All it took was a knock. It was as if the door was waiting for that knock. Anyone who knocked at that exact moment would have been let in. Waltzing in, grand and majestic, was the oppressing feeling of fear. The air in the room grew dense as if sinking to its feet, incapacitated. The carefully cultivated silence wilted in a corner under the dry heat of the ringing in her ear.
She was at the desk, seated on the chair, reading. The chair was the only friend the desk had made. They were very unlike each other but they were inseparable. As they sat with their legs intertwining, basking in the warm smile of the table lamp, they knew that their friendship was central to her reading habit. She always read here, leaning back on the chair, her legs tucked away under the table, careful not to leave footmarks on the white walls beyond.
As fear walked in, she stood up to face it, as if expecting it. But, as if in a spell, her head bowed involuntarily, her courage slipping out through her ears. She felt the heaviness in the air stretch her lips into a frown, force tears out of her eyes and sobs through her lips. It felt like she along with fear were being sealed and dropped into the vast, endless ocean. She was not wet but she could sense the water right outside her window. It was dancing coyly around her window, making friends with her walls. Greenish blue water, light and dense at the same time, rippling all the way to the horizon.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BLyQCqaAwiu
She loved the water, she always had. She was a water baby. But this was different. It had taken her a decade to build this room for herself to sit in. She had saved up money, learned about construction and built it brick by brick. But floating in water, this room was not a buoy, it was her prison. She had no money. She worried about how she would buy things. What would she wear? How would she feed her unborn children? What would she read? Yes, she had built the room with the idea that she would sit in here and read to her heart’s content. Even though she’d never had money, having ground beneath her feet had kept fear at bay.
If she got out of this room now, which direction would she swim in and for how long? And what would happen when she tired?
Gliding down the gurgling spiral of fear, outdoing herself, she had forgotten one tiny detail. The luxury this predicament afforded her. She could reread all her books. She could spend time with fear, get to know it better, appreciate its magnetism. She could watch the ocean all day from her window. Amid the chaos of spiralling, she had not stopped to consider the absurdity of her doubts. Why would she have to feed her unborn children?
https://www.instagram.com/p/BMOxuVDgKfV
The ocean is a living being that breathes in waves. Eventually, it always heads to a land to entertain the beach bums. And if she were in fact to be consumed by the ocean, wouldn’t that be the end of fear as well?
She opened her eyes and sniffled, recalling all the shed tears and straightening out her mouth. She offered fear some tea and leaned back in her chair to reread her favourite book.
She laughed like a child, without inhibition. Her open-mouthed laugh baring teeth and the pink palor of her tongue was endearing. And in that moment, everyone watching her turned believers. They believed that the joy in her laughter was permanent. They believed that life was joyous moments strung together. They believed that sadness was an impossible myth. Everyone who saw her laugh was sure that they were in the exact place they were meant to be. They did not question. They did not complain. They let the pleasant feeling of being sprinkled with stardust wash over them. They surrendered to the transient feeling of contentment.
I found it strange that no one, ever, not even once, had stopped to think what it was like to watch her cry. Well, when I saw her laugh, that was my first thought.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BMJD7IKAumN/
She had been like this forever, laughing only in public and crying only in private. But no one had noticed. When the first sob left her lips, she had tried to ignore it. Accounted for it, first under periods, then under stress and finally under L for loser. When the sobs grew louder, loud enough to echo, she trained herself to purse her lips and swallow the sobs. Swallowing a sob is not for amateurs. It made her sad, mad and then more so. And she ended up crying some more. But when all the sobs were eaten and the tears wouldn’t stop, she decided to experiment on how to make things better. Soon, she noticed that decadent food made her cry less. She cooked all the world’s finest food in her kitchen and ate it too. While she ate, she felt great. Her cheeks stayed dry as long as they were full. She felt as if a hole inside her was getting filled. But eat as she may, that hole never filled all the way to the top. Sometimes, she would have to stop eating from not being able to breathe. Another trick to dry her tears was to watch TV. Television sent her flying into an imaginary land where she was forbidden from crying. A world where everyone wore wonderful clothes and no one was ever unhappy.
No one ever saw her cry. She cried alone in her room, standing expressionless in front of her mirror, eating her dinner or cleaning her bathroom. She cried quietly, the only outward indication being the overflow down her cheeks. It was a steady flow of clear liquid, compromising the downward turn of her mouth, falling down the top of her dress, outlining the heave of her breasts and puddling at her feet. When they had puddled a while, they flowed outward, along the natural slope of the room, across her floor and out the door. Though they hesitated momentarily on the stairs, wondering what it would be like for tears to be seen flowing down the street, they cascaded down the stairs, one step at a time like sobs that now did not exist.
