Heads you win, tails, I lose!

Every day that I am in Court or anywhere outside the house, unfailingly, the phone rings. At least once, sometimes twice, sometimes more often. Its one of my two daughters hitting the panic buttons…breathlessly she says “Ma I am home, I got a C in geography, and I need a box of glass paints in the evening.” I look serious, I try to keep the smile in my voice as I tell them okay and I’ll discuss this when I am home and hang up. Only to have the phone ring again, “Ma, Ma, I have a history and science test tomorrow, Ma can I not have the fish?” “Ma can I have coke?” another voice pipes in! You get the drift.
Now I guess it’s my fault. When they were small, it seemed a sensible idea to have them call when they came home from school. It still is, but sometimes I cannot take the call because I am in the middle of arguments or something and then God help you, they keep calling and the damn phone is vibrating in your pocket like there is no tomorrow and you want to throw the buzzing thing out of the window but you grin and bear it. So as soon as I can, I call the girls. “Its okay, we spoke to Baba.” Grrrowl. After giving me ten missed calls!
When they were younger it was worse. Especially when they had holidays. The phone rings. Whenever it was from home I made it a point back then to drop everything and take the call. I rush out of the courtroom, the phone has stopped ringing and call back. “Ma, a voice asks me breathlessly, “can I wear the pink pants today?” Sigh.
It went on to at least eight phone calls in the seven or eight hours I was out of the house. And my husband started muttering about the phone bills. So I sat them down and explained what is an emergency. And when one should call. I called them aside and gently explained how what colour track pants they wore was not an emergency, how a “Bob the Builder” show was not an emergency and I really didn’t care that the box of chalk had fallen behind the piano.
They nod wisely and I think that is that.
So, next time I get a call, a sing song voice tells me “Ma I’m not saying this is an emergencery but can I eat the chocolate cake in the fridge?”
What do you do? What does any mother do, but tear her hair out in frustration?
Now things are comparatively better. Only I cannot always participate in my daughter’s excitement when they come home. Like yesterday, Isha returns from school and calls. She is very excited that she is one of the girls chosen to give an interview to some newspaper about some interactive session they had. She is over the moon with delight I look at the four dead pan faces of my clients staring at me and in a flat monotone I assure her that I will look into the matter and hang up before she can wail.
Later, much later, “Ma, why aren’t you happy for me? I am soooo excited.”
So I explain that I was working and of course I’m excited but I can’t actually jump for joy at my workplace where every body maintains the demeanor of a stuffed cow and I think she understands.
Today she comes home and calls. She’s got her choir badge (whatever that is) and she ‘looooves it’ and is ‘sooooo excited’, and she has no tests the whole of the next week! I look around me, there’s no one nearby. “Heyyyyyyy,” I say. “I am so excited!” I say in a sing song voice and ask her how her day was.
Silence. Then, ”Maaaa, why are you talking so much? Get back to work,” she says and hangs up!
It’s a no win situation, right?

A book

Finally, something I have dreamed of.
http://frogbooks.net/frog-books-leadstart-virgin-leaf-poolani/a-sliver-of-moonbeam/

A few words on a current fashion trend!

I saw so many panties yesterday!!!!
But first things first. Last night we went for the KKR inaugural match at Eden Gardens.
We had tickets for the box at the stadium and went there with happy expectations of rubbing shoulders with the likes of SRK and Juhi Chawla. Predictably, they were in another box. In the second half, stuffed with snacks and cold drinks and after a lovely dinner we decided to go and sit with the mango people and sip of the atmosphere. Only this wasn’t the real mango people, after all this was the Club House so it was actually the young wannabes of Calcutta. There was of course little or no relation to the game being played on the pitch. In front of us sat a bunch of young girls who apparently must have inspired that ‘Queen’ song, “fat bottomed girls”….all were in hipsters and tiny tight t-shirts that kept riding up giving us an ample view of panties of every style, make and colour! One even said ‘sexy girl’ or something equally horrible in pink!!!! My husband was wide eyed. Only the bums were too huge, “no aesthetic value,” he insisted! I wanted to reach out and pull down some t-shirts…or hitch up some pants. During lulls in the game I made it a point to see how many more panties I could see. Red, blue even psychedelic yellow!!!! Reminded me of this time I went to the bookstore and saw this young girl squatting over a book in the corner. I was shocked to see half her bum and gently told her to go to a sofa!
Mother hen? Interfering? Old fashioned? Whatever.
Don’t they make high risers in jeans any more? I shudder to imagine my girls in outfits like that in public. And its not as if SRK or some equally delectable male was watching! This was for the entertainment, amusement and shock value of middle-aged people (like me) and the Calcutta cops! And or course it doesn’t matter if you look like the back side of a buffalo, you have to drape yourself in tight material that looks as though it’s bursting at the seams. This trend has developed in Court too, unfortunately. Tight black trousers clinging at the wrong places, short white shirt tail hanging outside an equally tight black waistcoat teamed up with shapeless chappals or sandals, with or without heels and yes, you’re a law intern!!!! Hallelujah, don’t these women have any sense? I know in the West they wear trousers no matter how fat they are, but then in the West they don’t have options like salwar kameezes dahling!
Please fat girls (unfortunately I am talking about young girls here, not one a day over 24 or so….) take a look at your backside before exposing it to the world….cover it with a t shirt or something and for God’s sake don’t go to work looking like a sixties wannabe sex siren!!!!
And this applies to all my daughters too. When your bum gets too big for those jeans, I’m going to tell you so! I don’t want the world to see your panties.
You see I’m your old fashioned mother who believes that inner wear should stay where it belongs. Inside.

