Mandai Nostalgia

Mandai 26 Jan 2021

Yesterday at Mandai was so very different from what it has been for the past five years. 

Since 2016, the first half of Republic Day at Mandai, Pune’s iconic vegetable market, has been a scene of festive crowds enjoying an art event. For the sake of continuity, I took a cautious break from isolation yesterday, and went to attend the flag hoisting.  Hanging out for a bit with Anuradhabai, my neighbour and colleague, felt good too. 

Mandai 26 Jan 2020

The world had changed after the pandemic, and naturally Mandai had too - it was a lonely morning, quite different to the crowded, bustling time we had last year with people pouring in to participate in the very exciting event that Gauri Gandhi, a professor at Flame University, started planning in late 2015. 

I'm grateful to Kunal Ray for suggesting my name to Gauri, and to Gauri for her wonderful idea and all her efforts in establishing it. Her idea of integrating with public spaces and local communities was very attractive. Mandai is a beautiful, historic building, not just a place to buy veggies but an icon of public art where art lovers and art students visit, and the Aggarwal nashta is pretty ok too! 

Each of the five events I took part in were great fun. You can read about some of them here and here. Mandai was a wonderful opportunity for me because it took me out of my comfort zone and I suddenly found myself free to use absolutely any material and let it speak for itself. One of the purposes of Mandai was affordable art and I thought it would be good to use a low-cost material, so started off with roadside stones, offering them in the kind of baskets that the vegetable and fruit vendors of Mandai use.

Today's Catch Pune Biennale 2016

Some of what I have made over the years has been with things given to me by friends who did not have the heart to throw them away - like cassette collections and saris, once precious, now too old to be used.  It has been so very gratifying when people visited my stall, thronged around, and purchased. These are some of my favourite photos, surrounded by happy customers, money in my hands and glee on my face!

In 2020, when Gauri announced 'Harvest' as the theme of Art Mandai, I went a bit berserk with ideas, making collages on tiny canvas boards and turning them into magnets. There were harvests of corn and rice, of course; there were also harvests of fish (some lay dead in seas of plastic), eggs, flowers - and lice, snakes and even blessings. Unable to conceive of harvest without some kind of tribute to the Indian farmer, I did a series of 'farmer-suicide' magnets too, little expecting that anyone would buy - and was surprised when most were purchased. You can see some of them in the image below - I was sticking them on my heirloom Godrej cupboards as they got done, and this was taken a few days before the Jan 2020 show.

Mandai 2020 was also special for me in quite a few different ways! For the past four years, my business partner was my husband, Ajay, who always came along, dressed for the part, and took the wonderful transactional photos you saw above!
 

But in 2020, we had a family wedding in Delhi (I rushed to the airport to join them as soon as the Mandai event ended!) and I had two good friends, Ruve Narang and Dhananjay Kale come and sit with me instead, attending to customers, and keeping the collection safe!

Ruve was a member of Art Mandai in the early years, and she is the one who designed the group's lovely logo.

In 2020, I was also quite gratified to find that the Art Mandai PR team had made me an icon of the event! My photo appeared in all the media clips announcing it, you can see the Times of India clipping at the end of this post. Over the years, I found a lot of validation in seeing that I and my work were regularly featured in newspaper articles that covered Mandai. My basket of stone faces can be seen in the first article about it on this link and here are a few of the other clippings too!  

The Monet's waterlilies you can see in one of the images above are made from the old cassette boxes from my friend Candy's precious music collection, stuffed with pieces of chiffon torn out from a gorgeous sari that my friend Gita gave me as it could no longer be worn. And the inspiration came from Musée de l'Orangerie which I visited while in Paris to present a paper at a conference on Sindh Studies in ECSAS in July 2018. It's not like I knew I was going to do this, but after I saw what was emerging, I knew where it was coming from.

If you'd like one of my magnets - email me on saaz@seacomindia.com!

