These are a few of the things I miss...At this time of the Year

1. Witches diving into the grass, ghosts hanging from treets, R.I.P headstones, pumpkins and jack o' lanterns.

2. Pumpkin and pecan pie.

3. Crisp falls days not soggy, cloudy ones.

4. The cashier at the drugstore with her light-up pumpkin ear rings and truly hideous ghost sweater.

5. Buying candy in bulk for trick or treaters and sampling them all beforehand.

Yes, I miss fall in America, in the North-East especially. I miss seeing Halloween and early Thanksgiving decorations.

I did see a little girl dressed up as a witch at the airport the other day....but that almost aggressive holiday spirit is missing. Of course, when I am in the U.S. I bemoan the commercialization....but now as I go for a walk and don't see a scarecrow or a fall wreath anywhere, I miss it. Yes I do.

Tarun Tejpal's editorial

"There is nowhere in India that you can take your daughter if you wish to level her with the beast of Partition, the beast of the 1984 Sikh riots, the beast of a hundred communal and caste massacres, or the beast of Gujarat 2002. Because we do not remember, we repeat; because we do not look the evil in the eye, it dogs us all the time."

Read this wonderfully written editorial by Tejpal on Tehelka, as well as, the expose that proves that the Gujarat progrom was well planned and was carried out with the full support of Modi and others.

Not that I had any doubts...but perhaps some did.

The interviews of some of those involved in the planning and execution of the progrom are chilling and scary.

SILENCE!!!

More than one person upon meeting me---after reading my writing and/or blog---proclaims, "Oh you're much quieter and calmer than I thought you would be."

I never know how to respond. Usually I squirm inside and feel apologetic and then come up with something inane like, "Yeah, everyone says that." Or the even more inane and pati-parmeshwar response, "Oh my husband is the outgoing, talkative one." Or the more studied and *somewhat* true response: I usually get quieter the more outgoing the othe person is. And if someone else is quiet I feel an urge to be more talkative and chatter away."

So I am clearly this strangely desperate balance-seeker of some kind or a pativrata stree as befits a nice Indian woman. What the fuck! And then I kick myself. Over and over again.

I am quiet. I am talkative. Depending on who you talk you'll get one truth.

I was the quiet child who skulked around in corners and spent hours during the summer staring at the too-bright blue sky imagining strange worlds.

I was the talkative child who would not shut up and was known as a chatterbox.

Then I became the almost too-quiet child. But still the chatterbox would emerge. In some ways I feel like I kept the loud, talker buried within. Some people saw that side of me. A few people.

But on the whole I am the kind of person who likes spending time by myself. I don't mind not talking. As long as I have a book or the Internet I'm good.

But....I only think I am quiet when someone brings this up. I don't think of myself as the silent type really. I can speak in public without dissolving into a puddle. I can make presentations and I get the usual nervousness but nothing drastic. Heck! I taught public speaking as a TA for some years. I can talk. I even like to talk. To discuss. To break ideas apart and bring them together. I like puns and jokes and when I am in my element I can make people laugh.

So, while I come up with those same, predicatable responses, apologetic for not being a phuljari, patakha kind of gal (Oh! how I wish I was, sometimes) I wonder if I am indeed quiet. Or am I putting on a show? Unconsciously...but a show nevertheless.

After this very long post I add another question: Am I a narcissist? A quiet narcissist?

Dumbledore is gay....*Yaaaaaaaawn*

I don't understand why this is front page news. For god's sake I am more surprised the man is 300 years or whatever old. Now *that* is news. Being gay...not so much. Especially the outing of a fictional character from a now-dead series. WTF?

Let me backtrack. I am not a great Potter fan. I've watched the movies and read five...that's five pages of the first book. I could not make it through. This is not because I don't like children's books. I do. But I find nothing really new in Rowling's imagination. She has recycled and re-used things that other authors had. And I don't care for her writing style. But that's just me....thank god there are the million others who hang on her every word.

Don't get me wrong. I am glad that there is something that made kids and adults read (of course, most of them read only HP and nothing else which is a shame, but still) . But this half-assed *revelation* when the books are done but the movies remain seems oddly calculated to me. Not to mention pandering to the liberal types (I am one so I resent being manipulated) to defend gayness (which is not the issue here at all) and to create an adversarial relationship, yet again, with the conservatives.

If she had made his gayness openly stated in the book and used that storyline to teach tolerance or whatever in a sensitive manner I would have been all for it. But this re-writing of the backstory seems calculated to make rabid fan-fiction folks go nuts imaginging old Dumbledore in various states of undress and to make controvorsy for the sake of controvorsy.

The fact that the whacko Christian right went nuts over the magic elements in the books just shows me how whacko they are. The fact that, after the fact, the author outs a character just for the sake of courting controvorsy seems rather pathetic to me.

On the shelf at Off the Shelf

Off the Shelf bookstore in Geneva is now stocking a few copies of my book, The Burden of Foreknowledge. I love this quaint little store, reached by a creaking, wooden spiral staircase. Almost as if it transports you to another world. It's small but they have a great selection of books and magazines. It's becoming my favorite place in Geneva.

The Glory of His Smile: A *Very* Short Story

He feels the closeness as he never had before. The breeze coming in from the barely-open window of the car touches him like a balm. His hand on his shoulder guides him, carrying him past all obstacles. He is blessed.

Was the a glimpse of paradise, verdant and cool as he speeds past an empty, deserted lot? He sees himself as he was, weak. And now he is made powerful. Made righteous and whole. His cotton shirt has already soaked up the tears of his mother and sisters as they said farewell to him just fifteen minutes ago. He feels the loss of the moisture on his skin and he wavers.

He closes his eyes just for an instant. The car swerves slightly and he rights it carefully, his eyes fully open. He stops at the designated place and waits for the designated time. The hands of his watch speed up and then slow down in a strange cabaret. He prays. The hands steady and he counts down.

"I am ready," he says out loud and feels the glory of the divine smile beside him. Around him.

The car hovers in an instant of waiting silence before it explodes.

How many people has the Myanmar military junta detained?

That might never be known. What is sad is the world that looks away when unarmed monks are attacked, thousands disappear and reports of abuse filter in. Just recently they gunned down a Japanese journalist in the street...this despite Japan's multi-million dollar aid to Myanmar in 2006 alone.

Let's not forget Burma and the Burmese people during these times.

Food snobbishness

I am a bit of a food snob. There! I said it. I don't share the usual desi love for masala chai. Yuck! I like my tea very propah, brewed in a tea pot, milk and sugar served separately. Some might call it a slavish remanant of the raj. I just call it good tea. And civilized!

And I feel the same way about biryani...the snobbishness I mean. It might be unreasonable but many people cook biryani like pullao and call it biryani. Now I've only recently learned how to cook biryani from my sister who is the best biryani cook in my opinion. But even before that I knew you couldn't just make the curry and then boil the rice in it, somewhat similar to pullao (which is cooked in the meat broth) and call it biryani. Heresy!

The curry is cooked and thickened so it doesn't make the end result soggy and squishy. Each grain of rice needs to stand apart from the other. Then you boil the water until the rice is almost done...but not quite. Then you layer the rice with the thickened curry and simmer until it's done. No gooey biryani please.

It's a precise process, part science, part art...and totally delicious. And yes, no vegetables in the biryani. I am a Muslim biryani snob....no potatoes and peas in mine please. It's a meat and rice dish. Period!

And yes, no food coloring either. Gasp! Like a good paella a good biryani gets part of its color and its unique fragrance and subtle flavor from saffron. I dissolve mine in kewra water and that's when the biryani becomes what it is. Not an overtly spicy-hot dish but with layers of complex flavors, fragrance and appearance.

I miss wedding biryanis from Allahabad and Kanpur. Mine is a cheap imitation of a good imitation (my sister's recipe) but man those U.P. muslim wedding cooks, their biryani can make you weep. As do their salan and their kebabs. And the sheermal...just sweet enough and heavenly with a spicy wedding curry. And the naan, not the overly-white and soft naans from Indian restaurants, but the good stuff, slightly rough (whole wheat flour) and porous to soak up the spicy curries. I WANT SOME!

I need to get invited to a U.PMuslim wedding.

But until tha happens I am thrilled about my own quite decent, chaste and pure biryani. I just made a potfull yesterday and we've finished almost all of it already. Maybe there'll be some for dinner. Can't wait.

More than an evening in Paris

I did it!

I drove the five hours from Geneva to Paris (and back) myself...I had passengers but I did all the driving. All over the weekend. We arrived in Paris around 11 and I did the prospect of which terrified me the most...merging into the traffic around the Arc de Triomphe. Can you say nerve-wracking??

Still I managed not to run over the million insane pedestrians (those damn tourists) or bang up the car and drove us down the Champs Elysees to our apartment and even managed to find parking. Yay! Safe and sound.

Then it was the usual Paris sights and trying to stay up late and wake up early to cram as much as possible for the poor in-laws who had me inflicted on them as a tour guide. Walking up and down long stairs, running from the RER to the metro and the different lines....and the ancient Paris tradition of wandering around utterly lost.

