Two suitcases and 90 boxes of books

2010-05-04T23:59:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-02-21T05:42:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-05-17T10:40:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-04-03T08:55:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-03-13T06:13:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-01-10T00:58:00.000-08:00

Instead of lamenting about the books I have not read (at least 95%) in various 'books of the year' lists, I thought I would lament over the books that made an appearance on my bookshelves last year but are still waiting to be opened. Here's the top six:

* The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple. I picked it up in June and as I walked through the tombs in Delhi in December I wished I'd read it and was not so ignorant.

* M had promised to lend me his copy but after An Unexpected Light, I definitely wanted a Mirrors of the Unseen by Jason Elliot of my own. S is captivated by the mountains he's seen from a flight but I want to fill in the colours in the images that cropped up in my mind every time an aunt said, "When we were in Iran..."

* 'If you don't think you want to read a book about Uzbekistan, think again' it says on the blurb of Chasing the Sea. I didn't think again before picking it up but when I will get around to Tom Bissell's first book is another think altogether.

* M said -- and I quote "Probably teh best foreign correspondent ever' while handing me Kapuscinski's Another Day of Life. He keeps asking me if I've read it (as you can see the answer is a shamefaced no. But please don't send me to Bangladesh).

* No one at work wanted Ken Follett's World Without End. Unbelievable. But then as Follett himself says Pillars of the Earth was a word-of-mouth book and certainly not the thriller that most associate him with. Will it live up to the 12th century world that I inhabited for almost a month years ago? I'll let you know. Soon.

* When I wanted info on Istanbul, C said read Orhan Pamuk. That was very helpful, C. But nevertheless, will I read it before or after Turkey? Only time will tell.

There's others that remain unread but one of the books that I 'did' read and count among the best buys of the year is Frances Mayes' A Year in the World. It was a companion as I went around the south of Italy, and even now, just the word Pescara conjures up fish with lemon juice, long walks and longer drives in a beautiful country. And every time you reach the end of a chapter, you turn the page with anticipation: Where next?

2007-10-12T01:18:00.001-07:00

Lessing has finally won the Nobel Prize for Literature!

Here's a pic courtesy AFP

2007-09-18T06:29:00.000-07:00

I'm devastated. I just realised that all my ‘love letters’ are on e-mail and no grandchild of mine will ever find a stack of them bound by ribbon in a box somewhere. I would have said 'attic' but friends like R pointed out, "Do you even HAVE an attic?" Not that I can see any grandkids on the horizon but the mails I'm sure are hanging around somewhere in some folder. Or at least what's left after I deleted several since yahoo was still stingy with its mailbox space then.
Meanwhile, there's something wrong with the internet browser at home though strangely one of the IMs is working. It happens all the time. Every couple of months something or the other goes wrong with the computer negating all the time it is SUPPOSED to have saved me. "Technology sucks," I told a friend. On Gtalk of course.

2007-08-22T08:11:00.000-07:00

A Wendy Cope that made my day

that I must now remove because she says

"This is the law: the creator has rights that you can't overlook./ It isn't OK to make copies - you have to fork out for the book".

http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2223830,00.html

2007-07-14T00:21:00.000-07:00

You know how some moths take on the patterns of some butterflies to escape their predators? Well, there's a weedy little thing in the kadipatta pot that's pretending to be an offshoot and a grassy thing that thinks it'll pass off as the real mccoy in the bamboo planter.
Meanwhile, the mogras are blooming, the raat ki raanis are happy and all the bulbs I picked up during the garden story have put down roots and decided they'll stay. The plants with the blue flowers are climbing up the walls and the runner beans have offered them company promising a dash of scarlet to offset that glorious blue.
Only the lavender put her foot down when it rained non-stop for two days a couple of weeks ago. "Aargh, I hate it," I heard her say a bit too late as she turned black with rage. She's calmed down and brilliantly scenting the balcony now but I think it's time to call in her children.

