I got it after the first line, you know.

************

Me: So I renewed my lease for a year.
The mother: But... what if you finally meet someone?
The father: One of them can always sublease or something.

************

Me: It's really sad how awful my Hindi and Bengali is. Even the brother speaks better Hindi than me now.
The father: All of that may be true, but you have the best understanding of lyrics to Bollywood songs out of anyone in this family.

I felt so proud and validated.

************

The brother: What are you getting Baba for his birthday?
Me: He sent me his usual email of what he wants.
The brother: I didn't get this. What was on it? Was it for everyone?
Me: No, I get one every time I visit home. Things to work on - my health, my temperament, my ambition, the way I talk to people...
The brother: Oh. Are you doing any of that yet?

************

The father: You've been silent these past few days.
Me: Umm no, I Skyped with your wife almost every night.
The father: Oh. I wasn't informed.
[less than an hour later]
The mother: You can call your father, but not reply to my whatsapp message?

Competition nahi hain, bhai.

************

The father: So my eye surgery's on the 14th...
Me: Oh good, you finally got around to scheduling it.
The father: Yeah... but I need to talk to the doctor if it makes sense.
Me: If what makes sense?
The father: If I should have eye surgery after I've been up all night watching the World Cup final.

Of names and reactions

The parents have always been Mamma and Baba. When relatives protested with things like "Ma is more respectful" or "Mamma sounds like Mama*", they were firmly, but politely, informed that this is what they preferred her to be called. I had other names for them from time to time - Mother & Father, Mommy & Dad, Mumsie & Babs, the mother and the father in all online references - and these are still used from time to time, usually when I'm trying to, but failing to, cajole them into something. But Mamma and Baba will always endure.

A few years ago, I started called her Ma. There were two reasons for this. One, I'm called Ra by loved ones. So when there would be a plaintive "Raaaaa" yelled from some corner of the house, bellowing back "hain, Maaaaaa?" rhymed and therefore seemed like a lot of fun. Two, and more importantly, she hated it. I mean, hated it. It made her feel old, it seems. The quickest way to irritate her was to call her Ma. I was always astonished she didn't get whiplash from the speed with which she would turn to glare at you with a look Medusa would envy.

It started out as fun, but somewhere along the way, it became natural to call her that. There's a sweetness to the word Ma that just felt... right. Unfortunately, she didn't - and doesn't - see it the same way. And it wasn't till when I was home this summer, and happened to call her Ma in the middle of a conversation. Both the parents grimaced, and when I rolled my eyes, it was the father who suddenly commented, "when you're used to hearing something for so many years, it hurts our ears to suddenly hear something else." Which drove home the point a lot better than their glares and grimaces over the past few years had.

So I'm trying to get unused to calling her Ma. It's not as easy as it should be, for some reason, but I'm trying. I would like to point out, however, that calling my mother Ma instead of Mamma is darn sight better than their son calling his elder sister Duddo instead of Didi**.

*maternal uncle in Hindi and Bengali, for the uninitiated
** elder sister in Hindi and Bengali, also for the uninitiated

Of ants, souls, and stories that stick

When I was a kid, we lived across from a park, and often walked through when returning home from friends' houses, or the market. There were a lot of ant hills in this park, and I don't quite remember what prompted this, but my mother once told me that these ant hills are the homes of ants, and if you knock any of them over, even by mistake, those ants will hunt you down, and destroy your house. I don't think my mother was quite as graphic as this, and I have never bothered to find out if this is a true fact, but even today, some 20+ years later, I choose not to step on any ant hills should I see one, thank you very much.

When my brother was a kid (and I therefore a somewhat older and wiser kid), we visited the Kali Mandir in C R Park (and while looking up its exact name, I discovered it has a Wikipedia page all of its own). The brother and I were bored while the parents did their chatting-with-God thing, so I told the brother that the stones which have names written on them (dedicated by families of people who have died) have the souls of said deceased individuals trapped inside them. And therefore, while we need to walk all around the temple while waiting for the parents, we need to make sure we don't step on any stone that has a name on it. And so we did.

