Love affair with the milkman’s wife

“The person I love most is our milkman’s wife.”
We stopped – astounded, intrigued. It was the summer holidays, and the kids and I were leafing through a magazine brought home from boarding school by a neighbour’s son.
We looked at each other, gigged a bit at what the poor milkman might have to say about this, and carried on.
“She is very kind,” we read. “When I was small, she looked after me. When I used to come from school and the house would be locked, she would call me and give me lunch.
“When I would be alone in the house, she would come and sit with me. At night, she used to tell me stories or sing songs. Every morning, she used to get up early and come to our house and when I would get up she would give me a nice bath. Once in a week, she would take me to the cinema.”
Yes, we smiled to ourselves, god bless the milkman’s wife, and what would we ever do without her! She even takes him to the cinema! The situation enthralled us and we examined the piece for clues to get a better perspective. There were none, and even the byline was a bland one – A Jadhav (IV) – so we only had a surname and an initial, and an indication of the seniority of the author. But that didn’t stop us from further speculation and analysis.
Why, we wondered, was she described as the wife of the milkman rather than a kindly neighbour, or, perhaps, an ayah? Was it because the milkman himself had an ever stronger role in A Jadhav’s life? Although that hardly seemed likely! Did his personality dominate even the fact that his wife took A Jadhav to the cinema as a weekly routine?
Or, on a more sinister level, perhaps A Jadhav, along with being locked out of his home at lunchtime, had been brought up to believe that women could only be defined according to the functions of their husbands.
As we discussed the matter, conflicting visions arose. One saw her as the kind of buxom milkmaid depicted on chocolate boxes picturing ye olde English countryside, but this was shot down as anachronistic. Another put up the proposition that she was a sort of Yashoda, childless but motherly. The metaphors were certainly apt. Finally, the theory emerged that A Jadhav was a wit. The piece was designed to entertain (it most certainly had us) but had no roots in reality. Well – there certainly was a tinge of the surreal to it.
Welcoming this version, we carried on with the magazine, and stopped short when we noticed the byline again. “Our main meals are breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” we read with growing dismay. “We have our breakfast in the morning, lunch in the afternoon and dinner at night. There are two types of food, vegetarian and non-vegetarian.”
Brilliant! But we had to sadly admit that A Jadhav was a master of the prosaic rather than the droll. Our certainty wavered with a sentence towards the end: “Normally the vegetarians and non-vegetarians at St Peter’s have the same dinner.”
When we looked back at the milkman’s wife article, only pathos and a certain beauty stood out. A Jadhav, whoever you are, we will always remember you.
God bless the milkman, was our general attitude as we closed the magazine and went down for lunch. God bless his wife. May their tribe increase.
first appeared in Maharashtra Herald on 8 Aug 1996

