From Russia with love

What struck me most the first time I visited Russia was that there were no spies anywhere. Perfectly normal people walked down the street on their way to work, to shops, or home, or to pick up their kids. They smiled at each other, and behaved like people do anywhere. None of that sinister cloak and dagger business anywhere at all. Amazing.
James Hadley Chase, Leon Uris and Ian Fleming, and the Western media in general, had helped create internal archetypes which, it had never occurred to me, were ridiculous. I – and so many of my generation – had been thoroughly conditioned by the great American concepts of the evil of communism and the essential villainy of the Russian. It took me several months to recover from the experience of strangeness that Russia was a normal place with normal people. Today the clichéd vision of Russian as KGB spy is somewhat outdated, having given way to one of an abject, poverty-stricken individual belonging to a nation driven to its knees by the might of capitalism. Poor fellow. Yet another stereotype.
Between these two extremes, I had a range of tourist experiences. On my first trip, I met a young Russian woman who longed to marry the Indian film actor Mithun Chakraborty. She had, she confided, seen his film Disco Dancer forty-two times. She had written a letter to him, describing her passion, devotion, and intentions, and entrusted it to my care to post to Mr Chakraborty.
As it happened, in those days I lived just down the road from the disco dancer. I had seen his nameplate when I went to visit a classmate who lived in the same building – although, to be frank, I never once bumped into the much-desired gentleman in the lift. So I knew what address to mail her letter to, and did. I don’t know if there was any happily-ever-after there, but we would doubtless have heard about it if there had been.

With the Kulbakin family at House of Soviet Culture, Mumbai,
in 1982 

What astounded me most about this episode was that the young lady who wanted to marry Mithun was twenty-three years old; not a goggle-eyed teenager. I was precisely the same age at the time, and considered myself a mighty sophisticated woman of the world – though I persisted in refusing to drink wine for fear of what might happen next. I just could not believe that she was serious.
But I believed it when she brought her mother to meet me the day we were leaving. We got along very well. I had been trying to learn Russian for a year by then, and could manage some basic conversation. A while later, her mother took me aside and pulled out her wallet. Rolling her eyes and making mmm…mmm noises, she slid out a picture from a secret compartment and showed it to me coyly. It was a photo of Amitabh Bachchan. Of course I knew where Amitabh Bachchan lived. Hardly anyone in Bombay could escape that knowledge. But in this case, I desisted from trying to arrange an alliance.
first appeared as a Times of India Middle on 29 May 1998

How I transformed myself

I walked smartly down the corridor,

and from the corner of my eye

I inspected my reflection

In the reflecting glass wall

overlooking the runaway

at Sahar airport.

All around me,

people were dressed in their best,

and looked beautiful.

(After all, they were travelling abroad.)

Only I was ungainly,

too fat,

and my stomach protruded.

What a strange, unattractive gait I  had!

Then I thought – 

let me pretend

that the reflection is someone else,

that the woman in the glass wall

is a stranger.

Suddenly I saw

the woman in the glass wall

transformed.

She was beautiful and appealing

and even glamorous.

and I felt much better.