2007-05-07T01:27:00.000-07:00

The term BC. For me it would probably be BL.
Before Lessing I used to worry about the disappearance of species, I used to be a member of several wildlife organizations and all those books I studied as part of my two papers of environment studies made me diligently turn off the tap and keep plastic, to an extent, out of my life.
Not that I still don’t cringe at the sight of a tree stump or even that of a mutilated tree. But suddenly a report on penguins dying out in the Antartic and all this shoo-sha all over the world this year about global warming, leaves me, well, cold. Where once I would have sighed and felt horrible, I just turned the page. What was I thinking? That it’s simply a prophesy coming true?

Candace pointed to the very top of the globe. “Look,” she said, and they saw a small cap of white. “Ice,” said Candace. “Just a little, at the top of the world. And the bottom, too, this small shape of ice. That is how the world was once—they say about twenty thousand years ago, but perhaps it was more—there was no ice or snow here… it was warm. All of this. They think that for fifteen thousand years all this area was free of ice, and during that time there were civilizations. They were much more advanced than anything we know. And then the climate changed, and the ice came down and covered all this space…

So does that make me insensitive? Or simply fearless because fear mostly comes from the unknown? Or perhaps we should still do our bit because if we don’t the process will simply be accelerated?
Which brings me to another L thought. That we go on discovering things and using technology and hurtling ahead without ever stopping to think of the consequences of what we are doing. But if we did stop to think, would we be able to stop anything? Well, according to her in her latest book, we have been trying for years to make that restless male of the species try to understand; but it doesn’t work. And just for the record, it’s called ‘nagging’.

2007-03-25T06:16:00.000-07:00

Hold the booze

Three months into 2007 I can confidently say I'm having a bad drinks year. It all started on new year's of course. We landed at Trattoria after a hard day's work and a drive past Marine Drive (where no one knew what they were doing) only to be told we would have to wait 45 minutes. Since none of us wanted to wait that long we trudged off to a friend's house in Cuffe Parade with some food and tried to make do with what little alcohol was there. Readymade Bloody Mary mixes really aren't any good so off we went back to Trats where in full support of the paper's 2'007' theme, I asked for a Martini. All I can say is I'll never be a Bond girl.
I had this lovely bottle of Absolut Raspberry and a family do coming up on January 26 so I thought I would keep away from alcohol and then really binge. It was not to be. At an office party on January 25, I was served a peg of three quarters horrible Grey Goose vodka and a quarter glass of Sprite which had me rushing to the Taj loo to puke and a hangover that put me off so completely that I could only play the hostess who doesn't drink.
Mojitos at a recent dinner were another medicinal no-no so that I will only be saying yes to beer for some time now.
And for all those who are wondering what any of this has to do with either travel or books, well, the vodka came from Singapore on someone else's travels and well, everything in life is connected to books somehow.

2007-03-07T23:02:00.000-08:00

I think it's now safe to explain the 'trust in your dreams' picture.
So there I was going about life as usual when one fine day Conrad writes to me saying Mrs Lessing will be speaking at the Cheltenham literary festival and ha ha you're going to miss it. Suitably riled, I replied back: Ha ha that's what you think. That sowed the seed. I made him book a ticket for the talk (which turned out to be an early birthday present, thanks C) and a month or so later I was on the plane looking down on London in autumn.
It gave rise to a lot of jokes at my expense, the most common one being "See you in four months". And as I was running (as usual) for my plane back and as I huffed and puffed my way to the counter at Heathrow and found the door of the plane closed I panicked. The man was unruffled and told me to go sit down and catch my breath. "But..." I said. "The plane's been delayed," he said. Relieved, I started to walk away when another man at the counter said, "I remember you. You were running the last time too."
I didn't know whether to be mortified or to be pleased.

2007-02-19T10:54:00.000-08:00

I sent in this picture to the guardian arts blog with the caption :
I took this picture in Paris last year. Walking down a busy street I was stunned to see this painting on a wall of a man seemingly walking up into the sky

It was published on the blog yesterday.

2006-12-08T01:31:00.000-08:00

Trust in your Dreams
their night gleams know
what seems is true.

