Tag: south indian

Dreams of home are back

These days I dream often of home. It’s usually me being back in Trivandrum. My brother is driving my Mazda, which was shipped across continents for (apparently) no good reason.

The other day I cooked rasam. I couldn’t decide on what to cook, which is where I struggle most when it comes to cooking. I got the idea from Uma who was preparing rasam the previous evening when we spoke. I had a nice meal (which means there was fish), and then I had a post-lunch nap.

These days I dream often of home. It’s usually me being back in Trivandrum. My brother is driving my Mazda, which was shipped across continents for (apparently) no good reason. Towards the end of the dream I watch as my 23kg-luggage bag shuffles away across a container belt, while logistics of my return flight hover around my head like calculus in cartoons. It’s as if I’m contemplating shipping back my stuff to Texas, but not myself.
Wonder why.

Over a month ago my physiotherapist had asked if I miss home, and I quickly said no, just the people, things, and some of the places (lol).

Interestingly, after my big fat lunch I dreamt that I was back in school on a late evening. There were crowds by the stage and something loud was playing on speaker. It must’ve been School Day, you could hear commotion and cheering from back there. I was rushing from behind the stage to our classrooms near New Hall, there was a sense of urgency to the whole thing but I have no idea why. I spotted many familiar faces, made up and in costume. I quickly waved at a friend, it seemed I was surprised that she showed up in my dream still in her uniform. Some were friends from undergrad. All of us weirdly affiliated.

I couldn’t with my dazed dreamy head make out the timeline, but I had to.
If I was still in school it meant I might have to practice for a group song I was better off lip-syncing to anyway for everyone’s benefit.
If I had just got out of high school I might have to attend felicitation and line up backstage – but in that case someone should be looking for me.
If I was in undergrad and just visiting, why were my friends in costume and practising? Or was I in the present, working in the US and visiting teachers?

If my physiotherapist ever caught me in a dream these days I’d respond What are you talking about, I don’t have to miss home when I am home.

I remember being a bit sad when I woke up, and realizing it was Teacher’s Day in India.

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The 5AM hour

Hours before daybreak belong to television lights thrown on younger faces asleep on couches, parents driving teenagers to tuition classes and early morning goodbyes.

Hours before daybreak belong to television lights thrown on younger faces asleep on couches, reflections flying past their curtains into the damp, sickly air. Parents that drive their teenagers to tuition classes for lessons they’re happy to forget about until they drive their own in a few decades.

It is the hour of early morning goodbyes in presence of a thoughtfully packed bag that doesn’t quite belong nor assume relevance until a few hours. Amidst stolen moments of delight at an infant air that speaks hope and possibilities in a way the approaching noisy day cannot.

The exam in three months? You’ll crack it. The messy long-distance relationship? It will be okay. The project you have a deadline for today afternoon? There’s plenty of time, and you know what they say about the early bird. (They say it has a false perception of time).

It is the hour of walking past gym-goers in a world of their own behind glass walls. The hour before tea and coffee, where everything seems a little less unequal, a little more messy, real.

If I were home it’d be the hour to appreciate a peaceful dawn before sweat-stained morning drowns it in bus honks and handbags clutched to chests. To be proud to belong to the land of (good-looking) temples, to be thankful for the smell of agarbati everyday at daybreak, and the person responsible for it.

Most of all, the 5am hour belongs to the “You can call me anytime sir/madam” guy who will not solve any of your issues in life, but whose constant uneasiness somehow convinces you whatever is plaguing you isn’t as bad as his own.

(I wrote this while waiting outside Texas Driver License Center yesterday morning, I heard that “You can call me” line one too many times.)

#21 Postcard – I cooked (and ate) well last week

I didn’t cook or eat properly the last couple of weeks, so I made a conscious effort to not let perishables go to waste the past week.

Warning – I bought pork chops last Saturday that I didn’t want to freeze so you’re going to see a lot of pork. The cooking was almost entirely done in the evenings after work. Also no breakfast – it was mostly leftover hummus or avocado on toast because they’re the easiest things to do on week day mornings.

