Welcomed home

I was away for a month- a bit of work, a bit of visiting family. I got back on a foggy damp day. In the evening, the Himalayas welcomed me home with a spectacular show.Viewing the mountains is extremely rare in the monsoon. And to have it accompanied by unearthly golden light and brooding clouds is truly a gift. I am a lucky woman, I thought.

But this was not the best welcome.

I came in to Sonapani, instead of our home in Chatola. Mian's students are here, and so my wee household had moved here lock, stock and barrel when I was away. When I arrived, they were both busy with important things- Mian was meeting with his students, Shona B was showing her best friend who's boss.

I'll go and rest, I told them, come down when you are free. I turned and started to go down the steps. A noise made me turn around. There they were, my family. Students and play ignored, walking down the steps single-file behind me.

I am an incredibly lucky woman.

No longer in safe custody

I wonder if anyone remembers the note titled 'Every woman should have' that was circulating the internet a couple of years ago. It listed a number of things some of which made sense- like a set of tools, and a reliable recipe for 'company'. I would like to add one thing to that list: a landline.

Shortly, very shortly after I moved to Dehradun I went and got me a phone. I did it myself and acquired a good dose of self-confidence along with the phone connection. I met interesting people along the way, and they helped me feel at home. The broadband connection allowed me to skype with Mian and enabled me to sail through times that would otherwise have been lonely. That phone bill increased my legitimacy and allowed me to open a separate bank account, renew my passport, replace my lost PAN card. In case of a glitch in cellphone connections, I had the landline as a backup. Above all, it was mine. It was a phone connection I had untangled red tape for. It was my claim to responsible citizenship.

And so when I left Dun I was loth to abandon the phone. Despite not knowing where we would be going, and despite the fact that I could always get another, I did not want to let this go. Instead, I ran through bureaucratic  loops once more, and put it  in safe custody- a lovely term for BSNL's holding on to the connection for me.

But it is not working out well. There are no phones where I stay. Getting them to lay a line will take more energy than I have. And today, I started the process of terminating my phone connection by applying that it be taken out of safe custody.

It has been nine months since I left Dun. The hard, nearly homeless, cold days are over. Now we have a home, furniture, a garden, a dog even. I have two cell connections and a data card that allows  me to be connected no matter where I am. I am glad to stop paying every month for a phone that I do not use, and do not see any way to begin using.

Why then, do I feel bereft?

One of those who watch

Shona-Bhaloo with best friend Rambo in the background. He trotted over that day for a self-planned play date.
Sho, of course, was extremely happy.

What Shona and I gaze at most evenings.

The Wedge-tailed Green Pigeon. Stunningly beautiful. These are distinguishable from the Pompadour because only the male has the red blush on his wings. What I find most enthralling is the orange glow at the throat.They come every evening to a tree with berries on it and fill the air with their cooing. Yesterday, a pair flew to the lemon tree and posed for us. How could I not obey?

And for those of you who  remember my camera-less state, the Mian changed all that. I now have a gorgeous machine whose standards I need to educate myself to!

What is wrong with these men?

Imagine this. A well-lit and fully occupied bus traveling down the highway. The driver's love for music has created all the passengers to realize that they will not be able to sleep this night. A woman is traveling. She is galloping towards her forties,and her grey hairs attest to this. She sports a mangalsutra, and the rest of her outfit is frumpy enough to cause her concern at times. She is confident and assured. Sitting next to her is a man in his fifties. He is traveling for work, and has spoken on the phone of wanting to get back to his family. He has ingested nothing but water throughout the journey. A safe enough scene. No victims,no perpetrators that leap out.

In the middle of the night, the man tries the old surreptitiously-stroking-with-extended-fingers.

Seriously? Did he think I would not notice? Did he think that I would be too intimidated to protest? Or, I shudder to think, did he think I would welcome it? Perhaps he thought that I would not have seen the trick before. Perhaps he thought he was the first man  ever to think of it, and did not know that every woman in the subcontinent has experienced it a dozen times.

These men should know that we have perfected our 'strategically-poised-thumbnail' trick.

Go ahead and lust after every woman you see. Go ahead and think you are God's gift to the world. But do yourself a favour and don't underestimate our intelligence.

Burning mountains

I am sitting here on the porch anxiously waiting for Mian to return. It has been two hours since he went off to fight a forest fire. I know there are other people around, I know that two hours is nothing when it comes to fire, I know Mian is a careful and responsible man, but still I worry.

