behindthebench1

Verses for pre primary children in Indlish

2024-09-17T22:13:00.000-07:00

Foreword. As a child, I learnt ‘Rain, rain, go away, come again another day, little Johnny wants to play.’ We in India welcomed the rain, we celebrated its arrival, we longed to go out and dance in it. I also read about houses with bathtubs, foods that included scones and crumpets and games like lacrosse. All unfamiliar in my Indian neighbourhood. Things have changed since then and children now have access to books that deal with their culture, their country, language, food and times. However, I found a need for those attending the little budget school (in Porvorim, Goa, where I work) to have some fun verses that related to their daily lives, which they could learn easily. Many of the students are first generation literate and their parents feel proud when they recite these and, more importantly, understand the words and sentences. This small compilation of some poems is an offering to the future citizens of India, may their lives be healthy and happy. 1. Today, Tomorrow, Yesterday. I washed my face today. I washed it yesterday. Wash today, washed yesterday Tomorrow is still far away. When tomorrow becomes today And today becomes yesterday, Where will today go? That’s what I want to know. *** 2. Counting from One to Ten. One, two, three, Are these rotis for me? Four,five, six, Rice and dal I mix. Seven, eight, nine. These fruits are mine. And T-E-N Is how I spell ten. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 t-e-n *** 3. Parts of my Body. Two eyes, two ears, a mouth and a nose. Two thumbs, two hands ten fingers and ten toes. When I want to clap-clap-clap. Or my arms to flap-flap-flap, I put my hands together, like this. Or raise my arms up, like this. Two legs, two feet, a head and a chin. Two lips, some teeth, one smile and I win. *** 4 About Birds and Animals. Cows are brown and crows are black. Cats say miaow and ducks say quack. Horses are big and mice are small. Dogs are short and giraffes are tall. *** 5 My House. In my house there is a bed. It is not yellow it is not red. In my house there is a door, A fan, a chair, a table and a floor. In my house, there are some windows Air comes in through them and out of them it goes. In my house there are tables and chairs, Tiles in the bathroom are shaped like squares. In my house there is a kitchen where we cook. And a shelf where I keep my favourite book. *** 6.Letters of the English Alphabet. A for Aiee, B for Baba, C for Chacha, D for Dada, E for egg, F for flower, G for girl, H for hour, I for India, J for joker, K for kilo, L for letter. M for me, N for neighbour O for orange, P for paper, Q for queue, R for rubber, S for school, T for teacher. U for us, Vfor view, X for x-ray and Y for you, Z is last, Z is for zip. a-b-c-d-e-f and g, h-i-j-k-l-m-n-o-p q-r-s-t -u and v, x and y and zed-ed-zee. *** 7.Inside my Home. I look outside my window, and open wide a door. I close a latch, a curtain draw and walk upon the floor. I sit at a table, and close to it I pull a chair. I drink from a glass, and eat my food until my plate is bare. *** 8.Going to School. Ricksha-Dada, Auto-Dada, take me to school. I must reach on time, daily, that is the rule. Tempo-Appa, Bus-Bhaiyastop when the signal’s red. In my tiffin I carry, sometimes upma, sometimes bread. Driver-Uncle, Driver-Kaka, my shoes are clean, see here. I will take my bag from you, when you stop, when school comes near. *** 9. What I Carry to School. Rubber, ruler, pencil, check. Hanky, tiffin, bottle check. Book to read and book to write, With my friends I must not fight. *** 10. Mobile Phones’ Ringtones. My Baba has a mobile phone A cat’s miaow is its ring-tone. My Aiee has a mobile phone. A car’s horn is its ring-tone. My Ajo has a mobile phone, A baby’s laugh is its ring-tone. My Aji has a mobile phone, A pip-pip-pip sound is its ring-tone. Tai and I don’t have a phone. We have to grow up to get one of our own. *** 11.The Toilet--1. The toilet is also called a bathroom. Or loo, gents’,ladies’ or restroom. When your job inside is done, Wash your hands, don’t hurry and run, Pour water down the drain. Keep the toilet clean, come sun or rain. *** 12. The Toilet- 2 To the toilet we go, To the toilet we go. Walking, walking. Not too fast, not too slow. Some water we pour. Half mug and some more. Keep it clean, always clean,And keep dry the floor. Remember, remember, never forget, To wash your fingers andyour palms. Scrub and rub with soap Yes, your fingers and your palms. After that, wipe and dry,With a hanky wipe and dry. Why do we do this? Why? Why? To stay healthy, that is why. *** 13. Our Food: Bread, pao, poi, roti, puri, Chapatti, phulka, bhakri. Kurmura, chawal, bhaat, poha, Sabudana, shevya, sooji, rawa. Bhaaji, shaak, daal, kadhi, Koshimbeer, usal, aamti. Eggs, meat, chicken, fish, We eat well, whatever the dish. Mirsang, hing, jeera, dhania, salt, hallad, we add for spice. A little oil, toop or ghee, makes food taste very, very nice. For sweet we use gur or sugar, sometimes honey, too. Chaat or bhel, fruit or juice, what’s good for me is good for you. *** 14.The YEAR. January, the year begins, it is quite cold, the weather. February, North Indians wear woollen caps and knitted sweater. March, the trees get green with leaves, ‘paalvifutli’, we say. April, examinations over, gets hotter by the day. May, schools are closed, masti time, mango season. June, we buy umbrellas, light downpours are the reason. July, the month of storms, floods and damage everywhere. August, rains still heavy, with strong cyclonic winds here and there. September is kinder, drizzles come and drizzles go. October life is dry again, winter winds are yet to blow. November sees a temperature dip, a nip in the air outside. December, end of year, We plan for the future, So in time to come, we can look back with pride. *** 15. Where Stands My School in Goa. From the Vidhan Sabha to Saligaon, The National Highway goes. It leads from Panji to Mapuca, That everybody knows. Three bridges cross the Mandovi, Atal Setu stands on high. The High Court stands on one side, The jetty low does lie. From Succour to Brittona, Torda to Pittona, Penha de Franca to Betim, Including Salvadore da Mund, ....... ...Is all a part of Porvorim. My school stands on a Service Road,Gauri Petrol Pump is very close. There are restaurants along one side.And a big shop called Delfino’s. When we cross that road, so busy and wide, We look first this side, then that and again this side. Then we cross, Carefully cross. *** Author’s name: Sheela Jaywant. Address: 96/6, Mae de Deus, Sangolda, Goa 403511. Phone number: 9766413016. Email: sheelajaywant@yahoo.co.in

RESOLUTIONS 2024.

2024-01-27T02:29:00.000-08:00

Time to list out resolutions, I mumbled to myself as I sat before my keyboard-monitor. Sri Husband overheard that—he has sharp ears only for things he shouldn’t be hearing, selectively. Otherwise, he ignores or pretends to be deaf to my voice. He promptly snorted: ‘I hear that every yearend and have not seen you once keeping a single resolution.’ That is not true, he is talking rubbish, as he commonly does, in a dominating, bullying tone, which forces me to fall silent. Hidden in Bhagwat Gita’s chapters is a small verse that implies timidity is a sin. Some other religious text says meekness and giving in is a virtue. Religion confuses me. Whatever, I am what I am and I will make resolutions for the NY, whether or not I keep them. I don’t see why a husband (of forty-five years, poor me) should even be keeping track of what his wife does. Bai Goanna would take my side on this, methinks, if she were around. Where was I? The resolutions: First, I will not cross Chogm Road because I want to die naturally. I don’t want to be hit or run over by a vehicle nor nudged to fall steeply on the leeward side of the slope. Of course, not dying might be a fate worse than death. Lying (pun unintended) with a broken spine, skull, scapula or femur is a horrible alternative. Worst of all, I am certain the driver will get away with a bad dream, not even a penalty. A colleague on a two-wheeler was rammed into by a big, fancy, expensive car. He was accused of getting unconscious instead of inconsiderately making people phone for an ambulance whilst he lay there allowing his head to swell and ear to bleed. That was in Dona Paula, and Chogm Road is getting to be like that locality. ‘No,’ said Bai Goanna making an appearance: ‘Dona Paula has big buildings and is densely populated. Porvorim-Saligao is still not so bad.’ The word ‘still’ implying that we’re getting there; already, Hindi is the local language here and have colonies that resemble a nascent Dubai. Coming back to my resolution of not crossing Chogm road. In the case of an accident, one has to be taken, by kind roadside labourers or the cops, rarely by any gaadiwala, to Mapuca or Bambolim, because even though we now have the Assembly and the Court here, we still don’t have a big government hospital. Gossips say there was one to be built near the Police Station and Sanjay School, but (Sri Husband insists), let gossips gossip, one must not believe them even if their chinwagging is true. For those who don’t know, Chogm stands for CHoG-M Commonwealth Heads of Government Meet, held in 1983. The road existed as a mere path until then. Most part of the official conference was held in Delhi. However, a Retreat for all the attending world leaders was scheduled in Goa, which back then was a destination on the hippie trail and not a full-fledged tourist destination that it is today. Benefits of the event set the ball rolling for the tourism boom in Goa. Thirty-nine world leaders from across the globe attended it. The road, which has grown, been dug, resurfaced, dug again, then hot-tarred, is named after that event. Presently, it is once more in digging phase, to match with Porvorim’s smart sister-city, Panaji. Like happens now, at that time also, Goans had reacted. The Sangharsh Natya Manch (SNM), consisting of student activists from various colleges in Goa staged around 75 performances in towns, villages, market squares and street corners, as part of the campaign against the CHOG-M Retreat, depicting the expenses of some Rs.430 million which they thought was an unjustified, ill affordable luxury for the country and the state. A decked-up, cheerful Goa still follows that routine: crib, complain, comply. Bai Goanna said, ‘Write about the accidents and traffic jams, no.’ To which Sri Husband responded, ‘When there’s no speed and vehicles are crawling, there are fewer accidents. I hate to admit it, but Sri Husband is often correct. The fancy-shancy school on this road, has made deep, cruel cuts in the hillside for its expansion, and cut off the giant tropical trees that stood sentinel in our village. Outside its gate, big cars create traffic snarls at least twice a day. Even if parking space is provided within its compound, each car that enters and exits will take twenty seconds or so to turn and that is enough to make the rest of us crawl. Bai Goanna said: ‘We need a bridge or flyover here.’ Sri Husband and I chorused: ‘Shut up, no more construction.’ We both agreed on something; rare moment. Another reason besides the digging and the school for our traffic to slow down are the eateries. Chogm Road, some say it is now the pride of North Goa, is a glorified khao-gully, (an off-shoot of the NH, considered the khao-main-road). There are small street-food stalls and fancy restaurants selling Goan food, nouveau-Goan food like paneer sorpotel, cuisines from Arabia and Japan, Indianized American pizzas, Rajasthani thalis and more. Interestingly, it has also become an upmarket fashion street. Sri Husband: ‘There’s no place for public buses, autorickshaws or taxis to ply.’ As if, I wondered, they do on other roads in Goa. I mean, who wants public transport? Only losers like him and Bai Goanna. Like the majority, I’m happy with the taxi-mafia and the exorbitant fares, keeps us safely indoors. Of course, that’s because I don’t go out much, and expect that anyone unhappy with the situation must do the same. (Now even walking outside is restricted, refer to resolution at the beginning of this piece, para-3 line-1&2). My neighbours have built rooms (without permission from Panchayat or TCP, naturally/obviously) and let them out to home-deliverers. Two-wheelers with insulated boxes fixed at the back, driven by young men (women’s libbers have entered the military, conquered the medical world, ruled countries, broken sports records, but not yet the world of the online-ordering operational teams) zip across our curvy village lanes at all times of day and night, carrying parcels of groceries and ready to eat goodies. No silencers on their engines, but, mercifully, they don’t use the horns either. Better still, people around me are ordering mattresses, tailors’ chalk packets, underwear, shoes, fans, toys, medicines, fresh meat and whatnot from their homes, to be delivered to their homes. No need to go out and add to the traffic. How to have personal contact, asks Bai Goanna. Pat comes Sri Husband’s logic: ‘No more misunderstandings, no more personal fights. No one meets, no one is unhappy.’ As you have seen, dear Reader, my NY resolution has not gone beyond road-crossing. Wishing you, your families, friends, colleagues, everyone around you and Happy 2024. *** ***

Ponnje.

2024-01-27T02:28:00.000-08:00

Ponnje’s sinking streets have stopped making news. There are pictures on Facebook and Instgram showing people rowing through the flooded lanes, possibly in clean, though muddy, rainwater, and not backflow of sewage. Sinking roads and drum-sized holes are so common, it’s no longer surprising. The more optimistic, positive thinking, politically correct lot say that’s a small price to pay for becoming smart. (As I was typing this, the ever-interfering Sri Husband reminded me that the opposite of smart is idiot; he asked whether I have heard of an idiotic city. Ignore him, Bai Goanna advised.) Ponnje, smart or otherwise, might be considered a town or an overgrown village. People think Goa is a city. I’ve heard an airline pilot announce that we were flying over and landing in Goa ‘city’. He either didn’t know or believe that Goa was a state. Most tourists and the powers that be in Delhi-Gurgaon-Elsewhere who want to buy property here think Goa comprises a kilometre wide space parallel to the Arabian Sea where everyone wears long underwear or micro-mini-skirts made of floral cotton and hats to match, drinks beer, parks where s/he feels like and enjoys a frequent traffic violation. If Goa is a city-state, a rural urbania, if you like, is Ponnje a suburb or what? Meanwhile, what does one call the large complexes comprising hundreds of ‘flats’ or ‘apartments’ and ‘villas’ in Dona Paula and Old Goa, Vasco, Assagaon and Porvorim? Are they towns within towns? Each ‘gated community’, as such complexes are called, has its own sub-culture, different from the language, food, music and social habits of the native minority of Ponnje/Vasco/Assagaon/Porvorim. That sub-culture I call corporatese. Management vocabulary, financial inputs, easy expenditure, Reiki, pranic-healing, expensive clothes, domestic-staff problems are parts of the evolution. The addresses are similar, following a pattern, somewhat like government quarters: house and floor and building number with name of group of buildings, usually with the builder’s label, following by nearest landmark, rarely road. House number 302, 6th floor =6/302 or simply 6302. Buildings have alphabets, so C-6302 guides you to the correct unit once inside the big, watchman-guarded gate. (About ‘security guard’ migrants I will write another column).Housing colonies have names like Rio de Marina (to sound exotic) or Gardenia de Velha or Villas Paradiso or simply Jhavier Plaza, Sea Park or the down-to-earth Coconut Orchard. One large and beautiful ‘Casa Familia’, which brought to mind a picture of many siblings, their children and grandchildren enjoying meals together and bickering, too, was inhabited by a single human being and her caretakers. Landmarks are no longer giant jackfruit trees, banyans or peepals. Not even Sai Krupa Bar or Desai Wines and Cashews. Now they are car showrooms, mobile-shops, shoe boutiques (!), pastry stores with fancy names, or restaurants. Sri Husband’s second interruption: ‘Who needs landmarks? We have the GPS and the cell-phone, don’t we?’ Who asked you, I wanted to say. Kept silent. Silence broken: ‘How do you spell the Capital of Goa?’ He peered over my shoulder, making sure I don’t ignore him. Ponnje, which a couple of months ago still had traces of prettiness, is also spelt as Panaji, Panjim, Pannji. Goan pronunciations depend on which language is being spoken. Mapuca, Mapusa, Mhapsa, Mhapshe. Canacona, Kaannkonn. Calangutay, Kal-angoot. And the toppers: Chorao is also Chodne and Thivim is Thiyeim. Then, there’s Parvari and Porvorim. I kind of like different pronunciations and the way we adopt words from other languages. (Aside: an Irish-Chinese boy, US citizen, married a friend’s daughter, Indian, and they’ve settled in the UK. Once, trying to explain something to me, he said, ‘matlab’… ah, I thought, we’ve exported a word that we’d probably imported from the Middle-East centuries ago.) Talking of the new Goanese (see, another new word to replace ‘Goan’) who have followed their hearts and the fashionable trend of spending lots of money to buy homes (called villas and apartments) and very big cars, who live in ‘lifted’, ‘stilted’ buildings with manicured spaces for children to play and seniors to walk in, have brought in many new words to enrich Konkani. I don’t know how much of Konkani they use. The upper-class ones mix with their kinds. Their children play not hututu (kabaddi, in case you didn’t understand), not kho-kho, not coconut-breaking, banana-tree cutting or slow-cycling races. It’s tennis, golf (we will get a golf club with wide, water-guzzling greens sooner rather than later, sure we will. Not just one, maybe fifteen) and skating for them. Migrants who do physical work at a certain rate per day know better Konkani than I do and will enrich it over time adopting words from Bihar, Nepal. On a Ponnje hoarding, I read an advertisement for horse-riding. I believed horses belonged to crisper climes like Rajasthan, the hilly areas of Tamil Nadu and (presently violence ridden) parts of some northeastern states of India or places that had maharajas. “Your beliefs mean nothing”, Sri Husband said. I have seen advertisements for ‘swimming-lessons’, I typed. ‘Swimming pools in many hotels and colonies,’ said Bai Goanna, ‘are filled with water from Sangolda wells.’ She’s jealous of those who have made a lot of money by selling well-water. They own tankers on which is written: ‘Water is free. We charge for the transport only.’ Funny, no? There are those who do scuba-diving, pub-hopping, looking for a fun life in Goa. They are monied migrants, not out to eke out a living. Then there are the still-saving, working-hard types who want to be near Nature, but with good connectivity, home-delivered meals and evening entertainment that is different from classical music soirees; some slog, I have seen, at running good eateries and selling handmade items at pop-up stalls. Goans with Goan DNA, the affording ones, are, to the surprise of the neo-Goans, focussed on academics, careers, even unconventional ones. On 30 June, Friday, at the crematorium in Ponnje, whilst bidding goodbye to one of Goa’s illustrious sons, Adv. Manohar S. Usgaocar, there was a crowd of niz Goemkars. The traffic could have been chaotic because the gods were weeping and the road very rough with all the re-digging, collapsing and bad filling-up. But it was smooth and horn-free. Industrialists and tailors, doctors and drivers, people in big cars and on foot had come to pay their respects to a learned man, courteous and ethical to a fault. They were there to respect a truly learned professional, a ‘good’ man. The gentle behaviour, the voices soft and low, the easy camaraderie that cut across income barriers, that’s what the real Ponnje, the real Goa, is about. Was. Nothing to do with casinos. “Or,” Sri Husband had to have the last word, “Statues.” Grudgingly, I admitted, he spoke the truth. And these events don’t make it to Facebook/Instagram.