Everything I cooked was yum! 😀

Pork fried rice/pulao thing. I cut the chops into thin strips, seasoned with paprika and salt, fried them to give a nicely colored crisp. Saute vegetables and ginger-garlic in oil, season, add the pork, then the sauces, then mix in the cooked rice.

Also curd for the tummy ❤

The heart wants what it wants – Rice with rasam and pork!
Cooked rasam on Tuesday night. Lazy pork with curry leaves, red onion and chilly powder, turmeric. I slept so well!
The rasam lasted me for another 3 meals.

Sandwich with lazy pork but without aromatics
I used a peeler to make thin carrot shavings because chopping carrot isn’t worth the effort plus the long slivers sit well within the bread. It wasn’t as crunchy as I’d like though. I coated the vegetables in the leftover fat from the pan.

Crab-cheese poppers – okay this came frozen and I just had to bake them in the oven. Ugh I didn’t click a photo of the dip – it was a ranchy something with bites of pickle.

I worked from office on Thursday. I had avocado toast for breakfast that I took with me (do not compromise, even if in office :P), and had packed orange marmalade sandwiches with me for lunch. They obviously paled in comparison with the lunches I ate all week, and I couldn’t wait to get home to have the rest of my rasam-rice 😀

A Tropical Sunday

A tropical Sunday from 5 years ago

Sundays without practice are rare. Opening the Whatsapp group (renamed the previous night to Practice at 9) with a half-open eye at 8:50 on Sunday morning, only to see the latest message ‘no practice’ – heavenly. It’s afternoon, my stomach is full from all that kappa and meen curry, and I have a nap to look forward to and I also look forward to waking up hungry so I can go downstairs and eat more of that.

If you’re from a tropical place you’d know a Sunday lunch isn’t lunch if you haven’t sweated profusely either during, before or after it (I know it’s a tropical thing because Mark Wiens shares the sentiment). The kitchen is hot and humid, so is the market, so is the car, so is everything. Nobody wants to be outside but it’s Sunday so you have to sweat.

I should’ve aimed for a productive Sunday but it’s Sunday, and all that sun is going to lull me to sleep.

I should draw the curtains before falling into a nap, otherwise I’ll be sweating like shit when I wake up. Why are Sundays so drawn out yet so similar and short?

I wake up sweating like shit anyway, my back unpleasantly drenched, face sweaty, the sun bathing my room in all that light even with a single window open. The world outside is bright and blinding at 4, a distant jackfruit tree in my neighbor’s backyard hissing in the hot afternoon breeze. I stretch my arms, and the black pants I wore to market with Achan earlier falls to the floor.

Ugh.

I look around and the room is still messy. I cannot believe my room is still messy. It was messy before I fell asleep, it was messy when I was 15. It’s messy now at 20. It looks glorious in the sun though, all the colors (read clothes) on the single bed, encroaching onto the double one. And on the rack. I must find time at night to clean up, I’ve been judged my whole life for a messy room.

Well at least I have stuff on the walls, that should offer some redemption. Why can’t people just watch Jack Sparrow and the weird cat stickers on the walls and ignore the rest of the room? And David Beckham shining in the rays, who I’m not even a fan of but Tessa gifted that when I was 14? Why’s that still hanging on the shelf? How have I not noticed? The last time I noticed it I was 15 and rearranging this room and adding an embarrassing handmade curtain on the steel book shelf.
Has anyone else noticed?

I want to sleep, but WAIT THERE’s KAPPA. That’s why I welcomed sleep in the first place. Do you know how horrible it is to fall asleep, wake up to realize there’s nothing nice to eat? If not you can never appreciate a sleep with the knowledge that something nice awaits for when you wake up.

Upstairs at 4 is just bright sunlight everywhere, it’s blinding. (Luckily I didn’t need glasses and didn’t get headaches when I was 20). Okay, Amma’s outside in the garden-slash-rainforest. The tiles are still warm and the day still bright.

“Harvesting aana amma?”

“This is the second batch,” she says holding up her cupped palms filled with kovakka. She’s also munching on them. I pick two sturdy looking light-green ones (that’s how you know they’re not ripe/bitter inside) and throw them in my mouth, proceeding to carry them all in my t-shirt crinkled basket.