And...yes...hold your breath...interacting with *nice* Parisians. There were the two girls who looked at the map for me when I was a tiny (ok...a lot) lost and disorented the first evening trying to find my way from the garage to the apartment. Okay, so they totally got me lost...I was 5 minutes away from the apartment and they sent me off on a 30 minute wild goose chase.

Then the totally cool British couple (well, they live there so they qualify as Parisians) who walked with us to show us the closest metro stop to the Eiffel Tower. His company had posted him in Paris. He went mountain climbing in Switzerland. He was doing a master's course in French while she was learning it. And they were pros with the Paris transit system.

Can I mention the slightly creepy but kind of cool guy who hit on me as I waited on a bench, reading a book, drinking coffee while the others went up to the top (I'm kind of over the climb now)?

And the nice cop. Yep! The last night we were there (the second night) France won a major rugby tournament against New Zealand. It was wild. Traffic was stopped as people danced in the streets. Two tres chic girls in very short skirts and very high heels ran up and down the Champs Elysees waving a French flag. And all around us horns were blaring. Long and short beeps...loud, loud, loud.

As we walked around the Arc a cop came and said that we had to leave and wait in the tunnel a few minutes before making our way back. We went down and as we were walking to the exit this other cop started talking to us. He was totally in the mood to chat, asking where we were from, wondering what was going on on the surface. He actually seemed upset that we walked away and upstairs.

The street celebration was a riot (almost literally I think)....the crowds were huge and it was hard not to get infected with their sheer joy. I wish I was that enthused about something. Oh well!

For the first time I kind of liked being in Paris. Tres magnifque Paris. Au revoir.

Burma article on Slate

Guess who's quoted on Slate ? Except, of course, I'm a she not a he. Why is it that most people (unless they are S. Asians) always assume I am male? *thanks...Sujatha* :-)

Wonder why. So Michael Weiss (yes, he's sure to be visiting my l'il blog) if you see this question, do you assume male by default or is there something about my name? :-) Not that it matters but I am glad Burma is being discussed somewhere.

Solidarity for the unbroken human spirit

The history of my family has intertwined with the history of Burma. I remember hearing stories of the coup, of how my mother's uncle (a cabinet minister) survived the shooting of the cabinet because he was home at the time. And then he spent the next 20 years or so in prison, being let out only when his bone cancer had spread throughout. My mother remembers bombed out buildings after the war (WW II) as part of the images of her childhood.

For years, Burma has languished under military rule. And now these brave monks, protected by a fragile human shield of civilians, who refuse to lay down and die just...it just makes me tear up

(AGI) - Yangon, 26 September - Approximately 200 Buddhist monks, surrounded by a human chain of supporters, have recommenced their marches in Yangon of protest against the military junta, according to eye-witness reports from the former Burmese capital. The march has restarted despite reports that police this morning used batons and arrested several monks in a bid to prevent the marching from restarting after the first night of curfew.

SOLIDARITY!

Fair and Lovely Accents

I've been wondering recently about accents. It's interesting to note that when we move to a place with a perceived cool accent (the U.K, even the U.S. and Australia) that accent is quickly incorporated.

Hey, I'm just wondering. Not that I've consciously inculcated (at least I don't think I have) it but I have a totally American accent (well the mid-western, less-accented version) myself so it's not like I am picking on others.

I know people who've moved to London and suddenly they sound like a Brit. But, on the other hand, I know others who've moved to Thailand or Kenya or Japan or Malaysia and they don't have the accent of the English-speakers of that country.

Curious!

I guess, in India, someone moving from a small town to Bombay or Delhi takes on that accent. Again, because it's cooler. It gets you more. Impresses people. Perhaps even impresses you, huh?

But then it's not really unconscious, is it? I remember when I was in university (many, many moons ago) in Allahabad. This girl went off to be seen or meet or whatever it's called, her husband-to-be who lived in the U.S.. She spent a few hours with him getting to know him (how do you do that?).

Anyway, she came back to class with a weird American accent. When someone asked her she retorted, "Well, if you spend time with someone it automatically has an effect. It just happens."

I wonder if her fiance went back to the U.S. with an Indian, Allahabadi accent. Probably not.

But what's at the root of this phenomenon? Is there something else, something beyond the it just happened/it's natural/it just is excuses. Is it just that we pick up something from where live? But, if it's that why is our unconscious selection so discriminating? Why an American accent but not a Mexican one?

We choose to take on accents from those whom we perceive as being somewhat superior (interestingly few moving to the UK start talking with a cockney accent, or with a Texas twang in the U.S.), better than us.

And we might spend years in a country with other English speakers, even if they are not the majority (as in India) and never seem to pick up that less "desirable" accent.

What makes a British accent sexy and proper? What makes us go weak in the knees when we hear an Australian drawl? What makes the way we pronounce our words, where we place emphases, how we break them up so fraught with shades of superiority/inferiority, and dare I say it--- racism? Is there some subtle racism at work here? Something subterranean, lurking under the surface?

Are accents the fair and lovely creams of the language world? Do we smear them on to escape the duskiness that is just a thin surface away?

There is nothing inherently sexy or proper or cool about any of this. We buy into the Western superiority argument. Is there really an argument? We just do it...without thinking what that says about the world we live in, about us and about those we choose to emulate and more importantly, and more importantly, those we choose not to emulate.

Ba Ba Mouton Noir!!!

You know it's bad when Germany and Britain call you the dark heart of Europe. Oucch!

Ooh la la...here's yet another reminder that all is not as it seems...even in a land as perfect as a painting with its history of neutrality (mmm...Nazi money anyone?), fresh air (oh those fascinating consumptives and their quest for Swiss air) and chocolates (okay, they're holy, let's not go there).

Yes, this is the poster for the Swiss People's Party...and no it's not a kids cartoon. Those are three white sheep atop the Swiss flag kicking a black sheep (Baaaa!) across the border. Now some say that this poster alluded to kicking out foreign-national criminals from La Suisse.

But others see it as racist. I ask you...why couldn't that sheep have on a beret and a striped T-shirt? Or wearing clogs? Perhaps showing a row of bad British teeth? Eating a bowl of pasta?

Non!! Mon Dieu! It's a black sheep so yes, I must come down on the side of those who call it racist.

The funny thing is I've driven past this poster a few times and thought it was advertizing something for kids. It was not until the controvorsy broke that the old lightbulb went off in my head.

Not that I am shocked. Few things shock me these days.

And, oh btw, that is one agile sheep...do you see its two hind legs kicking out in tandem. That is the Jackie Chan....errrr...(wrong color)....William Tell of sheep. Except then he'd be shooting an arrow at the apple on top of the sheep's head. Never mind!

I need to brush up on my Swiss references. It's either William Tell or Heidi. And we all know what Heidi would do....milk the damn sheep...drink the frothy, warm milk (Yechhh!), make some cheese and then kick the sheep over the border. Oh man!

P.S. For all those who asked. I am fine though I have a slight whiplash (a bit like being a little bit pregnant) but I now drive like an old lady and those darned Swiss bicycles just swoosh past me. But I don't care. They can't kick me...I am in my tank-like car.

F-150 and I: Dancing the Tango on a Wet and Rainy Street

I know the size of the front of a Ford F-150 truck. is it 20 times my head? Thirty? Of that I cannot be sure. But I know for an instance it is the size of the world and everything in it. It takes over your vision, fills your senses and makes your world just a tango for two. You in your mini-SUV and the F-150, white and black coming together as if by some inescapable force

And then you realize that that strangely graceful time as it slid towards you before the impact was just a prelude. That its grace is less elengance and more sheer power and brute force. And that the music looping in my head splinters apart in the garish cymbals of breaking glass and buckling metal.

And then, after, when it's done, when the cops and the ambulance are gone, when I've called anyone who needs to be called, using my most-calm voice....that's when the fear arrives. More than the soreness of my body...is the magnitude of my fear.

Fear of driving...driving like an old lady, avoiding sitting behind the wheel, re-living that silver grille on a black surface slamming into my car. Spinning around in slow motion.

My life did not flash before my eyes. I thought of no one. I ceased being myself.

How can something that lasts an instant still be with me three days later? Will it still be here 3 weeks later, 3 months?

How do people go back to real life after being seriously injured in car accidents? How do they get their nerve back?

I barely faced my mortality in that accident and I am not (well I'll know for sure when I go to the doctor) even injured and yet I feel as if I've lost something, some part of myself that I might never find again. Something I still need to search for and reclaim.

As soon as I figure out what it is. But I am happy (is that the right word?) to be still here...still alive.

The air smells sweet and I fill my lungs with it before letting it go...slowly!

Come to my window

Usually outside my window I see mountains: green, brown, and white. I see green meadows and brown and white spotted cows (I hear them too...usually way before I want to wake up in the morning). I see gentian Swiss skies and feel like I am lost in the picture on old Nestle powdered milk cans.

Today I see a parked goods train, while another with passengers slides away gently. The skies are blue and there are trees. Different...but comforting somehow.

It's a good day.

Soft and Gentle

We have spectacular thunderstorms here. The mountains echo with the claps of thunder, magniying the sound until it bounces from one to the other. Lightning shines in flashes. That was at night and early morning.

Now it's raining, softly, gently. And I can hear the sway of the trees and see the grey of the dense clouds as they cap the valley. From here to infinity. To eternity.