No one noticed the tears flowing down the street being joined by other streams of tears. There were many tears like hers but they all sat crying locked up in their own rooms.
Can you imagine a world where all these tears would get together and skip rope? Skip rope till they grew out of breath and all they could keep track of was the rhythm of their skip. When the tears mixed with the nascent sweat on their indoor skins, their heart would beat all over their being. Tears and laughter would step aside for perseverance to pass through every inch of the body, aware only of the muscles shaking off its lethargy. In that moment, everyone watching them would cease to exist and the only truth would be the resilience of their bodies.
I am not someone who talks to my smartphone. Wait, I do talk to my smartphone like how I talk to my pressure cooker and sometimes to my books and plants. Analogously. So let me rephrase that. I don’t talk to the virtual assistant on my smartphone. So it had never occurred to me that your smartphone too could be prejudiced against women because arguably it’s more likely to be created by a man.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BMOxrZOgyvz
Imagine a day when you are shopping online and your virtual assistant says, that dress is totally asking for it!
OR When you mark a parlour appointment in your calendar and it says, please revise this appointment, who will make dinner for your family?
OR When you are chatting with your girl friend and it says, that girl needs to have a baby!
Well, I don’t need another voice in my head and I hope that day never comes.
Leah Fessler studies the responses of virtual assistants Siri, Alexa, Cortana and Google Home to sexual harassment by their users. Some response is positive, some coy and some don’t understand. But they rarely say Stop harassing me!
The writer looks into what makes these bots the way they are. And the study shows the “acceptable standards” of what constitutes sexual violence against women and how technology is perpetuating our deep-seated sexism. There is an opportunity here for technology to save the day. And I sure hope they take it.
Tech companies could help uproot, rather than reinforce, sexist tropes around women’s subservience and indifference to sexual harassment. Imagine if in response to “Suck my dick” or “You’re a slut,” Siri said “Your sexual harassment is unacceptable and I won’t tolerate it. Here’s a link that will help you learn appropriate sexual communication techniques.” What if instead of “I don’t think I can help you with that” as a response to “Can I fuck you?” Cortana said “Absolutely not, and your language sounds like sexual harassment. Here’s a link that will explain how to respectfully ask for consent.”
When the news of the actress being kidnapped in Kerala first came out, the reactions from the older men in my immediate family was as expected.
One said, it must be staged. They (including the actress) must all be in on it.
The other said, why did she have to travel that late at night, all by herself? What was this “work” that could not wait till tomorrow?
Yet another said, this actress, she is known to be “that type”, no?
https://youtu.be/UMyC-W969ZQ
On Sunday, the Association of Malayalam Movie Artists (AMMA) held an event in solidarity with the assaulted actress. At this event, Mammootty administered the oath to protect our womenfolk and make Kerala safe for women. In his 1995 movie The King, the same Mammootty as Joseph Alex IAS famously delivered the ‘sense, sensibility, sensitivity’ dialogue. The same dialogue that ends with him pulling close his subordinate by her raised hand (Vani Vishwanath‘s character) and saying, I know how to make sure you never raise your hand at another man, but after all you happen to be just a woman. On most days, I would sweep the irony of this under the rug. But not today. In his speech he said, masculinity is not in making a woman surrender, a man’s job is to protect a woman. I would like to say to the world at large, I don’t need your protection. What I need from you is to respect me enough to let me be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C85Uv6hcgf8
What if it had been me? Would my family have reacted the same way? Maybe not within my earshot. Beyond it they would have said, I told you so. They would blame my mother for how I was brought up. Because clearly they weren’t a part of that. They would have blamed the principal of my school for she showed us how to be independent. They would blame the hip, city college I attended though it was regressive enough to put Victorian morality to shame. They would blame everything. The books I read. The company I keep. The man I married.
Once when I refused to be dropped off to some place and wanted to drive myself there, I was told there is no need to be such a feminist. Every time I leave home to catch the train back to Bangalore I routinely get asked if I have forgotten my dupatta. And every time, I pretend not to have heard to avoid a scene as I leave. When extended family wants me to have a baby, it’s always a boy first and then a girl. I am also the one who needs to have a child “to be tamed”.