I have never understood how people dressed up neatly at home. I probably dressed nice from 5-9, from 10-15 I’d rather not look at what I wore at home, repeat for 16-19. In a lot of pictures from those days I wear a shiny shorts from my brother’s jersey set (I had like 4 or 5 of them*), and one of his tee shirts I had picked up, or some random top from my cupboard that I wore like a derelict. 100% of the time I looked like someone who received terribly mismatched clothes from a donation.

The pictures are hard to look at. My mother never had issues with what I wore though. And the pictures are unbearable I tell you, and I have confronted my mother in later times on how she could let her only daughter walk around like that.

“There’s more,” I proceed to the creeper to pluck. “How long you been here.”

She tells me what she’s been up to while the rest of us have been on our Sunday siesta.

“Ottum orangeelle!” She slept a while. She’s really happy when she’s out here and lights up like a child every time there’s a rose blooming, and its close-ups end up in her Camera gallery. She also loves attending flower exhibitions and clicking photos at odd close-up angles, the latter also with couples at their wedding receptions. (I never got it back then but guess some 5 years later I click trees and gardens wherever I go as well.)

I’m looking out for the really young and tiny ones now, like the ones where the wilted flower is still intact, they’re probably a couple of days old and are super crunchy. They go straight into my mouth. I’m a bad person.

There’s a wind and all the mango trees and the curry leaves and everything else in the forest sing. Not dry rustling leaves on the ground but healthy, rich and evergreen bunches thick on tall branches. Tender curry leaves and long mango leaves and fat broad ones on the jackfruit tree plant which never grew up. There’s usually also tiny birds on the chembarathi, often attacking at my brother’s window with their sharp tiny beaks.

I ask if there’s tea.

“Illa,” she answers in a duh way. Sunday tea is late unless I’m ravenous and there’s nothing to eat and I prepare tea in a fit to calm myself down.

“Well it’s hot here I’m going inside, is anything on TV”

“Arinjudade, nokeella” (yes she is from Kollam :D)

I proceed back inside with my t-shirt harvest cup – and plunk transfer them on to the dining table. There’s a brass vase-like holder (that doesn’t match the table) which I should probably use but it stays empty. If I were hungry enough I’d chomp down all of it myself, but today there’s kappa so that’s where I’m going and couldn’t care less.

Later in the evening

I’m sitting on the verandah entrance with my tea cup, legs spread on the lower steps. (Pictures of the pose exist, they’re terrible). One of the things about tea is drinking out of a cup you like, and figuring over time just how strong you need it to be (and just how much) to relax, and how much to refresh. I notice how dark(er) my knees have become from that single knee drop step in the choreo, and a solar-system shaped blob from childhood that persists. I had claw marks from our poochas criss-crossing all over my two arms and my perennial concern during ages 7-9 was what if they’re permanent, how would I explain them to others (as I am now) for the remainder of my life that I wrestled with cats to take their ticks out? They’re gone now, so will this blob sooner or later I guess.

I now drink from a Walmart mug, but then I’m 25 26 now, after many effortful attempts the tea is prepared in a microwave and for better or for worse, I’m okay with that. Unlike the claw marks, I can still find the solar system somewhere in there if I look hard enough.

#5 Kumbalangi Nights/All my meencurrys

To everyone that asked how my first semester went, I’ve told I’m glad it’s over.

A painful majority of my week nights (or whatever remained of them considering I went to sleep at 3 and woke up late) were spent listening to Cherathukal in my bed. During week days I draw the blinds but keep the shades parallel so light can filter into my room, in case I over sleep. There’s a streetlamp right outside and there’s these trimmed grasses and short plants by my window throwing shadows on my walls to keep company.

(Only on week days because weekends are more cheerful.) Some days I turn on the fairy lights in my room. It’s a little weird because it’s sad yet it’s a good way to sleep, away from deadlines and college. The song reminds me of all the good fish I should be eating. All the meen-curry’s at home, basically. And I’m not even a meencurry person.

Kannan loves meen curry. Me-not necessarily. When coming home he asks if there’s meen curry to decide if he should eat from home. A yes suffices, never fails to amaze. I would have different questions. What other curry? Thoran entheluondo? If meencurry then what meen? And what meen curry? Because there’s so many.