 

Why I love Pune ... featured on Pune 365

Art Mandai

monsterdotcom (an installation by Saaz Aggarwal)

Kunal Ray, a professor at Flame University, wrote this descriptive article, Art in the Bazaar, and I was happy that The Hindu picked my piece monsterdotcom as an illustration (but not so happy that, in their wisdom, did not credit me for it).

The project began in December when Gauri Gandhi, who also teaches at Flame, called to ask if I would be part of an art initiative to integrate with public spaces in our city and show work with a group of other artists. The place she chose was Mandai, a market built in what would then have been the centre of Pune's 'native town' during the British administration. It is a beautiful place and very well organized for vendors to sit on platforms with their wares and storage cells under them. 

I felt that this was a fabulous initiative to integrate people from different walks of life and give us a more meaningful connection with our hometown, and was just delighted that she had considered inviting me to be part of it.

I have lived in Pune for twenty-three years and I love it for its pace of life (more leisurely than Bombay where I used to live); its beautiful trees that transform the skies with brilliant colours in summer; its fresh fruit and vegetables; its warm, smart and cultured people … and various other reasons! However, in the past several years, it has become terribly congested, the municipality and other administrative systems have been unable to cope, and the traffic is just terrible. There is also a huge and continuing influx of migrants from other parts of the country which has changed the fabric of the city and made it more interesting. 

We went to explore the mandai, a word which means market in Marathi, and were absolutely charmed. I had planned to exhibit my paintings at the event but after spending time at Mandai, decided to create installations which would blend with the character of the place. I bought small baskets and planned to paint little roadside stones for display and sale, a process which might fall under the category of 'Found Art’. In the end, when I picked up each stone and looked at it, brush in the other hand, I could see faces looking back at me and they somehow came to life. 

Ajay and I sold stones for Rs500 and Rs1000 each, having dressed the part of traditional vendor couple and which probably attracted visitors to the event as much as the faces themselves. 

Pune bakery gyaan

Pune bakery gyaan, after several years of painstaking research:
Persian Bakery, Kolsa Galli : pitta bread, black bread, focaccia (fondly referred to by them as ‘Italian chappati’).
Imperial Bakery, Poolgate: their whole-wheat cheese papris are just fantastic, their rot and coconut biscuits are also pretty good.
The bakery at Poolgate after Imperial Bakery and Chandan kiranawala whose name I can’t remember: best naan bread in the city.
Diamond Bakery, Bhairobanala: the best ever brown bread, multi-grain bread and mava cake.
Royal Bakery, MG Road (the south end, before the One Way starts): plum cake – ultimate.
City Bakery Pune MG Road, open after 4pm only (these products deserve A*, gold medal and Sahitya Awards): nut biscuits, flan (also known as pig’s ears), cheese fingers and of course Shrewsbury. They also have new products like chocolate-chip cookies which are pretty good … and, all much better than what you get at Kayanis, and served with great wit and good humour, traditional Irani style (unlike the bad-tempered Kayani staff). I used to love Scottish shortbread but prefer their Shrewsbury any day.

