Chiffonesque

 Today was an odd day. I have realised that if my work day begins with a call, no matter how important it is, it's hard for me to stay on track. And today I had insisted that my brother and father come to visit me. Preparing for their visits itself is a huge leak of energy. I don't know why I stress so much when they come. For one thing it would be good if everyone just ate the same thing. This business of menu-planning is such a bane.  Anyway brother and I went for a walk to Carter's. It's strange. We both grew up here but he doesn't feel anything here...no real attachment or anything. And when I left Bandra, I kinda left Bombay. I guess our childhoods were different and what we remember from that time is different. We had gelato and I took him to another vegan place which he hated. I have a sneaky feeling that he has started disliking Bandra because of all the vegan fare I am asking him to try.  But he did enjoy the paneer bhurji I got my cook to make for him. He ...

 Things have been a little rough since the last two days. I have been dealing with a fair amount of churn and guilt. And when things start getting nauseatingly bad is when I connect with V. If nothing else, he talks extensively about Tandav and that oddly is a stress buster. Anyway, the other day I picked him up and we went to Bandstand. There we were at our usual little coffee and snack tuck shop. V was telling me an interesting story about the huts near the sea. A beautiful dog was moving around here and there. The cafe people were shooing him away but they were doing it with so much affection that it was almost like an invitation for the dog. Still...he seemed lost. Not wholly agitated though. (But I hope he reached wherever he had to.) Anyway, after that, V and I were sitting on the promenade itself. It was cold. Really cold. (V told me today that yesterday was the coldest day in Bombay so far). The moon was high, almost perfectly full, dripping with pearly light and glow. The ...

I got some bad dreams and had to work today but I didn't. Was getting stressed out. Very tentatively, I asked V if we could catch up today. I know V and I are friends but sometimes I feel he has such a big life that catching up when bored doesn't seem to fit in his radar. Anyway he was sweet enough to come. I finally got a string of lights up and we chatted. I like our evenings like this... comfortable, peaceful, and homey. We were looking out onto the traffic, the city buzz, the glittering ephemera that an address like Bandra West, Pali Hill brings. Only to us, this address was a candy-rock neighborhood before it became THE address. Actually it's strange. V and I didn't know each other growing up. Our paths barely crossed and then one day, well into adulthood, our paths crossed again. But today when we talk of our time in Bandra, it's as if we had spent our lives in two corners of the same page. Maybe that's how it is as you go through life in a volatile world ...

So, here's what happened...brother and I met up at Carter's and I took him to a vegan place close-by. Portions were small. I like the food there but small portions really rile up the brother so he was gloomy throughout dinner.  Here are pictures of a smoothie bowl and a vegan pizza.  What else? Oh yes! Yesterday, I talked to my broken toenail, ate my meds, prayed, and today the toenail came off. It's such a relief. Toe still throbs and hurts but it's much better now. Yesterday when I was tending to my toenail, when I was cleaning it, etc., some really tough memories flooded my mind. Memories of a past relationship that had gone toxic beyond recognition. Had become abusive. Suddenly all those memories of me walking up stairs, fumbling to get through the door, with a knot in my stomach so afraid that I wouldn't know what I would find, what kind of language I would have to hear...it was sickening. My toenail was broken and bloodied. It still held on to the skin in quit...

 Today I tended to my toe. Had contemplated going to the doctor but didn't. Had a call in the morning and then there is the whole sweet deal of coordinating when the cook and the cleaning help arrive. Anyway, it started hurting badly again in the night. So called up my friend who recommended that I wait it out if I couldn't stand the pain. I have to clean the wound and all that. I think it is one way to really get in touch with the body.  I had read Louise Hay's 'You can heal your life' many years ago. I had loved it and it spoke to me.  It is a book about the general mind-body connection and how diseases and ailments point to the out-of-sync conditions we put ourselves in. The foundational concept of this book is that if you experience pain or trouble in the body, there is an accompanying mental thought pattern to accompany it. It naturally follows, then, that if you want to resolve the problem, you change the way you think (by also taking other measures if that...

 My toenail was hurting a fair bit and I went to the doctor, much against my will. He was going to pull out my nail because it has turned black and it had been bleeding for a while. I got fever yesterday and my head and hand had started hitting as well. I couldn't allow him to pull out my nail though. I screamed and he told me I was being a wuss and my nail wasn't really paining. Well, it was. It was. It was. I don't know why doctors and dentists don't believe that there is pain. Anyway he said that there was no way out and I had to just summon up the courage and get it done. I told him I needed time and could I get anaesthesia. He said that the injection would hurt more. Anyway I called V, who had offered to come to the doctor with me. I don't know whether he really meant it or not. But I was very upset and I really was in a lot of pain. Talking to him was a mistake because he said it wasn't paining as bad as I was making it out to be (what is it with these men...

