Tiger chase

At the gate of the Panna tiger reserve, our jeep driver confided that a tiger had killed an antelope and now lurked nearby. Just the previous day, he had driven in some foreign tourists and as the tiger gorged the remains, the tourists feasted their eyes. And two days ago, his jeepload had seen all of four tigers.
Until that point, I’d been sceptical. I grew up in an area replete with wild life. We drove through the nearby sanctuaries dozens of times and I never once saw a tiger in the raw. I had come to the philosophical conclusion that to see a tiger in a jungle, stepping haughtily through the undergrowth, was simply not in my scheme of things. But now there seemed new hope.
We drove through wild tracts of great beauty, ignoring acre upon acre of golden grassland that would have driven Van Gogh’s reapers green, intently scanning its deepest reserves for streaks of stripe. Every rustle in the thicket drew the jeep to a halt. The guide generously pointed out wild boar and sambhar, antelope and spotted deer, mongoose, langur and birds of every kind. We resented the lot, knowing that if they roamed free thus, no tiger lurked nearby. When he indicated a tree with massive claw marks running down its sides, all we could think of was Baloo skipping along, singing about the ‘bear necessities’ and carelessly outwitting Shere Khan.
We stood over the Ken River in a remote tree house restaurant, and it flowed gorgeously blue and shimmering in the morning light, rapids rippling over elegantly configured rocks, and dense thickets encroaching down to the water – but what was the use? There simply wasn’t any tiger, crouched on the banks, sipping of its bounty.
We stopped again at a picnic spot, with what was probably a stunning view of a slate-encircled gorge, and the guide leaned gallantly over the protective fence, shouting, “Hello! Hello!” to the resident echo and I pleaded, “Tiger! Tiger!” in the hope that someone would hear and do something.
Several bumpy hours later, all covered in fine clay-dust, we drove, dejected, towards the exit, musing bitterly that we hadn’t even seen tiger pug marks. (Everyone I know has come home having seen at least pug marks).
And then it happened. I gasped. A dim, majestic shape loomed in the distance, merging subtly with the trees in the forest light. My heart leapt with joy. But then my eyes focussed and it took form. How embarrassed I was to realize that this was only another sambhar. Tall and beautiful, wild and proud it was – but, for god’s sake, it was not a tiger.
From Panna to Pune is but a short syllable away and soon enough we were back in the big safari park in which we live. Dog committees congregate on street corners, yapping canine concerns deep into the night. As we drive along the road, herds of plodding water buffaloes amble, pendulous and ponderous, out in front of the car. It’s true that ‘Buffalo, buffalo, burning bright …’ doesn’t have quite that ring to it – but for the time being it’ll just have to do.
Fewer buffaloes are herded through Pune traffic in 2011 - though the bikers and motorists are just as unsightly and dangerous.
first appeared as a Times of India Middle on 17 Apr 2001

Tetris

5.30 a.m., when the alarm bibbibbibbips

and you stumble out of bed

with only three or four hours of rest inside you

for the business dinner that went on late,

… good food, good deals

so you’re not complaining,

not complaining, just exhausted … 

and spend the next few hours 

cooking breakfast

seeing your lovely kids

off to school,

packing dabbas

(each especially catered to a different taste

because you do enjoy indulging them)

and then,

rush to get ready for the office

and you’re still not complaining

because you only have to walk to office,

not take the commuter train,

and in any case, once there, they all call you Madam,

and do your bidding entirely 

– no,  not complaining, just exhausted – 

and finally get home, along with the lovely kids

all jabbering fast

so much to tell! so much to share! so many complaints!

so many jokes!

but there’s still laundry to be done

and dinner to be cooked

so, of course, you do it,

and in between when you need a rest

you sneak into the loo

not to smoke a cigarette

which is what you actually want

but it’s too smelly and besides 

if you won’t look after your lungs, who will?

so the cigarette must wait

but you can reach for your little

hand-held video game

and waste a little time, having fun.

Symbiosis

colonizers of a virgin planet.

constant companions.

of lovely long tresses.

scratch, scratch, scratch.

god! are they

breakdancing 

having sex 

digging holes

all the way to China?

scratch, scratch, scratch.

face wash, lipstick, kajal, perfume.

(scratch, scratch, scratch).

medicated oil and shampoo.

tormented writhings. 

fevered imaginings.

little settlements

– no,  whole civilizations –

annihilated.

tiny wriggling body

frantic waving legs

scratch, scratch, scratch.

thumbnails meet.

loud click.

one black dot

is now deceased.

scratch, scratch, scratch.

first appeared in Femina magazine 15 Dec 2000

105.7C

Mercury is a temperament

and Mercury can also be

a god

and a planet

But Mercury is also

a thick silver rod

encased in a glass tube

which jolts you

as 

rigours

vomitting

listlessness and pallor

simply cannot.

And Mercury is

the potent rod

that can direct you

to the dread

antibiotics

which you have long forsworn

in favour of

Alternative Medicine

and 

Natural Healing.

So he’s better now.

And I’m exhausted.