I stopped taking buses in Kerala when bus travel became nerve-wracking with abuse. When people breathed down their fake outward morality on me, I stopped interacting with them. When they began polluting the air I breathe with their obsession for perverse sexual violence and their abuse of little girls in icecream parlours and otherwise, I made myself a home far away in the trees. A place where I could think for myself. A place where I could filter the information I receive. In Malayalam we call it kannadachu iruttakkuka, meaning to close your eyes to make it dark. Recently I read something about sociological works arguing that women’s migration from Kerala is not only a strategy to escape patriarchy but to come back with a better means to fight it. From my safe space here I write, mostly to assert my sanity than to change the world.
https://www.instagram.com/p/4KOtlZJYd1
In 2015, T & I drove across India over 40 days. We took turns driving, though T drove more because he loves driving. To me, driving is just a chore, something I know to do like cooking dinner. I chose the most exciting terrain to drive like Zoji-La pass in Leh where it was snowing, the expanse of the Agra-Delhi expressway, the Nilgai-studded highway to Kutch and the beautiful Bombay-Pune highway.
We were entering Kargil and daylight was fast depleting. T was driving. From Pathankot, three of our friends had joined us for the trip up to Ladakh. So, in the car we were four women and one man. When we came up to one of the army barricades where we had to prove our identity and the identity of the vehicle we were driving, I, along with my cousin, stepped out. We headed to a tent by the side of the road where a couple of men stood huddled around two officials, all peering at a ledger. The army official, on seeing us, called us out of turn. Madam, are these your vehicles’ documents? Yes. Is there a man with you? Huh? He needs to come to complete this formality. We tried resisting. You mean, you want the man in the car to come and show you the same documents that I am showing you right now because he is a man? Yes madam, we don’t take documents from women especially if there is a man travelling with them. But I also drive this car. That doesn’t matter Madam. This is for your own safety.
End of story. We had reached a no-go situation. My cousin who is Hindi-speaking and more outspoken than me, went at them for while. We were both fuming but there was nothing more we could do if we wanted to enter that army-protected area. We gave in. Well, this is not an inspirational story. As I write this the frustration from that day returns with alarming force. On most days I like my situation in life where I choose how I want to live my life. And then there are days like these.
Everything good that you learn should start from families and in schools. Fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, teachers and students should know how to live their own life the way they want without dictating how another person should live theirs. Maybe that’s what we need to teach our kids. Respect. For self and others.
I have never been excited by the ocean. It could be because it’s always been in my backyard. I could go whenever I wanted though I have few memories from my childhood of being at the beach. There is also the Indian mentality of not getting into the water. Until I visited Unawatuna beach in the south of Sri Lanka and swam in the ocean, going to the beach was always an unnecessarily hot and boring activity. In my family, you went to the beach to “feel the wind”. “Kaatu kollan” best is apparently Kozhikode beach.
I’ve never actively thought about it till now, but I might be a mountain person. Mountains are a challenge. A challenge that me with my abused lungs, asthma and bodyweight find super hard to master. Two years ago a couple of us drove to Yelagiri over the weekend; a tiny hill station 160 kms south east of Bangalore. There we trekked up stone steps for maybe 30 minutes and I was done. Panting and out of breath, my lungs were breathing fire. It felt like someone was pushing down a massive weight on my shoulders. Of course I made excuses for taking breaks including the juvenile one that I was waiting for the other friend who had trouble climbing. We still laugh about that. An hour or so into it, when it grew dark and started raining hard, I was the happiest to return. That must have been a max of 800-1000 metres.
https://www.instagram.com/p/ia7xs5JYba
Walking and swimming aren’t challenging activities to me. I enjoy both and can do them endlessly. Once, in Gokarna, we walked some 17 kms along the beach in a day. We got up early, walked out of our stay and just kept walking. When the sun beat down on us too hard, we got into the water to cool down. When we got hungry, we stopped by one of the many shacks by the beach and had our fill. When there was an opportunity to people gaze, we plonked on the sand and did just that. We beach-hopped from Gokarna to Kudle to Om. We could have kept going if the day was longer.
Though I don’t like to leave the house on a regular day, I would like to believe that I am an outdoorsy person. I love being in nature, sweating it out and being under the cool shade of giant trees among the chatter of birds. It is precisely this romanticism got me hiking in South Korea. And of course Crossfit, the fitness regime that changed my outlook to life. In our 20 days in South Korea, we completed four treks. And I was blown away that I was physically able to do it. And for that I have Crossfit to thank. It’s the trainers there who taught me to push myself. Not to give up when breath becomes laboured. That the human body can take a lot more exertion than we are used to on a regular day. Crossfit taught me that when you think the climb is going to kill you, it’s just your brain messing with you. Keep on going on.