Mind your own business!!!!

There’s a gigolo (lets call him X) who lives across the road, as you walk down our staircase, you can look into his bedroom, if you care to. There is a huge LED TV that dominates the wall opposite and although the rest of the house looks a ramshackle mess, one can see that the bedroom is pretty swanky. And this is no ordinary gigolo mind you, you won’t find him at street corners, he only goes on assignments for select people, I hear he is doing very well, that’s what the neighbours say and judging from his clothes and stuff, I see no reason to disbelieve them.
So today as my husband got into the car to come to court in the morning, he said “what a life, X is lying in bed at ten in the morning, watching Channel V.”
“after all he works all night, he has a tough life”.
A grimace. And a tiny hint of a smile.
My husband is getting used to me, I thought to myself, earlier, he would’ve ranted and raved and gotten on his moral high horse. But my point is simple….X is otherwise well behaved, when we run into him very very occasionally, he always speaks respectfully and nicely. Can I ask for more? Does my extremely limited interaction with him allow me to ask for more, or be judgmental about him? After all, his livelihood allows him to support his elderly widowed mother and unmarried sister… we all have our crosses to bear.
Like the friend we have, at one point of time, he was sleeping with one woman and seeing another out of town while being married to a sweet naïve girl who thought the sun shone out of his backside, (yes, she got a rude shock when she finally realized that the sun was no where near his ass!). My husband was visibly upset…..”your friend,” he ranted, ”immoral, unethical, dishonest….”.
“Hold it,” I said, “as far as I am concerned, it is none of my business. I’m not married to him, I do not plan to live with him….so what do I care? It’s his private life.”
My husband did not understand how I could stand it. Just like the other guy I knew who was having a torrid love affair with his wife’s own sister! Or the other lady we had occasion to run into, who wasn’t sure who the father of her son was, so her son had no less than four birth certificates, each with the name of a separate father!!!!! Or even that other married friend who sleeps with anything that moves just because its there….or the one who got upset because her husband wanted to know where she was going at 11:30 at night!!!!
Well, what can I say? Save that I have been fortunate to know all kinds of people and one reason why I do know them is because I have never been judgmental or superior. Its your life, your business. What do I care how you choose to conduct yourself or your life…as long as I don’t have to do the same? And who knows, who really knows, what the compulsions are. Ask the prostitute and she’ll tell you how she has to work to put her daughter to school. Ask the wife and she will tell you about her husband who beats her black and blue each night that he comes home drunk, ask the other woman and she will tell you how she was sexually abused by her own brother and her mother refused to believe her. I know, these are extreme cases but who wants to hear the reasons and justifications, valid or not? We have friends who I know are having affairs. Hell, I know their partners, one is a creep who makes your skin crawl, the other one is an out and bastard constantly pretending to be someone he is not, another one’s in laws are so dominating, she’s better off outside the house than in! And how does it matter to anyone else what anyone else does? Unless it’s your husband that woman is sleeping with, of course. (But even then I think I will ask my husband before I accuse the girl.)
Its so easy to sit on a high moral horse and be certain that you will never do anything wrong. That’s what most people like to do….they look at each other in alarm and whisper about so and so who did such and such….never once realizing and tomorrow they may be in those shoes. Why, I do not have so much confidence in myself. Who’s to say that tomorrow someone may not sweep me off my feet and I may be ready to leave a stable happy family to follow a dream? Would I do it? Honestly, can I say? Can anyone say what each of us go through except the person who is going through it? We hear of someone having a fling…..immediately we turn holier than thou and “concerned”….we want the dirt, we want to give our opinion, we want everyone to know that “no ya, its something I’d NEVER do”. Well, never say never dear. That apart, why not just let things be?
I hate the hypocrisy, I hate the judgments, I hate the ‘holier than thou’ lectures that are more fake than those glow-in-the-dark stars in my daughters’ bedroom …..can we have less opinions please?
Can we mind our own businesses, the world would be such a better place if we all could do each other that little favour!
And can you now go back to work and let me get back to mine?

