As Margaret Atwood says, it's a shock

And now for the heck of it, a blog using a German kezboard. Much fun to use just like the Paris one. Riversides, dusk, music, dance make for beautiful evenings. Pitz I must leave tomorrow.

Growing pains

Having a new plant in the house is like having a house guest from a foreign country. You know little about their likes, their dislikes, what they eat, what they drink and how well they do in 40 degrees heat. They come to you perfect from wherever they have come and then you have to wait and watch for signs of how you are treating them, the expression on their faces as you put pickles on their plate or their tendency to change their demeanour from green and healthy to withered and wilted. The Houseplant Encyclopedia says the bleeding heart (all the way from West Africa!) is a beautiful but demanding potted plant, especially where atmospheric humidity is concerned, and is supposed to flower in spring to early summer. God knows it’s humid enough but I’m yet to see any flowers after the first ones it came with dropped off though it does seem to be living up to its ‘climbing shrub’ inclinations. Maybe some food will do the trick.
Speaking of which, the growing of food doesn’t end at just ensuring that seedlings safely grow into plants or even that you ensure they bear fruit. You have to know when to pick. The cucumber seeds that I planted on February 14 or so soon turned into beautiful climbers that are taking full advantage of the trellis with their delicate but strong tendrils. Though how the plant supports the increasingly heavy cucumbers that suddenly appear out of nowhere — you lift a leaf and like in some treasure hunt find one hanging on, soaking up the sun, going from dark green to lighter shades — is beyond me. Anyway, the first one we picked was dark green and beautifully formed but turned out to be slightly bitter. The maid, whose mother is apparently a veteran farmer, said it should have been left on the plant a bit longer while the vegetables seller, after his initial surprise at us growing cucumbers said we probably didn’t extract its bitterness while cutting it. I’ve found two more now but I think I’ll give them another day in the sun.

Bookless in Bombay

I think I might have to change cities. Move somewhere else. Someplace that has a decent library. A library that is still present in the physical world and has not moved off into that other, ether, virtual world.
A month or so ago, when when I went to return my latest (and what was to be my last) consignment of books — a beautiful gem of a book of short stories on food by Jim Crace, Hilary Mantel’s first book and Anne Fine’s Raking the Ashes (dark and humourous) the shelves at the British Council Library in Mumbai were all closed off to the public (and were being mercilessly emptied by staff) while members lingered over tables in the centre piled high with withdrawn books put up for sale. Deep in my heart I felt terrible — it was like making the most of someone’s misfortune, or like vultures picking at the remains of something beautiful and alive that is now dead.
The library often withdraws books and puts them on sale but this was different. And yet there I was, going through it all, not once, not twice but thrice to see what I wanted to take from it all. What kind of books come to bear the withdrawn stamp? Is it that they have too many copies of the title? Or is it that no one reads them anymore? It’s the same story at bookstore sales too, where books that normally cost Rs 640 are suddenly marked down to Rs 80. Why? The bad books I don’t care about but the authors I like? I feel a need to ‘rescue’ the books from a callous world that does not realise their potential. Which is how I have two copies of The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, one bought from the trestle tables on London’s south bank for five pounds, the other from a Crossword sale for Rs 60 or so.
That’s also how every Beryl Bainbridge went into my shopping pile. With a name like that I would pick up her books blindly. Okay, maybe not. Maybe it had more to do with the one book I had read of hers — The Bottle Factory Outing — and her humour immediately won me over. But it’s one of life’s mysteries — how can anyone not want her? And yet I felt bad that all the gardening books, if there were any, had been cleaned out.
So now, without a proper library (no, an online version is NOT the same and besides, this is the year of more real, less virtual for me, how can anyone expect me to spend more hours browsing the web?!) how will I know which books to buy and which to well leave alone? And there are so many stages of my life left — where will a pedant like me go when I need books on pregnancy and on parenting? Though there are no siblings on the horizon for my nephew I had to pick up a Horrid Henry book where he is nasty to the new baby — who knows if I’ll find it when I need it? Tom Stoppard’s plays were surely better off on the BCL’s shelves than mine but who knows when I’ll want to pick him up or Bertrand Russell again?
Books are destiny disguised as chance encounters, they turn up and tell you to pick them up when you are in need. How else would you account for, fittingly, a book called Library: An Unquiet History that my eyes fell on among the piles on my second round? Written by a Harvard librarian, it says on the first page, “When I first went to work in Harvard’s Widener Library, I immediately made my first mistake: I tried to read the books.” He goes on to quote Thomas Wolfe in Of Time and the River: “The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know — the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be…. The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever.”
For one fleeting moment, I thought yes, maybe it was okay not to have a library because of the feeling of being completely illiterate that it all gave you. Just a fleeting moment. But really, I would rather know there are other books waiting for me. Available in all their page-turning glory when I want them, need them. I will have to find another city.

So he's become a little golu molu now. But otherwise he's just the same. He came, he played, he won, he bowed, he blew kisses. And despite the clowning around, looked close to tears. The irretrievable carrot happened but I couldn't make it. If I had, would I have been able to see that familiar gesture, the one where he touches his cheek and then his bald pate? Or the one where he touches his nose in a little prayer? Take that Tim, he told Henman when the score was 3-0. But we won the mixed doubles said Henman, so it's three all. "He's very affectionate," said the commentators, counting the hand holding and the kisses between him and Graf. "I haven't smiled like this ever on court," he said. Not in three years, me neither.

I've been saying forever that I wish all my plants would bloom at the same time. It looks like they might be getting there except that someone/something has a liking for buds and nips them off. This morning I ran into the culprits... three baby squirrels having a ball with the mogras. They are behind the fallen blue flowers on the trellis (yes, I finally put it up!) too I'm sure. The pigeons, meanwhile, seem to have developed a taste for lemongrass. Either they are getting a high off it or somewhere, in somebody's house, is a fragrant nest. Coming back to spring... the vincas give the place a meadowish feel.

Someone once wrote about going to a plant sale and suffering the "insane anxiety of the plant maniac. It was 10 am on Friday, an hour after the gates had opened for a two-day sale. And I was worried: would anything be left?"
She apparently had 50 plants sitting at home waiting to be put in the ground, as one of her neighbours who saw her there reminded her. "So what? Who stops eating potato chips just because she feels full?" was her reply.
The plants I picked up recently at an exhibition cum sale have decided to put in roots with me and stay. Except for the impatiens. For three weeks she flourished and flowered. And then one night suddenly one of the branches wilted. Next morning, another. My first thought was "There should be a doctor I could call, shouldn't there?" It's some sort of bacteria is all I have managed to figure. So she's gone.
But last Sunday, the khet ki mooli were lovely.