Coins in the Fountain

The last time I visited Rome was seven years ago when we live in Connecticut. At 11 am on a Friday, I returned from the dentist and B said, "hey, let's have lunch in Rome tomorrow."

I threw in some clothes in a bag and with two other friends of ours we drove like bats out of hell (only the bats are slower) to T.F. Green (about an hour's drive which we made in like 40 minutes) and went to Rome for the weekend.

It was strangely surreal. We were tired and jetlagged and lost track of time. Our friend, M, said, "hey, remember the day we arrived?" We were like, "uh, you mean this morning?"

It was a wonderful weekend, especially because it was such a rare thing. Some people commended me for putting up with my husband like I was some long-suffering wife. Hello!!! I traveled by myself for months in the Indian Himalayas and backpacked through India with my best friend for three months.

I resented being cast as the dutiful, indulgent wife when I could barely wait to throw my clothes into my bag and take off.

I am thinking of Rome because this past weekend was spent there. This time the flight was just about an hour, there was no jetlag and it was insanely hot (yes, me with my heat intolerance and these summer vacations in hot places. wtf?).

Still....Rome was beautiful. The eternal city, alive and lovely at every turn. Built on the sweat of slaves and the blood of millions, it has a certain weary aura and an undeniable mystique. I prefer Rome to Paris. I think it's a more soulful city...and there was very little dog poop on the streets.

The last time we couldn't visit the Sistine Chapel (this time I spent a lot of time there) or the Trevi fountain (I am not much for customs that consist of me tossing money into water).

But there it was, this amazing, beautiful fountain, gushing water on an evening the air was so still and thick I could swallow the heat. And the spray from the water cooled my face and I dipped my hands and arms in it and for an instant got some respite from the furnace of Rome.

I threw in these coins: half a Swiss franc, a US dime, a 20 cent Euro coin and a 50 paise coin: all my homes (well the Euro is more neighbor but you get the point).

Even though I was back in Rome despite not having thrown a coin in the Trevi the last time, this time I wanted to be sure I would return (not in summer though).

I also wanted to be sure that I would also go back to the other places that hold places of my heart. Places where I have left pieces of my heart.

Arriverderci Roma!

Change...It does a body good

So, I am trying out a new look. Of course, all my links got deleted as did my hit counter which I think is a good thing...in a way. Let's see how long I hang on to this new look. I do tend to get comfortable with the status quo....so this might be it. But then again, I might find something nicer.

Sometimes even clouds get trapped

White, grey or ominously black, clouds seem so very free. Vagabonds and wanderers, so much so that even Wordsworth started his famous Daffodils with, "I wandered lonely as a cloud." Lonely, yes, but still a wanderer.

We look down on them from airplanes and I watch them over the Jura mountains every day to get advance warning of the weather. I know that even if the sun is shining, a grey cloud, hovering like a cap over the mountain tops signals rain later in the day.

And then, yesterday, I saw a trapped cloud. A young cloud, white and fluffy, it was hemmed in by Le Saleve. It drifted all day from one side of the mountain to the other. Low to the ground it seemed to slink about trying to find a way out.

From a distance it was a smudge, from closer up, wispy and insubstantial--it is just condensed water after all--but real, so very real.

As evening advanced it shone white through the approaching dark. And we talked about the cloud captured by Le Saleve. It seemed tired out, more still somehow, as if it was giving up.

This morning it was gone. Free as a cloud again.

Love and Desperation

I found this story incredibly sad. A man, whose wife was sick with neurological problems and uterine cancer, almost blind, bed-ridden and just 75 pounds pushed her off the balcony after kissing her.

He could no longer afford to pay for her medical costs, which were in the thousands of dollars per month.

How do we make these choices? What would I do in a similar situation? What would you do?

He did not run or try to concoct a story. He just waited and told police that "she did not jump."

Read more about it here: http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/08/16/wife.killed.ap/index.html

Is this finally the case that will put the usurous US health insurance industry on trial?

There but for the grace of God go I...and you.

Naina and the Dancing Hijabis

**This post might (will) be offensive to ultra-religious and hijabi types but I am PMSing and I just want to be mean and offensive today. So there**


Last week we went to the Fetes de Geneve, basically a giant fair along the lake in Geneva. They had a ferris wheel, other strange rides and more importantly lots and lots of yummy food stalls at the not-so-usual for Geneva bank-breaking prices. Interestingly most of the stalls were Indian. Samosas here I come. There were also wicked looking cocktails (sadly I was still on antibiotics and cortisone so I had to abstain) and cotton candy and churros.


Oh yes, when I say we went to the fair I include my dog, Naina. She was excited, sniffing at the ground, the air, trying to figure out what all the excitement was about.


We were about 30 feet away from this ninja...errrr....hijabi woman. Did I mention most of the fair attendees were the Arabs who descend on Geneva in the summer? She had her index fingers up in the air and was sort of jerking around rather rythmically.


I was thinking, cool the woman is dancing. A bit strange to be doing a bhangraesque dance while in full religious regalia but she's happy, she's at the fair...so whatever. Then she comes closer and starts shaking a finger in my face, "no...no...no....dog...no...no."


What the fuck? My dog, on a short leash (maybe a two-foot leash, while she was really about 30 feet away) was happily sniffing some other dog's pee on the ground (charming, yes, but that's my dog) nowhere close to this woman. If you're afraid of dogs why come closer to one to admonish its owner?


I said, "My dog has no interest in you," and she gave me a dirty look. Okay, so I think it was a dirty look since all I could see were her eyes and I really need to see someone's entire face to interpret expressions.


We continued walking. And I realized either I was the modern equivalent of Moses or people were just jumping back on either side when we passed. I am not exaggerating. Mothers would pull their kids back, husbands would bark out something to their wives and they would just fall back. Yes, the good religious folk were fleeing the polluting presence of my dog. You do have to wash yourself seven times if you are touched by a dog. I love touching my dog. She feels great, silky and fluffy and warm. I am perennially unclean I guess.


Then this 7 or 8 year old brat runs forward with an inflatable baseball bat (I wonder if his religious parents knew the bat had pot leaves all over it) and behaves like he is going to swat her on the head with it. I looked at him and said in my sternest, mean voice, "I don't think so," and he slunk away.


If he had even touched her I would have hit him. I was getting really pissed off about this. No one says you have to love my dog or even pet it or whatever, but quit behaving like idiots. All dogs are not itching to attack you, especially one that has its nose to the ground sniffing or trying to look pathetic so that I'll give her a churro (I did).


Geneva is an incredibly dog-friendly city so when we stepped into a weird parody of a country western bar tent, the waitress immediately brought water for her. She got tons of petting including from this very cute and very energetic two-year old.


This kid kept running to Naina, petting her (roughly) on her head, poking at her paws, her eyes, pulling her tail and sticking a finger up her nose. She was very sweet and very into the dog but Naina, who usually cannot get enough of being touched, retreated under the table, looking at me reproachfully each time this girl touched her somewhere she didn't want to be touched. Still, she did nothing. Just moved her paw or her face away while I tried to teach the kid to be gentle. Eventually, she would just pat her face and her head very sweetly and semi-gently.


Usually when I am out walking I keep Naina really close to my side, walking at my heel so that she doesn't bother people. I know some people are afraid of dogs so I try to be a good citizen.


Now as stepped into little Arabia again, even though I still kept her close to my side I wished that some some hair or something of hers would get on to some of the people jumping back from her. Okay, so I might have held her just a little bit more out there than I usually do. I was getting sick of this strange dog paranoia.


The said dog however was having a grand time. An old man knelt down and hugged her and a little girl petted her belly. Naina was in doggie heaven.


Then I saw a woman wearing a headscarf, looking at her eyes. Her eyes get a lot of attention..since one is blue and the other brown. I braced myself for another negative reaction, some jumping out of the way, abject terror.


Instead this woman rushed over to Naina and hugged her tightly (which she tolerates but does not like) and petted her. Then she called her son who was on some spinning ride and brought him over so he could pet her as well. We managed to communicate despite her broken English and my total lack of Arabic.


She said Naina reminded her of her dog at home. That her dogs too had eyes like Naina. She wanted to know nothing about me but everything about my dog. How old was she? What did her name mean? etc. etc.


We spent about 10 minutes talking about the dog. "Bye, bye Naina," she screamed out as we left. I smiled.


I had confronted a stereotype and it was slightly altered but to be honest hijabis still make me uncomfortable and the Arab invasion of Geneva strikes me as odd. They love what Geneva has to offer. But they still don't want most of it in their own countries. Why?

Perhaps as a (semi) Muslim woman I am even more sensitive to this whole head scarf/hijab thing. I don't remember hearing any of these debates when I was a child but suddenly it's a big thing. When did it become such a symbol of identity.

As a child I was told proudly that no woman in three generations of my family had observed purdah. It was seen as a step forward. And now there are young women choosing to wear hijab as a right. To some they are asserting their rights as Muslim women. To me they are regressing and setting women back.

I am not sure I understand this at all. This need to set yourself apart when there is no need to. Dress modestly. Be religious. Pray five times and definitely avoid my dog. But why make yourself into a spectacle? Why attract more attention when the stated purpose of the hijab is to attract less?