Cat Pets by Sheela Jaywant

2023-03-06T22:22:00.004-08:00

We called our first cat ‘Babbu Singh’. Sri Husband, a dog-person, didn’t allow it into the house, but did not mind it being fed and sheltered outside the house or under the staircase. The fellow (Babbu, not the Husband) moved his baby limbs, trying to walk, trembling and swaying, in what we labelled The Cat Dance. I don’t remember why we called him Babbu, but later we changed his name to Daan-Singh (Danc-ing, in case you didn’t get it). Over my shoulder, he (Sri Husband, this time, not Babbu) said, ‘You’re writing on cats?’ Bai Goanna echoed: ‘Cats?’ To shut them up, I showed them how much information Google had on them (cats, not Sri Husband or Bai Goanna). It worked. While they read about felines, I typed on. Babbu died young, we don’t know of what. He had been ill for a day, and at the end he opened his mouth very wide, let out a loud terrible sound and just fell down dead. Cannot get that out of my mind. The next one was named ‘Mouse’. Mews=Mows=Mouz=Mouse, see? Sri Husband, who never liked cats was, in the beginning, and all the time, annoyed at the sound and feel of her. She mewed uncouthly at him for no reason at all, brushed herself against his legs to his annoyance and, despite closing windows, sneaked inside the front door when someone opened it, and found her way to him. If he was sleeping, she would unobtrusively curl up against his leg or abdomen, giving him a start when he moved or awoke. He did all he could to chase her away: roll the newspaper and whack her, throw a shoe, yell. Unafraid, she climbed upon the tallest cupboard, daintily walked on the open shelf on which stood precious glass curios, jumped on the kitchen platform and (blasphemy), with her paw or snout, moved the lids from vessels to investigate whether the contents were to her liking, to eat, generally drove him to growl and say unpleasant things about the feline family in general. Undeterred, she put her claws out and scratched him, tore his clothes; never mine. We have no recollection of how she entered our home, our lives. I think it began on a rainy morning. There was half-metre of rain overnight, with stormy winds. Civet cats, snakes, birds, all find shelter in the large jungle trees and shrubs in the confusion we call our ‘compound’. Even the village stray dogs rarely venture inside our wall. Domestic animals prefer open, more sophisticated habitats. This cat, ‘Mouse’, we suspect, was discarded, thrown into our compound by a villager who did not want to keep it, nor destroy it. That was kind of him: we know people who drown kittens or abandon them in markets or by the sea, where they generally die of starvation, or bullying by other strays, or illness. Although Sri Husband’s attitude was ‘get-rid-of-this-cat’, the white and yellow baby was fed with due care. In the beginning, we bought fresh fish for her, served it cleaned and sliced. We discovered she was selective: mackerels-yes, sardines-no. Once, we gave her packaged food, dry pellets of a certain brand. She loved the taste and, thenceforth, refused to even sniff any marine life, fresh or frozen, raw or cooked. No cuddling ‘Mouse’ was the rule. Absolutely no picking up, no baby-talk, no show of affection in any form, not by me, not by Bai Goanna. Thing is, ‘Mouse’ did not follow Husband’s words, neither understood them, nor obeyed in letter or spirit. Almost a year later, Mouse had an affair, got pregnant through multiple partners; her swollen belly indicated another generation was due. I had strict instructions that under no circumstance was ‘Mouse’ to be brought inside now, no kitten would be allowed, never, not in this house, by no one at all, not a chance.... I nodded, and Bai Goanna assured Sri Husband that we had understood clearly: no kittens, no cat, not now, not ever. On another cyclonic night, much worse than the one that had brought ‘Mouse’ to us. the seasonal creepers that climb high up on the majestic trees that stand sentinel around us billowed like oversized curtains. The wind howled menacingly. The teak trees banged against the cement roof, making a booming sound inside the house. There was no electricity, of course. A metal roof rattled over someone’s house. A window slammed. Boughs snapped and fell, twigs were flung across roads. A car horn blared rudely. In that chaos, we heard a feeble, distinct but barely audible ‘mew.’ ‘The cat’s littered,’ said Sri Husband. Bai Goanna and I kept our promise, said not a word about Mouse or what might be happening to her. He flashed the torch in the upstairs balcony. On a tall table, inside a cardboard box, she had littered two-four-six babies. She was still licking them, but looked very tired. Through the drumming drops of pelting rain, he took a long look at the pathetic souls and opened his heart and one bathroom for them. Blobs of flesh, suckling from time to time, first flailing, then creeping, then crawling, gained strength by the day. Then, one day, one died. Another followed the next day and a third a day later. The remaining three were very carefully monitored. Not a peep out of Sri Husband when they boldly clambered up the leg-sleeve of his jeans. Their wobbling, frail limbs got strong and they wrestled with each other, scratched the upholstery, climbed onto the dining-table, ventured inside suitcases and were rescued each time they mewed in terror. Bai Goanna and I pretended not to notice, definitely did not comment on this. Finally, they went to their adoptive homes. Sri Husband, began to like cats, somewhat, referred to ‘Mouse’ as ‘Tiger’s Aunt’ (Vaagha chi maushi), the vernacular description of the species. He was no longer annoyed at the sound and feel of her. She still mewed uncouthly, brushed herself against his legs, and no longer needed to sneak in. She was welcome. Every moment she was with him, she reminded him, mere mortal, that her ancestors were worshipped by the Pharaohs of Egypt. When he slept, she curled up against his leg or abdomen, giving him a start when he moved. He adjusted. She kneaded his flesh with her claws, nails extended, scratching him at times. He playfully pushed her away. She caused tears in his clothes, never mine. It’s noteworthy, how animals win humans over. She vanished one day. No neighbour had seen her, no corpse was found; we suspected she had been eaten by a snake. This was nearly certain when our third and present cat-child, ‘Choo’, alerted Sri Husband one morning to a python less than a metre from his leg. Our part of Goa is still uncemented, with a healthy forest surrounding our modest abodes. Creatures creep, fly, crawl, eat and procreate as Nature intended them to. Choo communicates well. When she returns after her daily nocturnal outings, she tells us about her adventures. Do you know, cats meow only with/to human beings? When Sri Husband was unwell, she did not leave his side. She put a comforting paw on his hand/foot, as if to say ‘I’m there, you will be fine.’ Watching a football match on tv recently, Bai Goanna and I caught Sri Husband pointing out a goal to Choo. We nodded to each other: magic is possible, miracles can happen, when an animal adopts you.

Removing Chappals and Other Traditions

2022-10-03T07:42:00.006-07:00

Shri Husband doesn’t wear chappals. ‘Will you change that sentence? It sounds odd, somehow, like I walk around with naked feet,’ he growled as he read what I was typing, over my shoulder. He cannot not interfere with my column. ‘Old habits die hard,’ I mumbled. Bai Goanna piped up: ‘Don’t say ‘old habits’. Habits are formed over a period of time, how can one have a new habit? All habits are old.’ Together, they broke the thread of my thoughts; I typed that. ‘Train of thought,’ both chorused, ‘or series of thoughts. You say thread if you’re talking about emails.’ I wish they would leave me alone when I’m writing. Anyway, if you read the first sentence, that Sri Husband doesn’t wear chappals, let me tell you, he doesn’t wear sandals either. You might imagine that he goes around like MF Hussain. No, his footwear comprises shoes with laces. No Velcro, no clips or elastic to hold them in place, he wears the polishing kind. They are good for the fit. ‘You mean good for the physically fit?’—Shri Husband, goading me. Me, patiently: ‘No. By ‘fit’ I don’t mean physically fit as with a good pulse-rate, flat abdomen and no illness, I mean they are comfortable for the toes, heels and ankles.’ For Shri Husband, buying shoes means giving the salesperson a fit (of the seizure kind). He turns them around to check the soles’ grip, the stitching at the edges, the inside, the back of the heel height, the evenness of the exterior. He asks the salesman when/where the shoes were manufactured, when/how delivered to the store, how long kept out of packing, in the open, on the shelves. I suspect in the billing software, they have a column that alerts the counter staff who in turn alerts the sales team that Shri Husband is a customer to be handled with enormous patience. Most of the time, he is attended to by a senior (means potbellied, greying and normally sitting on a stood, telling others what to do) person, who is armed with answers to the random questions tossed by Shri Husband: ‘Do people buy real leather anymore? Is this real leather? Real? Really? How to tell, it looks and feels like faux leather. Phone your manager and ask him whether it’s real leather or something else. Or (the ultimate threat), I’ll check online.’ Shri Husband wears shoes the old-fashioned way, with socks. Cotton, rarely manufactured therefore hard to find, hand-washed, shade-dried, no-allergy garments. ‘Can socks be called garments? Try using the word ‘hosiery’.’—Bai Goanna’s attempt to distract me. ‘Socks can be called under-garments,’ Shri Husband clarified. The issue is, whenever we visit relatives, temples, hospitals and air-conditioned shops, these days, we are told to remove our chappals. There are no rules for shoes, but it is implied that those also have to be taken off and added to the higgledy-piggledy pile near the entrance. Shri Husband grumbles as he has two layers to shed. Why not just use rubber flip-flops, I wonder; I don’t voice my thoughts, you know that. ‘There are racks and shelves,’ Bai Goanna has told him many times, ‘to keep them on.’ Shri Husband has retorted, ‘They are for show. No one touches their own footwear to put them up on a shelf.’ He is correct, as always. People shuffle their feet out of their footwear and leave the latter wherever they lie. Hence, in many places, the shelves are empty and there’s a pile of chappals, etc. next to the stand, mixed like chivda ingredients. In places where tokens are given and footwear is stashed in pigeon-holes, the chappal-owners do their best to not touch them. The pairs are slid or thrown on the floor by the token-handler, adjusted into place by the chappal-owners with their toes, worn by a wormlike, crawling motion of the feet. Shri Husband does a visual check of public places where footwear is prohibited, from the door. If the floor inside is clean, socks are removed, if dirty, he waits outside. His logic: ‘Shoes are kept outside to keep the inside clean; if the inside is dirty, what’s the point in keeping the shoes outside?’ Bai Goanna’s logic: ‘If you’ve gone somewhere, what’s the point waiting outside?’ Tradition based on common sense made the shoes-outside rule a universal one in the eastern world. Now, many westerners have adopted it for their homes (we, the superior, civilized humans of India transfer so much gyaan to them and yet get no credit). But in offices, hospitals, shops, they are allowed. Oddly, we buy shoes from air-conditioned shops, and vegetables from gutter-lined pavements. Another tradition of almost touching something with one’s fingers and then drawing those fingers to one’s heart or forehead, endures. If my foot touches someone else’s, I do that gesture as an apology. But if someone else’s foot touches me, I still do it. ‘Weird, no?’ Bai Goanna says. Employees touch the outside stairs when they walk into office buildings, then touch their chest with the same fingers, supposedly in gratitude for having a job. Of course, whether one is earning one’s salary has nothing to do with how many times stairs and chests are touched, six days a week, so many weeks per month/year, for a lifetime, especially if you work in a large corporate or the government. Mechanical rituals are a must; work ethics are optional. ‘Cynical you are,’ said Shri Husband. ‘As if everyone is a kaam chor.’ (Look whose being sarcastic about cynicism. Whatever did he eat for breakfast today?). Take burping, slurping, rubbing palm over exposed, rotund belly (only for men). In most places outside India, if done in public, these acts, done deliberately, individually or combined would be considered rude or worthy of psychiatric evaluation. But, our ancestors knew the scientific reasons behind them (including taking pride in a planet-shaped abdomen with a blackhole-navel). If we collected the gas from all the burps and other gaseous expulsions, a million, million male Indians could together harvest a fair amount of fuel to overcome the price rise. ‘Are you serious?’ Shri Husband asked, reading this paragraph. ‘Why would she not be?’ asked Bai Goanna, for once taking my side, sort of. Think Swatchh Bharat. Great concept. Government gave money to build toilets; many of us got funds through the panchayats. Small sheds were built. We use them… for storing coconuts, rusted cycles, wooden planks, cracked buckets, broken chairs; we still ‘water’ our plants when full bladders protest. Tradition is tradition. Our ancestors ‘watered’ plants thus, science has proved that plants get nitrogen/phosphorus/natrium/potassium/minerals/vitamins/hormones/TLC by this method. We should not blindly follow the West and ignore the gyaan that our forefathers followed for thousands of years. ‘Thousands?’ Bai Goanna asked. ‘We’re just in 2022.’ Shri Husband said: ‘She’s including the years Before Christ, way back till the cave years.’ I cannot make out when he’s serious, when not. And then he reminded me of one embarrassing incident. On a billboard was a photograph of a young couple with their two children, and beside the man was written in English: A clean Bharat is a healthy Bharat. I (innocently) asked, ‘That’s Bharat? I thought that was ….. (name of famous model).’ When the guffaw subsided, I realised it wasn’t the name of the man. It was written in the way a second standard textbook is written: ‘When Bablu is clean, Bablu is healthy.’ I mean, in English one writes ‘India’, no? Or at least that’s what I had learnt in school and followed until recently. Just saying. For me that is tradition, saying ‘India’ when speaking/reading/writing in English. Or Konkani, for that matter. Talking of tradition, next time I’ll write about the art of accurate nose-blowing and spitting. Namaste.

