Tamilians cannot make tea. Take it from me. I can brew an almost perfect filter coffee that makes maamis go besh and look upon me as a potential son in law, but I cannot for the life of me make tea that might impress a Malyalee, a Maharashtrian or a martian for that matter ( No offense to Malayalees, Maharashtrians, or martians for that matter).
My philosophies for making tea are rather hasty as I have come to realize but my habits have steeped in and I am unable to change them. Making tea for me means boiling an inordinate amount of water and throwing in tea powder, sugar, milk, ginger or any other spice that strikes my fancy and then let the unholy concoction bubble for as long I am willing to wait. My tea drinking friends consider this nothing short of blasphemous and I am often looked down upon for this alone.
My shortcomings with regards to tea were discovered by chance. On a rainy afternoon in damp Syracuse, friends unexpectedly dropped in and a spirited evening of conversations followed. Wanting beverages to revive flailing spirits tea was called for and I in all good earnest volunteered. Later on I received heapfuls of curses; someone even accused me of trying to thwart the pleasant evening with my mean coffee drinking agendas.
There are few things better than a good cup of coffee, filter or otherwise and a strong flavourful cup of tea is one of them. Tea drains away blues in the rains. And yes I am quite aware that rhyming is not one of my stronger skills. At home we follow the good Indian tradition of stuffing our guests silly with food and drink. Coffee is passed around ubiquitously, propelling late night caffeine driven card games with unusual amounts of calculations defeating the mathematically challenged.
Last week I went to a friend’s home. “Im sorry there’s no tea or coffee” she said exasperated, her hair forming tense ringlets near her temple. “Beer is in the fridge though, chalega?” A better time was never had before.
There is a virile excitement to be found in driving fast. Zipping across landscapes in a rush, driving in raucous speeds gives one a thrill otherwise unattainable. And this is not a pleasure extended to those who occupy other seats n the vehicle. The slow increase of numbers, ascending to the forbidden and mentally marking off milestones as the road markers seem to merge, until time itself begins to fly. Wind in the hair, spirits loose and caution (or the lack of it) hovering like a concerned parent behind.
There is another joy in driving slowly, the slowness brought upon by choice or force; with a low speed limit and a near empty road, the lack of acceleration not robbing the essence of movement. With speeds like 30 mph, there is time to note every lark that perches upon telegraph lines, time to feel every bend in the road, time to whoosh past trees and time to feel gravity working on you, as you hurtle down hills.
Driving in Massachusetts can be exasperating because the roads there have potholes. Lanes dizzyingly and exasperatingly merge or diverge, befuddling the novice. Driving in Massachusetts can be rewarding because the road suddenly will cut across a lake, pierce through a dense forest or dally around rounded hills; or even more suddenly deposit you in a city amidst skyscrapers and the sea.
It takes two to tango. And providing a much needed background score to this vista was a well furnished ipod that would play notes befitting the landscape and friends in tow, replete with lazy witty repartees. I spent most of the fall and winter of 2008 on trips that were more lessons on nature appreciation and less trips.
Much has been said of the American freeways and how they are a pleasure to drive on and also extremely purposeful and useful. This post is a tribute to the unsung heroes in Massachusetts, the state routes. Unseen, unknown like dark ribbons on the landscape.
Route 9: Is a major artery for Boston and its suburbs. About 10 miles form the city centre, it decides it has had enough and then exclusively zips past lakes. Peppered with grocery stores, malls and humdrum commercial establishments that suburbia thrives on.
Route 20: Is actually US route 20 stretching form Boston proper, traversing the length of the continent ending somewhere non-descript in Oregon. Parallels I-90 for most of its length often ducking under it and in one case going over it. In the city it has a most innocuous beginning in a leafy square, hardly expected of a road going all the way to the Pacific. Becomes a surprisingly crowded road, linking areas. Is densely forested, and in my opinion has some of the most lip smacking restaurants this side of the Atlantic.
Route 85: This one is hardly important but a personal favourate, simply because it was close to home and I had a treat driving on it one cold snowy afternoon with kathanakuthoohalam for company.
Route 135: One does not expect waterfalls on an urban road. And it is not inappropriate to lose ones head if the first time one sees a waterfall on a road, it is frozen and the ice threatens in looming shapes, to engulf small cars.