I am liberal, unabashedly so and feminist, unreservedly so. And I find religiosity and religious people rather frightening. I believe they have the right to believe and do what they want to do but I can't understand it. Or want to understand it. And I have the right to find them frightening and strange.

Interestingly, it is liberals who support the right to wear the hijab. And so uneasily I find myself on the side of a more conservative viewpoint. I believe (and I am sure many will disagree) that wearing the hijab is injurious to women...and men.

It pre-supposes that women are just their bodies and their hair and by controlling these two, society is made safer. It pre-supposes that men are lustful animals unable to control themselves. And it pre-supposes that women have to curtail their personal freedom and bear the responsibility for men's inability to control themselves.

I have a solution.

Instead of women wearing hijabs, why don't men wear blindfolds? I'll even throw in the white canes for free.

And then Naina and I can go to the fair without dancing hijabis and bratty kids.

Happy Birthday India and Happy Anniversary to us

We make wishes and they are blown away by time, breath on a thistledown scattering away the fairy-like petals until nothing is left but the core. And isn't it the core that matters?

When the flesh falls away from the bone and all other things rot, what is left behind is real. And substantial and pure.

What is left of India after 60 years is its skeleton, its core. And there are problems, of course, but despite it all, there she stands. And today, of all days, I want to overlook the issues, the problems, the things that did not go so well and just bask in a grand idea that became a reality. And what a reality.

Just as we are 13 years later, a reality that few would have predicted.

I love you.

Undead Bread

I love the bread in Europe. At our local boulangerie and patisserie we get freshly baked baguettes. But we can also get fresh bread from the Shell station, any small convenience store. And all of it is wonderful. They put no preservatives, however, so by the next day it's hard as a rock and about as fun to eat. Not that I mind. We've all dreamed of European village life and a freshly-baked baguette is always part of the fantasy, right?

But sometimes I just want some soft, regular sandwich bread. You know the regular kind. The Swiss and the French grocery stores do carry these. And you can tell the disdain in which our humble, sliced sandwich bread is held.

First of all, most of the brands call them toast. There is a difference between bread and toast damnit. Then, as a nod to American portion size, there is one that announces (in a giant starburst): Great Big American Sandwiches. And let me assure the slices are about the size of a thimble, nothing great or big or for that matter American about it.

Now we're back to preservatives. So good quality fresh bread has none. Agreed! But apparently for us sliced bread eaters, they put in a giant dose of the stuff. You know we have no appreciation for anything good so we probably love eating some chemicals with our bread. We are American after all.

I have this loaf in my cabinet. I think I bought it 4 weeks ago. There is no fungus, nothing sprouting, it's still soft and white and flawless looking...if you put rubber and flawless in the same sentence that is. But I digress!

I mean really...bread in the US would last maybe a week without some grey/green life emerging on it. But this stuff...it's the dracula of bread. I think it'll stay the way it is for a couple of months. Yechh!

All Hail the Undead Bread

Hot Air and Views

The Temple of Hatshepsut

Views from Hot Air Balloon

What the heck am I doing up so early? It's dark and I had hit my best sleep. I am in a boat with seventeen others, heading out from our cruise boat in a motor boat and on to some field in Luxor.

It's hot-air balloon time. We rise with the warm current, 17 of us stuffed into four standing compartments and I watch the sun rise over the Nile. Over the haze of modern Luxor, I can see ancient Thebes shimmer and come alive for that one instant where the powerful sun-god Ra appears to establish his mastery over the earth.



But the sounds of Luxor waft up. Prayers and shouts and music and Ra is defeated yet again.



The heat from the balloon is well...hot. It is called a hot air balloon after all. And we float noiselessly over the Valley of the Kings.



And I see the temple of Hatshepsut rise up from the desert. Almost as if it is part of the desert.



A temple of a usurper, a woman who invented the story of her divine birth, where her mother was impregnated by the spirit of the great Amun-Ra. So she had to rule, not her stepson Tuthmoses III. A woman who did not call herself queen but a pharoah, a King of Egypt. A king because she was the son of Amun-Ra, not his daughter. A woman defined not so much by what she was but what she was not. And all the more powerful for it. She ruled for 27 years before her death.



Hatshepsut whose name was all but expunged by those who came after her. For never should a usurper be honored. But clues were left behind and the son of another pharaoah who treasured history left a trail to her in ancient hieroglyphs. History does not die. It can only be forgotten for a while. Hidden away until it chooses to come to light.



They said she was not mummified--the most horrible thing for an ancient Egyptian king--so that she would not be re-born. So that she would truly die and so that her soul would not ever ascend to the paradise of Osiris.



But then a lone tooth fit perfectly into an empty spot in an unidentified mummy's mouth and what was once the body of a 45-60 year obese female with bad teeth and hair was confirmed as the mummy of that most unusual pharaoah, Hatshepsut.




This happened just a few weeks before I leaned down from my balloon and saw her temple rising from the harsh sands of Egypt. Do kings remain kings forever?

Okay, is she not the cutest dog ever?

My niece took this picture while Naina took a quick break from running about madly in the backyard while she plotted her next evil move.

I can't believe she is 6. She looks like an overgrown puppy and people are constantly surprised that she is not just 9 or 10 months old. We need to figure out the youth serum she's using.

So...Naina in the Backyard for your viewing and awwwwwing pleasure.

Shambhu the coffee-loving sweeper politician

"What you doing here now? Me want coffee in cup."

His breath coming in gasps, coughing in strangled spells of time, he would enter through the backdoor. He loved coffee, or really Nescafe. Milky and sweet, he would get it poured into his cup until the brim. Sometimes he asked for and got another cup.

I wondered why he brought his own cup...or rather an old, thick porcelain cup that was part of a long-depleted set that my mother had given him. After drinking his coffee he would wash it and stash it somewhere under the stairs that led from the indoor patio to the terrace. He would retrieve it for his next visit.

I asked about it but was gently told that since he spent his days cleaning toilets it was better if he drank from his designated cup. Better for who?

I wondered why he sat on the floor but somehow I knew not to ask.

All the servants sat on the floor, even if as a child I would ask them to sit on a chair or on the bed. Interestingly their children (some of whom I played with) and now their grandchildren had no problem lounging with me where I sat or lay.

But Shambhu was not even a servant. He was a dalit--a chamar I think-- and for him it seemed to be enough that we included him in our archaic 11 o'clock coffee ritual and that he could practice his broken English on us and we would talk with him.

But while for us he remained a jamaadar, outside he was also a railway employee (all railway sweepers moonlighted cleaning private toilets once they were made 'permanent' and were assured employment). And more importantly he was a politician. He was called 'netaji' and people would greet him with folded hands and give him a chair to sit on while they stood. He was head of a sweepers association and made speeches and apparently brought about some changes. I wonder if they got him coffee instead of 'chai' at these functions. Hhe was in the Hindi paper 'Dainik Jagaran,' with a garland of flowers around his neck, surrounded by people. He showed it to us.

Once while I was going somewhere, I saw three men walk up to him on the street, bow deeply with folded hands as he patted them on the back and talked with an authority I had not seen in him before.

He was severely asthmatic, an ailment he shared with my mother. So, in between talking about "the dogini give birth to puppies,' and 'I tell him, you listen here, I am neta of place not you. You go dafa from here mister,' they discussed their asthma.

"Begum sahib," he would commiserate in hindi, his face serious, "it is very difficult to breathe these days. You seem better."

"No, no, Shambhu, I had a bad attack a week ago but this Tedral is working. Did you get that inhaler I told you to get."

"Haan, this Ventolin," he said, taking it out of his pocket,"I use it but still this way of breathing. What can I do?"

"Are you using it correctly?"

He was not. My mother showed him how. But eventually all medications would stop working well for him. Perhaps it was his job, sweeping the railway platforms caked with Allahabad's prodigious dust and filth. Cleaning the flush toilets was not too bad but he also cleaned the receptacle-based toilets in some of the servants quarters. With a cloth tied around his nose and mouth, he would go in and retrieve their shit in an old bucket, the flies already swarming on early summer mornings. Mostly his wife, Kamala (also a moonlighting railway worker) would take care of these houses of the poor.

Each time he showed up, his breath whistled like a steam kettle, each word punctuated by painful pauses. Sometimes he was better, sometimes worse.

He died a few years ago. He was a postscript in our lives. I am sure, that the by now retired netaji, got more than a few accolades in his consitutency, and I am sure his wife, Kamala, and his children eventually went on with their lives.

I wonder what kind of death it was. Did he struggle to breathe till the end? Was there relief at the end, when he could finally give up the fight to bring air into his lungs? Did someone give him one last cup of coffee in the days leading up to his death.

Why am I thinking about him today?

Because I am my mother's daughter in at least this one thing. I am developing asthma. Today I am struggling to breathe. That lung thing I picked up in Cairo has morphed into a full-blown attack. The last time I had an attack was seven years ago so I guess I am luckier than my mother or Shambhu. I am on a course of Cortisone and some kind of inhaler but there is no positive change, after more than 3 days.

And each time I cough and cannot stop, each time I hear my breathing whistle in and out like a tortured banshee, and I hear my own voice sound strangled and weak, I can smell Nescafe and I can hear Shambhu.

It makes me wonder about him, think about him. The human mind is a selfish, self-obsesseed thing. At least mine is.

Kabhi kabhi kyun?

