The Chasing iamb

Never say Kozhikode unless you want to meet Malayalees. I was on a postage-stamp sized dance floor in Jaipur and made the mistake of yelling a sentence including 'Kozhikode!' across at someone. (Why?Can't remember now) Three ladies leaped at me to mark me as a sister under the skin, since I had got the 'zh' right. The madly hilarious Sarayu Srivatsa, who only a moment previously had decided she was Gama, had gone into a deep wrestler squat and was slapping her thighs... stopped. 'Kutty! Me too!' she screamed.
Behind me I heard another yowl of sisterhood. And there was a leather-jacket wearing stylish woman I had been ogling in the afternoon , cooing 'Kutty! at me. 'Who are you?' She laughed and said, "Jaishree Mishra.'  'Mishra?" "Endu cheyaam?" she sighed. We giggled at  each other and she went away.  Later it was brought to my attention that I had asked Takazhi's granddaughter  whether she was a Malayalee.

In other news, I succumbed to the blitz about Sara Paretsky and bought Total Recall. I am happy to report that it was very satisfying. VI Warshawski is (barring Kathleen Mallory) probably the coolest detective ever. Of course with  Kathleen Mallory, one is told  over and over again that we can't like her. Warshawski, smartalecky, lovely, competent Warshawski is incredibly likeable. The plot is elaborate enough without being convoluted and the writing intelligent without sidelining the mystery.Now I am wondering about the Paretsky essays.

Jyoti Basu, Constructed to Destruct, 2004


Today I enquired whether I could be transferred to Mumbai and I was told that it was possible. Happy. Happy. Happy. All of last week was such wonderful fun. Mumbai is always perfect for me but it never gets better than January in Mumbai. L was like a girl with a new toy. She who has been everywhere and done everything, loved Mumbai so much and so volubly that I felt it was a compliment to me. We ate, walked about,  hopped in and out of taxis as if it were a caper movie. One evening  Dippy Diplomat, baby and husband drove us across Mumbai to a gallery  in Mazgaon. We drove 2 hours for a 20 minute sojourn at a crazy gallery. Crazy-full of Mallus of every shape, size and colour. L and I reeled, recovered and giggled uncontrollably. Then we jumped into another cab and drove to Churchgate to eat croissants.

I want to move now.

In other news I found the Subodh Gupta piece that ARoy was talking about when I interviewed her about male sex appeal. Alright then.

The hills were really alive over the weekend since the office trooped to Uttaranchal for a jaw-jaw.  I have never seen wild flowers before. My irritation at being far away from showers and too close to mud (two spectacular tosses on one morning) was almost eclipsed by simply miles of outrageously showy and coquettish flowers. Did I mention the apple trees and bhang chutney? BB  Bhopali bit into the first apple of the weekend, (plucked straight from the tree as everyone kept saying in a wideeyed manner) and said, "Suddenly I am aware of my nudity." 

There was wild, wild dancing every night and I am sated temporarily. It's Monday night again.

After being lost in Dwarka for aeons Gaya and I managed to get to the Chandni Chowk heritage walk yesterday at 8.30 am. Gaya, her two friends and I were among the few natives taking the tour. The rest were mostly phirangs and NRIs, so the group was in turn a tourist attraction, stopping traffic across Chandni Chowk and earning many droll, eye-rolling comments from the publicks. Two seconds after we joined the group, an elderly white gent turned to me and said something about how he could not hear himself think. I said that it was enough to be semi-conscious and Gaya reprimanded me for being rude. But what's it about some people, that the moment they arrive at places like Chandni Chowk, which they have come, hundreds of miles to see, they run through a thesaurus full of words meaning 'not like home'? (There was once a nice young software engineer who went with me to Laad Bazaar near Char Minar, turned to me in dismay and said, " Oh! I thought it would be like Shoppers' Stop!")

Our guide was not too thrilled by our propensity to wander off to buy food every two minutes. But civilization was not built on an empty stomach and the food in that neighbourhood is irresistible. And if you like your food to have noble pedigree, ooh this is the right place. There was Ghantewala's mithai, oldest sweet shop in Delhi. 1790 is what the sign says. There is also some story that one of the Mughal emperor's elephants was a frequent customer at Ghantewala's and would come to the shop and ring the bell around its neck to be fed.. One of the Americans in the group, whose calorie counter was whirring in his eyes, when he saw the ghee, muttered something about customers turning into elephants. A little past Ghantewala's after we had taken in the sights on the main road we turned into Parathewala gali and did not emerge into sunlight for an hour or so. I want to go back to look at Kinari Bazaar (pretty with yards of tassles and trimmings and beads hanging from every shopfront) and Dariba which has been the place to buy jewellery since the Mughals.And also the lovely Naughara Gali which has a Jain temple, a couple of beautiful havelis draped in vines and flowers, a little performance space where tawaifs danced in better times,  all of which goes back several hundred years. The guide said that the houses are occupied by large Jain families.

