and back to our regular programme ...

ah! saturday. it's one of those really nice days outside, not too hot, mildly overcast and no plans for the day. the best kind of half a weekend really. a few of us headed out to california pizza kitchen for dinner yesterday followed by hero. cpk (downtown bellevue) is a great place for pizza. hero was a great movie. the only flaw- the seats we got. second row from the screen isn't the best place when the entire movie is subtitled and you have some tall people sitting in front of you. i had to peek between locks of strangly hair and thick heads (we got a bunch of kilt-wearing alternative dressers in front of us) to read the action on the screen. i was tempted to borrow a few rubber bands from g and tie their hair up to enhance the viewing experience.


and it's a terribly small world. of all the people out here i had to be introduced to the one person i'd been hoping to avoid! but hey, at least that's over now :)


i got done reading the alchemist by paulo coehlo on the flight back to seattle. it's a great read. he could easily have culled out a ton of stuff from the last 50 pages and had a leaner, meaner and cooler fable. it's a great read nevertheless. not for the morals or the inpirational message - read it purely for the sheer simplicity of the imagery.



disaster stikes. just looked up movie timings ... a bunch of us were supposed to watch harold and kumar go to white_castle and it's just out of the theaters... i got conned into watching that crappy 'corporation' movie earlier this week with the promise of this whacho movie later, but zounds! i'm gonna have to wait for the dvd. the weekend just got a bit overcast.


da blog will have to wait. i'm gonna head out for a hike. my usual haunt ... mt.si

back in seattle and craving caffeine ...

so i'm back in seattle and fighting jet lag and memories of a bad movie. i got conned into seeing the corporation last night. don't be fooled by the reviews here. the movie sucked like a high-powered hoover. it was a pathetic excuse for a documentary. it was patched footage put together by low-iq zealots without a clue and a huge agenda. they made michael moore look highly objective and rational. incidentally, they had a lot of footage of moore pontificating ad nauseum and the movie took forever to get over.


so i'm back at work trying to catch up with e-mail and thinking about last week when i was probably running on the beach about this time. i'll get to updating the trivandrum bits later tonight. i need some coffee now. yawn.


if you have a decent connection check the spec spot out. it has a number of short spots (quick ads) created by wannabe creative types. some of them are hilarious. and yes, we do have the gratuitous spot with the indian cabbie

and meanwhile in the grasslands of africa ...

it started off innocently - questions about life in seattle. cooking patterns, usage of oil and spices, the availability of bay-leaf (i nodded sagely without the faintest clue as to what a bay-leaf was), the freshness of the frozen rotis (an oxymoron if i ever saw one) and the price of gas.


like masai tribesmen stalking a lone lion they were patient, following the spoor accurately, forcing me right where they wanted me. i ran through the tall grass, shaking my mane occasionally to shake the flies off my face, not really bothered by the puny figures carrying sticks but with a faint sense of unease that i was playing into their hands. but i plunged on nevertheless, confident that a few swipes of my paw and a few choice roars should do the trick.


and then i found myself in an arrayo that was blocked off at one end by rocks that had been pushed down from the slopes above. my senses tingled but i still wasn't overtly worried. i whirled around and then almost fainted in surprise, where i'd sensed a half dozen men there were now a few dozen spread across the river-bed in a ragged formation leaving me no way to escape without a fight. i took a few paces back and pawed the ground, the men started to approach cautiously but relentlessly, spears at their shoulder, shields held in front of them. i roared then, a futile attempt to scare them off. they kept moving forward.


i then did what i do under extreme duress. i rolled over onto my back and kissed my furry ass goodbye.

hold him down, hold him down. bring the girl.

now for some details. my mom's elder sister, smart as a whip and with a tongue that can carve a turkey if she was in the mood. and when it comes to family get-togethers she's often in the mood. her husband used to be in the government, quite senior, and a faint smell of curruption hangs around him like a slightly grimy cup. it's more a feeling you get when you talk to him than anything he says. their children are all grown up and have lives of their own. but i get the feeling that they control their son's life by remote control. he has a daughter who'll be a teen soon but he calls in almost everyday to report on what's happening at work. after a few hours with them my mom starts getting muchos concerned about my laid back attitude towards career advancement, my spendthrift ways and my marriage - or rather, the lack of one.


