Down at the Red Rose Cafe

Except this one's not down by the harbour in Amsterdam. It's in Schipol airport. And they've left off the Red Rose part and settled for Amsterdam Cafe. But it looks and feels exactly like the one in the song. It's hard to believe that it's inside an airport.

For the record, the date is 12th July, 2007. The time is 6 am or thereabouts. (I don't usually wear a watch, so no reason why I should do it now when it involves listening intently to garbled stewardess announcements about local time, one hand poised tensely over the screw to change my time and getting it wrong anyway. Airports have clocks.)

I can't believe that I'm actually in Amsterdam. You'd think believing that would require a leap of faith anyway, considering that all I'm in is another airport. But this airport has a vibe that can almost be called character. People seem relaxed, as if they were here by choice and not because an airline dumped them here at an ungodly hour to suit someone else's convenience.

I'm relaxed too. The famous Schipol Airport, stuff of myth and legend, giant hub of the travelling world, seems surprisingly small and manageable. Or I had dramatised and exaggerated the putative dangers as usual.

I'm the shortest person here, except for some eight-year-olds. Not all, just some. I'm also the fattest person here - America had better make up for this. The Dutch are a good-looking people. They're also an easygoing people.

There are no gas chambers here - only the Dutch would create a smoking section that's an open, comfortable space. In Dubai Airport, the smokers are losers. Here, they're shiny, happy types.

Watching people come and go, I noticed another interesting difference. Sitting in Dubai Airport, you notice - with envy - what people are wearing or carrying. Here, you cannot remember the details of what anybody's wearing, but I notice - with envy - how well they're wearing it. I just correctly identified some passengers as being Turkish and am feeling vaguely pleased at this sign of cosmopolitanship. You can also tell who's waiting to connect to a transatlantic flight by the way they light their cigarettes. They use matches. It's useless to bother with lighters only to give it up at this end and go hunting for another at the other end.

Also, how do people fall so easily into conversation with strangers? A pleasant hello is all that I'm willing to contribute. I find I've gravitated towards the only other Indian here. Now we're sitting at neighbouring tables and ignoring each other, while saying good morning to everyone else. In my defense, I did look at him but he ignored me first. He's wearing a t-shirt that says some Association of Umpires. Maybe he's famous in the cricketing world and ticked off at not being recognised. Anyway the Dutch guy on the other side is much better looking.

I suppose I should take out the camera I just bought and learn how to use it. I still have three hours to go.

The crack of dawn

It’s five in the morning, the end of June. Burdubai is not as silent as one would like, but construction crews, mercifully, are not at work. The lights at the KFC across the road have only just gone out. The sky is lightening already. I am startled to see several lit windows in the other blocks of flats. Then I remember that the school buses arrive terribly early here. Mothers must be at work on lunch boxes (breakfast boxes?), and fathers, on getting the poor sufferers out of their beds. There’s an Emirates car parked in front of my building – someone’s flying Business Class somewhere. Farther down the service road, a man lugs a giant suitcase to the kerb and stares at the parking meter as if it were a taxi genie.

A taxi pulls up and spills a lot of shiny people. Their night has clearly been hedonistic. The suitcase guy is very fortunate for someone who’s stupid enough to wait on a back road for a taxi at dawn. Maybe it is a taxi genie. I’ll try it later this morning.

At some point in the last 5 minutes, the night became morning. The wind feels suddenly cool on my face, so different from the fevered breath that it was last night when it tore my bougainvillea blooms to shreds. I suddenly smell – with a rush of pride – fresh jasmine, flowering on my own plant. It's a scent that belongs to another time and place, someone else's gentle morning routine. I touch the leaves and they’re clammy from the humidity. The coffee from my new French press tastes good. I don’t know if I should be drinking coffee before exercising, but who cares. I see a paper boy on his bicycle turn into the street. I hear the clear tones of somebody’s wind chime, then Leonard Cohen starts to sing about a famous blue raincoat. It’s five-fifteen and my trusty Linn hasn’t forgotten my wake-up call.

By the time I’ve laced up my shoes and am ready to leave, it’s bright daylight and cars are backed up at the red light. Who’d have guessed there was a secret peak hour before six?

What’s the difference between a writer and a woman writer?

Why are they still saying things like “woman president”, “woman CEO”, “women bankers”? Why not just president, CEO, banker – the job being more important than the gender? Victory, defeat, success, failure, achievement, ambition, job satisfaction are all gender-neutral concepts.

Consider all the "fall-out" journalism surrounding the recent French elections. The news channels gushed about a possible female president. One of my local papers ran a torch-bearing, anthem-singing comparison of the female contenders for the various presidencies. Are they all relieved now that France will be led by a man after all? Who knows?

Get over it media morons. “Feminism” as a term is practically archaic. Maybe by the time the US elections come around, they would have finally moved on to the next level – to judging people as people.