Mother Courage

“Uck!” she said, peering with comic and exaggerated suspicion at the pea soup. “Do we have to eat this broth, like in Oliver Twist?” And they cackled with glee, all three of them, doubled up with helpless, ingenuous merriment.
It was a good joke, but I couldn’t laugh. It was just a bit too close to the bone to be funny. Like Caesar’s wife, it was important that I be not just above suspicion, but always appear to be above suspicion.
For me, it had been a transition from a professional to a domestic life. From recognition to anonymity. From a buzzing, frenetic, congested big city, to idyllic, laidback green spaces – a happy move. But it was also a move with which I had transformed myself from a successful and contented single parent to that dread mythical beast of yore, the feared and hated stereotype of scheming, evil manipulation and unfairness – a stepmother.
When people discover that Ekta and Veda (nobody would imagine the rhyming names to be coincidence) were born in the same year, one in May and the other in July – amazement, confusion and speculation follow, in quick succession.
No, it was not by Caesarean operation, as a first flight of lateral fancy sometimes leads them to deduce – nor, for that matter, a ridiculously long and protracted labour. “I know!” a gynaecologist’s eyes once lit up when trying to solve the mystery. “It’s super-fecundation!”
But of course it is nothing as esoteric as that. Ekta and Veda were born of separate parents. For more than half their lives they were not even aware of each other’s existence. Their childhood is linked not by blood but by fate. They share a room and toys and books, friends and lunch boxes, their dreams and nightmares; their inheritance and, to an extent, destiny. Their jeans too, although not their genes.
When I explain (which, very often, I don’t) there is embarrassment, and frequently generous, well meaning – but no less painful – attempts to view the whole affair from a liberal perspective. Somehow, being a stepmother never stopped being a social crime. I find it awkward to describe myself as one, participating in an ongoing crusade to soften the harsh images associated with the word. This includes writing letters to editors, requesting that they stop using the word ‘stepmotherly’ as a synonym for ‘unfair’. The letters are published, perhaps as a curiosity – or as an indulgence to a former colleague. But the usage persists.
A large part of the stepmother’s lot is the inner musings and assumptions of others. People love the drama of it. My two darling little stepkids had been left motherless at a tender age. Who could be blamed for watching covertly just in case I was marching determinedly into the deep woods with the little Hansel and Gretel in tow?
And who, on the other hand, could blame me for knowing that I was watched?
When I am tough and demanding with one child, it’s because as her mother, I expect the best from her. But if I treat the others the same way, am I just behaving in a candid stepmotherly fashion? Ostensibly well-meaning brandishing of the rod can so easily be a virtuous mask of the cruel mother – step or otherwise.
The internal evaluations are tougher and more demanding than those of others. I might behave (or intend to) in precisely the same way with all, but what about my private feelings? To what extent should my life become a ruthless drama of control and evaluation? What is the value of a healthy, natural, aggressive and potentially destructive reaction versus a polite and well-meaning but contrived one?
A favourite child may be one who possesses qualities which gratify you and is often the one who is said to resemble you the most. But resemblance can transcend genetics, as adoptive parents know only too well. When my son’s teacher casually informed me one day that he looked exactly like me, I was stunned with delight. All parents feel a certain satisfaction at having their offspring likened to them in terms of looks or behaviour, but stepparents are infinitely more sensitive to such unwitting praise.
Aman, blessed with a resilient personality and a wonderful instinct for humour, was young enough to have forgotten his tragic loss. Today, seven years after his natural mother died, he is a bouncing testimonial to my stepmotherly virtues with his spontaneous public demonstrations of affection and undying devotion. “Miss, miss, miss!” he had shouted, standing up in class, wanting everyone to know, “My father is getting a new mother!” Later, cuddling up one bedtime, he told me, “You are going to become our old mother!” I bristled, new in the relationship and self-consciously preferring to be myself rather than any unattainable vision of perfection. But he had only meant that as time passed, I would no longer be ‘new’.
But Ekta had been four and pined for her mother with a wild and inconsolable longing with which I could identify, but was helpless to confront and resolve. One evening she sat on my lap as we drove, crowded into the car, to a movie. “Mumma,” she whispered in my ear, snatching a private moment, a rare commodity in a family with three children, “Zara’s grandmother can speak to dead people!”
My blood ran cold. Less from the prospect of communicating with the dead than my glimpse of the forlorn hope this innocent little child still carried.
My instinctive response to raging sentimentality is to take refuge into practicality. “Oh well, that’s life!” is a philosophy that has saved my sanity on many occasions.
First appeared in Verve magazine First Quarter 1998 

