Chiffonesque

It is a sullen day. The sun shone two minutes after I closed my eyes. I seem to have left my spirit behind and got in to work. Thankfully, it is not a lazy day in office. There are hard, neat tasks to do. My mind can focus. But after the first stint of completing tasks, there are the mop-up nitties. That is not something I look forward to. But wait, there is a welcome break. One of my colleagues wants to think of a few ideas. She seems happy. I like it when happy people want to discuss ideas. I venture a concept. She is a little doubtful about what I mean. I Google for an image and show it to her. Ah! She likes what she sees. Off she goes to play around with it. That done, the heavy, sodden melancholy descends again. So, I think of another idea. I need not think of it now because the idea has already been decided upon, but still. I need to do it. So I close my eyes and conjure up a sharp mental image. I have the acidic taste of strong coffee in my mouth. I had made a trip to Barista ea...

It’s that time of the year again. Colorful mandaps and flamingo-pink ganpatis. (Now there are other colors too – lilac, mauve, chocolate brown, and my personal favorites – black and white.) The other deities on the mandaps are smaller in size and demurely fringe around the star-God. The cute mouse (the only time in the year when I refer to a rodent thus) occupies a neat little space in the ample spotlight. And one generally feels the bonhomie of prayers getting answered or at least attended to. The sugary modaks aren’t half-bad either. But the music... First of all, it's all filmy. There must have been at least six mandaps lined along the road in Vashi and all of them sought divine mercy with Bollywood strains. Secondly, all the songs were contemporary (no bhajans , of course) with nothing dating back to more than three months. Thirdly, and very strangely, all of these numbers have been picturized on Abhishek Bacchan. Obviously, AB might not have wanted to build an image as the...

People look at a girl in a short-skirt longer than at a girl in shorts. Places that are known for cheap booze will always serve batter-fried appetizers. Not too many hors-d’ouvres will be sautéed or braised or steamed. Spelling mistakes in menus indicate unclean drinking water. Spelling mistakes on toilet doors indicate management with very strong patriarchal background. (I went to a restaurant in Lonavla where one door said ‘Men’ and another said ‘Laddies’. Women were perhaps expected to go in the garden.) Alarm clocks work better than alarms in mobiles. If there is nothing good on T.V., it must be a weekend. Smokers don’t giggle. People who eat only egg whites with a tea-spoon are bad swimmers. Women who use ‘lotions’ instead of ‘creams’ tend to be mothers of sons and are more judgmental of other women. Men who bob their heads for no reason while having Coke wish they were women. Most people working in ‘Barista’ don’t know what it means. (They also don’t know the meanings of the foll...

You shoot the breeze with someone. He is witty, flippant, and always, scathingly insolent. Then, months later, he sends you something that he has written. It surprises you because you didn’t expect him to be this intelligent …not in this grown-up, seen-life-and-analyzed-it-fairly kind of way. Abhishek sent me a link to what he had written. For the longest time, I have considered him to be a very good writer. Better than he thinks he is. But, and this is a huge revelation, he is more mature and sensitive than I ever gave him credit for. This article has views I don’t necessarily agree with. In fact, I don’t believe for a moment that he is as blameless as this article makes him out to be. But I know this much – that if I had such an argument with a friend, I would definitely not be as coherent as him. Here’s the article: http://dumbnuts.wikispaces.com/Chennai Like I say, it’s a wonderful feeling to be proven wrong.

Lunch time. I am biting into some soya chunks plumped up by zesty olive slivers. This is the protein I need to repair the raging wear and tear that happened at kickboxing today. I felt so breathless.. and not because the asinine gym was playing Celine Dion at 7:00 a.m. I wonder if I had to do crunches after feeling wind beneath my wings or what. Anyway, much reminiscing is due. Boyfriend, A , was here and it was excellent! He met my family, my friends, my family’s friends, and my mad-cap cousin who switches from being family and friend to foe. For the record, he had told me to stay away from any Delhi guy, especially the ones who stayed in South Delhi. (My boyfriend is a typical Delhi guy and as South Delhi as they come. Not that I can make out if a person is from South Delhi or not. All of them are unwilling to take me to Mandi house – whichever part of Delhi they come from.) Now cousin does a volte face and tells boyfriend that maybe he should be cautious of Bombay girls – what wi...