USA, Gujarat

We first met Blandine in Paris, and she was very kind to us. Two young Indian girls travelling across the continent, unescorted and ill-equipped with funds, was something of a rarity in those days. She extended her hearth, and heart, to us; giving us our first exposure to things exotic, educating us (as far as we were capable of receiving such education) on French art, history and cuisine. We, on the other hand, Amita and I that is, were simple and innocent; gauche, even, and I can remember refusing to try the wine for fear of what might happen next.
But Blandine took all this in her stride and went as far as to make us welcome at her sister’s in Monte Carlo and her mother’s in Lille, revealing a strain of Indianness in her nature that eventually overcame her and she married a Coorgi tea planter by the name of Ravi Aiyappa, and they now live happily ever after in Paris.
Back then, Blandine was a great traveller and, like many of her country folk, revelled in the East. On her first trip to India after we returned, it was of course our bounden duty to reciprocate and we sent her off to spend a few days with Amita’s parents who had recently returned from a lifetime in various locations around the globe to the ancestral village in Gujarat. The idea was to acquaint her with The Real India, the India of the villages. And Blandine went, duly equipped with mosquito repellent for herself and imported chocolate for the village kids. And returned with a perspective on Indian village life that entranced us.
Now these villages of Gujarat were never told of by Kipling, and, well, tales are crying to be told of them. Tradition has enjoined their sons and daughters, over the generations, to export themselves across the seas and set up shop in more congenial corners of the globe. Every family has at least one such prodigal on its rolls. In strange lands – distant in space, and time, and manner – they replicate their village lifestyle with no more than a cursory concession to attached bathrooms, toilet paper, frozen food, central locking systems and the like. Food processors churn out dough for dosas and dhoklas as obligingly as for pancakes. Or paincakes, as local dialect would have it.
Through it all, their hearts remain in the hot, dry and dusty villages of their birth. And the exiles recharge batteries with periodic trips back home.
They come laden with gifts – the fruit of their toil in the unfriendly faraway lands. And it is these that Blandine saw, and marvelled at, driven to poetry by the incongruity they threw up. The dusty village houses were equipped with the latest in electronic gadgetry, but they couldn’t use it – the electricity, when present, was given to wild fluctuations. Cupboards were overflowing with synthetic fabric – but the weather was not conducive. Sores, rashes and conjunctivitis – these were the lot of their children, marvelled at for their strange accents and exotic manner; and diarrhoea – with no Best Before date to use as a guide, and cowpats to substitute for playdough.
At bath time, Blandine was equipped with soap and shampoo and hair-conditioner, all of differing nationalities, and headed to a bathroom fitted out in splendid matching tiles, basin, commode, and towel rail. Unable to resist, perhaps from force of habit, she turned on a tap but not a drop dripped out. Gushing water, after all, was only a phenomenon of the monsoon skies. And Blandine, reasonably versed in the art of bucket-bath, made use of one filled with water drawn from the well.
first appeared as a Times of India Middle on 18 Dec 1995

Monsoon country

She was looking for a good place to spend a few weeks writing her poetry. So, of course, I suggested Bombay. After all, the rains were due to arrive, and what more poetic concept exists on this planet, as sure as June rhymes with monsoon, as sure as one brings the other?
So she wafted in with the cool breeze from across the seas, bringing a whiff of exotic scent, and it blended and was lost forever in the heady aromas of monsoon Bombay: the new batch of fuming automobiles crowding the thoroughfares; the nearly-dried fish caught unawares and turned soggy by the early showers; the squatters’ rights that floated up from along the tracks where they are dropped every morning and cling to your hem as you struggle to cross roads knee-deep in the swirling cocktail that comprises equal parts of rain water and overflowing sewage.
I could tell she was intrigued, and on one occasion leaned forward delightedly, asking, “Is that a flock of migrating birds?” It wasn’t, of course; the little dots of white that roosted on the beach below were merely more squatters, delivering up still more of that early morning business to the sea.
Duly chastened, she sat back, and, some weeks later, didn’t say a word but peered, suspicious and disbelieving, at the peacocks that we could see thronging Malabar Hill and dancing on the roofs of old houses in unbelievable, illusionary glory.
In Bombay, visitors are fondly informed (in a kind of cultural counterpoint to “lovely weather we’ve been having lately!”) that there are three seasons: hot, very hot, and unbearably hot. After a few weeks of this I noticed she no longer smiled but nodded disinterestedly, having realized that this was not a little joke, nor even mere propaganda designed to lure unwitting tourists. The poetry was doing fine: the quality of rain (quoth she) falleth mercilessly from heaven and is a bit difficult to describe. We agreed that it was not quite the monotonous never-ending sleet depicted by Maugham and his empire-building cronies in an attempt to ruin the reputation of the monsoon countries. Neither was it the little patter of raindrops to which she was doubtless more accustomed back home. We got one excellent sample through the shutters of a Local into which the stereotyped mass of commuters (hapless victims of one another’s odours) was crammed, racing off to collect the pot of gold at the end of their own personal rainbows. Another time, thunderous buckets overflowed over us, a foretaste of the revelry to come on the auspicious occasion of Gokul Ashtami.
Greenery had sprung up across the city just as if it had been invested in the stock market. We had noted, with some alarm, the new trends in full coat-pant type rainwear, the kind which enables one to bike to work and stay dry, yet drip over the others in the lift.
It was time for one of those episodes in which the city is ‘thrown out of gear’. And it came to pass that it rained full speed on high tide day. People lived to tell the long and boring tales of how they were trapped in the bus (or car or train) for hours and hours, with no respite from the rain. Finally the deluge began to abate. Systems were restored. We were survivors!
Recovering from the terrible blisters induced by the gorgeous genuine-imitation plastic rain shoes the poetess had ventured to acquire from a roadside hawker, she found herself, in the language of the day’s headlines, limping back to normalcy.
first appeared as a Times of India Middle on 28 Aug 1995