 Things were good. Didn't go for a walk today but it was a beautiful evening. V came home. I lit some candles because I wanted him to experience what I experience at the end of the day. I realise that I would need chairs or something if I have to entertain people. But we talked.  I realise that I was holding it against him for not coming to meet me after Ma passed on. We spoke about it. I don't know if I am over it. Hopefully in time. I know that the kind of freedom I want...the kind of freedom I really want...forgiving and letting go is a very crucial part of it. V is a good guy. He just didn't think that I would want something like that. I am so tired of feeling let down or feeling guilty for letting people down.  Anyway, my heart feels heavy now. But it was a good evening with lots of stories. 

 Today I am in some pain. My toe-nail nearly got ripped off and is throbbing and bleeding. Still I went for a walk, spotted a vegan restaurant, and sat at Carter's. Bought Dettol, bandaid and cotton and considering I am the most cowardly, squeamish person in the world, I don't know how I will manage to wash and dress my wound. My throat just swelled up for no reason. My friend tells me that my lymph nodes may be infected. I am supposed to gargle today but I haven't yet.  I saw a lizard in the house and that also shaved off 5 years off my life.  I have so much to finish. I haven't even started on that yet.  Okay, now let's see all the good and happy things that happened: 1. I fit into my pants from H&M Bangalore, which I am so happy about. Looks quite good, I think. 2. Watched Tribhanga. I really liked it. I thought Tanvi Azmi was lovely. I know the movie has received a fair amount of criticism for being too 'pat' but I didn't think so. I think the mo...

Today V accompanied me to Mount Mary. I wanted to offer some candles for my friend's father's death anniversary. I had gone for his death ceremony to Dibrugarh. I had never met him but A, his daughter, is a very dear friend. I wanted to meet her. V doesn't visit church. He gave some long spiel about having a pact with God where God doesn't visit him in his house and he doesn't visit God in His. Melodramatic scenes of Amitabh Bachchan clanging temple bells yelling at Shiva about how he never asked God for anything, etc. came to mind. Anyway, we weren't wearing masks as we got down from Mount Mary's. Got caught and fined. 200 bucks each.  Then we went and sat close to the rocks, chatted a while, and had coffee. I have noticed something strange in my talks with V. It's usually about similar themes...Bandra, our growing up years, modern-day relationships, sex, its importance and uselessness (depending on which of us is talking), etc. But then he will talk ab...

  Today V called. It made me happy. I couldn't meet him because I was waiting for my brother who didn't turn up. But it felt good talking to him, making plans for next week. He was telling me about the new, winter fruits and vegetables that are available in the local market. And then he made fun of me for wanting to visit the farmer's market in DeMonte Park tomorrow. I love black candles. Love, love, love them. I love all candles but black ones especially...they look so Stoic, dignified, and majestic. I bought a few of them from Mount Mary. Lit one of them tonight. I was hoping to save them for a special occasion. But heck...I am a special occasion. Time to unwind. My drink of contemplation for tonight is a cold Diet Coke. And let's see what comes up in rumination. 

 Some pictures of Bandra today/ yesterday. (I didn't make it for the morning walk but stepped out when there was still light. So that's something.) Here are a few pictures from my walk: This Tanjore tiffin room is somewhere on Carter's. It looks empty-ish but I love tiffins. So nice and wholesome. Will try this out sometime. This filigreed skyscaping of trees and skies is what softens the edges of rough days. It's gorgeous!  Okay. This photograph, rather photographs like these...of roads leading into a promenade and ending with a splash and burst of sunshine...is what generally fills me with glorious hope.  A friend had once told me the story of one of the poets - either it was Robert Frost or Robert Browning, whoever served in the war. He was going away on war and his wife was upset because he wasn't reassuring her of returning. He told her, "The sun doesn't promise to rise again." In certain places, like such bends in Bandra, I feel the strength and ...

Today was nice-ish. It was quite restful for the most part. Had a friend over in the evening. We went for a walk up Pali Hill. It's just such a pretty place. I think I will try to get a walk up there in the mornings as well as the evenings. I am sure it must be pretty. I start a new assignment tomorrow. Really looking forward to it.  Then I have to make a few decisions regarding a couple of other things. That's not going to be easy.  Then there's milk to buy and budgets to work out and clothes to sort out and stuff to order from Amazon for the house. (Am still living without curtains. But I love the flooding in of sunlight in the mornings and flecks of citylights at night.) But I will try to make it for the morning walk. It's important to begin with joy. 