Timid Frieda, who will lead her?

The writer’s going for 50,000 words at least, the copywriter is programmed to autoedit after 100. The writer wants to tell a story, the copywriter wants to know about marketability, feasibility, liability and who the target audience is. The writer knows that it takes as long as it takes, the copywriter sets impossible deadlines and worries about them. The writer wants to write a novel, the copywriter wants to write the blurb.

Between them, they’re ruining my book. And as if they were not bad enough, I now have the horrible fate of Kavya Viswanathan knocking on my window at night.

I had a momentous flash of insight yesterday, almost an epiphany – one of the reasons my book reads like shit is that I’m “channelling” whatever I’m reading. So, not only does the style drift from chapter to chapter like a homeless person, so does the plot. Worse, I can’t tell if I’m just borrowing styles or whole sentences.

John Grisham has nothing in common with Wodehouse, Sophie Kinsella is not exactly Georgette Heyer and Naipaul is emphatically different from Rushdie, but they mingle freely in my work, with the indiscriminate camaraderie exhibited on the shelves of Dubai’s bookshops.

If I have to finish my damned book, I will have to stop reading for a year. Or, at least, it will have to be restricted to certain kinds of non-fiction. I especially have to ditch my oldest and dearest friends – authors that I have read and re-read for years. I hope it’s only for a while.

Timid Frieda, Jacques Brel

Holy Cow

Just finished reading Holy Cow by Sarah Something or the other. There’s much to be caustic about, but I won’t, for the following reasons:
1. I’ve decided to dial down the causticity generally for fear of turning into a malevolent old bat, instead of a sweet old lady
2. On the whole, I enjoyed the book
3. It’s the first India book I’ve read that actually goes to my very own Whitefield, and that forgives it much
4. It is – in my limited field of erudition – the most entertaining catalogue of India’s religions

So I would say: read it – after all, it is about one person’s opinions based on one person’s experiences, so you can’t really argue or judge, just absorb.

Though you’d think an ex-journalist would think twice before going the old caricature route to – oops, caustic comment nearly got through. Out, damned bat!

Blog branching out

Someone recently dismissed my blog as self-indulgent. I was very pissed off until I realised that it is. And that that's what it's there for. So that was alright in the end and I'm still friends with the critic (on a "more to be pitied than censured" basis).

But it got me thinking and I decided to bring some focus to bear. So my prattlings have been divided (quite neatly, if I may say so) into three distinct blogs. The links to the other two appear here, lest anybody miss a single drop of self indulgence.

Railroad lady, a little bit shady...

My heart is warm with the friends I make,
And better friends I'll not be knowing,
Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take,
No matter where it's going.

As the poet says, the conflict between wanting to spend time with loved ones and wanting to set out on the open road – or railroad, in this case – is unresolvable.

Travelling 6000 miles to meet precious people and then taking two days to travel from one to another seems like a wanton waste of time. But then, flying over it seems like a wanton waste of the Rockies. The Rockies and the loved ones tied in first place, my office lost and my holiday got extended by two days.

I’m going to look for America for the first time and I don’t think America’s in the airports. So I’m travelling across the country by rail. I still don’t know if I’ll get a visa, my ticket out of here is yet to be bought, but I know exactly where I’m going to sleep on that train.

In between buying my Amtrak ticket, I scrolled in indulgent amusement through various sites with rail travel tips that nobody who’s grown up in India needs. I suddenly stumbled on two things that brought me up short. One was a caution about walking long distances to get to your coach. The second was someone’s funny account of running desperately for an open door, any open door, as the train started to move.

The butterflies exploded in my stomach and I watched helplessly as the hard won adulthood disappeared as if it never was, at the thought of doing that on my own. The painful surge of adrenaline as the train pulls in, the dreadful urgency of that brief, chaotic time, the panic of not knowing how long two minutes actually is, the certainty that you’re going to drop something important – like your ticket – in the gap. (It never happened. The ticket would have had to crawl out of a zipper and tear through solid leather to do that.)

My cursor paused on the last part of the booking process as the doubts got out of control. No brothers to ensure that I get to the station well in time. No fathers who know which part of the station to go to. Planes are easy, I thought. I’ve always flown on my own. Airports are specifically designed for idiots…

So I looked at pictures of the train to put off making the decision. With each picture, the adulthood receded even further, as more forgotten feelings returned.

The excitement of seeing the engine far ahead when the railroad curves. That distant whistle that makes you want to follow wherever it leads. The sensation of gliding through air when you go over a railway bridge. The weird echo when you go over a mountain that you don’t so much hear, as sense. The fairytale quality that a landscape has when you see it through a train window. Two children bouncing along the side of a goods train, on either side of their father, learning why trains can’t brake like cars, catching his own enthusiasm.