Bukhansan: It’s a fortress on a mountain that serves as the border of Seoul and it’s still heavily guarded. The path is clearly laid out with steps here but you are not allowed to take pictures towards the city. This day hike is best for people who enjoy surveillance.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BL2MpjEguYE
Seoraksan: We stayed in a windmill-themed lodge in Sokcho on the foothills of the Seoraksan mountains. We took the easiest trekking route that took us through two waterfalls before climbing up to a viewpoint. Since Seoraksan is to the north, though it was early October, the leaves were turning and it was beautiful. Trekking is a popular activity in South Korea and you will see many senior citizens, mostly older women (called Ajummas), climbing up nimbly in gaggling groups with packets of orange and Soju. The good thing about crowds in Korea is that they don’t litter.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BMGZ0WPAWXe/
Hallasan: Located on Jeju island, Hallasan is a dormant volcano. Access to the upper reaches of this mountain is restricted. There are endless steps built onto the cliffside of this mountain and you just keep on climbing. The winds are strong and the scenery is breath taking. You get to see little hills called oreums, made when the Mt. Hallasan erupted millions of years ago. When the mountain plateaus out before the mid-way shelter, we were told that we were the last ones on the property and we had little time to get back down. The downhill was an eerily silent descent broken only once by a toy-sized cargo train from the shelter that offered us a lift!
https://www.instagram.com/p/BMJEx7fg0fI
Our best climb in South Korea was in the company of one of my old friends from college, Thressy Maxwell. From Busan, we took a bus to Okpo and onward to Gujora beach in Geoje. Late October being off-season, the streets were silent, most services were shut and the atmosphere was perfect. We bought her favourite fried chicken and climbed up a bamboo forest to reach a sort of a tiny fortress with a view of two beaches. We had lunch there, just the three of us, shared stories and found a different path to walk down. I will always remember that place when I think of Thressy and of Korea.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BMOxuVDgKfV
Looking forward, 2017 intends to be the year I get fitter than I am right now. And one of the big motivators is a secret desire I’ve been nursing since I read Vasudhendra’s Mohanaswamy. To climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Thank god I have friends who think it’s a good idea and are ready to indulge me. It’s a tall order even for a fit person because of the high altitude and the low temperatures. Not to mention that I have the lung capacity of a week-old balloon. And Kilimanjaro is a dormant volcano that takes a week to climb. And as of today I know nothing more about it.
Let’s just say that’s how challenges are born and accepted. There will always be a way to make it happen. There is a story about Vararuchi in Eithihyamala. He and his wife are on the road (deshadanam). When each of their babies are born he asks if they have a mouth. And he asks his wife to abandon them because the gods who gave the child a mouth will also find a way to fend for them. Africa trip is not till October. I have over six months to prepare. Though I am not religious, my faith is based entirely on the naive belief that the powers that be will not put me in situations I cannot handle.
Jackfruit. Chakka in Malayalam. It’s one of the few things left in this world that can bring a smile to my Grandmum Grumpy Face. Gmum where G stands for grumpy, has had enough of this world as she reminds us multiple times a day. But present her with the prospect of a jackfruit-related activity and she perks up like a politician seeing a TV crew.
It was no wonder then that the talk of this hallowed jackfruit began the minute I got home. Never mind that I had bought an exorbitant air ticket at the airport and waited all day to board this late evening flight. Never mind that I got home well past her bed time. And never mind the minor detail that the occasion for this emergency visit was my father being hospitalised. All she could talk about was the jackfruit.
She talked persuasively about the possibility of me looking into the plucking of the said jackfruit. It’s like the art of persuasion was child’s play to her. I don’t know how she does it. She never once asked if I would do it. But in the end I found myself in the mid-morning sun, staring up at the jackfruit tree, armed with a cane pole.
The night before Mission Jackfruit, she hunted down specific aluminum vessels of varying sizes for the much anticipated jackfruit disembowelment proceedings. Meticulous as she is, she had counted the number of fruits on the tree, called plavu in Malayalam. And there were 48. Guess Douglas Adams got the number wrong after all.
When the day of the jackfruit killing dawns, the excitement is palpable. Three of us, minions at her bidding, have emboldened her efforts. We are in a trance. Now she is shooting out commands faster than a machine gun. And now we are running around, willing ourselves to run for cover but involuntarily being efficient. We are mavericks prepping ourselves to go out into the big bad backyard and battle the plavu for a chakka.
For breakfast, Gmum goads us to fuel up with extra doshas and tea. When we reach the scene, we inspect the fruit hanging way above the rest, at least 15 feet above ground. And without further adieu, Mission Jackfruit, also known as the Chakka Murder of 2017 is underway. Being the only person under 65 years of age, I am entrusted with making the chakka kiss the floor. I have three supervisors, each one lower in rank than the next, with varied opinions on the best technique to tackle the situation. And I thank God for the extra shot of patience I took this morning.
