14 posts tagged “cactina”

The house is empty and silent. S is gone, on a week-long office trip to Bangalore. Most of the tiny light bulbs are gone, folding one half of the house into the natural darkness of the night. My appetite is gone from the weariness of working, and all my money is gone, from caring for mother and father.

It does not help that I am listening to depressing music from Sigur Rós. I sat down with the laptop with the purpose of making lists; decisive bullet points that would guide me through the rest of the week, instructing me to take my calcium, finish my report, set up meetings and analyse documents, call old friends and write and paint in the still unused drawing book S gave me two years back.

I haven’t had the time to paint in the last two years. My head is crammed with ideas for paintings and stories, magic pangolins and recipes and mother and satellites from which swings the earth. Sometimes, if you look at me discreetly, you can see the edges of these thoughts in the corners of my eyes, as though they are spilling over. I have seen them, day after day, in the reflection in the glass window by which I sit and have my lunch. Sometimes, I must pause and watch my eyes in the mirror because they are so beautiful with the acknowledgement of life.

Time flies so fast. Its going to be our first wedding anniversary on Saturday. I can’t believe one year has passed! Its been a warm and fuzzy year, full of funny incidents, pranks, surprises, getting new jobs and relocating, setting up a cute house, and lots of conversations about lots of topics. Its been the happiest year of our lives for both of us.

Yesterday we sat down to do a little stocktaking exercise, and were amazed to find how much progress we have made on our marriage. We tried to think of improvement points and the only three we could think of are a) we both should lose weight, b) we should go out with friends more often, and c) we should make more investments. We are very happy and peaceful and look forward to many more years together.

For Saturday, S has planned a delightful surprise (not any more, he broke it yesterday)- we are going to Bangalore for the Aerosmith concert! This is very special, as he dislikes loud music of any kind and is taking me because I love Aerosmith. Yay! I am so excited! I’ve loved Steve Tyler for as long as I can remember! And I hope they sing Sunshine! We will also go on a cute walking tour to all the places where we had our first few dates- coffee shops and bookshops around the city, restaurants, etc.

Gee! I am so happy and excited!

I never feel uglier than when I go to beauty salons. I realized this many times during my brother’s wedding. I found out, to my dismay, that nothing I possess naturally is good enough to meet established standards in beauty. My hair is too thick. My skin is not the right quality. My finger nails are flattened like a duck’s. Shades of plum don’t look good on me. And so on and so forth.

Fortunately, the ladies who attended on me had many beauty aides that could help me overcome my shortcomings. For example, was I amenable to paying for a small pouch of imported hair serum? Then the ladies could tame down my hair, and curl them in ringlets like little girls’. A honey and oatmeal wrap, costing Rs 2000, could invigorate my complexion and bring out the color of the henna tattoos on my hands. A French manicure could hide my deformed nails, and for Rs 1200 they would mix me a shade of lipstick that was not plum, but a faint plummy tinge that would go with the color of my sari.

Frankly, I wanted to get all the aides. But after meticulously calculating my budget, I decided to have only the hair serum. After paying over Rs 200, the lady mixed for me a blob of serum, .5 cm in diameter, in a bowl of water 4 cm in diameter and .5 cm deep.

I asked, “Isn’t this too little for my hair, which, as you said, is very thick?”

“Its imported.” said the lady, “A little will go a long way, you’ll see.”

I gave in, and a half hour later I was standing outside the salon with a head full of tight curls, waiting for the rain to recede. Sadly, I didn’t get a taxi immediately, and had to walk in the rain to get one. I came home with a head full of clumped greasy hair and a zit on my forehead. The imported serum couldn’t take care of the acid rain of Calcutta.

So I joined my new workplace. Rather, I rejoined my old workplace after a gap of two years, of course in a new role. I’ve been here a week now, and allocated my two projects. The work is interesting and the team is great to work with. It feels nice to be back, but sometimes it can get a little overwhelming too. There are too many people from the past, too many memories, too many old jokes and secrets. On the other hand, there are also many changes to get used to. First, everyone expects to see the old me. They are shocked to see that I have put on weight, grown my hair long, and generally tamed down. I, in return, am surprised to see the change in my old friends. The people who were single two years ago are now married. The people who were just married then, have children now. From worrying about which pub to visit in the evening after work, they now worry about which car their wives will prefer, and which school will be good for the baby. We are all a little overweight. Many of us need reading glasses. It is very lifelike. I think I will enjoy working here.

