Wrong again.

I have been doing things for the wrong reasons all my life.

Take travel, for instance.

I have never been a great traveler. I remember a ditty from my childhood that said something to the effect that travel made a person wise and well-rounded. I don’t think I quite believed it. Still, as a child, I travelled quite a bit and even made myself enjoy it. Or, more accurately, made myself believe that I enjoyed it. Somehow, around that time, I got hold of the notion that important people travelled a lot. And, that they did it mostly by air.

In my Clarion-McCann stint, as a senior writer and later as Creative Controller, I got to travel quite a bit on work and found colleagues envying me for it. This and the fact that a promotion as Creative Director with unlimited travel among other mouth-watering perks was dangled as a bait to prevent me from quitting Clarion-McCann further strengthened my belief in the equation “travel = important persona” and vice versa.

In my Everest days, both as Creative Chief and later Creative Consultant, I got to travel way too much and stay at the best of hotels and found myself to be the target of envy of colleagues.

Later, I flew twice to the US of A to visit Abhi and Ujwal and twice to Sri Lanka on work.

Somewhere along the way, though, I lost my zest for travelling and finally, late in life, came to terms with the fact that I was a lousy traveler. I didn’t really enjoy it. Never did. I did not have the stomach for it. Never had. I would rather stay put in South Bombay. I feel safe and out of harm’s reach in SoBo, something I may not feel in Soho.

Sometime in the future, I shall be travelling to the US. I’m not looking forward to it, I’m afraid.

Operation Clean-up.

At 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://tinyurl.com/48tnw4 when I was a child, the bathroom to the back of the house on the west side used to be reserved only for washing the cooking utensils. That time, coal was used for cooking and heating the bath water. http://digbig.com/4xrss. The coal ash was collected and stored. It was then used for scrubbing the cooking utensils. As my mother used to use grated coconut as well as coconut milk in the many delectable dishes she cooked, at least one coconut was cracked open every day. The fibre off the shell was used as the scrubbing pad or sponge. On the window ledge of the wash room, there used to stand a brass pot filled with ash and topped with a bit of the scrubbing fibre. I keep remembering me watching our family retainer scrubbing the pots and pans over his shoulder and sometimes offering to join him. I was never granted my wish. Little did I realise then that, some day in the far future, I would finally be granted my wish minus the coal ash cleaning powder and the coconut fibre scrubber. Instead, we would graduate up to Vim or Pril and plastic fibre scrub pads. In contrast, I have tumbled downhill from silver tongue cleaners to plastic or stainless steel ones over the same time span. http://digbig.com/4xrsy.

N.

She was my sister's college friend. A fair-skinned Goan Hindu with delicately etched features, she wore her nearly auburn hair trimmed short in a bob and lived with her mother in a huge elegantly furnished apartment on Laburnum Road, off Hughes Road. Even in my child's eyes, she seemed to have a mysteriously wicked air about her. Her disappearance was equally mysterious, sudden and without a trace. But while she was still around, she was probably the best coiffed, the best groomed, the best dressed creature I had ever seen. She had a weakness, I guess, for bouncy georgette and chiffon 6-yard saris in pastel hues. Even in those days, she used to drape the sari quite low off her waist as is all the rage now. Whenever she visited 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://tinyurl.com/48tnw4, I used to virtually devour her with my eyes. It didn't seem to bother her much. She chided me about it gently once or twice, though, almost as if it was all a big joke. She was my first childhood crush, I guess. The next one was a dumpy and dark English teacher in the first grade. I adored her for the way she taught me English. She was, I think, largely responsible for instilling the love of the language in me. http://digbig.com/4xqnp. The third one was another teacher, a fair and short damsel with sparkling eyes, who taught me in middle school. Almost every day, I used to watch her avidly from our terrace when she walked to and back from school.

Pain and suffering.