Marx to Michael Jackson

Eight years ago, when I first visited Russia, the skyline was dominated by large billboards that sang the praises of Marx and Lenin and generously wished long life to Communism and Socialism. They have vanished and in their place stand shy saplings of consumerism – billboards of varying sizes which urge you to buy shoes, computers, cigarettes and so on. What happened to the old boards? Some, apparently, were torn down with ceremony and amidst rejoicing at the changing of the old order. Others disappeared quietly and the wood was appropriated by the workmen who put it to use in their dachas – that’s capitalism, isn’t it?
I can remember shopping, last time, in stores called beriozkas. Here you could buy handicrafts, crystal, souvenirs and very cheap but high-quality Russian vodka. The medium of exchange was the US dollar. Now these commodities are available everywhere: at street stalls, where the needy might dispose icons and other family heirlooms; and in department stores, where you can catch the attention of surly-looking salesgirls by calling out, “devochka!” the Russian word for girl. Sated shoppers at the one-year-old Sadko Avenue (already a match for Bond Street; already more a symbol of Russia than the Red Square) peel off notes from wads stuffed inside their wallets, confident that there’s plenty more where that came from. The WASP expat newspapers refer to this prototype sneeringly as the man in the lime green suit with the fat gold Rolex on his wrist. But they also tolerate him kindly because it’s he who is firing the economy.
The US dollar is legal tender, but we preferred to make our purchases in roubles as the economical option. Smirnoff, the American vodka made from the fabulous recipe of a long-ago Russian (as everyone knows) was available much cheaper at the kiosks than the dollar shops and it’s possible to shop from one kiosk to the next looking for the best price. The kiosk is a Russian version of the panwallah, and stocks cigarettes, booze, chocolates, lingerie and electronics, much of it imported.
Russian food is not as bad as propaganda has it. But when, in nostalgic fits of longing for more familiar fare, we ate at the restaurant Delhi, we found it as popular as its food is atrocious. We were also told that food here is actually only cooked once a week; that it was now run by the mafia, (a word Russians use to describe the antisocial section of their society) and frequented mostly by Indian expatriates. You can still see a weekly Hindi film on television – the one we saw bits of had Rekha and Shatrughan Sinha speaking such fluent Russian that it quite boggled the mind. The advertisements are peopled by characters who look like they would be more at ease back home in America. And in a country which the world views with concern for its food shortages, we were amazed at the number of television ads for dog and cat food.
I didn’t come across anyone like the Mithun girl this time. They’re there, I suppose – but no doubt leaning more towards Michael Jackson. On one occasion, though, my cabby casually began to chat about Rao (as in the Indian Prime Minister, PV Narasimha) and his political ideologies of which I believe he knew more than I did.
This cabby was in fact not a professional taxi driver, but the owner of a private car who, according to local custom, would be willing to ferry you to your destination for a small fee if it happened to be on the way to wherever he was going. If you stand on the side of the road in Moscow and wave out your hand until someone stops, you can specify your terminus and negotiate a price.
Over a series of meetings in those few weeks, it struck us that this could well be the reason why no one ever seemed to be on time. And on this trip we had another of those interesting coincidences that call forth that “Oh my! What a small world!” refrain. We sat chatting with an Indian businessman and our conversation went something like this:
IB: Oh so you’re from Pune!
We: Yes, that’s right. Do you know the place?
IB: Um … sort of … I have a brother who lives there.
We: Really? Where does he live?
IB: Er… can’t really remember, it’s a funny-sounding name … I think it begins with a W …
We: Would that be Wanowari?
IB: That’s right! He lives in Wanowari!
We: Oh how nice … we live there too! Where in Wanowari?
IB: Er … you know, it’s one of those new gated-community kind of places …
We: Really? We live in one of those too! Which one does your brother live in?
IB: Er … I can’t remember … what’s the name of your place?
We: Clover Village.
IB: Yes! That’s where my brother lives. Clover Village.
We: Wow! What a coincidence.
IB: He has a row house there … I can’t remember the name of the lane but I know it’s the second left turn after you enter the gate.
We: No! That’s our lane, Flemington Terrace.
IB: Yes! That’s my brother’s lane! He lives at No 2 Flemington Terrace.
Me (aghast): No! We live in No 2 Flemington Terrace.
Me (thinks fast): How many children does your brother have?
IB: Two
Me (looking suspiciously at husband, wondering, ARE YOU THIS MAN’S BROTHER BY ANY CHANCE?): But we live in No 2, and our neighbour has four children!
It turned out that this Indian businessman’s brother was our next door neighbour. The extra two children were a third brother’s, who lived with them. Small world, right?
I enjoyed that stay in Moscow very much. I still had enough halting Russian to find my way around on my own. The metros were still as clean and organized as they had been before – relics of a more rigid era. A ticket to anywhere by metro or by bus was just ten roubles, a very small amount. Still, few passengers would buy one. I saw a ticket inspector patiently explaining to a woman who did not have one that she should have and that everyone was supposed to. Sadly, my stop came and I had to reluctantly get off without hearing the rest. But I doubt whether she was led before a firing squad to be shot, which may or may not have been the procedure in the old days.
parts of this first appeared in The Metropolis on Saturday 18-19 Dec 1993