Gmum cheers me on from the sidelines with an age old saying, Pennu Thuninjal Brahmanum Thadukkilla meaning when a woman decides to take action even Brahma won’t stop her. The minute I hit the chakka, my crew springs into action, like a school of piranhas, taking it apart and cooking it multiple ways, leaving behind delicious end products, all within the hour. This crew would make a stellar car stealing company selling spare parts.
If Gmum were a superhero, her wand would put both Spiderman and Harry Potter to shame. It collects sticky jackfruit latex called chakka mulanju. It’s primarily used for sealing pickled mango jars and she’s had it as long as I can remember. And if you wish to rain down the wrath of the Gmum on yourself, I dare you to touch this wand.
All parts of the chakka other than the core and the pokey rind are edible as Gmum has demonstrated time and again. She used to even salt and dry the covering of the seed (tholi), and the stringy covering of the flesh (chauni) and fry them as chips. Not one to waste anything, she would also use the inner layers of the rind in avial.
Chips: As kids we grew up on endless supplies of chakka chips. I still gawk at the price of little packets of these in stores and imagine Gmum suffering a stroke when I tell her its price. Cut off the ends of the fleshy jackfruit segments so that you are left with similar sized pieces. Now make long slices of equal measurement so that they cook evenly. Fry in hot oil and stir till crispy. Then reduce the flame and add salted water. If the flame is high, the oil could overflow and catch fire. Gmum says “kilum kilum” is the sound chips make when they are done. I doubt we will ever get that sound right. And you can buy chakka chips online now.
Moloshyam: Cook the fruit in water with salt, turmeric and chilly powder to taste. When they come together, add a spoon of coconut oil and a sprig of curry leaves. Chakka Moloshyam makes it worth the year-long wait for jackfruit season. This tastes even better when eaten with piping-hot kanji. Variations include adding a paste of coconut and cumin and occasionally shallots.
Mezhukkupuratti: Another simple recipe is to crush shallots, whole red chillies and curry leaves and saute them with the fruit.
Seeds: Chakkakuru added to both moloshyam and mezhukkupuratti make it yummier. But do expect some music from the rear.
Chakka Varatti: If you prefer sweeter things, try chakka varatti which is essentially a jackfruit halwa. Made best with sweet ripened chakka, the flesh is cooked and then ground to a paste. Cook this paste with ghee and melted jaggery on a low flame. Starting with this semi liquid, stir till it darkens, leaves the sides of the vessel and easily forms a ball. Making this sweet is also a good upper arm exercise. This preparation can be stored for a while and be used in chakka adda which is a flat steamed/toasted rice dumpling filled with gooey jackfruit goodness.
Pappadam: Grind cooked chakka to a paste along with cumin, pepper and salt. Spread in circles on cloth and dry in the sun. These can be stored and fried as required.
This is all in a day’s work for Gmum. She is more than half a century older than me but she still does more work in a day than I do in an entire week including crossfit. When we were both younger, I remember how she used to work like a horse from four in the morning to ten in the night; in the kitchen, around the house and in the backyard. Now that she is unable to work like that anymore, she has taken to employment generation for her minions. We are currently considering nominating her for the post of employment minister for the nation. She would give Make In India a boost that no one saw coming. If that’s not available we could settle for head of Vigilance or CBI, for such is her skill in triangulating information from seasoned evaders. Watch this space for more on these appointments.
Note: This was written for TOI’s Write India Campaign (Anita Nair edition). Didn’t make it to the top but it was good practice for when I grow up and become a writer.
How blue is my sapphire? Blue as the sea can be. Sea Blue Stones and Jewelers. PC: Wikimedia
He was the one. I woke up feeling positive. This decision was a long time coming but now it seemed natural. All of us live with our past. All of us allow it to shape our future. But some of us know how to shrug the past. I think that is who I am.
Amma and I were early risers. By 5 am I would be making us tea with milk powder as soon as she had washed the saucepan. No one in our family approved of milk powder. You might as well drink coca-cola, they seemed to think. They refused to believe that milk powder could replace milk though we had no idea where our milk came from. But this was our little secret. I had learned how to make ginger tea with milk powder during my years in the college hostel. Amma had loved it the first time I made it for her and that’s how milk powder made its way into our morning ritual. We now stashed a packet behind the jar that held tamarind, in a dark corner of the store room, away from prying eyes.