I wonder why sometimes the words come bursting out of me, like a horse unleashed, like water bursting out of a dam, the thoughts running faster than the words that capture them and my fingers try vainly to catch up, tapping away on the keyboard. So swift flash the images, so fast the words that trap them into concreteness that I can't sleep or eat or think without the caravan of words trampling through my conscious and unconscious mind.

And then, there are these times, when my feelings roil impatiently but.
But the words come out in dribs and drabs. And they are drab and cliched and so indistinct that I want to cry. Times like this. Like now. Like today.

My fingers wait, tapping the space bar, begging some words to rush through me like the wind and kiss me back to life.

Rate my blog please/Embrace the Dark

I found my blog on The Guardian Abroad. You can rate it if you are so inclined. I just think it's kind of fun.

This is what Phil Bowman says about my blog *blush*

"Thursday June 21, 2007 Phil Bowman in England
Like a good road movie, the locations are spectacular but are incidental compared to the central theme; which is definitely film noir. Jawahara Saidullah covers life in all its shades in this thought-provoking blog. From Byronic grafitti carved in stone at the Chateau Chillon to the graves of Morrison and Wilde in Paris, we discover that in order to appreciate the light, we must first embrace the dark."

Pyramids of Giza

The first night we were in Egypt we stayed at the Mena House (the hunting lodge of one of the Egyptian kings) now run by the Oberoi. We had dinner at the outdoor, poolside barbecue place. They brought us hot Egyptian flat bread from the oven and the kebabs were succulent.

But right in front of my eyes, almost close enough to touch I could see it. More than 3000 years old, watching the decline of yet another day, insignificant for them, the great pyramid of Giza.

The light faded gently and I watched as the night absorbed the triangular form into itself. But since I knew where they were, if I stared into the darkness I could just make out a perfect pyramid, where the stars did not shine, where the night was just a shade darker, just a little more intense.

I finished my dinner in the shade of times past and I was humbled.

Flying over Ramses II

Temple of Ramses II from plane (Abu Simbell)

Ramses II was probably the greatest Pharoah of Egypt. The third pharoah of the 19th dynasty, he ruled for 67 years, subjugated and assimilated the nubians, the people of the sea and others. He had 150 children and his wife (probably also his sister, yes, icky but true) Nefertary was the only queen who had a temple built in her honor, right next to the great temple of Ramses II himself in Abu Simbell. His next favorite queen was (ick again) his own daughter with Nefertary who he is said to have married because she so resembled his beloved. He also is said to have married three other of his daughters.


All the incest and begetting aside, Ramses was quite a remarkable ruler and a spectacular man who won many battles (the famous Battle of Kadesh among them) and built amazing structures that stand even today.

He also inspired Shelley to write Ozymandias, one of his most famous short poems. One of the statues of Ramses II at his great temple fell during an earthquake in antiquity, which some say, led Shelley to mock the king thus:

"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.
Near them on the sand,Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Ramses II might have the last laugh though. His monuments survive more than 2000 years later and so, in some ways does he. His mummy lies in quiet repose at the Egyptian museum in Cairo. Ramses II might not have wanted to be gawked at by strangers but...at least we all know who he is as we look at him in awe. I stared at his silky white hair, stained yellow by the mummification process and I closed my eyes for a moment to imagine how he must have been, millenia ago, magnificent king before whom all bowed. I flexed my knees to accord him that royal respect before leaving the room.

Ramses II attained his quest for eternal life in a way. How many of us will be able to do that?

All I can is say I flew over Ramses II and tried to look into his soul.

I went all the way to Egypt and all I got was this lousy chest infection

Yes, I'm back. Days earlier. It's amazing how quickly a vacation loses its luster when you're struggling to breathe and burning up in a fever. I think I have the Egyptian plague...maybe not since it does seem to be responding to antibiotics.

We were lucky enough to be able to leave earlier than planned. So...once I am feeling better, I'll regale you with tales from Egypt.

Hello my friend....how's about a felucca ride? I give you best Egyptian price...

Ok...from Cairo to Aswan to Abu Simbell, back to Aswan and on to Luxor (stopping at Kom Ombo and Edfu in between) before returning (tomorrow) back to Cairo...it's beautiful. And of yes....insanely, absolutely HOT! I am burning up. What's the hieroglyph for air conditioning?

Anyway...will be blogging (and responding to tags) when I return to Geneve.

Another day...another tag

Ok, http://indiequill.wordpress.com/ has tagged me for Eight Random Facts about me. Here goes nothing:

1. I am scared that I won't be able to come up with seven more random facts about myself. At least some that won't make readers roll their eyes and then fall asleep with boredom. Yes, I am insecure.

2. I eat tomatoes in salsa, chopped up in greek salads and indian salaad, in ketchup...but I cannot eat tomato wedges or tomato soup. Yuck! Blechh. Don't know why but there it is.

3. I cannot be in a bathroom without reading something. If it is someone else's bathroom and I can't waltz in with a book or magazine I read anything...seriously...I read the ingredients lists of toothpaste and shampoo and conditioner directions. Anything!

4. I love scatalogical humor even though now that I am older I make an appropriately disgusted face and voice a semi-dignified Ewww. But when I was a kid I had a store of disgusting jokes that I had no problems sharing with anyone who would listen.

5. This is more a guilty confession: I am addicted to Lifetime (yes, television for women)...bring on the woman being hounded and victimized before fighting back, bring on the polygamist pilots and the haunted houses by the lake. I am ready for them all.

6. I used to live on Diet Coke but now cannot drink it at all. After my gall bladder was taken out last year I can only drink the leaded stuff. Sad!

7. I am terrified (like I have nightmares about it terrified) that one day I'll wake up and will not be able to write anything but the most prosaic, basic sentences.

8. I ask my dog Naina "Who's your mommy? Who loves you puppy?" more than 10 times a day...and at the back of my, mind I think one day she will actually respond in human speak. I imagine she has a deep voice but speaks with a very cute lisp. Yes, I am a tad obsessive.

Phew...I am done. Bring on the eye rollers and sleepers. The people I tag are:
binafshe.blogspot.com, auroragirl.blogspot.com, annesutterances.blogspot.com, nowherenick.blogspot.com, themadmomma.blogspot.com, jacpaulus.blogspot.com,firangsquirrel.blogspot.com,blogpourri.blogspot.com

That's it....All those who are tagged. Please do this only if you are okay with it and if you want to. No pressure!

This is how it works, blog about 8 random facts about yourself...they can be anything really. Then tag 8 others to do the same. Remember to leave them a message on their blog so they know they are tagged. Have fun!

Everything I Learned about Switzerland I learned from Bollywood...

Well, from before Bollywood was called Bollywood. When it was just the Hindi film industry. This is what I learned then (and then what the reality is):

1. The skies are always bright blue and the weather always perfect for cavorting (it's been raining almost non-stop this month and the skies are quite grey)

2. If you are female you are impervious to cold as evidenced by your ability to run around in the thinnest chiffon possible. Men--those unlucky bastards--do feel the cold because they need to wear turtlenecks and pea coats (not true, as evidenced by me walking and shivering by the lake...in summer...brrrr)

3. You open your mouth and out pop the lyrics of Gulzar, accompanied by some soulful music (So not true...though I am awakened by braying donkeys outside my window....not Kishore Kumar or Kumar Sanu or whoever)

4. All train stations are picturesque and perfect places for singing and dancing (yeah, well, not unless you want to be stared at and laughed at).

5. It always looks beautiful no matter what (ok...well, that one is true. It is an amazingly beautiful country)

I just have one thing to say to the Indian honeymooners (and assorted Asian tourists) who spent an inordinate amount of time by the flower clock by the lake. WTF? Why are you so fascinated by this thing? There's an actual big mechanical clock and then someone plants flowers over it. Why is it such a big deal? Stop wasting your film and digital space. *Phew*

Tale from the Crypt

Byron has carved his signature into stone, each letter distinct on the lightly colored surface, elegantly delineated. I can imagine him leaning close to the stone pillar and carving out each letter of his name patiently, knowing that generations to come would look upon it and try to divine his presence.

This Byronic graffiti is in of the first floor rooms at the Chateau Chillon, about an hour and a half drive from Geneva. Situated on the banks of the lake, it is part a fortification (and toll booth for lake-faring merchants of yore) and part a stately royal residence.

From the cold stone of the underground dungeons and other rooms to the giant fireplaces and beautifully detailed furniture of the rooms on the top floors, this 900 year old castle appears strangely insubstantial when you view it through the shreds of mist around the lake. But it is real and it has survived for almost a 1000 years mostly intact.

While other tourists wandered around the courtyards and admired the views from the many windows or exclaimed over the painted ceilings and ornate furniture I found myself shuddering in the heat as ghostly fingers crept up my spine.

I had walked into the crypt, a place that others seemed to avoid. In the 15 or so minutes I spent in the crypt there no one else entered. I could hear the sounds of conversation, the laughter (and cries) of children above me, but no one else was around.

It was damp and occasional shafts cut into the ceiling let in light while slits on the side of the stone walls gave me glimpses of the lake. If I listened carefully I could even hear the swishing of the water against the outer walls of the castle.