my mom and her sister are constantly on the youngest brother's case telling him what to do with his life and his career. he's a pretty smart guy, he got his start in a bank started by an ancestor, works for another bank now. he spends most of his day schmoozing with people trying to get them to transfer their deposits from some other bank into his own. he's a case study in phychoses, paranoid about his boss, sure that the competition is out to 'get him' and quite confused about everything else in life. his wife is an amazingly sweet and competent woman who holds his excesses in check with a velvet glove. his kids, my cousins are still in school. one of them is in the 12th grade, pretending to work hard at his studies. he's the perfect man about the house, he actually blushes when my aunts tell him that he should be in the movies. he sings most of the time and has malayalam movie dialogues down pat. his younger brother is so overshadowed that he's become the shy silent type. but it's obvious that the real power lies in the tail.


so that was the cast gathered in trivandrum. the morning after we got there was a ceremony for my grandfather, we stuck a new plaque on his grave. an immensely vivid life, marked with some insipid inscriptions on a slab of granite. we headed back after that for another big lunch at home. the afternoon saw us sitting in the living room on ornate furniture that's about a century old with a slowly spinning ancient ceiling fan struggling to keep pace with the stacatto conversation that darted across the room.


and that's when the aunts did the unthinkable, they cornered me with a classic pincer manuevour. i was pinned to the couch and they closed in for the kill. the opening salvo was so innocent - "so, what is it like in the us? aren't you lonely by now?" and then it got progressively fiendish.

who's that white woman in the photo huh?

my mom has a sister and two brothers. her younger brother stays in the house in trivandrum with his family and my grandmother. her elder siblings stay in trichur near each other but they rarely meet. there's more intrigue, petty rivalry and strife in this family that in most soap operas. my grandmother's the point of contention now. like some strange hitherto undiscovered species of exotic fowl none of them know how to take care of her. but that doesn't stop them, all of them have opposing ideas for taking care of her.


my grandmother's an enigma. i'm not sure anyone ever really knew her. i've never known her to have any friends of her own, any desires, hopes or likes of her own. she lived in my grandfather's shadow when he was alive. and now that he's dead she seems to have come into her own. she spoke to me for longer the first hour i was in trivandrum than she's ever talked to me, all the years i've known her. i feel i know her a little better now, daughter of the chief-justice of kerala, married to my grandfather when she was still in her teens, stuck in trichur while he went gallivanting around the world till her father put pressure on the government of india to cut his stipend. we teased her quite a bit about the photos of appapan with the white woman and kids, she steadfastly maintained that it was the wife and kids of the guy who took the photo, appapan's colleague.


she's in rewind mode now, reliving the best parts of her life and telling us about the choice parts. happy storytelling ammama.

goodbye and thanks for the chase

sometimes instead of karim-saab's we'd head out to the sri mulam club for a game of cards and a couple of pegs of brandy. this place was chock-full of middle-aged and older men playing cards with their favorite poison at their elbow. it was the kind of place where eneryone knew everyone else and the average net worth was the gdp of most african countries. appapan (what i called my grandfather) had an established set of cronies and they'd yell at a bearer to bring me a small stool. they tried to get me interested in rummy early on and although i understood some of the finer points of the game (these guys spent more time at cards than working), i never did see the point. my stongest memory of the place is one of them trying to teach me to play billiards. i remember standing on a stool to be able to use the cue-stick.

we had a big dinner almost every evening. if i was lucky he'd give me some money to buy sip-up's from ayyapan's shop down the street. sip-up's were frozen sticks of flavored water in little plastic sleeves. the after dinner session was on the porch with me straining to read in the bad light, my mom and a visiting aunt talking about relatives, with my grandmothers cutting in occasionally with some obscure insight.

he got me hooked onto james hardly chase early on and he gave me the few he had lying around. he'd pooh-pooh my grandmother's protests over the gratuitous half-naked woman draped over the cover. a certain phase of my literary growth consisted entirely of hapless detectives and traitorous women oozing oomph in palm beach or beverly hills. at the end of each vacation he'd get me to bring him a bulging wallet from which he'd extract a few hundred rupee notes and press it into my hands. those notes had a half life of about 10 minutes, after giving me a fifty to buy a book on the platform my mom would confiscate the rest. appapan was always a little quieter on the day i was leaving, and as if to compensate for this slip he'd be extra gruff when he was sending us off in the auto.