My four-month break from work was wonderful. It gave me the much-needed time to wind down, recuperate, read, and most importantly, think and reflect.

Today I tried to top up the beanbag and was so nauseated that I had to quickly zip it up and go lie

down. As the room swung around and the light dimmed and greyed and I drowned in the grey light, blacked out, and reentered the grey, I remembered the feeling from long gone, the feeling of nausea and confusion that I experience whenever I see a writhing mass of wet circles packed tightly together.

 

As a child, I almost puked every time my mother cut open a ripe papaya. The black, slimy, spongy mass of seeds that stuck to each other and gently jumped up and down as if in response to some invisible polar force were the main reason why I would never eat a piece of ripe papaya until it was shoved down my throat. Similar was the case with fish roe, which made a regular appearance in the kitchen on weekends. An accidental peep at the raw lattice of fish roe nauseated me, and even the tempting smell while cooking and after could not make me take a look at it again.

 

My mother, who has a good knowledge of ailments and diagnosis and traditional herbal remedies, at once put my condition down to “a bad liver”. As a remedy she gave me the juice of the dandelion in an old iron spoon, with some sugar mashed in it. (Mother believes that sugar is the magic ingredient that makes everything palatable, indeed, edible, for children.) The taste of that alkaline gummy juice, with the faint blood like perfume from the iron, lingers in my mind.

 

Whether it is from the dandelion gum, or from the numerous other herbs, flowers, roots, and seeds we were forced to consume while growing up, my liver is in fantastic condition (certified by the doctor), and I haven’t had such a fit for years until today, when I saw the writing mass of styrofoam globules inside the beanbag.

I don't know what it is that turns me off. It could be the writhing motion or the slippery consistency. It could be the vulgar abundance of it all. And I can’t explain very well how I feel when I see a mass of wet circles. It is akin to, but much stronger than, the nauseating feeling you have when you hear a hard chalk scratching a blackboard, or when you taste dishwasher liquid in the mouth.

The potato is the world’s most extensively grown tuber. It originated in southern Peru and was grown by the Incas. Its cultivation spread through the Americas and Europe between 1400- 1500. In India, sweet red potato is a native plant, but the Europeans introduced the potato (aloo) as we know it today.
 

Starch is the main constituent nutrient in the potato. Potatoes also contain potassium, magnesium, phosphorous, zinc and iron. Vitamin B is present as thiamin, riboflavin, niacin and folates. Vitamin A is present as carotinoids. The skin of the potato contains fiber. New/ baby potatoes, in addition, contain traces of selenium. Human beings need selenium- in extremely small quantities- for efficient functioning of the thyroid. Green spots on the potato show that it contains excessive selenium, and is best avoided.
 

The potato is the proverbial blank canvas. You can eat it steamed, broiled, roasted, fried, baked or stewed. You can make either sweet dishes out of it, or savory ones. You can eat it as a main dish, side dish, or even as a snack. Depending on the spices you use, you can make an American, European, African, Indian, or a Nordic or Latin American dish out of the potato.
 

Take five boiled potatoes. Skin them. Dice into one inch square pieces. Take a wok. Pour some vegetable oil in it. When the oil smokes, reduce heat, and put some mustard seeds, cumin seeds and dried red chilies in the oil. Let them splutter and release tangy aroma. Then tumble all the potato pieces into the wok. Toss and turn the potatoes to coat them well. Throw in some salt, red chilly powder, and a pinch of turmeric powder. Toss and turn and coat potatoes. Put a lid on and let cook for five to eight minutes. Open lid. Turn potatoes again. Taste for seasoning and adjust. Dilute half teaspoon (or more, if you like the smell) of asafetida in two teaspoons of water, and pour into the potatoes. Turn once more. Close lid and cook for a little while. Take off flame. Take off lid to cool. Just before you eat, squeeze a little lemon juice and sprinkle chopped cilantro leaves.
 

Apart from being a tasty side dish/ snack, this is an easy dish to teach your wife if she is 30, and doesn’t yet know how to cook.
 

If you have not thrown out the boiled potato peels, you can make another tasty snack with them. Make a thick paste of flour/ rice flour, poppy seeds, chilly powder, salt, and a little pinch of turmeric powder, just for the color. Heat a lot of oil in a deep frying pan. Dip and coat the potato peels in the paste, and deep fry them till crunchy. Drain on paper napkins. Use as snack with Indian tea.

