Ma Gupu in Jehangir Hospital, Pune

The general ward at Jehangir Hospital, Pune, is a crowded kind of place. When I entered, I looked around for a while before I saw this spunky-looking elderly woman sitting upright near a window, reading the newspaper. Her back was to the sun – sunlight helps in healing she later told me, and she’d asked that they move her to a bed near the window a few days ago.
In case you’d like to spend some time with Mrs Gupta too, she’s in bed 166. They won’t transfer the phone line, but if you call ahead to check that she’s still there, it’s +91-20-26050550 or 26122551, and she now uses her maiden name, so ask for Nergis Barucha. She has been discharged, but is still using the hospital facilities until her relatives decide how she is to be looked after and come to get her.
She wasn’t sure exactly when that would be – “Maybe today,” she said. It kind of reminded me of the time when I was five and in boarding school for the first time (Nazareth it was) waiting for my parents to come visit me. “Maybe today,” I would think when I woke each morning and found, heavy hearted, that I wasn’t at home. But Mrs Gupta isn’t feeling sorry for herself or anything like that – she’s just waiting, practical, cheerful – only just a tiny bit worried about how she will pay the ayah since the money the relatives left when they last visited ran out a few days ago.
Since Mr. Gupta died seventeen years ago, she has been teaching at a school in Panchgani. She told me that she works from 8 in the morning till 7 in the evening. Her favourites are the 1st standard kids, but she still teaches Geography, French and English to classes 9, 10, 11, and 12. And she is very involved in running an English-medium school for underprivileged kids, too. One morning last month, she woke up and started getting ready as usual when she suddenly found – she’s not quite sure how exactly – that she’d fallen on the floor. She got up, tended to herself as best as she could (haldi and sugar, patted around for broken bones, bathed in neem water – you know Ma Gupu) and went off to work. It was only a few days later when she collapsed and had to be driven in to hospital. Here the tests showed her to be in excellent health and physical condition – except for the matter of one broken vertebra. That was three weeks ago.
“Everything happens for the best,” Mrs. Gupta told me. “In ’48 I broke a vertebra and it caught a nerve that affected my left leg. Now that nerve is free and my leg is fine! In any case, I’ve been working too hard. This is god’s way of telling me that I really need to rest.”
Ma Gupu then told me about how she found strength in the story of how a young Tibetan boy had jumped out of his monastery window when the Chinese broke in, hanging in terror to a ledge until he finally said to himself, “in the name of god, I let go!” It worked for the Dalai Lama, and now, when in despair, Mrs. Gupta says to herself, “In the name of god, I let go!” and let what will, happen.
While that’s probably what keeps her so cheerful and relaxed despite everything, it’s also probably why she blithely donated all the money left by Mr. Gupta, including his entire Provident Fund to Lawrence School, for the education of underprivileged children. And why, when a group of OLs got together last year and quietly sent her gifts of money, she put it in a Bank of Maharashtra fixed deposit when the manager promised her benefits of various kinds, but she’s in hospital today without insurance, and she doesn’t even have an ATM card.
Mrs. Gupta is eighty-one years old. I went to visit expecting to see an enfeebled, incoherent, bed-ridden invalid. But she was sitting in a chair, recognized me at once (we last met in 1977 when I was fifteen) and we chatted on and on. She asked after my parents, whom she remembered very well, and I spun out all the “happily ever afters” of my life for her. And she told me about her days as principal at Horseley Hills, and how Mr Gupta died, in Sardarshahr (a town in Rajasthan with, incidentally, the most god-awful roads you can imagine), just one month after they went there to start a school, She even told me about the time she took Ramesh Venkat* himself (a great favourite of Mr Gupta) to the HMs office for some awful misdemeanour. A doctor doing rounds walked by and asked how she was doing. “Preparing for a trip to Everest!” she said.
She wore a full shoulder-to-waist harness. “Makes me look like Jhansi ki Rani or maybe Joan of Arc gone awry,” she joked, and told me how when she’d said that to a group of youngsters visiting an accident victim in the ward, they’d replied, “No, no, ma’am, you look like Cleopatra!”
As I was leaving, I told her that I would spread the word in the OL community. So she said to pass on her very best wishes to all for Christmas and New Year.
In case you want more news about Mrs. Gupta and can’t actually come to Pune to visit her, feel free to mail or phone me, 9823144189. And in case you want to help, do get in touch.
*Present HM of Lawrence

Bombay Clichés at Kamalnayan Bajaj Art Gallery

Kamalnayan Bajaj Art Gallery is a pristine space – beautifully maintained and managed. As someone without training or experience or even artist friends, I am so very fortunate to have had my first show in this classical and highly-regarded gallery, from 6 to 12 November this year.