Kissing is fine, but there's so much more to it

The first thought that came to my mind when I saw the photo of a couple kissing on the streets of Delhi was: “Chheeee”. I really do not want to see strangers making out on the streets and for god’s sake I am so, so grateful that we are never going to have anything like that happening here in Pune.
After all, we are the city that was once home to the first and greatest self-styled ‘sex guru’ in the world, (Rajneesh, who later renamed himself Osho). At the veritable peak of that movement’s most energetic shenanigans, the disapproving frowns of Pune influenced the devotees to cover up, cross their knees and refrain from necking in public.
And, more recently, we have become the proud city where our Gay Pride parade comes with an elaborate and very rigid code of conduct which clearly articulates the necessity to be prim, and specifies the conservative nature of Pune.
So in our city we are luckily quite safe from the messy Kiss brigade!
However, putting personal distaste aside, it’s hard not to admire the young people who came out on the streets in Kerala, protesting against authoritarian harassment and using the kiss as a political symbol of personal freedom.
The fact that it was taken up in other parts of the country is confusing. Do we know what we are doing? Or is everyone jumping onto a bandwagon in an unfocussed and wannabe frenzy?
On one side we have our moral Gestapo. Are they driven by a political agenda? Or the greed for ugly power? Or is there a genuine concern that things are going wrong? After all, it is a matter of degree: you see a couple holding hands. Then they move closer. Their lips touch. Their hands get busy. Where is this going to end? Who is going to define the point at which it stops being ‘personal liberty’ and starts becoming porn? I would worry. And so would some – quite a few, unless I’m much mistaken – of you who are reading this.
But on the other side, as a young person intent on fulfilling my biological destiny, I would most certainly not have tolerated anyone else trying to interfere with my decisions about my body. Before it got to the point where everyone was being frogmarched into purdah or burqah (or even the more secular swine-flu masks once such a major fashion statement in our dear city) I would certainly have protested.
Looking at the news reports, it’s hard not to suspect that the politicians are crooked, self-serving and working towards dubious ends. After all, kissing in public may not be Indian culture, but pissing in public certainly is, and why isn’t anyone doing anything about that instead? Most of all, it’s hard not to be cynical about how moral these custodians of morality might be in their own personal lives.
And, looking at the news reports, it’s hard not to worry, because the young people who are protesting are terribly vulnerable. Do they understand the delicate, precarious balance of equality in a relationship? Do they appreciate the long-term value of honesty and commitment? Are they sensitive to the very different weaknesses that each gender has; do they know how to respond in a mature and sensitive way? Are they conscious, wary even, of the often irrevocable consequences of sex?
The worst part about the whole circus is that, instead of being guided to achieve this maturity, it seems more likely that they are being manipulated towards some kind of National Kiss Day, where they will be made to buy things so that the other side can get richer.
first appeared in Pune Mirror on 10 Nov 2014

Stepford comes to Pune

If Mumbai has it, then Pune wants it too.
Ok, we don’t have stable electricity, orderly traffic, or even a world-famous dabba-delivery network.
And our public transport sucks. But hey, there are more important things! And if Mumbai’s nanga-panga store mannequins are being recalled – we must dump ours too.
Apparently, Mumbai men have been spurred on by lingerie-clad mannequins to commit unspeakable acts against Mumbai women, and we Pune women had better be careful it doesn’t start here too.
Out with the mannequins!
The female mannequins, that is. No bad things will ever happen if the male mannequins stay on, continuing to grace city chaddi-banian store windows with their faux manhood. The most extreme public nuisance any male mannequin could ever have the power to inspire is a wrinkled nose and mild tremor of disgust from a woman whose glance happens, entirely by accident of course, to settle briefly on the slight swelling the male-mannequin sculptor might have indulged his mine-is-bigger-than-yours aesthetic to secretly pad into the underwear.
So, let the fibreglass men stay. They are not a dastardly danger. But the women have got to go!
Besides, we never did like them, did we? There’s something about a female store mannequin that calls to mind the Stepford Wife. Stepford, of course, is that fictional town in America where the men somehow developed the technology to convert their wives into robots. Ahhhh – what a perfect dream! A beautiful woman who scrubs and cleans the home, cooks delectable gourmet food, and drives the children (having skillfully produced one of each kind) to their tennis and taekwondo lessons, an unwrinkled brow and welcoming smile adorning her face all the while. She never, ever, feels angry or disappointed or tired or frustrated or bitter. And at night … ah, night! But alas, ‘decency’ compels me to stay silent on the subject of what transpires at night. Night, of course, is when the mannequins’ charm becomes most active. At night men, driven wild with desire by their shiny plastic skin, their coarse acrylic hair, and certain sharply-pointed body parts (which ‘modesty’ prevents me from naming), will be out lurking with intent to attack real women.
The Mumbai corporator responsible for setting off this chain of events apparently feels that scantily-clad female mannequins are an affront to dignity and are likely to deprave, corrupt, or injure the public morality or morals.
I agree!
Real women have soft, and often slightly swollen, bellies. Real women do not have mathematical proportions. Real women change their facial expressions frequently. Real women often look messy. And real women are frightened of mannequins.
Yes – that’s the truth. In 2009, Journal of Consumer Research published research which showed that a woman’s self-esteem is directly related to the kind of models they are exposed to. The researchers ended their paper by recommending that overweight consumers avoid women’s magazines.
Maybe if the BMC had been in charge, they would have recommended women’s magazines being banned instead. And maybe if those researchers had been in charge, they would have recommended that men inclined to commit crimes against women should be locked up so that they could avoid lingerie-clad store mannequins.
So, let’s not bring our sons up to respect women. Let’s not bring our daughters up to respect themselves. Let’s tell them that they don’t really need to work hard and be sincere – all they need is an MBA from one of our city’s ‘renowned’ institutes, and their lives will be fun forever. In fact, let’s not worry about garbage collection, water harvesting, cleaning up our river, or creating affinity for social justice or a rule of law. Let’s just remove female store mannequins. That should solve all our problems.
first appeared as If Mumbai has it, then neighbour Pune wants it too in Pune Mirror on 4 June 2013