 I just had cold milk and bikis. Oreos, I think they were. Felt good. I think between today and the coming week, a few projects and engagements will fall away and I may get more space in my days to breathe and dwell. Let's see how this goes but looking forward to it. I was a little antsy and upset today. Sometimes I feel that a lot of people take me for granted. That they will behave however they want and I will not do anything or say anything. I don't like feeling that way. Sometimes I sense the defenses coming on and I know that maybe I wall myself up to my own detriment. It's not a good feeling to have but for now, I can't do much about it. I met V for a walk in the evening today as well. It was splendid. He waited below my building and we went to the same spot on Bandstand for a couple of coffees. (We went there last time as well). It was such a glorious evening. There was a steady, cool breeze, and soothing streetlights. I can't say for sure but the weather is ...

 Today after a walk at Carter's, I stopped at Bagel Shop for a cup of coffee. As with much of the charming coffee shops in Bandra that flout civic rules with such pomposity, this one too apparently does not give water. You have to buy it. The server was rather pinch-nosed about it. I was about to throw a sweaty little tantrum to make that genteel crowd uncomfortable but I refrained. I ordered coffee but went to the medical store opposite it to buy water. Those guys didn't have change. (I don't use a debit or credit card and none of the Gpay or such variations.) So I asked the shopkeeper that if I bought more things (which I needed), would he give me change? He said he was all out.  He handed over the bottle and said that I could pay him any other time. I told him it will be a while before I got change. He said it's no problem. He could not possibly refuse me water. A food and beverages establishment had refused me water.   The posh part of Bandra is not the part I gr...

 The extent of effort some people will take to hide the fact that they are married is...I mean...complex world problems can be solved with that kind of focused, deep, persistent thinking. Today I spoke with a friend from Pune who is likely to be visiting Mumbai in February.  So yay! Yesterday I spoke with a dear pal who has moved to Pune from Bangalore...I hope to meet her soon! We were talking about going to Lonavala and catching up there for a weekend. I got Kombucha! Was savouring the happy rose and lavender flavored one and life felt good. Today had a couple of discussions where I felt quite deflated. Sometimes I feel I have not accomplished anything in work. I still have to persuade some quarters to pay for writing. Not just because I need the money. But because writing as a process also needs the buttress and value that financial sufficiency affords. I don't understand why writers are considered so menial. Like all the important work happens AFTER stuff is written. I mea...

  A strip of cobbled road, lights... because celebrating is something they do, and a cheeky Social promising dope coffee right above CCD whose coffee beans do seem roasted and ground in the pre-COVID era. #bandrawest

 A friend recently informed me that the new(ish) term for conditions such as ADD is 'neurodiversity'. I thought this was really good because it takes the shame and sense of 'being wrong' from a condition. Which anyway is not true. As my friend explained, one can have laser-like focus for some things but be completely scattered about other things. But diversity indicates that there is more than one way for your synapses to fire together,more than one way for the brain to make sense of the world, more than one way to cope, and therefore, importantly, more than one way to survive. One of the chief virtues of diversity, I think, is that it presupposes coexistence. And coexistence in turn presupposes safety and absence of threat. Then why do we get so triggered when we encounter something different or unfamiliar? Because, I feel, the lack  of diversity does not really present a clear and present danger. To see the danger of excessive homogenization, one needs to take a long-...

The way it began held no clue to what a sweet, tender, gentle finish today would have. V took me for a frankie and a coffee near Bandstand. Bandstand was gorgeous. It was cold and breezy and it was high tide. There was a churn and a roll in the sea that felt so good, so instinctive...I didn't know how much I had missed just listening to the sea.  We sat at the steps. V laughed at a few couples around us. I thought, just as I always did, that it was cute. V took me for a walk in the little bylanes of Chuim village...the tiny little houses of his Koli friends who had spread the net and would watch over the nets until 4 am the next day. Their houses always had the sweetest decorations...lights shaped like dolphins, etc. V told me about how he thought that sharks were intelligent. He's grown his hair. Looks pretty good. And he knows it. He played with a couple of Huskies near Pali Hill. We walked past all these tiny alcove like swish shops - boulangeries, suit makers, florists, can...

Today was a sweetish day. Lost my cool only twice but otherwise managed to hold it together.  Met up with a friend for coffee and dinner. We, umm, unwillingly pub-hopped. Finally, we went to the terrace of a restaurant where friend enjoyed chicken lollipop and I got shitake and spinach mushrooms. We talked about books, stuff she has watched, her plans, 2020, and it felt good.  Mellow fairy lights around us. Pretty people smiling and greeting each other. Guys smelling nice. Girls charming in heels and silk. It felt good, nourishing, in fact, to be out with a friend enjoying a meal, talking about a little bit of the life that we survived.  We both were talking about our favourite restaurants in Bombay...and we were describing it as eras in our lives. Like the way Candies near Aamir Khan's house was an era of my school days. There was the era of Zenzi. Then both of us...or most women our age who started working and earning well around the time we did...spent a lot of time in...

