A Shade of Blue

College photos being unearthed and dried in the WhatsApp group. It's difficult not to get sucked into the mayhem of memories. One of the photos is of our graduation ceremony. All girls are wearing silk sarees, as was the rule, and I'm wearing Aayi's blue saree with the red border. It was a gift from her brother on the occasion of his son's Munji more than a decade earlier. And it was the only good saree Aayi had those days. So the red border had faded in places and it was hard to conceal. For some time inside the hostel I felt I was the poorest around. But the feeling wasn't novel so it didn't bother me for long. The only thing that mattered that day was that Mr. MF, our HoD, who had been a terror all along, was putting the graduation ring on my finger. I have the photo of a smiling MF. 

Anyway, less than a year later, I went all by myself to Mangalore and bought two sarees for my mother with my own money. One of them a silk saree, copper coloured. My mother wore it with a lot of fanfare for some years, before it became a habit for anybody and everybody to give her a silk saree as gift. 

A Slip of the Tongue

I think the word Haircut is wronly placed in the financial lexicon. Whatever it intends to convey needed a stronger word, actually. 

Checking a Box

I gave P a haircut! With scissors. My first. The front came out very neat but the back of his head looks like a model of step farming. Anyway, I got away with it and now the more I look at it, the prouder I feel about my creation. Like I am ready to give a haircut to the world. 

It's as if V suddenly stumbled on a box of old memories. These days she starts the calls with, "Hey, do you remember... " and before we know it, both of us are laughing even before a sentence begins. Yesterday we were reminiscing about the times we were talking gibberish. We used to have a gibberish conversation! We agreed that if it was a little structured, we could have it on Duolingo. 

What would we be laughing about ten years down the line? 

Lying in Wait

I've never felt frustrated about the idiom "Guduguva moda suriyuvudilla"(Thundering clouds seldom rain) before. I want rain! 

A Tall Order

I've had enough of people sighting Himalayas from anywhere and everywhere in this Corona season. Now I want to see Suratkal beach from Bangalore. That's it. 

The New Normal

In Bangalore, migrants are blamed for a host of problems like lack of civic sense, population, changing demographics, lowering the standards of living, increasing crime rates etc. Now that many have gone home and there is no picture of their return plans, I wonder if we'll begin wooing them officially. Small shops around are feeling their absence already. 

I must clarify here that I'm using the term migrant somewhat freely here to mean the North and East Indian labourers. Because to be precise, I'm a migrant myself and so are thousands more, who have stayed put in Bangalore during this crisis, who've not had to worry about livelihood even a day in the last two months. There are also migrant labourers from other parts of Karnataka. But yet, I find that in everyone's mind there is a clear distinction. 

The Curious Case of SJ

One week into the new WhatsApp group and it seems some things haven't changed, in all these years. 

Among these 27 women, there are about 5-6 who had a lot of fun as a group in the college days. This group includes Pal, my then-roommate. One of them, SJ, s out of the network now. Whenever her name comes up, the standard remarks are, "Nobody knows where she is" or "SJ has just vanished from the face of the earth!". It was surprising for a popular person like SJ to go missing like that so I looked for her on LinkedIn. And there was her profile,  matching in name and our college. But it also said that after her MS in US, she went on to do Islamic Studies and she seems to be now teaching that too. I told Pal that she was on LinkedIn but she didn't seem very surprised or excited. So now I wonder which one of them happened - her old friends got spooked by what they saw in her profile or they tried but she didn't want to get back in touch. 

Small Mercies

I'm elated today. I finally know how to make Sambaar without using coconut. In my defense, nobody in my family or family neighborhood makes it without coconut. So it was much later in my life that I realized Sambaar powder existed for a reason. I had tried it once before but since it turned out like a distant relative of both daal and sambaar, I couldn't repeat the attempt. So when most of my contemporaries made the express version, I spent time roasting the masala ingredients, grating the coconut and grinding the mix. Of course I consider the latter superior any day and will not give up on that but today's success makes me feel empowered in a way. 

So MK asked me what I was watching over the weekend and I said Paatal Lok. She asked me if it was a mythological series. Now that I call innocence. 

Jumbled Up

I brought up the Jaggi incident in the new Whatsapp group on Saturday and have been sort of regretting it since. Reactions poured in till yesterday night and of course everybody found it funny. But the side-effect is that most are considering it my innocence while obviously it was ignorance. Somebody said it was so me and another even went on to say I continue to be innocent. That's a stretch, really and I was embarrassed. And totally baffled; what is this innocence of mine? Makes me feel like an impostor. 

There seems to be a fundamental difference in the way Americans and Indians hold a pen to write. Initially I thought it was a one-off thing but no, it seems to be a generic thing.

Heroes and Villains

Jaideep Ahlawat has a new admirer in me. I've liked him in previous smaller roles too but Paatal Lok of course belongs to him. How does someone like him sustain or better this kind of new success? Will he be able to? 

Watching series like Paatal Lok is hard. The reality of it seems very absurd at times but you know in your heart that it must be true. And it makes you uncomfortable that this semi-fantasy-reality world is not too far away. 

But this every-smalltown-killer-is-a-victim-of-his-circumstances is becoming a cliche for me. I mean, it seems that they only want to make me sympathise with this victim while not offering any hope of change in circumstances. "Oh, that's how these hinterlands are, you know!"

Restored Connections

WhatsApp is working overtime on my phone since last morning. Our Engineering batch girls have formed a group finally. 22 girls out of the total 27 so far, five still at large. As someone said, it feels like we are in a hostel quarantine. The usual suspects are talking nonstop and others are struggling to catch up with it. I called L yesterday and we talked more about the missing people. Anyway, there is a Zoom meeting later today. Gosh, I can hear the chatter and laughter already! 