The tame, orange, slightly watery kind made with puli and fine arapp so that the coconut doesn’t stick on to the rectangular or square choora kashnams that you can peel off layer by layer like kitkat. The red one with mathi is my favorite, with lots of ulli and tomato paste, sweet and spicy and sour and heads (with eyes and brains as well, for all you folks too puny to eat the best parts of mathi), and skeletons that you can chew and grind and yes, swallow (well muringakka allalo mathi alle). The fat juicy neymathi bought fresh from market that oozes bursting fat onto the frying pan, filling the entire two storeys of the house with the smell of mathi fry, it’s criminal to eat it cold.

Or even the netholi curry made with curry leaves and thick coconut paste that sticks to each shockingly yellow piece? On some days, manga pieces creep into the yellow curry (I’m not a fan). And that lame ass meencurry I ate from the roadside thattukada with a huge fish head-piece and was all the hype but tasted like an average emotionless curry even compared to my mediocre cook Amma’s worst.

And all those Sundays with fish bought from the market and onto the meenchatti straight with some arapp from the mixie, split green chillies, curry leaves and/or drumsticks. The fat fish that broke apart as you gouged out a big piece burning the index and thumb fingers and revealing white flesh underneath that turmeric coated yellow paleness and escaping fumes. And the greedy you go for it again before your finger has even cooled down and it goes straight to your mouth, the taste of fresh fish that you don’t get once refrigerated. Gulp. Another bite and another and another. You need more pieces. Chatti evide? 

They say the arapp gets better and the curry tastier the next day even if a bit sour and if you’ve had your amma give you undas of that with pazhinji you’re as lucky as me, but there’s nothing quite like cooking fresh fish. The cheli of the market and the heat of a Sunday noon culminates in those easy burns, accompanied fumes and the juiciness in your mouth. Or even the coarse varutharacha meencurry for ayala that’s brick red and thick and you cannot see much else apart from the likely contours of pieces and a stray white eyeball floating here or there. Curry leaves? Somewhere there. Drumstick? That too. Less on gravy but amazing with kappa. 
Kappa. Goddammit. *pause for a dramatic sigh*

The best I came to making fish curry here was with grated coconut and puli and tilapia. It tasted good, edible, but nothing like a meen curry should taste like mostly because the fish has unfamiliar un-fishy flavors here. So like every other night I go to bed on Wednesday after a marathon to submit an assignment at 11:54pm for a 11:59pm deadline and I listen to cherathukal and imagine all the types of fish curries I could be having at home, if the kid in the film knows all of the different varieties, of the gleaming skinned fish in his curry, of his favorite way to make konj – with lots of ginger and garlic or with thakkaali or frying them deep red with crispy curry leaves or a glowing curry with coconut or?

This is not meencurry, this is fish moly. For a horror from this Christmas.
(It tasted great, lime juice FTW)

#1 Uppmaav

Of all the things I do on a weekday, cooking is probably the most rushed. At least as rushed as it possibly could be.

The good news is, you can only rush it so much. That is if you’ve learnt your lessons, want the intended results and not spend an hour scrubbing the vessel after.

So you start by heating some oil – vegetable oil cos it’s cheap, coconut oil if you can afford that wherever you are, peanut if you aren’t allergic and any others if you’ve explored more. The vapors are rising off the oil surface so you now add your black mustard seeds. (no I will never side-note “or cumin if you’re North Indian“. Just don’t bother if you want to add cumin to uppmaav).

So this is where cooking begins to test your patience.
Was the oil hot? Of course.
Are the seeds crackling? No not yet.
Let’s wait 15 seconds. It usually happens in 15 seconds considering 15 is longer than you and I and all of us think it is.
Is it happening yet? You know, if I were home, I’d add some curry leaves at this point to induce crackling, never mind if it’s only the leaves and not the seeds.

Okay it’s finally happening! So now we add diced red onion – the rationed red onion that cost $0.75 each and was chopped while calculating its worth in rupees. This time you really can’t tell why the tears.

