The monsoons are here, be still my beating heart…

It happens every year, the skies darken with water laden cumulus clouds and unload their burden on the city which then promptly drowns under its burden of choked drainage systems, lack of desilting carried out adequately on its rivers and estuaries clogging with illegal waste dumping. On 26/7/2005, the brat had just started playschool, it was his very first day. I dropped him to school and picked him up, and then went off for an interview for an article I was working on to Worli. All was calm until 2.30 pm, when it suddenly began raining cats and dogs out of the blue. I wasnt too alarmed. I would finish within an hour, and I had the car and the driver. I would be a little late, but then, thats all in a day’s work. I left the interview venue at 3.30pm. The husband began calling frantically on my mobile. “Where have you reached? Try and get back fast. Things are bad here.” He didnt need to tell me that, I could see it all around me. The rain was like a sheet of water pouring all around us. The roads were flooded wherever I looked. The traffic was bumper to bumper. Choked in every direction. People had begun walking in long weary lines back to their homes. The trains, the lifeline of the city had collapsed. The electricity had gone off, the tracks were flooded, the city was in a complete mess. I sat in the car, unmindful of the water level rising upto my window, little realising the danger that could have happened had the automatic lock got jammed. Later, we were to read about the many people who were found dead in their cars, asphixiated thanks to doors getting jammed. The car moved inches in an hour. The heavens continued to rain. I couldnt call home, the mobile networks had got jammed. I could call Bangalore and Pune, and tell my sisters in law to relay my position back home, where the mother in law was bravely managing brat in pitch darkness. The flood had reached above the wall of our compound I was told. The ground floor flats had been evacuated and the entire area cordoned off by the police. The husband had decided to start walking home. He left behind his mobile with a friend (his brand new Nokia Communicator bought only a couple of days earlier) to save it from getting damaged, and I was in pieces with stress over his whereabouts. There was no way he could be reached. But I had told him to try and get home. Brat had to be given his anticonvulsants and MIL might not have been able to give him his dosage. But, she managed. The swell of people walking along intensified, I took in three women from the road, but seeing the car stuck, they prefered to get off and walk. One of them had a six month old at a creche in Nalla Sopara. The baby would need to be fed. God alone knows how she managed to get home. A van rushing around the direction back to town splashing through. A young college girl, drenched to the bone was just swiped up into it, and they disappeared into the darkness, her screams muffled by the rain. No one even bothered, my driver warned me not to step out of the car, I looked around for a policeman, I could find none. I did eventually find one near Bandra, but this was five hours later. And I did try to tell him what I had seen, but he had too much on his mind to be bothered. We inched through the night, but the roads were completely clogged. I contemplated getting out and trying to find a room in a hotel, but didnt dare wander around aimlessly in the pitch dark. My sister in law called to let me know the husband had reached home. He had broken through the police cordon and swam through the roads to reach home. Luckily, he is an international level swimmer and could do it. Lesser mortals would have drowned with the sheer force of the current. We neared a friend’s home, and I went up. She, sweetheart that she is, managed to make me a paratha and had some food sent down for the driver too. It was the finest meal I have ever had. I stayed the night there. The next morning I left at six. My son was home alone. I had to get home. We abandoned the car on the side of the road, and began walking. I had not realised when I left my friend’s home that I would have to walk through neck deep water. I had platform heels that I threw away and walked barefoot for almost 15 kilometers, through gravel and glass underfoot. The mobile was dead, battery over. No phones were working anywhere. The trains were at a complete standstill. There were people walking with me who had walked through the night from as far off as Colaba and New Bombay, and who were still walking to get home. In the spaces where the roads were not flooded, residents had put out plastic chairs and created rough canopies with plastic sheets and bamboos for the weary to rest their feet a while. Everyone was out on the streets helping, with steaming hot mugs of tea. Water bottles were handed out, as were glucose biscuits. One man, seeing my bleeding feet, ran up to his home and brought down a pair of rubber slippers. I had tears in my eyes. We walked further down past Andheri, past Jogeshwari, where the buffalo stables are, and carcasses of dead buffaloes littered the streets like so many boulders. The road was washed out. Only gravel remained. The rubber slippers gave way under the water and disappeared. I was back to barefoot. Some more good samaritans ran a van in a circular route from Jogeshwari to Goregaon, offering ladies a lift for the short distance. I was hesitant, but exhausted, and I climbed on. At Goregaon, a man manning a PCO, had put up a notice saying his PCO was functional and a horde was crowded around it. I pushed through and called home. And told the husband where I was, and he came and got me. I reached home having done more exercise in a single day than I had done in my entire life. The bones broke the next day. The feet had swollen because of the cuts and the water. But thankfully nothing serious. The water was drained out of the building compound the following day. We got electricity and water supply only after five days in our area. I went to my mother’s home with the brat. After all, he was only 20 months old.

