Chiffonesque

We have a small police chowki inside our colony. (How imperial that sounds - our colony .) The most action I have seen there are the Nirula delivery guys carrying boxes of pizzas inside, some scuffle for change and such like. Otherwise, the place is just a landmark for me to locate the lane that leads home. Despite that, I get lost every single time I enter the colony, but that’s another story. (I am stupid - that’s the story.) So, last evening, as I ambled along a dark, leafy lane, two guys on a motorcycle approached me. ‘Where is C-65?’, one of them asked politely. ‘I don’t know’, I replied. ‘But there’s the police station right there. You can ask there’, I volunteered, all in the spirit of co-operative humanity. The guy is silent for a while. As I continued my amble, he called me again, ‘Madam, one minute....’ Madam waited. The guy took off his helmet and asked me quite earnestly, ‘Did I misbehave with you or anything? Why did you tell me to go to the police station?’ Now madam is ...

I got into a cycle rickshaw this morning. The rickshaw-wala was a familiar guy. He had dropped me to office a couple of times before. Middle-aged, tired face, thin body, wise eyes, and a sunny smile. Today, he greeted me, cycled briskly so that I was at office in 15 minutes, instead of the usual 25, and wiped his forehead. As I paid him, he looked at me earnestly and a little shyly. Then he said, ‘ Mujhe kal kaam tha. Main aapka kal se daily wait karoonga. ’ (I had work yesterday. From tomorrow, I will wait daily for you.) And he rode off.

I was going through some material and came across this bit of information. There is a Command Line Interface command that gets you information about the system settings of a computer. (So, with this command you have access to the vital, heart-of-the-matter stuff.) The command is ‘ /info/sys .’ I wonder if the software company is named after this command. If it is, I’ve made a pretty neat discovery.

My office terrace is pretty humble to look at. One can imagine it to be the sullen backdrop of a withering Christmas tree - in the manner of some art-house film. It doesn’t have seats or shade, except the kind afforded by a vacant sky. But there is a slim roof above the threshold of the terrace. This is where smokers (the group that is constantly in need of ‘fresh’ air), slouch around, finding their own zones of comfort. The last coffee break had me on the terrace, looking across at a grey-blue building. Colleagues who I haven’t met yet wondered why I was there, without a coffee or a cigarette in my hand. After all, what can you expect to see in Noida, right? Even if it is a view from the top. But I like what I see. There are coarse squares of concrete, bricks, and walls. These enclose dry, parched earth, tufts of coarse grass, and emaciated, dusty trees. While other cities may be urban jungles, Noida still has the feel of an urban farmland. Getting back to the coffee break. I was gene...

Japanese animes are being discussed. The next logical stop are cartoons. D recounts this episode of Top Cat. Top Cat, in Manhattan smart clothes, approaches a fashionista-type feline with red lips and a long cigarette. ‘Hi baby, what’s your name’, he asks, sidling up to her. ‘A.T. Jazz’, she purrs. ‘What does A.T. stand for?’ ‘All that.’

I feel like writing something now, but nothing very serious or ‘constructed’. I don’t much care for putting up unstructured posts on my blog. But at the same time, I don’t want to feel hostage to some notion. So, I shall just do as I please for now, because I think I deserve it. It’s bright and sunny. Since I am not used to the heat, my head and shoulders are paining pretty badly. My nostrils are burning and I am seeing black polka dots on practically everything around me. To top it all, I had a severe argument with my husband. He didn’t know what we were arguing about, so he couldn’t put up a counter-argument fitting enough for my formidable erudite reasoning. This irritated me further. But I was soon beckoned for lunch, so I went. There was kadi and rice. The kadi is especially noteworthy because it had mounds and mounds of soft, pudgy pakodas that were well-seasoned with jeera , garlic, and chilli powder. The gravy was quite thick and yellow and excellently sour with curd. So, af...

It fades from the season’s memory No more of those nips Winter no longer remains Coating my finger tips. It’s time for the March guest To arrive like a drummer It’s time for the unwanted one, The famed Delhi summer It will be my first here, For now there isn’t much to say, But I’m sure I will love it, I was born on a hot, April day.

I went to Ansal plaza the day I moved to Delhi. I had a job interview the next morning and no appropriate shoes. The Shoppers Stop at the Plaza didn’t quite stock sensible black or brown shoes, what with sequins and flower-Austin-power dominating every kind of footwear. However, I managed to find one that wasn’t so bling. It made annoying clickety-click sounds and if the office was carpeted, the heel was likely to get stuck in the rug and make me trip. But it was either that or my four-inch platforms that I had worn for my reception or my sneakers that I had run in since two years. So, the clickety heels were bought. At the counter, I seemed to be in the slowest line. One girl in the line was a Shoppers Stop ‘Citizen’ and she was trying to adjust some points or the other. The couple after her were also Shoppers Stop ‘citizens’ (whatever happened to ‘customers’?). They too wanted to redeem some points, use gift vouchers, be updated on how many points they had accumulated so far and ALSO...

We were at Tranquebar for our honeymoon. It’s a sea-side village a few hours from Pondicherry. We sojourned at a bungalow on the beach (helpfully called ‘Bungalow on the Beach’). Our room had a verandah with wicker chaises, white cane settees and tables, clay ash trays, and choice views of the landscape and the sky. Sometimes, we’d have coffee there. Sleepy, slightly disheveled, scruffy in glorious holiday indolence. Our morning brew would come in bright, navy blue ceramicas with a glint of teal. On the round, white table-tops, the cups looked Mediteranean. Opposite the verandah was a Danish fortress that seemed, at once, blanched, bright, and faded. In the Hemingway sunshine, it conjugated through shades of yellow – corn, butter, chartreuse, beige, maize, Navajo white…. Sometimes we would walk on the beach, just the two of us. The sea and the horizon would be rimmed in a green that looked like the iris of a fairy’s eye. There were deep gorges and fissures where crustaceans lay and pla...

It has been a long time since I was here last. I know that because it is my blog (obviously) and because I had forgotten my password. Actually, I think I remembered the password but had forgotten the username. So, I couldn't post. I am now in Delhi and have thus far traveled by bus to Noida and back thrice. I loved it. Very rustic - the manner in which passengers are hailed, the conniving conductor looking to see if I would actually ask him to return my change, the slightly smelly but cute children who benignly parked themselves on me when the bus lurched this way and that, and the hindi declarations of numbers which I do not understand. What is ' chaurasi' and 'pacchatar', etc.? Noida is divided into sectors (maybe chaurasi sectors or pacchatar sectors or something like that). Once I needed to go to sector 29 and since I did not know what it was called in Hindi, I got off rather belatedly. It was nowhere near where I wanted to go but the bus guy was quite polite....