Should we hang them or castrate them

Should we hang them or castrate them?
The country is alive and baying for blood. From 15-year-old schoolgirls with the Head Girl instinct to frantic face-bookers to middle-aged wannabes eager to cosy up to Kiran Bedi –the air around us is amuck with opinions on rape. The terrible crime in the Delhi bus has got us all demanding change. But how?
One way would be to change the laws. We could make an example of the young men in this case, draw and quarter them in public (in a flash of ‘fast-tracking’). But, as we all know, the laws will never be changed because too many of our law makers are on the wrong side of the law.
Perhaps, then, local governments could implement schemes to make urban spaces safer for women. In Pune, a new mandate declares, plainclothes policemen will patrol college campuses. And who will guarantee that these very policemen could be trusted to fulfil their noble mission? After all, Pune policemen are better known for accepting bribes at traffic lights and charging money to file FIRs than for actually doing anything to prevent or solve crimes.
Can we then rely on the media to sensitize us to the rights and responsibilities of the gender that is physically stronger? Well – in the very week of this ghastly rape, a prominent magazine has published its periodic survey on sexual attitudes. And instead of a sociological picture of changing mores in urban India, it is a collection of titillating visuals alongside weak statistics that seem devised to prompt you to pull out and measure your own equipment.
Sadly enough, even the Indian education system seems to have let us down. Smart urbanites still seem to think that rape could be reduced by legalizing prostitution!
But rape is not about sex. Rape is about dominance, it is about violence. Men do not rape women because they need a sexual outlet. The truth is that a desperately horny man usually has a hand (or two) that he can rely on. If a woman wears clothes that reveal her body parts, it’s a perfectly normal biological reaction for a man to feel aroused. Instead of attacking and violating her, however, civilized men sidle off to a private corner and make their own arrangements to get over it. It is a terrible mistake to assign rape to an eager sex drive. Men who rape are giving reign to their brute, demonic instinct and not to the very ordinary human instinct for sex. Until law makers understand this, until we find ways to spread this simple message, men will continue to rape women under pretext of this organic and in fact rather noble function.
The brutal bus rape in Delhi will stay alive in the headlines for a long time to come, but there are rapes happening every day, all around us, that are never going to be reported. The women who are staying silent are being violated by their family members, neighbours, colleagues – not just strangers. By telling women to cover themselves we are only making them so ashamed of their bodies that when they are raped, they blame themselves. It’s not just the laws we have to change – we have to work much harder and change something deep inside us too. As Indians, we have traditionally repressed women, denying them self-expression and condoning ill-treatment worse than rape: women are covered up, aborted, even killed, to protect a man’s ‘honour’. Apparently this is ok, because men worship their mothers and sisters. If we really want things to change we must nurture human dignity and consign some of it the more vulnerable, and more precious half.
first appeared in Pune Mirror on 22 Dec 2012