On Sunday, the roads began swelling up again with water as the skies began pouring down. I felt my heart quicken and thud against my ribcage like a jungle drum. I didnt step out of the house.

Page 123 bedamned

No, Page 123 of L’Officiel has not happened. Not to my regret. What has happened is even better. Round faced, black dialed, dotted with diamonds, sinuous steel linked strapped Longines…..Isnt this man the bestest?

Birthday greed intensifies…

The countdown to the birthday intensifies and with it, the occasioning of many magazines lying open at strategic places being left around the house at strategic points like the husband’s pillow and the husband’s cupboard and the husband’s gym bag. The magazines say, don’t be subtle and hope he can read your mind. He cant, so give him a hint. Have given him umpteen, but am sure he will bring in something bought with a lot of money and love, which will see me at the store the next morning as the shutters go up for an exchange. While I love the husband to pieces, we have serious issues on differing taste. You can just imagine the rapiers drawn when we were decorating the house. Being the weaker sex, and the party with no money and therefore veto power, we are now resigned to living with boudoir red velvet curtains in the bedroom. I rest my case.

He is the man who has bought me ransom amount diamond sets in designs that went out with the Flappers. He is the man who bought me Versace sunglasses in purple cat eye style when the rest of the world (read Elizabeth Hurley and Aishwarya Rai were wearing bug eye Chloe styles). He also gets me epilators and gym memberships. You get my drift. He tries so hard and is so endearing about it, it hurts me terribly to go exchange what he has picked out with so much love and affection. But after many pieces of jewellery that stay unused in the locker have become rather shameless about the entire situation.

Not that I am a jewellery person. At the max I have a pair of diamonds in the ears, one ring and one bracelet. And yes, I forget, the mandatory mangalsutra around the neck, or rather, my version of it. And I am done. And this too, is worn to keep the mother and the MIL off the back. A married woman without jewellery? Blasphemy.

Am not expecting any jewellery this time round, considering the poor man is being harassed by this nagging shrew of a wife to buy a house. But considering he is the only person who actually takes the trouble of getting me something, I hope he gets it right this time. Or actually remembers to get it. He’s been making strange statements lately about how women should stop celebrating their birthdays once they cross 30, rather than let the world onto the fact that they’ve become old. And how birthdays are meant only for kids. Never mind the fact that his birthday is the occasion of much hullabaloo in the entire family, with the occasion being celebrated with a splendour to rival bashes thrown by Elton John. L’Officiel. Page 123. Open and waiting. Greedy greedy me.

 

A tribute to my denims

Denims. The wearing of. The obsession with. And the servile gratitude towards. That is what the subject of this post is to be. It actually took me a long while to get my butt into a pair of jeans. Through school and college I wore dresses and skirts and was the good girl with the high collars and the full sleeves. Perhaps the mother was terrified that had I dressed more appealingly, the boys would be all over me. Of course, that was a mother’s fear. With absolutely no justification to it. I was the proverbial case from Bridget Jones’ reminiscences of her adolescence of the one time a boy followed her home and then fled terrified when she turned around to confront him, pudgy, bespectacled and braces and all. I could so identify with the adolescent Miss Jones and her angst at being so rejected by an eve teaser. I had absolutely no admirers, secret or otherwise. And with the inch thick spectacles, the globules of pus erupting pimples and the tree trunk of a waist, I didn’t hope for any. Kept the nose to the books and sought solace in Fabio like visions of the man who would sweep me off my feet. Well, he did and he bought me my first pair of jeans. By then of course, pimples had been tamed down by Clearasil, contact lenses had rendered spectacles redundant and the tree trunk had become a waist. Its to his credit that the man bought a pair of perfect fit jeans in the age before lycra with only his hands to guesstimate my size. And so begun the saga of the denim. Once I discovered how liberating a great pair of jeans could be, I was damned if I was going to struggle through waxing and depilating and such pains every week just so the damn gams were skirt worthy. Told you, I am the butt lazy sort.