Is Art always and without exception a child of pain and suffering and deprivation? Can an artist never be someone who has had a normal – even a “boring” – childhood as Alan Bennett has repeatedly pointed out? An artist as a tortured soul suffering in the Nether World is the fashionable take and a much touted figment of popular imagination as well as a conscious and deliberate media spin. A deprived background adds a dramatic edge to the story no doubt but need not be the fact of the case. Sunil and Nargis Dutt surely did their best to give Sanjay a happy childhood. He turned out the way he did despite it. Now there is a media conspiracy to whip up sympathy for him by projecting him as a tortured but noble soul loved by one and all. His recent Gandhigiri-spouting Munnabhai screen avatar is put forward as an additional proof of his being a good but misunderstood human being. Even if all this is taken at face value, does it condone his role in the Mumbai blast case? I no longer belong to the eye for an eye school. But the Indian State surely cannot afford to take a lenient view of the digression and make an exception for an individual citizen for the sake of its very existence. That’s the way the cookie crumbles as the saying goes. However, the point I’m making is that the art born out of suffering seems to be a false premise. Just as much as the rosy-hued portrayal of an artist as a rootless person, a born expat or émigré, an outsider – the other trendy self-delusion much favoured by Salman Rushdie – happens to be. Art can be a way of earning money like anything else people do for the same purpose. If you happen to be good at what you do, it may even turn out to be a fairly lucrative and comfortable way of doing so. And who knows Time may decide to forgive you all your trespasses and faults as it did Yeats in Auden’s view:

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
http://www.serve.com/Lucius/Auden.index.html.

Truth to tell, there was a time in my life when I too flirted with the artist-as-a-tortured-soul and artist-as-an-outsider self-delusion. I even affected what I thought of as an arty mode of dress, khadi kurta over denim jeans. (I was no stranger to jeans of course as I had adapted them as my favourite garment of comfort in my early youth. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2007/02/gruelling-test.html.) I also started frequenting art shows and craft stores regularly. I used to visit Contemporary Arts & Crafts when it was a first-floor walk up – with a wooden floor and down-to-earth prices – opposite the Bombay University near Kala Ghoda as well as the old Bombay Store on Phirozshah Mehta Road. I was a regular at Wayside Inn, another Kala Ghoda landmark that disappeared quite recently. Arun Kolhatkar and George Fernandes too used to frequent the moderately priced eatery. More truth to tell, I was attracted to copywriting because I thought it was a creative field. Along the way, I dabbled in writing for children and was successful at the very first try. The ditty book I did with Sanat Surti (I See, I Think, I Sing) published by Thomson Press as a Sunflower Books paperback in 1972 won the National Book Trust Award. The second book (The Cloud & the Kite) – we tried selling it to a Japanese publisher – never made it. I lost the comprehensive dummy of the book soon and along with it the children’s writing yen. I continued to do well at copywriting and won a few awards as well, though, fortunately having shed the copywriting = art notion. It’s just business writing – a fairly comfortable way of earning good money if you’re good at it. Experience shows that the Auden hypothesis applies to good copywriting too. Amen to that.

Genesis.

A couple of days back, I got an e-mail from Anita under the subject line: “Kids” (meaning Armaan and Anika).

Today I got asked where do babies come from and about getting married.....

Thank god I had read a little of it - how to answer them at this age but could not remember the entire story, so now I have to do my homework on it!

They were too funny and most of it on the mark too.

I e-mailed back as follows:

I don’t remember asking anything remotely approaching the birds and the bees territory when I was a kid. I was pretty dumb and incurious by today's standards. But good to hear they had you stumped for a moment. Bully for them.

Ujwal and I had a huge laugh about it and she told me about the girl on Judging Amy [a Hallmark TV show] asking her judge mom what an orgasm was.

This got me reminiscing about how it used to be in those days of innocence. Growing up must have crept on me suddenly and unknowingly, I guess. At what exact moment, I can’t quite recall.

Or, maybe, I don’t want to remember, who knows?

P.S.: I found a couple of sites where a simple answer to the difficult and embarassing query is given: http://pregnancy.about.com/cs/secondpregnancy/a/babiescomefrom.htm and http://health.howstuffworks.com/adam-200107.htm. Also a rather amusing hint is here: http://www.insidemotherhood.com/2007/03/20/where-do-babies-come-from./

Gruelling test.