Then we were taken to an old haveli where the guide says St.Stephen's college began. Everybody got some strange schadenfreude out of that because the rooms of the haveli are now tiny tailor shops with names like Maa Padmashree .

The guide was strange as I suppose most guides are strange. One rarely reads about the brilliance of guides. If Tony Perottet is to be believed then guides have always been strange, even among the ancient Romans who invented this whole tourism business. My major objection to the chap was his casual prejudices about Muslims, expressed in a banal manner while talking about anything from architecture to language. One of Gaya's friends asked me, do you want him to be as bland and colourless as American guides? I know political correctness is deadening but there really has to be a better alternative to a fairly bright young man, who has the good sense to weave quiet moments into his tour, sounding like an idiot.

The banality of his spiel was useful in one sense. At one moment he was blithely talking of the incredible trials of Guru Tegh Bhadur who was first forced to watched his companions tortured to death and was then beheaded by Aurangzeb. He was uninspiring and the group was standing precariously on two inches of footpath, thinking of lunch or perhaps already planning what to say to people who asked us what the trip was like. It occured to me that this is exactly how historical events happen surrounded by bored people thinking of lunch, too blind to see what is happening in front of their faces.

The guide showed us a library where he said the revolutionaries of 1857 used to meet. Next door was the Imperial Bank, which is now a SBI. When I suggested that they should have robbed the bank, Gaya responded that the presence of a Mallu would have helped the Mutiny quite a bit.

The tour ended in Jama Masjid, where I have been many times before. After the guide left and the group disbanded, four of us walked around in the courtyard. I was thinking of scenes from Black Friday and the sense of desperation and solace that Badshah feels at the Jama Masjid. I have always lacked the necessary equipment to yearn for God, like other people lack a sense of rhythm or colour, but for a couple of seconds I yearned to be young and Muslim and male, kneeling in spotless white with hundreds of others. Then one of the others said something wistfully about congregational prayer. I told her how similiar Jacobite church services are similiar to low-impact aerobics lessons, everyone laughed and the moment was gone.

I I wish Madhulika Liddle had been there. Her Muzaffar Jang, the Mughal detective would have been a blast to have along.

Young man from B'lore told me a year ago, " I am moving to Delhi because I like its elite culture."  I nearly rolled down the steps laughing. At the time I was superior South Indian content to become part of the weed and rot and mud of my wannabe but mostly civilised Bangalore. Here I am now mewling weakly in the Outer Mongolia of Delhi. How did this happen to me?

Many dheergashwasams later I am barely ready to admit that on Saturday I went to a museum and it was rather cool. The National Gallery of Modern Arts to be precise. And it was all rather socialist, subsidised, well-designed and inclined to make one mildly approve of the state. And Moolchandji at the reception is a sweetheart who does not laugh at you when you make contrived bilingual puns while buying prints.

I strongly recommend going off to the NGMA and gazing at the Benodbehari Mukherjee centenary retrospective. Earlier I had dawdled past the SH Raza exhibit, with an expression of subnormal intelligence as I saw painting after painting of The Bindu! I looked around at the four or five other visitors who were staring at the paintings with the too-familiar Insect Woman expression.

(The Insect Woman expression, if you have not heard this one from me before, is the expression people have at cultural events when they do not know whether to be appalled or deeply appreciative and don't want to let on that they are waiting for someone else to bell the critical cat. Origins of this phrase (circa 2000) lie in the incident of 25 bearded men and lionesses looking profoundly stoic after a screening of the Shohei Imamura film Insect Woman. The film had several rather puzzling scenes of incest including one where the female protagonist working in the field soon after childbirth casually asks her father to suck her breasts to make them less swollen with milk. I came out of the movie with my hair standing on end and was then outraged to find that no one, absolutely no one in the lobby would make eye contact, for fear of being asked what they thought of the movie. Hence the phrase.)

So. The Raza exhibit puzzled me as abstract art usually does. Mostly they were outsized canvases with outsized circles in virulent colours and I almost channelled the scornful spirit of my ancestors in Pathanamthitta. Except when a cool one called Bangladesh spoke clearly to me. Then I wished I knew a little more about art.