But more than that, despite not seeing anyone there I did not feel alone. There was someone. Many someones here. The temperature had dipped as soon as I walked down the rough-hewn stairs. As I stumbled I steadied myself against a wall and felt the moisture chill my skin. I wondered if there were bodies entombed in the walls.

Was that strange smell just from centuries of being next to a body of water? Was it just mustiness or was it really the smell of buried bodies? It didn't smell like any other subterranean place I've ever been to. This was the smell of death.

More than a smell, this was a place where live could not thrive. From the smell to the feeling of being buried even as life continued above me. The tantalizing glimpses of sky and water just made it more surreal.

Rooms led to passages and steps and more rooms. Who were the nameless dead? At least Byron had left his mark in a place frequented by the living on a stone pillar that was warmed by the sun that streamed in from a nearby window. But these people had no names, they are anonymous and I am not sure if they were totally at peace.

I wondered if I could find my way back through the maze, wondering if I was doomed to be trapped forever, bad B-movie scripts playing in my head. Then I saw an old wooden ladder. I climbed up gingerly and emerged into the blazing sunlight, slightly disoriented.

It was strange to be back among the living. Perhaps I had brought something dead up with me into the land of the living.

Wilde in the Rain

I will never think of Paris without rain. Cold rain trickling down my nose, making its way under my cheap, yellow poncho that says Paris! on the back. Trickles of rain as we sat inside a restaurant. Sheets of rain as soon as we emerged. It was a live entity this rain. Stalking us, lying in wait until we came outside at its mercy.

Cascades of rain as we waited in the longest line in the world, to the top of the Eiffel Tower. Perhaps it mocked us for our tourist follies. It certainly was malicious. Blown sideways into my face on the second level, open to the elements, beading on the glass windows at the top.

Rain...rain...rain, as we walk down the narrow pathways of the cemetery. Glistening on Oscar Wilde's tomb. "You are my hero," says a scrawl in red. Hundreds of lipsticked kisses (indelible marks, Lonely Planet tells us) decorate the block of rock with a large winged creature springing from it.

A page with his photograph, its edges ragged, dripping with water. A candle extinguished long-ago, a red rose with all its petals blown off save one. Wilde's grave is a favorite spot for gay men. They kiss the grave, try to have sex on it...and commune with him in some way.

Jim Morrison's grave is hidden away. We approach a guard, "Excuse me?" in English. "Morrisson?" he says and laughs.

We find it. It's small but there is a small gate leading to it. A bottle of whiskey leans drunkenly, the joints lie soaking and unusable. "Jim, Oh Jim," says a woman in her 50's to a man who will forever be 27 to her.

Respect for the dead, the signs inform us, is to not deface their graves. But they forget to write about love for the dead.

As strange as it was to me that a woman would cry at a stranger's grave as if he had died yesterday or that others would have sex (very uncomfortably) on another's grave, there is something haunting about their love. It is not amorphous and abstract. They actually feel some real connection, some link that reaches across the years and makes their feelings current and makes the dead come alive...for an instant.

My shirt is soaked. There are tears in my poncho already (6 Euros well spent). I lift my face into the rain and lick the drops off my lips. And I feel alive.

I wonder if the sun ever shines in Paris. It'll always rain in Paris for me.

Books by Indian Authors: A Tag

I was tagged by Geets at auroragirl.blogspot.com about books by Indian authors. So, here goes. The ones in bold are those I haven't read but am dying to:

1. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai (interesting, well-wrriten and oddly familar of young grandchild living with grandparent, until I rememberd no.2 on my list)...

2. Fire on the Mountain by Anita Desai (a granddaughter comes to live with her aloof grandmother and of course, Anita is Kiran's mom). Interesting.

3. Spy Princess by Shrabani Basu (a compelling biography of the fascinating Noor Inayat Khan, an spy for the British during World War II, of Indian descent and a supporter of Indian independence, tortured and executed by the Nazis at 30).

4. By the River Pampa I Stood by Geeta Abraham Jose (now that I am all settled in Geneva, I can order it. Can't wait to read it)

5.Planet India: How the Fastest Growing Democraxy is Transforming America and the World by Mira Kamdar (saw it at Barnes and Noble when I was in Boston last week but will order it from Amazon I think)

6. The Tennis Partner by Abraham Verghese (a poignant and very real story of an unusual friendship between and Indian doctor and an American medical student. From the same doctor/writer who wrote My Own Country: A Doctor's Story)

7.The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (well, he's not Indian, he's Pakistani but I snuck him in here since I've heard good things about it. I have it and have just started reading it).

8. Blessings and Other Stories by Bina Shah (I've known Bina from chowk for years and have her novel The 786 Cyber Cafe. Hope I can get this one soon)

9. Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam (one of my favorite books in the past few years. Beautifully written. Slow in parts but a wonderful, slowly unfolding story).

10. The Tree Bride by Bharathi Mukherji (I know she's supposed to be great so I keep buying her books hoping to be wowed. Like her other books I find this one predictable, pretentious and forgettable)

11. Serving Crazy with Curry by Amulya Malladi (A bit predictable but still a decent read. Reccomended beach reading)

12. Beyond the Courtyard: A Sequel to Unveiling India by Anees Jung (A long-awaited sequel to Unveiling India. I couldn't put this down. It's non-fiction but reads like a story of the soul of India. Plus she came to my book launch and bought my book and she was very, very cool :-)

13. Riot by Shashi Tharoor (Ummm...I really like him but this book screamed mid-life crisis. I wish I could forget I had read this).

14. My Story by Kamala Das (Interesting book)

15. Salaam Paris by Kavita Daswani (If you're going to write a book about a super-model from a conservative Muslim family, do your research. I kept throwing this one against the wall in frustration. Desi chicklit...Ugggh)

16. The Sari Shop by Rupa Bajwa (This is the book (author) that made all those who've been slogging away for years jealous. Have to read it soon.)

17. Madras on Rainy Days by Samina Ali (Though I figured out the twist, this was a very well-written and well developed book. Highly recommended)

18. Brick Lane by Monica Ali (ok, she's Bangladesi, sue me! An important novel when it came out. It was well crafted and well written but did not live up to the hype.

19. Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh (just finished reading it. I am usually not a fan of his fiction but this one made me tear up and think. Good read)

20.The Red Carpet by Lavanya Shankaran (Been meaning to read this for a while).

21. Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai (I really liked this one)

22. The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar (a very interesting concept, but the maid's voice in the novel did not ring true at still. Even then a decent read)

23. The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri (A very good read)

24. The Age of Shiva by Manil Suru (need to read it when it comes out in 2008)

25. The Blue Bedspread by Raj Kamal Jha (a little gem)

26.The Last Bungalow: Writings on Allahabad edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (It was released the same time as my book and I bought it at Wheeler's in Allahabad. The author was there and even signed it for me. Pure nostalgia and important Allahabad history of a time and place that's all but disappeared).

27. Can Your Hear the Nightbird Call? by Anita Rau Badami (can't wait to read it. I like her)

And...I'm done. I left off the usual suspects (Rushdie: I love him, Arundhati Roy: loved God of Small Things) to make space for some lesser-known books.

Binafshe, indiequill, Deepti Lamba, and Sujatha Bagal...consider yourself tagged. Go!

A white mountain in the distance

Today as I walked my dog down a dirt path bordered by a field of peas, punctuated by small patches of bright red poppies I saw a white mountain in the distance.
The sun glanced off its surface turning it rosy. It seemed impossibly near but I know it's more than 100 km away. I've driven through it in the longest tunnel I've ever been in, twisting and turning behind a giant truck, unable to see the exit or the entrace. Snaking our way at 70 km an hour. On our way to Milan and back.
But today I see it as it is meant to be seen. From a distance, that seems at once so near, guarded by grey, craggy peaks that it dwarfs easily. It's proud, cold and mesmerizingly beautiful.
I walk through someone else's fields, looking around to make sure there are no No Trespassing signs. How do they say that in French? Will some farmer shout at me? Will I understand what he says? How I betray my ignorance and discomfort every day.
I forget this is not America. If there is a narrow path through a field perhaps I can walk on it, with my dog sniffing out the scents of others who walked on it before us. It had rained earlier and the air is still heavy with moisture. I feel it on my skin like a balm.
I stare straight at the mountain, aware and amazed that my gaze takes in the sight of two countries at once. They open up before me green and vibrant, splashes of color liberally thrown in.
On another path some distance away, between softly blowing fronds of some crop, a bicyclist speeds away. People are heading home for the evening.
And I look at the mountain that has stood there for centuries. Centuries before I arrived, before any of this existed. I know I am in the presence of something huge. Something unknowable. Important.
Which is why conditions have to be right and the air brightly clear on the days that you can see Mont Blanc.

Sewing myself

I hated needlework in school. Especially because Sister Borgia (a highly appropriate name) was our needlework teacher. She was about 4 feet tall and made up with her sour attitude what she lacked in height. She also fervently believed like all the nuns that girls--young women--should know how to sew. What do these eternal virgins, these brides of Christ know about preparing young women for life in the world? Still, you had to get a passing grade in needlework.
So I learned to hem and do the running stitch and cross stitch...badly. I could never do it right. I was too impatient, too uninterested. I passed. Barely. And when school was over, I threw away the needles and the threads and never sewed again.