I’m impressed, bro. Watching the kids going through a punishing regimen year after year to pass the Secondary School Certificate examination with flying colours is a truly humbling experience. In my times, I had neither such single-minded focus nor such persistence and stamina for studies. What’s more, I don’t remembering a rigorously planned study schedule. I vaguely remember, however, the shocking pink cover of a paperback book I had picked up around six months before my coming ordeal. That one was supposed to advice me on the best way to study, if memory serves. I guess I didn’t pay serious heed to its wise counsel and went about my studies haphazardedly and sporadically. I wasn’t a brilliant student by any manner of means. I managed to scrape my way through with a 70 per cent score and a school prize in English, though. In contrast, I see today’s kids – some of whom Ujwal tutors in English and Marathi – cheerfully slaving their lives in studies and in tuitions. In spite of having little free time for themselves, they are so well informed on what’s going on around them: the latest movies, the latest hits, the latest video releases, the latest restaurants and pizza parlours, the latest malls, the latest multiplexes, the latest cricket scores, the latest Bollywood gossip. When I was their age, I was hardly as knowledgeable. I must confess, though, that around the time I passed high school, there was not much happening except maybe Radio Ceylon, Binaca Hit Parade, Raj Kapoor and Nargis, Nat King Cole, The Platters, Gene Kelly and Lana Turner in The Three Musketeers and stuff like that. Being hip then was probably wearing jeans and reading comics and nibbling hot dogs and sipping coffee in the garden cafeteria of the Excelsior Cinema. How times have changed, bro?

The medicine cabinet.

In the third floor flat at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/07/morgue.html in the room behind the sitting room or ‘hall’ as we used to call it was the room separated from the former by a wood and glass partition. It served as the puja-dining-store space. On its eastern wall was our medicine cabinet, a miniscule walnut veneered wooden cupboard maybe 2 feet by 1 foot and 6 inches deep. All the Mankar family’s first-aid needs were stored there. Minor cuts, wounds and scrapes were treated with either tincture of iodine or benzine – both of which burned like hell and brought tears to the eyes – or else with Mercuryochrome – which didn’t. There was cotton wool to swab the wounds, boric powder and potassium permanganate to disinfect them and rolls of gauze dressing and a Johnson sticky tape roll in a blue tin case. I had my generous share of falls and scrapes on the knee and was a real cry baby at the time of dressing the wounds and all through the healing process. Glycerine acid tannic was the throat ‘paint’ of choice for treating my frequently recurring tonsils infection. I remember being offered the bribe of ice cream in order to undergo a tonsillectomy. Being the coward in constant dread of physical pain that I have always been, I somehow always managed to dodge the Damocles’ sword and eventually managed, as I grew up, to outgrow the menace. Towards the end of my childhood, when I was fifteen and poised to appear for my Secondary School Certificate exam in maybe a couple of months, I managed to burn the ring finger on my right hand on a Sunday afternoon while thoughtlessly doing a lab experiment in the south-western part of our terrace. My father and his friends were busy with their weekly session of bezique http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/07/playing-cards.html and they all rushed to my rescue with Burnol and sympathy. The same evening, I went with my sister to the Imperial Talkies on Lamington Road within easy waling distance from home to watch the hit musical, Albela. It was made by Bhagwan, a successful stunt movie star turned comedian, and Geeta Bali who was a big star already and a good sport apparently for having condescended to act with someone far below her own class. Coming back to my medical ordeals, the second major catastrophe was again just before my Bachelor of Commerce exam. This was when an inverted abscess on my butt had to be surgically removed in Dr Hiralal’s surgical clinic. It was situated on Queen’s Road halfway between the Royal Opera House and Charni Road Station. A few days later while I was recuperating and studying for my exam, my right hand index finger got infected and had to be operated on. This resulted in my ending up with a foreshortened index digit with a rather pointy round nail.

Red versus black.