As we sipped our milky tea with a hint of ginger, I whispered to Amma, “I am going to marry Manu”. She leaned closer to me, held my arm and smiled. “If that’s what you want, that’s what we will do”. I could see her face cloud over with guilt over my first marriage although that decision was made almost a decade ago. Technically, I had agreed to the arrangement but the pressure they put a 20-year-old through was extraordinary too. While they gave me “time to decide”, they booked the venue, paid the caterers, bought jewelery and printed the cards. It’s a shame young people don’t realise that their grandparents have many last wishes.
For the family I married into, I was never good enough. I wasn’t beautiful enough, didn’t earn enough, didn’t cook well enough, wasn’t obedient enough, wasn’t cultured enough. Well-brought up as I was, I began to toe the line– first his, then his family and finally my parents. It took me 7 years to get out of that marriage. I often wonder what gave me the sense not to have a baby.
I remember the day I walked out. It was a Sunday. He had been watching TV all day and had had breakfast and lunch in front of the box. When he called out for tea, something in me snapped. I think that was my 7-year-old resilience. I was done. I have no memory of what I said standing between him and the TV. All I remember is the noise in the background, “How blue is my sapphire? Blue as the sea can be. Sea Blue Stones and Jewellers”.
There was nothing extraordinary about this ad. A little girl was asking an old man over the counter, a question. He responds with a ring in an open box saying, “Blue as the sea can be”. The camera zooms in to their logo behind him. Fin.
Ordinary as it was, this ad always took me to my dark place. I felt hopeless. Feeling-wise, it was the diametric opposite of how Pears bathing soap made me feel. The smell of Pears soap took me to a cozy place, a memory of bathing in hot water while the rain pelted outside.
I must have hardly been a teenager then. Whenever my parents fought, which was often, they would turn up the volume on the TV to make sure I didn’t hear them. But most parents underestimate their children; forget that children learn everything by watching their parents. Children know the meaning of every note of your voice, every move of your muscle.
The lasting memory from this time of my life still makes me cringe. It’s of a clumsy big girl sitting at the top of the stairs hugging herself. She is crying her heart out in mute. Oblivious, you can hear her parents arguing in the living room. You can hear them over the loud jingle on TV. “How blue is my sapphire? Blue as the sea can be. Sea Blue Stones and Jewellers.”
They are still together, my parents. They are miserable but they are still together. Apparently it was all for me. Their entire adult life has been a charade of staying married than being married. It’s like no one expected marriages to be happy. Everyone was married because they had to be. And no one was divorced because they couldn’t be. So they continue to live in limbo, pickled by antimicrobial words like culture, family, society, status and values.
That’s why happiness was never absolute in my family. It was always a function of something or someone. There was no occasion for you to just be happy. You were happy only if you did something. Or because someone gave you something. Probably why I didn’t recognise happiness when we first met.
Though we worked together, Manu and I had met at a friend’s party where we got talking about jargon at work and our general work woes. “What I really want to do is work in some place like a pet store that’s full of animals”, I said. “Me too”, said he. Before the end of the month, we were spending our Saturdays volunteering at a pet shelter close to his place. Once we wrapped up work, we would head to a roadside tea stall. Since it was Saturday afternoon and I was usually free, if he had errands to run, I would tag along. Afternoons soon turned into evenings and weekends.
When deadlines were due, I usually worked long hours. On one such occasion, when he hadn’t heard from me for almost two weeks, he turned up at home just as I was heading out for a walk. Evening walks soon became our thing. Over two years, we became inseparable.
Now I recognise happiness. Happiness is ordering mint-flavoured ice cream without having to justify myself. Happiness is wearing my most comfortable fashion-retard dungarees and not being scoffed at. Happiness is growing an identity for the first time. Happiness is the lack of expectation; living in the moment. I had all of this with Manu.
If you met Manu in a room full of people, he would be the one chatting up the awkward person in the corner. Sent away to residential school at a very young age, he had grown up to depend on no one. An eerie sense of being capable of anything, emanated from him like radiation. If he was unsure of anything, he didn’t show it. He was always calm as a lake and uncomplicated as a binary.
Never before had a man treated me with such respect. When I mentioned my first marriage to him, it was in passing. We were over at a friend’s place, and he was surprised at my party trick–opening bottles with my bangle. And I said, “I used to be married to an army man”. And that was that. That was the most I had told anyone about my marriage. And he respected that.
I don’t know when he began picking me up but I was now waiting at the end of my road. Feeling footloose, I wondered if I should post my decision on Facebook later. Of course I decided against it. I would not know how to follow it up with a picture, a date, details, anniversaries. I had no patience for baring my life online.