There are many more but I realize that I can hardly say different things about any of them. All of them were the same, traversing lands of great beauty and picturesque. Route 140 where a friend (who cooked well) lived. Route 111 where we got lost at 1 am in the morning, route 62 that we were always confused about, route 117 that took us to a great big Wal-mart. Routes 2 and 3 that were less state routes and more freeway, route 110 that had the huge houses, route 30 which most illogically loops around everywhere, route 28 where I ran over a duck, route 1 with all the seaside villages, route 128 winding along cold forlorn marshes, I could go on and on.
What I’ll do instead is hope I haven’t bored you with this long post, and hope you can see all of what I have said without calling me a clichéd sentimental old fool.
This post is also a birthday present to K, who was privy to all the aforementioned incidents and travels. Music connoisseur, in charge of general maturity and a close friend.
I like writing about cities. Most people see them as dots on a map or as places populated with urban detritus, but not as an organism. Not the fire breathing, I-will-destroy-everything-in-my-path kinds nor as a gaggle of dysfunctional humans. But as an entity that shapes the environment around it, in all spheres political, social, geographical and mental. It is easy to see a city as a collection of famous buildings or past happenings of importance. It is also easy to see every city having a ‘character’ atry, hep, modern, conservative, heartless and so forth. What is not easy to put in words the ‘je ne sais quoi’ of every city and see it with that perspective.
Consider a piece of lush land between low rounded hills and a shallower inlet of the sea. Miles of mangroves blurring the distinction between the land and water and the whole scene reads like a page out of Tolkien’s epics. In the nineties denizens of Mumbai were confronted with the existence of such a piece of land lying east of the city, on the Indian mainland and they conspired to turn it into a city.
And this momentary deliberation is what makes New Bombay what it is. A planned city with the widest roads in this hemisphere. Railway lines with stations so near one can walk to and from them. Malls, theatres and shops confined to particular areas and homes in sectors. Sectors in nodes. It was all very novel and for the first few years after its conception the city lay barren with pockets of population stranded like some post-communist city. And with time all industries moved to Navi Mumbai (in a cruel mockery of the name change from Bombay to Mumbai, its sister followed suit). MIDC (Maharashtra Industrial development corporation) was established all over the hills, ironically with toxic companies having the best views. Come monsoon and all the unpaved roads become unofficial waterfalls with picnickers reveling in them.
Viewed from the eastern end of Mumbai, New Bombay has an impressive skyline, one that is tall, modern and spans the length of the city. Mangroves, buildings and the foothills of the western ghats in the distance.
Anyone who has lived in Bombay long enough can tell you when the rain won’t come. We are experts at predicting when it won’t happen. Come the last few days of May and all of humanity has had enough of the heat and the sweat. And of the dull monotony that stark afternoon sunlight brings. Mangoes have been consumed, the raw ones pickled. Juices with ice cubes floating in them had by the gallons to make the throat sick. The last few days of May are the summer that deprive us the joys of the season without affording its pleasures.
As reports of drizzles come in hopes turn heavenwards. The first of June is awaited with a fervor bordering on the religious, but like all other things Indian, the rains are late. Veterans then remark that the rains never arrive on the first, and that the one time they did come on that day, in the 50’s, the rest of the season was bad. “Monsoon hits Kerala” newspapers exclaim a few days into June and then the real countdown begins. Three Kasargode, five Uttar Kanara, seven Karwar, nine Goa. The wait becomes irresistible, unbearable and the rains seem sadistically within reach but away.
Vacationers will come back with tales of how they encountered a few stray showers on the ghats, or how their seaside weekend was spiced up by the sudden prattle of premature showers. And all we can do is sigh at their luck, and beseech the fan to miraculously cool us faster. A few more days of dogged heat and listlessness and then action suddenly comes to the backyard. “It rained in Uran yesterday” a Port trust official would blurt out, in the manner of revealing a state secret. “My cousin living in Panvel said that it s raining there now”, the bai would chip in excitedly. Reports would come in from seaside urbania all around Mumbai. Pen, Alibag, the ghats near Pune, the Ggats near Kalyan, Vashi.
Tomorrow. The experienced would nod their ascent. And paving the way for the anticipated tomorrow would be a day far stickier than any other day of the season. I never knew if it is really a meteorological phenomenon that makes the day hotter and more fetid or it is simply the minds preparation for a new season. The heat at its zenith, humidity at a naturally impossible hundred and the first could sighted. Like the climax of a movie life then moves in slow motion. The eye impatiently scans the skies for the pregnant clouds, but there are none to be found, and almost magically the clear sky turns murky, the smell of mud assaults long before the first drop wets the earth.