By another stroke of great good fortune, the show was covered by many publications – including every major newspaper in Bombay and Pune. Partly this was because of its theme – Bombay. But the real reason for the huge publicity was because it was the prominent art critic Ranjit Hoskote himself who gave me the names and phone numbers of all the art correspondents. I know Ranjit because for some years we worked in the same office (Times of India, Bombay) and I’m very grateful to him for sparing the time to view my portfolio and for his generosity in sharing the names and numbers.

The biggest coverage was in Sunday Mid-day (seen alongside) which does not have a particular art correspondent, but when I called the desk to ask if they would cover my show, the person who picked up the phone happened to be Alpana Lath. When I introduced myself, she told me that she used to make the pages when I wrote a column for the paper in the mid to late 1990s. She was now the editor, loved the images I sent her, and when the paper appeared with a full page devoted to them I was absolutely ecstatic. 

I’ve posted quite a few of the press clippings here, as I am very proud of them! Some were phone interviews, since I live in Pune. However, I visited the Time Out Mumbai office where editor Naresh Fernandes – whom I also know from my days with the Times. It was in the early 1990s, and he had just started his career; I enjoyed his writing style (as he did mine), and I made an effort to stay in touch, including during his stint with Washington Post. Naresh too found my work interesting, and it was a real thrill for me to be featured in Time Out!

All this press coverage, interestingly, did not bring a huge crowd of visitors to the show! Very few people actually came off the street and most of those who did were art students or people on a lunch break from nearby Nariman Point offices. It was a pleasure to interact with them and a spiritual learning experience to observe different reactions.

My first buyer came in on the second day of the show. I had brought around fifty paintings to exhibit – how and why so many were made in such a short time is described in these press interview clippings – and I spent that first long buyer-less day, 11am to 7pm, in the anxiety that I was going to have to take them all back home. The first buyer was an art collector, Sidharth Bhatia, who had read about the show in Sunday Mid-day. In fact we were acquainted, as he used to work with the Independent when I was with TOI ; they were owned by the same company as the Times and had their offices in the same building.

Not surprisingly, there were quite a few paintings left at the end of the show. But I was lucky again, as they were all packed and taken on commission by Niloufer Kapadia of the elegant Fourth Floor gallery at Kitab Mahal. She had read about the exhibition on the alumni network of The Lawrence School, Lovedale, where we both had the great good fortune of having studied at.

When I read what I’ve written above, it strikes me that the success of my show was much more about being in the right place at the right time than any particular artistic talent. And I think that sentiment is also reflected in the welcome note I wrote for visitors to the gallery, which I displayed on its notice board:

WELCOME

And thank you for visiting this exhibition of Bombay Clichés!

I lived in a city called Bombay for many years. 

All that while, I never forgot the feeling I’d had, when I first came here as a teenager (an extremely awkward teenager from a rather cloistered, privileged background) of being an outsider. The feeling came back to me very strongly when I started working on these paintings and I noticed that my characters had turned out (quite unwittingly) to be rather calm and self-contained, so caught up in their own private worlds that they cut the viewer out completely. This reminded me of how I felt back then.

Today, nearly 3 decades later, and having lived away for 12 years, Mumbai is still the city to which for various reasons I feel most connected. When I started working on this collection, my idea was to use simple line strokes to portray the complexity that makes Mumbai an alluring symbol of the realities of the universe: constant movement, relentless expansion, predictable patterns, extremes of all kinds, seemingly precarious but perfectly reliable balance – and continuous change. I added the pen embellishments partly to represent the frolic and bustle, partly because I was trying to create an innocent, folk art effect - but in the end because, really, I’m a writer and not a painter at all.

The paintings are priced at Rs. 5000 each.

In case you want one which you can’t see here – any particular scene, colour combination, design – I’ll be happy to make it for you!

Here, then, is my outsider’s view of “my” Bombay. I hope that you, visitor or native, will feel the warmth and humour of these scenes as I do.