Also add some salt at this stage to accelerate the cooking and browning like that uncle/aunty in the TV cookery show told you. (If you opened this article I’m assuming you’re at that age). Keep sauteing – toss and toss and toss.

Is it browning? No not yet.
Did you add the salt? Of course.

See, at this point, you’ve given up trying to rush this. Cooking will take its own time. Which is why it slows you down, often when you absolutely need to and just aren’t aware of it.

I know it’d be low-key insulting to even bother to tell you the rest of the recipe. But to finish what I started, once the onions are translucent, throw in chopped carrots, bell peppers and whatever else is in your kitchen that can be eaten half-raw. Saute for a while. Add the rava, mix well until you’ve slightly roasted the granules. Pour in water and keep stirring until it boils, evaporates and reaches the consistency at which you like to have the meal.

Turn off the heat, take in life at a slightly slower pace than before you embarked on the uppmav.

Bon Appetit!

Pothichor

The only early memories I own of pothichor are a misshapen package wrapped in banana leaf and newspaper, that Manichechi brought home when I was younger, with ammumma’s food inside.

Like everything else she cooked, there was as much coconut in the accompanying dishes as there was white rice (read: a LOT). Pink lovelolikka (is that how you spell it) and mango pickle staining a corner of the white rice with a shocking yet warm red. Red chilly chammanthi in very generous amounts. Two different thorans, one always being beetroot, both with lots of grated coconut. A separate tiny banana leaf wrap that you eagerly open to find the insides bathed in fried oil, with pieces of fish fried until crisp and more (well, almost black), yet surprisingly white and soft inside.

Amma talks about choodu pothichor that maaman brought to her medical college hostel from Vakkom early morning before classes, that stayed warm and succulent until afternoon and even up to dinner. She would wait for lunch time quite like Imran Khan did at work for his dabba in The Lunchbox, the anticipation of the banana-leaf parcel tingling her tongue. (And did I tell you she doesn’t care much about food? Oh not yet.)

As I grew older, especially in college, I saw more pothichors brought from home, sometimes for groups of 5 – 10. My own mother never cared about cooking much – eat to live, not the other way around she says. My father, an upholder of the other way around, still holds it to heart and lives a battle.

In circles when people said, “Mother’s food is always best”, I was always the sole one shaking my head. Once a friend said “Come on, you’re just exaggerating, I’m sure your mom cooks well”. The next day, I brought her my mom’s prepared lunch and she didn’t contest me after.

Once while my brother was admitted in the hospital for jaundice, my uncle and I were exiting the ward around 8pm as we saw an aunty eating from her pothichor. My uncle suddenly commented, “Did you see that.”
Assuming he wasn’t referring to the only thing I’d noticed, I cautiously asked, “See what?”

“That woman was eating pothichor.. kothi ayi”, he grins.

“Oh yesssss”


In the past one year there has been this mad rush in social media over the nostalgia and memories associated with pothichor.

So a couple of months ago, when my parents were leaving on a train to Thrissur at 11AM, I suggested to Amma, “Let’s pack pothichor for you guys?” I knew she’d be excited, she hadn’t had one in years. While packing, my father said “It’s been decades since I last packed one.”

We packed 2 separately, it was vegetarian with an omelette for each, and they gobbled it up as soon as they got on the train, amma said.

Last week, my parents and I were travelling to Belgaum. Our train was at 12:50PM, and obviously it was time for another pothichor episode. An elaborate one this time.

Amma first fried large kilimeen (pink perch, from Google) with spices. She separately cooked onions with masala and added tomatoes to it, and finally mixed the fish pieces into it. Chammanthi from roasted coconut. I made a double omelette with lots of shallots (small red onions) and green chillies. There was cucumber thoran with fair quantity of grated coconut (by amma’s standards, not manichechi’s), and another kovakka thoran.

Last time, it was achan who did the packing, but he was busy eating Puttu with the fresh fish masala (LIVE TO EAT manifests in opportune moments such as these).
I was already a tad bit hungry but saved the hunger for my long-awaited pothichor. Amma laid out the leaves and I apportioned.