 Stupid day. Today is a stupid day. Dumb day. Stupid. Stupid. STUPID. And there's no malpua in the house or anywhere closeby. I don't understand why rasmalai is more freely available than malpua. Stupid rasmalai. Overdesigned idiotic sweet. Malpuas are better...dark, soft, spongy, juicy and sweet with coconut milk batter, parts of it slightly crisp from the deep-frying.  Eaten with eyes half-closed in reverence. If life is kind, you eat malpua with a thick helping of dense, flavorful, cool sweet rabdi. Stupid day still but it made me think of something nice. So now it is a sweet, stupid day. 

 First, there was the poem, Thinking' by Danusha Lameris. Don't you wish they would stop, all the thoughts swirling around in your head, bees in a hive, dancers tapping their way across the stage? I should rake the leaves in the carport, buy Christmas lights. Was there really life on Mars? What will I cook for dinner? I walk up the driveway, put out the garbage bins. I should stop using plastic bags, visit my friend whose husband just left her for the Swedish nanny. I wish I hadn't said Patrick's painting looked "ominous." Maybe that's why he hasn't called. Does the car need oil again? There's a hole in the ozone the size of Texas and everything seems to be speeding up. Come, let's stand by the window and look out at the light on the field. Let's watch how the clouds cover the sun and almost nothing stirs in the grass. Next, there was the delectable poha that my cook makes.I find Maharashtrian poha to be the best, especially made with potat...

It's like the deep cells in your body and your gut don't know that the year has changed. That there ought to be fresh resolve. If not fresh resolve, then at least a fresh set of angst. But no. It's a continuum. The constriction one felt in the past comes along.  Sometimes I marvel at this stubbornness of ache. There's a line in Ernest Hemingway's, 'Old Man and the Sea'. It's a favorite line of mine. When the old man is trying to reel in the fish but the fish won't give in. The old man ceases his struggle for a bit and admires the fish's tenacity. He is taken in with the strange nobility of the fish. The line goes, "There was no panic in his fight." That's a gorgeous sentiment. Anyway, that's what I am thinking about the faint soupbof anxiety, dread and ennui I have been feeling since a few months now.  Well, a worthy adversary is still something to be thankful for.

 You see the sweet, cuddly depiction of Winston Churchill in 'The Crown' and almost forget his role in the Bengal famine of 1943 - a famine that occurred in the year when rain levels were higher that average, when Bengal produced enough to feed the entire region, and a famine that caused close to three million deaths.  My father tells me stories of the famine. He tells me of the time when poor and hungry people stormed to the Park Hotel where the British and the elite were still wining and dining...but they stopped at the gates. Even under the provocation of fatal hunger, even as a mob, they wouldn't storm into place and claim food because it was not 'their place'. This word ' aukaat ' in Hindi - I don't know what the closest word in English is for it - it's not caste or status...it's this unalterable place in life - that no matter what happens, you don't get to move out of your groove. Your children don't. Generations after you don't...

 Lots to say but it's past midnight and I just warmed up my tea. So there's that to get through. I ate a roti rolled up with a slice of cheese and strawberry jam. Ate a bowl of spicy potato topped with daal and some thetcha. I love thetcha. Thetcha is a Maharashtrian chutney made with spicy green or red chillies, salt, and garlic. These are the basic ingredients but there are some slight variations. I love this a lot. My favourite way of having this is with hot rice and ghee.  Speaking of chutneys and powders, there are so many varieties you find in Gujarati and South Indian households. I like the nutty, spicy and savoury ones that one generally has with rice, rotis, idlis, dosas, etc. But they can be smeared on bread in a pinch or even used as a dry rub marination. I have given up non-veg but my friend, who's from Hubli originally but is now in Bangalore, has a pudi (powder) which has cumin, curry leaves, tamarind, chillies, hing, and a few other things that are divine. My...

 Things that happened today: 1. I saw a kite and a crow at my window-sill when I woke up. 2. Unboxed my first box of books from Bangalore. I still haven't installed all the shelves in that bookshelf (couldn't manage). But stacked whatever I could. 3. Watched AK vs AK. Really enjoyed it other than Anurag Kashyap's alarmingly stolid performance. Why? It's quite disconcerting. One of the things that has always blown me regarding Anurag Kashyap's movies, right from Black Friday and a pirated copy of his first unreleased film 'Paanch' was how superb he was with casting. And he works with such blazing talent...I couldn't fathom why he thought he would be good here? It's another matter that Anil Kapoor raises the bar ye high. He is fantastic. Still. In a movie with Anil Kapoor, if YOU are the one who is hamming, it's a surreal alternative universe. Anyway, as movies about movies go, this one is quite a delight. I don't think comparisons with Bowfing...

 Make of this what you will.