I knew what “coupling”, “siding”, “broad gauge” and “metre gauge” meant almost before I could say the words. I used to know what the different types of whistles stood for (well, mostly I just knew that they stood for different things). I’ve ridden in the cab of a diesel engine – and being in the cockpit of an aircraft is equally exciting, but they don’t let you toot the horn.

I’ve balanced on a suitcase, eyes straining past restraining arms for the first sight of the engine as it entered the station – always a giant iron genie who had in its gift places I couldn’t imagine and things I was too young to know.

I will be in Union Station, Chicago, Illinois, at 1:00 pm on the 10th of July. I may be a little late. I will probably be standing in the wrong place. I will certainly have my usual few seconds of panic. But I will board the California Zephyr anyway, because I always do. I’m going to collect my gift.

Also published on Whistlestop by Amtrak

How many cooks?

Once upon a time, my friend used to do restaurant reviews and I got free meals in some really nice places.

The meals were ordered and eaten incognito. But after paying the bill we usually threw off our disguises and revealed ourselves with a merry ha-ha, because we needed to interview the chef.

We loved the chefs, each one uniquely gifted and equally cuckoo. We called them serial killers in awe and affection. Well, I’ve just finished Kitchen Confidential and I realise they are.

Some of them were geniuses. Some, sublime. A few were copywriters who could cook. I remember a particularly unsatisfactory pasta, preceded by a spectacularly disappointing appetiser. The chef’s “philosophy” on this one sounded like back-of-pack copy on fancy flavoured tea. You know the stuff tastes like dirty rainwater because you’ve tried it before, but the copy is so full of promise, you try it again – because perhaps last time you were just not sophisticated enough to understand. It’s still rainwater. Or you’re still unsophisticated. It all comes to the same thing in the end.

Kitchen Confidential also turned out to be an unexpected instruction manual that came just in time. It tells you all you need to know but were afraid to ask about leadership of a psycho team working in high-stress conditions.

Now that I've finally been told how to manage my “line cooks”, we'll all live happily ever after.

The road is calling - again

In 10 days it will be eight years since I left home.

It seems like last month that I landed at Seeb International Airport in the middle of the night, enthusiastic and curious. Looking back, my blitheness looks like extreme ditziness: my flight was eight hours late, I had just 30 rials to my name and not one address or phone number, not even my employer’s. I think I just assumed I would be met because I’d never not been met in my life. Sure enough, I was met – a little late – by my boss and his girlfriend. (I remember thinking in the car that there were problems between them. As we now know, they had just picked up another one.)

But it also feels like eras have passed. The world turned, so much happened and I’m somebody else entirely now.

Well, a little bit anyway. I can still see myself arriving somewhere unprepared, Shanghai perhaps, with 200 yuan to my name and not a word of Mandarin, enthusiastic and curious, smoking a leisurely cigarette in the nearest coffee shop, miming “carrot cake” to the waitress, instead of “Yellow Pages”.

I wish I was.

Scarlet ribbons

It all good, they imply, there’s an easy way out (or in, depending on your point of view). Whenever you’re ready, they say. Just say the word and the genie will appear bearing fairy tales. The genie goes by several names in many languages, but the basic story is the same: register, leave it to the deus ex machina and live happily ever after.

But there’s an invisible stair in this easy three-step guide, an innocuous little box you have to tick to signify that you have read and accepted the fine print. You lie and tick it anyway.

Here be the fine print:

Create a carefully worded profile. Tell some friends and family (maybe subconsciously hoping somebody will stop you, but they will only tell you success stories – because everyone knows one, including yourself). Get a million responses. Put your life on hold while you sift through them. Feel more and more confused and pressured as the responses increase and your time/sense of control decrease.

Lose some sleep over any email “relationship” you start. Lose even more wondering whether the word “relationship” can appropriately be applied to the situation. Obsess over each word, phrase and punctuation mark in the said situation/relationship. Lose all sense of proportion. Abandon all normalcy in your dealings with fellow human beings.

Struggle against a growing sense of injustice and self pity. Try to ignore the creeping sense of ignominy. Get used to living with the echoes of your previous strong (and highly perceptive) protests against this sort of thing.

Start to dread your email. Greet long meetings with relief because the greedy genie cannot reach you there. Spend the greater part of these meetings thinking “Why me?”. Take revenge on the friends and family by passing on the responsibility of making judgements for you.

Fight the knowledge that any loneliness you may have felt before was probably an illusion, because now you’re really alone. Outside, in the dark, when it’s raining, quite abandoned by the responsible adult who was supposed to be in charge of you – yourself.

Did I mention that you have to pay the genie for this privilege? Perhaps you go insane in the effort to cope and so finally find peace in an institution where you’re denied access to a computer. That would be worth the money.