Life is so good to tough-looking women

Was it a hot flush that clutched at me when I read Sunanda Pushkar’s Tharoor’s endearing comment in yesterday’s papers that life was tough for good looking women in this world? Could have been. Surely – that must be what it was. One of those thundering, overwhelming hot flushes that makes you feel like a snake shedding its skin.
Because straight away I started wondering how much more tough life must be for good looking women who have plenty of money.
And then it struck me that life had surely got to be much, much tougher for good looking women with plenty of money who have husbands that are handsome, well-placed, and intellectually sound – and who dotingly classify them in public as “priceless”!
Since then I’ve been thinking hard about whether life could possibly be tougher for anyone else.
Yes – perhaps if you were a good looking and wealthy woman with a dreamboat husband and two children (one male and one female) able and willing to execute each and every failed aspiration of your youth? Because one day, you would be having a wonderful, wonderful surprise party for (say) your husband’s fifty-seventh birthday. Twenty-four of your closest and most loved friends would be secretly flying out from all over the world for an intimate dinner hand-cooked by you! And life would betray you by suddenly, unexpectedly striking asparagus off the market. Or the servant-woman under a bus. Alas.

Until quite recently, I was an overweight adolescent blessed with profusions of facial hair, and I must say life in those days was real easy and great fun. Still, it was a period in which I could have easily been convinced that beautiful women had it just as easy as me.
One day, life’s strange byways led me from a Bombay local train compartment almost directly into an ‘ante-natal class’ with a bunch of stiletto-heeled women who arrived at the clinic in wafts of chiffon and Jean Patou Joy Eau de Parfum, tripping out of chauffeur-driven Mercedes Benzes in a particular frenzy that they might soon be afflicted with stretch marks. We were earnestly exhorted to rush out and buy expensive cream to rub those ghastly, ghastly marks away. In pre-Liberalization India, it was Joy over Chanel, Benz over Audi, and such creams were coveted concoctions of the most privileged – and life was tough indeed because they were hard to come by.
But why on earth would anyone ever want to try and erase their hard-earned stretch marks? The earnest inquiry won me an ante-natal class full of “what a peculiar person this is” looks.

Just a few years later, there was a wise woman condescendingly comforting my children with the awful truth, “Sometimes life can be tough,” when they complained, “That’s not fair!”
And one day about then I met Sujatha Burla, Telugu celebrity chat-show host on TV9, styled as “The Most Beautiful Anchor” in Andhra Pradesh. Hate mail rained on Ravi Prakash, CEO of TV9 for branding a merely good looking woman thus. Later, Close Encounters With Suzy became a sensation, and it was acknowledged that Most Beautiful Anchor was well-deserved – after it was ‘revealed’ that thirty-two-year-old Suzy had been rendered paraplegic by a car crash eleven years before. Here was a woman who had never let the fact that she could not even raise herself or perform a single life activity without help from someone else stand in her way of living life to the full and achieving wealth and fame. So I already knew, way before my hot flushes struck, and way before Sunanda Pushkar Tharoor told the world that she felt sorry for herself because she was good looking: life is so, so good-looking to tough women!
first appeared in Pune Mirror on 7 Nov 2012

