Migration

I open the door as quietly as possible. It is 6 in the evening and they are fast asleep. Jet lag. My retina processes 3 pairs of chubby calves. My sister, niece and nephew own these legs. They look adorable. The chubby legs.

I see the green dot against Effie's name when I open my email. She was supposed to have reached Guwahati. We chat. She is in Guwahati. She has moved to her new flat. Andy had jokingly called me 'judgeand' in a comment made on my previous post. Being English, he has an English sense of humour. I understood the humour but confirmed with Effie if I had understood right. I had.

We had just sat down for breakfast when the doorbell rang. My sister opened the door. It was Alvita. Tall and slender in a white sleeveless shirt with pretty frills, jeans and sneakers, she walked into the living room looking tired. She had dropped in on her way to Pune from the airport. She had arrived from France. We were expecting her a little earlier and sat for breakfast when she did not appear. Her children were sleeping in the car and did not come up to the house. She left not very long after.

Barnali called me from Shillong one evening. It is always wonderful to talk to her. But this time she handed the phone to someone else telling me the person wanted to talk to me. I was pleasantly surprised to hear Shibee's voice. She was in Shillong visiting her Nani. She had her babies with her. She was long past jet lag having landed in Guwahati several days earlier. But sleep lag doesn't go easily for a mother with an infant child.

Gargi is arriving next week. We both are excited at her impending arrival. She will be coming to Mumbai, staying quite close by and we hope to spend some time together even though her visit will be very short.

Vacations have started for children all over the world. It is exciting for Indians residing abroad to come to their country of origin for visits. It is also exciting for their friends and relatives to be able to see them. It is a lot like migratory birds flocking home at the end of the season for a short break.

Zuri

Zuri is a name of Swahili origin and means 'beautiful.' Courtesy: Google search. Shalmali (I love the way the name rrrolls in the mouth), mistakenly wrote my name as 'Zuri', purportedly in a state of jet lag. As she also happens to live in Zurich, the mistake was understandable. A laptop and a 3G dongle happen to be my most faithful companions of late. They don't mind my carrying them wherever I go, which actually happens to be quite a small distance. Well, as much as one can travel in a third floor apartment having a 1000 square foot carpet area. These two devices tell me the meanings of everything I want to know.

My name Juri, is an Assamese girl name meaning 'stream' (a repeat information from an earlier blog) and a Slavic boy name also having variants 'Yuri' and 'Jaris.' My Assamese name was personified by me. I used to be quite a crybaby as a child. I wish I had been named Zuri. It would have been nice to personify this name.

Shalmali is 13 years older than Ninad and 13 years younger to me. I met her for a few hours and conversed for much fewer. She is striking to look at. Her kohl rimmed eyes and short hair, all in lovely ringlets, sit well on her attractive features. There was harmony in the way she dressed, her kurti, jeans, footwear each looked like they were made for the other. She is a scientist and an artist. Aditya, the mysterious beautiful blog writer I mentioned in one of my earlier blogs, married her and got relieved from his internal and personal conflicts and had to stop writing. God bless both of them.

6 months can be a long time. A lot of things happen in 6 months. A school boy gives board exams and reaches junior college, 2 babies are born, several people die, 3 cousins get married, pay hikes happen, people get promotions, relations between spouses change, labs get accredited, people travel across countries, silver jubilee class get-togethers relieve 20 year old nostalgias for some time, resident doctors complete their postings in BMT wards and life moves on in general. A lot of things.

And yet I landed in Mumbai 6 months back and I feel that I landed here just the other day. Fleeting desires to flee the city did visit me occasionally but were brought under control. And yet now that the time has passed, I don't know how I did it. My travelling was confined to an area of 4-5 kilometres in these 6 months with nothing exciting happening. I can only thank the laptop and the 3G dongle for keeping me relatively stable in the state of inertia I had to submit myself to.

Tempers in Mumbai have cooled, an effect of the cool environmental temperatures brought about by the unceasing rains and the dark grey clouds effectively conditioning the air below them. Assam, on the other hand is a victim of soaring temperatures. Temperatures higher than any recorded in the summers of the last 50 years have been reached. Power cuts, rampant in Assam, are making the misery greater.

I hope, for the sake of general good, that the weather becomes kinder than the ministry responsible for power generation in Assam. Mother Nature is easier to appeal to than the two legged in power.







 

Red hot bombs

No. I am not given to narcissism as far as my external appearance is concerned. Narcissim is not the reason I am posting this photo here. I was brought up secure in the knowledge of my ugliness. My father often worried, in a volume audible enough for everyone to hear, that no one would marry me.




This is a 16 year old photo. The baby is my baby. Ninad. And the pretty lady in the picture is, hold your breath, me!