Some ten-odd years later, with the brother now a teenager, we visited Kali Mandir again. A lot more stones had been dedicated by now, resulting in hardly any blank stones left. I watched my brother stand in one spot and try to figure out how to go anywhere in the temple complex without stepping on the souls of some poor departed-from-this-world individual.

Whenever I go home next, I want to drag him there and see what he does at the age of 23.

Chat conversations

My Gtalk status yesterday morning was whining about how the Indian Embassy won't pick up the phone. So of course, the mother had to ask.

Mother: Why do you need the embassy?

12:37 PM The princess is asking  me: for my passport to become machine readable   can't apply for schengen visa otherwise  Mother: The princess says OK, Didi 12:38 PM She sighs too at my constant absurdities  me: :D 12:39 PM Mother: Somehow these sighs of hers makes me feel rather immature at times, don't know about you though 12:41 PM me: why would I feel immature?   I'm not the one being sighed atMother: That's a very good point, girl!

One hour later:


Mother: Was just thinking it's a REAL good point!   You think I'm mad too! 1:19 PM me: huh?  Mother: Mad along with being immature?  me: what are you talking about? 1:20 PM Mother: nah, just thinking  me: you're definitely sounding like you've gone mad

I love the mother, I do. Who else would be such a constant source for entertainment?

Happy Teacher's day, Mommy!

A dash of self-analysis

The last few weeks have been somewhat... stressful. A variety of things has happened, most of which I can't get into the details of**, that pushed me to the point of completely shutting down and going into a funk last weekend, till finally a few conversations with two or three dear souls got me out of it.

What I realised over this period, however, is just how much my upbringing, for lack of a better word, has influenced the person I am, for better or for worse.

Both the parents, especially the father, are incredibly private people. They've never liked the world knowing what's going on in our lives. It's our problem, we deal with it. And some of that has rubbed off on me. I have never been able to call a friend and say, this is going on, I need your help or even just talk about it. It takes me ages to reach out to anyone for even the smallest bit of help. And the problem is, being this way completely conflicts with the person I am, who, well, talks a lot, quite frankly. And who needs to tell people what's going on.

So there's always this urge to tell friends back home what I'm stressed about, but at the same time there's also this hesitation because, well, I can't. Or shouldn't. Sometimes I rationalize it by telling myself they're busy anyway. Or stressed about things themselves. Or don't want to hear me keep whining about things. But all makes for a fair amount of misery. And loneliness.

And then sometimes it all gets too much and I send frantic, misery-filled emails to people. Or furiously and/or tearfully type out a huge rant on Gtalk. Or just call and pour it all out. And always feel so much better. And wonder why I didn't earlier.

The other thing the parents have always drilled into me is that you really can't ever take anything for granted. We were always fortunate, growing up, that we never really lacked for anything we wanted. If the parents had to figure out ways to give us all of that, they never let on. But they always reminded us that a lot of what we had was thanks to the father's job, and you never knew what could happen when.

So when I started working, while there was no doubt in anyone's mind (particularly my mother's) that I could be extremely extravagant and impulsive with how I used my money, I also saved a fair amount. And frequently went into panic mode if I found my bank balance going below the magic number in my head that was the minimum I should always have. There was no rationale behind this number, and no amount of arguments presented by dad along the lines of how my investments also counted could make a difference. If the cash in my bank account was not a certain amount, I would be constantly palpitating.

And that continued when I came to the US. Despite living on student loans, I have by no means been the most frugal person around. But I make sure that there's always that minimum balance in the account. If not, I hit the panic button. Which usually involves calling the father and asking what I should do.

Among the various stressors of the past few weeks was the fact that there was a problem with my paperwork for the internship. And as a result, I hadn't been paid for nearly a month, despite the contract stating that I was to be paid every two weeks. And while this was troubling, it was a minor ripple compared to the tidal wave of everything else going on, because truth be told, I have enough savings at the moment to last me a while, if necessary.

At dinner with the other interns some days ago, it came up in the conversation that I hadn't been paid. And almost everyone's first reaction was to ask me if I was fine financially, or if I needed money. And I found it interesting that almost everyone at the table was completely startled when I assured them I was fine. I seemed to be the only one there who wasn't living from paycheck to paycheck.