2006-12-08T01:19:00.000-08:00

While on cafes, if you ever ask for a cafe au lait in Paris you need help. You will immediately be branded a tourist and all that comes with it including a huge American-sized mug of coffee. I didn't have a problem because after trekking up and down Montmartre looking for just the right sunny table with Carole, she ordered. But the trick is to ask for un creme—and you will be in and given the quaint (that's all any civilised person would drink) French size.

2006-09-23T10:23:00.000-07:00

I may not have spent A Year In The Merde but a week in Paris was enough to make me chortle and chuckle through this Brysonish book all through last week. I could clearly see the places, almost taste the baguette sandwiches and not help but nostalgically smile at the perfect rendering of French English.
When I landed, I knew you didn’t pronounce consonants at the end of words in French but I still asked for a ticket to Jules Joffrin. “Jules Joffra?” said the lady at the airport counter. My ouis went flying out of the window along with the mercis. “Yes, thank you,” I said meekly. Though later I did confidently use mehsi several times. But that was after I kept asking for Rue Ramey and kept getting blank looks. I was looking for my hotel and finally pulled out the hotel’s letterhead and pointed to the street’s name. “Ah, Hu Hamey,” said the helpful woman who led me to the street and even offered to help with my luggage.
Settled in, I called a friend, who thankfully spoke perfect English. “Allo,” she answered. How quaint, I thought, deciding to say allo from now on. Until at dinner at her place one night she extolled the virtues of toast dripping with ‘onee’. “Onee, you know, how do you say it…” Another friend saw the incomprehension on my face. “Honey,” she said. Ah, the silent H.
Anyway, so here’s a sample from Stephen Clarke’s book:
“If you don’t like Tea Time, how about Tea For Two?”
“Oh no.” This was Stephanie. “Dis is flat also. We want fonny nem. Like Bare-narr say, Ingleesh oomoor.”
“And, er, if we coll eet Tease Café?” Marc said.
“Tease Café?” I was lost again.
“Yuh. Tea, apostrof, s, café,” Marc explained. Stephanie nodded. Good idea.
“Tea’s Café? But that’s not English either.”
“Yes,” Stephanie retorted. “You av many nems with apostrof. Arry’s Bar. Liberty’s Statue.”
“Brooklyn’s Bridge,” Marc said.
“Trafalgar’s Square,” Bernard added.
‘No…”
“Roll’s Royce,” Bernard said, on a roll.
“No!” Where did they get this crap?
“In France this is considered very English.” Jean-Marie was playing interpreter again. “There is an American café on the Champs-Elysees called Sandwich’s Café.”

2006-09-03T11:47:00.000-07:00

Time to let go, pigeon-toed one. But we'll
carry your memories with us for the rest of
our lives too.

2006-08-16T06:22:00.000-07:00

Right, so since Darcy is hibernating for whatever reasons, my question is: Is a known Daniel better than an unknown or potential Daniel?

2006-08-09T10:40:00.000-07:00

Waiting for Darcy
A sign outside the Globe Tavern on the south bank of the Thames reminds you of its antecedents of being a pub located close to the original Shakespeare’s Globe. But that is not its only claim to fame, one of its recent ones being that Bridget Jones’s Diary was shot there.
It was not my intention to go looking for Bridget on a recent trip to London but when I asked to read back issues of The Independent to figure out whose baby Bridget is now expecting and how she was coping with her pregnancy (Days since baby due: 6 (bad) contractions:0 (bad) Babies: 0 (embarrassing)), friends thought I was a bit loony but soon started pointing out little trivia like the one in para 1 and an ale at the tavern was certainly not amiss. And as we discussed the merits of the movies and the reviews which had made even the men go out and see it, I looked around. There were women in black suits, looking supremely confident, having an after-dinner drink with men. Dateish maybe but certainly no Jude and Shazzer affair.
I knew few other young women in London. The Italian friends were charming and the French so proper. And C with her job at a metals magazine (ooh, let’s put a close-up shot of an aluminium sheet, that will have readers drooling) was lovely and funny but didn’t ring any singleton diary bells.
So it was that as I sipped my beer at a pub in Hampstead that I sat up alert when J sat up at the mention of an online community that could help her find singles and dates. Long skirt, roots showing, J was drinking ‘Pimms, my dear, I’ve been drinking since 2 in the noon, so unlike me’ and talking about how friends were concerned when she decided to rent and not buy a house. “We need to have a talk, they told me__like I was going to marry this ghastly guy or going to go off chemotherapy,’’ she said. After the merits of mortgages had been discussed through, she suddenly announced that her mother’s dentist was in jail. “She’s very upset, you know. It’s so strange. He’d been looking for a girl and she’d been trying to pair him up with me.” J (male) with a cat that wears a collar specific to the cat flap on his door offered his sympathies. Conversation flowed as easily as the beer and soon J had another distressing story to recount. “My parents recently had a fire at their place and they didn’t even tell me! I was furious,” she said. “They had six firemen in the house and they didn’t call me.” Something to do with men in uniform, of course. What can I say? Truth is stranger than fiction? Durr.