My mother, a god-fearing and simple person, used to tell me never to harm the black ants. I used to watch them fascinated as they marched in a disciplined and civilized queue to collect and carry away the stray crystals that had dropped on the kitchen floor as she measured out the sugar for the tea she had put to boil. As for the red ants, she had no such reservations. They would devour anything: sugar, fish and meat bones… you name it. They would also bite you if you displeased or disturbed them in some way. In my mother’s book, the black ants were Brahmins while the red ants belonged to a much lower social order. They were the scavengers, useful but villainous. These days, it has come to my attention that the rules of yore do not apply to the ant universe. No more do the black denizens stick to the white-collar chores and the red to the other sort. The difference has blurred, nay disappeared. I’m aware that the ant world I’d witnessed in the good ol’ days was on the third floor of 233 Khetwadi Main Road, figuratively and literally another world, I guess, for all practical purposes. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/07/morgue.html. I sometimes wonder if there are several parallel ant universes (or, alternative realities) like what sci-fi writers write http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_universe_(fiction) and quantum cosmologists theorise about. http://www.manyuniverses.com/indexH.htm. Stuff like: “There is no one reality. Each of us lives in a separate universe. That's not speaking metaphorically. This is the hypothesis of the stark nature of reality suggested by recent developments in quantum physics. Reality in a dynamic universe is non-objective. Consciousness is the only reality.” Sounds trés Advaita, no? Enough already. Coming back to the ants of this world here and now, being a very fair-minded guy, I decided to give the black ants another chance. This morning, I left a strip of rind from a slice of ham on a piece of a paper on the kitchen platform. Lo and behold! A few minutes later, the truth of my earlier observation was reiterated by a long line of very agitated black – yes, black and not red – ants. What is the world coming to, boys and girls?

LATEST FLASH! Recently, Ujwal forgot to take her daily Revital Ginseng-Vitamin-Mineral capsule and her Calcium tablet. They remained open overnight in a plastic receptacle on a lowtable in the living room. The next morning, I found them infested by a horde of miniscule black ants. Either the medicine was sugar-coated or the ants belonged (shudder! shudder!!) to a Mutant Ninja specie. Will they take over the earth? Who knows?

Spring loaded.

I lived my childhood with spring loaded or clockwork toys for company. Toys for boys. An Egyptian mummy, too. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/06/toys-for-boys-egyptian-mummy-too.html told a part of the story. The other day, though, while buying toys for Armaan and Anika, I suddenly but distinctly remembered the long forgotten tactile pleasure of winding spring loaded toys. It was almost as if the power to animate them and make them do stuff was in your hand that magic moment. Battery-powered toys don’t give you that feeling, do they? They run of their own volition almost, in utter disregard of the child. No fun there. And as the batteries run down, the toys too start slowing down as if old age is catching up with them. That kind of thing did not happen to their spring loaded elder cousins I played with. Their nemesis was rust. And, the perverse urge that hit me on rare occasions to turn the key counter clockwise. Speaking of keys, they came in two types: the detachable ones and the other kind. Of the two, the first type was apt to get mislaid. I remember the bouts of frustration I used to be prone to on account of so many lost keys. Sometimes, though, the toymakers out of compassion used to pack keys in pair. Else, you were at the mercy of the toy shop owner who just might condescend to sell you a spare key from his precious cache.

Aditi learns about ‘those days long past’ from Ujwal.

This post too is family lore gleaned from the replies Ujwal gave to her elder grand daughter for her Chicago school project.

Home & Family as a Child

1. Date of Birth: 10 August 1938.

2. Where lived, siblings: As a child, I lived in South Mumbai, Thakurdwar, a predominantly “Marathi” area at that time. No siblings.

3. Growing up, entertainment, books, games, etc.: Growing up wasn’t too bad. But I was lonely. Our games were simple. When it was too hot to play out or it was pouring, we played card games, checkers, carom. Other times, we played robber-and-police, running races and the like on our huge terrace. In the front yard, we played kabaddi (hu-tu-tu) and kho-kho. I read books in Marathi, my mother tongue, as well as comics, Enid Blyton and stories from Shakespeare and abridged versions of his plays in English.