that's how i remember dr.c.m.george. retired professor, bon-vivant who travelled all the way to canada to get his phd, whose photos holding a kid with a white woman in the background led to no end of speculation among us cousins, the terror of the neighborhood. he lived a good life and they tell me he died a good death, keeping everyone around him on their toes and grumbling about the food in the hospital. i didn't give him a chance to call me the 'great man' before he died, i was too busy trying to juggle graduate school and a relationship gone awry to travel out to say goodbye.

trivandrum ahoy

it's about 750 km from madras to trivandrum. the roads are great, other cars are aggressive and the entire drive is like a long videogame. pac-man has those little buggy, crabby things that try to eat you. how simplistic. imagine avoiding cyclists, autos, cows, kids, dogs, squirrels, low-flying crows and trucks with wobbly wheels. all at 120 km/h. all with a mom in the backseat who keeps complaining about the bumpy ride, emits sharps intakes of breath just before you attempt that brilliant overtake manuevour that would have had shumacher taking notes and a dad whose calculations of time and distance have no bearing on the 3 dimensional world. it was, to put it mildly, an interesting experience.


the house in trivandrum was exactly how i remembered it, but much nicer. it used to be the one-stop venue for all my summer vacations while growing up. my grandparents lived there alone with a coterie of servants. more accurately, my grandmother lived there and my grandfather ruled his fiefdom from the porch, traumatizing all the passersby whom he know from when they were in diapers. i remember him from when i was little, wiry and full of life. he'd call on the telephone every sunday afternoon and ask to speak to the 'great man' even before talking to his daughter. that was how he used to call me ever since i can remember.

when in trivandrum we had a routine all to ourselves. mornings were spent on the porch. he'd read a couple of newspapers and read some bits out loud occasionally. i'd have my head buried in my latest alistair maclean novel. my grandmother would direct the endless flow of mangoes, tea, juices and coconuts from the kitchen to the porch. we were a tiny island of humanity in the middle of a crowded colony of people rushing to work, moms shopping and kids late for school. passersby would inevitably call out to my grandfather from the road and pause by the gate to be amused by my grandfather's description of my latest escapades; most of them shamelessly concocted. i sat there alternately preening and mortified. the paucity of water in madras and my making up for that by depleting the water levels in trivandrum was a sure-fire way to get a few chuckles.

if i was lucky a couple of kids down the street would get a game of monopoly going and i'd roll the dice with the best of them. there were three of them on udarashiromany avenue that i used to spend most of my afternoons with. choopa, the leader and dabbler in amateur theatrics. sajji, the serious academic one. harikrishnan, mama's boy whose fate was sealed with a dad who ran an industrial strength tuition center in his house and who kept forcing his son to study harder. we'd hang out mostly at harikrishnan's house. i suspect the three of them didn't hang out usually but those months of summer when i'd visit we'd all somehow naturally come together. their houses were right across the road from ours. there were of course other boys who came and went, none that i really recall well enough. choopa's now an established actor in malayalam television serials and has small roles in movies. he's got the typical 'acchayan' look with a receding forehead, gold-framed glasses, an amply well-fed body and a luxorious moustache. saji is married with a kid and unsurprisingly he became an engineer with a construction company. harikrishnan surprised everyone by settling down in california with a wife and a job with cisco. i got to see the first two this trip, it was a slightly awkward meeting, perhaps it was just the monopoly and cards that kept us together.

some evenings my grandfather would walk across to the neighbor's house to play cards. the house belonged to an academic called karim who eventually became quite famous in kerala. i'd simply jump the wall and run into their kitchen to be pampered. they'd play rumy with coins as stakes. i inhaled enough second-hand smoke there to convince me to never take up smoking ever. they'd sit on wicker chairs around an ancient wooden table in the porch that was covered by a frayed felt cover, karim smoking his imported cigarettes and my grandfather smoking his usuals 'wills'. time used to slow down during those evenings, maybe it was the way the smoke rose lazily from the cigarettes held languidly in their long fingers. fingers which were always shuffling and rearranging cards, perpertually looking for an advantage in the game. the games were never about winning, it was more two friends needing an excuse to spend time with each other.

half-moon bay and other experiences

so i hung around in chennai for a few days after i got here on a sunday morning. my mom still teaches in the school i went to and she takes off early. my dad takes off earlier so it's usually just me and max till about 2:00 pm.