(PS: Is it just me or are there only Daniels left in this world?)

2006-07-31T03:35:00.000-07:00

Things to do, places to see. Like so many carrots, we dangle these in front of ourselves when we want to head out. A second trip to London? Isn’t that a waste considering a lifetime is not enough to see all the places in the world, leave along going somewhere twice? So I dangled some carrots__a literary festival held in a castle with the promise of books at 50p, a gorgeous castle situated on the crag of a hill and the complete works of Shakespeare with Judi Dench in one of them.
But as I looked down at the capital of the world stretching out below like something out of a fairy tale, all the carrots went out of the plane window. Not to say that I didn’t try. I went to the National Express office to find out about Edinburgh and even asked how I could get to Hay on Wye. Tickets for Scotland were sold out thanks to some football match and they’d not even heard of Wye. But it didn’t really matter. I didn’t even bother with the printouts of the London walks. I was content to just be, to indulge in the bard, to browse in the bookshops and walk around in the silence. Petticoat Lane, said somebody. But it was like something out of LA. I was out in 10 minutes.
An unplanned trip to Bristol and Avebury (yes, it’s there in the previous post but I need to add my two bits) on a beautiful summer day really showed that summer days are all they are cracked up to be even though sunshine till 9 in the evening is such a treasure in itself. Not to say that the Indian countryside is any less beautiful, but it’s the quaint differences that make you pack your bags, right?
A sign in a 16th century church at Avebury said they were looking for bell tollers. Practice was at 7.30 pm on Tuesdays. Anyone fit enough could join.
A birthday party in Bristol was held at a pub on the riverside so I caught the moving aside of the bridge to let a vessel pass.
I know a third trip will only warrant itself if I find those carrots again but reading newspapers (Sunday or otherwise, a la Ms Maxted) while eating takeaway lunch in a park__I would board the plane just for that.

(P.S: A tragedy: One carrot, that of watching Agassi play at Wimbledon, has been rendered irretrievalble).

2006-06-27T00:37:00.000-07:00

I would write you know. Except that she always does it better. Take this for instance.

Muriel is not always hard at work in Italy. Sometimes she comes to England. One of the pleasantest days of my life was spent in the company of Muriel and other friends, at the Hay Literary Festival, from where we took off to lunch in the hills. England comes up more often than its detractrors like to admit with days so perfect you have to forgive it on the spot for its extremes of gloom and dark. The country around Hay is, when the sun shines, paradisiacal. Birds, flowers, flowering trees; brooks babbling and streams sparkling. On a sandy spit in the middle of the Wye, that treacherous stream which can flood on an instant, two swans sat on their eggs with the sun shining on their backs. A delicious day. Such days cannot be planned for. They happen.

I didn't make it to Hay on Wye (ah the poetry of names) but I wouldn't be able to put Avebury in better words so I won't even try.