Please can I have

an antibiotic too?

first appeared in Femina magazine 15 Dec 2000

Black booty

I walked through the door of my house, and nearly fainted at the words I heard blaring over the music system. Before I could wonder if I’d imagined them, there they came again, loud, cheerful and mellifluous: “I want to see your underwear …”
Until that moment two years ago, I had naively and somewhat egoistically imagined the generation gap to be a figment of fevered imaginations which, like Santa and time travel, simply did not exist, and if it did, merely represented the incompetence of my own parents. Even more painful was the fact that none of my children were yet of an age to be interested in anyone else’s underwear. It struck me that tastes in music define a generation as clearly as traits such as hard work, birth control, fondness for hashish or a facility with the newest technologies.
Another reminder of the generation gap came recently at the Black Country Museum in England. The Black Country, immortalised in print and celluloid by British media personality Meera Syal, is so named not for the numerous Indians who inhabit it but for its role in the Industrial Revolution. “Black by day and red by night, unmatched for vast and varied production, by any other space of equal radius on the surface of the globe,” the American consul in Birmingham declared in 1868.
The museum is set in a twenty-six-acre site and recreates the living and working conditions of those days. We went down into a coal mine, took a ride on a canal boat, visited ironmongers, sweetshops and apothecaries, saw a silent movie in a shed-like hall, and even had a lesson in a Victorian classroom where the teacher wore a black gown, spoke in a shrill falsetto, and kept a wooden cane at hand.
Much that we saw, including the cinema, buildings, and some products in the shops, were familiar to me from my own childhood. Tea-plantation bungalows and wooden-floored boarding school dormitories in the Nilgiris still retained much of the Victorian era a quarter century ago, and perhaps still do. So when we walked into a shop and one of my teenage daughters pointed at a bacon-slicing machine saying, “That must be the photocopier,” I was startled into a sudden vision of what a different world my children live in. By the time I dared to imagine such a miracle as a photocopier and could believe that I no longer needed to painstakingly write out copies of documents or roll messy carbon papers into the typewriter, I must have been in my twenties. For me the museum had been more about nostalgia than novel experience.
But in the end, the Black Country Museum presented us with an encounter which reassured us that the world is indeed a familiar and cosy sort of place. At the fossil and gift shop, there were beautiful stones for sale. When we told the man we collect stones like these from the ground around our house, he politely asked where we were from. We said, “Pune, India.” He laughed, picked up one of the stones and showed us a label which said that it had been brought here from “Pune, India.” So of course we promised to come back again soon, this time with a big box full of stones.
first appeared as a Times of India Middle on 23 Sep 2000

Knitty-gritty

I learnt to knit when I was only six. But unlike taiji, who shares the same distinction, I was not married off shortly thereafter.
My introduction to this fine if sturdy art happened during a brief and utterly desolate period of my life in the boarding at Nazareth Convent. Yes, that same Nazareth Convent immortalised in the Booker Prize-winning God of Small Things. Everyone else in Class Three was learning to knit during their spare time and so did I.
Knitting, I’ve heard recently, can serve as excellent therapy. Some teach it to convicts and other antisocial elements in the hope of calming them down. My mother was a committed knitter. Not so much to keep her on the straight and narrow as occupation for the long winter evenings. This was decades before television came to our remote corner of the planet.
So knitting became part of my adolescent angst and I viewed with disdain people who said, “Oh isn’t that sweet, she’s just like her mother” when our every social call was interspersed with the speedy clickety-clack of both pairs of our knitting needles, and I longed to stab them between stitches. If my mother was a better, and more experienced, knitter than I, it was surely just coincidence.
But it was true coincidence that, twenty years later, the older women in my husband’s family turned out to be great knitters. This gave us at least one major binding force, and the wool market in Delhi, with acres of brilliant bales and loops of wool, was practically on the doorstep of the family home.
Over the years, I also learnt the metaphors and clichés of knitting.
Knitting, for all my youth and energy, was something only tired old women did. If at all a young woman knitted, it could only mean that ‘good news’ was on the way. I was acutely aware that knitting needles could be used for purposes of excavation when ‘good news’ was actually not good news but very, very bad news indeed; as for example in the case of Noelle in Sidney Sheldon’s The Other Side of Midnight.
Knitting was also the embodiment of patience and I owe it my aptitude for perseverance and tedious hard work.

106, Wodehouse Road, Colaba

Now knitting is a dying art, a pastime of the previous millennium. Both my daughters were duly indoctrinated; so was my son, on grounds of gender equality. But none cared to bear the mantle of the family tradition. To them, cable only means cable television, and filet has to do with meat rather than needlework. They know nothing of jacquard and aran or other bywords of my world. Yarn shops have closed down the world over, replaced by burger joints and gymnasiums.
But knitting was always a part of my life, even during the several years when I lived in Bombay where, someone once told me, there are only three seasons: hot, very hot, and unbearably hot. It was a way to pass time between suburban railway stations. Climbing off a Local onto the clamouring platform, holding the knitting needles aloft, was always a good way to get those nimble-fingered bottom-pinching rascals skipping neatly out of the way.
first appeared as a Times of India Middle on 6 Apr 2000

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.