The fire as it was last night. See how it is restricted to the top of the ridge

But back to the fires. The hills around us have been burning for the last several days. Some set accidentally, some 'controlled fires' that weren't, and some lit by embers from other fires.

And still we are lucky. In most areas, forest fires are a sort of Somebody Else's Problem. The villagers believe that it is the forest department's job (which, one may argue, it is) while the forest department has no personnel, equipment, or funds  for anything other than painting 'prevent fire' hoardings (which is also true). The area we live in is different. Right now, there are about 20-30 people trying to control the fire I see in front of me.

Methods for fire prevention are primitive, to put it kindly. A bunch of people go to where the forest is, and stand there in the heat and smoke. Using branches, they beat out embers and the advancing flames. Other people use rakes, sticks, and their bare hands to clear away enough litter to create a sizeable fire line. Their hands and faces are blackened, they inhale smoke, and are cut by thorns. It is hot, thankless work. And so not surprising, perhaps that people don't go to put fires out.


Except here.

The forest fire as it is now, at 5:30 pm. It is daylight, but smoke covers the valley, and I can hear the crackle as it burns

If here, people tend to run towards a fire rather than away from it, it is thanks to the wonderful people at Sonapani. These people have taken it  upon themselves to protect the forest they love. Since the area started burning, they have been out there with rakes and determination. And they do not restrict themselves to the fires that threaten them. The last marathon 18-hour fight was for a forest across the valley. Today, they are here with the Chatola villagers. Bless them.

Of furniture

I wonder if anyone remembers Champak magazine. If you have never heard the name before, you haven't missed much. It was a children's periodical (perhaps monthly?) and extremely shoddy. The language was bad, the illustrations badly-drawn, and the humour crude. The type of magazine, in fact, of which we would smirk 'humph, North Indian' as if that explained it all.

Hungry for reading matter, my sis and I would still occasionally  buy it. And one of those stories stuck in my mind. It was a tale of a chronically messy boy who was unable to clean his room. He just did not know where to start. One day, his mother gave him a vase of sunflowers. He couldn't bear to keep them on a messy table, and so cleared the top. This necessitated clearing the drawers, which required him to tidy the closet, and so on till finally, the boy stared wonderingly at a gleaming room.

Something of the sort happened to me  yesterday. The carpenters finished their work, and left me looking at three tables, two chairs and two shelves. The shelves called out for a vase of flowers, which called out for tidily arranged spice jars, which needed a clean space for the other vessels, and so on.

At the end of it, I stared wonderingly at a gleaming room. The kitchen appliances shone. In the center of the room stood a table with two chairs drawn up to it. A cloth had been spread on it and a teapot squatted in the centre. The light streamed in from the window next to the stove and created a bright orange square where Shona sat. The rose on the shelf glowed like a jewel.

I looked at it and burst into tears.

A table is so little to ask for. And it has taken us since November to get it. All winter, we have been squatting on the floor, or on camp stools. We have been cooking and prepping food on a stack of suitcases, or on the stone wall near the patio.

It seems like we are making a big deal of furniture. But think of all that it means. It means cooking side by side in comfort. It means a workspace where we can put books and papers without things sliding off our laps. It means goodbye to that incessant pain in my lower back. Above all, it means meals with grace. It means no more balancing plates on our laps and guarding food from the dog. It means a table laid for dinner. It means candles, and flowers, and conversation, and laughter.

It might have taken us since November. But it is worth it.

To-do lists, love and a wee bit of jealousy

Mian returns in a fortnight, and this means that I get into a little flurry of getting things done before he comes.

 He protests mightily at this of course.   'We should do it together' he says. 'I don't want you to think that you need to make things ready before I come' he insists. I shrug and go on with my happy plans of surprising him when he gets here. Some of these plans are laudable, designed to make his life a little easier- like making tables. Some plans lean more towards hiding evidence of misdeeds- like cleaning up oven splatters. Whatever they are, they are done for love of the man.

Which is why I was touched to realize that G had such a list too. He has been excited about getting the external wall plastered and coated with a lime wash. I am in the middle of my all-too-frequent cash flow hiccups.

'We can do it later', I told him.

'No' he asserted, 'before Saheb comes.'

I recognised that urgency all too well. 'My Saheb' I snarled- almost.

Plastering walls is fine. But if  G's to-do list includes a pedicure, my wifely antennae are going to start tingling.

Absolutely Cuckoo*

One morning, Mian received a text message from me, 'I think I am going out of my mind..a bird just miaowed at me.'