Like a slow orchestrated ritual culminating in a bedazzling climax the rains hit Bombay. As the dispossessed shriek and run headlong into the spray.
I woke up groggy and sleepless. A tangle of arms and legs greeted me. And slowly a head emerged from within. “Good morning beta, welcome home” Appa’s head said to me. Thinking myself to be in a surreal Kafkaesque dream, I promptly went back to sleep. Seconds later a leg landed on me, pushing all the wind out of me. “Sorry, I haven’t quite mastered this asana” again Appa’s head spoke to me. I opened my eyes fully and Amma stared at me, nothing unusual in it, except that she was upside down. Jet lag is funny I thought.
A few minutes later I was completely awake, although my body believed it was still ten time zones away. And I got a feel of the situation at home. “One must be healthy, we aren’t getting any younger you know”. The parents had discovered Yoga. What followed was a bewildered me being demonstrated a series of bodily positions I never believed possible, especially from the ones who had birthed me. Appa effortlessly rolled himself into a series of punctuation marks and enquired to my well being. On the other side of the room, Amma was breathing like a wounded rhinoceros. “Advanced Pranayama...good for the stomach you know” she said.
And the house was in the throes of extreme fitness. Mornings started with a pod of garlic. No wonder the milkman left, and the paper fellow doesn’t come in until nine I mused. Breakfast was a minimalistic fruity affair. Lunch was seasoned with queer strange smelling herbs. Dinner almost did not exist. Hedonistic I balked at such austereness. And craved for ghee dripping form edible surfaces. Instead I am supposed to do crunches. Something about me having a non-flat stomach.
Pah!. Homecoming.
* I am home for a vacation. And this is what happens.
Chaos theory will have us believe that small disturbances in a system will ripple through, magnifying themselves leading to one huge cataclysm. The bigger the system and the longer it takes for the smaller errors to accumulate. And after the big bang, the newer systems are generated with small errors of their own, which in time lead to further chaos. India was an idea crafted by politicians, visionaries. An impractical reality that somehow defied all laws of coherence and managed to stick as a coherent entity. Too many differences in the entities that constituted it. Most countries had a strong basis in language, religion, history or culture. Some were racially defined, some were remnants of large civilizations. India was all this and more. And none of this. Peoples of different colors and histories, strange languages and stranger antecedents. At time the only string holding the country together was its land mass and the sheer number of people.
Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century Indians sought to gain common ground. Politics provided a great platform, the violence and dazzle luring all equally from Itanagar to Calicut. The onslaught of the middle class with similar values. The common feeling of battling poor infrastructure, violence and general chaos to reach the elusive higher plane. At the turn of the century it lay poised like a badly balanced airplane to take off into the future. And like a horrible aircraft , ill fated to reach the skies, it blew. And splintered into pieces. Like the body parts of the mythical Shakti, into several pieces, as it was since antiquity. India as a nation ceased to exist in 2035. Experts will point out several factors and reveal the imminence of that action. Some say it was to happen, some felt it to be an unnatural paradigm. Foreign hands, Gods, Religions, Colour and every possible prejudice were blamed in this fission. But reality lay splattered, a loose coalition of city-states and smaller principalities across the sub-continent.
And now each of these entities would be free of violence they thought. Bound by religion, culture or language exclusively. Some countries exclusively urban, some completely rural. Some spread out over large swathes of land, some confined to off shore islands and scanty mountaintops.
Circa 2009
Facebook and Orkut were merely tools. Sure they provided valuable connections now and then but that was about it. Six degrees of separation worked for once, in his favour. Combing the mists of the ancient past, searching through medieval rabble and trying to locate the future in the present chaos of modern India, his was a difficult task indeed. Especially the part of India he was supposed to work on.
Searching wasn’t easy. For one his search began around 1279 AD. And history wasn’t an easy pursuit. Like a temptress his destination moved across regions and countries. It changed languages and religions. And the messy proposition of caste. Which had oscillated no lesser than five times in 1500 years.