Someone I have known for the last 10 years, but was totally out of touch with in the last 5 years, suddenly remembered me and sent me a picture of the 'Bhut Jolokia' by email. It was captioned 'the hottest chilli in the world.' This is slightly old news. The Naga Bhut Jolokia has been superseded by the 'Trinidad Scorpion "Butch T"' as the hottest chilli in the world. This is however a digression and  not the point that I am trying to make.

The message he wrote to me said 'sending a picture of the second hottest chilli of the world to the hottest chilli.' a.k.a. Me. I am infamous for the peppery and stingy words that my vocal cords would often articulate. I try to control my cords and am much better at the control part now, but you know that thing about old habits.

And then he saw my current pictures and informed me that I look like a Mami now. Not that it bothered me. I am a Mami to many kids, and adults for that matter. But he was trying to motivate me into getting back the 'pataka' looks and figure I had when he last saw me. I was not aware of being a 'pataka' back then. I therefore decided to look at my old pictures to confirm. The only ones that I had access to were on the internet, because of being far away from home. This one I located looked somewhat patakaish to me.

Only I had not been aware of the 'pataka'ness of the Juri back then. I wish I had been. It could have been put to better uses. *winking smiley*

I have never felt like a 'pataka' before (refer to second line of this blog), and much less so now. I am 15 kilos heavier than the photo above. It doesn't really matter to me, but I thought the lady in the picture looked good, as does the baby. I wanted to show them off. Please bear with me this time. Je promets que c'est la dernière fois. I promise this is the last time. The French might come across a little weird on translation. I know Alvita will rescue me. Or Huma will. This is the best I could do from what I learnt in school.



 

Sea view, six packs, unbroken spirits

The rains have started in Mumbai. The sheets of rain look lovely to anyone who wakes from the afternoon slumber and is greeted by these sheets though their windows. Especially when there is a blurry view of verdant trees, sea waters and hills yonder. Rains bring out the Williams: Blake & Wordsworth and the Da Vincis in a lot of people. Yours truly included.

There used to be a field in view when I looked out of the large three pane window of the room where I spend most of the time. Cricket matches used to be held there. Microphones used to fill the air around with cacophonous commentary. I did not mind it. In the island of isolation, the crowds and noise from a nearby field was the only social activity I could experience. This was 4 months back. The green field gradually changed to a reddish brown. Large brick walls were built around it. Temporary residential tin shacks cropped up just inside the boundary.

Soil was being dug up from one half of the field and this was used to fill up the other half. Intuitively I had had my window panes sealed with large sticky tape before all this had begun. Of late my right brain seems to have overcome my left. The Mumbai heat and the dust raised from the dry construction soil would be harbouring bacteria and fungi. They had to be kept out.

A large rectangular hole gaped at the farther end of the former field. Soon the hole became a foundation for the building that would be coming up there. Beyond this former field is a 14 storey residential building. This building has one apartment per floor. Each floor has twin car parking spaces and car lifts to take the cars up there. One hunky Bollywood film star has reportedly purchased a flat there. Just thinking of being able to sometimes see him, shirtless, on one of his balconies made us happy.

Beyond that building were trees, in a clustered row, separating the road from the Thane creek. An embankment lined the creek shore. The creek carried waters from the Arabian Sea into Navi Mumbai and it was therefore the sea for us. You know, a part of the whole and all that stuff. This room has a view of the sea. The breeze from the sea kept the apartments cool in the sweltering Mumbai heat. It also occasionally brought in nauseating fishy smells which was tolerated with not more than a passing remark on its unpleasantness.

With the rapid pace at which the field is transforming into a building, it won't be much longer before the sea view becomes a past tense for the three paned window. Not much hope of being able to see the Bollywood star's six packs remain. He hasn't occupied the apartment yet (we know because the entire building remains dark at night, none of the apartments have yet been occupied).

Pankhi, my haematologist friend, broke a leg. She had topped the lists in all three MBBS exams of the '87 batch of GMCH. She is a singer and comes from a family of musicians, film makers and artists. She has also sung for Coke Studio on MTV with the well known singer and musician Hariharan.

She broke one leg, but several bones and each bone in several places. They broke by tripping over a rope. She has the Vitamin D3 deficiency that the average urban Indian has these days. Her bone mineral density is normal. Nevertheless, she managed to shatter so many bones by tripping over a rope. Which, by her own admission, she had noticed and taken care to carry her right foot over it with sufficient clearing space over the rope. She was betrayed by the left leg and the right hemisphere of her grey cells.

Her leg is in a thigh high stiff cast and she can barely walk. I called her today and she was preparing to go to work. Her tibia, fibula and metatarsals fragmented barely 15 days back. She embodies the spirit of the batch of '87. Such a spirited batch we are. Those who know me would agree.

The cacophony over the microphones have been replaced by sounds of machines boring into the ground. Sounds of metal being dropped over metal also reach the ears. There are constant humming noises from machines doing things that I haven't yet been able to identify. I do mind these sounds.