A Madam's Life

Once upon a time I fancied myself an intellectual, and put on airs and pretended, like so many others of my generation, to read Sartre, Joyce and others which today’s under-thirties would disdainfully dismiss as ‘books’. Then one day I noticed that weeks had slipped into months and years and all I’d done, day after day, was iron three even-sized but gradually expanding sets of school uniforms (and pajamas, and play clothes) fill three water bottles (and snack boxes, and lunch dabbas). Life blurred into a haze of endless bottles of white shoe polish, unit tests, twice-a-week home-baked chocolate cakes, lazy Saturday afternoon ice lollies and Disney movies, with nothing but some intermittent mommy violence to break the monotony.
It struck me that I might easily lay claim to the title of The Erma Bombeck of Pune. After all, we live in a city of pompous epithets – the self-important Oxford of the East that generates hordes of postgraduates who cannot distinguish an apostrophe from a garden spade.
A phase of adventure tourism began and life became a confusion of grave responsibilities and impossible commitments, with stress-induced ailments resulting in major surgery.  Meanwhile, grouchy bad temper had submitted to a sanctimonious streak and I’d become a Reiki Master.
Shouldn’t that be Reiki ‘Mistress’? my friend Amita frowned. But for various reasons I wasn’t that keen to be called a mistress – though now that I think about it, I’ve been called ‘Madam’ for long enough with great forbearance. People recognize me at forty paces – even on the telephone if you want to know the awful truth – as ‘Madam’, and I’ve learnt to live with it and keep smiling.  We’re a tiny and sadly marginalized community, us Madams, with our headaches and bridge mornings and afternoon naps, especially these days with attrition figures in the household-help industry marching ahead of the IT and even BPO sectors. Speaking on behalf of the Society of Highly Opinionated and Amply-endowed Madams (SHOAM), Maharashtra chapter, I encourage the government to set aside some kind of reservations for us too. In fact, if I was Chief Minister (and believe me, you could do worse) I would go right ahead and allot separate parking spaces for Madams whose drivers didn’t turn up for work that morning.
As CM, it would also be my pleasant duty to publicize the sensational, path-breaking research of an internationally reputed agency which intimately relates poor driving manners to sexual dysfunction. Men who broke through traffic lights were shown to suffer premature ejaculation. Road hogs who swerved, cut lanes, and shoved small fry out of the way were observed to have the most hilariously teeny-meeny wedding tackle. Those who used the cell phone while driving, the report elaborates, had been blatantly cuckolded many times over. And those who senselessly blared their horns were, naturally, those who leapt onto their beds with hope and anticipation but never managed to actually get horny.
Parts of this  appeared in Saaz ki Awaaz under the title Sallying Forth in Times of India, Pune on 13 Jan 2011

Summer

Dragon breath on skin

Sweet mangoes, bright gulmohurs,

Summer is orange.

I live in the house that Iqbal built

In 1993, a home driving distance from Mumbai set amongst leafy glades, with recreational facilities and running solar-heated water, was nothing short of living in a resort. Still, living in a village, we naturally feared that our children would turn into village idiots. They in turn found themselves sadly compromised. Which child would want to live in Number Two? Such was their fate.
Over the years, Clover Village wannabes sprouted all over Pune. Outside our little village, bustling, chaotic activity developed. From being a locality that rickshaw drivers had never heard of, it began to sport traffic jams and specialty food stores.
But a few quiet spots and intensely rural situations prevail. For a brief period recently, my office was in a nearby building a short walk from home. The shortcut led through an open field, a rare un-constructed plot, overgrown with weeds, stray dogs and the odd drunk.
Walking home for lunch one day, an apparition approached me: a beautiful, brightly-dressed woman with a basket of combs, beads, bindis and other intriguing trinkets on her head. Strangers crossing paths on a lonely road, we made eye contact and half smiled and she startled me by suddenly dipping down, hitching her sari to her knees, and proceeding to urinate, the basket still poised on her head.
I did actually have my camera with me. The sky above shone a brilliant blue, and a pair of lovesick goats frolicked blithely. Beyond the haphazard vegetation, the Lego-brick blues and yellows of Clover Village peered over its walls. It would have made a wonderful photograph, the ideal cover for The Lonely Planet Guide to India. But I didn’t dare. The woman was younger than me, and despite all my celebrated strength, she could probably run faster – even mid-stream. Even with the basket on her head.
I myself was dressed in maroon trousers and a white cotton shirt with large flared sleeves. I looked, if I must retain my reputation for honesty, somewhat like an escapee from the Osho International Meditation Resort, perhaps fatigued by the flapping of the sleeves in one of the more energetic jumping-about meditations, and a little inappropriate for the office, some might say.
The thing is, I tend to be a bit nonchalant in the matter of dress, egotistically presuming that garish personality, if bandied about loudly enough, easily prevails over shortcomings in other areas. Just the other day, I was lunching with my friend Shanaz, when she suddenly started to laugh. It began with a flickering smile and built up into a rollicking, eye-watering guffaw. If we’d been eating fish, she’d have surely choked on a fishbone. The waiters drew up in concern. And what was so funny? Apparently madam had suddenly been overcome with a vision of the footwear I had worn on my wedding day.
And another time recently, I went out to dinner wearing my large black sweater with golden motifs on it that makes you look like a Christmas tree. One of the other guests admiringly confided that she had something similar, bought in London, and inquired if mine had the same lofty provenance. I had to confess that I’d bought the thing for a hundred bucks off a cart at Shivaji Market and in the years that followed have worn it to every single outdoor event between November and March. I take it as a tribute to my personal audacity that no one has ever given me one of those sneering ‘haven’t I seen that thing before’ looks. Anyway, if you happen to see a large, bossy-looking woman wearing that black sweater one of these evenings – hello there, it’s me.
Some parts of this appeared in Saaz ki Awaaz under the title A brighter shade of pale in Times of India, Pune on 14 Dec 2006