4. Parents, family values/rules, own reaction, how they moulded me, etc.: My father was the Principal of a well-known school. My mother was a general physician who passed her medical examination in 1926 when hardly any women went in for professional training. Her colleagues were British and she the only Indian woman in the group. Discipline and punctuality were very important for my parents (One day she was scolded by her boss for being late for work by three minutes.). Work is worship. Duty is religion. Extending a helping hand to others should be a way of life. Such were the lessons in the art of living I learned from my parents. If my mother called out to me, I had to be in front of her before she finished pronouncing my name. Such was her demand for punctuality. I hated this. I would say, “Wait a second!” and would be angry with what I felt was an unreasonable and too finicky a demand. (In retrospect, though, I feel it has helped me so that I am able to finish my chores faster than most today and have time for other things while my friends are still toiling in the kitchen.) If I said I would be home by 7-30, I jolly well had to make sure it was 7-29 when I rang the doorbell and not 7-31. (I didn’t realise the importance of this rule until I had my own children and I started worrying about their coming home late. I never had to sit down and enumerate the rules to my children. Somehow, they sensed that respect for elders, value of hard work and being a caring-sharing person were important to me.) I belonged to a middle class family. So, spending money just for the sake of spending was a no-no in our house.

School and college

1. School: St. Teresa High School College(s): Sophia (till B.A.); St. Xavier’s College of Education (for B.Ed.)

2. Subjects: (School) English, French, History, Geography, General Science, Math. My favourite subject was English because it opened up a new world to me which otherwise would have remained unknown. (College) English Literature, French. (B.Ed.College) Apart from English and Marathi, I read Sociology and Psychology with special stress on Child Psychology.

3. Dating scene in college: Not a common phenomenon in my college days, though some of the ‘forward’ girls and boys did date with fairly stringent ‘dating protocol’ rigidly enforced by parents.

4. My parent’s view on dating and my reaction: Parents, mine included, generally frowned on dating. I did not dwell on it overmuch as I did not have a special boy friend.

5. My dating: After I started to date the person I eventually married, there was opposition from my mother although she knew his family well. She didn’t mind my marrying him but did not relish my being out with him late. A matinee or early evening movie show was okay: late night show, unthinkable. Although I was forced into telling lies at times, I didn’t resent her attitude as I felt that’s how moms were supposed to behave.

6. Friends’ dating and my feelings: Yes, a couple of my friends dated on the sly. I was not judgmental about their behaviour and even helped them as a friend is supposed to. On the whole, though, we usually moved in mixed groups rather than as couples on their own.

Music

7. Most popular, my choice: The most popular music when I was growing up was from Hindi films. In English teaching schools, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Pat Boone were top of the pop.

8. Impact on youth: Hindi film songs were a great hit with young people. They were sung at parties, picnics, school and college get-togethers. Some of the patriotic songs from films were also believed to have moved young folks into sacrificing their careers in the freedom struggle. With the elite among the youth, rock and roll which had just made a debut too held a certain amount of sway.

Clothing

9. Popular with college kids: In the circles I moved in, skirts and blouses, dresses and, to a small extent, salwar kameez. The hemlines had started to go up gradually.

10. How I dressed: Dresses, skirts and blouses.

11. Views on fashion: I was not very fashion-conscious. I dressed for comfort and what went with my somewhat generous figure.

Ideals

12. Ideals, goals, life-view in youth: Being a good human being was very important to me. Being a caring, sharing person aware of the needs of another human being mattered. I had no academic ambitions. Being a good daughter-in-law, a good wife and a good mother were my goals.

13. View on achievement of goals/ideals: I believe I am a caring, sharing, warm human being but what makes me most happy is how my children have turned out to be: helpful, hard working, sensitive and responsible family men. But I have not achieved my dream of owning a small house of my own by the sea.

Sports

14. Sports popular when I was in college: Cricket was all the rage even then. (Our college had an all-girls’ team – a rarity at that time.) Also popular were table tennis, carom and badminton.

15. What I played: Table tennis.

16. Anything else?: I would have loved to take up riding and swimming. But we didn’t belong to a club, so swimming was out and riding would have been too expensive to learn in Mumbai at that time.

Movies

17. Movies in my youth: Love stories and socials in Hindi with lots of songs. English: Martin and Lewis (comedies); Hitchcock; Doris Day/Gene Kelley (musicals).