The doctor has asked me to stop eating potatoes. He might as well have asked me to stop eating.

What are the five books that changed your life?  (Inspired by Ms. Genevieve.)

 

I can’t resist this QOTD! I must do it!

In chronological order-

Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun

Read as a Bengali translation when I was ten. In hindsight, no child, however dark, should read Hamsun at ten.

A Room with a View by E M Forster

First read when I was fourteen and then read repetitively all through my adolescence. Especially beautiful lines about love underlined in green felt tipped pen.

Ghare Baire by Rabindranath Tagore

First read when I was fifteen and then read repetitively all through my adulthood. Breathtaking in its modernism and encouraging my thought in a range of new ways every time I read it.

The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects by Lewis Mumford

Read as college text at eighteen and instrumental in initiating my lifelong love for urban geography/ sociology.

The Complete Prose of Woody Allen by Woody Allen

Read last year. It still makes me break down into hopeless laughter whenever I think of specific pieces. Dark children need lots of humor, even when they grow up.

...You write out a beetroot recipe for a friend and one of the steps reads-

• Wound them well, so that they bleed. 

Well what d'you know. I either have a dark side, or a poetic side.

It looks like I will start working only from March. Till then, I am going to take it easy and stay at home, and travel to Delhi to visit my parents and younger brother between February 7 and 19. This means that I'll have some time to catch up on reading, viewing films, and designing. So, I have made a new year's promise to myself to see at least thirty movies between January 5 and February 5, read two books, and design at least the template for my website. As part of this promise, I've also decided to post reviews of each film and book on this blog.

 

I already started on the first two parts of the resolution. I've seen two films ("Maqbool" and "Walk the Line"), and started on a book ("On Beauty" by Zadie Smith).

 

"When I was young, tasks of writing often caused me difficulties. Almost all my writing then consisted of essays or answers to questions set as homework. Writing these essays and answers confused me. I felt that the teachers (or my father, who sometimes oversaw my homework) and I were aiming for different ends. For me, writing meant writing. I would of course answer the question, and keep to the set word count; but apart from that (I thought) I was pretty much at liberty with style and choice of words. For example, to a question like, "What happened when Silas Marner's gold was stolen?" I felt it was perfectly alright to end my answer with a sentence like, "And then Silas Marner let out a scream, and the anguish of it pierced through the village night."

 

But my teacher thought otherwise. While she corrected our homework, I would invariably be called to her desk. We would then have a talk.

- Swati.

- Yes.

- Where did you get this last sentence?

- I wrote it myself. (proudly)

- But its not there in the book!

- I know. But don't you think its logical that Silas Marner will scream in grief when he finds out his gold has been stolen?

- Ok. Good. But henceforth, just stick to what George Elliot has written. And no big words.

 

We had these conversations many times during my junior school days. Sometimes the teacher/ my father would get angry, and then they would draw a long thick red line through my answer. I would have to rewrite it. Sometimes I would have to rewrite it many times over. It was very much like a battle of nerves, wits, egos, and justice.

 

This dilemma troubled me less and less as I went up to high school, and then to college. In these years, I had to write more and more of analyses. As long as I knew the established theories and could explain them well, my teachers did not mind me writing out my own thoughts. In fact, they encouraged independent thinking, new ideas, and arguments. By this time, I had realized and accepted that though I loved writing, I was not a good writer. Though I sometimes had good thoughts, my language- both Bengali and English- was simply not good enough to write and develop these thoughts. This realization did not bother me. I was just happy to write.

 

In this phase of my life, I also worshiped my writing like my God, and treated it as an inviolate thing. If I wanted to bunk class, or not do a chore, I could easily tell practiced lies, like, "My Mother is really ill, I need to go home," or, "The Professor has set us a tough assignment, I must go to the Library." But I could never bring myself to utter falsehoods like, "I want to go practice writing now, and that is why I can't attend your class." First, I didn’t want anyone to know about my writing. And second, the last thing I wanted to do was to use it as an excuse, or tell a lie about it.

When I think back, I can only smile fondly at the intense child that I was. I also smile for all the people who are at this moment adding their own lines to school essays, or missing work to write out their thoughts.

 

I still write, not because I like my writing, but because I like to write. Sometimes I think I write because I do not like to talk. However, what I do definitely know is that in many ways, my writing is the most important thing in my life. This thought is frightening, and I still have not come to terms with it."