Music and perfume...

It is strange that the mind will forget so much and yet keep alive a memory of flowers that have been dead for thirty years or more.
Garden fresh gardenias, fragrant, pristine and white.
You could not help falling in love with its delicate fragrance as it spread across the room while I played the piano and my father stood and watched, listening to what I hoped was music. Ah, but it was, he loved whatever tuneless thing we played. He always said that when he would turn old, he would lie in bed and listen to the twinkling of the piano as we played in the next room. In his dreams the piano twinkled merrily undaunted by the fact that my pianist skills were abysmal.I did not know then, that the music he heard, had nothing to do with the movement of my fingers on the keys, it came from his heart...had I known, maybe I would've paid more attention to my piano lessons!!!!!!
Baba loved music and flowers. In the garden and on our terrace, we had every kind of flower and these were not only the pretty yellows, oranges and pinks, although we had a lot of those too. The flowers of my childhood were those that assaulted your senses: there was the innocuous yellow champak, spreading its bitter sweet tang in the air, the hashnuhana, also called queen of the night as it bloomed at night with its heady and intoxicating smell; the white lotus that dared call out to the girl in me so sometimes yes, even I, would give in to its charms and weave a necklace out of its tiny stars; the night jasmine, heralding the autumn after the rains, one whiff and you knew that the air was going to go cooler and the holidays were approaching. My childhood is a cacophony of colours, sounds and smells. I used to love going for a walk in the night, the fragrances teased us into our dreams and stayed with us when we grew up, so much so that now I cannot pass a white lotus tree without being assailed by memories…….memories that tumble like snakes from a jar , memories vivid and dear. Its funny how smell plays such an important part in our lives, the smell of fresh bread, the smell of lamb roasting, the smell of wet earth, the smell of warm sun drenched skin, the smell of a cigar lingering in the night sky, the smell of golden mango blossoms and cinnamon and of course the smell of night flowers. Baba loved gardening, a passion unfortunately I did not share. He personally saw to each plant, each errant strand of ivy and spent his holidays trimming, fertilizing and loving his plants. He hated tuberoses and the smell of incense, it reminded him of death. And yes, it’s a smell even I associate with death. But we learn as we grow that death is as much a part of life as anything else....so it is with incense and tuberoses.
Have you ever swum in a pond or a lake on a golden evening when the sun was just turning into a sunny-side-up orange and a pinkish glow was beginning to take hold of the sky? You sink under the water just to cover your ears and hear the sound of silence, of stillness that has no beginning, of vacuum that has no end. And when you emerge the singing of the crickets can take hold of your senses, even as the wind blows the trees into a restless rustle. The sounds of a fire crackling on a chilly night, the quiet splash of a fish as it lazily turns in the water, the sounds of the birds calling from the thickets, the sound a lonely crow trying to claw its way into our lunch, the silence of the stars on a moonless night, these were the songs of my childhood.
Only I did not recognize the music then, I hankered for walkmans and the radio, I failed to hear the whistle of a full moon as it called from between the clouds. Now sometimes we go on a holiday and I am amazed by the luster and shimmer of these sounds, sitting on a hill in Pune, or on a terrace in Tinchuley, or on a beach in Puri the songs of the full moon fill my mind ending in a crescendo that fills the sky leaving a wail in the air. A sunset on the hills or at sea can burst like a fugue upon my senses and there is something so plainly refreshing in the golden adagio of a sunrise……….
Having appreciated these subtleties of my childhood so late in life, I am of course trying to inculcate a love for the same in my immediate family. My husband frankly thinks I am crazy; I once managed to get him to accompany me for a swim in a pond in a full moon night but he is immune to the charms of a magnolia calling in the night. Surprisingly some of it seems to have rubbed off, for last year I saw him taking impossible-to-capture pictures of the full moon as it played hide and seek between the clouds on a full moon night on his cell phone!!!! I decided not to say anything….after all there’s no point in pushing your luck. As for the girls, I drag them out of bed at odd hours, only to see a half moon galleon singing in the sky luring the stars like a ghostly siren….I wake them in the cold and tell them to just pull a blanket or they’ll miss the whiplash of the rising sun, I call them out to listen to the minuet of the summer evening, to smell the white jasmine to embrace the call of the twilight.
As I get older I realize there is so much I still have to share with them, yes I may have all the time in the world to do it but then again when you think about it, one never really has enough time. As it is, today, holidays are short, too short, often it is spent in a concrete jungle rather than a place where the briar grows dry and mottled and the owls hoot in unison with the crescent moon. And there are barely any gardens where a soul can wander free and unfettered in the shadows of the palm trees waving in the sun.
So will my daughters be able to see these, hear these and treasure the fragrances, or shall they grow to be immune to the opera around them…shall I let them be deadened by school work and studies and responsibilities or can they too enjoy the glow of a lamp quietly reflected on the water in front of them? Shall they know the joys of sleeping under the stars in the open breeze or shall they forever be lulled by the drone of an air conditioner? Shall they ever learn that once you drown out the shrill of voices and noise, there is music in your heart.....and you only have to listen?
I don’t know, but at least I will have tried.