18. How often seen: About twice a month.

19. Impact on youth: Hair styles and dresses set the fashion trends. Songs were hummed and hit parades on Radio Ceylon were popular. Not every second collegian wanted to be a Shammi Kapoor or a Dev Anand, though.

20. Favourite movie and why: “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (James Stewert and Doris Day) for Day’s rendering of “Que sera, sera”, apart from the inimitable Hitchcock touch.

Marriage

21. What kind of marriages? Love marriages acceptable: In the society I lived in, most marriages were arranged. Love marriages were acceptable and not uncommon. The trouble usually arose when people married out of their community (caste/sub-caste) or religion.

22. My marriage: Mine was a love match. I knew my husband-to-be for about five years but got engaged just a year before the wedding. I was allowed to go out with him but had a fairly strict ‘curfew’ (reporting home time).

23. Family resistance, own say: No resistance from my family about the person I chose to marry. Yes, I had a say in the matter.

Partition

1. How old: At the time of the War of Independence (1857), I was not born. When India was partitioned, I was nine.

2. Any memories? I remember my mother saying, “I wish you were born in happier times”, probably referring to the vivisection of the country and the violence accompanying it. I also faintly recall going out round the city in a truck to see the illuminated building on 15 August 1947.

3. Personally affected? No personal loss such as what the people in Punjab and Sind who had to leave their homes and migrate to India suffered.

4. Opinions, thoughts, feelings: My mother who had a lot of Muslim patients tried her best to keep on an even keel about them. But there were such strong ‘hate’ vibes in the air that they affected the children like me also. I was too young to really understand how and to whom to mete out the responsibility for the bad happenings all over India: the killings, the looting, the riots, the refugees. As I remember, we were deeply affected by all the talk going around us. Two people emerged as the principal villains: Jinah and Gandhi. (Though today I know that the latter had nothing to do with partition, I can never persuade myself to hail him as ‘Father of the Nation’.)

World War II

1. How old: One year old when it started and seven year old when it ended.

2. Personally affected?: Not really. Except from hearsay around the time the war was nearing its end, I felt that India had unnecessarily been dragged into it and that it was unfair to expect us to fight for Britain when we were fighting her for our independence. Also, vague memories of rationing and shortages again from what I remember my mother or neighbours saying about how it was tough to get this or that.

3. Pearl Harbor?: Too young then to really understand all the implications.

4. Hitler?: I was no fan of his, although I admired a compatriot of mine, Subash Chandra Bose, who fled to Germany hoping to raise a liberation force to free India. Also, I have heard in later life people saying that the Holocaust was a Jewish ‘invention’ perpetuated by Jewish-controlled Western media .

Recipe

1. Family recipe to share: The much celebrated Prawn Green Curry by Ujwal Mankar.

Ingredients:

One fresh coconut 15 medium sized prawns, shelled and de-veined. One small bunch of coriander leaves (cilantro). 2 long green chillies. 6 black pepper beads. 8 cloves of garlic. Juice of one medium sized lime. Salt to taste.

How to make

1. Grate the coconut. 2. Grind ¼ grated coconut along with the coriander leaves, chillies, black pepper and garlic in a mini-mixer to a smooth paste. 3. From the remaining grated coconut (3/4), extract thick juice (‘milk’). 4. Again, from the same coconut, extract thin juice (by adding water). 5. Mix the paste with the thin juice. Add salt. Bring to a slow boil in a wok. Add the prawns. 6. Let it all simmer for 7 to 8 minutes. 7. Add the thick coconut juice (milk), bring it to a quick boil for a minute and remove the wok from the stove. 8. After it cools down a bit, add the lemon juice. IMPORTANT: Never reheat the Prawn Green Curry – even if you have stored the leftovers in the ‘fridge. Serve after thawing thoroughly. NOTE: Fresh coconut may be substituted by tinned coconut extract.