It happened like this. Shona and I were pottering around the garden when we heard a plaintive miaowing. Shona and I both hunted for the cat, but couldn't find it. We both stood under a tree that had seemed to be where the sound was coming from, and looked at each other. And then we heard it again, directly above us.

We looked up and an a jay looked back at us. It opened its beak and miaowed. It was at this point that I yelped, Shona whimpered and we scampered back home. I checked the bird book, and there was no mention of miaows..the bird is supposed to screech. It is at this point that I messaged Mian.

I am glad Shona B was there, because else I would have seriously thought the mountains were addling my brain. As it is, when G came around, Shona and I  nonchalantly brought the conversation around to ornithology.

'Lots of birds now' I said.
'hmm' said he
' Some that I haven't seen before.'
'perhaps'
'The bird calls are different here too'
'Duh'
Taking my courage in my hands, 'In fact, today I heard one that sounded like a cat'
This time he looked up, relief flooding his face 'So you heard it too! yes, there is one that miaows.'

I am sane. Or atleast, no crazier than before I moved here.

* The title? How could I resist? Magnetic fields, and well worth a listen.

A most decadent day

By Pahari standards, at least. Shona and I spent a grand total of 50 rs between us, and felt like two pampered princesses at the end of it.

It all began when I made dinner for the little one and realized that I was out of rice, and out of cash to replenish supplies with.  

So the next morning, I fed the pup her breakfast and went off to Mukteshwar which is where the nearest ATM is. I had only done this walk once before, and that was with my Mian. In my minds eye, I saw it as being long and ardous, and so had decided to make a day of it.

It wasn't bad at all, we reached in only 1.5 hours. And we had started early, so the walk was when the birds were still active.Its spring, and the walk was wonderfully fragrant. It surprises me how close the plant life here is  to the Pacific Northwest. A lot of the flowers I passed, I had first seen in the Olympic National Park. Buttercups, ox-eye daisies, wild roses..The last especially were wonderfully fragrant. This monsoon, I plan on getting cuttings and planting them where they will ramble over the walls of our house.

But to go on, we walked up to Mukteshwar through the forest with me looking at the butterflies and Shona hunting them. Once I was done with the ATM and the bank, a most wondrous thing happened as far as the little one was concerned. We shared an omlette between us, and I had some chai. Spicy, salted meals come very rarely in the pup's life, and she went into transports of delight. After she was done and as I sat sipping my chai, she turned her bowl over to lick the underside-in case some egg reached there by osmosis. 'The pup's never been fed' I could feel the passersby thinking.

On our way back home, I stopped where a rock juts out over a cliff. We sat down, and I pulled out a second surprise for the pup- grapes! Grapes are possibly the only thing the pup loves over a  bone..she was so excited to see what was in the bag that she actually fell over. That was the highlight of my day..sitting there on a cliff and sharing grapes with scrupulous fairness.

And then when we got home, we napped..and the little one woke to a belly rub. Spoilt pup? maybe a wee bit.

I miss Dehradun

In many ways, I am living a childhood fantasy. Its quite incredible in a 'connecticut yankee..' sort of way. After all, how many children do grow up to be astronauts or royalty-trapped-in-a-tower?

But I miss Dehradun

And this was driven home to me during a visit this week. Some aspects of it I still don't like- the 'might rules' attitude, the xenophobia..but, but..

You see, I shared my dehra with the people I came to love.

The fruit-seller who was so happy to see me, he insisted i sit down with him and eat some grapes. The old man who is now senile, but still recognized me and managed to convey it. The colleagues who made rice and brought my favourite foods in their tiffins. The little girl who spent all  the previous day making a drawing and mounting it on cardboard for me and Mian. The little boy who thought I am moving back and was overjoyed till he learnt the truth. The only slightly older boy who couldn't stop talking and remembering the last time he had been home. The friend who drove out of her way to meet me for fifteen minutes. The families who took me into their homes and fed me and entertained me. The woman who nearly burst into tears when she saw me.  The colleague who bumped into me 'accidentally on purpose' and proceeded to tell me of a land dispute- he knew I couldn't help, but 'I can't tell anyone else', he said.

And this is the gist of it. Somehow, I touched lives there..I realised this week that just as they were part of my life, I was part of theirs too. And I miss that. And I hate that this seems to be one more instance of my unreliability. I will be back, I promised them as I left. More than for them, the promise was for myself.

 

Close, too close

Finally able to share, and thrilled about it.

What would Lemos Teacher say?