A piece of fish in each, no pickle for Amma, more for achan, no omelette and more chammanthi for me.
(Yes I agree, pothichor without pickle and chammanthi is just blasphemy).

Spicy onion from the fish stuck to my fingers and I licked them clean – yum. Yet I conquer my urges again, for later.
“Should we add another fish piece?” Amma asks. Of course we should.

I wrap them up, two rubber bands each, neat and nicely shaped.

Needless to say we forget them at home and realize on the train by 1:30PM when we’re hungry and start checking bags. There is no pothichor.
We buy a biryani and a Veg Meal at Kollam railway station. I could only be jealous of my father who’d atleast tasted the fish (so much for conquering urges. Live to Eat, guys).
Two others in our compartment also brought pothichors. One of them had fish masala.

Monsoon Diaries : Poochakuttikalude veedu (Home to the Cats?)

Cats are like the jackfruit-mango-coconut (chakka-manga-thenga) tree trio in Kerala. You keep at least one of them in your house.

My mother is vehemently promoting mud vessels in the kitchen, disapproving all things aluminum. I have reason to believe she would’ve done away with steel as well were it practical. Hence it is that I’m ladling simmering moru curry in a mud-vessel (one of three we have at home) with a steel spoon at 6:55am.

I’m not usually up at 6:55am. You would think I’m a spoilt brat but truth is, my brain is wired to be in dazed mode for the rest of the day when I wake up even 60 seconds before seven. I only survived JK’s 5am Physics tuition because I loved him. 

But I’m early today. Up because I was never down.  Last night was mostly fretting over our pregnant cat who disappeared day before yesterday and hasn’t returned. She had been lying on a cushioned settee since evening, decided to leave by 11 and hasn’t visited all of yesterday.

When I say ‘Our Cat’, if you’re Malayali you’d know she’s not really Our Cat. Poocha’s here are like the jackfruit/mango/coconut trees in our compounds (famously called “chakka-manga-thenga” trio. Some call it a distasteful usage – Where did you get that from they ask, unimpressed. Why, everywhere. And everyone. 😀 Now shut it.)

So yes, cats are like them – you have at least one by default if you live in a house, as opposed to living in a flat/apartment. You cannot keep your own cat or grow your own mango tree if you live in a flat.

We’ve always had cats because we’ve always lived in a house, and we’ve always been an especially cat/animal-friendly family. I’m not sure but I think central to Malayali cats hanging around kitchens is the fact that they expect all our fish. Cat-human relationships must be sad in non-fishy states?

They start by walking in and out the kitchen door to make sure the Mother spots them. The key is to remember – Humans love to say No the first time around – it’s their privilege. The rejection and almost outright denial of entry to the kitchen/house must ALWAYS emanate from the mother. This has to be followed by gradual cozying up – to the kids first, later to mother herself who holds key to fish and everything else cats want.

Meanwhile, your dog has already welcomed this other tiny(ier) being. Sometimes, the canine even starts aping the tinier one because they exude such mettle and spunk. And a You can pet me but nobody owns me vibe.

With nobody to stop them now (fathers are quite irrelevant in the cat world), this is followed by an invasion of the settee and sofa – one by one until humans have acquiesced to the claims of the new member on family furniture and acceded to the revised norms around the house.

Then the cat would relax, have kids and more kids until you can draw out their family tree in your head to explain who is whose who to bored relatives.

Our own poochakutti – not really kutti and not really ours – has given birth at least thrice, this must be his fourth. (we refer to him as avan/eda *masculine). Yesterday, Amma had saved up three fat fish heads for him but he never showed up. It was a sad day.

So I was wondering last night if he would be holed up somewhere warm, how many kittens there would be and so on.

The moru curry is almost done when my mother announces “Well look who’s back finally” and I only want to know “Are the kittens still inside”.