Calcutta Police!

When ever I hear the words “Kolkata Police” an image is conjured in my mind. It’s this big fat man with a protruding belly, dressed in dirty white vaguely gesticulating with his arms. It is an amusing visual. I admit, these days you also sometimes see good looking handsome young sergeants on their bullets but those are too few and too far in between to really count. In the split second of the visual image in my mind, I also tend to think of descriptive words like corrupt, nincompoop, bribe taker all in words that are best not used here. But today here let me try to redeem the image.

Are you surprised? I am. But the other day we were returning from court, it was rather late in the evening, when the rush hour is at its peak. And “rush hour”, as we all know, is a fallacy. It should be called rush hours, because the evening session continues from about 5:30 pm to 8:30 pm each day…maybe longer, depending what part of the city you are in! My husband was driving…we were getting more than a little irritated at the endless stopping and starting and basically trying to reach home without a scratch when we were stopped at a crossing. It wasn’t a big or important crossing, just one of many on Hazra Road. We wanted to turn right. But there was no lane available as cars were jostling each other in an effort to turn the other way on the main road. The lane to our left was chockablock with cars trying to outdo each other and go first. There were cyclists and rickshaws, taxis and autos and buses that stopped to disgorge passengers. There was the hand pulled cart going the wrong way and pedestrians and cars parked on the side. An ordinary crossing, not worthy of traffic lights with typical weekday traffic. And there was a cop. One of the typical representatives of the esteemed Kolkata Police. He did not turn a hair. He smartly got cars moving, stopping one, moving another and yet another and another and did not even blink when a Superior Officer stopped his car, rolled down the window, shouted something at him and moved on. He was patient with the hand pushed cart and even the taxis on the wrong side of the road. He got them moving. He got the bus to get going, he cleared the lane to the right, and to the left, totally looked through the VIP car with the red light and then waved the traffic on. All in all it took about a minute. I turned to my husband, “ you know, given the circumstances, I think he did a terrific job!”
In the recent years, much has been written about the traffic management skills of the Kolkata Police during the Pujas. The past few years, traffic during the Pujas, which used to be horrendous, has improved greatly. The traffic keeps moving and though the going may be slow, you are not stuck in any major jams. But the Pujas are only an annual event for a few days. No one looks at the ordinary cop at every little crossing, the ones who keep the traffic moving on any given day. Like cogs in a wheel they work in unison to keep the balance, unnoticed and unappreciated. We all like to abuse them, or worse, laugh. After all as Arthur Conan Doyle said, there is nothing more unaesthetic than a policeman! But there they stay, day in, day out, rain, hail or shine doing a thankless job so we can go wherever it is we need to go. Yes, some of them are corrupt, much has been written on the corruption of cops, some are brutal and dishonest, many movies have become runaway hits on that theory alone but there are good guys too. Like in every profession. There are guys out there who are only doing their duty…so lets cut them some slack. And next time you see a seemingly helpless looking traffic cop on the road, don’t look at him with utter disrespect, he is one of the good guys who ensures you are home with your family tonight!