Coming back...

A trip to India for NRIs is never quite satisfying. A month long sojourn seems like an appetiser to a full course meal. Yes, The NRI in me reached India, travelled to Mumbai, to Pune, to Calcutta, to Muzzafarpur(North Bihar) and then back via the same route to Muscat.

It was hectic, it was fun. There were set backs at time, road blocks at others. The street food was mouth watering, the cold was heart warming, lazy mornings, heavy breakfasts, things which we don't usually do when we stay away from the generation that has always sought to feed us, to take care of us, were all done lavishly. A month long sojourn where everyone wants to see how you have changed/grown over the last year - horizontally(for us), vertically(for the kids) finally came to an end.

Everytime I go to India, I try to cut down on my list of people to visit and add a few places to visit, every time I fail. However this time, I did take the kids to the Elephanta caves, to the sonet lumiere at The Victoria Memorial in Calcutta. I wanted to take them to see a theatre or a play as it is called, but an elderly relative took sick suddenly and a visit to the hospital took precedence.. well, there's always a next time!

I am back now to my routine, to my work, to my early morning coffee and restless reading of books. PTAs will start soon enough, and so will my walks to lose the fat that I accumulated over bengali sweets and mutton curries. I am suddenly back to being an adult again. Going to a place where everybody is from your previous generation makes you a time traveller in a sense. You are called by innumerable nick names, you are pampered and scolded, your views are not taken, your hair colour is looked at with indulgence mixed with agony. You are served water before you ask for it, you are put to bed early and you have to eat fruits!!!

So lets just say that on one level I am glad to be back, to belong where I truly do. I am glad to be back to all my blogger friends, I have missed you all a lot. I am sure all of you had a great New Year's eve and I wish everyone a happy and prosperous 2010. Looking forward to sharing the details of a sometime mundane, somethime active, sometime poignant and sometime hilarious life with you once again.

The lost colours

A few days back as I was researching on Benarasi Sarees for my other blog, the mind wandered to the days when my mother's wardrobe was filled with colour. the blues and yellows, the reds and pinks seemed so natural, so taken for granted.

And then the day when we lost the only man in both our lives came to mind. The early morning hour when the last, laboured breath was taken and the pain finally erased from his face, the last shred of hope erased from ours. what followed that day is sepia toned and dogeared in my mind, a natural dam against a furious storm. The image that, is stark and clear, however, is that of my mother, rigid, alone, and devoid of all colour, apart from the red of her eyes.

Nobody told her to alienate the colours, She was not forced into whites, and yet the society which she had grown up in, which was imbibed in her did not allow her to think any other way. The idle days that followed, which were devoid of the punctual nursing routine, saw her rigid frame lying still for hours at end on her side of the bed.

On the 13th day of dad's passing away, she gave away all her sarees to who ever wanted to keep them for the sake of memories, the rest were given away to maids and the numerous helps who worked in the house of mourning.

So many years have passed since then, I have held my sorrow in me, but my life has moved on. The material things in my life did not change with the passing away of my dad, but for my mother and so many like her, the loss of the husband is not just a painful stab in the heart, there is a physical change that follows, at every step the society puts a reminder that she is a widow, in case one fine day she forgets!! The colours vanish, so does jewellery, there are restrictions on what she can eat, where she can go. There is nobody who is monitoring, there is nobody who will question, its just the cognitive morality that has seeped into the system, that is forbidding.

As a daughter I could have taken the initiative, I could have persuaded her not to shy away from colours, but her rigidity and my non confronting nature came in the way. It rips my heart each time I go into a shop and tell the shopkeeper to show sarees without red and maroon borders, He invariably shows me a white saree with a black border, he smiles a sad and understanding smile, and I leave the shop.

I am not a feminist, but I cannot let any man rule what I wear. I have never worn sindoor in my life. Bindis are also a rarity with me. I have no fascination for jewellery or for anything that declares me married. Its not that I want to project myself as unmarried, its just that like a marriage certificate all these physical declarations seem like bondage to me, they clip my wings, they take away my identity. They are dependent not on love but on norms. Sati might have been abolished, but the sneer on the face of society for widows is still there.

Putting the right foot forward

The last post was an expression of my angst and fury. And this one is an expression of the fact that I still believe in humanity(male and female). Each time we put the right foot ahead of the left and form a step, we are actually taking a decision to move ahead, to cross barriers and borders, to take a plunge into the unknown, to discover and to live whatever comes in our way. Each morning before the tiny step we are renewing our ethereal faith, we are renewing our trusts in people and in God.

