The cars that drove us

My Dad’s first car was a 1958 Standard Super 10. The previous owner was a senior police officer, so my Dad tended to get waved through checkpoints and suchlike on his frequent road trips. A few years later, KLT 9006 became MEO 5860 when he moved to Bangalore, got a wife and a brace of kids. It also changed from black to white. “The Standard”, as my Dad refers to it, remained our car until I was sixteen. In and around Whitefield, it was iconic, practically a surname.

It’s gone everywhere and ferried everyone – long-distance journeys, school runs, doctor and vet runs, birthday parties, picnics, railways stations, bus terminals and airports at all times of the day and night (it got its windshield broken in a riot on one of these trips), social occasions in all corners of Bangalore,. And of course the mechanic. As our best friend said (they had a Standard Herald of similar vintage): “Until the Maruti came we didn’t even know that cars were supposed to run continuously, without needing constant tending.”

We knew how and when to pour water in the radiator before we were tall enough to see into the engine. We knew about batteries and distilled water and fan belts. We knew how cars worked; we saw it with our own eyes. And where today’s cars have a neat package of basic tools, my dad had a whacking great toolbox and a pile of rags that was essentially bandages and plaster. “Palani’s workshop” in Ulsoor where we had gold-card, frequent-flyer status is now a Diagnostic Centre.

The next car was The Tank, a granduncle’s 1978 Ambassador that we bought after he died. My brother and dad drove it from Calicut to Bangalore in pouring rain, the trip immortalised by my brother’s article in Autocar India. In between, there were assorted hard-bitten Mahindra Jeeps and a Hindustan Trekker that came via my Dad’s job. One of these was my first driving experience. I had to practically stand on the clutch to get it to move.

In 1999, my Dad got his first new, straight-out-of-showroom car – a Maruti Omni. This one did a lot of long-distance trips, too. A second Omni came with air-conditioning and power windows. Now there’s a Hyundai Santro, his first automatic, which I think is the favourite car after the Standard. He certainly treats it like a pet dog.

He learnt to drive in government jeeps on the treacherous hill and forest roads of the Nilgiris. He has fascinating stories of rogue elephants and stray horses. Cashew farming in southern Kerala, fish farming in paddy fields, potato projects in Kodaikanal (“doesn’t taste like my potatoes”), oranges in Kotagiri (“not as sweet as my oranges”). At the time, the agriculture department was also responsible for the welfare of tribal villages – this consisted of giving them the benefit of agricultural research, cultivation methods, seeds and conservation, but also seemed to include wider, less defined support services including rescue from and/or condolences for marauding elephants. I wonder what happened to all this. It seems more desirable than turning forest tribes into handicraft factories or tourist attractions, but I suppose time marches on and all that.

The “Super 10”, as my brother and I call it, had been running for 31 years when we sold it. Apparently it still is, there has been the occasional sighting. My Dad is 73 and has been roadworthy (more or less) for about 47 years. At the end of this month, he needs to get his license renewed. We all have our fingers crossed - his driving license is not just necessary to him, it's also in some fundamental way important to us.

Photos: One is our car, as you might have guessed. The other is the original brochure for a 1958 Standard Super 10.

The House That Built Me, Miranda Lambert, 2010

Life with a three-year-old

My niece believes I've been imported solely for her edification so she's reluctant to let me out of the house. I ease her into it by letting her participate in the dressing process. She lays out my make-up and hands it to me like a chatty surgical assistant. She comments at length on my clothes and puts on my jewellery to see what it looks like. Then she picks out my shoes and dusts them with my powder brush. It adds at least half an hour to the process but it makes the day go so much better. And a one-person fan club who firmly believes you are “so pretty” is a relief when you’re seeing a new grey hair every day.

She has wondrous toys that we would have killed to get, but her favourite* consists of two jam jars full of ordinary glass stones of the decoration-in-flower-pot variety. They represent, variously or together, people, money, food, cars, houses, laptops, phones, groceries, luggage, furniture and, after she’s been spending some time with her father, aeroplane parts. She’s lately learned about the presence of mascara in the world, so it also becomes that sometimes. The stones form the jungle, the lions and the princess lost among them. There’s always a princess. It becomes Swiper, the thing he’s swiping and the chorus that says “Swiper, no swiping”.

She seems to learn a new polysyllabic word every day, though none of us knows how. One day she’s struggling to work out how to slant the lines of “A” and the next, she’s writing her name easily (according to my brother, the Indian government would now consider the household 100% literate). She came home from ballet class and taught me the “arabeck”. In return, I taught her the Surya Namaskar; she had fun doing it but couldn’t pronounce the name, so promptly rejected it.