Mian and I both dread the days when a button comes off his shirt. That is when something primordial rises up in me and despite the fact that he is better with a needle and thread than I am, drives me to say, 'I'll do that! No, really. I can do it,  honest. It's easy as pie!' Being the gentleman that he is, Mian refrains from pointing out that I can't bake a pie either and hands over the shirt. If the shirt is lucky, I forget about it. An unlucky shirt gets mangled beyond rescue and handed back to its owner with the promise, 'I'll buy you another one. Honest.'

And this is despite Lemos teacher. In the fourth standard, we were taught the basics of sewing. In that entire school, she was perhaps the only teacher who saw being left-handed not as a sign of moral depravity, but as a reason for extra effort on her part. And so she picked up the needle in her left hand, and slowly, painstakingly, pricking herself all the while, taught me to hem and sew on buttons. Her return on investment was dismal.

All this  is to justify my unrestrained pride in this:

 Made all by my own self with half a pair of old jeans and bits of an older kurta!
Which brings us to the question I asked earlier. Would she grimace at the unfinished edges, or be pleased with the frugality of the project?

Eye candy

In lieu of words, images  of the little one working it  for the camera.

She's grown, hasn't she?

Upper class travel

Not sure if this post will be anything close to coherent. The story begins with my first 'phoren' trip- which was also maybe my 2nd or 3rd flight ever. As things go, my connecting flight was delayed by 24 hours, which meant that I needed to spend a day and a night at the Frankfurt airport. Incredibly crowded it was, and I was desperate to sleep. I wandered about till I came to a room that was miraculously vacant. There were loungers, remarkably clean and empty toilets, and a sense of peace. I sponge-bathed and lay down to sleep congratulating myself on finding a decent spot no one else had found yet.

It was much much later that I realised that I had probably gate-crashed into the business lounge. The Indian Railways have a similar and even more complex hierarchy. there are separate waiting rooms for 'sleeper general', 'sleeper women', 'general', 'AC', 'AC women', and in atleast one station a separate one for 2AC and higher.

The delhi metro might be alternately lauded and criticised. One thing is pukka, though. It is totally, unabashedly democratic. A couple of days ago, I watched as what seemed like an entire village helped a gramdma use the escalator. She was triumphant as she stepped off it. 'That was the first time', she informed everyone. 'A couple of more times, and it will be nothing'.

What do I want to say with this post? I am not entirely sure. Maybe I just want to convey the pleasure I felt when she triumphantly stepped off the escalator. Maybe my sense of empathy with her as she found herself out of her element, but coping all the same. I don't know

Just drag her along

The day before yesterday, the little pup-let went off her food- an event sufficiently unusual to provoke a flurry of texts between me and my mian. She also threw up a pellet of animal hair- proof of a 'meal' she illicitly had when she had run away the day before.

When I called the vet however, he didnt want to take any chances and asked me to bring her up to the roadhead. 18 hours without food is a long time for a 5-kg pup, and she was too weak to manage the 45 minute trek uphill. And so I hoisted her up on my shoulders.

This caused a great deal of comment, and I needed to explain to all I passed,"This is usually her favourite walk. But she is ill, and can't do it. I'm taking her to the vet." In most cases, the response was a cluck, and wishes that she would get well soon.

 Until I met a man who said, "so what? drag her along." I looked at the trusting eyes of the little patient as she lay on my shoulders, and felt horrible about that remark.

My sadness was defused pretty soon though, when I realised that she has more friends here than I do. Little children darted away from their mothers to say hello to Shona- who they knew by name. Later that day, G came runnning down because he had been told that I had taken Shona to the vet. And in the evening, Mian told me that the villagers of Sitla were asking how she was.

 Clearly, Mr.Drag-her-along was a stranger around these parts.

The ghosts in our house

The house that is now ours is full of stories of the people who lived there before us.
There's Kaki, to whom the house belonged and who I always suspect has a soft corner for my Mian-who she calls her Panditji. There are their relatives, visitors, and the several people who worked on this land.

But the stories I hear most often are of the couple who rented before us. I hear of their ambitous garden, of how they imported the compost all the way from Pant Nagar, of how they were scared of the rural setting, of how they lit up the orchard every night to scare the darkness everyday.
And I don't just hear the stories, they crop up in our lives. They planted sunflowers, and gladioli, and lilies- all of which are now naturalised here. They erected a creaky bird feeder which scared the birds and that I now -in a most prosaic fashion- dry laundry on. They read Mills and Boons, and I now dip into the two books they left behind. They began to painstakingly stencil the walls of their house before giving up and laughingly painting a huge flower on a part of the last wall they worked on.