2006-06-21T02:42:00.000-07:00

All trips have two lives__one when you wake up each morning and think, ah where should I go today? And the other when you are back and recounting the wheres you went. The trip then lives through the stories that change with the person you are telling them to. Some friends hear about the Monets and the Vermeers, others about the pubs, yet others about the types of cheese. But parents listen to everything, all the silly things from the shoe bites to the ‘my room was on the fourth floor and I had to lug up all my luggage’. And what mothers really want to know is what you ate__and whether you ate enough.
I did eat lots, considering it was France and had more than my share of drinks. If it was beer in London, it was wine in France. And so it continued into the flight back where when I asked for some white I was given two bottles. No, the steward was not flirting with me. Since my flight from Paris to London was delayed and I had had to run to catch my flight while my luggage decided to continue being on vacation and return the next day, AND my window seat had been allocated to someone else and there was no space in the overhead lockers, I had plenty to moan about as I walked into the plane breathless from all that running to gate 23. The steward, who had probably identified me as a ‘problem passenger’, said I could moan to my neighbour but showed his concern throughout with “How are you doing then?s” and “You ok?” And of course tons of wine to shut me up.

2006-06-08T03:04:00.000-07:00

Since i have 10 minutes i will use this french keyboqrd again. Some people in Pqris qctuqlly offer the use of english keyboqrds but zhqts teh point of being in pqris qnd doing thqt: ok i cqnnot find the auestion ,qrk sign:
i dont know zhether teh french just dont like to speqk english or reqlly dont knoz it cos most of the time i seem to get along with a bit of sign lqngquge: but they do like talking qnd if you qsk them something they will give a full reply in french even if you dont understqnd q zord:
qt teh qirport i met this woman from new jersey who was just as excited qbout being in pqris qnd speqking in french: she turned qround in teh queue qnd qsked me if i knew what to say for good afternoon: i told her i could look it up but she said it wasnt important, she just wanted to try saying it to the people at the counter: My kids said dont embarass yourself mamma but i shqll speqk my words; she said.
so bonjour and bonsoir and à biéntot.

2006-06-06T09:53:00.000-07:00

i was going to get out of this cybercqfe in 15 mins but considering the french keyboqrd couldnt resist: hqh its fun:
i got into pqris this qfternoon qnd checked into this reqlly szeet hotel only thing ,y roo, is on the fourth floor: goodness;: i think its qll pqrt of the zhy french zo,en dont get fqt if you knoz hzqt i ,eqn: but i cqn see sqcre couer fro, ,y roo, so i;m not co,plqining
i hqd q brilliqnt ti,e in london: one of the bestest: sqz three plqys qnd drqnk lots of qle qnd beer qnd zine:
qnd i zent to qvebury in teh countrysid; it zqs q brilliqnt sunny dqy qnd perfect for q picnic: fro, there onzqrds to bristol zhere i sqz brunels suspension bridge 9thqnk you ,qvis cheek0
sundqy i zqnt to hq,psteqd heqth qnd finqlly ,et bridget jones zhen ze zent out for q drink qt free ,qsons qr,s in hq,peteqd heqth:
qnd ,ondqy i spent stqinding on both sides of the zorld qt the pri,e ,eridien of the zorld:
zoz: i mean wow: le,,e try the qccents qnd grqves qnd stuff:
àèçç: hmmm

2006-05-23T06:21:00.000-07:00

All the time we were growing up my father would buy books and always say the same thing: "I'll read them when I retire." He retired seven years ago. And though I tried everything from leaving books where he might see them to directly telling him how wonderful a particular book was to get him to start reading, nothing worked. A nod, a shrug and the matter ended there. From Travels with Charley to Churchill's Triumph, they all met the same fate. Until a couple of days ago, my sister got him The Da Vinci Code. ''He'll read it I tell you,'' she said, "he read the blurb at the back." So what, I replied. He does that all the time. But surprise surprise, a ticket he usually uses as a bookmark is now at page 50 I think. What can I say? Thank you, Dan Brown.