Saaz Aggarwal

Communities, Mumbai

“Table join-madi,” I requested, delighting the Chembur roadside restaurant waiter with my fluent Kannada, and he hovered around for more, eventually disappointed to find that there wasn’t any. Partly it was the way I casually stretched out that “join”, but mostly it was the word madi, a handy and flexible connector with strong cultural and philosophical undertones that enables one to string together words of practically any other recognizable language, and distinguish oneself as reasonably-versed in Kannada.
It’s true of every city, but more particularly true of ours. Distinct subcultures – tight, village-like communities – coexist in painstakingly carved-out domains. Some are conceptual, and circumscribed only by their own peculiar rituals and culture. But locality, of course, is the most common determiner of community: for years I have thought of Colaba as my village, with familiar faces dating back thirty-five years and more. Back then, I was an ethnic minority so rare that there were only two of us, my brother and me. Our lives had a sheer backdrop of pain and isolation, unable as we were to shelter in any of the community niches of our compatriots. But today, along with exponential choices in areas as diverse as fizzy drink, career and Internet vendor – choice of community too abounds.
Occupants of the same carriage in the local each day are subject to hidebound, time-bound hierarchy and sacrament of great significance which set them apart as a unique entity. Members of Mensa have all the uppercrust edge of Brahmins with five-thousand-year old traditions. Those who met and married through the TOI Matrimonials will have a fellow feeling for others who did the same. Beggars at each separate traffic light have distinct territory, vision and mission, and (unwritten) industry best practices all their own. Even intelligent-looking women who sniff disparagingly at buffet tables, dismissing them as “press conference food”, will pass each other on the street with a certain cosy familiarity of attitude. It’s this fundamental sociological reality that gets you the very best idlis in Matunga, and, if exotic pure-veg concoctions in world cuisine figure on your scheme of things, you will surely take your NRI visitors for a meal at Shiv Sagar.  Every minority group – religious, sex-related, educational, privilege – follows its own set patterns.
Threads link individuals, (as madi did the waiter to me), forming a link between their communities, and this integrates the whole. In the case of Mumbai, despite the staggering different categories, there is a well-defined and easily distinguishable amalgam. This stereotype describes us as brisk, business-like, goal-oriented, action-oriented and completely no-nonsense. It goes on to flatter us as highly adaptable, and with a high tolerance for discomfort but a low tolerance pretence or posturing.
And yet, each little microcosm characterizes a whole host of different habits and rituals which engender a vital sense of belonging. Everywhere we go, we bump into others of our particular ilk, and this, despite the teeming multitude, gives rise to the illusion that Mumbai is actually quite a compact, well-knit place.  It’s all we can do to keep regulating our various faces to retain our rightful places in each community while maintaining the sanitized front of a Mumbaikar. Or, as we say in Kannada: “Adjust-madi”. 

Crawford Market

For a few weeks each year, mangoes hit the ceiling at Crawford Market.
Higher and higher they pile, their prices swinging in inverse proportion, until the competition arrives – first lychees, then cherries, plums, and peaches, and then the most luscious, irresistible pears. They are scattered on stalls and wooden crates in the area, some even obscuring the brilliant fountain in the centre of what was once courtyard to this rotund Norman-Gothic building.
With the floor strewn with hay turned slimy by fruit peel and other unnamed substance, this section of the market is reminiscent of Covent Garden – not as it is now with its naked aborigines and painted performers, but back in the My Fair Lady days. The fountain was designed circa the same period, by Lockwood Kipling – father of the inimitable Rudyard, who was born nearby at what is now the Dean’s residence at the JJ School of Art, in 1865 – and some of his bas reliefs adorn the exterior.
In later years, the foreign influence would be represented by products of diverse nationality. Alongside stalls vending standard Indian market produce, tubs filled with soaps of Chinese and Thai make sell for Rs10 onwards. Bottles of French shampoo jostle for space with tubes of Swiss face scrub, and shelves groan under the burden of Taiwanese Black Bean Sauce and Italian Extra Virgin Olive Oil.
A few days ago, I walked the slippery, narrow lanes leading into Crawford Market with my mother-in-law, soaking in the heady aromas of rotting flesh from the meat market and decaying dung from the caged animals – pet dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, goldfish and more – that lined the route. For me, Crawford Market had been a familiar haunt long before it was named Mahatma Phule Market; for her, it was the first time, and the most special treat I could think up for her brief visit to Mumbai.
As children, gawking the bustling metro on our annual visits, a high point would be the visit to the nearby Badshah Cold Drink house, where we would guzzle mango juice, marvelling its availability in December, and scrape every last bit of kulfi off the plate. Those were the days before ice-cream came to the hill resort near which we lived – and the parking lot outside Crawford Market could still manage a space or so for shoppers.
In later years, when I lived and worked nearby, Crawford Market was where I went to buy inexpensive return gifts and decorations for kiddy birthday parties; faux-silk Diwali saris for the bai; and fruit of the utmost variety and quality. Nowadays, I still undertake the four-hour drive from Pune every few months to stock up on essentials, and revel in the distinctive population of the place: the canny vendors; the throng of memsaabs in their tight t-shirts and clip-clopping stiletto heels, haughtily pointing to that, that and that, at first one shop and then another, followed at a respectful distance by a coolie balancing a wide, shallow strip-bamboo basket on the head; and, of course, the coolies who come in a wide permutation of size,  nutritional intake, regional mix, and gender.
Where else but at Crawford Market could I buy the half-kilo of active dry yeast and the litre of vanilla essence which ensure that home-made bread and cake are economically viable? And where else could I buy several months supply of paper napkins, toilet paper, aluminium foil, garbage bags and more at one shot without destabilizing my budget?
Proudly showing my mum-in-law around my favourite shopping complex, it irritated me that she was initially unimpressed, but gratified as she struck good bargains on aam papad, jelly, and pasta.
The pasta at Crawford Market comes in every shape and size of traditional pasta, some in brilliant, unorthodox colours. It’s sold in sackfuls, like any other grocery product, labelled ‘Italian pasta’, and one of the stall keepers offered us a packet of ‘pasta masala’ to go with it. Intrigued, I asked what it contained but the boy was vague. Masala, he repeated: “salt, garam masala … it’s masala for Italian Pasta.” I politely declined.
Sated, fully-laden coolie in tow, we headed for the exit and my mother-in-law, with the practice born of long years of pure-vegetarianism in this barbaric non-veg world, gently steered us out by a less aromatic route.