In that fleeting moment, standing in the shade of the giant rain tree on that August morning, I felt joy. The world was not a bad place after all. As if in a vision, it was revealed to me how it all made sense. I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I hoped that when the weight resettled, it would be lighter, shared between us.
“I have made up my mind”, I said, as soon as I got into his car. He turned to me and scanned my face. He knew what I was talking about. We knew it had taken time but we had gotten there. We couldn’t stay away from each other. We both knew that we found peace in each other. We agreed that marriage was the logical next step though we had never spoken about it.
We were not renegades who belittled the institution of marriage. All of us live with our past. All of us allow it to shape our future. But some of us know how to shrug the past. I think that is who I am. With him by my side, I still had faith in the possibility of a successful marriage.
He eased the car onto the side of the road. “Are you sure?”, he asked, holding my hand as his face lit up. Before I could answer, the radio jockey took a break. “How blue is my sapphire? Blue as the sea can be. Sea Blue Stones and Jewellers.”
“Domlur?” she said, hailing down a rather new looking auto. As the automan slowed down and came to halt in front of her, he asked, “Route gotha, madam?” “Yes, yes, I know the route”, she said. It was Thursday and they were in no hurry to get to work. She sent up a thankyou! to the upstairs person for letting her off easy in this May morning sun. Finding an auto at 9 am had the reputation of teaching one patience.
As they got in, the automan was clarifying why he didn’t know the route; he wasn’t from Bangalore. He was from Hassan. His mother had met with an accident and he didn’t have enough money for her treatment. He had rushed to Bangalore and he was now working day and night to save enough to pay for her surgery. They weren’t very talkative but he didn’t seem to pick up on that.
Without a sense of where he was going, he continuously asked her for directions at every turn off the road they were on. He sounded nervous and behaved so too. Time and again, at traffic lights, he would take out an image of Jesus and stare at it. She looked around for the driver’s ID card that’s usually stuck behind the front seat. She found it inserted horizontally on the handlebar– how useless. She tried to remember the details of his face. He had tired sickly eyes, worry lines that sagged his forehead and an unsure gaze. Perhaps unsure of what he was doing in this big city. Or unsure of what the future held.
Soon, he got a call. She found herself hoping it wasn’t some bad news. She was in the habit of expecting the worst so as to be prepared for all eventuality. Once, a long time ago, she had missed a phone call and a friend of hers had turned up dead. When he hung up and turned around to face her, she braced herself for the unthinkable. “My owner”, he said, smiling. The owner of the auto he had hired was calling to check on him and his whereabouts. The hire cost the automan Rs 1000 a day. How much did he have to make a day for this arrangement to make sense, she wondered. Her ride was worth Rs 100 and would take 45 minutes. Damn, how many hours did he work in a day? She quietened down to think it through.
Just before they got to MG road, she was jolted out of her thoughts when the automan tried the latest trend on the roads these days. As vehicles piled up at a red light, he got on to the wrong side of a two-way street via the break in the median in order to get ahead of the line. When she protested, he casually dismissed her, “Thumba jam ithe, madam. You will never get to work”. “Get back in line, now!” she said, dusting off her stern voice. When he obeyed her without question, she made a mental note to use it more often.
As if to clear the air, he told her about the time a man rode with him all the way to Koramangala only to say at the end of the journey that he had no money. “Come home,” he had told the automan as he left. She didn’t ask him why he hadn’t fought for his money. She wouldn’t have either. When they got to Domlur, he wanted to know where to find a ride back to Banaswadi. “If you don’t find one on Old Airport Road go to Indiranagar”, she pointed.
As she paid him and got off, he asked, “Could you please help me out? You know I don’t have any…” She wasn’t listening because a realisation was dawning on her. She was realising that the minute he told her about his mother, she had known that the ride would end with this question. She had done a mental tally of the notes in her purse. In between, when he broke the traffic rules, she had even toyed with the idea of taking the moral high ground. Before he could finish his plea, she gave him a five hundred rupee note and a smile.
Throughout this exchange she could feel a pair of incredulous eyes on her. As the auto drove away, the tirade began. “Was that a 500 you gave him? Are you mad? He told you that entire story because he wanted to dupe you. And you walked right into it. 500 bucks. You’ve never had any value for money. This is how he makes money, I am sure. He must be spinning these stories. Different stories for different people. How fun! He must have taken one look at your face and thought, this one? This one will fall for my sick-mother story. You saw him drive on the wrong side, didn’t you? If he was as scared as he claimed to be, don’t you think he would have stuck to the rules? And did you see how he made a show of taking out a picture of Jesus and staring at it? I am sure you will find him acting in plays by night. He must be duping people for practice. And he must think of this as payment for his acting chops.”