2006-05-11T01:51:00.000-07:00

I’m geographically challenged. I have little sense of direction and I can never remember how one road connects to another.
I thank my stars I live in a linear city like Bombay and not a roundabout one like Delhi or one with a hajaar lanes and bylanes like Pune.
Lanes befuddle me and all highrises look the same. I try to keep landmarks in mind, I really do. For a long time, when I had to commute to Prabhadevi, I kept in mind a huge hoarding of some product that loomed just before my destination. It served me well — until they changed it. Since it was not replaced with anything quite distinctive, I thought it better to leave it to the bus conductor to let me know where to get off. It follows that I often find myself at the mercy of cab and rickshaw drivers too.
It’s not that I can’t remember some other landmark. But soon as I get into a vehicle or a train, I seem to space out. I look up from my book or my thoughts and suddenly realize that I am well and truly lost. I hurriedly clamber to the exit until I get my bearings and figure out if it was the last stop I was supposed to get off at or the next one. Much to the amusement of those around.
There’s a road that leads from the Bandra-Kurla complex to Ghatkopar. Every night, I would be speeding on the wide road and somehow, almost magically, find myself in the streets of Ghatkopar. I wanted to figure out how that happened. For several nights I tried to be alert to watch where the car turned. But it must be something about long, wide roads. I still don’t know.
A friend of mine dropped me home from Andheri a few times. It took this friend just a couple of trips to figure out the shortest route. Me? I’m still clueless. It has given way to a quiz. “So, what’s around the next corner?” Giving a correct answer leaves me immensely pleased. Though the fact that my friend had been in the city for hardly two years while I’ve lived here all my life did cause some embarrassment.
Did. Note the past tense. I agonized over road names and tried hard to jog my memory for a long, long time to ensure that I knew exactly where I was. Until I read something in an essay by Tim Cahill called ‘Getting Lost’: “Consider your predicament a privilege,” he says. “In a world so shrunken that certain people refer to ‘the global village,’ the term ‘explorer’ has little meaning. But exploration is nothing more than a foray into the unknown, and a four-year-old child, wandering about alone in the department store, fits the definition as well as the snow-blind man wandering across the Khyber Pass. The explorer is the person who is lost. When you’ve managed to stumble directly into the heart of the unknown — either through the misdirection of others, or better yet, through your own creative ineptitude … in those bad lost moments, in the times we are advised not to panic, we own the unknown, and the world belongs to us … Few of us are ever so free.”
Yes, I quite like discovering things anew.

2006-04-18T05:06:00.000-07:00

Sophie Kinsella's perfect man for the high-powered city girl moving to the countryside in The Undomestic Goddess was a man who had trained to be a gardener plus has a family business--he owns the local pubs.
Then the perfect man in Jane Green's Bookends is (is cos I'm reading the book just now) an artist who grew up on a farm and so paints and grows his own tomatoes and works as a real estate agent to make enough money to retire by the age of 40 and paint full time. Sigh sigh.
These things only happen in books for sure. Or maybe everything happens in books. After all, Emily Barr painted the perfect picture of a bastard. Matt may consider himself an accidental bastard simply because he thought he had no choice but to carry on a double life since (READER ALERT, DON'T READ FURTHER IF YOU INTEND READING 'PLAN B' BY BARR) both his girlfriend and his wife become pregnant at the same time. But methinks even to be an accidental bastard you have to be a bastard at some level, natural or otherwise.
Anyway, bastards or perfect men (ha!) when you are down in the dumps, feel-good chicklit rules.

2006-03-23T10:21:00.000-08:00

Rosemary Bailey's bag and baggage, when she moved into a monastery she and her husband had bought in the south of France, included some pieces of furniture, some suitcases full of clothes and 90 boxes of books. What a perfect proportion of possessions.
But if I move, what will I do with my 70 odd potted plants? Ok, I always dream of an acre of land and growing rosemary and thyme and lavender (I've got basil and chillies but these just sound infinitely more romantic and unachievable), but I'm sure I'll be as lost at being a farmer as she did:
My new rusticism was equally ambivalent. I spent as many hours reading books about herbs as I did planting them. It was clearly more efficient to buy vegetables than spend the time required to grow them, however good they might taste. As I pottered about the garden in my sun hat with my latest basket on my arm I sometimes felt like Marie Antoinette playing at being a milkmaid.