Bored Housewife

One Sunday morning I read an article by an aspiring woman writer who explained why, while deciding what to write, she had rejected the idea of a Middle.
Her reasons were: one, a Middle was too insignificant; and two, she didn’t want to be mistaken for a Middle writer, since Middle writers (she said) were invariably either cranky gentlemen retired from the Armed Forces, or else bored housewives.
My mind reeled, and my Sunday was ruined forever by the realization that since I had never served in the Armed Forces, I must be a bored housewife.
Some hours of self appraisal ensued. Couldn’t I be an energetic and fulfilled housewife? With growing dismay I realized that could never be. The sad truth of life is that to be a housewife is to be bored – just as to be a teenager is to be flighty, to be a corporate boss is to be dynamic, to be a mother is to be nervous, and to be a dog is to be faithful.
Now these are not mere clichés. They are not even just politically incorrect stereotypes, although the list does include ‘erratic’ women drivers, ‘giggling’ schoolgirls, ‘inscrutable’ Orientals, and more. It is simply the nature of existence. And so, if you are in company, it must be august; in public debate your opponent has got to be worthy. If you have loyalties, they must be fierce. And if (god forbid) you are a drunk or a whore; you most certainly have a heart of gold.
I was a housewife and therefore I was bored. There we were, my (dynamic) husband and I; our three children speeding recklessly through the relatively stress-free years between learning to spell ‘daughter’ and ‘neighbour’ and experimenting with cigarettes. And there was nothing but my Monday morning bridge game and an occasional Middle between me and catatonia.
Now one of my sworn duties as a bored housewife has been to churn out family aphorisms to flourish at one another in moments of stress or dominance.
Some of these are:
Yes, I know but LIFE is not fair so you might as well get used to it while you’re young.
Be content with what you have.
Aww poor baby but never mind, you know you can’t grow big if you never fall down!
There are dozens more in similar vein, but most significant is one that says, sharply, “Intelligent people never get bored.”

First appeared as ‘Pared Away’ in a Times of India Middle on 6 Mar 1998

Big city, small city

A few years after I first came to live in my little shaded neighbourhood in Pune, still exulting in the sandpit and flowering trees and comfortable parking that fifteen years in Bombay had somehow exemplified as an impossible dream of luxury, I became aware of a rather subtle phenomenon. People would say hello to me, and I would say hello back, impressed by their friendliness, but completely unable to place them. Embarrassed, mildly disbelieving, my newly-wedded husband explained that these were our next-door neighbours.
This was a big surprise. I wondered how these could possibly be people who I passed by frequently on the way to and from home, yet I knew for sure I had never seen them before.
Pondering this puzzle for a while, it struck me that this must be a legacy from all those years of living in little apartment blocks piled higgledy-piggledy on top of each other, with grandmothers and dogs and Sintex water tanks and African violets all jostling for their little inch in five hundred square feet of space. To walk down the corridor was to smell someone else’s dinner. To look out of the window was to encroach on someone else’s most private moments. To curl up with a book was to be distracted by the loud whacking, by merciless mothers, of children who couldn’t remember their seven-eights-are. Of course we had to find ways to keep ourselves to ourselves!
I lived in Bombay for fifteen years, and never thought I’d move. That was me, there, attending book readings at the British Council, plays at the NCPA, and inhaling deep to hold my breath as the double decker careened past the aromatic Sassoon Docks and lurched to a halt outside Bus Station. That was me boarding the coach at the Air India building in the dim hours to catch early flights out into the unknown, laughing happily when concerned security guards asked why my father or brother hadn’t come to drop me. Me who tried to comfort the bumpkin on a visit to friends in Santa Cruz while she watched, dismayed, as the train whizzed past not only the Santa Cruz station, uncaring, but also the next four, and had to face the prospect of grievous bodily injury while attempting to disembark. And yes, I can remember trying to buy vegetables at Andheri market. What a savage place it was! We were like animals, vying for the same prey. The aggression levels of Andheri market, Andheri station, and the environs, will live as icons of dread in my memory forever.
And Colaba, Colaba – for years I have thought of Colaba as my village, with familiar faces dating back thirty-five years and more. All this seems to me, when I think about it now, like snatches of existence from another lifetime. I still own property in Bombay – another of life’s miracles, for a humdrum person such as myself to possess a piece of the planet on which a size-four foot stands on a fortune.
And for many years I lived in a little kholi in Bandra with a Kathak class right below me. Visitors sometimes asked, “How do you LIVE with that noise?” And I would say, “What noise?”
I honestly could not hear it at all, and went about my daily activities with the incessant thumping and banging and jingling of bells entirely outside the scope of my perception.
Years later, focussing on this habit for the first time with dawning awareness, sweeping my neighbours with a sincere and appraising eye, I began the long process of breaking free.
Was it just me? Hadn’t we all developed this facility? Wasn’t it a normal, big-city phenomenon? Didn’t the glazed, faraway look in the eyes of public-transport commuters the world over as they gaze, unseeing, into those of their co-passengers, speak of the same trend?
Here, in Bombay, we had blindly accepted hideous black-and-red
window grilles (or sometimes evilly white ones), and installed double and triple doors with multiple locks on each, and a large ugly padlock hanging outside ostensibly for safety but really more just to delineate our personal space. After that, working on an auto-pilot with the wisest guiding light, we went and developed this special type of blinkered vision in which only we and those who we knew personally actually existed.
Now when I visit, walking down the streets of Bombay, suffused with the warmth and comfort that one can only experience in one’s own true home, I am acutely conscious of how the teeming crowds on the railway platform affects me. On one hand, it’s impossible to describe the exhilarating freedom in the anonymity which no small town, not even my nearly-there, wannabe adopted home can provide. An insignificant corpuscle flowing in a moving mass of humanity, I need never pretend to be who others think I am.
On the other, an intense claustrophobia arises. I long to take deep breaths, but am inhibited by the sundry fragrances that suffuse the air.
I see familiar faces where there are none. I smile at people who I think I know. Hardly anyone smiles back.
first appeared in Maharashtra Herald on 25 Jan 1998