She thought to herself, “All I know is, when you need money, you need money; nothing else will do. If he was lying to me, that’s entirely on him. If he can lie about his mother being sick to make a quick buck, then he surely has bigger problems! I took a ride with him but I’ll never know if he took me for a ride!”
Disclaimer: No husband was harmed in the making of this story. None of the thoughts in this story are derived from or directed at the you-know-which husband. He is hail and hearty and continues to be the only love of my life.
I sent this story to a contest and nothing happened. These are times when I am glad I have a blog where I can publish everything I write and not feel contested. In need for some much sought after validation. To the seven people who read my blog, let me know what you think of this story. It’s 300 words because it’s flash fiction (#whaaat)!
Mr Husband
Their anniversary was without fanfare. For 20 years, the only departure had been an elaborate dinner in place of their usual chapati and curry. This year on the menu was Khow Suey, a Burmese noodle soup.
Kitchen was her happy place where she cooked up the vegetables she grew. With a dozen condiments, Khow Suey was a labour of love for a dinner for two. You had to caramalise garlic and onions, chop herbs, roast peanuts, saute mushrooms and boil eggs.
She loved these laborious tasks. They kept her mind from racing. She had been married off at eighteen. He was a decent man, her husband. Soon, they were raising two children and by the time she turned 40, it was just the two of them again.
Who was she? A quiet married woman who talked to herself, holed up in her kitchen while her husband got lost in a world he entered through the newspaper? And what about him? A man with no complaints or surprises; content with his job, family and the drama the newspaper offered?
Their life was an ode to familiarity. Mornings, they went for a walk. She made breakfast while he got ready for work. Once he left, she cleaned up, took a bath, napped a little and tended to her garden. She would be busy cooking dinner when he got home. Their lives weren’t boring, she reasoned. Such was life.
Chopping mushrooms, she heard herself say, “That’s what I’ll do. I’ll grow some mushrooms, cook them up into a deadly curry and feed it to my dull old Mr. Husband. That should do him in, no?”
Her murderous plans where still on when the doorbell rang. She opened the door, took his lunch box and asked him about his day.
Serious Men by Manu Joseph is a slice of India that’s beautiful in its uniqueness. Written in 2010 and published by Harper Collins India, this book won him The Hindu Best Fiction Prize for the year. Though politically this book dwells on the strong undercurrents of caste in science and academia, for me this is a story of two men and the women they love. Buy this book.
Ayyan Mani is the plotting peon to Arvind Acharya, the “insufferable astronomer” and Director at the Institute of Theory and Research: the protagonists. Ayyan Mani wants to get his wife and son out of the stifling life in their crumbling Mumbai chawl. As a peon at the ‘Institute of Brahmin Scientists’, he is also keen on witnessing and steering the War of the Brahmins to a conclusion of his choice. Arvind Acharya is on a mission to save science from populist scientists whose genius has long stagnated; professionals bent on finding their space in the limelight for that one final time. This is the story of their wins and losses.
Written with superior insight into our society, credit goes to Joseph for bringing up caste and class issues without pointing fingers. Laced with a generous helping of humour, Serious Men is a reader’s delight, one of those books you wish would last forever. My favourite however is the banter between Ayyan Mani, an Ambedkar inspired Buddhist and the missionary principal of his son’s school who tries to convert him to Christianity every time they meet.
While men in the book are beautifully crafted, the women’s side of the equation isn’t as balanced. Oja Mani is a typical lower middle class mother who wants her son to be “normal”. Lavanya is the homebound wife, ever-accepting of Acharya’s eccentricities, arguably her life’s goal being ‘to make his achievements possible’. Oparna is the beautiful woman scientist, a rarity, whose actions are all too predictable. I have my qualms with Joseph’s uninspired flat women characters but I would compromise my displeasure for gems like the love-hate relationship between old Princeton friends, Jana Nambodri and Acharya. Now, as professional rivals, the author maintains a maturity in their their relationship that is rarely seen in Indian storytelling. While Jana visits Acharya at home and reminisces about his rebel friend, he cuts no corners in expressing his professional animosity.
Full disclosure: I have a strong dislike for India themed books with themes like the Hindu-Muslim riots, India-Pakistan partition, terrorism and independence struggle simply because coming from India’s shin, I don’t relate to any of these things and these are not concepts I grew up with. Therefore, books like this one, Em and the Big Hoom, English August and Cobalt Blue give me hope that Indian writing in English is not beyond redemption.