 

Striped squirrels and real life

This is an old blog entry. It was written on the 7th of March 2013. For some reason I did not post it then. I can't recollect very well what the reason was. I think I did not like it much when I previewed it back then. But on reading it now, it does not seem so bad. (Please remember, unlike you guys, I have so much time on my hands that I have to constantly think of ways of spending it. Reading older blog entries once in a while is one of the ways.)

March 07 2013:

I thought I'd be back sooner but I guess time flies. Something to do with the pulse rate of the earth it seems. You can google to find out more about the earth's pulse.

Life doesn't suck. Its great. Especially when you stop being unhappy about what you don't have. Like I have. I don't have great health or loads of money that I can spend without worry. Most people in my social class have more money and more parties and travel more and have better houses. I notice, but I recently realise that it doesn't make me envious. I feel happy that I know these people and feel happy that maybe I am the lucky mascot for their good luck. That does not at all sound modest, but it makes me feel incredibly blessed. You may not understand what I'm trying to say, but you could put in an effort; or not.

I grew up in an incredible place....one of the finest academies of India. My father was a teaching faculty there and I was just one when he started working there. He also retired from there. The campus was huge as it was the premier academy of its curriculum in the country. It was built in the suburbs of one of the beautiful cities of India and was also a recognised national sanctuary. Our residential homes were made on neat rows of streets, forests lay between the rows. We had peacocks dancing in the back gardens during the rains and wild deer drinking out of water cups in our gardens.

Striped squirrels nibbled on the fruits that grew on trees in our backyards and the varieties of birds we saw everyday were such that camps of the WWF, called the World Wildlife Fund in those days, used to be held in the academy premises. This academy is among the cleanest places in the world and is noise and air pollution free. Having scant public transport meant that we had to use feet and bicycles all the time as kids for transporting us and it never occurred to us that this was not the norm in most urban parts of the country.

We picnicked often. And  played on the streets. Also read a lot of books. Never bought books. There were plenty of libraries in the academy and we made good use of them. We grew up on Enid Blyton, Nancy Drew, Hardy boys, Champak, Chandamama and the Amar Chitra Kathas.  We gathered in the evenings and played group games. We went swimming and played badminton in the courts with our friends. We went horseriding, played squash and sailed boats in Peacock Bay. We watched children's movies in the auditorium every other Friday when they would be screened. And everything was done with friends. Quite a wholesome childhood actually.

And yet when I came out into the real world for college studies, I didn't quite fit. We were not trained to handle real life. Getting trained for real life took a long time. A very long time. The childhood we had seems as much of a fantasy as Enid Blyton's books.

Of blank minds and full mouths

I can't believe it. I open this 'new post' page on my blogger because I want to write something, but my mind is a blank. I have nothing to write. What I can't believe is that my mind is a blank.

Perhaps I am getting closer to attaining my spiritual goal of enlightenment. If my friends, who are kind enough to read my blogs, think that there is humour in my write-ups, then they are right. I intend many of my lines to be funny, and they are, at least to me. My son has informed me enough number of times for me to not forget that the only person who laughs at my jokes is, well, me. I do try to put up my best 'hurt' face when he says this but it doesn't seem to have the same effect on him as my Dad's 'hurt' face has on me (read blog titled KIKI). Kids of this generation...grumble....

A friend, recently acquired, writes beautifully. I complimented him on the poems and the feelings he had entered in his blog page, and he answered that he has stopped writing now because he could write only when he had personal/internal conflict which is no longer there because of the wonderful woman he married. I told him regretfully that he should have written a book when all his conflicts were in optimum glory. Too late now. With this wife, returning to a state of conflict will be difficult. I know because I have met her.

I haven't mentioned this friend's name, because his friendship status is 'recently acquired' and he may/may not appreciate his name popping up on my blog page. Hopefully, I'll know what he appreciates when he reads this blog.

Those of you who have kids and need to make craft for their school or to introduce them to a creative art form must look up Shalmali Patkar's blog SaawrichaKapus.blogspot.com. It is a beautiful blog and even adults interested in the art form could try their hand at her creations. More about Shalmali later. Keep your curiosity turned on as she is a beautiful person.

My reticular activating system has somehow got into the pattern of allowing me sleep for not more than 5 hours at a stretch at night. Which is quite annoying. I wake up fresh and then become groggy a few hours later; needing a couple more hours of sleep to get my brain and body cells fully competent. All this is OK now but will be quite troublesome once I get back to work. Have to ask my management if they will allow me a couch in my room.

This has turned out a decent length. I can't believe I started with writing that I have nothing to write. Dr Bhausaheb once told me I talk enough to compensate for a roomful of people who do not talk. Must be true although I did try out my 'hurt' face on him too. It had the same effect on him as it had on Ninad. I need to practice on getting my 'hurt' face right.