Really? Really?

Once, some years ago, I wrote a poem about committing suicide. Despite the morbid theme, it aspired to be funny.
Sitting in a Bombay local train, a Local, I gazed blankly into space. It was off hours, so there was space to gaze blankly into. The train halted at a station, and my blank gaze fell onto the shine of steel rail under the window. It was a deep moment of truth, and the poem was conceived. There was a juxtaposition of two major themes. One was the history of blood and violence to which I had borne witness on more occasions than I like to remember. I had seen young men caught unawares as they jumped across the tracks in a hurry to get to the ‘Fast’ on the others side – and were hurled straight to that great Dombivali up in the sky instead. I had heard the awful wailing from the hutments that lined the other side of the tracks when yet another member of the tribe met his fate under the wheels of yet another speeding brown-and-yellow monster.
If the Locals were a powerful tool of death, why couldn’t they be manipulated for one’s personal convenience too?
The second was my own preoccupation with suicide, a preoccupation which sometimes worries me, but on other occasions (for example a few years ago when a book which listed practical methods of committing suicide stormed into the market and sold more copies worldwide than any other book in history, next only to the Bible) – I find reassuringly human and normal.
After all, isn’t suicide the ultimate weapon of control over one’s destiny, the only foolproof way of, to coin a phrase, saving one’s life permanently?
Although this poem was written several years ago, I only worked up the courage to have it published very recently. But back then, I gave it to Mukul Sharma to read. Mukul was at that time the editor of the erstwhile Science Today and I considered him a great benefactor, having published one of the very first pieces I ever wrote, along with my photograph. Although it was routine practice for Science Today to publish photographs of its contributors, at that time in my scheme of things, this was tantamount to having won the Booker Prize.
Mukul called me next day and returned it without saying anything. He reserved his comment for about six years, when I met him in Bangalore where he then lived. It was late at night and I had dropped in to say hello on my way to the airport.
“Do you remember that poem you once gave me to read,” he asked, “the one in which you tried to commit suicide? Did all that really happen?”
“No, of course not!” I guffawed.
“You had me worried there,” he went on.
I couldn’t understand how he could have imagined an autobiographical element in that poem, and told him so. He knew very well that I was particularly happy with life in those days, smugly considering myself successful and prosperous beyond belief.
“Well,” he justified his assumption, “look at Syliva Plath! She led a tortured life, and when she was happy and peaceful at last – that’s when she went and committed suicide.”
“Hmm,” I said, looking at my watch, “guess I’d better go and do it now.” We laughed, and I carried on to the airport, and have been taking it a day at a time since then. As you can see – it hasn’t happened yet.
first appeared as ‘Sweet side of suicide’ in Maharashtra Herald on 23 Nov 1997