There is a road in Koregaon Park that is not listed on tourist maps. Yet, it is a place a traveler would be besotted with. It is innocuous like a village path with simple, bucolic scenes. I call it a ‘road’ simply because it takes long to get home when I trundle on it. Actually, it is a lane that started small and never grew up. A Peter Pan strip. Like a favorite jaunt, this road is many things to many people. It is cheery to kids who bubble out of little huts to play with rubber tyres and sticks. It is a chic soignée to polished cars that glide through wrought-iron gates with bottles of Dom Perignons stashed in the backseat. It is frothy to gangly teenagers who laugh over nothing in particular and share a smoke at the crossroads. It is vibrant to runners who sprint across it in the wet, morning mist. It is rugged to construction workers who sip chai amidst bricks and mortar and befriend stray dogs. It is languid and treacly for lazy weekenders who amble along peering into bushes or g...

I just knew it! Knew it! Knew it! Knew knew knew it! As soon as the time comes for me to leave Pune (another three months tops), I will see an avenue for such thrill and enjoyment that I would want to stay back a little while longer. Last night, I went for a drive with a friend. We took a wrong turn and got to Law College Road and there, next to an alarmingly bright Kinetic showroom, is an Innsbruck-looking structure. It is lit prettily and a few twinklies stud salad-shaped foliage around the café. Good-looking youth dawdle in all things strappy and vivid – tees, skirts, chappals, jeans. I know it’s a café. Then, I see a banner - a yellow cloth in smudged red lettering – Mocha. Something deep and visceral and true and primal said ‘Yesssss!’ My Mocha. How much I had missed it! How different it was from the Bombay Mochas. How much better lit and how much cleaner and tidier and how much more polite the staff...and yet, the sameness thrilled me. The ‘All Day Breakfasts’ listed on page 11, ...

My first day at kickboxing. A lot of grunting and groaning while doing push-ups on knuckles; a lot of wondering why the hell two minutes seems so long with leg in mid-air and stomach hurting and thighs feeling like they’re getting pulled by a tenacious rhino. And this was before the going got tough. Of course, the idea is that my body and mind get so strong that I can be lethal and deadly to attackers. As it happens, kickboxing is more useful than my initial strategy of taking them home and making them eat my culinary experiments. Or telling them about my job. (That works well with creepy first dates, though.) But as I do stomach crunches and thigh-bends, I realize that maybe I should have stayed at home and read ‘How to win friends and influence people’. No enemies…no aaaargh !

One of my exes just informed me that he is now the father of a bonny baby girl. He sent me a snap which basically has him hogging the space, with a little bundle somewhere in the picture. (To give a little background, he had come to Mumbai to be an actor at some point in time. Instead, he became a software engineer after friends dutifully helped him through the shakal versus akal debate.) On sending him an admonitory email, I receive pics of the little baby. And she is such a darling! In the 15 pictures that RK sent me, she is yawning in 14 of them. (In the 15th one, she is fast asleep.) To top it all, the baby’s name is ‘Araya’ – a name I had reserved for my daughter. I would spell her name as ‘Aria’ because that’s what I want my little girl to be like – the aria . Complex, expressive, melodious and dramatic, but more than that, above everything else, a solo pursuit. To get back to the little baby – she is only a week old but has a lot of hair. And her tiny mouth is shaped in the fo...

Let me just say this – it is very easy to travel in cars and think that everyone else on the road - in a rick, on a cycle, in a bus, inside a pothole, outside a pothole, in perambulatory mode, is a nuisance. It is very easy to make goddamn cracks when someone gets pelted with stones. It is very easy to joke about someone who has to ward off strange advances from people a little too eager to give you a lift. It is very easy to sit in your car and say, ‘Oh..why are you walking? Why don’t you just rick it? Or just buy a car? Why don’t you do that?’ Well, here’s why. Because I have legs. Because the road is not just for people on wheels. Because I have the goddamn right to walk to wherever I want to whenever I want to. Because this is a free world. Because to walk home and not be accosted is a perfectly reasonable expectation. Because if I do get accosted, it is a violation, and I do not see the humor in that situation. Because walking someplace is a choice. Because when I decide to walk h...