Today, when I open the wardrobe door, vistas of denim unfold. Deep blue overdyed indigo, to blue wash bleached, to black to brown to beige. I have them all. From the pre-lycra era denims which are unforgiving to the butt and the ego, to these marvelous new creations of technology that give so much that one forgets one is wearing anything. From the prosaic Rs 250 Timbuktu from Spencers that one still gets into to the obscenely priced ones from Just Cavalli that one only dares take out if one is ‘going out’ and is feeling slim enough to dare to wear, what with its unforgiving fit that does good things to saddlebags but is sheer torture to get in…make that jumping up and down, lying on the bed and wriggling into and such like. All the stuff that makes the brat dance in glee and clap his hands and ask me to take it off and put it on again. I have them all, the skinny legs, the boot cuts, the relaxed fits, the cargos denims, the distressed and the ones that distress me when I wear them. What works best for me are dark plain denims in a slight bootcut, balances out the broad butt, with an empire line top. I rock when I wear that combination. A skinny leg, no matter how in it is right now, only makes me look like a chicken leg, all the fat on the thigh.

Au consequence my entire wardrobe is structured around denims. Casual tees for casual days, linen blousons for brunches and lunches, designer threadwear for more formal occasions. Thankfully, have never developed an affinity for salwar kameezes even on my ‘Oh God, I’ve become a little elephant’ days. It also helps that the husband sneers in disgust whenever I wear anything resembling a kurta or a kurti, and refuses to shell out the money for any ethnic wear. The sad part is that when I have to go to a formal function, I am generally scrambling in the mother’s or the mother in law’s closet for some worthy sarees. Have gone to the depths of laziness even in this issue now that I wear neutral denims and bling bling sequined embroidered tops or kurtis to less formal events where I can get away with them.

Therefore, this ode to denim. Long may it reign. And long may they invent better fits for expanding bodies.

Day one of diet

Thirtysixandcounting

Now that the holidays are done and dispensed with, and mango season is over, the remnants of the indulgences are all nicely settled around the waist and the hips like the trophies of honour from battle I have never ever won, it is time to get down and get serious about losing the weight one has piled on indiscriminately. The last time I looked the stomach was in jelly wobble mode and the toes could just about be discerned from a standing vantage point. I must confess on a shameful aside that I have taken to wearing the corseted panties that helped me get back to a relative shape when the brat was born. And they are tight. The moral of the story. I am fatter now than I was a few days after I had delivered this watermelon of a brat. Coming to think of it, my total weight right now at this moment, having made allowances for water retention and such like in this PMSing state is barely two kilos away from what it was at full term, when they weighed me in before wheeling me into the delivery room. Fat is an insidious thing, it creeps up gradually even though you might be fighting tooth and nail to keep it at bay, it sneaks in through the one aloo paratha dribbled with butter you just cant resist because you’re sick to your teeth of struggling through a bowl of unsweetened oats ‘because they’re good for you.’ Is there some simple explanation as to why everything that is good is bad for you, and everything that is bad for you is good.

The family went for a buffet brunch yesterday where I ate enough to feed a starving family in Ethiopia. The waiters were cringing in disgust when they saw my plate, and the number of trips to the buffet counter were the entire exercise I had had in the entire day. Fellow diners were sniggering behind their napkins, and the husband was making eyes as round as saucers in a vain attempt to get me to behave in the face of limitless food. He finally gave up on the effort and shifted to another table to indulge in deep conversation with his sister. It didn’t help also that the brat merely nibbled at his food, so I was obliged to finish his remnants, which I did with glee. And then there was dinner. And a chai time snack. And so on. Get thee behind me temptation.