It bothers her when I disappear into a book and she’s lately taken to hanging around the bookshelf and picking out “books without pictures” (which necessitated a hasty shifting of some books that do have pictures to higher shelves). She turns the pages, getting increasingly frustrated by the rows of black type that mean nothing to her, understanding even less why I prefer that to playing with her. Sometimes I suddenly remember that she will be sixteen one day with no time for tedious old aunts, so I shut the book and play anyway.

I’ve forgotten what it’s like to do anything without a running commentary, I haven’t invented so many exhausting games at such short notice since I was that age myself, I can’t go out, work late or sleep in without feeling guilty, my reading has slowed to one often-missing book a month and my powder brush is permanently out of commission, but every time she’s happy to see me, I feel like I’ve won an award. And I’ve never won so many awards in my life.

Aunts and uncles – much like grandparents – have unshakeable belief in the unique glory of their nieces and nephews (I have several and I think they’re all geniuses, including the one that’s only 10 days old). So I could go on forever but will stop here.

*Favourite at the time of starting this. At the time of publishing, it was a pack of cards. By now it’s probably something else.

Cherai Beach Resort

It’s five in the evening, the tide is coming in. We leap in the waves and are baptised by salt water, again and again. We laugh, fight, cry and enthuse, cocooned by a shared illusion that time makes no difference, age is immaterial.
Every year or so we endeavour to find our ancestral home in other places, the extended family gathering in a two-day simulation of long-ago leisurely summer holidays. The strange thing is that we do find it; somehow the patterns that were established then reproduce themselves. It’s a combination of collective memories and the fact that each of us has felt the same influences, even if in different ways.

But each “family meet” also brings poignancy, because we’re the last ones to know. My nieces and nephews will establish their own patterns - nice ones probably - but the images of the houses we came from, the timbre of the voices that touch a chord deep in the gut and even some of the food will go out with my generation. As always I’m haunted by the urgent thought that it’s up to us – me, actually – to record the stories, gather the recipes and hold it all in trust for the kids. I don’t know why it seems so important, but there it is.

Earlier that day, we sat at long tables beneath stirring coconut trees, deep in the satisfaction that only fresh fish, perfectly made, can bring us. The voices that surrounded us came from our childhood, and a boat rocked beneath us, like a cradle in transit. Meanwhile, water lilies bloomed outside our doors, picturesque backwaters lapped at the fences and a pink dolphin lay unaccountably dead on the beach up ahead.

Morning has broken

The best time in our house is breakfast time. We're all foraging for different kinds of food, and reading different newspapers, sharing whatever bits we think are amusing. Woman falls out of train into sea and survives. Columbian police arrest drug dealer's parrot for giving warning of their approach. Woman gets roughed up by neighbours because her dog poops in front of their house. Obama's not coming to Bangalore because he's afraid of the techies. If there's no interesting news, we amuse ourselves by checking how many exaggerations the Times of India crams into the same story the Hindu has reported with great restraint. Occasionally, arguments break out as we all have widely differing views on whatever the main headline is, but they usually end abruptly in a quest for a five-letter word for boredom or an Italian composer. This last is my mother who is deeply addicted to the Guardian Quick Crossword. My Dad will promptly make up a word that fools nobody (he often thinks I'm still eight). In between, we blame each other for the failure of the vegetables we painstakingly planted or take credit for whatever fruit the garden has recently produced. We hotly debate the merits of some new block of flats that none of us is going to buy, earnestly study the dog adoption listings for a pet we're not going to get, and, if it's a Sunday, my Dad will search the matrimonial ads for a bridegroom I'm not going to marry. We interfere with each other's plans for the day, get in the way of the maid and are generally friendly to each other. Of course, conditions deteriorate as the day progresses and dinner is usually the worst time, but that does not stop us from inflicting our company on each other. Looking back, this seems to have always been the pattern in the household, more or less. You'd think that by now we'd have taken the hint and gone in for TV dinners.

10 years after Kargil

About a month or so ago, we watched the remembrance ceremony of the 65-day war in the Himalayas. We would have anyway because we’re all fans of military ceremonies, but this time there was also the fact that we knew one of the names inscribed on the memorial. My strongest memory of him is of a laughing boy on a terrace telling us about army life, making light of hardship and homesickness. Later that night I searched for the letter written from the border a few months before the fighting broke out. As usual I had taken too long to reply, I was setting up a new life in Muscat, had a lot to do, put it off. And the next note I saw with his name on it was a post-it on my desk from the office manager with the news that Captain Vikram Menon had fallen in Kargil. We were four cousins born in 1973 and then one afternoon, just like that, we were three.

