Friday 24 April 2015

Break at Kihim

Early this month some friends of ours, their families and we caught the ferry and went to my sister-in-law's beach house in Kihim, just outside Mumbai.
It was riotous and very enjoyable, if one ignores the itch I developed after returning.
The lane behind the house. All very picturesque. 

 'Flying Penguins' following our ferry. People held out biscuits and chivda hoping they'd swoop down and eat out of their hands. I saw one seagull sitting on the top of the ferry and enjoying the breeze.
Sisters, S and K, checking out their early morning beachside selife (12 April 2015).
 Love apples. Stolen from next door. Plenty of mangoes on nearby trees...all still hanging where we left them.
 My first evening at the beach, alone. (11 April 2015)
 Walking on the little lane toward Kihim beach.
A rooster and his family. 

They saw sand for the first time.

Kerala

A strike in Kerala, a 'samaram' (November 2014). I think that's a church in the background. 

A movie theatre in TVM

A single screen movie theatre in Thiruvananthapuram (November 2014). I was charmed by the building and surprised a single screen theatre could brave competition from multiplexes. But this is Kerala, everything is possible. Saw two movies in two days.

Street views

On my way to work one day in 2014. Near Jogeshwari, Mumbai. There are some pictures crying to be taken. This was taken during the rains.

The aroma of onions

This was written at end 2013.
..................................................................................

I'm sitting at my work table, and for the last couple of days i've been thinking that there's food stored in the drawers of my table. Though there's also the niggling thought that it's actually the onions and garlic sharing space on the window ledge, level with my ear. complicated seating arrangements, right?
My husband is always unhappy about the way i keep house. I would eat something that has recently expired. He would throw it out a month before. and so on and so forth.
But with the recent spiral of onion prices, we ended up watching onion prices carefully, reminds me of my parents buying gold ornaments when i was a kid, and then going off to the wholesaler and buying two kgs of onions and potatoes. The only problem is when they start rotting.
On 24 December we went into overdrive... we were cooking mutton for the larger family and so bought 3-4 kgs of onions and another 3-4 kgs of potatoes and a kg of garlic. Half of the onions and tubers went into the mutton curry.

The cook (pure veg) likes to add potatoes in whatever vegetable she's making. It's edible only when she does. And we only keep her on because she's been able to stand me for the last five years. So, now, we're down to a couple of large potatoes from last year's batch. We still have a watermelon and a couple of apples from last year. We're both silently wondering who will peel and dice the fruits and serve it to the minions.

My husband is so worried of the waste... what if the onions rot. So he lays them down on the bedroom window ledge. This is the bedroom my mother slept in when she was alive. We have yet to move into it and the bed is now sagging under the weight of my oven,  cake mixer, their packaging, curtains that need washing, papers - his and mine, a leather folder that has some more papers etc.

A few months ago, my husband also tied a clothesline between the TV stand on one wall and the curtain rod on the opposite. His only worry seems to be that people can peep in and see that we are drying our clothes in our bedroom.

The window ledge, a very broad one, now holds a large basket with about 2 kgs of onions and a large quantity of garlic and wafting all about... a pungent smell. The smell reminds me of my early days at the Times of India.

The paste up artists would buy onions in kilos and store them in lockers next to the draft board. The smell so pungent,  some days so welcome and fragrant and, on others,  when the skinny horny artist told me to stand near him and proceeded to skewer my breasts with his elbow, tortured.

It ended one day when I was told I had to put the edition to bed early. I ran up with the layout and explained it to the artist. Ran down to work on the articles. After I'd sent it up electronically, I ran back up to check and sign off the layout.

The layout was a mess. Pasted in the wrong places,  with no resemblance to the layout. It was when he insisted on me standing next to me and poked my breast in the process that I roared that he'd pasted crap on the page and I could do it with half a brain. I was close to grabbing his collar and trying to wrestle his blade from him when the Malayali supervisor slid between us and begged me to go back to my floor and return in about 20 mins. After which I found the page beautifully made... and signed off quickly.

That night my best friend, and working at Economic Times at the time, told me I had quite likely incited a strike and that none of the paste-up guys would work with me again,  and that my useless temper had got the better of me.

Needless to say, I didn't sleep a wink that night.

I returned next day, glumly climbing the stairs to supervise the layout, and had a few guys crowding my table and chatting.

I'd become famous. And a tad popular.  And I realised I came to adore the guys upstairs.

Also breast poker became very careful thereafter.


My obituary

I got this idea after reading Veena V's obit. I enjoyed readin her's and writing mine.

An Obituary

Arwa Penna, the author, poet, traveler, blogger and serial nut, has died aged 90. According to one of her few surviving friends, her last words were that death had taken its own time.

Work was her life and unspectacular in every way. But on retiring she began to travel, a taste of which she got during a three-year break from work. She trekked the Himalayas and ghats of Western India and travelled well into her 80s, resulting in books on travel, poetry and fiction, almost all of which was vigorously rejected by publishers.

Some of her poetry was published, but not well received. She was, as she said in an interview with the Telegraph, “Over the moon it was published, grateful for the crumbs of fame, and eventually crushed by the rejection and derisive criticism it attracted.”

After being widowed, she embarked, with some surprise, on a series of ‘indiscretions’ with men, all notably younger. As she said of her Syrian Christian self, “When I was young, I was repressed and inhibited. Strangely, in my dotage men seem to find me interesting, which is hugely flattering. What’s the harm in a pleasant distraction.”

The longest such distraction was a pint-sized Tunisian, a financial whiz and already in possession of a wife and a brood of children. The pair met frequently, sometimes in other countries, something Arwa attributed to keeping her on her toes, physically and emotionally.

She was a supporter of equal inheritance and property rights for women and equal rights in the workplace. In the 36 years of her career, she did not get a single promotion. A manager, later a friend, attributed it to her ‘voluble’ and ‘aggressive’ nature. In almost all the companies she worked with, she attempted to join their trade unions, perceived as a threat by their respective managements. One newspaper group, the Bombay Pavwalla, blocked her every application/attempt to join the union. The matter was taken to court and so fiercely fought that it proved to be the company’s undoing. It was eventually liquidated and the case was closed just before Arwa reached retirement at age 58.

Arwa’s constant fights with management, however, stole the shine from her real achievements. She got them to help nearby villages generate electricity, implement organic farming methods and helped create a crude form of co-operative farm insurance.

Arwa’s intense quirkiness came out in her writing and most aspects of her later life. At age 51, she embarked on a hiatus, trekking in the Himalayas, living off herbs, fruits and food offered by kindly villagers, sleeping in the rough, swimming the ice cold rivers and rejoicing the death of her menses.

At age 54, she broke her leg while running down the stairs at Dehradun railway station for a train to Bardhhaman, following which she decided to return to Mumbai. And get a job.

A number of consultancies led to a senior editorial role at the Royal Bank of Scotland, where she managed to get a series 16 certification, something that had eluded her for more than 18 years in the investment banking industry.

At her retirement, she was gifted a gold-plated ball point pen and a copy of Jeffrey Archer’s Honour Among Thieves, both of which prominently sported price tags. She was not sure if the title was meant to mean anything. The book she had read before. She attributed the price tags and book choice to the careless attitude of modern corporates and the plastics manning them.