When I would hear this from friends and colleagues back in India, I always assumed I was at an advantage because I lived with the parents and didn't have much in the way of household and living expenses. But here, as students - most of us international students, at that - I would have assumed we're all in a similar position. And it struck me, for possibly the first time, just how glad I was that I had been brought up the way I had.

**UPDATE: Two years later, I went into the details. Here.

What, man?

The mother and her younger brother have an age difference of about 7 years between them. One afternoon, when she was in college, the two of them were at the bus stop, waiting for a bus to take them home and away from the rain. A guy, standing nearby, kept staring at my mother. My uncle, at age 11 or 12, took offense and walked up to the guy and said, "What, man? Can't you see it's raining?"

Decades later, I was in my early teens when the brother and I were making our monthly visit to B.C. Roy's Children's Library in the car. I was sitting in front, giving a last read to the book I was about to return, and didn't really notice when we stopped at a traffic light. When the car started again, my 8-year-old brother piped up from the back seat, "Why were those men in the bus staring at you, Didi?" I shrugged and said I didn't know. "Well, I glared at them and then they stopped."

Protectiveness clearly runs in this family.

I can never say or hear the words "what, man" without bursting into giggles.

To Mamma, with Love

The mother loves bacon. She doesn't have it too often because she thinks it's expensive. So when we went to Flurry's earlier this year, I bullied her into ordering it, and made her have it. And this morning, I woke up at 7.30 AM for the first time since quitting my job, and fried bacon for her. And now she won't let me take her out for a Mother's Day dinner because I spent SO MUCH MONEY on a packet of bacon.

For as long as I can remember, she's done that. Scrimped and given up on what she likes, what she wants, because it may be too expensive. But nothing we ever wanted was too much. Music cassettes would be lying on my breakfast plate if I got a fabulous score on my math test, the brother got his electrical guitar after he cracked his twelfth Boards, the father was gifted a Bose music player for his 50th birthday.

Mamma got married at 20, right after finishing college. She did her Master's and started working after marriage. She decided to stop studying the day her two-year-old son looked at her and whined, "why you always studying, Mamma?" Everything she's ever done in her life has been for her family - her kids, her husband, her mother, her brothers. She has a terrible temper, but is terribly disappointed at how unladylike her daughter is. The current easiest way to irritate her is to call her Ma instead of Mamma or Mommy because you know, Ma just sounds old.

In school, there was nothing that happened in my life that the mother didn't know. Of course, not much happened, because I have the most boring life ever, but whatever did, she knew about. She made sure the brother and I read as kids, she made sure he and I were best friends as kids, and I know that no matter where we go in life, how rarely or frequently the brother and I talk, he and I will always have a good relationship because our mother made sure of it.

She's gorgeous, you know? In my leaving school slam book, a friend wrote "Roses are red, violets are blue, your mother is beautiful, what happened to you?" When I met him and his wife last month, he went into rhapsodies of the first time he ever saw my mother. A couple of years back, the first guy I ever had a crush on added me on Facebook, a decade after I'd moved away. His first question when he caught me on FB chat? "Is your mother still as gorgeous?" We regularly meet shock and disbelief when we announce we're mother and daughter, not sisters. Very demoralizing it all is.

I was watching an episode of Friends once, in the parents' bedroom. The parents were having some discussion, the brother was pottering around. It was one of the flashback episodes; the father glanced at the screen and asked, puzzled, "how did she become so fat?" "Oh you know, her brother was a miracle baby, so he was loved a lot more, so she was depressed and would eat a lot, so she's kinda fat." And as I said those words, everyone started grinning sheepishly, because it's SUCH A PARALLEL TO MY LIFE. Only I'm elder.

It is a universally known fact that the brother is the mother's favourite. The only person who denies this is the mother herself, who thinks mothers don't differentiate between their children. Hogwash, I say. When she goes berserk and stubborn, he's the only one who can calm her down. He's the one she likes to whine and talk to about stuff. He's the calm, dependable, go-to person in the family. Of course, part of all this could be because I'm a little... shall we say, hyper and opinionated about the things she says and does. Which is actually exactly how she is with the grandmother, but saying this to her would classify as being opinionated.