And this makes me wonder about the stories we are creating. Our black thumbs, the solar cooker, the way we take our trash all the way to Haldwani, these things will perhaps be talked about. But I hope that somewhere in those stories is also mention of our coffee mornings, of how Mian and I stand on the porch wrapped around each other and look at the sky. I hope their are stories of how he brings the water and does all the heavy work. I hope there are stories of the meals we make, of our little Bhaloo. I do hope that some of this joy lingers in the house.

Splash!

It was a freezing cold day on the Ganga. Despite the sun having risen nearly 4 hours ago, the clouds did not allow it to warm the earth. The two oarsmen were relatively warm, the remaining four of us sat rolled up in our sleeping bags thinking dark thoughts of the day we had volunteered for this jaunt.

Because of the clamminess of the day, the river was deserted. No boats, farmers, fishermen or even dolphins. We hunkered down in our woolens to prevent our noses from freezing.

That's when I heard laughter. We looked incredulously at two young girls as they stood in the water. They were fully dressed, but the floral salwar-kameezes were thoroughly soaked. One of them was washing her hair, the other was not up to anything that lady-like.

As we watched, she ran down the slope to the river and without a pause jumped in. Watching her swim strongly out away from the bank I was taken back to my childhood. My sis and I, we were not the sporting types ever. But the one thing we did, did often, and loved to do was swim. She taught me all I know of swimming.

As I watched the girl swim in the Ganga as her sister bathed, I was envious for a moment. That envy was overtaken by pity, though. Not one of my childhood memories has either me or my sis standing on the banks while the other swam. With us it was always a double splash!

I don't do justice to a swimsuit, I don't have technique, and I can't dive to the bottom of a water body. But thanks to my sis, I can swim, and delight in it.

Going to school

'Shonaaaaa' they shout from the top of the hill. And Shona immediately runs up the hill to greet the students on their way to school. They run down together, I gather up the furry scamp near our house, and wave good bye to the others.

Till one day when the littlest girl of the lot nudged her brother. 'Well' she said, 'aren't you going to ask her?'
'Ask me what?'
'Will you tutor us? in English and Maths?'

Uh oh. Here we go again.

Only this time, it is even more challenging. Instead of just one little girl, I also have her two brothers to teach. Instead of just struggling to teach english to a hindi-speaker, I now have to teach maths- in Hindi. I opened one of their maths textbooks, and realised that there is no way I can do it. I cannot understand half the terms, and certainly cannot teach them.

They won't take no for an answer, though. 'In March', I promised. I am very nervous.

I am also humbled by the efforts these children take to get an education. I complained in the last post about the walk I need to take to the top of the hill facing ours for a strong internet connection, about the walk I need to do once or twice a week. These children go to that ridge, and then down to the other side every single day. And for what, I wonder.

What is this walk of 4 steep kilometers going to actually give them? Really, truly give them? A 10th standard certificate. And what is that? A stepping stone to a 'better life', where the better life means going away from the land they love, toiling throughout their lives and coming back as strangers. At the same time, I am the last person to say that literacy is not vital. Homeschooling is not an option where these children are first-generation learners. They clearly need to read, write, and calculate if they are not to be hoodwinked by everyone. But that is not all they need. They need to learn science, ethics, natural history. They need to learn how to use what they have learnt, to take science beyond the textbooks. And this the school does not teach them. Is it futile then, this walking to school? Is it necessary? Is there a better way?

I don't know. And next week onwards, these three come to me to fill some of the gaps in their learning. I am extremely nervous

A wee bit cold (again)

The day before yesterday was a day of hailstorms.A day when going out was not something to look forward to. So cold and hailstorm-y infact, that I had to cancel a skype meeting I had. The connection between the two? Well, the thing is that to access the reliable internet that one needs for online phone conversations, I need to go to Sonapani. A 2-km trek which would not be so bad if 3/4ths of it was not vertical. And not something I wanted to do with hail, a pup, and a leopard who snacks on pups on the route. I wish my colleagues would understand that, though. It seems that everytime I set up an online meeting, the weather gods grease up their cannons. I realise my colleagues' frustration, I feel it too. But this is a choice I have made.

And very often, that choice is amply rewarded.

I woke up to this yesterday. I photographed our dishwashing sink because the frost was most clear on the coffee cup, but every leaf had its rim of ice, every stone had a starry pattern on it. I had filled the kadhai with water to soak, it was solid. The first time that has happened. I am used to a thick crust of ice, but frozen solid? the first time. Shona and I had fun licking a kadhai-shaped ice-candy. Mian declared the two of us nuts.

And by the way, not a bad view for a sink, eh?