LOCKED UP

2022-03-30T09:22:00.001-07:00

. Bai Goanna’s only business is to see what I’m doing and report it to Sri Husband. It doesn’t matter that TMC’s flowers are blooming on posters stuck on school boards and public signages, that AAP candidates’ banners are on every lamppost on Chogm Road, that the BJP and Congress are in the same frenzy-competition as Goa Forward and others in the fray, that sewage enriched seawater has made kalwaahn (oysters) less readily available and less tasty, nor that a third tsunami of Covid is imminent. One thing that interests Bai Goanna and Sri Husband is to spy on what I’m writing. The conversation on the above matters went something like this: Bai Goanna, naively: ‘What happens to the election posters afterwards? Are they torn and thrown in the dustbin or left as they are, to uglify the neighbourhood? Or do they use the other, blank side? Or will they be hot-mixed into tar and concrete to resurface Chogm Road after the next monsoon?’ Sri Husband, cynically: ‘Who knows? Who cares? Nothing will change whether or not you ask questions, especially questions with no answers. Or questions whose answers are obvious.’ Me, not voicing my thoughts: ‘Good that they’re arguing between themselves. Now I can concentrate on my writing, bhivpachi garaz na that I will be disturbed.’ The invasion of my privacy is their focus on any given day, so this intra-quarreling with no involvement from me is a pleasant change from the regular routine when they gang up and pick on me. Talking of my regular routine, I get some well-earned solitude when I drive to and from work. No colleagues, no family, just ‘me time’. Which is why I like traffic jams. First gear driving for an hour gives privacy, with plenty of scope to practice ancient Indian meditation techniques. Breathe in, out; stomach in, out; leg stretched, change gear, change foot from pedal to pedal, accelerator to brake; chew steering-wheel to rid the soul of negative vibes. Collectively, a hundred drivers of four- and two-wheelers turn necks from side to side, sharing compulsory relaxation/stretching exercises whilst Patience rules supreme. Some find it stressful, but what the heck, we’re all in Goa ‘for susegaad’*, correct? Whether on vacation or work? (* ‘for susegaad’ is a term I learnt from a visitor, a second-home Goemkar, not a tourist. Like ‘Goanese’ and ‘Cal-ung-youtay’, this is a newbie in my lexicon.) What should take ten minutes from Sangolda to Delfino’s via Chogm Road sometimes takes an hour plus even in the afternoon, at an unsteady 10-20 kmph. It’s good practice for slowness enthusiasts, because the speed limit on Atal Setu is 30 kmph. I have learnt to stick to 29 kmph, to the irritation of other drivers, even though no one is forcing me, and I know that the cameras that I cross are for show. I’m law-abiding—trained by Sri Husband, you know that-- and speed-limits are not to be broken. Even the two-wheeling honeymooners that race alongside on that same bridge, maybe drunk, maybe not, laugh into my windscreen as they pass. But, just as I don’t mind broken beer bottles on Baga beach or the hordes that make sure the Drishti guards are justifying what they earn, I no longer mind people not wearing masks and coughing into my face. Was born and raised in this country, have lived in Goa for decades, so am perfectly aware that rules cannot be enforced or followed except by a low-IQ minority like self and family. Why get stressed when one day everyone must die, no? Whether or not you wear a mask/helmet you will die, no? Whether you dash across the road in between speeding cars opposite the mall at Porvorim or you plunge into the Arabian Sea at low tide when the guards are telling you not to, you know you’re doing it because it’s kismet, not regulations, that will decide when you will exit the planet, right? Same-same about vaxines. Sorry, vackseens. No, wagsinations. Auto-correct is blocked, oof! Sri Husband puts his fingers on the keys: v-a-c-c-i-n-e-s. ‘There,’ he sniggers. ‘Write on.’ I do. Why rules are made is a matter for debate. Example: schools have been shut. The guard at our gate gets chided if he allows anyone inside without permission and screening and a louder yelling if that anyone isn’t following ‘protocol’. So, he makes sure he does his job. Says Sri Husband: ‘If nostrils and lips are covered, you’re happy; cloth mask, paper mask, mosquito-net mask, even socks will do if not a hanky or dupatta. You don’t allow covering the mouth with the palm, though, only because the Rule says, ‘wear mask’.’ I tell him with quiet confidence: ‘We follow rules. We also make sure hands are rinsed with a sanitizer.’ Quips Sri Husband again: ‘The manufacture of the dispenser, the stand for the dispensing bottle, the liquid inside the bottle are new and profitable businesses. You don’t do your own quality control, you buy the cheapest sanitizer available, in bulk. Every shop-owner and auto-rickshaw driver does the same thing.’ I agree with Bai Goanna when she says: ‘Whether the liquid, for some reason blue in colour, disinfects anything I don’t know.’ We recommend all those who enter school to carry along their own soaps/sanitizers/napkins in case ours aren’t up to the mark. We don’t have the stamina to respond to people who ask a million questions whose answers we don’t have: ‘When will school reopen’ ‘When will classes start?’ ‘How long will this virus last?’ ‘When will the government allow us to send our children to school?’ ‘Will the exams be online or offline?’ Different voices, different languages, similar words. ‘When will Lockdown finish?’ the words inadvertently escape my lips as I stretch halfway through my typing. I regret it the very next instant, because a raging debate follows on whether we’ve been locked up or down, inside the house or outside the office, or are we locked at all (considering we’re in touch with the world via the internet). Bai Goanna says, ‘Other than the first time, when we made so without milk, sugar, fish, fruit and cooked what we could pluck off the plants in our compound, we really weren’t locked, were we?’ Sri Husband agrees with her: ‘Even through the first few weeks of Lockdown 2020, people walked towards their villages far, far away. The lockdown or lockup was for the mildly privileged. The very privileged were in and out of Goa, the not so privileged were journeying by foot to remote areas and we, the sandwiched sections of society paid for Netflix, Amazon Prime, and allied pastimes.’ Some put YouTube to good use, learnt baking/chess. Some painted/wrote. Those who were WFH (working from home. If you’re not familiar with this, that means you’re doing something differently valuable, like cooking, raising a child, taking care of a parent or have a valuable life-skill like plumbing, carpentry, sewing) realized that life is about upgrading skills. What we learnt forty years ago may hold good for some. Only for some. Those who feel ‘quality of life’ is gauged by smelling flowers, watching and filming sunsets, rearranging the furniture according to vaastu/feng shui, and posting old photos on Facebook are the privileged ones. Just one percent of our population can do that. If you are reading this, you’re in that top one percent. Even as I typed on, Sri Husband mumbled: ‘Those with the real issues of lack of incomes, serious squabbles on the domestic front, illnesses not connected with these mutating viruses that couldn’t be dealt with as they should, whose children have lost two valuable years of learning, they are ones locked up in their karma, Covid or no Covid.’ Grudgingly, I admit: ‘True, that.’

The Budget Month

2021-04-02T10:44:00.000-07:00

April, start of the new financial year. I have no idea why it cannot coincide with the regular New Year. “You,” accused Shri Husband, “have no idea about many things.” I chose to ignore His Sweetship until I was through with the typing. A quick googling told me the reasons (for the financial year starting on 1 April, not why Shri Husband was his normal, irritable self). One said: ‘The income relies upon the estimation of the yields that are harvested in the period of February and March. Thus, two months of span give government idea whether the revenue is going to increase/decrease.’ But, the mystery remains unsolved, like that of evolution of mankind, because there are other theories. One, the Income-Tax Act came into force from April 1, 1962. Second, it might have been to prevent year end accounting and balance sheet, etc., preparation coinciding with Holiday season of Christmas and New Year. Remember, before computers and emails (seems unbelievable that we lived through paper times), lots of work had to be done with ink and mental arithmetic. Papers had to be punched and filed (that hasn’t changed, hard copies are still greatly valued). Importantly, the files or copies had to be dispatched to a wonderland called Head Office, which often was in England. After that, the comments were written and the documents returned to have responses to comments noted on the files which were re-dispatched by sea to the land of the Rani. By the time the accounting for the year was over, it was April of the following year. Nothing’s changed, really, we’re still going bang into the 31 March deadline year after year, never smoothly sailing through it. Another reason: April coincided with the Hindu new year. This is a weak example, for many traditional businesses begin on Dassera or even the Laxmi Pujan done at Diwali. “But, then,” I read from the internet, “festivals like Navratri and Diwali fall in the month of October and November, followed by Christmas in December. These account for heavy sales for the retailers making accounting complex and time consuming.To avoid the collision of both so as each of the activity gets efficient time and attention, December might not have been preferred as the month of closure of the financial year.” I love Google, I said, as I got this information. The “grrrumph” sound from Shri Husband was best left un-deciphered; I’d rather not solve the mysteries of his mind. Importantly, India is not the only country that follows this trend. We have company: Canada, United Kingdom (UK), New Zealand, Hong Kong and Japan. In Delhi, the FM and the PM and the entire stable of television channels have already gone beserk over the national budget announcements and their repercussions on industry, farmers, tourism and what not. No concessions for freelance humour columnists. No sympathy either. At micro level, in a tiny office in a little Goan school, the accountants bend over ledgers, cash-books, vouchers, receipts and across that wonderful invention called Excel. For some reason, Excel has a quarrel with Tally, the finance software. Both have disagreeing totals. Same person making the entries from the same documents, but something or the other doesn’t match. Frustration means chai is needed. We have a moody electric kettle that refuses to work when we want it to. We budget for a new one and repairing is working out more expensive and getting readymade tea in a plastic bag from a nearby gaddo doesn’t satisfy the chai-drinkers. What follows the Excel-Tally disagreement are: • explanations (‘Vendor send previous full year’s newspaper bill after 1 April’), • digging into memories (‘Remember, the sewage overflowed and we got labour to clean it?’) • discovering scribbles on scraps of paper stuck in diary pages (‘Arre, I forgot to write this in the register, we had got the fire-thing refilled, no?’), • and manual recalculations help to match the figures (‘Better to do like this by hand. Computer must be wrong’). Finally, everyone’s satisfied. The income depressed me. A few parents, even those who are regular salaried government employees, resisted paying fees quoting ‘Covid’. The slum-dwelling, migrant labourers have been better behaved. The teachers—am proud of them—were willing to work for nil if things got worse. “We can’t waste the children’s year,” they said. If there is a Chief Principal in the Sky, s/he must have heard that and made sure we had just enough each month to pay the salaries. To the rupee. “Then,” said Shri Husband, as always looking over my shoulder to read what I was typing, “What was the case for ‘depression’?” Best to keep quiet, otherwise he gets into lecture-baazi mode. I didn’t even feel like telling him that many budget schools have done so poorly that they have either shut down or are on the verge of doing so. We’ve scraped by, thanks to the efforts of the teachers and responsible, decent parents. The expenditure, other than the meagre salaries of a budget school, was on electricity and water bills. Even the telephone didn’t get used. Stationery was hardly used as the summative examinations, unit tests, formative assessments, continuous evaluation (for those not in this profession, these terms are not synonyms) were held online. The lower-kindergarten students had spent an entire year in school without having seen a classroom or their teacher in real life. How to predict for the coming year, I mused, with the virus mutating from avtar to avtar? No one listens to my mumbling. Everyone gets on with the job at hand. We budget for masks and sanitizers. Liquid hand-wash. Floor-cleaning fluids. Disposable gloves in the first-aid kit. I recall a chain-owned beauty-parlour recently opened in Porvorim charged us Rs 100 for a tissue apron worn by the hair-cutting person, a flimsy mask worn by the one getting the hair cut, and blue plastic covers for the footwear (in case the virus energetically jumps from shoe to lip defying all expert predictions). I wonder what their budget looks like. These days I wonder what any budget looks like. Numbers-challenged me is fascinated by such things, like I’m fascinated by man going into space. Same level of difficulty. Second ‘grumpphh’ from Shri Husband, this time decipherable, but not for printing in a public space. The budget exercise is over. Estimates, guesses, calculations will play out in real time as the months unfold. Ruksana, Suhasini and Francis have breathed a collective sigh of relief that all was well. Mistakes were caught, errors rectified. Looking backward, I think, in a country where so much is siphoned off, so many under-the-table transactions happening, it’s a joy to know that there are many, many, many people living honest, transparent lives, where every annual budget is accurate and unchallengeable. Viva to the common man, the woman on the street, the little-folk of India.

Covid Events 2021

2021-02-05T08:14:00.001-08:00

We’re unlocking ourselves; senior classes and colleges have tentatively opened, Board-examinations have been slotted for May 2021, more than a month later than the usual times, but we’re still teaching on WhatsApp. Mid-year, who knows, the National Education Policy might jolt Goa into improving the lot of future generations: and make government teachers, well, actually teach rather than punch in every morning to justify getting salaries. Actually, I must add, contrary to expectations, the teaching community did very well through the online classroom phase. Some, who hadn’t known how to handle a cellular phone learnt within seven days to record and air lessons on YouTube and take tutorials over Zoom or GoogleMeet/Team. (BTW, I used the word ‘cellular’ phone because according to Shri Husband, who claims—perhaps rightfully--that his English is better than mine, a ‘mobile’ phone should be able to move on its own or be driven, not carried.) Now that the Calangute hordes have gone back to re-infect folks in Karnataka, Maharashtra and wherever else they drove here from, the traffic has thinned on CHoGM Road. (Note: CHoGM is the correct spelling. Chogum is not.) Familiar local thug fights, over long-festering family-feuds, unpaid rents and scarce parking-spaces, have re-started as the drunken tourists have gone. We’re venturing (“Please write ‘masked, sanitized and distanced’,” dictates Shri Husband, peering over my shoulder) out of our territory, our village home, after three-fourths of the year. One (rare) thing we both agree upon: we don’t take punga with any virus. It took god knows how many centuries to eradicate ‘Devi’, the dreaded and highly infectious small-pox which left people with no eyesight and with ugly pock-marks on their faces even when they survived. Praying/fasting didn’t help, inoculations did. Remember polio? That awful virus which made people get sudden high fever and flaccidity and left them lame and helpless for a lifetime? How many drops for how many children over how many years have now conquered it… do the math to see how difficult it was/is to tame a rogue virus. Again, prayers/fasting didn’t work, the vaccine did. If the above two paragraphs were frightening to read, that was the intention. Covid-19 is no common cold. It’s not a Goan/Indian/Asian thing either. Get used to the idea that it’s a ba-ad infection and the only way to beat it is by taking precautions. “Masks, hand hygiene, distancing,” repeats Shri Husband in his irritating (he’s always correct, that’s what makes it irritating) way. So, with every precaution carefully taken, we chose to attend whatever we safely could of IFFI, and the Kesarbai Kerkar Sangeet Sammelan. IFFI first: I missed three days because although the documents were loaded (‘up-loaded’ – that was Shri Husband’s voice in my ear—‘although in your case, loaded might be correct, too.’), no acknowledgement came through my email. A visit to the (really helpful, cheerful and efficiently staffed) counter at the ESG worked. I got my card in a jiffy. After that, we booked our tickets online and dutifully saw what we were entitled to. It wasn’t the same. No queues, no arguments, no wrappers/tissues or tempers flying around. Some things were unchanged: blimp-shaped women wearing translucent dresses with easily viewed, brightly-coloured, gaily-printed underwear competing with similar-looking/dressed men. Filmy-creative-artsy devil-may-care attitudes are fun and common at such events. Staid old me notices and stores in the memory such things. As well as the soggy popcorn at Inox and cold chai in teeny steel conical tumblers at KA. And announcers with semi-Indian accents (love ‘em). College-student ushering highly enthusiastic cine-philes and time-passing retirees, fingering the micro-keyboards on their gadgets at sonic speed as they multi-tasked, messaging friends, checking our e-tickets/temperatures, chit-chatting as they did so. Guards who didn’t look like they were themselves secure, what to say about keeping us that way inside/outside the auditoria. Inside the theatres, it was a pleasant surprise that there was no national anthem to stand to. Aside: we weren’t the only ones who were carrying tiffin from home, going by the dabbas on the table outside the entrances. Missed the out-of-Goa regular IFFI buffs. The Kesarbai Kerkar Sangeet Samaroha: a big, big treat. If I had the money, I’d visit Salzburg or the Sydney Opera or Broadway. If I had the political clout in this country, I would charge that kind of money for attending these utterly delightful concerts. I read that it’s amongst the ten best classical music festivals in the world. With good reason. The curation, the quality of singers, the backdrop (every year it’s memorable) is of very high standard. Shri Husband says so, too, and we all know how hard it is to get a kind word out of him. In spite of the cheer in my life, cannot end this column on a happy note this time. Reason is the Farmers’ rally in Delhi. Biting cold, injustice, the might of the State on protestors, the goons who may have infiltrated the crowd, the forced-to-forget problems of the ex-Servicemen of this country who are asking for their dues--refer ‘One Rank One Pension’ or OROP-- for the last couple of years. Governments may mean well, may want India to be catapulted into the league of the Developed Nations, but if earlier we were terribly slow, now we’re pushing things through without dialogue/discussion; that means many points get missed, often vital ones. Listening to vox populi is democracy. I read today that in the Andamans, bridges will be built. The pros to the population and the cons to the environment need to be discussed over by experts. Without the inputs of environmentalists, modern town-planners/designers and the local population, there will be cause for alarm. In Mollem, the people let the government know they were serious about what they wanted. See what happened about getting the IIT to Goa? People may be unlettered, but we cannot assume they are unintelligent. Development is necessary, so is caution whilst driving towards it. I benefit from the flyovers and broad roads because I can reach Kala Academy, my Pandharpur for all that’s fine in my world, with ease. But there are no footpaths for me to walk on, to reach a grocery-store. No clean/comfortable/regularly-run, fairly-priced, ticket-providing buses that will take me from my home to wherever I want to go. No taxies that won’t fleece me unfairly. In the meanwhile, the broad roads will take many big cars which will keep burning expensive fuel as they search around for parking space. The fields on the sides that grew food, that made Goa pretty, are getting smaller and drier. The number of coconut trees is dwindling as also the number of climbers to get those coconuts down. The newer, more productive varieties of the nut have a different taste and texture. The beaches, once the pride and joy of Goans, have as many plastic bottles/packets as footprints. Or more. “Now look who’s giving the lecture,” Shri Husband said. Always has the last word, he does.

THE NEW NORM

2021-01-09T17:39:00.006-08:00

To figure out a new norm, I figured out the old one first. 1984, Bhopal Gas Tragedy, Union Carbide responsible. We made our first many bucks by selling certificates. For a whole year, and the following decade, anyone who wanted to submit to the government that they, or some member of their family, had suffered due to the killer, debilitating gas, came to us. We made a file for them, with certified true copies of their birth certificate, income-certificate from their Panchayat, ration-card and medical certificate, too. We gave death certificates of relatives, real or imagined, for a higher fee, naturally, for they were more difficult to procure (regular printer refused to print because of a superstition). That file would get them a pension for life. Or a one-time grant or some facility or the other from the government. Some even managed to get maal from the company, directly. Smart people. And what did we get? A fee, an income. We did so many people so much good. We also bought our first car. Cars. 1993, the Latur Earthquake. God was kind; we added a floor to our house. Competition had come in, but we were quick. Temporary huts, roofs, beds, gas-cylinders, sale of farmland, licences, paperwork in government offices to apply for subsidies, grants. Our rates were low: two per cent of what anyone got. Fifty rupees extra for the trouble we took to help people out. Competition was negligible. The 2000s have been generous. The Gujarat earthquake. We filmed doctors bandaging wounds, people digging trenches, pitching tents, cooking and transporting food and sold the footage to news channels. We changed with the times. Our rivals were still selling certificates. We’d moved on. Experience matters, see? I didn’t have to worry about my daughter’s dowry. Or my sister’s daughter’s. I donated a hundred and one gilded coconuts to the Siddhi-Vinayak temple. Nothing’s too good for one’s favourite deity, no? 2001, January, the tsunami. We gathered truckloads of clothes, rations, medicines. People were ready to buy cooking oil, petrol, soap, water. Wherever we went, whenever we set up shop, whether in Tamil Nadu or Andhra, it was hard work. Businessmen from all over the country were setting up shop. We had expected to make a tidy profit, but no, the competition kept the prices low. We didn’t make a loss. That’s all I can say. 2006, the Mumbai floods. no luck there. That city has its own network. We did some business and stayed put, which was good, because we do some dhanda annually, nothing spectacular, but regular stuff. Plastic-sheets and gutter-cleaning labour-contracts, mainly. Herbal teas and immunity-boosters were good investments, yes. Natural disasters are a boon, yes. 2013 and 2019, Uttarakhand cloudburst and collapse. We ran there as fast as we could. We’re the experts. We can give you any disaster material anywhere in the country, anytime you want it. Glucose biscuits made locally, packed with wrappers to make them look like the real stuff. When you’re hungry, been out of food for three-four days, tastes the same, whether the biscuits have paraffin or maida. One hundred and ninety-nine percent profit? Arrey, multiply that by ten. You want drinking water? We give. You want paracetamol? We give. You want to call the Army? Ok, we have our limitations, but we try. If you pay, we try. 2020, January. We got a whiff that something was happening, weren’t sure. March, the Pradhan Mantri, bless his chest, announced the Lockdown. Covid-Corona, Virus-Shirus, curfew. Wah. Milk, dal and rice, wheat and sugar, there was money to be made, we thought and the family sat to bounce ideas. It led to nowhere, too many players around. Then, we learnt about the PPEs and masks. When the planet bowed to the whims of a mutant-nucleic-acid, we weren’t prepared, I admit. We learnt overnight, like a million-million others, to do things together that we’d never done before. Online education and WFH is what you think. We’re different. Standing in our balcony at 2000 hours, one particular evening, clapping and banging our thalis with spoons, we realized where the future lay. We raced to make or buy and sell elastic-eared masks. Paper ones, jute ones, synthetic ones, cotton ones. With stripes and zari-work, masculine-looking ones, colourful checks for the style-conscious, bright-motifs for toddlers and old-fashioned ones for old people. Millions of masks at a profit of Rs. 1 per mask comes to… do the math. Disposable gloves, aprons, head-gear. Home-made sanitizers, sanitizer-bottles with/out pumps, sanitizer-bottle-dispensers with foot-operated levers. Chaandi hi chaandi—no, sona hi sona. Life is good, Corona-mata ki jai ho. One of my cousins is negotiating with a dozen hospitals for ventilators and another is having discussions about garbage-removal/disposal contract with a couple of MLAs. Viva. The other day, I walked into a new beauty-parlour at Porvorim. Nothing they can do can make me beautiful, for that I’d need a jadugar, no less, I agree. What impressed me was, they were charging Rs 100 for a safety ‘kit’ which including plastic footwear covers. Now, to tell customers that the present mutant might jump from ground to nostril and endanger all around was novel. I came from there a wiser woman. The new norm requires one to be quick-thinking, a step ahead of the others in the race. It’s not about selling home-made ladoos/chaklis. It’s not about tailoring your own clothes or making family movies and putting them on YouTube/FB/Instagram to bore relatives on the other side of the planet. The new norm is about frightening people or convincing them that they should be frightened—or at least more responsible until the vaccine takes over—and buy chappal-covers in barber-shops so we can enjoy the hospitality of Bank Managers, get a free diary/calendar for 2021. It’s when you compare the new norm with the old that the picture becomes clear: whilst change is the only constant, as things have been, things remain.

Spending is an Art or My Heroes 2020

2020-12-06T04:37:00.003-08:00

There’s a difference between expenditure and waste. Wonderful words. I typed them on the screen and read them aloud and I was going to expand on them, when I could type no further, because Shri Husband peeked over my shoulder and made a nasty comment. Because he had nothing better to do. Because he is presently partially locked, and it doesn’t matter to him that all of us are. He scowls nevertheless, thinking he alone is being punished for something that is not his fault in any way. He is, therefore, in a permanently bad mood (since it’s a continuing condition, can’t really make out what the triggers are, honestly). When the government says ‘bhiu-pa chi garaz na’ and the doctor says, ‘take all precautions, mask-wash-distance, it’s a bad infection, this corona virus causes’, can’t blame him now, can I? They say, and I have read, that full un-locking (or should I say locking-up?) will take years if not months, vaccine or no vaccine, because the no-one’s sure how the virus will behave and mutate. So, bored in the interim period, he’s (Shri Husband, not the doctor) ready to pick on anyone. Mainly, me. I erased what I’d written. “You mean ‘deleted’,” said my personal, domestic interferon (what an apt word to use in these Covid Times, heh, heh, to describe Shri Husband). “Whatever,” I retorted, typing on, hoping my months-long-grown hair would block his vision. No such luck. “But it’s true,” he said, agreeing with me in a grudging kind of way, “Spending really is an art.” He must have heard this in childhood or read it on a car-sticker or something. Can’t believe he could come up with something so profound. “Means?” I said, hoping to shut him up. Usually, when I ask such questions, he gets up and walks away. He didn’t. Instead, he told me: “Spending, whether of time, energy or money, is a habit. A habit is an acquired behaviour pattern that is followed so regularly it’s almost involuntary. Examples of spending habits might include shopping for trivia on pay-day where money is concerned. Where time is concerned, getting up late in the morning and watching television at night and then panicking when the deadline for the column is very close.” He was getting into lecture-baazi mode, so I kept typing, bashing on regardless, ignoring him. That’s the best thing to do, I’ve learnt. In bygone years, I have known housewives who sorted out the husband’s salary (in those days wages were disbursed in cash even if the earner wore a white collar) and put fixed amounts in envelopes labelled ‘bread’, ‘eggs’, ‘butter’, ‘daal’, ‘soap’, ‘gas’, ‘milk’, ‘vegetables’, etc. Oh, and ‘matches’, for induction and micro-wave cooking didn’t exist even in fantasy stories. Nor did the internet. Or the mobile-phone. It was always a mystery to me what they did if they needed extra salt, sugar or oil in a particular month because the ants attacked a dabba or carelessness led to spillage. Shri Husband felt, still feels, that wives like me “would take out from one envelope some money and put it in another to neutralize a deficit in the latter and play musical envelopes till the end of the month”. Not true, but I don’t protest. I still know families who budget their EMIs, credit-card amounts, birthday-party gifts expenses, Netflix charges, petrol-bills, medical insurance and stuff. As an afterthought, they add school-fees: I should know, have been phone-chasing defaulters since the beginning of this academic year. But I stray… Smart people manage and manipulate their twenty-four hours. Shri Husband snorted: ‘Smart’. I knew he was thinking of, or referring through that snort to those like me, who need twelve hours sleep, some minutes snatched through the day and, steadfastly, many hours at a stretch at night. They also need to chew their food well and sit before, during and after meals/baths or returning from or before going to office/market. How to spend time calls for another column. Some are good at energy-conservation: they peel garlic while the milk is on the boil, run the mixer whilst the pressure-cooker whistles, sweep and mop whilst the washing-machine churns. Wise they are, for they accomplish much through the day. “And,” mumbled the man in my life, “some are otherwise.” Before I could react, he rectified that and said, “You do manage a lot of free time, I must admit. Teach me how to do it.” When he asks a favour like that, I go chup. He believes I’m a creative person. He also believes that lazy people are creative: they think of ways to get out of energy-expending situations. We both appreciate—and you know it’s rare for us to agree upon anything at all-- those who know what gives them pleasure: music, trekking, bird-watching, growing vegetables, collecting mouse-pads (or wrist-watches, which is my hobby, ahem), brewing wine, making jewellery, baking sour-dough bread, travelling, clicking photographs, etc. Those are the people who rule the money they earn. Money doesn’t dictate that it should be saved or splurged upon short-lived joys like buying shoes you will wear but once and then let the fungi and mould feast upon them. “The same,” said Shri Husband, indicating that I should take down what he’s saying, “is true about spending/wasting time or energy.” I have noticed that those who are careful with money are careful with time and energy. I saw Shri Husband nodding. In agreement. A never-to-be-forgotten moment. It was then that the Universe colluded: we both simultaneously heard the news that Mr. Ranjitsinh Disale had won the one million US dollar Global Teacher Prize for being an exceptional teacher who made an outstanding contribution to the profession. There were 12000 applications and nominations from 140 countries. The gentleman is from a Zilla Parishad Primary School in a place now prominently on the map: Paritewadi, Solapur, Maharashtra. That was impressive. We were delighted. More joy: Mr. Disale shared half his prize money with the other nine finalists. Which means half of more than seven crores in Indian rupees. Each of the other finalists will get, thanks to Mr. Disale’s generosity and consideration, fifty-five lakh of our currency. Whew. Shri Husband said, “He’s only thirty-two, and he knows how to spend correctly.” We’ve learnt a big lesson from someone half our age. I thought—Shri Husband all but forbids me from thinking, says it tires my brain, but I think anyway—that just as important was the fact that the person who constituted this award in 2014 was also an Indian, Mr. Sunny Varkey from Kerala, a businessman and long-time resident of the UAE. He heads the Varkey Foundation, which is a charitable organisation dedicated to changing lives through education. Imagine spending a million US dollars per year on a prize. Another man really knows to spend; for once, Shri Husband and I agreed yet again. In this Year that Changed the Planet, at the tail end of the year, I virtually met my heroes 2020. These two men, may their tribe increase, have shown how when time, energy and money are correctly utilized—‘spent, not wasted,’ Shri Husband reminded me--- magic happens.

a poem on inoculations

2020-05-10T10:40:00.002-07:00

file:///C:/Users/Sheila/AppData/Local/Packages/Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe/TempState/Downloads/248-Blinded%20Article%20Text-1338-1-10-20191222%20(1).pdf

individual needs in plastic surgery

2020-05-10T10:37:00.000-07:00

https://www.rhime.in/ojs/index.php/rhime/article/view/267

a poem about dying on an operating table.

2020-05-10T10:35:00.002-07:00

https://www.rhime.in/ojs/index.php/rhime/article/view/261/279?fbclid=IwAR3fY16CnHGnmqkc-qvP51BUHtzLck9Ar9EaJpL5axNhO2pMpSS1MbA6qGw

lockdown 700 students.

2020-04-19T01:52:00.002-07:00

I rarely write serious stuff.
I work as Administrator of three schools. Two (a Konkanni-medium primary school and a high school) get grant-in-aid from the government and one is unaided.
A few of our ‘aided’ children, from standards I-VIII come to school attracted by the midday-meal provided by the government. We can’t help them with food through their vacations anytime, even in years past, that’s true. But, the lockout that flowed from 22 Mar into the summer holidays meant many of them would be drinking/eating Pepsi/vada-paav (or basic fare like chapati-onions equivalent) for more than two months.
These midday-meals comprising two pulses and two vegetables, and bread, are monotonous, but nutritious. When I joined, and found that on some days the food was bad, I threw a minor tantrum and threatened to complain to the authorities. After that, the local women’s Self-Help Group started making pretty good stuff. (Aside: four women cater to a total of 1200 students in different schools, daily, in Porvorim. They start cooking at 0445 in the morning and dispatch the dabbas by 0945. Covid19 has locked down on their income, approx. Rs 7000/m/person.)
The UNaided school’s fees are low, approximately Rs 600/month; I don’t know whether the parents will henceforth be able to afford even those.
The lockdown means a large number of students would lose out on routine. I don’t mean a rigid time-table, but expected events like getting a meal at all or an uninterrupted night’s rest. A single room shared by family members and ‘guests’ from the village, even a tenant or two, don’t allow for the humdrum existence and privacy most middle-class persons take for granted. Unpleasant silences and high-decibel quarrels are the norm. Physical fights, substance abuse, sexual harassment provide highly avoidable excitement.
Considering they’re already lagging in studies compared to their better-off contemporaries from well-off homes and expensive schools, this gap—already big-- is going to be hard to fill over the years post-lockdown. Unlocking cannot be switched on, it will take time for the parents’ incomes to stabilize and for their homes to return to normalcy.
I read posts on Facebook. This is what comes to mind. The Covid-19 Lockdown, to those connected with schools like mine, is not about getting used to doing jhaadoo-pocha. Our PTA comprises plumbers, electricians, masons, tea-stall workers, maids and such like who have never had groceries home-delivered, who believe their children will get a better life than theirs because they wear a uniform and attend school with a bag and books.
Many of the semi-/illiterate parents aren’t unintelligent. They recognize how the Lockdown losses will affect them. So do those of my ilk. But we can plan. We won’t starve. They might.
Goa locked down a few days before the rest of the country. Schools and colleges were among the first to shut their doors to students, though the teachers/staff attended. Exams were initially cancelled, then postponed. For the first three days, only the stray dogs that prowl in the compound missed the children. The rest thought it was time to catch up with Whatsapp messages, finishing corrections and making long-pending register entries. By the time the national lockdown was announced on 22 Mar, there was a sense of unease: what to do about the IV, IX and X standards?
Standard IV is when the child leaves primary to enter middle school. It involves re-admission, even if it is into the same institution’s senior section. Standard X appears for the Board examination. It’s the first rung of the future, the first external exam. The backgrounds of the students notwithstanding, our Board results have been good. Speaks well for the teachers/staff.
IX is important for a completely different reason. That is the only time a school need not promote a student who has not fared well over since the time s/he joined school, when students can decide whether they want to subsequently do vocational/academic courses, or take up jobs.
Until VIII, schools are supposed to continuously evaluate students through the year on classwork, homework, projects, oral responses, behaviour, attendance, etc. Practically, in a class of forty students, most of whom are first-generation school-goers, the only way to evaluate a child’s progress is through tests and exams. It is almost impossible to make a child repeat a year, which is why this policy has earned the name ‘no-fail’ policy.
Many of the 700+ students of my schools aren’t going to be learning music/craft with their parents. The online tutorials on the free channels are in English or Hindi; our Konkanni Primary kids won’t follow any of it. Even our high school students will find difficulty without guidance from a teacher. They must be whiling away their awake hours playing games on their parents’ phones. Or hanging around OUTside their homes as there’s not much space inside. The swampy, garage-littered surroundings won’t do much for their physiological/psychological well-being.
Much though people grumble about ‘government schools/teachers’, my small audit sample, restricted to these schools, has shown me that the teachers really do their best. They have to tackle more than finishing portions and imparting knowledge through modern teaching methods. They are faced with poverty, malfunctioning families and their consequences. They hand-hold the children from ages five to fourteen. Releasing them into the world at the best of times is heart-breaking.
The lockdown can’t be suddenly lifted. Whilst the haves will pick up the threads quite easily—their parents have spent quality time with them, their teachers have gently taught them the reading/writing/’rithmatic, craft/music/PE through virtual media, the have-nots would have developed deficiencies in nutrition, emotion and discipline.
Can I bring myself, anxious as I am about the future of ‘my’ students, to think about new recipes, embroidery, poetry, painting, when in isolation/solitude? Yes. I have running water, electricity, cooking-fuel, food, a roof and the ability to read. It helps.
But, the Covid-19 Lockdown has, after a very long time, forced something humourless to get typed out of my keyboard.

Engraved in Steel Covid Lockdown.

2020-04-13T01:22:00.001-07:00

Covid-Lockdown = Spring-cleaning.

Whilst rummaging through kitchen drawers, something I saw triggered a typical Bambaiyya-Hindi phrase from long ago: “Iss per tera naam likha hai kya?”, commonly said-

• in school by mates who wouldn’t share exam timetables,
• in buses/trains during seat-grabbing,
• by clerks in government departments who took their own sweet time opening a lock/drawer/file,
• by uniformed guards at mall-entrances snapping at loiterers lingering near the luggage-rollers, curiously eyeing bags/packs.
• by acquaintances who wanted to puncture egos of foreign-returned persons who wouldn’t show them imported ball-point-pens (to own one meant you were a ‘someone’).

As I inspected the old utensils in my kitchen, I discovered how ‘naam-likha-hai’ might have originated.
In the old days, buildings and bungalows all over India were often named after a member of the family that built them: ‘Narayan Sadan’, ‘Champa Nivas’, ‘Radha Kunj’, ‘Pethe Nilayam’, ‘Umaid Bhavan’.

Peculiarly, at a lesser economic level, south of the Vindhyas, eg. Gujarat, Maharashtra, brass/steel-ware in bought in the 1930s-‘70s, was always ‘marked’ by names of the owners.

My mother-in-law’s possessions: The handle of every spoon/ladle/spatula/strainer, the side of each vati/ pela/ dabba/ taat/ zhaaknni (=bowl/tumbler/box/plate/lid) had a name/date engraved on it. Every vessel, big/tiny, had a history.

I read one written in English: Sow Savitri Ghanashyam Doiphude. (Sow=Sau=Mrs=Saubhagyavati). Who’s that, I ask my sister-in-law over the phone; ‘might have been a neighbour’, she said. Perhaps she had loaned my mother-in-law sugar in that dabba? Excellent cursive penmanship. The letters flowed.

A big and heavy paan-daan (closed container that held betel-leaves, supari, tumbaakkoo, choona, kaat, dry-coconut-shavings, gulkand) was gifted to my father-in-law, ‘with grateful thanks’, by a certain Advocate Siddhananda Maharudhreshwar Rajyadhyakshya; the names of his juniors and staff – I imagine--have also been included, possibly rank-wise, as they weren’t in alphabetical order. The writing, again, remarkably neat, was at the bottom of the dabba. Complicated names, perfectly inscribed.

A 12”-diameter brass chapatti-dabba, the well-proportioned paraat and the wooden chakli-making-gadget had my grandmother-in-law’s name on it, greeting her on her first post-marriage Ganapati-festival. I marvel that the legible letters engraved close to a century ago have survived scrubbing with abrasive powders and coconut coir.

No spelling mistakes. This ‘writing’ on metal was done by salesmen in steel-utensils shops in Mumbai, sitting on hard cotton cushions with white covers, next to the cashier-owner, using an electric machine with a needle-tip that tapped the metal surface at high speeds. They would have been barely literate, and in the vernacular. There was scope for errors (at least in English); there were none.

The inscriptions on three tiffins, in Marathi, tell me something about Shri Husband and his sisters. Alongside each name is the date on which the tiffin was bought. The small ones were for the primary-school years, for carrying easy-to-eat laddoos and shakkar-parya. The flat, compartmented, rectangular ones with clips on the sides were for middle-school, for chapatti+bhaji+banana. From standards eighth to eleventh (no 10+2 then) they carried multi-layered containers with usal, chapati, curd, the inevitable banana, and possibly a fistful of roasted groundnuts or homemade chakli.

There are drinking-water lotas with ‘sa-prem bhet’ (=with affection) or ‘abhinandan’ (=congratulations) written on them, presented on a birthday or on clearing a Board Examination. Some have tiny, flawlessly executed flowers/leaves drawn alongside. I marvel at the precision of the work.

The most interesting ones are the small haldi-kunku presents:

• one oil-container can pour out a teaspoonful of liquid through a beak. On it is written, ‘Lata-kaki heechya kadoon, sankrantichi bhet’ (=from Lata-kaki, on the occasion of Sankrant).

• a comb-holder from a certain Guna-atya to my eldest sister-in-law. No one remembers this Guna-atya, but the illustration of a baby held up by two sturdy hands and the fact that she was called ‘atya’ suggests she was close to my in-laws.

• Soap-dishes, wick-lamps, kunku-dispensers, sugar-pots, tea-strainers, spatulas, ladles, a remarkable assortment of spoons of all sizes, shapes and quality have at least names, if not dates and occasions, written on them.

Tiny letters, long names, longer messages, all squeezed into two-millimeter-wide, inch-long spaces. We need magnifying glasses to read some of those. I’ve seen men doing it with the aid of only ordinary spectacles.

I don’t know where/how this custom was born.

Correlle, Pyrex, Corning, Borosil, Opal, Khurja, microwave-friendly cook-cum-serve dishes look nice on our dining-tables, may serve as family heirlooms, but are unlikely to arouse curiosity. No Tupperware salad-box or Milton casserole is personalized like this. No name, no date, nothing to differentiate it from any other.

Drums to store water, with taps, before the era of the square ‘syntex’ tanks that now cling to kitchen-ceilings, had bold engravings and proudly occupied precious space on kitchen otas (=platforms). Heavy, grey, no longer shiny, but quite indestructible, impossible even to dent, our steel inheritance gave us a sense of the past, a link to parents/elders/philosophies/attitudes long gone. Many of these items, from homes like ours, have gone to charitable institutions because they are cumbersome to use and take up too much space.

I discover that the word ‘own’ has no equivalent in Marathi/Hindi.

Aadhar cards and passports have our parents’ names on them, but they don’t give a feeling of ‘ownership’.
I had not eaten from a thermocole/foil-coated toss-away until I was well into adulthood. In my parents’ generation, money was spent on education, food and rent, in that order. Every item bought was meant to last forever, hence ‘marked’.

The other markings were on our arms/thighs: to fight small-pox/diphtheria/dysentery/tuberculosis.
We’ve changed our lifestyle and habits, and in the near future, will change them drastically again. Vocabulary and habits have changed drastically and will change some more. Strangely, the phrase ‘naam likha hai kya’ might, I believe, live on.

This compulsory staying put, caged in a comfortable home, thinking about those who don’t have what I have, is a memory forming, nestling, staying put in every human mind alive and conscious today. Across country and race, war and riot, garden and golf, a collective, never-to-be-forgotten part of Mankind’s memory.

Covid-Lockdown=Engraved Forever.

At Delfino 7 Apr 2020

2020-04-10T04:05:00.003-07:00

We had stocks estimated to last till 14 April, the last day of the ‘lockdown’ as announced by the PM on 22 Mar. Not that we were running out of daal-chaawal-sugar-oil-soap, but since the news hinted that the curfew might be extended, we went shopping. To avoid a crowd, we went immediately after lunch, the hottest part of the day. Others had the same idea, for there was a crowd outside Delfino’s, our closest ‘supermarket’. All the small grocers and other shops in our area were shut, although the CM had requested them to stay open for 24 hours. Considering that they are usually shut most of the day anyway, didn’t expect anything different. A few did open for an hour or two in the morning, as was the usual routine pre-Covid-19 anyway, to sell milk-bread, onions-potatoes and maybe cigarettes-chai and then pulled shutters down. At the best of times these shops sell wilted, soggy ‘fresh’ vegetables. Except the ‘horticulture’ sheds. These days, hawkers who sell the local farm-produce have hiked their prices. We pay them what they ask for. In the Delfino’s compound, a shamiana had been erected to give shade to the customers waiting to enter. Small white circles were drawn to indicate where we could stand, 1.5 metres away from anyone in front, behind or to our sides. Like chess pieces, we stood, waiting to make a move when the Security chap indicated we should/could, when someone exited from the payment-counter at the other end of the shop. He sprayed the handles of the trolleys and every palm with a lemon-smelling disinfectant before entry. As senior citizens, we were entitled to break the queue. Shri Husband, a stickler for ‘go by the spirit not the letter of a regulation’ said we should go when our turn came, as it wouldn’t be fair to the younger folk. ‘We’re in good health and it won’t take long,’ he said. Strange how he’s patient at the oddest times. Not with me, but I’ll save that for another article. Every time a young person’s turn came, a senior citizen turned up and went ahead. Stay, ordered Shri Husband and I shifted from one foot to another and back, smiling through my mask at a woman standing across the square, who had focussed her spectacled eyes on my huge canvass bag. When she didn’t smile back, I folded the bag and pressed the creases to spite her. Little else to do. When my turn came, I exchanged four cardboard egg-trays for coupons. Two bucks per tray is what Delfino’s takes off the bill. I stuffed the coupons into my wallet. I have a collection of those coupons. For some reason, I do not remember to present them at check-out, so they accumulate. “The lockdown hasn’t made a difference to your memory,” Shri Husband remarked after we went home. Snide. I should never have mentioned the coupons to him. Inside Delfino’s, there was quiet music, air-conditioning, no jostling, pleasant staff. No Amul buttermilk, but milk aplenty. No kurmuras, but poha available. No mutton, but beef and pork looked fresh. No toor or moong dals, but urad and masoor were in stock. Our favourite rice, ambe-mohar, the ponni-rice for idli, rava and the flours we love—jwari specially—were available. We aren’t into insta-foods, but I noticed that the noodles, bottle-can-and-carton shelves were empty. Maybe customer-habit researchers are doing a study? Convinced that the electricity-department wasn’t letting us down, we bought butter, paneer, peas from the frozen section. Oil, soap. Once I’d run through my list, I reached out for non-list items—snacks, sauces. Shri Husband was impressed (rare!) that I had made a list. Like budgets and dusting, it’s on my never-to-be-done things. But these are unusual times we’re living through and persons (being politically correct here) like me in other parts of the planet must be doing the same, I imagine. I saw other trolleys piled high. Were they stocking for six months? Was I doing something wrong by buying for just another four or five days? Influenced by the others, at the chemist, we decide to buy a month’s medicine. I walked out pleased that I had ‘everything’ now. Coconuts, curry-leaves, green chillies, drumsticks and pumpkin flowers we get from our compound. The nustekar blows the horn every alternate day announcing the arrival of a scooter-ful of fish from Betim. Bony, scaly, down-market ones, but they’re a good source of protein when we’re tired of eating eggs. What I can buy at and around my house, I don’t buy from any supermarket. Like leafy vegetables, alsande, chawli, tambdi bhaji, etc. I must admit, and not reluctantly, that Shri Husband is a good house-husband. Sweeping, mopping, washing he does, and happily. Possibly because I’m tidiness challenged. He lends a helping hand in cooking, chopping, clearing, too. Through Facebook and the Whatsapp groups of my schoolmates, ex-colleagues and other acquaintances, I have gathered that many husbands around the world are as kind and supportive. There is no way I will let him read this paragraph, let him know I am fortunate. Might change his persona. This is not the time to disturb status quo. After the Delfino trip, after putting things away, I sit to check messages. I have friends in ill health. One is living by herself and missing face-contact with other humans. One cousin is unhappy to be imprisoned in a tiny flat with unpleasant family-members who are not talking to each other, for twenty-four hours, day after day. One is an alcoholic getting severe withdrawal symptoms. One is worried because she cannot reach her daughter on phone or via the internet and doesn’t know what to do because the daughter fiercely protects her ‘privacy’. Contrary-wise, many are enjoying their solitude, the company of their partners/pets/books/music. A very few, like me, are grateful that life has been, so far, good, that I am able to have excursions to places like Delfino’s. Approaching 14 April, I say, que sera, sera.

A Festival of Scraps and Leftovers.

2020-04-07T23:33:00.002-07:00

What’s the word for the last gooey rice-and-gravy slurp of a meal which we Indians 'mop' up with our fingers? I can’t get up from a meal unless the plate is ‘wiped’ clean. Four fingers of the right hand caress the plate in a circular, scooping motion. Some law of physics attracts and holds together near-liquid dal/curd combined with a quarter fistful of rice, flavoured with the last bit of fried fish or dry vegetable. It’s a skill as complicated, but messier, as eating non-filleted fish with chopsticks. It’s childhood conditioning: ’don’t waste food’. How my polishing a plate would help anyone starving anywhere in the world, I didn’t understand, but the mantra stuck. There were more ration shops than private grocers where/when I was a child. In the early days of my marriage, I often cried over curdled milk (no fridge), collected multi-ingredient one-pot-meal recipes (I owned ONE kerosene-fuelled wick-stove), and cooked with whatever was seasonally, locally available (nation-wide transportation was primitive). Erratic electricity supply meant undependable running water. I enjoyed solitude in remote corners of Uttar Pradesh, through bitter Kashmir winters, drought-stricken Tamil Nadu and in Punjab through its troubled years. Cellular phones, cable-television, and the internet were decades away. I learned from neighbours/acquaintances ‘make-do recipes’ with whatever the neighbourhood grocer sold. I became clever at creating recipes out of odd ingredients. Be informed, there’s madness in the methods. I’ve always had a pukka roof over my head and enough food on the table to welcome guests, but because of circumstance, frugality ruled. So, when the lockdown was announced, I went into kanjoos-mode immediately, stocked until 14 Apr 2020. Gas, check. Oil for cooking, check. Milk powder, in case fresh milk was rationed and we had problems with the fridge. Rice, for making idlis and dosas, too. Flours -- wheat, jwari and nachni. Pulses -- rajma, chana black/white, matki, kuleeth, moong, masoor, alsande. Onions and potatoes. Fruit and fresh vegetables that lasted, like gourds and apples. Masalas. Sugar. Soap and scrubbers. Eggs, bread, butter. Done. Since we can’t trust the voltage in our village, I chose to not stock anything that ever swam, flew or trotted. The freezer held icepacks for predictable headaches. Presently, all vegetable trimmings, rinds and peels are used to make stock for soup or dal, or grated to plump up polle. Early every morning, I soak a fistful of a whole pulse. Shri Husband, peering to see what I was typing, said ‘soaking a pulse’ sounded strange. So, to rephrase: I soak a fistful of one of the pulses mentioned above. And not in rum/brandy as Shri Husband hinted; plain water works. After sunset, I strain it and allow it to sprout overnight. The following morning the grains’ nutritive value is increased multiple-fold. (A good way to cheat price rise, too; you get more value per rupee spent when you soak-sprout seeds). A different pulse is soaked each morning, for variety. After pressure-cooking, I add to it cut drumsticks and the odd pumpkin flower, both freshly plucked, and cook again. Salt and dried kokum bring alive the curry, a tiny piece of jaggery neutralizes the tanginess, a pinch of haldi and spoonsful of the impulse-driven masalas are added. Lastly, I temper it with mustard-cumin-methi seeds and some curry-leaves, again freshly plucked. The last sentence is the post-speech ‘Jai-Hind-Jai-Goa’ of every recipe. Mandatory. Occasionally, I garnish with a spoonful of fresh coconut gratings and a few chopped coriander leaves, the metaphorical ‘icing’. There are no restrictions on playing around with ginger and garlic for those who swear by their medicinal properties. Gardening and I are incompatible. But, in times like these, I rise to the occasion like a German hausfrau during WWII. On Day 1, I buried the sliced tops of onions and garlic in soil in a discarded plastic container. Two weeks gone and I have micro-greens for salad. When, in 1969, the Shiv Sena riots to chase away all ‘Madrasis’ introduced me to my first curfew, I was twelve. Cauliflowers, carrots and peas were luxuries, then. Mother used pumpkins and bottle-gourds to make interesting baked dishes. I boil cubes of the gourd/pumpkin flesh, mash coarsely, add salt, pepper, dried herbs, oil/butter, sautéed cashew-nut bits, grated cheese to taste, some milk-powder, blend an egg into the mixture, then bake until set. I don’t worry about proportions unless things go terribly wrong (much like governments worldwide). Retrieving/salvaging takes a lot of imagination. Shri Husband, intruding: “You should know. New mistakes every day.” My Goan genes miss xit-kodi. Unusual times call for sun-dried, gas-roasted Bombay-duck/mackerel, whose smell I love and most non-West-Coasters abhor. My logic: if people can have nutri-nugget korma (ugh!!), no reason why I should not have salted shrimps with brinjal. My stock of dried fish is packed in ten—ok, exaggerating—four layers of plastic bags, each held firmly with a rubber-band. These packets are kept safely in my grandmother-in-law’s heavy-gauged, tight-lidded brass dabba. I removed my virus-proof mask to sniff the stuff before I put it on the gas to roast. Love that raw smell. Shri Husband spent that morning in the balcao. I should do it more often. I was living through an ingredients crisis; the internet told me tomato leaves were edible. We had them as a side dish, lightly tossed in garlic butter: served that plant right for not producing fruit. Snacks comprise fried peels of gourd/pumpkin. Potato, that import by the goras, now beloved of Indians as stuffing in another import, samosas, unites humans from Alaska to Australia. “Other than the Corona virus?” quipped Shri Husband. Lockdown means monotonous meals, a reminder that I have food. Hunger, an indication of good health, unattended can lead to illness, death. I watch in dismay workers trudging home, pockets empty, stomachs rumbling. Curfews are often indefinite. This one’s unrestricted, planet wide, a first. I would kill for mangoes with cream right now. Or a bite of ripe banana. Others would kill for scraps and leftovers. If the virus doesn’t get them first. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sheela Jaywant is a humour columnist and short-story writer who likes to hear from her readers on sheelajaywant@yahoo.co.in

The Corona Virus in Porvorim Goa

2020-03-15T01:35:00.001-07:00

I was boarding a Mumbai-Goa flight. As always, I looked around to see if there was anyone I knew, who looked familiar, to chat with. This was at 0300 hours. Everyone around me was wearing masks. I didn’t know nose and mouth masks came in such variety. Plastic ones with punched holes, the usual porous green and white tissue ones, some resembled foxes’ noses in colour and shape and others were triangular-folded handkerchiefs knotted at the back of the head. At the main entrance, I wondered how the guard (masked himself) recognized who was entering with whose identity-card or ‘photo-proof’ as he called it, considering that all he could see was the eyes and forehead of the person presenting it. “Irregular protocol,” Shri Husband agreed. Cheers to the Corona-V, after four and more decades we agreed on something without arguing. The girl at the counter didn’t need to ask me questions more than once because she could hear me and read my lips. Because I was unmasked. The virus was a ‘maybe’ attacker, whilst any mask is sure suffocation for me. I took my own precautions by sitting next to masked persons so that I got filtered air to breathe. If they had germs to share, those germs would get right back into their own nostrils, I reasoned. (“Stupid logic,” remarked Shri Husband. Why he wanted to read over my shoulder what I typed I don’t know. Gave both of us a headache.) The others’ mouths could be made out through the masks. Whatever they spoke was indistinct and lots of guesswork, shouting and gesturing happened before the communication was complete. Sample question: ‘Sir, aisle or window seat?’ Answer: ‘Ju oo half a cee er da aafoo?’ After a couple of frustrating minutes, the mask was momentarily removed, exposing the to-be-dead-if-infected, near panic-stricken passenger to unfiltered air. Passenger quickly spat the words “Do you have a seat near the bathroom?” and before you could say ‘covid-19’, adjusted the mask and elastic to shut the mouth again. No one seemed to mind removing the mask-filters whilst consuming chai and samosas, though. Inside the aircraft, we were all zombies, having spent most of the night awake, a large majority of us ‘faceless’. Back in Porvorim, Goa, following the Centre’s advisory to take precautions against this micro-sized part-living part-inorganic creature that was killing planet earth’s most important biped, the CM announced on a Saturday evening, on television, that schools were to be shut till the end of March. I celebrated. Prematurely. No students to come to school, I read the soft-copy circular on Whatsapp, but exams would be held as scheduled. Confused, my colleagues and I waited ‘virtually’ for another circular from the God of Schools, the Department of Education, or the ADEI. (Aside: my colleagues say ‘Dipaamen’ when they refer to the former. Dropping the ‘r’ and both the ‘t’s, I have learnt, is the Goan thing to do. The long form of ADEI has been long forgotten. We all know that when a notice/ circular/ letter/ anything comes from the ADEI, we must jump and do whatever is ‘ordered’, unreasonably late though it may reach us. Now I find the same folk saying Coyona Viyus. Peculiar Goan thing.) Doctor friends sent scientific facts—I’m convinced by them-- to say:- • we were and have been for a long time more at risk of dying from multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis or plain old diarrhoea than this new pathogen that doesn’t survive at Goan summer temperatures, • that Corona was heavy enough by virus standards to, if exhaled in a sneeze or cough, drop to the ground and not bounce back into another nose, • that we needed to worry only if we were immuno-compromised, old and frail, or plain unlucky, • that hand-washing with soap and water before and after touching suspect surfaces (including other people’s hands) was not inferior to expensive and out-of-stock ‘sanitizers’. • that the collective immunity of the sub-continent was possibly better than that, say, of the Canadian population, as we were regularly exposed to garbage, sewage, pollution and mostly not in air-conditioned environments. Other friends sent other ‘facts’—I’m unconvinced by those—to say:- • cow urine would solve this health problem amongst others. My retort: bull-shit. Why it (cow-urine, not bull-shit) could never stop or cure small-pox, leprosy or diabetes amongst the old-fangled diseases, I don’t know. • that if I suddenly and permanently converted to veganism and additionally cut off onions and garlic from my diet, I’d be protected from harm. Here, there was some confusion on Facebook, because one party insisted that garlic was medicinal and another said it was not sattvic (pure) for human consumption. For some reason, that diet hadn’t saved anyone from renal or cardiac failure or any dreaded illness. Wondered why. • that this virus was created to teach the western world a lesson, etc. Um…we have some organisms that teach us lessons, like the amoebae, the Salmonella typhimurium, the vectors causing leptospirosis, malaria and dengue, etc. India is dealing with them on war-footing, too, but the media doesn’t give it credit for that because the western world might not be interested in those headlines. We, as responsible citizens, decided to self-isolate ourselves. Of course, the poder, the nustekar, the bai who got the bhaji from the fields, the linesmen from the electricity department and those digging our roads were at work. No one had told them they should restrict themselves to their huts. They couldn’t afford masks/ sanitizers anyway. I don’t know whether they used soap or had running water, but that was not the time to ask. The policemen were manning their posts. No shops were shut. Those highest at risk-- doctors, nurses, technicians, taxi-drivers, bus-conductors, were doing their duties diligently, not taking rest, not looking for glory. Whilst Twitter told me the number of deaths due to the C-V, I googled to find out how many died in rail/road accidents that very week, in India. I don’t worry about the planet or humankind. I don’t worry about the country or the state most times. My world is restricted to my home in Porvorim. When this self-confinement to contain a pandemic had to be tackled, my worry was spending twenty-four hours without respite, with Shri Husband and Bai Goanna at home. It was panic time for me. I carefully re-re-heard what the CM had said on television. School would be shut for students, but exams would be conducted. Teachers and the rest of the gang had to clock in. I had to go to school. I smiled. Shri Husband grunted. Amicably, I think.

Free Samples

2020-02-16T09:01:00.000-08:00

Come January and sales representatives from publishers come to my office, carrying bundles of books in big canvas bags, or holding them by the tough thread that holds them together. The watchman doesn’t bother about getting their names entered because they’re unable to liberate their limbs from the heavy wares they are lugging, to sign, and he’s illiterate. If they were saleswomen, I think they would have carried the bundles on their heads. “Or,” said Bai Goanna, joining Shri Husband to peer over my shoulder to see what I was typing, “they’d use a second-hand foldable pram to wheel the stuff from their scooter to your office. Women are smart.” I agreed silently about the smart bit, but prams? Doesn’t occur to her that some of these marketing types might come in four-wheelers, mostly the bread-box Maruti Omni that none else wants? Folding prams, come to think of it, are practical solutions to take to the market, a trolley-substitute, see? Then again, anything on wheels would be defeated on the way to my office; like any decent path in India, it is strewn with pebbles, gravel, twigs and every and anything that would rip the tiny metal balls out of a bearing and break a pram into many useless angular pieces. “That sentence,” pointed out Shri Husband, “sounds awful.” He could have used the word ‘inelegant’. I didn’t—never do--- have the courage to say ‘then don’t read it, stay away’. I just ignored him and typed on regardless. Where was I… the publishers send book samples, several per subject per class. Doesn’t sound like much until you do the arithmetic. Take LKG (lower kindergarten, which takes children between 3.5 and 4 years of age, approximately 2.5 feet in height) as an example. The children have to ‘learn’ line drawing. If they are clever, they do patterns and colouring as well. The little ones spend three hours in school, in which, besides doing a page of work, they have to sing a verse, memorize numbers and tell us the names of their grandparents if they have any. How many books do you suppose each child would buy for the year? I have seven SETS of books for pattern writing, joining dots, gluing cotton swabs and reading aloud, each set containing at least ten books. Do we really need so many publishers printing out the same stuff? At nearly the same cost? So many, many ‘samples’ are gifted to each school, with ‘not for sale’ or ‘complimentary copy’ stamped prominently on the front cover or first page. To prevent ‘misuse’. What misuse could one think of for a hundred pattern-writing books? Now, multiply each set by thirty-five students. Go on, do the maths. By the time I see what the teachers are selecting for the fifth standard, I’m exhausted. I’ve watched them go through tables-books, small sums, problems, divisions, decimals and …wait until I tell you about the high school workbooks. The Devnagari script books are, like the script, complicated, with red and blue lines with broad spacing, medium spacing, narrow and very narrow spacing. The mathematics notebooks have squares of varying dimensions: 1 cm square, 1.5 cm square and worse. There are ‘un-ruled’ books, too. Would you believe, there are at least a dozen different kinds of blank-paper books for art. Did I tell you about graph-books? If the government and/or activists are serious about saving the Earth/trees, by law we should be using only slates. Consider this: if a book costs Rs 100, the supplier gives a discount of 30% to the buyer (parent) and another 20% ‘concession in cash’ to the in-between (i.e. school). And schools, the salesperson tells me, do make profit on the sly thus. I’m stupid, he tells me. I agree. Husband and Bai Goanna also agree. For once, we’re on the same page, the three of us. Now, if we dismiss the supplier from the chain and connect directly with the manufacturer, a student can actually buy an item for 40% of the printed price. Nice, no? What is true about books is true about cosmetic products in a more complicated way. When I buy a toothpaste, I’m paying for research done a century ago, plus the cost of the company’s marketing director’s ‘with family’ holiday abroad, the advertisements showing twenty-metre smiles on hoardings on way to the Dabolim airport, the plastic-coated cardboard box and heaven knows what else. Of course, I buy toothpaste for oral hygiene, but that’s not the point here. I need friends who are dentists (or purchase managers in hotels) who can gift me some tubes; am sure they get plenty of free samples. In the hospital where I once worked, receiving free samples was a way of life. The MRs (as Medical Representatives of pharmaceutical companies are known) came in hordes. On days when the patient-footfall was low, MRs occupied all the benches, laptops on their… what else… laps, typing away, resting their bags by their feet. The moment they saw Target Doctor, the computers were speedily put away, the bags swung on backs as they hurried into the clinics. Those bags contained syrups, capsules, pills, little devices to check sugars/salts/whatever was the latest fad. To be given free, of course, with ‘Physician’s sample, not to be sold’ boldly printed across the label. Samples were often accompanied by calendars, pen-stands, watches (now definitely not in vogue), note-pads, mouse-pads, mobile-phone covers and other cute goodies to make prospective prescribers happy and motivated. “What,” asked Bai Goanna, “About foreign trips and sponsored conferences?” “She,” said Shri Husband before I could answer her, “will write about it later, in another piece. That’s beyond the scope of this piece.” Correct for once, I thought, keeping my thought to myself, adjusting my posture to prevent them from reading further what I was typing. Tea-bags, cosmetics, paan-masalas, pickles, choorans and chivda, everything has giveaway samples these days. We pay for them when we buy the actual stuff, never forget. The good quality stuff needs no small introduction. No matter what the marketing gurus say, a Wendell Rodricks (a man I deeply admired, may he rest in peace) product is to be cherished for design and quality. Word of mouth works best. Just wondering, are any free samples involved in big money products like fighter-aircraft, ack-ack guns and submarines? Never read about India getting free helicopters on ‘trial basis’. “You’re ignorant,” chorused Bai Goanna and Shri Husband, adding, “Remember how we damaged the Tejas (train, not plane) seats on its trial runs?” Sigh. Yes. Said and done, I love free samples. Don’t we all?

At the Airport

2019-12-11T06:41:00.001-08:00

The woman squawked out ‘last and final call for Mr Ram Verma’. I craned my neck to see who was delaying the flight. The others in the queue seemed not so flustered. Minutes went by. Next announcement: ‘last and final call for Mr Ram Verma, Shrimati Sita Verma, Master Lav Verma, Miss Lavina Verma’. Hainh? I thought, an entire family is late now? When for the fifteenth time that same staff called ‘a last and final call’ for the same lot of names, I went and asked her whether she knew the meaning of ‘last and final’. She was flummoxed; then she said, if I don’t make this call three dozen times, the passengers will say ‘you didn’t tell us’ or ‘you told us only once’. Apparently, if a single ‘last and final’ announcement is made, that’s insufficient. That’s not the only thing that makes Indian airports special. Last weekend, whilst waiting for a flight, I discovered that when a flight is delayed, after the initial message of ‘by two hours’, it’s delayed by ten minutes at a time, sometimes for another hour or more. The truth is hidden behind accents no one follows. The twenty-something lipstick-wearing girl handling her boyfriend-via-mobile and irate customer simultaneously hadn’t a clue why the morning fog in Thane, Mumbai, was causing a problem at Kempa Gowda, Bangalore, after sixteen hours. Another thing: a flight which must take fifty minutes to a destination, on the ticket shows sixty minutes as flying time. So, when it does reach in fifty, wind conditions being kind and all, the pilot proudly announces how his airlines is always before time, pre-punctual, so to say, a new addition to the Indlish lexicon. Who’s to tell him that that’s rubbish? Most of us don’t even wish the pilots, nor they us, what with the cabin crew forming a protective namaste barrier between flier and flown. If I thought the ground staff spoke in a strange accent, I have to admit that the flying employees talk in stranger accents. Even a normal ‘hullo’ to answer a phone call is a ‘hellyo’ for them. Someone in that industry should explain that to me. These days, old timers say, there’s no charm in flying. All sorts of riff-raff occupy hard steel benches and eat (God forbid!) samosas with cholay. Seats have to be alongside courier boys and unshaven IT types. And humour columnists. Gross. It has interesting moments, though. I once entered the ladies’ loo-cubicle and found a handbag on the ledge above the flush. Immediately, I alerted those outside, who were washing hands, adjusting straps or trying to make sense of the hot-air drier. Everyone had a dazed look in their eyes: no one speaks to strangers at airports, right? When they do, they make friends, exchange phone numbers, offer jobs, insurance policies, and more. So, I made my announcement again: there’s a purse in here, someone’s left a purse here, who’s purse is this, etc. One woman sweetly, unexpectedly and very stupidly asked, ‘are you sure it’s not yours?’ I love Indians from India, I tell you, especially those we meet at airports. It’s a breed you don’t find at railway stations any longer. As for bus depots, no one has the time to spend in chit-chat there. Bus-stands are no longer addas for non-destitutes. The real fun in watching human behaviour is at airports these days. And in aircraft. As in trains, so in aircraft, everyone switches seats to sit with old acquaintances met at the airport or new one’s made there. Drives the cabin-crew crazy, trying to figure out who’s in which seat and whom to give which pre-sold meal to. We’re Indians, no? In spite of the fact that our mobile phones occupy forty-nine percent of our waking hours exchanging news like what we had for the last two meals, and the digestive episodes that followed, we still love live company. Seating arrangements and systems be damned. If one can get a free wheelchair and someone to roll us around in comfort, we book one; do our shopping, see the pretty sights inside these glamourous new airports and—oh, yes—break queues legitimately. The queue; a topic I could write a tome on: we know we have to stand in one, just not sure which end to join. Those yellow lines behind which we must wait make no sense to us. One woman behind me at security asked me whether she could go before me. She was on my flight. I let her. Did she know that whether or not she went first, the flight would not leave without either of us? I don’t know. I think she just wanted to be ‘first’. ‘Main first aa gayee’ carries a lot of weight, doesn’t it? A feel-good factor, seen at buffet meals and, of course, at airports. One woman who thought I looked familiar (I have such a common face, everywhere I go people say they know someone who looks just like me. I say to them, in my mind, ‘damn, not again’) stared at me, smiled, asked if I was Y Z. When I shook my head to say ‘no’, she said, ‘sorry, but what’s your name’. I mean, why did I have to tell her? I did. Conditioning. I’m Indian. I also asked her what her name was. Within minutes we talked about our childhood illnesses, in-laws’ problems, the consequences of voting for a certain party and how to cook without onions and tomatoes. Tomaatoes. Tomaytos. Tamaatars. Tambaaters. Indians at airports speak in several Indlishes; Marathindlish, Hindlish, Assamglish… and therefore, various pronunciations are heard and spoken, repeated, echoed so the other person comprehends… in ‘silent’ airports it’s great fun, uninterrupted by the growl and squeak of the (very) loud-speaker. Best of all, was landing and exiting at Goa. Even Allahabad and Gauhati airports aren’t as good. We have carpeted ramps with little ripples that engage our sense of balance, tripping us at intervals, ensuring we never get old with all that jumping to avoid the bumps under our feet. Dragging trolley-bags over a surface with resistance helps us strengthen shoulders and wrists. The fungus and mould that flourish in the tropical temperatures and humidity build up the immune system. There’s more, but I’m running out of words. Best of all, this is a military airport. No photos, say the signs. But they who own and will and must use all features of their mobile phones don’t know that or can’t read or aren’t bothered. As it is, in this age of satellite pictures tracking where we live and where we go, does it matter if we take a selfie with a loved one with the backdrop of runway lights? Apparently, in our airports, it does.

Customer Service.

2019-08-16T11:06:00.000-07:00

What’s customer service? I asked this question to friends. We Goans are so involved in the tourism industry that we hear these two words quite often, so I wanted to know just what they meant and what they meant to people. One said: “Standing around wearing some make-up and a smart uniform, greeting with hands folded and smiling all the time at everyone.” You mean like in airlines? I asked. Yes, was the answer. Another said: “Getting mobile phones or televisions or fridges or computers repaired, or the technicians who repair those.” Yet another said: “Call-centre agents who sit phoning customers.” An online definition says ‘Customer Service is the process of ensuring customer satisfaction with a product or service. Often, Customer Service takes place while performing a transaction for the customer, such as making a sale or returning an item. I asked my friends whether they considered lawyers’ clients and doctors’ patients as customers. They looked shocked. But, since the client/patient is paying for a service, s/he is a customer, no? No, was the firm reply, given with no explanations, no reasons. To add to my friends’ consternation, I explained that it was illogical that a doctor and a hair-dresser (the word barber is no longer used in polite society) should charge the same amount of money for giving 30 minutes of advice or activity. It takes a doctor takes years of training, skill and experience to know which tests to prescribe and declare a customer normal after seeing the results. The hair-dresser takes three months, take or give a couple of weeks, to learn to expertly cut, curl, straighten, wash, rinse, dry, plait, bun, roll and style hair. Yet, people are willing to pay more for the latter because they sit in a comfort zone, not in a waiting area, get pampered without experiencing pain/nausea/breathlessness. How strange is that. I’d imagine that one would want to pay more for being in good health. But the fact that people happily pay for a meal in a hotel many times the amount they’d pay to get their dental problems resolved proves me wrong. Back to Customer Service; it is the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase. The perception of success of such interactions is dependent on employees "who can adjust themselves to the personality of the guest". The more complicated the components, the more innovative the product and the higher the price, the better the Customer Service is the thumb rule. In a tourism-dependent place like Goa, hotels, shops, cops, taxi-drivers (sigh, we have to rope them in everywhere) must be trained pro-actively not only to say ‘hullo’ and ‘good-time-of-day’ nicely, but in their jobs, too. The old technicians in the Central Laboratory at Porvorim don’t pain or injure my 88-year-old relative when they draw blood from her veins to check for sugar: they don’t need to smile politely and say pleasantries. The proficiency gives the customer satisfaction. Taxi-drivers who help with luggage, receptionists who freely share information on cheap shopping-centres, postmen who fill in forms for illiterate peasants are all doing Customer Service of a fair without anyone writing about them. A good customer service experience can change the entire perception a customer holds towards the organization. A tourist who has enjoyed his hotel stay will return. Or will tell his friends to visit the place. A telephone operator who speaks clearly, accurately and patiently wins over customers as much as a slick marketing executive. If you’re in business, make sure your telephone operators are well trained. Professionalism works. Customer Service includes taped messages that tell me to press a number for English and another for technical problems and yet another for complaints and a fourth to speak to a human being. I prefer directly speaking to a proper voice and giving instant feedback. Recently we bought a computer. When we tried to load a very basic, home-use software on it, an error message informed us that the disc didn’t have enough space. The company, when contacted said, that’s how the product is made, if I wanted the software, I’d have to either be constantly online to use the free online software or buy an addition to attach to the computer. No one from the company could tell me why such a user-unfriendly product was being sold at all in the market. Make in India promoters must make note of such examples of poor customer experiences. Make in India need not be shabby or sub-standard. Make in India can well be superior to or at least equal to the best in the world. Read about Kiran Muzumdar-Shaw’s work and you’ll know it’s possible. Criticism keeps quality high. Customer Service was born out of criticism. If one wants to improve, one ASKS FOR criticism and takes it to heart. Customer Service assists customers in making cost effective decisions, buying suitable products (like they do in shoe-shops) and using that product correctly. See the stall-walas at ‘exhibitions’ showing the public the various uses of peelers. Customer Service includes assistance in planning, installation, training, trouble-shooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product. Plumbers, carpenters and electricians are the ones to be trained in these points. Architects, and garbage disposal experts, too. These services even may be done at customer's side where he/she uses the product or service. technical support Automated customer service[edit] Customer service may be provided by a person (e.g., sales and service representative), or by automated means[citation needed]. Examples of automated means are Internet sites. An advantage with automated means is an increased ability to provide service 24-hours a day, which can, at least, be a complement to customer service by persons.[5] Another example of automated customer service is by touch-tone phone, which usually involves a main menu, and the use of the keypad as options (i.e. "Press 1 for English, Press 2 for Spanish", etc.) However, in the Internet era, a challenge has been to maintain and/or enhance the personal experience while making use of the efficiencies of online commerce. "Online customers are literally invisible to you (and you to them), so it's easy to shortchange them emotionally. But this lack of visual and tactile presence makes it even more crucial to create a sense of personal, human-to-human connection in the online arena."[6] An automated online assistant with avatar providing automated customer service on a web page. Examples of customer service by artificial means are automated online assistants that can be seen as avatars on websites.[5] It can avail for enterprises to reduce their operating and training cost.[5] These are driven by chatterbots, and a major underlying technology to such systems is natural language processing.[5] Metrics and measuring customer service results[edit] The two main ways of gathering feedback are: customer surveys and Net Promoter Score measurement, used for calculating the loyalty that exists between a provider and a consumer.[citation needed] Customer service metrics that are followed by companies depend on the tool used for customer service. Most popular metrics include: • first response time, • average response time, • total handle time, • customer satisfaction score (CSAT).[citation needed] Instant feedback[edit] Recently[when?], many organizations have implemented feedback loops that allow them to capture feedback at the point of experience. For example, National Express in the UK has invited passengers to send text messages whilst riding the bus. This has been shown to be useful, as it allows companies to improve their customer service before the customer defects, thus making it far more likely that the customer will return next time.[7] Technology has made it increasingly easier for companies to obtain feedback from their customers. Community blogs and forums give customers the ability to give detailed explanations of both negative as well as positive experiences with a company/organization. Standardization[edit] There are few standards on this topic. ISO and The International Customer Service Institute (TICSI) have published the following ones: • ISO 9004:2000, on performance improvement • ISO 10001:2007, on customer service conduct • ISO 10002:2004, on quality management in handling customer complaints • ISO 10003:2007, on dispute resolution • ISO 10004:2012, on monitoring and measuring • The International Customer Service Standard (TICSS) • CCQA Customer Care Standard (Care Quality Alliance) www.CCQA.org.uk There is also an Information Technology service management standard: ISO/IEC 20000:2005. Its first part concerns specifications and its second part the code of practice Some have argued [8] that the quality and level of customer service has decreased in recent years, and that this can be attributed to a lack of support or understanding at the executive and middle management levels of a corporation and/or a customer service policy. To address this argument, many organizations have employed a variety of methods to improve their customer satisfaction levels, and other key performance indicators (KPIs).[citation needed] • Demand chain • Institute of Customer Service (UK) • Interactive voice response • Live support software • Privacy policy • Professional services automation • Public Services • Sales • Sales process engineering • Sales territory • Service climate • Service system • Social skills • Support automation • Technical support • Help desk software References[edit] 1. Jump up ^ Buchanan, Leigh (1 March 2011). "A Customer Service Mak

Never Mind the Floods

2019-08-16T07:47:00.003-07:00

“Whatta month,” exclaimed Bai Goanna on the last day of August. “Floods, rain, more rain. And then the government does away with Article 370, BJP’s stalwarts dying, a Major General dismissed for sexual harassment, fish still being injected with formalin, taxi-mafia being tamed by the CM, so many things happening.” “Do you,” said Shri Husband, “have any idea what Article 370 is about?” To my, and definitely to Shri Husband’s, surprise, Bai Goanna could tell us the pluses, minuses and in-betweens of whatever has happened in Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, what is likely to happen and the pros and cons of the Parliament’s most controversial recent decision regarding that region/ State/Union Territory. Before we could react, she explained that she’d been watching a lot of television lately and hence her knowledge of current events. Ah, technology, keeps everybody informed, stupid or intelligent, illiterate or schooled… What would we do without television crews sitting in Army boats? Does it occur to anyone that the Press guys might actually be hampering work? I remember, during the tsunami rescue operations in Tamil Nadu, reporters had to be given shelter, food, whatnot by the public servants (cops, municipality workers): they were coming the way of the real rescue teams. Also, spiritual-messengers from modern ashrams teaching the distraught to de-stress when what the ‘victims’ needed was drinking water, food, dry clothes, preventive (allopathic) medicines and sanitary napkins. …Bai Goanna was quoting leaders, writers, politicians, historians… pat! Shri Husband and I almost simultaneously vocally agreed on one thing: “We have to thank the electricity department of Goa and Saligao-Porvorim in particular, for keeping the facility going come storm or blocked drain-water.” Shri Husband took the first breath and asked me: “What does blocked-drain-water mean?” He’s the only one in India who’d ask such a question. And my grammar-Miss in school. Then, having successfully irritated me, he said: “I’m joking, re. Really, the light-men and the water-men did a fantastic job, hanh. So, also, the fire-men and the poder.” Truly, our village, marooned by the Guirim flood and the Porvorim traffic, was not much inconvenienced thanks to the utility men. Except for the one day when the government of Goa declared a holiday, come hell or high water, our teachers and students made their way to school for exams, sometimes wet, but always smiling. The scowls were more on the faces of habitual cribbers, more to do with in-house politics, less with Nature’s fury. In cities, the municipality workers who are the world’s greatest shirkers, according to some, rose to the occasion to clean up whatever mess they could. A question of too little too late, perhaps, but they did it. In our village, the postman and the gas-delivery chaps did their work with a sense of duty-is-duty. Valor, guys. No vegetables bothered my wado as, a rarity in Goa, it’s a vegetarian wado. Please note, I do not use the juvenile word, veggie; always the full forms, vegetables and vegetarian. The nustekar, too, unfailingly made his rounds to supply ‘fish-food’, as English-speaking Goans say, to us ‘fishies’ (like ‘veggies’). Formalin-laced or not, it’s a treat to eat tisrya-ek-shipi with hot rice and bhindi-solan kodi when it’s pouring. Available only in people’s homes. The fungus, the cobwebs, the damp clothes, the sunless days, we smile through them all, we Indians. Now, with Facebook connecting us, we smile into our mobile phones and then share the pics with the world, for those who know us even vaguely, to say ‘awesome’. I often wonder how many of those from non-affected areas contribute to the rehabilitation of losers of limb, life or property. Even those who claim they support the Indian Armed Forces and are proud of them, seldom give jobs or pay for the tuitions of the dependents of the soldiers/airmen/sailors in times of need. We’re still into the mode ‘government must do it’. I dislike this question that reporters ask: ‘what has the government done for you?’ We citizens love cutting down trees, using tons of plastic, refusing to segregate our waste, showing off our bullying talents, and we expect our elected representatives to be responsible. Ha. Strangely, whilst our national media was crying itself hoarse defending or attacking the government’s way of dealing with the removal of Article 370, an important national event, our school teachers were worried about seating arrangements, supervision, answer-sheet collections and marking. Truly, the lives of the migrant junta and we who deal with the daily living of their children, our students, is far removed from what’s happening in Parliament, Delhi. When the new Education Policy comes to us, we’ll wake up. Until then, it’s chalta-hai. By the time this goes into print, Ganapati would have visited and gone. The rains, too. A large number of us, unfazed by natural calamities and other such silly words, would have bought and discarded un-dissolvable statues of the beloved Lord. The traffic snarls and cars that need unnecessary trips to workshops are mere nuisances in times of heavy rains and floods. We in Goa take those in our stride. Tillari and other faraway places are, well, too far for us to worry about. Ditto with forests. We urban folk are happily detached from reality. I wasn’t surprised when a modern, well-informed mother told me there are no Dalits in Goa; her daughter had heard about the floods, saw them on television, also, but her world begins in Porvorim and ends in Panaji, so watching them on screen was no different from watching a movie in Inox. They faced the problem of not being able to celebrate a birthday properly because favourite restaurants weren’t getting the correct ingredients for the items on the menu. In my school, in contrast, the parents are worried about their next meal. The women who make the midday meal made do with green grams for a couple of days; but they did their duty well, cooking it in different ways, making sure it was freshly cooked and served hot. Teachers managed with leaking ceilings and sniffles. Never mind the floods, was the attitude, we’re there to make the school run, we’ll do it. Floods? said an acquaintance, it’s a temporary thing. Life goes on, true. Without safe drinking water, with destroyed homes, dead pets, it takes time, but life goes on. Right? What worries some is the fact that the auto-industry has a slowdown happening.

Carpe Diem—short story

2019-05-17T10:44:00.003-07:00

My mother died when I was one, and today, I’m meeting her identical twin, my Maushi, whom I don’t remember much. I’d met her a few times, mostly at Diwali when I was very young, nearly thirty odd years ago, but not since. All that I can remember of her was that she had an infectious laugh, and she was always doing something: chopping, tidying or frying. Each time, before we left our home to go to her house, there was always this routine conversation between my stepmother, Mummyji, and Pa. That I recall quite clearly. ‘Have the sweets and savouries been packed properly?’ he’d ask. ‘Yes.’ Mummyji didn’t bother to camouflage the curtness. ‘And the sari?’ ‘Yes,’ she’d snap. ‘For the fourth time, yes.’ My two ‘real’ brothers were already in senior school when Pa remarried; they were brought up by my maternal grandmother and my link with them got diluted over the years for we didn’t meet much. We still don’t. I think they haven’t quite forgiven Pa for ‘replacing’ Ma, our mother. Can’t say. We’ve never talked about it. I’m closer to my stepbrother, Kim. Quite often, I forget that Kim and I don’t share the entire set of genes that I do with my older siblings. Coming back to today’s meeting. Nothing has prepared me for it; it’s like opening up Facebook, not knowing who has written on my wall. I’m doing this out of latent, suppressed curiosity. I want to know what my real mother might have been like had she been alive. I don’t look like Pa, and in the past, many have told me I resembled her, I want to know more about her. How many of her traits have I inherited? When I called up Maushi’s son, my cousin, two weeks ago, he said, ‘Come on Sunday morning, join us for breakfast. All of us will be at home, too. It’ll be nice seeing you again.’ It’ll be hard, I told myself. Maushi and my mother were once a single zygote. Experiences may change, environs may change, but the basic nature, temperament, reactions, attitudes… this aunt is a copy-paste of my mother’s genetic file, her identical twin. I’m going to see something of my own self in her. I stand before the building my cousin lives in. It is right on the main road and the entrance is from behind. In front, there are many shops. It’s a crowded, bustling locality. I climb to the second floor. There’s a mild odour of urine. Decaying garbage is strewn everywhere. It’s a far cry from our home in the US. Pa migrated with us long years ago, leaving behind his world, my roots. The inhabitants of the apartments, the workers cleaning the corridor, the children prancing around… all stare in open curiosity, wondering who I’m visiting. The walls haven’t been painted for decades, and there are patches of peeled paint revealing raw brick, stains of paan and spit at every landing and corner, and dried splashes of perhaps tea or some other beverage on the scratched floor tiles. Several papers declaring themselves to be ‘notices’ are pasted crookedly at intervals, on top of older notices, on a cobweb laced wooden frame, on the right side of the staircase. On the first floor, the only window on the landing has a cracked pane, and it stands askew on the sill. From the angle where I turn up to the next storey, I get the first glimpse of the nameplate: Mrs C Bakla. The C stands for Charu, her name. The flat is in her name. My mother was Niru. I wonder, what was my maternal grandmother’s home like? We are Gujaratis. My father’s family has settled in Mumbai for five generations. We – they – know no other home; I’m told, we have no village to return to. Before we left for the US, didn’t live in a building like this. It was a clean, posh, shiny, happy place. In fact, my paternal grandparents’ home is still well kept. I went there the last time I was in India. About my mother’s side of the family, I know little. Whenever they’re spoken of, they are referred to as ‘her mother’s people’; they have no other identity. Mummyji once told me: ‘Your mother’s family is well off, but your Maushi’s husband lost a lot of money and they had to struggle for many years.’ Had my mother been alive, would she have bailed out her twin, helped her through the bad spells? I try and recall Maushi’s face, and her voice. They are virtually non-existent in my memory. Once Kim arrived, our visits to her house diminished, then halted, and it was Mummyji’s family that I was… still am… more connected with. I look for the bell. There is a little Ganapati idol tucked into a niche beside the door. It’s not been dusted, is covered with grime, yet there are fresh flowers beside it, and a small bulb (possibly battery-operated, because I don’t see any wires), shines in a diya by its feet. A toran is stretched above the door, dried, grey and gnarled. A tattered kandil hangs untidily on one side. Quite obviously, these decorations have been here since Diwali, three months ago. Why don’t people remove and discard them once festivities are over? I don’t understand this. Never did. But it’s none of my business. I’m apprehensive and nervous. I’m going to face a woman who is closest to me genetically. My father and my brothers are males. What is she going to think of me? Will she cry? Will I cry? I know I will. Do twins remain ‘in touch’ if one of them dies? After all, their souls were once, one. Is there a soul at all or is it only a figment of human imagination? We will all find out soon enough: this was no time to contemplate such things. I have a yellowish photograph of my mother with me, one that I found in Baba’s old address-book one day. She and my father, on their wedding day. All adorned with flowers and jewels, but I can clearly make out her features. I’ve kept that photo with me through school, through college, and now it lies nestled amongst my finance folders, unlaminated, unframed. I’ve got it scanned and preserved on a CD, too. For some reason, though, I haven’t shown it to anyone at all. I don’t know whether Baba has missed it. It won’t matter to any one else. My brothers… they’re not as sentimental as I am. Occasionally, I give it a brief glance and wonder whether my life would have been any different had she been alive. Does it bother me? Nope, just curiosity. At family gatherings relatives have remarked that I have got her dimples. It seems my voice, gestures and expressions are all hers. My brothers look like my father. My stepbrother, three years younger than I, also looks like him. I’m the only nishaani of my real mother, they say. Or used to say. Now so many years have passed and no one recalls her at all. She exists only through her genes, through my brothers and me…and our children. She died of kidney failure. Her twin’s kidney would have been a perfect tissue match. Why was it not done? The technology existed then. It would have saved her life. No one, but no one, has spoken much about it, for there are social and familial restrictions involved. Is kidney failure inherited? I don’t want to know. Are there tests that can detect faulty genes? I don’t want to know. Que sera, sera, what will be, will be. Both my children have inherited those same dimples. So have my brothers’ children. That little bit of her genome has remained steadfast. I press the bell. A hundred sparrows or crickets raise a cacophony together. Not a soothing sound like ding-dong or trrrinng. Perhaps it’s meant to startle and prod somebody to open the door. The keyhole darkens as an eye on the other side rests against it; tantalizing shadows are glimpsed through the gap below the door, the security chain rattles…. A moment, and then, the door opens wide. Behind the two smiling faces that welcomingly chorus ‘Aaoh, aaoh, come in, come in,’ stretches a rectangular room. There’s a sofa-set of three pieces, a dining table with four chairs, a television, a glass-fronted cupboard stuffed with dolls and curios, and two children stare at me wide-eyed, fingers stuffed into their mouths, legs apart… ‘Aaoh, come in,’ the adults repeat. I remove my shoes, balance against the wall whilst I undo the straps, kick them aside to join other strewn footwear companions, and gingerly step inside. Sit, they order, sit, we’ll call Baa. She’s been waiting for me, they say: later I discover what a lie that is, spoken as a mere formality. The cousin stays with me, his wife vanishes behind the cut-sari or translucent curtain that probably leads into a bedroom or kitchen like most flats in Bombay. ‘So,’ says the cousin. ‘All is well? Seeing you after nearly, thirty years, when I was….perhaps two years old. I don’t remember. You must be tired. We will have breakfast… my wife, Aditi, she’s made poha. Even the sweet moongdalhalwa is homemade.’ No mention about why I’m here. I notice, he doesn’t have the dimples, but his children do. I don’t know why he keeps saying I must be tired and hungry. He’s wasting time. I just want to see Maushi. That’s all. I subdue the eagerness in my voice when I ask about her. ‘Where’s she?’ ‘She’ll be out in two minutes,’ I’m told. I’ve been told the same thing ten minutes ago. I wonder, is she shy, hesitant or afraid to face me? Is she still mourning for her dead twin? Why this odd, uncomfortable delay? I want to ask. Is something the matter? But I don’t. I just clench my toes, cross my knees, first this way, then that, waiting for that special moment that will help me link with the mother I never knew. When she does come out, I stare. I instinctively compare her with the photograph I have: she is the same item, different size, shop soiled. I can see that those eyes, those brows and that nose are all the same. I’ve studied those features for years. I have them etched in my mind. Her daughter-in-law coaxes her to see me, talk to me. She stares blankly, but kindly. ‘Is your mother well?’ she asks. ‘Why didn’t you get her along?’ ‘I, I…,’ I stutter, ‘I’m Niru’s daughter.’ Her son shouts into her ear: ‘Niru’s daughter, Baa, Nirumaushi. Your sister, Niru.’ ‘How nice,’ she says evenly. ‘Good you came. Stay for lunch.’ I’m confused and shocked. I reach out to hold her hand. My mother’s hand would have been like this. Frail, wrinkled, unsteady. She’s all wrapped up in a crisp, well-ironed cotton sari. Tiny prints on a cream background, woven border, large pallav. ‘How nice,’ she says. ‘How nice, how nice, how nice.’ And then, she flashes those dimples at me. My dimples, my inheritance. She’s one of the owners. Her daughter-in-law reprimands her: ‘Baa, your sister Niru’s daughter. You remember Niru?’ There’s a pause. ‘Yes. I remember Niru,’ she says. She looks straight into my eyes, but I feel she sees nothing. Her eyes are hazy, there’s a hint of cataract in them. I can’t make out whether she’s able to figure out anything of what’s happening. Her expression is benign, but blank. She gazes at my face, touching my cheeks, my chin with her fingers. There is no recognition. ‘Niru,’ she repeats. I will never find out whether there was a bit of lucidity or whether she just echoed what she’d heard. ‘She has Alzheimer’s,’ my cousin whispers loudly from behind me. ‘She has Alzheimer’s.’ Why didn’t anyone warn me? I don’t know what to do. Mechanically, I dig into my bag, take out the gifts I got for them all and hand them out. I give Maushi the CD with my mother’s picture on it. ‘Maushi,’ I try prodding her gently, ‘Niru, your sister, Niru. Charu-Niru, your twin sister. Do you remember?’ It’s so sad; she just repeats what I say: ‘Niru, Charu-Niru. I remember.’ My cousin, his wife, their children, and the servant are all far more interested in feeding me the breakfast that they’ve laid out than in what is happening. I’m not hungry. I don’t care whether they’re giving me tea with or without sugar. I don’t want another helping of the dhokla no matter how fluffy it is. I want to reach out and talk to my mother’s twin. I’m desperate. But once the flight’s taken off, no matter how long you wait at the airport, it won’t come back for you. You have to buy another ticket. Here, there’s no second chance. I’ve waited years for this day. I want to know: if both were born at the same time, in the same place, to the same parents, they must have the same horoscope-chart. How then could their lives have been so different? When people perish together in an air-crash, I want to know whether all their horoscopes indicate the same time and mode of death. Surely they all have different birthdays, birth-times and different planetary conjunctions? I have so many questions saved up: maybe she would have answered them, modified them or deleted them. Now she won’t. She can’t. Her hard disc has crashed and it’s irreparable, irreplaceable. Charumaushi is sitting still, alive but lifeless, at the table. She sits and stares, sometimes at me, at other times into space or at her plate. She eats sloppily, but then carefully gathers the crumbs into her palm. My heart is bursting with unasked questions: how did you feel when my mother died, how close were you as teenagers, how much did you miss her through these years, did you miss her at all…? My stepmother had taken her twin’s place, married my father; but because of the bad spells that Maushi’s family had to go through, the two seldom met. Maushi was busy trying to make ends meet, raising her brood… and the years went by. My stepmother didn’t deem it necessary for me to meet her. Indeed, she must have figured, it was best to keep me away, lest I get emotionally scarred or something. And I nurtured my secret desire of meeting Maushi someday. For years, craving to know more about the woman who’d given me birth and Maushi was the only one who could do that. I touch Maushi. My mother’s skin would have been like this. Papery.The blood vessels bulging below the fingers on the back of the hand, networking around the bony skeleton. She reaches out, too, and touches my face again. Still expressionless. The smile is hollow. Alzheimer’s, eh? She has no memory, I’m told. She has no vocabulary, no feelings, just a body with no mind. A computer, a CPU with a keyboard and a monitor, without any software. Is Alzheimer’s hereditary? Have I got that gene? Has my cousin? I turn to him: ‘Did she ever talk about my mother?’ He’s uncomfortable at the question. He shuffles, looks away, slaps one of the children for misbehaving, orders the servant to get more tea, hot this time, and says: ‘I don’t remember.’ He’s lying. I can’t force him to say any more. What a disappointment. I try again: ‘Look, you and I, we’re products of twins. We share something no one else does. Tell me anything at all that she may have said about my mother, yourNirumaushi. I want to know.’ That uncomfortable silence again. I’m weeping inside. The pictures on the wall with quotes from the Gita, from Sai Baba, from Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, all seem so empty, so silly and irrelevant. I didn’t know why anyone would display a large-lettered poster that says Forgive in one’s drawing room. If someone raped my daughter, I wouldn’t forgive. I wouldn’t say she deserved it because of something she did in her last life. I’m getting upset. My mind is wavering, getting agitated, and I am beginning to regret this visit to my aunt. There is a sense of panic, a sense of not wanting to be here. I sigh involuntarily. I can’t rewind anything. I have to just get out of this place. Suddenly the cousin says: ‘I once overheard them say that when your mother needed a kidney, my mother was not allowed to give hers. My father feared for her health, he wanted more children and didn’t know whether donating a kidney would hamper her having more babies. We have never talked about this. I’ve not spoken about this ever before.’ How could anyone deny a sister… a twin sister? Had she protested? Or was she too scared? Did Maushi regret the fact that she couldn’t help her twin? Regret can do terrible things to you. Did she ever think about me, us? I’ll never know. I leave the house despondent, sadder than ever before, and take a taxi to the hotel. I don’t recall going downstairs. I remember just Maushi’s face, innocent of all pleasures, sorrows, devoid of all feelings. I can’t get it out of my mind. There’s so much I want to tell, to share, to confide, but I don’t know where to begin, whose shoulder to cry on. The kids and husband have already returned to the hotel from their fun outing, and they don’t know what I’ve been through. I can’t get myself to answer the excited ‘Tell, tell us what happened.’ ‘She didn’t recognize me,’ is all I say. ‘She’s got Alzheimer’s. She doesn’t recognize anybody.’ ‘So-o,’ says my elder one. ‘You’re showing the symptoms already. Can give you a trillion examples of what you forget, Ma.’ The young one follows suit, jesting cruelly. My husband puts an arm around me. I had wanted to go alone, be alone for this meeting. But he knows something hasn’t gone right. Years of togetherness prompts this instinctive response. Through my sorrow, I feel wanted, secure, and calmer. Tears brim and flow. I can’t, I don’t want to stop them. I cry softly. My children think I’m emotional because of the meeting, they still don’t know why I’m upset. They joke, laugh and tease me. Somewhere along, I realize that I have no control over my genes, my ‘inheritance’, the flow of my life. I must live in the here and now; savour all the good that I have – my children, my husband, my health. Tomorrow should something go wrong, so be it. If something goes right, so be it. I take a deep breath and my Maushi’s face comes to mind. That face is my mother’s. She isn’t even around. Hasn’t been for so many years. Would she have had Alzheimer’s had she been around? Would I have been a caregiver? All I know is that I have got half my personality from her, if Nature is superior to Nurture. I know that I have her will to win, her ability to laugh at everything Life brings my way. I don’t see it in Pa, so that half is hers for sure. She continues to live… I see my dimples… her gift to me… in both my children. I watch them squeal as they tease each other, smiling, laughing…proclaiming her presence in the little depressions in their cheeks. I feel better already.