Life at 80

I’ve heard that women often go mad when their kids grow up and they have no one to yell at any more. Well to be honest I haven’t actually heard anything like this but I’m sure it’s pretty common. Here, for instance, is what happened to me as my youngest one’s 18th birthday hurtled towards us, giddy and relentless: I turned 80, and my arms suddenly became too short.
First the arms. For years I’d held book in hand while reading. Then one fateful day, with no warning, I found that my arms had shrunk. They were just too close to my face, the words were all fuzzy, and I simply couldn’t read.
As for the business of 80 – it was a rare and wonderful accomplishment. I’d hovered below this significant benchmark for months, waiting, anticipating, as does one for headlines about the Sensex.
Finally, one morning, Sensexily, I crossed the psychological barrier forever. I did attempt some teetering, shifting center of gravity from side to side, but the needle stayed firm, and there was nothing between me and the carpet but my bath towel and that would have been a horrid sight for the cleaning lady, so nothing for it but step off the scale and admit it. I was now in my 80s and that was that, might as well brazen it out and pretend that this was exactly what I had been intending, bring on the samosas please and I’ll just have another two (or six) jalebis while we’re here.
Out of the window forever went the pompously named General Motors, the degenerate sounding South Beach, the holier-than-thou Fit For Life, and the rest. The weak and puny were welcome to their gym schedules. I had more serious business - lying in bed with a book, flexing that rapidly shrinking arm into an enormous foil bag and rattling large handfuls into my mouth. Of course everyone knows that pretending thin women look better is nothing but low propaganda by men who want to keep all the food for themselves – of course.
And it so happens that, being a woman of remarkable substance with karma rapidly coming to fruition, I have endured monthly felonies – a drunk driver, a forged cheque, a jewellery heist, and finally, on the first day of the new year, a hacking crime that crippled my office for 3 days.
Poetic justice, some will mock: for years I bossily insisted that we work on the first of January, virtuously demanding that we begin with gusto and ambition rather than lolling about bleary eyed and hung over. Instead, we struggled and cursed and I finally headed off (never one to miss a chance of cozying shamelessly up to officials in high positions) to my dear friends the police where I learnt to my dismay that this was not really a cyber crime, which would have been a super notch on my belt of serial victim-hood, but merely the plain or garden variety of extortion.
Later, the 18th birthday came and went, with noisy celebration by friends of the concerned party, and weary cheer from the exhausted family. Weary for the years of turmoil past, and cheer at the sighting of a white dove, holding promise of a calm phase ahead. I renewed my commitment to the stitching group and hanging out with the girls, exchanging recipes and such. I even relinquished hold (a little) on the kitchen where my ISO 9001:2000 habits had caused hardened crooks (I mean cooks) to run shrieking in exasperation. To be frank, we were just a short step away from blaring instructions on megaphones and frog-marching miscreants into long shower rooms with tall chimneys, but now the winds have signaled change towards less troubled waters, about which more another time.
first appeared as Geriatricks! in Times of India, Pune on 10 Feb 2006