Home out of range

If you lived, say, in Los Angeles, and commuted to work, the most relaxing part of your day would be the journey home.
Commuting, Los Angeles psychiatrists and mental health workers concede, with all its opportunities for unwinding and allowing the day’s events to fall into perspective in the individual’s private space – a sort of limbo between work and home where you are answerable to none – is the most deeply therapeutic technological advance made by humankind. This is what a Los Angeles psychiatrist, visiting Bombay on a powerful grant to make a longitudinal study of why residents of Versova, Marol, and other satellites of Andheri are so insufferable and nasty, confided to me.
This was several months ago, and we were on our way home (to Marol and Versova respectively). Crouched comfortably on the edge of the stony, crowded planks that pass for seats in the Local, we chatted amicably while other women thrust their bags in our faces in revenge for having occupied places they might otherwise have had, and unwound rapidly to the jerking jiggety-can of the train and the high-pitched complaining sounds that the occupants filled it with. Therapeutic: deeply so.
After a particularly vicious jab on the forehead, the psychiatrist casually, quite without thinking, stepped hard on her assailant’s little toe, looking innocently at me all the while so as not to get involved in any scuffle that might ensue. Marol, Versova, Los Angeles, what’s the difference, I mused. The only way to retain my sanity, I decided, was to dissociate myself from psychiatrists.
So I got myself a lovely little place in Town (yes, truth they say is often stranger than fiction), about as far from work as my former home was from the station, and moved.
It was goodbye forever to the Ladies – train compartment, I mean, not toilet. In one smart stroke I had evolved from being a poor sod in a mob, devoid of identity, into a genuine, suave urbanite.
Two-and-a-half hours of travelling time saved every day, and god knows how many calories of energy. I was the envy of the old crowd I was leaving behind to carry on chopping vegetables on their laps, tearing their mothers-in-law and bosses apart, and shredding vendors to bits for bindis, bangles, and samosas all the way home.
Everything is so much more expensive in Town, they said enviously. Ah, but think of how much I’ll save on transport, I gloated. You’ll find my address easy to remember I went on, trying to conceal my triumph. It’s the same as the number of the train we battled our way onto for so many years.
It wasn’t long before I realized that I’d been gloating in vain. The hours dragged, long winter evenings went on and on. And travelling by bus – that was just no way to go, though I will admit that some conductors came close to compensating my deprivations, the way they harangued passengers for change and flung pathetic old geezers off with a nifty ting-ting of the bell.
Of an evening I’d wander down to Churchgate station and gaze nostalgically at the frantic, grasping, gasping crowd – a wretched, lonely onlooker. It was no good. Being a mere observer only deepened my sense of isolation. I searched for solace and found it one day when I discovered the Colaba Woods.
Now this Colaba Woods is not the venue for a teddy bear’s picnic where tree lovers might bask in forest glades or other such poetic concepts. It is a landscaped garden with parallel tracks for walkers and joggers, and very enthusiastic they are, too.
I’d walk down every evening and relax there for an hour, feeling at home. It was quite a lot like rush hour, with toes available for trampling, large abdomens to jab with sharp elbows, and smelly little brats to jostle out of the way. When the monsoon came by, it was even more jolly therapeutic. I’d march down with my umbrella, delighting in watching the walkers and joggers skip smartly out of my way. It was ever so soothing.
That took care of aggression and subliminal vindictive urges. Adventure was a little more difficult. Where could I find an equivalent of dashing young men leaning at desperate angles from speeding Locals, clinging by the skin of their fingernails to window rods or clutching tightly to the roof, seemingly intent on acquiring a one-way ticket to that great Dombivali up in the sky? There was no easy solution to this. I tried to satisfy honour by watching pedestrians break through rope barricades to make a dash across the road through zooming traffic. Not many got hit but occasionally the wrath of a policeman would nab a miscreant and that would keep me going for a day or two. And when my pining for the rabble of hawkers rose to an unbearable ache, I would catch a cab and persuade it to stop at a traffic light. It wasn’t much, but it helped.
first appeared in Saturday Times 27 Feb 1993