But sometimes these days I wish I could thread a needle with a flesh colored twine and sew myself back together. Sew together those who I have not seen or communicated with for a while, close to my side. They are not me, but somehow their presence makes me complete.

Within me I want to sew on my illusions, my convictions, my joys. Tightly so they never go away from me. I want to stitch on to myself my sanity, my equilibrium, a feeling of belonging, my sense of home. A home that stays with me even though I no longer live there.

I want to sew myself together, take all my separate pieces...all the parts of me, and bring them together into a patchwork quilt of myself. I want to gather everything and everyone important to me and attach them to me with thread.

I am not gluing myself together. That makes everything stiff, inflexible, and tacky. Threads, however, can be cut if needed, they can fray...and they can even be reinforced.

I dream some nights of sewing myself together and making everything all right.

Feeling illiterate

The first thing this living in a country whose language I cannot speak is to teach me the a new-found respect for the illiterate. Really!

How hard it is to live your life when everything we take for granted are unintelligble. Not understanding when the cashier at the grocery store rattles off a number I hand over a handful of coins. She patiently counts back my change. I smile dumbly feeling stupider than ever.

I have learned the value of hang gestures. From "is that parking meter not working," to "I want two of those," to "I want a haircut," I've managed these tasks with my bare smattering of French.

Of course the haircut turned out to be quite drastic and not close to what I wanted but it is hair, it'll grow back, I hope.

Being illiterate is hard work. It makes you read body language like a linguist, lets you live constantly outside your comfort zone and lets you function despite the many, many barriers to your success.

Tomorrow I am getting a soin visage. That's a facial...I think. Keeping my fingers crossed.

In Praise and Defence of Blasphemy

I admit it. I love blasphemy. There! I said it. There is something within me that attracts me to it. The more blasphemous an idea, the more it challenges any establishment, especially religious ones, the more I like it.
I’m talking ideas that challenge Jesus’ divinity; Mohammad’s prophet-hood and talk freely of Shiva’s drug addiction. Bring it on! Blasphemy, to me, is what makes the world progress. Thoughts that are drastically different from what others believe and feel, aah, they are the ones that truly force humanity forward.
Where would we be without the famous blasphemers Galileo and Copernicus. Even most religious figures—that can potentially be so hurt by it—were blasphemers in their day. Jesus and Moses were a threat to the established religion of the day as was Mohammad. Why, then are ideas, thoughts and their provocative expression so taboo? Hinduism had few taboos practiced as it once was. What happened?
Why do we need to protect God and divinity from people who say things about Her? Surely (if you believe in it) the being who created the universe and us needs no protection from mere ideas? How supremely arrogant is that? Can mortals truly protect God from the expressed ideas of other mortals. Does Lord Ganesha really care that his image showed up on toilet seat covers? He looks like a cool guy. Maybe he took it as a compliment. But we’ll never know, will we? Hindus in the US protested against the purveyor of such sacrilegious merchandise, making them pull the seat covers from the market.
This was, of course, nothing compared to the furor over what was not one of Rushdie’s best work (to me his worst is better than most writers’ best but I digress) The Satanic Verses. It was a book for God’s sake. Don’t buy it, don’t read it, if offends you. Protest even. But burning books and a death threat?
I know that people of the Diaspora sometimes take blasphemy more seriously than do our counterparts back in our countries of origin. If there is one thing that should (but often does not) open up someone’s mind to new ideas, it should be traveling and living in other countries. Observing and living among people and environments that are totally different from your own should be a liberating experience.
Instead it sometimes creates fear, making them hold on harder to the past, grasping at the tangible aspects of their original culture and in the process making of it a poor facsimile. And since religion is such a crucial part of some lives any blasphemy against their faith becomes intolerable.
It was a personal journey of my own to arrive at a place where blasphemy has become such a cherished idea. Blasphemy to me is the domain of a different mind, of a brave person (or a foolish one) but someone who definitely swims against the tide. And that right, in an increasingly polarized and intolerant world, is precious to me.
I am tired of the “it hurts my religious sentiments” brigade. What the heck is a “religious sentiment?” If it is so fragile as to be hurt by someone saying or writing something, perhaps you should examine your religion and your sentiment. Perhaps indulge in some blasphemy yourself and feel the exhilaration of it.
Besides what about my sentiments then? Are they any less valid because there is no religion attached to it? My sentiments can be potentially hurt by the display of religion out there, by every church, mosque or temple I pass and by everyone who says “god bless you,” when I sneeze. But to me (and others like me) these are the realities of life and living. This variety of religious stuff out there is what makes the experience of living so rich. And one such experience is blasphemy. It’s a part of the world and life and has been since the very beginning when the first cave-woman looked at others prostrating themselves in front of a giant cactus and saying, “you do that’s just one giant, prickly plant, don’t you? I bet we can split it open, cook it up and make ourselves some soup.” I wonder how they dealt with her.
Remember the old saying, ‘sticks and stones may hurt my bones but words shall never hurt me’? Letting blasphemy, no matter how heinous or offensive, flourish, even under protest, can only take us forward.Of course, this doesn’t endear me to most people whether they are Diasporic or not. But my fellow Diaspora dwellers, we above all, should embrace blasphemy or protest such ideas with other ideas. We are the ones who decided to look beyond a certain wall to take a peek at the other side. We traveled beyond the seven seas just to see what lay there. In another time that act itself would have been blasphemy, causing some of us to lose our caste. Blasphemy is our tradition. Our birthright. Let us embrace it.

A Year of Resistance

Later this May it will be a year since my essay 'War Stories,' was published in the Seal Press anthology, Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality. Nothing has changed. At least on the surface.

The world is still at war, trapped in an ever escalating cycle of violence. And women--not just Muslim women--are just still being victimized for many reasons. Killed for honor, killed for dowry, flogged for studying in Afghanistan, held down and had their genitals excised for purity, living in captivity for venturing outside the home...for resistance. It all boils down to one reason: they are killed because they are women.

The women in the anthology spanned the globe, representing almost every continent. They cut across not only racial and demographic lines but also in their degree of Muslimness. From the pious to the profane, from very Muslim to barely Muslim, all were represented. From essays to art, to memoirs and poetry, this slim volume has it all.

To me it was a work that reached behind the Muslim veil to uncover a world teeming with many and contradictory ideas. Personally for me, while writing War Stories, I broke many taboos.

I've always written honestly about myself --whether in my blog or in articles and stories--but it was in bits and pieces, vignettes. No one could really put an entire picture together. No one knew me. Now I was about to rip that away. In 'War Stories' there was no anonymity to hide behind, no disguise. This was my own story, my journey...and my resistance.

There are others braver than I, others who have resisted and overcome more, and I can only appreciate them when I think of the fear that came to the surface each time I started down to write this essay.

Fear about what my family might think and say, fear even if some crazy fundamentalist types might come knocking, fear of hurting others by my writing. I cannot even imagine the struggles of the others who wrote in the same anthology: the lesbian struggling to come out, the Afghan woman trying to make sense of her world.

In the end I am glad I wrote it, glad it was published and glad it was reviewed well. But I am most glad when I think of my own small triumph: my own resistance.

So, every May, from now on I will celebrate my resistance while thinking of those who cannot resist, those who die for resisting and those whose voices we never hear because they are stifled even as they resist inside. And I realize that wars will continue and become more violent, more tragic and yet sadly mundane. The only thing that ultimately matters is our own resistance to violence and to its insiduous reach.

Here's an excerpt from my essay:

"How do I define war? How do I redefine it? Is that even possible? For years war has been the fear that follows my mother even into her later years. Fear that blossoms like daisy-cutters in my dreams. It is being violently uprooted from long-held anchors like home, family, city, nation, and comfort. It is the understanding that places that were havens can become killing grounds, in an instant. Wars don’t even have to be fought between countries. They are fought within them, between people who live side by side. They can be fought between strangers or between brothers. Wars unleash machines of destruction from afar like mega video games. You can look straight into the eyes of your killer and he can feel the warmth of your blood on his hands before you die. War has to be felt and experienced. And it still might never make sense. Living in a culture and in a time where war is part of the constant narrative it is no wonder that its stories haunt me, though I am lucky enough never to have experienced it first-hand. "

Feminism and I: A Love Story

***Thanks indiequill.wordpress.com for roping me in to write this.

I was not even 8 when someone gave me my first International Day of the Woman button, in 1975. It was red, I remember. I loved stickers and buttons and wore this one proudly on my schoolbag. I had no idea what it meant. I thought it looked cool, whatever cool meant then. I also thought scented, pink and green erasers were cool. And red ribbons (yech) in my hair.

I was 14 when I wrote an essay in school entitled, Why I Am not a Feminist.

When I think back, these two disparate, random pieces of my life stand out. In the essay (which I discovered inside some old book a few years ago) I wrote about how I didn't need a label to be strong, to be a woman, to take what I needed to take for myself, to assert myself. I thought I was being very smart and oh, so sophisticated. I was beyond feminism. And in the process, asserted my nascent feminist self even more so. Ironic, huh?

To not call myself a feminist now, for me, is a denial. A denial of women who came before me and had to fight for everything they deserved. A denial of women who continue to struggle against oppression and degredation even now. In Indian villages, inside the claustrophobic harems of the hardcore Arab world; killed for honor in Pakistan, murdered for dowry in India, not getting equal pay for equal work elsewhere...the list goes on and on.