They are out yay. 😀

 

I forgot to mention the final step after House Invasion – the lap. Which was also the last/best scene from Poochakkutikalude Veedu by T. Padmanabhan (Nalinakanthi). When it was taught in class X I remember smiling broadly – it’s a scene from home, of course –

My mother doesn’t pet cats or kittens, she disapproves of excessive PDA to them.
Some days when we got back in the evenings from school, Amma would be reading the daily, seated unusually steady. With only her glasses and forehead visible, the paper would block the rest of her from view. When you got close enough you’d see the four-pawed little thing seated on her lap with its limbs under its body, eyes engrossed in meditation and the human striving to let it stay unperturbed. 😀

 

Nammade Ooru Keralam – a rant

Some people we meet know exactly what they want and where to find it. Like my roommate Umadri, who’s lucky enough to know she loves good music and yummy Afghani chicken. Her only roommate on the other hand hops from place to place, tasting samosas deep fried in God-knows-how-many-weeks-old oil at the first joint and quickly conjured chowmein at the next, consequently contracting infections one after the other.

While I am thoroughly exhausted of this exercise, in my two months in this city I have found that while writing is liberating, blogging (which is essentially publishing within constraints) brings me happiness.

I remember the day Miriam asked me to start blogging, and I did.

I remember the day Miriam suggested I come to Delhi. Two weeks later, I’d landed in this place.

While that woman (so to speak) is to blame for all that I’m suffering today, it also suggests she’s responsible for my ongoing slow process of correcting the 22 years of wrong info my system has unapologetically gathered, including my coming to terms with the realization that after all, Veerappan wasn’t the LTTE leader I’d mistakenly believed to be from the days of my childhood until umm two weeks ago.

She’s also responsible for the little dance I do and my shrieks of delight when I find that the entire back page of The Hindu has been administered to accommodate Modi ji’s thala and Modi ji’s full figure. (Chalo ek page kum padhni hai 😜)

So venturing out in the morning these days involves thanking the Gods for the (relatively) clean air in the early hours  and taking a deep breath, only to chokingly realize the unwelcome stench from the dry latrine on the other side of the road just made its way in too. And I’ve almost christened a blessing on that Good Samaritan feeding the famished stray, not before he rakes up his entire energy to passionately discharge spittle onto the pavement sending half of it on a trajectory to land on my shoe.

If you can watch Delhi’s starless skies on brilliant nights that tell a story of steady cacophony below and nonchalant splendor above, and somewhere far away that speaks of corporate neon lights from a concert hidden from your view, that you don’t have tickets to and that you aren’t sure you want to. If you can look past the cramped dirty streets  and the dirtier profanity that IPhone wielders to your surprise indulge in, if you can catch hold of the multitude of roofs around occupied by bhayyas and didis lost in thought and fathom it’s all in good faith in the future and never desperation. If you can look past the pasted and painted faces on the Metro standing on their five-inch heels and insecure glances of self-reassurance, past the daily number of little kids buying icecream/golgappe from other kids who’d have been called classmates had the RTE really trickled down, maybe you could love Delhi.

Because surely this city is, like many others claim to be, an emotion. Whether the emotion of flying kites on rooftops/eating dahi chaat on a rainy day, or of an entire city that let a man bleed to his death on its roads in its wake, I know not.

Sadly though, I love my iddali (with an ‘a’ in between, yes), I instinctly look for thenga (coconut) before remembering it isn’t thoran but sabzi. I am baffled by the sweet sambar before I’m reminded it isn’t our sambar. And I miss listening to Velikku Veluppan Kaalam and Aareyum Bhava Gayakanakkum on Akashavani. Jk, that was around 18 years ago. But I do.

And if streets with all sorts of rubbish and a dust-spangled surrounding don’t repulse you, if the daily menu of paratha and thin long grained basmati rice doesn’t exasperate you, if being charged 30 rupees for a plate of measly vada doesn’t leave you feeling violated. If hearing a “Thankyeww soo muchhh” delivered in authentic Kerala English doesn’t evoke your grinning response of “Malayali ayrnnalle :D”(So you were a Malayali). And mostly, if a couple of weeks’ residence in (most) other parts of the country doesn’t elicit a special sense of pride about your own (and of course a rant like this one here), you probably weren’t fortunate enough to be born in my favourite part of the world.

PS: Do not ask me why this feature pic. Between banana leaf sadyas and coconut tree silhouettes, coastlines and backwaters, cities and towns and villages and sunsets and greenery and the arts, finally I settled on this I guess.

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