Happy 60th birthday, Bill Bryson

I landed at the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport and stood at the entrance to Mumbai in that state of mild indecisiveness that comes with the sudden arrival in a strange country when you’re pounced upon by hundreds of swarthy young men clamouring to take you home. I breathed in the warm, humid air that carried whiffs of petroleum fumes, drying fish and the impact of water shortage on several million bodies, and bravely resisted twenty-seven taxi drivers urgently tugging at me until I spotted with relief the hotel welcome board with my name on it.
The first time I came to Bombay was twenty-five years ago, with a high-school acquaintance named Steve Gatz, which I soon realized was a mistake. The best thing that could be said about travelling abroad with Gatz was that it spared the rest of America from having to spend the summer with him.
We stayed in a guesthouse near the Gateway, sharing a room with two Germans who knew where to get good dope and we would have featured in Shantaram if it’d been two decades later. One evening we decided to get some native colour and walked down to Churchgate Station to experience the death-defying sport of catching a commuter train into the suburbs. A filthily ragged woman in a headscarf squeezed into the carriage loudly orating the tale of her troubled life and asking for money. The baby on her hip was so startlingly ugly that it was all I could do to keep from putting hands to ears and screaming, “Baap re!” (for by now my Marathi was coming on a treat). I quickly gave her twenty rupees before Junior loosed a string of dribble onto me, but soon discovered that my wallet had been lifted. The woman of course was nowhere to be seen – she was probably at this moment sitting down to a feast of truffles and Armagnac with seventy-four relatives on a secluded railway siding near Dombivili with $1500 worth of traveller’s cheques, not bad for five seconds’ work.
But this was only memory, and the entire workforce of my hotel now glowed with joy at my arrival and the bellboy all but touched his forehead to the ground near my feet, a welcome change from last time when I would don my rucksack each morning, staggering around in the manner of one who has been hit on the head with a mallet.
The TV in my room showed a local soap, alive with beauty, agony, and malice, and I watched with appreciation. Here was progress: before, Indian television was only good for the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience. About every fifth word was in English, but the strain of putting it together became wearying and I decided to go for a walk.
Mumbai is not a good city for walking. The humidity makes biscuits soggy, preying insects plentiful, people sweaty and exhausted. There’s also the constant danger that you will fall into open pits, and even when you stumble out limping, it’s all you can do to dodge the rush of dilapidated taxis and occasional Mercedes Benz that come sweeping down. It’s not that Mumbai drivers intentionally want to kill you as they do in New Delhi – they’re just too busy blaring horns, cutting off other vehicles, talking on cellphones, indulging their lap-held progeny with a chance at the wheel. You can’t help but admire the free spirit of this great democratic nation.
I wandered around, looking for The Ideal, which Gatz and I had frequented. I hate asking directions. I am always afraid that the person I approach will step back and say, “You want to go where? Mohammed Ali Road? Boy, are you lost. This is Andheri you dumb clot,” then stop other passers-by and say, “you wanna hear something classic? Buddy tell these people where you think you are.”
So I trudged on. Rats the size of young swine scuttled alongside. Lounging at intervals were some of the most astonishingly unattractive prostitutes I’d ever seen – fifty-year-old women with crooked lipstick and body parts reminiscent of flowing lava. They stood side by side in a seemingly endless row of doorways. I couldn’t believe that there could be that many people in Mumbai – that many people in the world – requiring this sort of assistance just to ejaculate. Whatever happened to personal initiative?
Just as I began thinking about phoning my wife and asking her to come find me, I turned the corner and there it was.
By now I was so hungry that I would have eaten anything, even a plate of my grandmother’s famous creamed ham and diced carrots, the only dish in history to have been inspired by vomit.
The Ideal used to be one of those places that had marble-topped tables, bentwood chairs, a surly owner, and a list of stern instructions regarding Outside Food and Hand Washing. They served chai in glasses but Gatz and I would be honoured with white china cups. It now had formica tables, muted lighting, and a menu that included paneer dosa, Manchurian pizza, and even Mexican and Lebanese food. I tried to think what my jaljeera put me in mind of and finally decided that it was a very large urine sample, possibly from a circus animal with hepatitis. The kheema pau at the Ideal (short, I now realized, for “Ideally you should stay home for dinner”) had been our staple for weeks but it was absent. The intriguingly named Vegetable 65 I now ordered was so bad that to say it was crappy would be to malign faeces. I returned to the hotel and retired with Philip Ziegler’s classic account of the Black Death, imaginatively entitled The Black Death – just the thing for lonely nights when travelling.
I walked down Marine Drive next morning, revelling in the beautiful sweep of bay and energetic morning walkers, but stayed clear of Chowpatty. I remember Gatz’s enthusiasm as we climbed down Walkeshwar after an early morning excursion to Ban Ganga, sighting the flock of exotic migratory birds that appeared to be roosting there – and his horror when we found it was just some squatters engaged in alfresco excretion.
When I was twenty I liked Bombay for its laid back attitude but it was oddly wearisome now. Indians have been congratulating themselves on their tolerance for centuries, and it’s now impossible for them not to be nobly accommodating to graffiti and queue jumpers and excrement and litter. I may be misreading the situation. They may like excrement and litter. I hope so, because they’ve certainly got a lot of it.
Later, I headed for Dharavi, pausing briefly to admire Mumbai’s Gothic railway station that had once been named for Queen Victoria but now, like many other city spots, revered the mountain hero Shivaji who with his band of guerrilla warriors successfully stayed Moghul penetration to southern India.
Dharavi seemed agreeable enough in a thank-you-god-for-not-making-me-live-here kind of way. I walked through narrow lanes, stepping over gutters oozing slimy, ill-defined fluid, when two vaguely thuggish-looking men walked purposefully towards me. Uh-oh, I thought, causally sliding my hand into my pocket and fingering my Swiss Army Knife, but knowing that even in ideal circumstances it takes me twenty minutes to identify a blade and prise it out and I’d end up defending myself with a toothpick and tweezers. But all they wanted was a friendly chat to practice their Conversational English – where I was from, my wife’s maiden name, how much I made last year – that kind of thing.
Back at the hotel, I wandered the maze of shops selling pashmina, jewellery, carved elephants, silken garments and leatherware. Tourists from every continent beamed, dazed and laden with shopping bags. I heard an American trying to knock the price of a jade figurine below two hundred rupees, less than $5. There was no pharmacy here – strange for a city that has several on every stretch of road – more medical shops than litter bins. Gatz had once bought a bagful of dangerous and addictive medication at one of these without the word ‘prescription’ mentioned once in the transaction. This must make it fun for people who live here. Still, if you wake up with a bubo on your groin, better see a doctor all the same.
First appeared in Sunday Mid-day on 5 May 2006