Holiest of Holis

Padmanabhakripa, nee Jonathan Fitzwilliam-McDonald stood six foot tall in his bright orange robe. His blonde pigtail stuck up above his neatly shaven skull, giving him an extra two inches. He frightened me nearly witless by marching up and demanding alms. It was my first trip to England and I stood on Oxford Street, London W1, innocently gawking at the other tourists, totally unprepared for this strange apparition and his pack of chanting, ranting, cymbal-clashing Hindus. No one else seemed to notice; they blended well with the strange racial mix thronging the pavement. Intrigued, I followed them.
Jonathan was in the schizophrenic state of mind of one who has recently had his name changed. Seated, his costume turned from outlandish to merely eccentric – and he himself lost much of his former ferocity. Off duty, so to speak, Jonathan was no longer a religious maniac. Glimpses of the confused schoolboy peeped out from under the robe like a vest. “Just call me Padma,” he introduced himself, in a transparent attempt to avoid articulating the troublesome ‘bh’ in his new name.
It turned out that these were disciples of Swami Mahaboolshetra and among the novitiates, Padma had won the distinction of being selected to pursue his mystic studies at the Swami’s ashram in Bombay.
Back home some months later, I happened to visit the ashram in connection with a story I was following. The devotees were gathered at prayer and among the bowed heads I was pleasantly surprised to see the unmistakable blonde pigtail sticking up in the air.
When we parted in London he had been brimming over in excitement at the prospect of his imminent visit to India. But the Padma that greeted me now had bags under his eyes and the tortured look of a man whose dreams have recently been shattered. He was clearly on the verge of a breakdown. “I haven’t been able to sleep since I arrived,” he confided.
It had taken him a few days to orient himself, to reconcile the realities of Bombay with his scheme of things. The beggars, the noise, the dirt were passé; the BBC’s portrayals were realistic if not downright uncomplimentary – and hadn’t he seen the film Gandhi several times?
But the reality transcended these. For one, nothing had quite prepared him for the digestive exploits to which his stomach led him, in restaurants across the length and breadth of the city. Having stepped off the plane with appetising visions of Beef Madras floating delectably in his mind, Padma was dismayed to find that such a thing simply did not exist. And, sample as he may, not one decent curry did he ever come across – at least, nothing to compare with what the Indian restaurants back home had led him to acquire a taste for.
Returning to the ashram from one such expedition, Padma was seized with a terrible fit of cramps which caused him to buckle over in agony. The nearest toilet was godknows how many miles away and in any case the quaint old taxi was not moving towards it. It stood there, motionless, in a tremendous pile-up of traffic. It was the festival of the elephant-headed god Ganesha. Noisy, colourful, thronging processions carried enormous idols of this extremely picturesque god on their shoulders to be immersed in the sea, completely disrupting the traffic. Unable to revel in this joyful explosion of living culture, Jonathan sat there writhing in his tattered back seat, prevented from committing the unspeakable solely by force of his tremendous yogic powers.
His dignity was preserved – for the time being. He was to part with it some days later at a pedestrian crossing in the city. Here he was prevented from crossing the road by two policemen with a rope in a ritual peculiar to Bombay.
And so, it was no surprise to me when I bumped into him again a few months later at the airport, on his way home for good. His pigtail was damp and his robe – which, surprisingly, he had not abandoned – crumpled. A companion from the ashram who was there to see him off confided that on their way to the airport Jonathan had had a bucket of water thrown over him by a complete stranger. This quaint custom of the spring festival Holi appeared to have damped his last spark of enthusiasm. He smiled weakly at me. “I guess it’s back to frightening the darkies on Oxford Street for me,” his eyes seemed to say, but he remained silent. That was the last I ever saw of him.
first appeared in Saturday Times on 27 Jun 1992

My suicide (or Never to Return)

 I walk down to the station

 I go there every day

 But this is the last time.

 Today I go, 

 never to return.

 I walk through the same throngs

 that rush past every day

 scurrying to their offices

 their factories

 to meetings

 to hearings

 appointments for two o’clock sharp

 and births and deaths. 

 They will go on forever.

 Hurrying.

 Their numbers swelling

 every day.

 But not me, I won’t be there,

 I go today

 and will never return.

 No, I’m not dressed for this occasion,

 my last trip to the station.

 Couldn’t bear the thought 

 of all that messy blood

 mucking up anything better 

 than what I’ve got on.

  And I blend well

 with the others

 in their pretty clothes,

 Swinging, slinking,

 marching, lurching,

 flowing, going past.

  I’ve been through here

 before, you see.

 I go down to the station

 every day.

 And back.

 Used to, that is:

 today is the last time.

 Today I go,

 never to return. 

 If you climb the station bridge

 you’ll see a curious sight. 

 People stand there

 poised.

 Concentrating on the track below,

 they stand,

 poised.

 Ready to speed down the steep stairs

 and leap

 into the train of their choice. 

 I shall be poised elsewhere,

 waiting for the train of my choice.

 But how do I choose? 

 I climb down the platform

 onto the tracks 

 to the point where

 thousands cross every day.

 Cross: jostling, pushing,

 shoving, elbowing.

 But the time has passed 

 for me to be part 

 of that inelegant crowd.

  Today I stand

 on the track

 never to return. 

 I have nothing left to live for. 

 Today I shall let the train

 take me to my final destination. 

 My warm blood

 will bathe the tracks

 mixing

 with the mud and grime 

 and the secretions of some urban Indians.

 So I walk a little way down.

 And stretch out.

 Lie flat on the ground.

 And rest my neck

 on the cool, comforting steel 

 of the railway track.

 I close my eyes.

 Happy?

 No, not happy.

 But I am at peace.

 People climbing over the tracks

 climb over me.

 One more thing to step across.

 Or on: 

 someone steps on my finger.

 But I don’t care.

 that is the last time

 that anyone will ever step

 on my finger.

  The train is coming.

 The track vibrates

 against my cheek.

 Now it is sighted.

 People on the wrong side

 leap across in a

 tremendous

 hurry.

 I get trodded on

 badly.

 But never mind,

 I’ll survive.

 Or rather – I won’t, ha ha.

 And then I have a vision

 of something dropping through

 the floor of the train.

 Through a hole

 that was built there

    for people to drop 

    the wastes of their body.

    Those wastes

    are what will drop

    on my decapitated head.

    How undignified.

    How terribly undignified.   

    So I stand up

    and dust myself off.

    Perhaps, after all,

    I will return.

first appeared in Brown Critique Aug 1997