A few days back these images were mailed to me by Suraj. It is a chain mail and many of you would have already seen them. But I will still go ahead and use this platform to share these lovely images and message that each of them carry.

They renewed my faith and made me see beyond myself. Hope they light a spark in your lives too. For the ease of reading I am retyping the message below each image.

Stand up against racial discrimination. Stop Racism

Get out of a destructive relationship when there is still time


Children learn fast. DOn't fight at home

Do not neglect the Girl Child

Adopt!! You never know who you will bring home.

Think before wasting food.

Protect your child. Abusers are usually people your child trusts!

Is this what your child surfs on the World Wide Web??

Drive safe! Better late than never!

Tell me what you feel..

Like my blog, I have been neglecting a lot of things that are close to my heart lately. I have been putting it all to the back burner, saying the same lines repeatedly,"Next weekend, when there's a bit more time.." I must have said this a dozen times over the last couple of weeks, to my kids, to myself, to my friends.. only to realise just a while back, that time does not come, I have to create it!!

Talking of realisations, I have suddenly realised that men like trash!! Am I seeing raised eyebrows? Am I seeing a few eyes getting closer to their computer screens? Or am I seeing,"DUH!!! what did you think?" expressions!! Hahahah, but really, I have always prided myself, to the point of being egoistic that I was attractive to men because of my wit, of my intellect, and to an extent, because of my nature!! But believe me that's not what men want..MEN LIKE TRASH!!!

By trash I mean, women who throw themselves over anything male(had a better way of saying it but, my daughter reads the blog..so being careful with my language here), by trash I mean women who are constantly on the prowl, making overtures, making moves, being vampish, being dumb and being damsels in a perpetual state of undress as well as distress. And believe you me - all men, starting from tramps to technocrats like that!!

Another realisation is that offices are a hub of politics. It was so 13 years back when I started working, it is so, even now! The faxes and the software could have changed but the people have not. It's either a power game or a blame game, and in between all this and the numerable coffee breaks, if there is time, some work ends up happening.

Just a few realisations and their announcements at the cost of sounding naive, biased, judgemental, frigid or all of the above!!

Lets hear what each one of you gotta say!!

Our world

"Remember how we watched three Uttam Kumar classics back to back that Saptami night? which year was it? Remember..Rintu was in college I think, it must be '96. And what about the saree shopping we did together on the gariahat roads? remember the crowd, and the phuchka breaks we kept taking. That year Pujo was the best, we were all together, the pandals, the dhunochi naach, the aaroti..."

It is at such moments when I see mamma go all nostalgic about her past, that I realize what a completely different life we bengali children lead here in Muscat. The set of kids that I mix with and also some others whom I see around have our own little culture, and we follow it to the core. Uttam kumar could be missing, and we might not have fond memories of gariahat road, but this post will give you all a peek into our culture.

When we, pre-teens and teens meet each other at the Bengali parties, that we are dragged to, or at pujas and other such social functions, do we greet each other like our counterparts in Calcutta? do we say, "Ki re kemon achish?" No!! we dont, we usually say "hey" and give a hi5 or just smile and say, "You alright?" The irony is not here, the irony is in the fact that in the same breath we greet our elders in proper unaccented bengali, we continue to eat bengali food without the slightest knowledge of its name or recipe, we continue to respond to the queer pet names we carry, and we continue to live in the little cultural domain that we have created in a faraway shore quite naturally.

We have no idea how great Soumitra Chaterjee was as an actor, or how beautiful Suchitra Sen. We think Mithun is a loser and feel bengali black and white flicks are a bore, we hardly know anything about Tagore, and yet we dance to his songs and even sing a few for social dos, we get the steps right, we get the tunes right, the lyrics, written using the English alphabets are easily memorized, we even manage the expressions, but we remain passionless about his emotions, we remain aloof to his sentiments. His essence is lost in us.

We buy clothes whenever we want or feel like, there is no excitement about new clothes during the festive season, we live typical NRI lives and yet return home on time to report the day's events in Bengali to our parents, our lives are a paradox that even we cannot explain, and yet we live it without any difficulty in this small world of the Bengali kids in Muscat.

This was a break I took between my exam studies. If my brother can become a hit here..why not me?? c'mon guys, I gave you a thought to ponder upon..let the comments flow in.

with love
Toshali

The house and the mango tree...