2. Whose? Why special? Anyone else knows? Pass on to whom? This is a family recipe in the true sense because I learned it from my mother and my mother-in-law. It is special because both in its ingredients (coconut milk, coriander leaves – cilantro to you Yankees! and green – not red - chillies mainly) and its taste, you can get a glimpse and a feel of the kind of people we are: warm, hospitable, caring and sharing. No, nobody else knows how to make it. Yes, I would like to pass it to all my daughters: Nandini, Anita, Avantika ('Tika) and you.

A grand old pumpkin tale.

This morning, I peeled and ate about 20 pumpkin seeds. I had saved them for drying after salvaging them from a pumpkin slice Ujwal had used to make some vegetable soup on Saturday. It brought back memories of my childhood. My mother used to give them to me ready peeled with their green covering intact. Peeling is quite a chore. Even if the outer covering is completely dry, it’s still slippery. Holding the tiny seed in your finger and trying to break and remove it takes a lot of patience. My other memory about pumpkin seeds concerns the annual fair (jatra) in Navi Wadi (literally ‘New Street’) very close to where I stay now. We used to go to visit the temple of Maheshwari, our family deity (kula devta). They used to have sweetmeat shops there where you could buy pumpkin seeds in sugar covering. It was considered quite a treat then. I wonder if it’s still available. Or, considered a treat. I also remembered a story from my childhood. It was about a bouncing pumpkin that a crafty grandmother used to save herself from a tiger and a fox. By a strange coincidence, I read it just the other day in a book for children rewritten by the renowned Marathi writer, Pralhad Keshav Atre. Delectable!

The cuckoo flew over to the crow’s nest. To lay an egg or two.

For the last three years or so, the spring has been springing on my neighbourhood more chirping birds than in the past. It was like in my childhood when our house abutted a spacious garden populated by lots of chirpers and crooners. They used to hold a symphony every sunrise and sunset. Today I can hear the koel at dawn accompanied by what looks and sounds like a robin red breast and a chorus of parrots. These last three years, in fact, the koel has made it a habit of repeating her repertoire at all times of the day – which is uncharacteristic and a bit disturbing. My mother used to tell me that the dulcet-voiced koel sings to herald the coming of the rains. Surely, the monsoons aren’t about to break, are they? I came across a fascinating article on the koel at this website a while ago:
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mp/2003/04/22/stories/2003042200020100.htm. By the way, the koel or cuckoo is the avian world’s notorious “brood parasite”. She abdicates her parental responsibilities by laying eggs in Ma Crow’s nest forcing her do the rest of the hard work of hatching the eggs and feeding the chicks. Speak of birdbrains? Hah! http://www.wildlifeofindia.com/artcuckoo.htm.

Only three steps to perdition.

“Nawa varas nu sagan” (literally, “New Year’s salt”) is a pre-dawn cry you hear only on the New Year’s Day in Diwali in South Bombay as far as I can vouch. It’s uttered by the man who sells you packets of rock salt sprinkled with kumkum that’s supposed to bring you good fortune in the New Year. I remember a ritual from my childhood that took place on every New Year’s Day in my house. The servants would sweep the house, collect the sweepings and pile them up. A puja would be performed of that pile of rubbish. The pile would then be paraded through all parts of the house to the accompaniment of a chant. This was intended to banish all the evil influences that may be lurking about as well as to usher in the just and righteous reign of Bali Raja. The servants would then go down and keep the sweepings in a corner of the compound. They would buy the ‘lucky’ salt from the saganwala and only then come back home. Last Diwali, on the Bali Pratipada morning, I heard the saganwala’s cry and sent the servant down to buy some for old time’s sake. (By the way, Bali Raja was a demon king. He was the fourth direct descendent of Hiranyakashyap. Bali ruled all three worlds, it seems. So, the gods were jealous and afraid of him. The diminutive Vaman Avatar of Lord Vishnu tricked Bali into surrendering his entire kingdom by asking for the gift of “three steps of land”. Read the account of what all transpired here: http://www.hindunet.org/avatars/vaman/index.htm.) You can read some information on Diwali customs here: http://www.rumela.com/events/festival_diwali.htm & http://www.diwalifestival.org/diwali-traditions-customs.html. (I’m not sure how authentic it is, though.)