It is only us, who have the luxury of talking about it and not really experiencing much of what feminism had released us from, who are misguided. By denying feminism we deny the efforts of those who gave us the luxury of this talk.

It is a cop out. For someone like me, to take full advantage of the changes brought about by feminism (the right to vote, to equal rights in marriage, the right to my body, the right not to be killed at birth, to be equal to a man in the eyes of the law, etc.etc.) and then to turn around and deny the very movement that gave me these rights seems downright ungrateful.

But really, the right to not call yourself a feminist is also ironically a right bestowed by feminist thought: the right not to be labeled.

Calling myself a feminist does not, however, limit me to just being a feminist. I am not just a woman and a feminist. I am a woman, feminist, Muslim, barely Muslim, heathen-leaning...and yes, a humanist. Someone sensitive to the condition of women *and* men. Someone with an awareness that we are all in it it together. Men cannot be truly happy with repressed, unhappy women in their lives. And, yes, women cannot be truly happy with unhappy, silenced men in theirs.

I am aware that in the US, at least, at times feminist has seemed to be hijacked by selfish forces, where sometimes they have gone overboard. Where equality has been taken over by an ultra-sensitivity.

Feminism made me a strong woman not a damn shrinking violet. I can bear the occasional naughty joke. Heck, I even tell them myself. I've found the workplace strictures to be rather idiotic and onerous to women and men though I am glad that workplaces are friendlier to women than they used to be.

But that's another post. For me feminism is being me. Rather, it is one part of being me.

I am not afraid of labels. I can only be afraid of labels if I let them define me totally. Feminism does not define me. It does not constrain me or paint me in a corner. It sets me free to think and feel and respond to the world as a proud, free, and independent woman...a person. It is one part, albeit one very important part of me. And I am proud to walk in the shadow of those brave women (and men) who made it possible for me to walk tall and strong.

And to proclaim aloud: I am a feminist.

Parallel Mirrors

I wash my face and as I wipe it I see myself. My selves. I am standing between two parallel mirrors in my new bathroom. The mirrors are mounted on the medicine cabinet. I see myself frozen, white towel held to my face....to infinity. Apart from the fact that I hate looking at myself in the mirror and here I see only myself, many, many times (a nightmare) it makes me think.

It makes me think about other things. About reality. About multiplicity and about self. My self. And others. And a reality in which I stand in a continuum, just one image among infinite images.

For my birthday, my niece got me a kit for the National Geographic genographic project. I scraped the inside of my cheek and sent off my DNA. Now I know that I came from the L2 branch from Africa, from the coast. I still don't know how my ancestors traveled from Africa to India. Where the lived, how they lived, why they moved. When did their features morph into the ones I see in my mirror? I have requested those results and am awaiting someone informing me about it.

Till then I stand by myself in between two parallel mirrors seeing just my own face repeated in image after image. And far away, I imagine Eve, in Africa, my oldest ancestor. What of her remains in me? What of me was already in her?

Perhaps one day I will stand in between those mirrors and see face after face, somewhat familiar but oh so strange of all those who came before me. And perhaps in the midst of all these familiar strangers, I won't be quite so alone.

And in the future, there will be someone else, several someone elses who will also wonder about their ancestors. And that will include me. Strange! Makes me aware, at the same time, of the fact that my existence is a mere blip while at the same time it brings home the fact that we are all more important than we realize. We are part of evolutionary infinity.

Sometimes...

Sometimes there is just no one to call, no one left, none at all.

Lightning Strikes

I've been thinking about this story I remember from my childhood.

A group of people are taking shelter from a storm in some small building. Lightning crackles, circling the building as if looking for someone specific, someone in particular. Each time the thunder crashes people cry out in panic.

Finally, one person has a suggestions. The lightning is obviously seeking out one particular individual from among them so perhaps each person can step out one by one. The lightning, which refuses to be thwarted, will get its victim but the rest of them can be saved.

Everyone agrees except one person. He is terrified. No one listens to him. One by one they step out into the night sky that is shredded apart by lightning. One by one they return, until one person is left, the dissenter.

He begs them not to make him go out. Together they can weather this storm. He cries and pleads. But no one listens.

On trembling legs he steps out into the night. The sky explodes as a long finger of lightning reaches down and strikes the building within which the rest remain, convinced of their safety.

He was obviously the only one the lightning was not wanting to strike. It was not in his fate to die that night, just as it was the fate of the others to die together. His presence was keeping them alive.

There are so many ways to read this story. I've always found it fascinating. There are lessons hidden within it.

What do you think?

Jaya's cousin

Quite a few years when I had first sent in my story, Jaya, to chowk, I got an email from her cousin. Even though I had fictionalized the story quite a bit and had not used her last name, Jaya's cousin recognized her name. She was a scientist at CERN in Switzerland. We kept in touch for a while. Then we lost touch. I hate the fact that I don't even remember her name. Pratibha? Pratima? Last name? How elusive, this brain of mine. It can remember strange details (how a certain piece of rock looked exactly at some Circuit House when I was 8, the name of some little girl I sat next to in a bus years ago) but her name eludes me.

I was thinking of Jaya today...and then I thought of her cousin. On a related note, a few years ago I found a link to this old story of mine on some site in Germany (the rest of it is in German) and now I work for a German company. I am wandering.

So, here's a teaser from the story:

I was born at the darkest moment of the night. The time before the night lightens for the first glimmerings of dawn.
The time that is totally still, waiting...always. And now I drift here, in this darkness. A darkness that makes the hour of my birth seem like day. So thick, so impenetrable, so comfortable. Effortlessly, I turn in this womb of
death and I am happy. Happy? Just a word that I always wanted to really understand for so long. A goal never attained.

If you want to read more:

Here's a link to the German site: http://www.imn.htwk-leipzig.de/~bunk/mirror/jaya.htm

And here's the link to the slightly more edited version on chowk: http://www.chowk.com/show_article.cgi?aid=00000492&channel=gulberg

Is most of life about losing touch with people: through death and drifting? Or is it something we do...connecting with others in between the death and the drifting?

Monster in a File

Now that Burden is out there, trying to swim among the the rest of the many books out there, I really must get down to completing The Beauty Parlor. I know how it ends and I am two chapters away....but I am so busy with work and life that I keep putting it off.

And yes, it has become my own Monster. Perhaps I should watch Spalding Gray's Monster in a Box again. That might help me break through this impasse. I am feeling sorry for myself. And nothing works for that than listening to Spalding Gray.

There's another reason I am thinking of Monster.

It's cold and icy and frozen. And I think of Spalding on the ferry, staring into the cold waters of the East River and letting go. He disappeared. He had planned this, done a trial run a few days earlier, forever haunted by memories of his mother's suicide in 1967. Perhaps he felt unable to save himself from his fate. He gave in. How easy is it to die?

He jumped on January 10 2004 and his body was pulled from the river on March 7 of that same year. When we moved to Connecticut in 1999 we drove to Narragansett, RI because that was his birthplace. When we excitedly told people they had no idea what we were talking about. We felt a certain supercillious content.

A year or so later we traveled to New York City to watch him perform in Gore Vidal's The Best Man. When the actors took their bows, the audience exploded when Chris Noth (Sex and the City) came out. My husband and I clapped wildly when Spalding did, the sounds swallowed by the polite applause from the rest of the audience. There were a few others. We exchanged knowing looks, as if we were keepers of some knowledge that the rest of the world was too preoccupied to notice. I felt like a connoussier of sorts.

My husband introduced me to Spalding's work. He had discovered him as a teenager in Bombay. Monster was playing at some obscure theater and it was him and this other woman who wandered in. He thought it was a horror movie. That the lone man on the screen would soon be devoured by a monster that would emerge from its box very soon. As he started to listen, he forgot about the monster and was mesmerized. And a few years later when we met, so was I.

We saw him perform at UCLA just a few months before his disappearance. As we parked our car, we saw a large car pull up. It had New York plates. We're not really the kind of people who walk up to famous folks. Perhaps I prefer to keep a certain distance, a perspective of some kind. "He looks tired," my husband said. I nodded. We repeated parts from Swimming to Cambodia to each other. "I will have an orange," I intoned solemnly.

But this was not the the same Spalding that I had seen on tapes, whom I had seen perform in The Best Man with so much wit and heart. More than tired, he seemed dejected, defeated, trying too hard and not succeeding. Swimming didn't come alive as it always did.

That curious blend of humor and darkness was missing. We mouthed correctly some of the places where he messed up and sometimes stumbled. It was sad. He didn't seem to be there. Perhaps he had already started to die.

Guess who's on India Tribune's fiction Feb 4 best seller list

Okay, I'm not sure what this actually means. Did 10 people in India buy my book last week or what? Still it's good to make some list right? The cool thing is I beat Hannibal Rising. Here's the list:

Next by Michael Crichton (damn that Crichton)
Can you Hear the Nightbird Call by Anita Rau Badami (okay, I like her)
The Burden by Foreknowledge by a certain Jawahara Saidullah (who the hell is *she*?)
The Peacock Throne by Sujit Saraf (sounds cool but I have no idea who he is )
Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris