Songbird launches in Kochi

Film maker Tom Pierce (left) and Mathew Anthony (right) listen as poet-novelist-journalist CP Surendran introduces Saaz

The Songbird on my Shoulder launched in Kochi at David Hall in historic Fort Cochin. An elegant 350-year-old bungalow and home of the Dutch Resident at the height of the Dutch Empire, the building has been restored and now functions as a 'happening' Kochi art gallery.
After the readings, there were question-and-answer and book signing sessions - all great fun. We got wonderful press, too:
http://www.thehindu.com/arts/books/article2853848.ece

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/the-lightness-of-being/228234-60-122.html 
and: 

We're now at Kala Ghoda on 11 Feb: 6 to 7 pm at David Sassoon Library Gardens and then in Chennai at Landmark Apex Plaza at 6.30 pm on 17 Feb.

Veils

Semanti and Saaz in veils: Lovedale, 1977.

I wore a veil once. Semanti and I fancied ourselves glamorous Egyptian beauties and tied little chiffony bits of fabric round our noses and posed for a photograph outside the Girls’ School at Lawrence, also known for various reasons as Red Fort. We were fourteen. We perched our knees stylishly on the garden bench and smiled bashfully into the camera. Semanti was gorgeous – she still is. My knees were stout and lumpy – they still are.
In those days, the bulky knees were a source of deep misery. You have to be fourteen and pasty looking, which I don’t suppose you are, to understand how acute this was.
In later years, I tried to convince myself that the fat had been, all along, just another kind of veil. Like any veil, it included elements of both protection and oppression, each encroaching on the other in a subtle dance – changing position, intertwining, first one sidling ahead and then the other.
The oppression, I told myself, (quoting from the feminist literature and pop psychology fashionable at the time) came from society – horrid, unsophisticated society – where thin was an officiously-defined aspiration. And the protection was created for a sad inner core which couldn’t bear to reveal itself and therefore sheltered under layers of fat.
Finally one day I faced myself with the sad truth that I was fat because I overate and if I stopped overeating, I would eventually stop being fat. Moreover, it was ok to be fat, you could still be loved and comfortable (and healthy) and all those other things that we wend this mortal plain striving to achieve, and if eating was such a great pleasure, then – well – what the hell.
Meanwhile, I had acquired the habit of scrutiny, of keeping a careful watch on precisely which factors of existence served as veils, and which ones were real.
Make-up, of course, was an obvious veil – but then so was beauty. One who projected beauty had the freedom to develop, underneath, in any way they wished – but were equally prisoners of the fact that not many would make the effort to uncover that reality.
Wealth, social position, and material achievement were, of course, veils. They protected one from hunger, cold, loneliness, crowds, dirt and other distasteful possibilities. But they subjugated one with insidious suggestions of conformity to norms laid down by others.
Conformity itself was a veil, suppressing your wants, your identity, your uniqueness, just so that you could feel you belonged even when you didn’t really belong.
Arrogance, snobbishness, superciliousness – even sophistication – these were veils that hid the trembling uncertainty within.
Friends were a veil to cover loneliness.
Maturity was a veil to cover the inadequacy of upbringing.
Even illness was a veil that cloaked despair.
Emotions were veils, too – they veiled each other like anything, anger covering up for fear, fear suppressing sadness, guilt masking resentment, fear of rejection masquerading as entitlement – and under it all a deep, deep sadness, the sadness of basic unlovability.
Was anything, then, real? Or was it true in the end that we were all so controlled, so dominated by that most delicate of all veils of existence, maya as the ancients named it, that no matter how sincerely we shone a torchlight within ourselves, no matter how rigorously we worked to uncover the One which truly existed, maya was a permanent fixture in the sidelines, engulfing us in subtle ways and duping us with images of individual immortality.
First appeared as 'Veiled Meanings' in Sunday Mid-day on 12 November 

Flushing

In Mumbai when the temperature drops below 25°C, people start shivering and pretending that they are about to catch a cold, in a transparent attempt to trot out the woollens they acquired on their last trip to Kodai or Simla or possibly even Zurich. We Pune people, being more worldly, experienced, and tolerant, to say nothing of modest, are a more hardy lot. This season the minimum temperature inched to the wee single digits before the newspapers started crying Cold Wave, and only then did we consider ourselves truly entitled to feel cold.
Still, I stopped short of getting out my thermals. I quieted the urge by reminding myself of the time I was sitting in an aeroplane, about to land at Amsterdam airport, and heard the pilot cheerfully announce that it was 2°C outside.
Now this was some years ago, in what I like to fondly remember as My Young Days. I had never experienced 2°C in the daytime before – wasn’t expecting to, in fact, and had arranged to protect myself from the elements only with the help of two sweaters which I had knitted myself. One was in my suitcase in the hold, and the other I was still working on. Overcoats, I had always assumed, had been created only for sissies and hypochondriacs. I began casting off in a panic.
It so happened that on that occasion I was travelling with my two-year-old daughter and I said a little prayer that the 2°C wouldn’t, well, cause her to catch a cold. As it happened, it didn’t, and we came back to Schiphol airport after a short stay in Holland, survivors, to catch the flight to London.
At the gate just before we boarded, my daughter announced to me an urgent desire to relieve her digestive system of its wastes. (“Mummy – kaka!” she explained briefly, with the kind of expression that brooks no argument).
Amsterdam airport in those days was the most splendid place you could imagine. Every gate had its own toilet and we promptly headed for the nearest one. Business hurried through, I looked about for the flush. And was horrified to find that there wasn’t one. I pulled every lever I could see, twisted and tugged and wrenched at every metallic projection in sight. Nothing worked. The other passengers had probably finished boarding by now, but I was hesitant to leave a dirty toilet behind and bring everlasting disgrace to my country as one of third class, third world people who don’t even know how to flush a toilet. Just when I was about to give up and leave the job – to an Asian toilet cleaner no doubt, because in those days airport-toilet-cleaning was an industry dominated by South Asians – I noticed a subtle outline depicting a hand on one of the tiles behind the commode. Some primal urge, some deep instinct of self preservation, made me place my own hand over it. Just place: no force, no pressure. That was it; I’d managed to crack the code. The flush gushed into operation. A tremendous feeling of lightness and elation flooded my being. We raced for the plane. Ah how much one learns when one travels! I knew I’d be dining out on this story, no matter that the subject was hardly one appropriate for the table, for years to come.
But wait, there’s more. We stopped again at Schiphol for our connection on the way home. Standing outside a locked door, I wondered impatiently why the person inside was stalking about like a caged tiger. A sheepish-looking Indian woman stepped out apologizing that she hadn’t been able to find the flush.
This was my moment! I stepped forward proudly with the accomplished air of a jetsetting international traveller. “Oh, the toilets at Amsterdam airport are extremely high-tech,” I gloated with great sophistication, and kindly showed her how to do it.

Some parts of this appeared in Maharashtra Herald as ‘Yuckity Yak’ on 9 Feb 1997

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