I have now replaced the pin up boy on my window of imagination from Richard Gere {anyway, he’s turned grey, though I go weak kneed for a head of grey hair set atop a square face anyday, and he has the bad taste to kiss Shilpa Shetty in public. Me, I would forgive, but Shilpa Shetty. Yes, she has the abs. But can she match me in a battle of brains? Hmmphhh} to Adnan Sami. Come on, give the guy credit. Going down from garguatuan to able to fit in a single frame is an achievement that deserves accolades. Without resorting to measures like stomach stapling and such like, and merely through nibbling on salads and fruits, he’s managed to come to a modicum of size and shape. He deserves a good strong round of applause. And some wolf whistles please, while you’re at it. As for me, cant see myself nibbling at any celery sticks. The standing joke in the family is that if it is healthy and fat free, I wont eat it. Am cutting out dinner from today. No carbs after 5 pm, says Catherine Zeta Jones and Malaika Arora Khan. And look at them, they know what they’re talking about. The exercise thingie apart—btw have long divorced the gym, couldn’t stick the air of self absorption of the greek gods and goddesses littered around the place, flexing their muscles staring at themselves in the mirror without blinking—not having carbs after five might also help. I guess it would also help if I have less of them carbs through the day. And less of everything through the day. Now isn’t that called a diet? And me dieting? Bah. Am of what is known in the colloquial terms as ‘khate peete khandan ki’. Shall I bring shame to the family name and do the unthinkable and go on a diet. Blasphemy. Will I get disowned and cast out without a penny to my name. Maybe there’s a thought to that. Will not be able to eat to my heart’s desire and will become automatically thin as a reed. The real starvation diet. All I need is five kilos off and will be the next Marilyn Monroe. Oh, her body type is not the one in mode right now. Don’t tell the men that, they don’t seem to know. Or care.

Spanking new clothes day….

So here I am in a crisp white cutwork jacket with wooden buttons, warp faded denims from Replay, Aldo sequinned stilletoes and omnipresent leopard skin tote. No wolf whistles sadly, though I thought I looked good enough to whistle at, sad comment on sex appeal factor. Anyway, who can be blamed for the world’s bad taste. Or perhaps, I console myself, am too hip to be whistled at. Cmon, even the husband doesnt wolf whistle any more. More on the lines of hooting with laughter, especially when I try on one of those sexy, strapless numbers which show just how much the lung area has developed an affinity with gravity, making me run for my triple broad underbust support wire bras. Alas and alack. What is the occasion for this display of sartorial elegance? The orientation cum coffee meet for the brat’s new term in junior kg. What my life has been reduced to…where once I met film actors, models and corporate head honchos on a daily basis without time or inclination to give much thought to what I was wearing (just make sure the shoes are comfortable and the umbrella is in the bag–field job, field job), now I spend time and thought on what I wear to go to the brat’s school. Not really. Just vanity and wanting to wear something new that was unworn for over a month in the cupboard, and beckoning me enticingly every time I opened the damned doors. I wonder if I am the only dork who needs the security of having at least two unworn, spanking new outfits in the closet at any given point in order to feel like the closet is complete. It probably comes from the good old childhood when new clothes were only bought for festivals and birthdays (this being the preliberalisation, when money was hard to come by, and life revolved around pay day for honest folks like parents who lived out their lives in a single job, and retired with gold pens). Does this desire for acquisition of new clothes come from this phase of deprivation, but paradoxically, I still remember every precious dress I had from my childhood, which I wore proudly on the special occasion it had been bought for when it was spanking new and then gradually wore it down to rags, the last destination being wearing it down to play in the building compound, after which it would be earmarked for a kitchen mop. Those were the days. Today, I wear something for a year max, after which it gets cast out into the pile which gets exchanged for vessels. Needless to say we have more vessels than we need in our kitchen. Vanity is secondary here, what is more the issue is the fear of not wearing clothes that are appropriate to the occasion, even though all my occasions are brat determined these days, and consist of jeans and tops that vary from spat on Tshirts to exquisite sequinned chiffony numbers…shall do a post on jeans and their wonderful way of making the playing field even. A great pair of jeans can get you through anything, even a wedding, but not of course, a black tie event. So here I am with three more new tops in my cupboard just waiting to be worn, and know what, that makes searching for an occasion all that more delightful. Perhaps the next time I go to visit the dentist, the pain will get eased by wearing that black and white floral printed top with the empire line and lace detail? Who am I kidding?

Of being an aunty and other lifeshattering tragedies…

Depression hovering like an irritant helicopter buzzing incessantly over my head. Occasioned by the indiscriminate use of the word aunty. The occasion:Standing at the takeway line outside McDonalds with the brat, who insisted on pulling the ganji of the himbo teen in front of him. The teens were all standing in a gangly group, gawking at the girls, preening a little down the line, and pretending to be studly, by flexing out chicken arms for the scrawny ones, and beefed up biceps for the gymaniacs. When the brat had just about pulled the strap of the vested one for the umpteenth time, I gently admonished him to the tune of him getting a tight one on the butt, and the pain of no burger should he continue in the same mode, when himbo turns to me and smiles, with the wonderful wrinkle free face that only youth and no fear of where the next buck is going to come from brings. “No problem aunty.” I died. In the way only a woman who has been slathering on antiwrinkle cream by the gallon can.