However, the vast Benodbehari Mukherjee (1904-1980) retrospective (after your run past the Raza with its hypnotic circles) is wonderful and accessible. He seemed like the artistic equivalent of Sai Paranjpe, witty, poignant, observant but very janta.  I thought of Snegum and my other ardent tree-worshipping friends when I saw many of his landscapes. He also has a heart-warming portrait called The Tree-Lover. His portraits are in general very satisfying and so are the paintings from his spell in Japan and Nepal. If you are a philistine like I am, I think he is the artist to start with because he makes you so happy.

The photo exhibit about his life deserves a lingering read as well. His eyesight was damaged when he was a child and he became completely  blind in his fifties. Nevertheless, he spent the last couple of decades of his life working and even inspiring cinematic tribute by Ray in a film called The Inner Eye.

At the exhibition spot this picture of the embryonic artist with his brothers. As they looked at the camera, he looked at them.

That is what a set of complete strangers told me at a farmers' meeting in a village near Itarsi.

I was wildly distracted by the Assamese vet's incomprehensible but incredibly cute accent, the droll things that the Itarsi women were saying and the gossipy visitors from Jhansi. As if this was not enough titillation someone opened a box and let loose twenty yellow chicks in the yard.

And then the advice. I was tremendously amused. Especially since this advice came 45 minutes before the women asked me my name. In a fairly normal sequence of events they bitched about being married themselves and insisted on my getting married right away alternately. All except the most beautiful girl in the group. She was an exquisite, hugely pregnant teenager. I wondered whether her discontent, which i felt was much greater than the others, came from a greater sense of entitlement. Is it universal the feeling that beauties must do well for themselves?

I told Bottle Imp when I got to Bangalore and he wrote a poem about it. So it didn't go all to waste.

Have had a nice fortnight wandering around Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh. Please forgive the serial posting about the trip.

Lucky is a fifteen year old Adivasi boy whom I met in a village twenty minutes from Raigarh. I had been slightly jittery with his mother and the other women in the silk reeling unit which I was supposed to study. With Lucky...we just hung out and he made it possible to do so with sublime confidence. We had several cinematic moments together. His knocking down bunches of imli from a tree for me. Taking me to chat up the old lady who had set up the first chai-shop in the village. We discussed the repercussions of my jumping into the lake where other people were bathing and swimming. We talked about the new movies we had seen. He was a big fan of Hrithik Roshan. He wanted to become a cell-phone repair man in Raigarh. Woh log kam sochte hain, he said about other kids in the village who were not thinking of 'getting out' like he was.

When we walked around the village in the afternoon, I remembered P Sainath's contempt towards journalists who insist on calling villages 'sleepy'. For the first time I understood why they do so. The absolute silence in the streets and lanes is something we city folks associate with siesta, nocturnal rest and sheer inactivity. Having just stepped out of a house, which seemed dead or abandoned from the outside, I knew that inside a man and woman were cooking lunch, cleaning house, washing clothes and talking quietly.

I know kittens are now ok to write about in lj according to the new rules. Unfortunately I did not have a camera so I do not have photographs of the kitten that stalked a butterfly in the backyard while I sat on the khatiya with Lucky. He sketched vines and flowers and offered me random thoughts about life.

At some point though I had to return to the adults and I did so regretfully. To avoid being the pesky, perky, intrusive NGO woman I offered no advice and asked no questions that would offend someone I had met on the train. However Bamadevi and her friends had no such inhibitions. For most part they allowed me to just sit and listen to them chat about their work and their self-help group. I looked appropriately serious and did not laugh even when I saw that someone had scrawled Himesh Reshamiyya lyrics on the wooden rafters. When they turned their attention to me I replied with general friendliness but was not my usual daftly chatty self. Good thing too because there was a strange tension in the air in that particular group. Hostility towards strange NGO women is only normal under the circumstances so I did not react even when one woman took the first-day-in-college type ragging to a new level with some potential for violence. She said she would take away my silver chain if on my next visit I did not bring them all some sweets. I watched my breath and continued to smile in a moronic manner.

The cool Assamese vet in the team was supposed to pick me up from the village but after a while I abandoned hope of rescue. I imagined never being able to get out of the village in a chattisgarhi version of a Shirley Jackson short story. Eventually he turned up and took me to another village where the cheerful sixty year old head of a poultry-producers' cooperative and I made noises about the general uselessness of men. Sangfroid restored, my babysitter led me to chai and samosas back in Raigarh. On the ride back through the forest Satyendra and I argued about whose Hindi was worse. Wearing the same kind of clothes that the other men in the office wore he managed like every other man of his clan to look cool and stylish. Mostly as we whizzed down the empty road I speculated about the hairy moment in the village and whether I had imagined it.