Burning

Bangalore is super hot. It used to be windy but now hardly a leaf moves in the trees. We haven't even had a good spell of rain for so long. 

Once we were in my in-laws' place in the summer. Temperatures of the season are 40+ there and we were staying in the old house those days. It had only two small windows, both in the hall, which was used by the men. The women slept in the Gods' room, filling that small space. No fan there, of course. Parvati Akka, my third co-sister, was the one who managed that household and it typically took her a minute to sleep off, rain or shine. Me? My grandmother's place wasn't different those days so I could condition my mind to go to sleep after a while. But Saru Didi, my second co-sister, was the hardest hit. She came there only when we visited and she could never get used to it. So that day she tossed and turned for a while, cursing both the external and internal factors which drove her sleep away. Then she had an idea. She said we could sleep in the empty fields, it was a beautiful moonlit night too. It sounded nice to me. So we woke Parvati Akka up who was reluctant, also her husband and mine. Charpais were in abundance so we took one each and put them in the field. The night was indeed beautiful and Parvati Akka went back to her sleep. Others got to talking, enjoying the breeze, ready to doze off but that was not to be. We had not factored in the mosquitoes, which were having a field day(night). We tried hard to ignore them but they were just too many. We finally acknowledged that sleep was impossible and trudged back home, leaving the charpais behind. But not before Parvati Akka had given us an earful. 

Lost Connection

It seems Seetakka passed away. Blood cancer. Pappa said he had visited Maama, Atte and her about an year ago and he wasn't aware of it then. Later he had heard rumors but anyway, he hadn't told me anything. She was 44. I look at her photo in the news report and she looks the same, like she was decades ago. Her father was a close friend to Pappa those days and our families mingled very regularly. I must have vague memories of them even as a baby. But the most solid one is when I was fourteen, when I stayed at their place for 2-3 weeks, without my parents. The only place I've stayed in for that long, apart from my grandparents'. Actually it did remind me of my grandmother's by its remoteness. They had bought a piece of land near the Kerala border and built a house there. There weren't even petty shops in the vicinity and if you went to town, you had to walk a mile to catch the bus. 

But I enjoyed the solitude of that barren land. That is, when Seetakka left me alone. That house is so clearly etched in my memory. They hadn't maintained the surroundings at all so it was some coconut trees in a grassy land, just beyond the front yard. We roamed there in the mornings.We went walking along the dusty roads in the evening and she was a non-stop talker and I, the listener. She was older than me, was very proud of her writer father and it was quite obvious that she would enter the literary world soon. She was the only child and maybe I was a welcome ear; she told me all sorts of things. From classmates to monetary troubles at home. She suggested books that I could read from her father's vast collection.She even romanticized periods. I was struggling with the cloth pads and hated the routine so her words put the whole thing in a new light. I think we even exchanged some letters later. I now wonder why we didn't go on to build on the bond we developed that summer. I can blame it on the fact that Pappa fell out with Maama a couple of years after that but there was something else too. I can't put my finger on it though. 

Today my thoughts are more with Atte. She was always a strong lady and I hope she continues to find strength. 

Adapting

I used to have many after-Corona-goes-away-I-want-tos in the month of April. Now they've mostly become I-need-tos. I don't know what June will bring. 

Criminal Mind

After watching two Korean Police Procedural series, I've decided to add Korean to my Duolingo learning list. So I now have Spanish, Italian, French, Dutch, Russian, Irish, Portuguese, Japanese, Danish and Korean. I'm still in the stage of feeling thrilled when I understand a couple of words in an episode but it's been nice.

And yes, I've decided to study Criminal Psychology. I should've done it earlier. Anyway.

How about this one as Corona song too? Sarcastic, of course.

Future Tense

I look at my clothes unused for so many months now and it feels like by the time all this ends, I would be shrunk and wouldn't fit into those clothes anymore.

I spoke to Razia today. She's upset that most of the ladies whom she used to help for 2 to 3 hours in a day, haven't called her even once. She said it felt bitter. She also said she'd never had such idle time in her entire life and she was sick and tired of it.

The majority in our building have decided not to have any househelp for another three months. Three months! We were the losing minority.

It feels like a Corona song now. 🙄

And Then There Were...

And there goes Nissar Ahmed, the poet who gave me some of my favorite songs of childhood. But then I discovered much later that he had also written "Nimmodaniddoo Nimmantagade" and it made me feel very guilty that I had not thought of that possibility. That he should've gone through it while I was rejoicing with Nityotsava. 

Missed Lessons

Anu had her keyboard lesson on Zoom over the weekend. The parting line from her teacher was, "Ananya, it's obvious that you didn't touch your keyboard in the last month. You need to practice more now! ". Anu pouted and said Yes Ma'am. She's upset with Zoom now.

One of P's friends was proposing a new theory for India's unexpectedly low Covid-19 numbers. He said it was because of the predominantly vegetarian population(which is a big myth). P asked him about the disparity in numbers of meat-eating Kerala and vegetarian GujaratGujarat or Rajasthan. The guy says it's because Kerala is fudging its numbers! Some people never learn. And this guy is a professor of Science in a reputed institute. 

Lost in Translation

I should get a job as English subtitle provider for Kannada movies. P needs them sometimes but they are so bad that they kill a scene often. 

Mango Republic

Anu : Aayi, what are you buying on Amazon?
Me   : Groceries.
Anu : Can you buy some mangoes for me? You know I haven't eaten them this year at all.
Me   : Amazon doesn't seem to have them.
Anu : Why not!
Me  : They're selling only essentials in the lockdown time.
Anu : Mangoes are essential!
Me  : Of course they are not essential, you can live without them!
Anu : But they make me happy so isn't that essential for living? How can one just live without being happy?

If only I could also get some of those happiness mangoes!