Yes, I was hoping I could do a Draupadi and have the earth open up and swallow me whole, only burping to spit out some indigestible fat deposits. Aunty. Here was I in very hip Max Mara cargos and a green and lime striped lycra enhanced tee and feeling like I wandered there straight from a fashion shoot. I would give myself a well preserved 32 on a good day. But then, had I probably conceived and had a kid in my teens, the himbo could have been mine own. Welcome to dotagism. Welcome being all the more bitter considering the birthday arrives next week, and one will have officially turned 36. All the pretence of being on the median line between youth and middle age has now been rendered redundant, and one is officially an aunty. But aunty is such a loosely used word in
India. I have had shopkeepers with white whiskers and no teeth in their mouth call me aunty, to which one’s natural response has been to clout them on the head with whatever weapon is closest at hand, whether the stiletto on my foot or the make up laden handbag, which on a good insecure day can clout the daylights out of a football team.

Went home from McDonalds and examined myself closely in the magnifying mirror, yes, auntyism is here to stay. Faint stray grey roots around the hairline, from where the highlights have been dyed out to brown. The smile forgets to fade, and has morphed into a perma smile. The crinkle under the eyes is now a spiderweb of forgotten tears and dust in the contact lenses pulling. And the teeth have grown rather long, the result being me looking like a rabid rodent when I smile wholeheartedly, with the result that one only smiles delicately like a Victorian maiden, unwilling to risk being labeled a loose woman and laugh with all teeth and cavities and exposed roots on display to inflict on an unsuspecting world. Alas and alack. Anyway, will take heart in the new fact that forty is the new thirty and will be therefore thirty in four years, so will therefore still have a pretence at being in the prime of my life four years hence.

The scary part is that the biological clock has ticked away and if one wants to go in for brat part 2, am over the hill now. The get up and go has also got up and gone. Therefore I shall now cheer myself up with a wishlist of most hoped for birthday gifts.

The Fendi Spy Bag. Actually any nice new bag. Been a while since I bag shopped and am getting withdrawal symptoms. Have realized that all my good bags are cloth based and therefore need to be packed away in mothballs for the next few months along with the leather variety on the pain of damp fungoid stink. The nice silver mirror finish huge tote at In Touch would be nice too, I can fit the entire contents of my dressingtable in there and a cap and a umbrella (the monsoons are upon us) and be blessed. And it is only for Rs 580. So perhaps, I will buy it for myself.

A solitaire ring. Just so I can have a solitaire. But considering, the actual cost of the pulverized carbon, might just about settle for cubic zircon in rhodium plated silver and flaunt it around happily. It looks as pretty and no one except a jeweller can actually tell the difference.

A new house. One with umpteen bedrooms, efficient maids and cooks and umpteen bathrooms for all our infinite guests to use rather than queue up at the one we have. (We live in a two bedroom hall kitchen flat which through some weird fluke and bad planning has two closets masquerading as wcs which a really tall and broad person could get stuck in).While we are at it, a new island would also be nice. And a jet plane to get to it.

Maybe if the island weren’t possible, a trip to the
Maldives would also be nice. To Soneva Fushi or alternatively, the One and Only Reethi Rah. Ah, for a villa on the sea, with the glass floor to see the baby sharks swimming underneath, and the sumptuous sea food fresh from the ocean, grilled on the beach. To walk on an emerging island which is nothing but a heap of pure white sand surrounded by sea. And to snorkel under clear blue waters, through the corals and schools of fish darting through. Okay. Would settle for a holiday only with husband in
Goa. Yes, without the brat. If that makes me a bad mother so be it. Want to hunt high and low for our passion factor. Its gone the way of the dodo. Soon will have to send out an arrest on sight warrant for it.

And finally, a top to toe makeover, with an arsenal of plastic surgeons and make up artists at my beck and call. And a cover shoot with Vogue. Ahh!!!! Lets be practical. Just someone to fund my lasik surgery will see me groveling in gratitude. To be able to open my eyes in the morning and see clearly without having to put on my glasses. Heaven.

Happy Birthday to me.