i was all the eager-beaver the first few days, i was still quite disoriented time-wise and was up at 4:00 am raring to do stuff. turns out there's not much you can do at 4:00 and so i did a fair share of navel-gazing. at about 5:45 i'd head out to the beach with my dad. the beach is just down the road and it's great out there. i used to
call it half-moon bay on account of the countless bums lined up squatting on the beach but the cops have (pardon the pun) 'crack'ed down on that :). so it's no longer 'eyes-straight-only' running, you can actually look around and enjoy the sunrise and water as you run past huffing and puffing jogging aunty-jis on the verge of a massive stroke, faces all red and bloated capillaries about to pop.

about 10:00 i'd head out to landmark to pick up some books. it's amazing that they have a section dedicated to books in english by indian writers. and it's not dominated solely by the oxford twanged, trinity college returns.
there's a huge variety, amit chaudhuri (who belongs to the previously described class but retains his innate indian'ness), jhumpa lahiri, anita desai, upamanyu chatterjee, hari kunzru, vikram chandra, amitav ghosh and quite a few more.
i'm currently on lahiri's 'namesake' after ploughing though kunzru's 'transmission' and chaudhuri's 'a strange and sublime address'. namesake is a pretty good read, i'll post a few reviews of the books in a bit.

after the bookshop forays i'd head out to the coffee day in ifthahani center and sit there surrounded by gucchi-touting, cellphone stroking teens looking suave and excited all at the same time. they sit four to a table sharing a cup of coffee staring at their phones. they either have it to their ear, or they're staring at it intently or they're offering sms messages to a strange and new-age cellular god, like priests chanting shlokas around a fire. ever so often a phone would ring and there'll be a mad scramble for phones all around. i was conspicious there, with my lack of a cell-phone standing out almost like i was naked. in fact i could have sat there butt naked with a phone and would have drawn lesser scornful stares. the waiter plunked my coffee down at the table with an inaudible "humph".
the other thing differentiating me from the guys sitting there is the lack of 'boxer-peek'. my jeans were at about waist-level unlike the other adonis-clones with their jeans around their knees and boxers peeking out like little imps. i was hopelessly not 'with the scene'.

somewhere through the week i took my mom to the jewelry store to buy her something nice. this is turning out to be an annual ritual that only my mom and the mastercard company appreciate greatly. what started out as a hunt for a small studd or a nice pair of earrings soon turned into the hunt for 'the most expensive piece of metal with shiny stones set in it'. the people behind the counter started rubbing their hands under the counter and i could hear the owner of the store on the phone ordering himself a new car. meanwhile, my wallet started a slow burn in my posterior. we walked out of there happy. my mom happy that i cared enough and me happy that it was over. like surgery, it hurt but nothing that many months of therapy can't heal.

so my driver and the maid at home fell madly in love and got married sometime last year. i still recall the phone conversation with my mom

me: how're things there?
mom: big trouble, i think there's some kitch-mitsch happening between the maid and the driver
me: nice! good for them
mom: shut up. you don't have to face the scandal
me: what scandal? they like each other, so what?
mom: but what if something happens?
me: ah yes, perhaps you should talk to them
mom: chee, i can't talk to them about these things
me: write a letter to the editor then. if you were in the us you could have gone on the oprah show and talked about this
mom: we just bought a book that's featured on the oprah book club
me: groan. traitor
click.

and now they're expecting their first kid. she's in the hospital and this guy just hangs around at our place, too confused to do anything concrete. i doubt he's even 23 years old. it must be pretty stressful for him coping with all of this. to add to that he's a maniac driver who's responsible for numerous dents. hopefully fatherhood will tone his driving skills down!

a few assorted things happened that week including being asked to leave the restaurant at the gandhinagar club because i was wearing shorts. so we sat outside on the lawn which was nice. it was the healthiest meal i've eaten. the mosquitoes sucked the blood out of me at the same rate at which i was eating. i speculated for a while about the possibilty of using mosquitoes as part of a crash-diet but figured the the idea might not have much appeal.

and then we drove out to kerala on saturday morning but more about that in a few hours when i get back from the gym. i go to a gym here called - believe this - maverick.

it's a pleasure pissing you off sir

so here's the long promised blog update ... i've been busy - so sue me :). most of you overworked gentlepeople out there may not know this, but doing nothing is quite hard!

let's start with the flight out of seattle. i took northwest via amsterdam and bombay. don't do it. it's a crappy flight. no in-flight entertainment console and they force you to watch a shah rukh movie. the only form of entertainment is the concentric rings at the bottom of the barf bag.