Sallying forth

It was just an ordinary day. I sat in the office gazing (wistfully) at the hideous drainage pipes of the neighbouring building, weighing the relative merits of an antihistamine-alcohol combination against stout rope, versus a flying leap under the Flying Ranee or similar, when the phone rang. It was Arnavaz Damania, calling to tell me about the suicide-prevention NGO she had just launched.
Now I’ve known Arnavaz as one who combines such random virtues as bravery and love of fun with immaculate grooming, but ESP? Hmm.
Incredulous – stunned – at the myriad ways in which achievement courts fledgling NGOs, I waited. “So hard to raise money, you know,” she said. I nodded: I did actually know a bit about that story. “Painting exhibition in January to raise funds,” she went on. “Would you mind …”
So! My mind stopped leaping about in embarrassment and I began to preen a bit. After all, wasn’t I the one who had picked up a brush at age 44 and gloated as Mumbai art critics coined that soothing epithet “the painter Saaz Aggarwal”?
Yes, I would certainly make paintings for this noble (and providential) cause. But January - is it next year already? Looking back on the one nearly over, dear Queen Elizabeth comes to mind. “Annus Horribilus!” she once sighed, and here I have my own little Annus Extraordinarius stretching behind me.
It started with mixed reactions – gasps of horror, swoons of delight, no middle course – when friends learnt I had Pakistani visitors coming to stay for a week. The year then went ahead and brought us houseguests from Japan, Germany, England the U.S. and New Zealand – but none so exotic as those who looked, spoke, dressed and laughed just the way we do. Then bureaucracy and poor planning spoiled the fun and we never made our return over-the-border journey to the land of our ancestors.
Others holidayed in Egypt and Turkey, friends stowed away on a container ship bound for Madagascar, family members spent Christmas in Venice. And my trip of 2005 was 3 days, agog, at the Wanowari police station.
The fanciful parodies of Deewar and Page Three never prepared me for such courtesy and earnest hospitality – least of all by a group so short-staffed and ill-equipped. In this simple corrugated-iron roof shed with curtained-off store section, one plug point services TV and fan. So you can have one or the other, never both: Rwanda, not India (or Bihar, surely not Maharashtra). Impressionable at the best of times, I found myself practicing interrogation with Pratibha, my hapless drudge of yore.
Other less flamboyant young men served hors de oeuvres at the endless dinner-dos of 2005. Under fairy lights and suspended in a viscous atmosphere of mindless jabber, I gobbled fried yummies indiscriminately, pondering the lives of those who offered loaded trays to the laconic, the drunk and the greedy, bending their knees just so, and exuded huge pangs of compassion for the eager eyes and well-trained hospitable stance of Ravish’s boys.
And 2005 was the year in which smug satisfaction turned to dismay when I discovered that my name had changed. From the once popular, beloved, and idolized “Mumma” I had now become known in an off-hand, patronizing tone, as “Mom”. Certain cute and cuddly people had vanished, replaced by lofty individuals who stalked about the house, being witty like on television. Fundamental rules, in place for near on two decades, were carelessly flouted! On the bright side, I now have consultants who will penetrate for me the mysteries of contrasting mobile phone offers and other dread complexities of years to come.
Life is full of suffering, Buddha said. Nice to meet you, 2006, let’s get on with it.

first appeared in Times of India, Pune on 13 Jan 2006

MG Road

A whining beggar child

snot nosed and bedraggled

pulled

& tugged my sleeve

and snivelled persistently

begging for alms.

Irritated, I scolded,

gestured with a warning finger,

but she begged on.

And on, and on.

And on, and on.

So I whipped out my hand,

pulled

& tweaked her black and grimy ear.

Later, when I walked,

satisfied and self-important,

back from the shops to my car,

I saw the little beggar girl

weeping by the roadside

and suddenly

she was only a wretched child,

a poor, unfortunate waif,

not loved or cherished (like mine)

not fed or clothed (like mine)

just a little girl,

sobbing, alone.

just as I had, 

when I was her age, alone.

She was an irritating pest

only by bitter circumstance

and I was flooded with remorse

for I had no sweets in my bag

to give the little beggar child.