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.

Sheep's clothing

There's a new version of Asterix and the Normans. This one's based on the movie and includes some new characters and situations. On the one hand, it's a good to know there's a new Asterix out there, if only a renovated one. On the other hand, it might be a terrible tampering of a brilliant original. There's only one way to find out of course, but the last time I bought an untried "new" Asterix, it traumatised me for ages.

A zed by any name would spell as sweet

The work was right, the timing was right, the location was right, the money was alright. The job was exactly what I’d been looking for. I could have done it standing on my head and they would have known it too, when they saw my portfolio. I mailed them my CV, it was rejected almost instantly.

Apparently I had all the qualifications except one: no history of travel to the US, nor a valid multiple-entry visa. For a writing job based in Bangalore. I’ve got used to not qualifying for certain jobs in Dubai based on the colour of my passport, but not qualifying in my hometown for similar reasons was quite a shock. Maybe I should have sued, got them used to that!

But on calmer reflection, perhaps it wasn’t the perfect job. I’d have had to unlearn most spellings and start again. And build up a whole new vocabulary of homely phrases and pointless mutations. In a world where sympathise supposably takes a zee instead of an s, irregardless of my own feelings, I would need to line up all my ducks very carefully if I didn’t want to look like being two vowels short of a sentence.

I wonder if professional writers in other languages have to watch out for words that change character as they cross oceans. My thanksgiving this year will be for having grown up in a country whose English wanders nonchalantly back and forth across the Atlantic. The country seems to have changed a bit lately, but it's the illusions I recall.

I don’t know what the point of this post is. Anger breeds incoherence.

The summer's putting up quite a fight...

... and the dust from the battle is very pretty.

Photo courtesy: Tehzeeb on a Nokia N91 and rather early to work.

Revised photo courtesy: Somebody Tehzeeb knows who was in a helicopter. She knows interesting people.

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.

Secret diaries I write
Hoping someone will secretly read
And find out that I’m secretly
Someone more interesting than I

Those far away places, with strange sounding names

It’s that time of the year again. It starts small. There’s a poster in the window of the travel agent you pass every day on the way to work. Then a photograph of a wood as your screen saver. One morning, a sudden flashback of a landscape you may have seen through a train window sometime. Your shower starts to sound like a waterfall. Maps start to become 3D. Suddenly, the internet is buzzing with anticipation, the emails are full of plans, the travel sites are full of advice.

The travelling world seems to be divided between Lonely Planet enthusiasts and Everyone Else. What inspires this “love it or hate it, but you can’t ignore it” reaction? The price? I used to be one of those who took the price as a personal insult to my ancestors, descendants, hometown and myself, until I had to plan a budget holiday in Scandinavia. After exhaustively researching Norway on the Internet and exhaustingly sifting through folklore for a month, I began to see why a Lonely Planet is worth its weight in gold.

But browsing through a row of Lonely Planets in a bookshop is as bad as looking at an atlas. You change your mind every 30 seconds. It could be Rotterdam or anywhere, Liverpool or Rome, cause Rotterdam is anywhere, anywhere but here.

Bus No. 402

Public transport drivers have to answer questions all the time. “Does this go to Al Khoz?” (Yes, fool, that’s what it says on the front.) “Is this the Crowne Plaza stop?” (Do you see the Crowne Plaza anywhere?). It usually never gets more complicated than “Why did that bus go by without stopping?”, and very rarely goes beyond the realm of timetables and driving. Unless you’re the driver of the bus that goes to the airport.

The driver of Bus No. 402 is a flight information centre, confessional, nanny, behavioural scientist, expert on the vagaries of the Dubai Airport Random Rule Making Committee and a linguist who knows the slang for these vagaries in the streetspeak of at least seven communities. He also has monumental patience and a fair amount of clairvoyance.

One anxious passenger is meeting someone at gate 16 but doesn’t know which one that is. I wonder how he has his gate number before checking in, but it emerges that the pillars outside the airport are called gates by a certain section of the airport-going populace, and have unwritten numbers. Another man wants to know if his flight is on time and he wants to know this every ten minutes. A woman confides that it’s her first trip home as an expat and worries about her excess baggage. The driver says: “The flight’s not crowded, you won’t have to pay.”

A sunburnt tourist finds he has no local currency left for bus tickets. The driver pretends he can pay in foreign coins and issues a ticket anyway. I want to know how to get to Arrivals from Departure and he gives me minute directions. He clairvoyantly knows that the minuter, the better.

His attitude is actually reflective of Dubai’s general kindness towards people with luggage. Anybody on the way to the airport is every one of us. I think that’s why personnel in the Gulf airports seem more human than most others. They smile when they greet you, they listen when you talk, they act like they want to help. (So it’s quite a shock when you land wherever it is that you’re going or when you get on the plane, depending on the airline.)

The certainty of that last trip to Terminal 1 binds the woman in the Cayenne to the boys in the hard hats in the non-air-conditioned bus next to her at the traffic light. They will, one day, leave the labour camps behind, just as surely as she will the tax-free Porsche. Perhaps that's when the field is finally levelled.

It was forty-five minutes to the airport.

Nothing moves.