Freedom Struggle

It’s only been a few days since I learnt what actually happened to Lala Lajpat Rai. The name was familiar, naturally. But thirty years ago, history was not what it is today. I remember hearing, back in my single-digit years, about something called the Sepoy Mutiny. Later, by the time they had renamed it The First War of Indian Independence, I had lost interest and shifted focus to other ostensibly more cerebral disciplines, and remained unconvinced about the whole thing.
Three-quarters of a century later, I mourn for Lalaji, who succumbed to injuries from lathi charge while demonstrating against the Simon Commission in Lahore in 1928. My history textbook tells me that he had been referred to by the fond epithet Sher-e-Punjab.
My tryst with Indian history is a peripheral circumstance of the ICSE examinations. This year my two darling daughters will battle for their lives in the all-important, career-defining, life-and-future-delineating event. So here I am, busy stroking heads to keep panic levels down, administering B-complex and iron tonics, and saying prayers. Besides, of what use is my 100 wpm typing speed if not to prepare long lists of mark-scoring objective questions for easy reference? As I dash them out, I’m swamped by images of the brave and visionary men and women who fought and died for our country.
My own grandfather would have been in the prime of youth at the time. But, with his family responsibilities and personal code of ethics, he was not one of those who quit his government job in hot-headed response to the Non-Cooperation Movement.
This was not a man I ever knew, since he had died when I was only a few days old, but I have a distinct impression of him as a uniformed, stern-looking person, from the black and white photograph on my father’s chest of drawers in days gone by.
And now, along with the images of our (glorious) freedom fighters – images dominated, to be perfectly frank, by scenes from Attenborough’s film Gandhi – I’m further burdened by multiple images of my father who is reduced to a quivering, diseased, inarticulate person, physically dependent on those around him. Images of my dad coolly smashing his opponent’s service, and winning the tennis match. Driving us across the country, singing at the wheel. Entertaining his goggle-eyed children with the great literature of the world  before we had learnt to read. Today he’s ill and helpless, and we with our frantic lives can spare him no more than infrastructure comforts, hurried hellos, and perhaps a few useless, sentimental tears late at night when everyone else is asleep and the cares of office, kitchen, and exams, are briefly on hold. Back during the freedom struggle, he would have been a boy playing football, reciting Elegy in a Country Courtyard for the school elocution, getting whacked for the mischief his naughty sister had run away from. When Lala Lajpat Rai died, he wasn’t even born yet. Today, Sher-e-Punjab is the name of the restaurant on every street corner. And life goes on.
First appeared as ‘Down memory lane’ in a Times of India Middle on 25 Mar 2002