I still have correspondence pending. People I really care about but haven’t mailed, for no clear reason. Missed calls I haven’t returned, others that I haven’t made. Facebook friends I need to actually get in touch with. My friends’ parents just down the road that I want to visit but inexplicably haven’t. Their grandparents. Birthdays I’ve not acknowledged, though I always remember, every year. Meet-ups I’ve ditched or not set up. Simple, casual conversations that I haven’t had with the people I see every day. I draw my tired thoughts around me and huddle within, and all the while, time is passing swiftly by.

I didn’t find the letter, but I haven’t looked everywhere. It will turn up, and when it does, I can finally hand it over to his mother, about nine years later than I meant to.

Stargazing

Away to one side of the driveway, coconut palms grow deep in tall grass. In the middle is a gazebo, even quieter than the path. On the other side, a clutch of potted plants gives way to a little hut and a trailing vine. If it weren’t for the small signs saying “Nursery”, “Crafts” and “Café”, these could have been farm buildings. Further down there are craftworky things and interesting clothes hanging in small doorways, a staircase leading to a pastry shop, the original house and garden. Lake View Farm has found a great way to keep from turning into flats or row houses.

Hidden down yet another pathway is Tranquilitea, a tiny tea shop with big arm chairs on an open patio. They sell a startling range of teas grown in the Nilgiris and make a mean crepe. Sitting there is a delight. You just sit. And sit. Drinking in the green quiet with your tea.

And when you walk about later, spend too much on a pair of earrings bigger than your face and wander round the back, you look over a hedge with surprise into a lovely leafy neighbourhood, probably the very first of Whitefield’s “new” settlements. This is no cookie-cutter gated colony, but individual houses built on separate plots that together had been another farm called Taralaya.

I stood there and thought only that I would like to have a house in this nice place, quite unable to picture the farm of my childhood. As I continued to gaze hungrily over the wall like Rapunzel’s mother, little pieces started to resolve themselves. I noticed a sapota tree, then a few more and then many, everywhere, realizing without conscious thought that our orchard was not all cut down.

A cow lowed somewhere, somebody’s Alsatian barked, and I pictured it suddenly. Far away to my right, a house, in front of it, a rose garden, and behind, a kitchen one where my Dad grew strawberries that my brother and I picked illegally before they were ripe. – my distrust of strawberries probably stems from there. Straight ahead, a haystack we were not supposed to climb but did anyway, and beyond that, cowsheds where I saw a cow giving birth. I was of course not supposed to be there. To the left of those, poultry sheds, the business end of the farm. I don’t remember any lawlessness there, so they probably didn’t interest us much. Hens are dull. Or perhaps they were just well-guarded.

I came slowly by degrees to the place where I stood – I think I was almost exactly at the place where a brave but foolhardy dog named Max was buried after being bitten by a cobra he followed into a hole and killed.

Hard upon it came the thought that the place used to be riddled with snakes, which was why my parents never went in much for picturesque leafy hedges, and I stepped back hastily. It’s still a nice neighbourhood, though, and I would like to live there. With seven snake-spotting dogs.

"Hobby" is a dumb word and even stupider question

My new thing is painting furniture. I have begun with my own study table. As with most things in our house, it has a history and is older than I am. My mother got it when she was in school, shared it with her sister for a while and then handed it down to me when I was in school. I can’t remember whether my brother and I fought over it, but it seems probable since we did so over everything else in our shared room. (It was a time of a single tape recorder, so a phenomenal number of fragile tapes became collateral damage in the bitter battles for airspace.) Anyway, I asked my mom if she was sentimental about her table and she said not in the least, so I set to work on it.

Painting wood is not exactly flinging water colours on the nearest bit of paper. It involves preparing the surface first. It took an entire Sunday afternoon. Stripping veneer and sanding are work. Real work. Especially when you have a fifty-year-old surface with three layers because previous DIYers were not exactly conscientious about preparation. I found out that one of them was the above-mentioned brother, which is strange because I don’t remember receiving the requisite application in triplicate to mess with my table. The Line of Control was clearly crossed one time when I wasn’t looking. That happened all the time, both ways.

Being me, it began ambitiously. I was going to reproduce a painting by Vaco that I really like. I downloaded it and built a properly scaled grid over it so I could copy the design out faultlessly. Then I remembered that I would also need to reproduce the professional paint job, so I changed my design philosophy and did my own thing with flat colours. I call it “The Seeing Eye Sees And Having Seen, Moves On”. The catalogue copy will explain it all; the comma may be especially significant.

