What do I miss when I am away from India? Is it the sight of silver anklets laden feet, or the sound of the pressure cooker whistling away in its morning glory? Or the neighbourhood night-watchman's call and tap of jagte raho, keep awake, keep vigilant? Or the melodious music of the koels or the cawing of the crows? I miss all of these and more, for nostalgia is like sugar, sweetening every little thing.
The durbar of pretty women
Our friendship waned. I grew tired of constantly paying obeisance to her beauty. I also got tired of never getting complimented for anything. I understand that compliments aren't run on a barter system. But I did find it odd that for a woman who constantly thrived on references to how beautiful she was when she was young and how pretty she still was and the number of suitors she still attracted, she would choose to be miserly about how she complimented others. And that she could hold out on giving a compliment even if a person truly deserved it. The turning point came when she once commented on a person, who was her friend and was doing poorly on health issues.
A € 20 chicken?
If this were a short story (and an absurdly short short story!), it would say - two Indian women went out to buy groceries. They came back with a mysterious whole chicken that was priced at 20 euros. No one knew why. It looked like a chicken. It tasted like one. It was packaged as one. But 20 euros for a chicken?
A Doritos jar and its magical afterlife
The jar with the blue lid (yes, I tilted it for this picture!) - is from Follian Traditional Irish preserves. It now houses poppy seeds. Poppy seeds, soaked and ground to a fine paste are used in many Bengali curries. The jars with red lids on the same shelf - these come from the South … Continue reading A Doritos jar and its magical afterlife
Do you Facebook your travel?
I wanted to post more pictures on Facebook, but something held me back. And that is ─ remembering a time in my life when everything seemed so dark that I felt I had nothing happy to post or to show on Facebook. But the world did. So I would open my account and the timeline would be flooded with photographs of a couple in their ‘he proposed-I accepted’ pose, someone’s honeymoon snaps that captured every nuance of the sea in Bali, as well as every corner of their luxurious suite. Someone was climbing the Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and you could see their tired, happy poses, and someone else was sea diving in Mauritius. People in pretty dresses, blow-dried hair and generally, happy things and happy people in happy places.
How do you chase a sunset?
I have also realised in hindsight that the bit that is so magical about sunsets is also what happening around us, and not just in the skies. People returning from work, families laid out in parks and beaches, mountains and boulders on holidays, moments of leisure, of stolen kisses and romances. Of the boiled and salted peanuts enjoyed on a vacation while watching the sun go down, or a relatively dull day lifted up by the sheer brilliance in the sky, and the sense of community, a sort of shared experience that we get when you find that many other people are enjoying and rejoicing, sharing a similar pleasure as they watch the sun going down.
A winter afternoon in the Glendalough Valley
I know it sounds cheesy to start a piece by some very amateurish lines of verse. But some places are so magical, so other worldly that words begin to form, without effort, arranging themselves in neat lines like conscientious schools girls during morning assembly. Glendalough or the Valley of the Two Lakes is one such place.
I dream of oranges and Luzzus, sunsets and ships – I dream of Malta
In the alleyways in Vittoriosa, you will find the original auberges built to house the knights of the Order of Saint John. I found myself day dreaming what it would be like to live in one of the houses in the old town, with courtyards full of orange trees, and the warm Maltese bread baking in my kitchen, and with houses nestled so close to one another that I can hear the afternoon conversations of my neighbours, and catch the fragrance of their evening dinners.
The fine art of not asking intrusive questions
Why do we need to ask people - friends as well as strangers, deeply personal and intrusive questions. Is it an innate trait of being curious and inquisitive? Or is it our need to know overpowering our sensibilities and common sense? Perhaps, the fine art of not asking intrusive questions is something that can be cultivated if it isn't something that comes naturally to us.
An immigrant’s Diwali in Dublin
One of the elements of the expat or the immigrant life is the longing and the loneliness. The longing for friends and family who live in another part of the world, the loneliness - at least initially when you don't know a lot of people and miss the deep friendships that you once had. And so, when a festival comes up, you wish for both - companionship and friends to celebrate the good days, to revel in shared customs and traditions and to repeat over a hundred times how one misses the home that one has left behind.
The Banyan tree and other stories 