BACK TO SCHOOL: The Power of a Teacher.

2019-05-17T10:42:00.002-07:00

A phone-call to say a school needed an Administrator, would I be interested? Ten minutes to make a decision. A government-aided school (and a small non-aided one sticking to it), not a fancy salary, but it’s not far from my home. I will be able to make a small difference in the life of some little ones. I say ‘yes’. Since that day in mid-June, my world has changed. I have to get up and out of the house just after dawn. The clouds and rain don’t allow me to guess the time, so I keep looking at my phone (my collection of winding and batter-run watches rest in a wooden box, regularly serviced and gloated over, but now seldom used on the wrist). I carry a bag with a tiffin, a water-bottle and a napkin. Pens, pencils, erasures nestle alongside the notes and coins in my purse. My house-key has a companion: the office-cupboard key. I see things differently already. The flooded roads remind me that three-year-olds can easily be sucked into drains and drowned. One morning, as I take a left turn at a signal—very, very slowly, because it’s pouring heavily and visibility is poor-- a scooter-driver wanting to overtake from the wrong side bangs hard into my vehicle and falls head over heels on the road. I get out, to find that her young son has also fallen down. I help her park her scooter and take both to the hospital. She tells me she was rushing because she was late. I tell her she’s fortunate to have got away with minor injuries. I phone her husband to fetch her. Driving back, drenched, I make a mental note to tell ‘my’ teachers and students to follow traffic rules and be careful. It’s only later that I remember ‘insurance’. Like I said, I see things differently already. The girls’ toilets bother me. They are at the back of the building, the way to them camouflaged by grass in which I know reside snakes and other crawlies. They are tiled and the plumbing is in order, but the method of cleaning leaves them slippery. The woman who cleans them believes that water and phenyl must be poured and swept off with a coconut-stem broom. Scouring and scrubbing are unknown. Keeping the floor dry is an alien concept. The boys’ toilets are no better. I have a long way to go, I sigh to myself. The stores are places of mystery. Mould-covered white-ribbed cricket-leg-pads embrace hollow, faceless tablas. Crumpled still-glittering ribbons, frayed plastic festoons, a discarded sink, an unused gas-stove, a jerry-can filled with foul-smelling liquid and hundreds of bundles of unlabelled papers have been pushed into closed cupboards and open shelves. Untidy, grimy, slimy, ugh. There’s one store behind one toilet, another opposite a teacher’s office, yet another behind the same office. A clerk tells me the story of each piece of scrap as I go along, sniffing dust and mites, and fungi-spores, breaking cobwebs and tradition. None has ventured into this hallowed space for a long, long time. I touch the corner of a mossy wall and get a mild shock. There’s a crisp plastic near it. I move it aside and find the water-pump. It’s new, works well. I touch the wall again, no shock. Did I imagine it? Will try again with a tester, I decide. Work is worship, I remember these words from somewhere. I dress and talk formally, so unlike me, to remind myself that I will not take the smallest thing casually. I go through files, manuals, speak to students and the security guard to familiarize myself with the environment. I’ve never been a teacher, and my school journey ended forty-five years ago, before 10+2 started. We wrote with fountain-pens and hadn’t heard of traffic-jams. One ‘difficult’ student is talked about. Some teachers tell me they’ve taught his father in this same school. The student lost his mother early in life, the father married her sister and she, too, died in childbirth. How are the teachers going to deal with his misbehavior? In our times, our teachers were soft-spoken and kind; but our Head-master was allowed to use the cane and he believed that sparing the rod would spoil us. In these times of no corporal punishment but roughness in tone and choice of words, I guess disciplining young ones is a challenge. A far greater challenge, the teachers tell me, is that all students, irrespective of ability, effort or talent—or the lack of any—have to be promoted from class I to VIII. In class IX, therefore, it comes as a shock to some parents and their wards, that they’ve learnt almost nothing after attending six hours of school nearly two hundred days a year, for eight years. I had (still have) friends who were bright and friends who were duffers, friends thin and fat, tall and short, cheerful and whiny, failures and successes. I agree with the teachers. One day, a snake visited my office. Mr Krishna, sent by the Forest Department in response to my call, arrived in fifteen minutes. “It’s a boa,” he said, picking it up and offering it to me, “non-poisonous, harmless.” I decide to introduce it to the students. I carry it, to set an example of overcoming fear, to the classes and ask the children to touch it with a finger. Some are bold, others back away. But in every class, I notice, every child turned to the teacher to see her reaction. If she was calm, they were calm. If she squealed, they squealed. When I invited them to come closer, they looked at Madam for approval. When I explained to them that the creature was harmless, they turned to her to check whether that was true. They trusted their teacher. Only her. We were strangers, we were outsiders. She was part of their world, she moulded them. Whatever a teacher does or says echoes in eternity. I am here, writing, or working as Administrator, because long years ago, some teachers did a sincere job. I bow in thanks to them, and to my parents for leading me to their capable hands. So my new adventure has begun. I go to school every morning with humility in my heart and a prayer on my lips… and skip of joy in my heart for the chance to make a difference to young lives. Wish me luck, dear readers.

Admissions.

2019-05-17T10:41:00.003-07:00

Reservations, percentages, submissions of forms into multiple colleges, grumbles against The System beat any other topic of conversation these days. Even the upcoming elections, Bhai Parrikar’s condition, rains (too much) and the electricity (lack of) don’t overtake it. Last night, at a friend’s house for an impromptu dinner, a pet choked over something. Once the howling of dog in pain, yowling of mistress in panic, hurling of accusations (“how could you feed her a fishbone?”) by master and sense of emergency diminished, all present returned to what’s bad with education—and a zillion other things-- in India today. Present were a nuclear-physicist turned educator, an electrical-engineer turned educator, a nutritionist turned educator, an architect turned educator and me. I was the only listener, an intelligence-challenged housewife. Not involved with kindergarten, primary, secondary or college related problems, I sat for over two hours with a this-is-exciting expression on my face. My mind was on the yet to be served homemade apple-crumble dessert. Shri Husband regularly veered the conversation towards some ultra-cerebral stuff-- is homeschooling better than sending children to institutions-- drawing into further debate the already agitated congregation. For some reason, sending someone to an institution sounds horrid. The word institution seems to denote rehabilitation centres, prisons, old-age homes, de-addiction places. But, schools and hospitals, like families, are institutions, no? Shri Husband, sneakily reading what I was typing, denied that any members of his domestic and extended family felt there was anything wrong with the word. Does there exist a magic lamp that renders husbands temporarily non-intrusive whilst wives are writing columns? Bai Goanna suggests I should write to the PMO’s office to tell an Indian scientist to make a device like that… researched and manufactured in India and marketed to benefit wives beyond our borders. So much money to be made, she said. I digress. Admissions. Am told, there are parents these days who have the idea that there are other ways of earning a living than becoming doctor-engineer-taxi-chalak. They are those parents, mostly, who have the means to pay their offspring’s rent/grocery bills whilst they (adult-kids, not Mummy-Puppa) go scuba-diving, practicing classical guitar or tracking exotic fungi in the Sahyadris. Such parents don’t have to worry about entrance exams and capitation fees or local guardians should their ward be sent out of Goa to complete a course. Goans are ok to send their children abroad, on cruise-liners, but not to, say, Barielly, to the Indian Veterinary Research Institute. That’s reasonable, they discuss amongst themselves, because our bovine-porcine cuisine aficionados would not like the food served in north-Indian ‘dhabhas’: black dal, cauliflower sabzi, tandoori chicken (this last one’s acceptable). North-Indian fish is fresh-water and the gravies are made without coconut. Oh no, the Goan parent moans, our ‘poot’ can’t survive on that. The good part is, Goan parents don’t discriminate between daughters and sons, they deny out-of-state opportunities to both. When someone actually ventures ‘out’, it makes local news: Ms Y Z Prabhu got her Ph D from Panchpakwan University on the theme: “Why the scales of the black pomfret aren’t edible”. In the photo accompanying the press-release stands an MLA by her side. And her parents. Aunts and Uncles. Sometimes it’s just a mug-shot. Now she needs to get admitted into a government job is the message her eldest uncle tells the world. Back to admissions: for colleges, the first choice is Goa. Or the USA/NZ/Oz if they’re rich parents. Then, Belgaum-Bangalore-Bombay, depending on where one has relatives one gets along with. Besides fees, boarding and lodging, there is money to be spent on sweaters and blankets, new towels presently acceptable clothing styles and mobile-phone bills. Admissions are about budgeting, not just getting good marks. Interest in the subject and aptitude? Naa-naa. Getting admitted into coaching-classes is equally stressful. Like reputed schools, colleges and kindergartens, coaching-classes are carefully selected. There are advertisements to flip through: which class had how many toppers in which entrance exam. (The Indian Entrance Exam is a phenomenon by itself, a pre-cursor to many kinds of admission, of that in another article.) There are coaching-class ex-students to connect with to find out how much attention is personal and how much one-eightieth: fraction depends on class-strength, could go to one-hundred-and-eightieth also. Parents of such students have to be spoken to, to know whether the air-conditioned classes keep their temperatures at ‘cool’: why all such classes are air-conditioned to begin with is beyond my comprehension, but I’m logic-challenged as well, Bai Goanna patiently and repeatedly tells me. The grandparents of a toddler in my neighbourhood have been very frequently visiting a certain temple to check whether the goddess-deity they worship is going to allow the little one to be a student of the school they have chosen. The school is far away and expensive, but, says the grandfather, it’s for networking. Like the battle of Waterloo was won on the playgrounds of Eton, so also, corporate-India is apparently ruled by Montessori-mates, I was told this by the grandfather. I repeated it to Shri Husband. His snort was undecipherable: a mixture of contempt, ridicule, disbelief and pure laughter. Besides, he added, he didn’t understand what role the goddess played in admissions anyway. A couple that has moved to our village from another state have been running around trying to admit their child. Domicile, language, syllabus all matter. New friends, weather, food matter. But none cares about all those things: it’s admission and admission alone, that brings on the headache. Admission of file into Minister’s office, admission of person wanting to meet Minister, these cause headaches, too. Of those, another time.