Enamel paint is semi-transparent and apparently needs to be “flowed on with a full brush”. So I made further downward adjustments to my ambitions. When I checked on the net later, it seemed as if most 14-year-olds know this already. Well, they didn’t teach it in school in my day. Another thing I wasn’t taught is that if you forget the masking tape and you notice two days later that some paint's trickled down the side, you can’t just take it off with turpentine – it’s not nail polish. But on the subject of beauty products, my years of experiments with eye shadow have given me a very steady hand with the finer brushes. It’s also given my some highly effective, though unorthodox, things in my workbox, such as ear buds and cotton balls.

My masterpiece has really become a practice project in how to do the thing. I’ve identified two other pieces in my room for fame and glory. One of them will not occasion much comment (apart from, maybe, “do you know how much that veneer cost me?”), but the other might involve some dispute with the owner.

My first attempt at painting furniture actually went rather well, mostly because my Dad has a full workbench and lots of advice. The brushes were my own (left over from the time I went through a clay-pot-painting phase), but I need to replace his sand paper.

The table’s not finished yet, though the painting part is over. I found a great rubbing technique that involves some complicated antics with pumice powder and linseed oil, which is supposed to turn glossy to matte. If not, I can always learn how to strip paint and start over.

A whiter shade of pale

My maternal grandmother died when I was five so my only memory of her is a blurred image of what I now know must have been the funeral pyre. Over the years we've heard a lot about her and she has always sounded pretty spectacular.

For one thing, when she started travelling abroad on her own after her children were grown, she would have been in her fifties. That's not even middle-aged in our world, but in her era it would have been considered late autumn, time for one last blossoming – grandmotherhood – and winter definitely in the air. My Gran just caught the next plane out.

She did Europe on a shoestring years before the first Lonely Planet on the subject. A person who had never travelled embraced it with gusto. All this I knew from the stories. Tonight I heard it from her – my aunt gave me two letters that she had preserved. One of them was about the first visit to London in September 1970, and the other covered Brussels and Amsterdam soon after.

They recorded her first encounters with a washing machine, canned meatballs and a martini. That she walked from Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace and back because "the taxis are expensive". The wonder that an Indian in the seventies felt at the vastness of Selfridges, the fact that "in the West" small towns and villages enjoyed the same amenities as the cities. In the Netherlands, she'd "seen many pretty girls and none of them wore make-up". In Belgium she noted that "most of the tourists are American". In England, she was awestruck by the fact that the Englishwoman she stayed with worked from "morn till midnight" because "she has no help at all". Though India provided a lot of household help, it did not have melamine crockery, Revlon lipsticks or foreign bras then, so she bought these for her daughters and nieces.

Her style of travel writing strung events together on an invisible thread of thought rather than any compulsion of mundane logic. Descriptions of St Paul's, apple trees and the Surrey countryside tumbled together, high art was mixed up with a prosaic bit about having to haul luggage at Heathrow. There was a bipolar swinging from breathless excitement to inconsequent worry. Over it all floated an everything-will-please-me-because-I'm-on-holiday adjustment to the flow.

I recognized it all. At two in the morning I was staring in shock at the place where my voice comes from, the source code written before I was born, before my parents even met, for the many, many emails sent on my own travels.

I didn't know there was anybody else in my family who had this urge to send back despatches with copious detail about where you went and what you did, talking about taxis and telephone booths, being naive about the people you met, and thrilling to the fact that something was exactly as you'd read about in some book.

Her accounts were long and chatty but there was much that she didn't say about a deeply personal roller coaster ride of glee and fear, and a swelling delight in the fact that she could. I looked out for a long time at the dark trees, feeling weird that I knew this.

Interestingly, she also said that "in the air-ports now they check your baggage and yourself because of the recent hi-jackings". I didn't know it had started that early, nor that they used to hyphenate those words.

When a dog dies

There’s a tin full of rusks on the shelf for a dog that disdained dog biscuits. There's meat in the freezer and millet in a bin since he wouldn’t touch dog food. A chain hangs expectantly outside, a collar with black fur on it still lies in the back of the car.

When I’m reading late at night in the farthest bedroom of the house, I can almost hear the familiar grunt of a big animal walking under the bamboo, down below. I still seem to feel the loose paving stone go thud-thud as he walks over it into what we fondly call “the orchard” (two prolific papaya trees, a smelly cherry that only birds will eat and one fruitless custard apple). Fallen leaves still rustle all night long but it’s only the small creatures of the night going their way unmolested now.

When a dog dies, it's easy to be in denial about it. He could be somewhere at the back, in his "room" under the tank, in the garden, off chasing something. The porch always seems as if he just left it for a while.

I’ve been dragged into many unresolvable conversations about people's feelings for their dogs, whether they’re like those for children or friends or other family or even justified at all. I’ve found these arguments strangely distasteful and I now see why. Loving a dog is like loving a dog; it is unlike any other kind. I’m not quite sure what unconditional means where love is considered – it seems a bit of an oxymoron to me – but I think the thing is that dogs are all heart and instinct. So you respond in the same way, a way that tends to bring out only the undiluted good in you. There are no power struggles, shadows or second guesses here. It’s an outpouring of sentiment anointed by the relief of not having to temper it in any way. So when your dog dies, you feel the loss just as purely.

Our first dog came when I was five and my brother was four. So this is not the first such loss we have known, and it won’t be the last. Each one was a wrenching, but this one, he was special. Perhaps it’s also my own age now but he was different from other dogs.

For one thing, he was beyond question the biggest German shepherd I've ever seen, his face more wolf-like, his gait more lion-like than most of his breed (lying sedated on the table in the pet hospital, he looked like something caught with a tranquiliser gun in a jungle). He never licked you like other dogs, he nudged you instead, almost knocking you over. He was too big to jump or frolic, so developed a habit of bounding like a dignified bolster. He slept like a duck-billed platypus with his nose pointing forward and all legs splayed.

He was one of the few single dogs we’ve had, so maybe he grew up reserved because of that. Though I remember his father used to be introverted even in the company of four others and his mother was a sleek, secretive killing machine (enlivened teenage times at our friends’ place), so perhaps it was just in his blood. There were other things bequeathed by his long bloodline: he had all the eccentricity and vulnerability of the last scion of a highly bred clan. Even the traditional enemies of all our dogs - telephone linesman, newspaper boys, meter readers, postmen, water men, vegetable sellers etc - tended to acknowledge his magnificence even while wishing he didn't exist.

But he was more than the sum of the parts. He was, quite simply, Oscar. And there's a little hole in the fabric of the day for each of us, that bit of personal time with Oscar. For my mother, I think it must be the early mornings, for my father, last thing at night when locking up. For my brother, it might be the bit of blank space when he arrives from the airport on his next holiday here.

When I got home from work yesterday, Rana, the neighbour’s dog came rushing up to his gate and looked at ours, both hopeful puzzled. There's an Oscar-shaped hole in his universe too, and knowing what happened doesn’t make it any easier for me to accept either that he's not going to turn up.

The neighbour sent a message late at night: “Miss Oscar having the last word. Don’t know whether to take Rana’s barking seriously without Oscar’s affirmation.” That's funny because we only took Oscar’s complaints seriously when endorsed by Rana.

When a dog dies, you lose both him and the part of yourself that he liked, perhaps the best part of you, maybe the only one you liked too.

Magic beans

Article published in Little India ("Largest Indian publication in USA") in May this year under the title of "My Paper Google", and yet to be paid for.

I rushed to my laptop in a panic while cooking something complicated, to look up "blanching". And ended up very annoyed because I got onion peel on my precious keyboard. Much later, I remembered that I've had a sort of paper Google for years which tells me all I could possibly want to know. And it's survived worse disasters than onion peel.

My mother got this battered blue book when it was new, a present from her cousin in the early years of her marriage. When I left home to set up a kitchen of my own, she gave it to me.

It's a combination of old-fashioned recipe book and surprisingly modern how-to manual on setting up a new life. In the section called Basic Kitchen Aids" – which I read six months after I needed it – I recognised my mother's organised kitchen and therefore the things I had unconsciously bought anyway.

There is also crucial cooking-for-dummies information. The ounce to teaspoon conversion rate, for example. And how to tell a "moderate oven" from the other kinds. Descriptions of different cooking methods, alphabetically listed. What to do if you've over-salted a curry. How to rescue something that got burnt at the bottom. Fascinating tit-bits (of purely academic interest until very recently) such as: citrus fruits dipped in warm water are easier to juice, an egg-shell added to boiling bones helps produce clear stock without skimming, a wet knife slices hard-boiled eggs neater.

There is even a brief but illuminating bit on throwing parties. The advice ranges in tone from the understanding but implacable tenets of my great-aunts: "No matter how shy you are do not forget that they are your guests and you are the hostess" to the eminently practical voice of my mother's sister: "Serve a dish you are confident about so you can enjoy your own party".

The recipes are interesting (now and then I recognise something that has been the staple in our home all my life), but being an indifferent cook – if at all – they have spent more time on my bookshelf than in my kitchen. I've read the book cover to cover of course, but only because I read everything, compulsively.