stewardess: what'll you have to drink sir?
me: some of that awful tasting orange juice please
stewardess: we're out of orange juice
me: how about some tomato?
stewardess: we're out of all juices. i never had any juices on the cart. but i like making you ask for it. so what'll you have?
me: something terribly alcoholic and a pot of marijuana. the booze will keep my eyes unfocussed so i don't have to see you and the pot will numb the shooting pains in my shoulder as you slam into it each time you walk by
stewardess: here's your water sir. would you like something else?
me: throw yourself off the plane
stewardess: it's a pleasure pissing you off sir

and then it's schipol in a few hours.

me: a coffee please
woman_at_the_counter: 800 gazillion euros please
me: i just want a cup of coffee, not the machine itself
woman_at_the_counter: oh, then that'll be 300.45 gazillion euros. will there be anything else?
me: throw yourself under a running plane
woman_at_the_counter: it's a pleasure pissing you off sir

and many, many, many hours later - bombay airport.

customs_guy_with_moustache: so you have many things to declare no? you are having many electronics no?
me: no. nothing much in there
customs_guy_with_moustache: so you are having lots of gold no?
me: i'm coming in from seattle, so no gold and it's been a long flight. check the bags if you want to
customs_guy_with_moustache: i don't need to open bags, i can smell these things
me: that's just me, not the bags
customs_guy_with_moustache: so you are bringing drugs into the country?
me: do you seriously think i'll tell you if i was?
customs_guy_with_moustache: so are you here on vacation? having a good time?
me: not really, and i really like standing here talking to you
customs_guy_with_moustache: it's a pleasure pissing you off sir

and then many more hours later, i'm home. my dog's name is max. he's a golden retriever, not so gold anymore. he's about 13, slow as a dodo and a bit hard of hearing now.

me: hey there max, hey buddy, what's been happening?
max_the_dog: {who? where? i can hear a voice, i can't tell where it's coming from. these voices in my head ... i think i need a shrink but these people are too cheap for that}
me: cootchi, cootchie, cootchie ...
max_the_dog: {oh no, that cootchie-cooeing retard is back again. i thought he was gone for good. now i'll have to do all those stupid things he makes me do like fetch the paper, look cute when he takes me to the beach to chat women up using me as the bait. i think i'll just pretend to not hear him. i'll stare at this pot instead. nice pot}
me: i think he's a little hard of hearing now. he used to be so alert before
max_the_dog: {look yoyo, you don't feed me any more. these other humans in the house do. so go stare at your navel or something}
me: i guess he'll remember me later. i've brought him some shampoo
max_the_dog: {then drink it yourself bozo. i'll pretend not to hear when you yell at me to go to the backyard for a bath. so piss off now. this really is a nice pot. i wonder if she's single}

and the days go on. more in a couple of hours.

sound horn

i took off to india 2 weeks ago. didn't bother to update the blog, sorry about that. decided to leave over a weekend and was on a flight that friday.


me: boss, i'm taking time off.

boss: huh?

me: i'm taking time off.

boss: oh yeah, you're that new guy who works for me. great. you'll need the time off after all this stuff i'm dumping on you.

me: i'm leaving this week.



boss: huh?



boss: huh?

me: yeah, i'm thinking of leaving this week. i'm getting burnt out.

boss: huh?

me: yeah, i'm going to india. i'll be gone 4 weeks. the net connection there is crappy and i don't care enough to check e-mail. i have tons of stuff that's incomplete that i'll be dumping on random people. i'll make a huge pretense of handing off things to people in an orderly fashion but in reality i'll be dumping stuff on them. stuff that's so obtuse and badly described that they have no way of getting things done.

boss: huh?

me: so it's all fixed then.

boss: but...

me: (from further down the corridor, walking briskly away) thank you for understanding. this is so cool. you'll be famous, i'll put you in my blog.


and so it transpired that a few days later i jumped aboard a crappy northwest airlines flight (with no in-flight entertainment) and headed out to madras.

spent most part of this week driving through kerala and visiting assorted relatives. there's only one reason for the evolution of mallu relative - material for blogging. soon showing in a browser near you. just managed to get myself a high-speed connection so bloging will start again.

i've driven about 600 km today and my eyes are still imagining the rear of trucks with the ubiquitous signs - "horn please", "we two, ours one", "bypass rider" and my favorite - "no kiss". so i'll head off to hit the sack now but i'll be back tomorrow with oodles of material. i love relatives :)