I look at the mother sometimes and wonder how anyone who's been through so much, who's had the life she's had can still be as strong and cheerful and together as she is. And I wish that my similarity to her extends to making me half the person she is.

Happy Mother's Day to the best mommy I could ever ask for.

Suddenly, suddenly

It's funny how memories pop into your head at times. I was in the car this afternoon, on my way back from a meeting with a client, and thinking of one of the essays I still need to finish. While mentally composing the essay, I stumbled over the word "parallelly", something I often do. And then it struck me that MS Word never does recognise that word anyway, and I should probably use the phrase "in parallel".

Which is when I suddenly remembered the mother's copy of the Oxford English Dictionary. I can't remember a time she didn't have it. It was so much more than just a dictionary - it was like a memory album. Its pages contained dried flowers, little scribbled notes, and numerous photos. Photos of the brother and me, photos of the parents, photos of Dadu. Photos of my cousins as babies, reminding Mamma of the sheer joy she felt when she became a Pishi for the first time. That dictionary was to be handled with immense care, because picking it up meant picking up memories of more than a decade.

I haven't seen it in a long while, not since we moved house, actually. But it popped into my head this afternoon.

Places have memories too. Golden Dragon is by no means my favourite restaurant. It is, however, in the mall that is closest to our house, and the food is decent. By default, therefore, a number of memories have got associated with it.

September 2008 - The parents and I discovered they serve darsaan, the mother's favourite dessert, during Pujo. We also decided that since I was now working, I should treat them to dinner once a month. The father saw the bill, and decided henceforth McDonald's is good enough for such treats.

November 2008 - The mother's birthday, I was catching an evening flight out to Bombay, so I promised her I would join them for lunch.

December 2008 - The parents completed 25 years of togetherness, but we put off celebrations till the brother came home from college a week later. We went out for dinner, I got my hair curled for the first time! The father was supposed to officially gift the mother the earrings he had bought her, even though she'd been wearing them for a week already. He opened the box in the restaurant, and discovered he had got the worn, and empty, box. All captured on video.

March 2009 - My birthday fell on Holi. While the city enjoyed a holiday, I was travelling to Chennai on work. Managed to catch an earlier flight back, and joined the parents for dinner straight from the airport.

September 2009 - Pujo again, this time accompanied by a new colleague, who the parents sort of adopted for Pujo because she was Bengali and knew no one else in Gurgaon. Who knew a year later she would become such a dear friend?

2010 - The best friend was in town, and after a dozen mail exchanges, Gurgaon was finally decided as the venue for the get together between the gal pals. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get five of us together in one place at one time? Tip: Just decide the venue for dinner and inform them, don't ask them. It's what I'm doing for New Year's Eve too.

We don't go back so often now, but passing that mall tends to bring a smile to my face anyway.

The father and I still debate over who'll pay the bill every time we go out though.

A quick rant

The mother is one of the best teachers I've ever come across. Students she taught in Class III more than a decade ago still keep in touch with her, and talk about how she impacted their lives. She genuinely loves children, and for her, it wasn't so much about teaching, but about helping the kids she taught.

Despite all this, she was always very clear that she wouldn't put up with organizational politics. Whenever things got messy, she chose to leave a school rather than have to deal with the murkiness that politics can bring.

Right now, at this very moment, I really really wish I had the courage to do that. I am sick and tired of people not showing ownership for their work, of whining because they have to handle five things simultaneously, and going and pulling down colleagues to cover up their own mistakes. And I am really sick and tired of people allowing interpersonal issues to affect project delivery.

We're all multi-tasking, for God's sake, and we're all working to meet our clients' requirements. And we're all dealing with numerous phone calls, emails, and cranky clients while trying to actually meet our deliverables. If you can't handle that, get the hell out of consulting.

I'm a workaholic, yes, and I have no social life. So I will probably continue to give everything I have to this organization. But when people behave like that, you really wish you could just drop everything and go.

And for once, I wouldn't give a damn if my colleagues read this post and got to know exactly what I think of them: that they're juvenile, petty, and immature people, who don't know the meaning of the word loyalty.