"The accumulated experience of many a home-maker has gone into the contents of this book" says Rachel Alexander in the preface. She used the current word for housewife 34 years ahead of its time and seems to wear confidently her title of chairman. Possibly she was too busy being one to bother with the mere semantics of chairperson. She belonged to a magnificent generation.

The names in the acknowledgements belong to strangers, but they call up reminiscences like photographs. I spent many childhood summers with one great-aunt or the other and – as the most easily persuaded of the grandchildren – have accompanied those energetic old divas on a million duty visits, tea parties, ladies' lunches, fundraisers and the like. In my early teens I was even occasionally despatched alone as the representative. (I wonder how I could have turned out so socially recalcitrant, but perhaps my rabid introversion is because I've finished my quota of niceties).

It is called "A Guide to Efficient Housekeeping and Good Cooking" and was published in 1973 (a month before I was born) by the YWCA-Chennai as a fundraiser.

The cover shows age, but the book is neat and poised, the papers never askew or unkempt. After a lifetime of wear and tear, the spine is still straight and the spirit, indomitable. Whenever I open it, the pages susurrate like starched cotton sarees rustling around tea-trays on verandahs.

Old fogies and other myths

This is a discussion on a friend's blog, that I'm extending to mine.

The mother of this blogger has a plan. A self-sufficient community for like-minded elderly people. She's going to build one-bedroom cottages on her property in Kerala and these will be "bought" by the person/people living there until their death, after which it will revert to the Trust and be available for a new occupant. There will be a library, a restaurant, household help, transport, guest rooms, others of the same mind since there is to be a careful screening process. It sounds great. It is a great idea, but considering the profile of the target audience I wonder a bit.

For thinking, doing, healthy people, wouldn't a closed-in community like this be claustrophobic? I've noticed that the elderly members of my family never feel so elderly as when they are closeted for too long with people who think of themselves as old. At other times they have to be reminded at four in the morning that they haven't been twenty-five for many years now, so put the party hat down.

My parents, for example, enjoy having neighbours of different persuasions, interacting with all kinds of people. The same goes for friends' parents, my aunts and uncles. They don't consider themselves too old to contribute to society, and they're not. (The blogger's mother with her business idea is also a shining example of this.) They have active social calendars with friends who are years younger. They have a wide range of interests. In short, they like being in the thick of it. Sixty is the new forty and all that.

I have conversations, share pleasures with my older family members, not just duty chats. And when I review the very long list of them – well, while I can see them enjoying the idea of a community like this, I can't see them living there successfully. On the other hand, what do I know? I'm thirty-five, I have some way to go yet. Perhaps all these people I've listed feel differently.

Me, I would say use the money to buy the yacht and let the fogies live in a cupboard under the stairs*.

*They'll probably have noisy parties there but if you're nice to them and bring a bottle, maybe they'll let you in.

Aquarius

Sleep was elusive all night. I stayed quietly awake in some vigil that I seemed to be required to keep.

When I got the message in the morning that my sister-in-law had gone into labour in the night, it was not a surprise, merely a confirmation. It’s not even surprising that my mind chose to keep the vigil, untold – this is merely the same instinct that makes my brother call me unerringly when I really need to talk, whether I want to or not.

Our family unit of five is now six. That’s not surprising either – it’s always been flexible, taking on any number from two to two hundred at any given point in space or time. What is surprising is that my small brother is suddenly a father. And that this wonder-child is real, here.

The first photographs brought a rush of entirely new emotion. Perhaps this is unconditional love. It was so unfamiliar and so strong that I had no idea what to do with it. My actions seemed strange but were probably just a response called up from my genes – I visited my locker to check on my diamonds.

Two years ago, as the jeweller handed me the case, he told me fulsomely I had bought an heirloom that I would hand down to other generations. My friend and I were too busy gloating over my new possession to care. Well, the heir to it was born this afternoon. The sense of continuity that gave me was most surprising of all.

Bookends

Usually, when you return to things you used to be intensely involved in in your hometown, they tend to have grown small and pathetic. As Neil Diamond put it: “All I’d see are strangers’ faces and all the scars that love erases”.

But happening upon news of a repertory group I used to belong to, I felt the absolute opposite. Jagriti – as it is now called – has become a Trust and a Foundation, its aims much larger, its future much brighter than the old Artistes’ Repertory Theatre would ever have imagined.

None of this is news to me. I’ve seen the plans, walked in the foundations of the building. I knew the name was going to change; my feelings were even consulted. But the reality, the enormity of it was only clear to me when laid out in unmistakable print on the impersonal pages of a website.

I’m still struggling to identify the emotions. There is definitely a swelling pride and a triumphant whoop. But there are also other things, harder to define.

This new Jagriti – a redundancy there, since jagriti is sanskrit for awakening – is a stranger. There’s another one in my mind, the Jagriti Farm where we played, worked and rehearsed, not just for the latest play, but for life itself.

From those insecure teenage years I’ve grown into a real person, with my own self, my own larger future. For one moment today I felt all my age and my distance from who I feared I might become. It was a great feeling of renaissance.

But also, across that distance, I recalled suddenly, vividly the summer scent of grapes ripening on the vines that used to grow across the road. The December morning glimpse of a field of hyacinths in the mist. And three boys cajoling roses by the armful from the neighbouring wholesalers, for the latest of their many crushes.

Perhaps it is best left, as most things should, to the words of Simon and Garfunkel: Time it was and what a time it was, it was / A time of innocence, a time of confidences. / Long ago it must be, I have a photograph.

Looking back there was much laughter at the farm, the tears were brief and few. There was creativity (as evidenced by the many ingenious ways in which the boys sought to kill themselves with Diwali fireworks), dedication (they renewed their efforts every year, in spite of their repeated failure to blow themselves up), teamwork and faith (you needed a lot of this for the elaborate system of backstage signals that were necessary in the days before walkie-talkies).

It is wonderful then, to know that the spirit of Jagriti is to spread its wings and fly wider and higher, to nurture and be nurtured by others. And so continue for a long, long time independent of us, its first graduates.

Love over gold

The foreign friend said "Sure, but I don't really know them. They're just cousins, so you know... not really family."

I was left thinking of a cousin I hadn't been in touch with for 10 years, but made a point of meeting on this trip, though it was not convenient or economical. She was equally happy that I did. Another, who I've never had a chance to get to know, took the time to do so now, over a whole day in Boston. A third cousin worked till three in the morning so she could spend the day with me. A fourth and a fifth are annoyed with me because I didn't go to see them - but I will be back to do so.

And I see most clearly the face of a sixth cousin, waiting at the airport in spite of having a two-day-old baby at home. This was so not a convenient time to have a house guest, but his smile was unshadowed by this concern. Because I was not a house guest, I was a cousin.

I think also of the warm welcome from a friend after 14 years, of another, who's suffering the burden of working from home while entertaining me for a whole week. And a third who crossed the line from friend to family a long time ago.

At the risk of sounding like Brother Love's Travelling Salvation Show, it seems that every stop I've made was a blessing counted.

The large American deserves commendation for bringing this to my attention, because I can get a bit ungrateful and frazzled when I've spent too much time with people. Very ungrateful and frazzled, actually.

Hope Street, Providence

The house has the feel of an ancestral home, the kind of calm acceptance in the air that other such homes have had - sunny Cambrae flat, bright new Pullonath house and solid Lakshmi - in the good old days. Our good old days, my generation. So much so that I feel my old awkwardness return. Why does family invariably bring on a sense of inadequacy? So for the first two days, pretty Providence took a backseat to my own colourful internal landscape. But as always, the smog soon burnt itself away... to reveal elvish gardens and Charlie Brown skies.

There are real maple trees, with leaves that look like Air Canada! And flowers grow in the gardens that I have only seen in buckets at Spinneys or bouquets that sit on others' desks on Valentine's Day. There are birds twittering about the feeder that you've only seen on Animal Planet, houses you've seen in coffee table books, soil I've known in bags.

We went for a walk one evening, looking at gardens and houses. We were our parents and grandparents. The time and place are different but the spirit is the same.

There is luxury in this, holding a baby or a conversation. Lingering at the dinner table, just living our days together. Renewing ties, filling in the blanks. And like pages on a calendar, I cannot thread together a story. I see single scenes dissolving in and out, a music video or a slideshow. The remembered rhythm of a manageable space and evenings spent at home. The long-forgotten ringing of my feet on pavements meant for walking. Pugnacious shop fronts and neighbourhood grocers. The startling fact of neighbours dropping in to visit and congratulate – American people in an American world, behaving like they lived in tiny Ponnani. A long walk in the rain, drops ringing through heavy trees. The feel of an umbrella in my hand. Of doing nothing with others. The festive fragrance of a barbecue. The expectant chill of a drink while waiting for the Harry Potter party to begin. The uncomplicated joy of being here, now.

The contentment of these days wash through me so that I feel convalescent, like I am here at the end of a long and dangerous illness, out of danger now but tired and misty from battling it.

And when I leave, I am both healed and reft.

May our days be merry and bright

Pretty paper, ribbons, trees full of shiny things, lights, the smell of cinnamon and sugar, presents, parents, friends, food... it’s all very well to act post-modern and cynical, but the truth is that Christmas is fun, no matter how corny or commercial it gets.

Why is it only Christmas that does this? Yes, I did grow up in a small town with a sizeable churchgoing population. I have gone carol singing in December, with people I've known all my life, my breath rising in clouds before me as I sang Jingle Bells off-key. I know how good wine and cake taste in the cold. I’ve been to midnight mass in a small town church, where it always felt like Mary’s boy child was born just a few minutes earlier and the world was about to change for the better.

But I’m not Christian (and not particularly religious in any direction), nor have I lived in a predominantly Christian country. I have no warm-hearth childhood memories of sparkly trees, eggnog or chestnuts roasting on open fires. I’m not entirely sure what a chestnut is. I definitely haven’t known a working fireplace. The only snow I’ve seen is artificial, and that only last year. Nevertheless, all the Diwali lamps in the world cannot induce the aching combination of anticipation, nostalgia and glee that the words “white Christmas” evoke effortlessly.

Is it because it’s the only festival that’s celebrated in the only language that’s truly mine and the written word has always been more real to me than reality?

Or is it that I do have the memories? Not of chimneys and stockings, but of the spirit of it all. Life filled to the brim with brother, parents, dogs and a great many friends of all. Large-hearted dinner parties always full of familiar people. Equally large-hearted arguments to enliven it all. Cocooned in a peaceful suburb, a sense of security that’s absorbed into the bone, forever. Parents who were generous with laughter. Houses that were generous with space. Life that was generous with time. It was chaotic, crowded, noisy and fun. A lot like Christmas, in fact.

And may all our Christmases be white.

Planes, trains and automobiles

Writing a blog is like peeing outdoors in the dark. You know you’re doing it and it’s a (slightly nervous) relief, but you can’t see where it’s going or if anyone can see you doing it. It’s distinctly unsettling and if you didn’t really, really have to, you wouldn’t.

Long-distance bus rides long ago come to mind. Up mountains, down them, up them again, round and round the hell-born hairpin bends. When we finally stopped for a bit, the respite from nausea was overshadowed by needing to pee, and especially by knowing that it would have to be done behind a giant tyre in a place where trucks went to die. Of course it helped that there was usually a mother or an aunt to orchestrate this expedition. They never got it wrong.

In speeding trains, the shuddering, thundering loo seemed always to be on the point of wrenching itself away, but there was a door to keep out evil truck goblins. Unfortunately it also kept out mothers, fathers, aunts etc, so when you came out you might have found yourself marooned in an orphan cubicle, trundling along an empty track in bear country.

As for planes, if you were not maimed by one or the other silly device in the noisy can, there would be a hijacking while you were in there and you would have had the terrible burden of being the hero because you were the one who wasn't spotted.

Truck goblins and bears were upgraded to serial killers and creatures from The Descent, but hero-hood has since been recognised as optional, so progress has clearly been made.

My private world of Georgette Heyer

The battle rages in obscure corners and occasionally in the Amazon customer reviews.

Will Georgette Heyer finally be admitted into the hallowed ranks of “serious writers”? Or will she stay in the lace-edged, irrelevant world of historical romances? The world is not waiting with bated breath.

Those of us who already know are just deeply thankful for her mastery of her trade. Her books are a delight.

Mine tend to come fresh out of an Amazon carton or sometimes through strangers’ hands in a secondhand bookshop. But wherever they come from, they hold the reassuring smell of mothballs and Yardley lavender.

The Nonesuch is always the blue hardcover my mother read when she was young. Frederica is faded red, in the upstairs cupboard of a house in Ponnani. Arabella sits on a bookshelf in a sunny flat in Chennai. Beauvallet belongs to a frail old lady in a sturdy old house. The Grand Sophy is a severely restored volume that holds all the vast, weathered quiet of my college library. The ones on my bookshelf are merely manifestations.

For me, Georgette Heyer is forever mixed up with Lakme lipstick No. 53, Chanel No. 5, liquid foundation No. 3. Chiffon and cotton. Pearls and garnets. My mother, her mother, her aunts, my aunts. They’ve all read Georgette Heyer, almost as a rite of passage, but I think I’m the only one in my generation. That’s one more thing they shared that we don’t, my cousins and I.

Perhaps one day my niece will discover my books. If ever she has a private world of Georgette Heyer, I hope her aunt would have earned a place in it that’s at least half as kind. And the merest fraction as graceful.