What is a house after all? It is just walls and a few windows, a front and a back porch, a garage, a terrace, a few doors, and some people who call it home. Isn't it? Or is there something we missed?

May be we missed the small room up the stairway which had a rickety cot and a tiny bulb that hung over that cot. This room saw not only idle afternoons of tea and chit chats, but probably also saw some serious studying being done late at nights, probably it also saw the first kiss exchanged by an amorous and nervous young boy, and maybe it saw tears of rejection as well as joy. Today if we were to ask its long forgotten, cobwebbed and cracked walls to speak, maybe we would see a lot of important and not so important truths emerge.

What about the Huge Mango tree behind the house? The one that was used as a landmark. Many kids, many generations climbed its branches, planted by the grand old man who designed and built each room, each wall of this house, in memory of his eternal love. The tree, seasoned and weathered, has stood proud the test of all times. Did anybody know the simple story behind this planting? Did they know that the grand old man had once loved a woman deeply. The tree was planted as a sapling to grow with their growing love, so that one day they could point it to their grandchildren and say,"This is how huge our love is!!" They never got the chance to culminate the love, but the tree stood as a loving symbol of all that was beautiful once upon a time.

Then of course there is the inner courtyard. The humdrum of daily life, the washing of clothes and utensils, the tulsi at the centre, the diya that burnt each night only to fade with the rising of the sun. The lounging chair that was always kept here with an adjacent table with the day's newspaper and a glass of water. It was on this chair that the grand old man breathed his last at the age of 92.

The terrace, was the most romantic of places, this house saw. All the children of the grand old man got married here. Under the canopy of the stars and the brilliance of the moon, the sons had chanted their vows, pledging life long loyalty and love to their brides. What does it matter now that some loyalties were betrayed down the line, love was often compromised in the passing of the years. But on the day the sons brought home their wives, the terrace was the witness to the first exchange of shy glances, of the hope of a future to be built in this house. It was also the witness down the line to the wobbling feet of the kids born, of songs being sung on stormy nights, of lullabies cooed to drowsy ears, of drying clothes in winter afternoons, of sun soaking pickles, of naughty years and drinking bouts.

The house with its walls and doors, with its front and back porch, with its cobweb and ruined plaster is to be broken down. In it's place will emerge a multi-storeyed apartment. A functional and modern place with amenities that are required, with easy maintenance and upkeep, free form the mildew of the past. The decision has been reached, the sons have agreed. Its just a matter of time before the mango tree is cut down, before the existence of the room on the terrace, the inner courtyard, and the terrace itself crumbles down to the touch of a bulldozer.

We move with times, from the ashes of the old, rises the new. There is nothing unsightly about all this, there is no fight, there are no differences, its for the ease of all and the betterment of the future generation. Just that I needed to tell the tale of a house that was designed by a grand old man, brick by brick, the tale of a love that did not see the light of the day and yet weathered the storms of the night.

Seven Today

He is seven today. seven years he's been teaching me, changing me, loving me. Getting me to think like him, to understand him, to accept him, yes seven years is a short time..but he is trying and so am I. There is no goal apart from enjoying the journey.

If I have sat with him teaching him phonetics, he has in turn taught me that everything in life cannot be pushed, there is a time for things to fall in place, it took him a little longer than his peers to grasp words, to read, to write. I shouted, I cried, I ran up the wall time and again..but he was not ready yet. And then one day..he just read a story book to me, just like that! I have no photographic record of that moment, but I think I just jumped up and down the bed hugging him to me. He was 6 then.

He took to maths like a pro. There is always a star that he proudly shows on every page of this subject notebook. He still at times writes his 7 the other way round, but his mental grasp of arithmetic has helped me many times at the counters of the super markets. he is quick to point out the change due, and how much easier it would be for me to buy him a kinder egg rather than count the change.

He is forgetful with names, with dates, with the lyrics of his prayers and school songs, but he can play a tune from start to finish. He can swim like a fish and somersault like a dolphin. He is spooked terribly by ghosts. He is fond of barbies and race cars. He loves the outdoors and cannot sit still for more than a minute. He is expressive, he is naughty, he is my bond- Seven today.

lets see the years that went by..








There are highs, lows, major road blocks, soaring moments, and moments when I want to pull out whatever hair is left on my head..but I have to admit there is never a dull moment with my boy around! Happy Birthday Soumya!