Miracle in Florence

In 1982, Amita and I adopted the proven method of seeing the world by means of accommodating ourselves with friends-of-friends, their cousins, and so on. In Copenhagen, we stayed with my dentist’s neighbour’s daughter and her family – I promise I am not making this up.
In Germany, in a small town called Ludwigsburg, we found ourselves being graciously hosted by a family who had lived in south India for several years. Our first meal with them consisted, quite amazingly in those days, of dal, rice, mutton curry, pickles (as opposed to achar which is of north Indian denomination) and good old madrasi pappadams.
One evening they had a barbecue party for us but what was the use. None of their friends spoke English; between the two of us the only German words we had were weiner schnitzel, dummkopf, Lufthansa, blitz krieg and heil Hitler – which, for various reasons, we were unable to work into the conversation. Further we were social outcasts since we drank no wine for fear of what might happen next. Gabi, fiancée of the son of the family, made sincere attempts to chat with me. However, though she spoke in English, I could understand little of what she said. This was because she was hoping to discuss with me the works of J Krishnamurthy which she had studied in detail. Amita and I found ourselves in the kitchen, doing the washing up while the party carried on without us in the living room, where it had been shifted when it started raining.
From here we travelled north to Berlin and then Denmark (where my dentist’s neighbour’s daughter and her family looked after us very well indeed), and then south through Holland and Switzerland to Italy. After getting lost in Venice, losing money in Naples, and fending off some Romeos in Rome who sat on a broken wall outside the Forum, familiar to us from the Asterix comics, whistled at us and shouted, “Tum bahut sundar hai!” we arrived in Florence where we had several fascinating experiences.
The evening we arrived we hopped into a bus and confidently waited for the last stop, where we had been told the Youth Hostel was situated. Unfortunately, we had boarded the wrong bus. At the last stop, we asked the driver, by means of fantastic mime and gesture, the way to the Ostello. It soon dawned on him that he had on his hands a pair of pathetically stupid, if earnest, young foreign tourists. Heaving a longsuffering sigh, he turned off the lights in the bus, and drove us to the right spot.
For the two of us, habituated to the surly BEST drivers and their attempts to jiggle passengers violently back and forth and if possible actually hurl them onto the road by means of bucking and rearing the vehicle under their control, this was the most astonishing behaviour we could imagine.
Next day, Amita and I got into one of our frequent bitter fights and decided to spend the day separately – to my subsequent regret.
I had my eyes firmly fixed in the guide book wherever I went. She, on the other hand, had been looking around and, wonder of wonders, bumped into the one person in all of Florence we had any acquaintance with whatever – Gabi, who was spending a few months there workings as an au pair. And yes, Gabi even treated us to dinner; we had spaghetti (but no wine) in a little Italian bistro with red checked table cloths, and we all agreed that the world was a very small place indeed, and hoped that we would bump into each other many more times in the future.
Both of us found Gabi a lovely person, and secretly agreed that she looked a lot like Princess Diana. In those days, all the fashionable young women were trying their best to look as beautiful and spectacular as the unfortunate princess, so of course it was beneath our dignity to say that we also found her extremely appealing and wished the very best of life to her. In fact, Amita and I had a special bond with Princess Diana, because we had all three been born in the same year. This was a bond I took seriously and even until very recently, when my children said to me, “That’s not fair!” I would tell them, “Yes, you’re right! Life is simply not fair! I was born in the same year as Princess Diana, she got the crown jewels and look at me, all I got was you.”
Now, for various reasons, that is a line I no longer use.
first appeared as Come on Gabi, let’s go party in Maharashtra Herald on 9 Nov 1997