On the road with Ravi

In those days, there were less people on the road, although perhaps not significantly more courteous. It was so long ago that even when you added up our ages you were still only in the teens.  
My brother and I whiled away the hours in the car’s back seat taking a break from pulling each other’s hair by reading the road signs that flashed past and puzzling out the meanings. An ‘Officer’s Mess’ must be where the brave moustachioed ones in uniform would fling banana peels at each other and spill massive bowls of gravy down the aisle. ‘Lions Club’ gave rise to the image of tawny lions serving and smashing, and leaping gracefully over the tennis net to shake each other by the paw. ‘Meals Ready’ (now all but martyred to ‘Dhaba’ in the colonial victories of the North) meant, naturally, that the food must be left over from yesterday and we’d kindly advise our parents that we shouldn’t stop here for lunch. The forest department signboards which announced new plantations of E. Globulus and other varieties of eucalyptus saplings enthralled us too. We grew faster than they did, but they overtook us. The Nilgiri slopes, planted before our eyes, got covered with dense jungle.
Years later I sat, basking in a noisy tropical thunderstorm. It was inside the Rainforest Café at Piccadilly and I attempted to enthral two precocious children with the story of the rogue elephant that thundered behind the little red Herald on our way home when we were their age. A solitary elephant in the jungle called for caution and we were indeed charged more than once, a frightening experience but one that can be looked back on with complacence. Mudumalai still had large herds of elephants in the 1970s and as we drove through the sanctuary on our way to or back from the plains, motorists would stop to let them cross the road; first the tuskers and young males, and towards the end the cow elephants, trailed by their babies. It’s a sight you no longer see.
There were no elephants on the British motorways either.
Over the years, I’ve had many holidays being cosseted and indulged by my brother and his family in London, an annual retreat from the scorching May heat of Pune in a city of orderly queues, free admittance to the art treasures of the world, round-the-clock humour, early dinners, and chocolate with every meal. On the M3, whizzing happily past signs for Guildford and the Basingstoke roundabout, we’ve often driven through the mythical village this motorway once famously sundered in two in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Traffic is slow on the A303 past Stonehenge – for as long as memory serves, congestion on this route has been accompanied by debate on whether a tunnel would endanger the ancient monument. On this road I learnt that flashing lights from a car driving towards you could mean, “after you, my dear sir” rather than “get out of my way, idiot”, as it does back home.

At Kew Gardens in April 2011

It’s one of the most beautiful parts of Britain and on our route to Longleat, the Cotswolds, and even Cornwall. The first glimpse of the startlingly bright blue of the Cornish coast comes as a shock almost physical. Mired as we are in Shakespeare, Harrods, the Natural History Museum, London Bridge and so on, it’s easy to forget that this great seafaring nation of the history books is in fact all surrounded by sea. It’s an eight-hour drive and, taking a cue from an English countryside sign offering “Woodlands for sale”, a new generation of avid board-reading backseaters made us laugh by pleading piteously, “Don’t sell the woodlands!” over and over – a welcome change from “Are we there yet?”
Cornwall has much to see and our days there brimmed with natural beauty, local food, relics of old tin mines, ancient history, and more. A Welcome sign that stands out in memory proclaimed “Lanhoose Population 5”. The settlement boasted three buildings including Lanhoose Barn and Lanhoose House, and we wiled away a pleasant evening wondering how the five people might be distributed among the three homes, and whether there was a Lanhoose resident’s association and perhaps even a Lanhoose Bridge team or string quintet.

Pain, drama, true-life learning

I’ve heard that women often go mad when their kids grow up and they have no one to yell at any more. Well to be honest I haven’t actually heard anything like this but I’m sure it’s pretty common. Here, for instance, is what happened to me as my youngest one’s eighteenth birthday hurtled towards us, giddy and relentless: I turned eighty, and my arms suddenly became too short.
First the arms. For years I’d held book in hand while reading. Then one fateful day, with no warning, I found that my arms had shrunk. They were just too close to my face, the words were all fuzzy, and I simply couldn’t read.

Photo by Ayesha Monani Broacha for Verve in 1996

As for the business of eighty – it was a rare and wonderful accomplishment. I’d hovered below this significant benchmark for months, waiting, anticipating, as does one for headlines about the Sensex.
Finally, one morning, Sensexily, I crossed the psychological barrier forever. I did attempt some teetering, shifting centre of gravity from side to side, but the needle stayed firm, and there was nothing between me and the carpet but my bath towel and that would have been a horrid sight for the cleaning lady, so nothing for it but step off the scale and admit it. I was now in my eighties and that was that, might as well brazen it out and pretend that this was exactly what I had been intending, bring on the samosas please and I’ll just have another two (or six) jalebis while we’re here.
Out of the window forever went the pompously named General Motors, the degenerate-sounding South Beach, the holier-than-thou Fit For Life, and the rest. The weak and puny were welcome to their gym schedules. I had more serious business – lying in bed with a book, flexing that rapidly shrinking arm into an enormous foil bag and rattling large handfuls into my mouth. Of course everyone knows that pretending thin women look better is nothing but dastardly propaganda by men who want to keep all the food for themselves. Of course.
And it so happens that, being a woman of remarkable substance with karma rapidly coming to fruition, I have endured monthly felonies – a drunk driver, a forged cheque, a jewellery heist, and finally, on the first day of the new year, a hacking crime that crippled my office for three days.
Poetic justice, some will mock: for years I bossily insisted that we work on the first of January, virtuously demanding that we begin with gusto and ambition rather than lolling about bleary eyed and hung over. Instead, we struggled and cursed and I finally headed off (never one to miss a chance of cozying shamelessly up to officials in high positions) to my dear friends the police where I learnt to my dismay that this was not really a cybercrime, which would have been a super notch on my belt of serial victim-hood, but merely the plain or garden variety of extortion.
Later, the eighteenth birthday came and went, with noisy celebration by friends of the concerned party, and weary cheer from the exhausted family. Weary from the years of turmoil past, I renewed my commitment to the stitching group and hanging out with the girls, exchanging recipes and such. I even relinquished hold (a little) on the kitchen where my ISO 9001:2000 habits had caused hardened crooks (I mean cooks) to run shrieking in exasperation. To be frank, we were just a short step away from blaring instructions on megaphones and frog-marching miscreants into long shower rooms with tall chimneys.
And the other day, in an emergency situation, I used the men’s loo. I peeped in and instructed a helpful-looking young man to keep KV outside. He did. Getting older is really not such a bad thing.

Some parts of this appeared in Saaz ki Awaaz under the title ‘Geriatricks’ in Times of India, Pune on 10 Feb 2006

Neighbours

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!

BOMBAY CLICHÉS: Neighbours (Collection of Udaya Manjeshwar)

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.
Parts of this first appeared in Maharashtra Herald on 25 Jan 1998

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.

BOMBAY CLICHÉS: Ladies Compartment (Collection of Smita Sheth)

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. 
This first appeared in Saturday Times (Times of India, Mumbai) on 27 Feb 1993

Remembering PG Wodehouse on his 130th birthday

I was sprawled on my bed, engrossed in the final episode of Sex and the City when Jeevan sidled in to tell me that my flight tomorrow was likely to be late.
“Fogs in Delhi, Batty-baba,” he said. “Thereby all flights in country being delayed.”
This just put the cap on it. Preeti would be livid. I had promised to pick up fresh stocks of Fortnums’ goose liver paté from Patel Stores, our friendly neighbourhood bania, and if I failed to arrive on t. – well, you know, hell hath no fury like a rakhi-sister scorned, what?
“Jeevan,” I said, “there is no time to be lost. “Get Captain Modi on the phone pronto.”
Homi was one of the best. We’d been at Lovedale together – shared our tuck, travelled home by Bombay-batch every hols, and what not. If ever there was a bloke who could get something done in this desperate situation, it was old Hormuze Modi.
“Hey Batty!” Homi’s mellifluous tones attacked me from the speaker phone. “Have you heard the latest on Ma Gupu?” and he proceeded to drone on and on about our old Geography teacher who apparently had been through some rather awful times but was now retired and last sighted vicinity of Coonoor. Now I loved old Nergis Barucha, and the sound of her bossy “Bharat Watsa! you will accompany me to the headmaster’s office!” was still enough to wake me in a cold sweat from deepest slumber, but this was not at all the time for this kind of thing.
“Listen, Homi old chap, will you be quiet for a second and allow me to confide the most awful problem a man ever had to face?”
“Oh no Batty, not the clap again,” Homi said worriedly. He was one of those few chaps who really cared about a chap.
“Worse,” I assured him. “Preeti’s having her annual bash in Goa tomorrow, and the boat pulls out at 7 pm sharp. Jeevan tells me my flight is likely to be late. And you know what Preeti’s like. If I don’t get the paté there on time I’m for it. Do you think you could get the old Lear out?”
“Any time, Batty, you know that, but tomorrow is Binaifer’s annual candle-light vigil, that Save the Dolphins thing she’s been doing ever since she was three – so sorry old boy.”
You know, if anything ever did get me to tie the k. it would only be the hope that a cute thing like little Binaifer Modi might spring from the Watsa loins. I sighed and put the phone down heavily – then picked it up again.
Arvind and I had lunched at the Bombay Gym last week, and he’d let slip his new acquisition – a hovercraft, don’t you know. Surely he would – ?
But Melissa, Arvind’s delicate half, was out of sorts. “Bai trouble,” Arvind confided. “Poor Melissa apparently told her very clearly to cut the kakdi gol-gol but she went and served it cut lamba-lamba. I’d really better go in and check whether she’s regained consciousness, she’s been lying in a faint since lunchtime. Pip-pip, old man.”
Sighing, I now tried calling Rajeev, Preeti’s second husband,
No. 2 (ha ha, nice coincidence there) at one of these enormous oil corporations that have their own helicopters and what not. He was a jolly good chap, though an old Mayo boy, batch of 1968 – to tell you the truth I like him a darn sight better than any other husband Preeti’s had. But the silky voice that answered his direct line said he was busy with Japanese visitors. Out on the golf course I’ll be bound. Never can understand how these oil fellows ever get any work done, honestly.
I had my hand on the phone again when I heard a small cough. I let go of the phone. Jeevan, as you may have long suspected, was the brains of the family. I knew from the expression on his face that my worries would soon be relegated to an earlier period.
“Don’t mind it Baba, but how about we can try the Gidwani-madam?” he asked solemnly.
I looked at him aghast.
“What, that old battleaxe!” I stared at him haughtily, waiting for an explanation. Old Jeevan was clearly losing it. It was all that fish he ate – mercury poisoning, don’t you know. The Gidwani bird, to put it plainly, was the rudest, ugliest old harridan that dined out every night of her life on a bridge story. The one and only time my dear departed mater and pater had her over had been one fateful evening seventeen years ago. I had just learnt to play myself, and they’d called me in to make up the fourth.
“Do you play Stayman?” Mrs Gidwani asked me. I did, of course – I mean to say, what sort of bounder doesn’t play Stayman. But instead of responding with a simple “One no trump” which would have sufficed the likes of you and me, she gave a loud cackle and started telling us about the time she’d sat down to a rubber at the Willingdon and politely asked her partner, “Do you play Stayman?” To which the gentleman had apparently replied: “Madam, I AM Stayman.”
Now I mention this only so that you will have some idea of the vintage of this Gidwani. But while one expects that temperance and wisdom shall follow great age, as the night the day, our Gidwani has only got successively more ghastly. I shudder as I reveal this awful fact but since that evening she has gazed at Jeevan with covetous eyes and I assure you I have lived in utmost dread these seventeen years.
Now Jeevan unfolded his plan, “Baba, you are knowing every time Gidwani-madam is telling to me her desire for man-servant like my good self and her intention of ample reimbursement?”
My eyes narrowed. What on earth was the man trying to get at? Surely, surely Jeevan wasn’t suggesting that he sacrifice himself to the Gidwani just so that Preeti could get the paté on time? Where on earth was his sense of proportion!
“I am talk to Raju, Gidwani-madam’s driver,” Jeevan continued, heedless of the young master’s visible agitation. “They are having first-class new SUV, and Raju is anxious for opportunity to travel on new, improved NH4. I can be telling to her that I will go now itself and tomorrow morning bringing for madam young chap for household work from my native village of Karad. I have speak to my sister and one fellow is there able and willing. From Karad Goa is nearby only. Raju will quickly dropping your good self at Preeti madam’s place late night. Next morning we shall be coming back with servant boy for Gidwani madam.”
By golly, the chap was a genius! “Quick, Jeevan,” I cried, “chuck some things in a bag and let’s push off!”
“I have took liberty of already packing bag, baba,” smiled Jeevan.
So that’s how it happened, and there was great happiness and r. all around. Preeti’s paté got to the party well in time. Mrs Gidwani was delighted with the bloke from Karad. Melissa soon recovered – it had only been one of her regular migraines – has them every now and again don’t you know. Even sweet little Binaifer managed to save the dolphins. I mean to say, I was going to Goa anyway, and a chap’s got to do what a chap’s got to do, what?

A Madam's life

Once upon a time I fancied myself an intellectual, and put on airs and pretended, like so many others of my generation, to read Sartre, Joyce and others which today’s under-thirties would disdainfully dismiss as ‘books’. Then one day I noticed that weeks had slipped into months and years and all I’d done, day after day, was iron three even-sized but gradually expanding sets of school uniforms (and pyjamas, and play clothes) fill three water bottles (and snack boxes, and lunch dabbas). Life blurred into a haze of endless bottles of white shoe polish, unit tests, twice-a-week home-baked chocolate cakes, lazy Saturday afternoon ice lollies and Disney movies, with nothing but some intermittent mommy violence to break the monotony.
It struck me that I might easily lay claim to the title of The Erma Bombeck of Pune. After all, we live in a city of pompous epithets – the self-important Oxford of the East that generates hordes of postgraduates who cannot distinguish an apostrophe from a garden spade.
A phase of adventure tourism began and life became a confusion of grave responsibilities and impossible commitments, with stress-induced ailments resulting in major surgery. Meanwhile, grouchy bad temper had submitted to a sanctimonious streak and I’d become a Reiki Master.
Shouldn’t that be Reiki ‘Mistress’? my friend Amita frowned. But for various reasons I wasn’t that keen to be called a mistress – though now that I think about it, I’ve been called ‘Madam’ for long enough with great forbearance. People recognize me at forty paces – even on the telephone if you want to know the awful truth – as ‘Madam’, and I’ve learnt to live with it and keep smiling. We’re a tiny and sadly marginalized community, us Madams, with our headaches and bridge mornings and afternoon naps, especially these days with attrition figures in the household-help industry marching ahead of the IT and even BPO sectors. Speaking on behalf of the Society of Highly Opinionated and Amply-endowed Madams (SHOAM), Maharashtra chapter, I encourage the government to set aside some kind of reservations for us too. In fact, if I was Chief Minister (and believe me, you could do worse) I would go right ahead and allot separate parking spaces for Madams whose drivers didn’t turn up for work that morning.
As CM, it would also be my pleasant duty to publicise the sensational, path-breaking research of an internationally reputed agency which intimately relates poor driving manners to sexual dysfunction. Men who broke through traffic lights were shown to suffer premature ejaculation. Road hogs who swerved, cut lanes, and shoved small fry out of the way were observed to have the most hilariously teeny-meeny wedding tackle. Those who used the cell phone while driving, the report elaborates, had been blatantly cuckolded many times over. And those who senselessly blared their horns were, naturally, those who leapt onto their beds with hope and anticipation but never managed to actually get horny. 
Parts of this appeared in the column Saaz ki Awaaz under the title ‘Sallying Forth’ in Times of India, Pune on 13 Jan 2006