Flights of fancy

That day, the entire Indian cricket team was on the same flight, and he had managed to get autographs from the lot. The most difficult to approach had been Azharuddin. It was early in his career, and the now sulky hero stood in a corner of the security lounge, gawky, his nose buried in a book, but clearly unable to concentrate.
Like any wife who revels in needlecraft, I look forward to these tales of his travels, crafting them into legends as the years go by. And Ajay, who scoffs at jet lag as the ponciest affliction ever defined, obliges every time with tales that would draw appreciative nods from Sinbad and Baron Munchausen. Chance encounters in the ether, with the image of serendipitous threads arcing and intersecting in the sky, are enchanting if not exotic.
The early morning flights between metros held the commuter crowd, which would about-face and head home by the late-night return flight. The Madras-Bombay route was thickly populated with film stars. In those days Sridevi was a regular, yawning politely and rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, and occasionally even the gorgeous Rekha. Delhi-Calcutta, on the other hand, held mostly the smartly suited community of businessmen. Acquaintances would hail each other happily at the check-in counter, and once on board, wait for the breakfast service to conclude before they got up to stretch their legs and congregate in small groups to chat. Arjun Malhotra was a regular on this hop, and Ajay never failed to marvel at the IT giant’s friendly outlook even to one as insignificant as himself. Today, with Arjun’s TechSpan inching towards the Fortune 500, the vision of him bending down artlessly to touch the feet of an elderly acquaintance is a precious one.
And once, Ajay was on the same flight as Indira Gandhi. This is not a story of VIP arrogance and delays – quite the contrary. It was 1978, and Mrs Gandhi was as out-of-power as anyone can be. Who could mistake that fabulous profile, or the limited-edition sari? Yet, everyone pointedly faced away, and chattered around the dignified woman (who stood waiting in line like the other mortals), feigning deepest unconcern. When Mrs Gandhi stood in the coach to the aircraft, holding onto the overhead strap, the other passengers milled around, still painstakingly ignoring her.
Was it the most obnoxious in human nature, gloating sneeringly over a dazzling star that had collapsed into the viscous scum of the gutter? Was it vicious contempt for the excesses of her Emergency? Or was it merely the stereotypical mannerless bumpkin Delhiite? If he had a seat, Ajay would surely have offered it to her. As it was, no one else bothered.
first appeared as a Times of India Middle on 21 Dec 2001

Blood Group

Saibhaji is one of those ethnic dishes that defines a community. Combining the nutritional riches of spinach, dal, and a basket full of various vegetables, it’s a one-item meal, tedious to prepare but good to taste.
One day I innocently mentioned that I love saibhaji, and the people I was with laughed and called me a wannabe Sindhi. Through the ancient mists of time I remembered how, as a child, my mother would have to threaten violence before I’d be convinced that saibhaji was good for my health.
Those were the days when I was an ethnic minority so rare that there were only two of us, my brother and me. It’s quite common now for young people to have origins in different regions of the country. But the trend was definitively set by my parents, and, as with any pioneer venturing new frontiers of existence, life was cold and lonely.
‘Cold’ and ‘lonely’, in fact, are words that well describe life on a tea plantation, where we lived in those days – although more positive attitudes might offer ‘enveloping magnificence of nature’, and opulent ‘quality-of-life’ (a concept yet to be defined) which were equally attendant.
It’s amusing to dwell on that social context, in which every fresh acquaintance would first inquire ‘what’ we were. In later years this evolved to a pleasant psycho-philosophical past-time resulting in self-defining moments-of-truth, but at the time, there was a sheer backdrop of pain and isolation when I was unable to shelter in any of the community niches of my compatriots.
There was no language into which we could comfortably slip – like pyjamas and slippers after dinner – and natter on with others who spoke the same idiom. It was always English, and English that brought amused smiles (or, worse, grimaces of pain) – on faces that politely turned aside to hide them – to genuine native speakers of the language. When the relatives met, they would most impolitely jabber away to each respective parent in their native tongue, words flung like unfriendly rocks over our heads, yielding but the occasional glimmer of meaning.
At meal times, we would eat what they now call ‘world food’, my mother even boasting in public that frog legs taste quite like chicken, and I bitterly envied all around me, whose staple was the formula Indian Vegetarian Meal (now revered as a coveted genre by all major world airlines).
We were always outsiders – but no one sang Paeans to our Plight or wrote Epics on our Experience. Over time, it became part of my consciousness to be constantly seeking a peer group, permanently striving to fit in: from zodiac sign, to old school tie, to IQ, waist-size and more; an insatiable hunger to find others of a common denominator.
Now, with my fortieth birthday galloping, giddy and relentless, towards me (a horrible cosmic calculation-mistake, I’m convinced), at last I’ve found where I belong. Through an inexplicable chain of events, here I am, deeply embedded in a close-knit group of intelligent, competent and highly ambitious IT professionals. A burgeoning population. Blood group? Simple. It’s C++.
First appeared as ‘Outsider’s place’ in a Times of India Middle 15 Nov 2001