The task was fairly straightforward, to separate India into little nations. They were a large organization and had working teams, named in a cruel mockery of the Indian army. The Rajputanas would take care of Rajasthan, the Sikh regiment would create Khalistan. The Marathas would bring back their medieval glories and the Telengana dream of statehood went a step further to nationhood. Their team was nicknamed ‘Sangam’ signifying the lost Tamil age.
To bring back the glories of the Tamil nation, they needed a king. And not just anyone would do. So a meticulous search began. Looking through temple records, land deeds, properties and inheritances. Modern government databases, census data. Methodically sifted. Each demographic scanned and formulated. Large swathes of data residing as a muddle of names and places. It seemed hopeless at first but slowly a pattern began to emerge. And history, initially obfuscating, then slowly revealing patterns only to disappoint. Then letting out a little clue and piece by piece the jigsaw fell into place.
They had started with the Pandyans first, the last surviving Tamil kingdom. The lineage seemed straightforward enough till the fifteenth century where it ran into several errant progeny marrying in and out of religions. Invaders complicated the picture and the present day descendants would most likely be Indonesian. Or not. The Chera descendants were lost, over records and state boundaries. Eventually with time and meticulous research they had got to the inevitable.
"So where did we come from?" I asked. And my grandmother gave me the old Iyer lady’s equivalent of a finger, proceeding to slurp her rasam with sudden gusto. Appa looked pointedly away at a spot on the wall, concentrating suddenly on it. For a family obsessed with its Iyer ness this was definitely off-beat. No one would admit how and when it happened, but it did. And its repercussions were felt even today in the later generations.
Like most protagonists of a certain age I had delved deeply into my family’s history and discovered certain truths, which no one was willing to explain. My parents are very liberal and open minded with regard to love marriages, as long as it is not me who is doing the loving. Somehow my grandmother and mother seem to harbor the notion that I am a stud-muffin of gargantuan proportions and that some harlot will seduce me into marrying her and swapping bodily fluids with her (probably just one point where mother-in-law and daughter-in-law agree, but I digress). So when I led a long and mostly inconclusive argument about our origins and trying to figure out if anyone had transgressed the noble traditions of arranged marriage within my family I stumbled upon it. The more I thought the more evidence I got. People, places, names, phrases, why even the Gods that adorned our pooja-room.
We have Telugu blood in our family I concluded. So did anyone in last century elope? I asked my grandmother and she shuddered. Did we have arranged marriage with other linguistic groups. I asked in chaste Marathi and Appa admonished me likewise, in unchaste Marathi. Mind your language Appa, but pray tell me how did this happen? No one, all arranged marriage only and grandma closed the topic with her air of finality.
As I staggered with my new found knowledge I looked for support. Evidence apparently didn’t count for enough. Our ancestral village was Anantapur AP, within its’ very heart. Far away from the Kaveri or any other water body associated with Tamizhness. Our clan-deity, Tirupati. All the ancestral property we would have had but for evil zamindars (this is often used to reiterate the supposed greatness of our lineage) was in what is present day Chitoor. But the one thing that clinches it: eat my grandmother’s thakkali thokku without steam emanating from your ears or sweat drenching your face. So I went from family member to family member in vain hopes of getting a past legitimate “love-marriage” so that I could now pursue my Assamese love with zeal and woo her.
“Telugu-Tamil all are same pa no difference” Ramudu mama said, licking avakka pickle off his fingers.
“In days of yore, everywhere south was Madras presidency; you don’t know anything about that” Shanta maami screamed taking a break from watching Gemini TV.
“Didn’t you learn Carnatic music, you numbskull, similar culture. All arranged” Subudu periapppa reiterated all the while tracking constituency boundaries across Telengana.
“No we aren’t Telugu, don’t get ideas in your head” Savitri chitti said, going off to fight with her borthers over a paddy field in Guntur.
“Lite teesko da” said my cousin smirking at my futile attempts.
I have decided. I shall woo my girl in Assamese style. I shall sing Bengali love songs from Charulata to her. I shall quench her thirst with tall glasses of lassi, feed her undhiyu and dance the lavni with her. We will ring in vishu and she shall pray for my long lasting life keeping vraths on karva chauth.
Jai hind!
Offence takers: Don’t take offence. No slights to Telugus (I am partly one). Or anyone else for that matter.
I'm a parody on sanity!! Each person will have a different opinion of me..People centric yet what i enjoy most is my solitude... Am madly eccentric....predictably unpredictable....
