A reusable cookie tin

It had been lying in my armoir for a few months now.  An empty tin of Honey-Oatmeal cookies sat nestled among things that are necessary, useful, unused, keepsakes, iPods, scarves, handbags, clutches et al.

On one of those several flights that we took last year, to Calcutta and back, the Giggle insisted that she was hungry and the ever-so-diligent mother had quickly bought her a tin of cookies from the trolley. It was an early evening flight, so the trolley was laden with potato wafers, tins of potato stickman, salted nuts and cookies. None of it was ‘food’. The cookies though had won my favour over rest of the junk.

The famished eleven year old had finished four of the six ‘cookies in the tin, leaving the last couple for the father, who she was leaving behind in Bombay, for the coming fortnight.

And after the rest was put to good use, I had kept the tin. For myself.

As a little girl, I always wondered about the old tin that used to emerge out of my grandfather’s mahogany armoire. The tin and what came out of it. It was a rather uninteresting looking old cigarette tin. There once used to be some pictures on it, some patches remained, as did a few letters of the brand. Strange that it had not rusted. Perhaps it was a keepsake, as a memory of days when my grandfather was a smoker. But I had always watched him pull out crisp, new bank notes from it. The notes, of various colours and sizes, fitted as snug as bugs in the tin. The lid closed and stopped a couple of millimeters short of bending the edges or crumpling them.

Mine is a pink cookie tin, bought off a trolley, on a flight to Calcutta. And I had to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps. For ever since I was a little girl, I had wanted to have a tin full of crispy, colourful notes of my own. So, since today morning, my tin has found a new purpose.

             

Now, will you tell me your cookie tin story?

 

Once upon a time in 1003, Hatat House

This is 1003, Hatat House, which was home to the family Ghosh, between 2003 and 2008, in a quaint little desert city, in the Middle East. I have lived five wonderful years of my life here and have loved this house for its high ceilings, large French windows, the sunrise every morning, the eastern sun streaming in through the windows and the fact that the Bee and I had painted this empty canvas in the colours we loved the most. Here is a tour of our home in the desert city with PreeOccupied , one of my favourite blogs by a wonderful friend called Pree.

Pree believes in sharing all that she sees as beautiful. An amazing photographer , a believer in anything and everything that is beautiful and colourful, she loves creating, be it  creating  a warm home or rustling up a storm at the dining table with her culinary skills.

Here are some more snapshots from 1003, Hatat House, for more go and visit Pree.

 

Lumos

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Probasinir pujo

Read this post on the special event page on PreeOccupied‘s Beyond the Five Days of  Durga Puja

Image courtsey : http://bit.ly/9OIeSv

The golden sun is back in the azure sky,  casting longer shadows before disappearing on the horizon earlier than usual and the listless fleet of clouds lazily floats around, empty of their carriage. My window has a visitor every afternoon, who comes to play with my curtains and the wind chime and flirts with the nippy wind, a dragonfly. I find myself in Sharat again in my exile, in Pawrobas, in another’s land, waiting with bated breath for those five magical golden days of Anandamoyee‘s descent upon mother Earth, among us Bengali mortals.

Watching the long rays of the sun casting a spell upon the dragonfly, a desire arises to return to the golden afternoons of yore, when I would, in my careless days of girlhood, find joy in the pages of the new Pujabarshiki, a collection of novels, stories, poems by the leading literati of Bengal, published about a month ahead of the festival.

Those would be in the days that preceded the days marked in red on the calender as the days of Durga Pujo. In between drowning in and surfacing from the Pujabarshiki, I would flit between rooms, touching the softness of my grandma’s Gawrod, admire yards of my mother’s swishing tussar, swoon over her crisp Tants and Dhakais, try on her new slippers and yearn to grow into them, smell her new perfumes, try on her new nail paint. All this while two neat piles of crisp, new clothes and two Pandora’s boxes awaited to be handed out to us, my sister and I, on the morning of Shashti. Those boxes would remain a well kept secret till then. And when we did open them in all our girlhood eagerness, out would tumble things that the two little girls wished and prayed for, to transform into grown-ups for those five magical days.

The hneshel, or the family kitchen would be a buzzing bee-hive, my grandmother would already be filling up her korir boyam or ceramic jars of all shapes and sizes with various forms of delicacies – gawja, , kucho nimki, labanga latika, dalmut, pnaraki and sandeshes of various flavours and designs, for all those who would visit us during the festive days with or without a reason. A month had already gone in the ritual of exchanging Ruli, sindoor and alta among the much married womenfolk. The drum rolls on the dhak would start in the little hearts already when my grandfather would spend the Shashthi morning counting crisp new notes of small denomination and set them aside, with my grandma, to be handed over to the his brigade of grand children of all shapes and sizes.

But a score and a few years later, the known boundaries had suddenly changed into the unknown, the accepted norms and rituals had become distant as I found myself in another’s land, in pawrobas. That year, on a fine Sharat morning, there I was with tears streaming down my cheeks, sitting amidst a pile of photographs, some coloured, some black and white, full of smiling faces, stolen moments, frozen loving glances from the life that had gone by Festivity was once again in the air and the sun was sharp and golden in the heart of the Bong ghetto in the South of Delhi.

It was Shashthi, on that day of Sharat in 1998 and a pot of  Shiuli was in full bloom in Roy Mashima’s balcony next door. It was Durga Pujo in the Bong ghetto, in Chittaranjan Park but it was business as usual for the rest of the city. This Bangalini, in her Pawrobas was yearning for home. It was my first Durga Puja away from Kolkata and away from my loved ones and it seemed as if the world had come to an end. To make things a little more difficult the Bee had left for a short trip the previous evening with a promise to return on Saptami. A box had arrived by courier that morning, neatly wrapped in brown paper which lay unopened, my new silks, tussars and dhakais lay strewn on the bed, crying for my attention and DD2 Bangla blared away with a live telecast of Kolkata Durga Puja Porikroma.

And then as if to answer my prayer, the telephone rang and my mother’s soft voice asked me, “Have you received the brown paper box as yet?” Realisation dawned and a long conversation later I happily returned to the unopened Pandora’s box, revisiting the wonders of my girlhood again. And among all things womanly and festive lay the edition of that year’s Pujabarshiki.

The Bee too decided to return an evening earlier, just to surprise the grief-stricken Probasini and to make her Pujo with him a memorable one, in Pawrobas.

 

Oh, for a question mark….

Me and my dainty right paw! And the cup tilted slightly. And almost in slow motion a couple of drops of the amber liquid jiggled at the edge, couldn’t steady themselves and took the plunge. Down rolled the largish drops by the side of my beautiful blue porcelain and “splash”

And all this while I could hear the right brain (or was it the left…) instruct the right paw “move to the right and grab that cup,  move it out-of-the-way, uff, cover the keys, cover the keys, DO SOMETHING!”

But you know how it is with dumb right paws, they tend to go to sleep the moment they are taken off the hook or if the mind has happened to stray and wander into Twitter.

And the keys, the four arrows, were left slightly wet because the steaming amber fluid had decided to roll off them and seek cover from me under them. And then to add to my woes, they found some circuitous way to paralyze the “z” and the Fn key. Oh, wait the backslash wasn’t working either.

So here I am, still trying to fathom how to go about my daily dose of clickety clack on my keyboard thus rendered defunct. Then the brain wave struck me. And they were two “dirty” words, at least I considered them thus so far,  that lodged themselves in my mind as the only option left,  “copy” and “paste”.

Yes, and if you are still wondering how I managed to type this “z” – how else “?”

 

Strange love : On the Agastya trail…

Agastya’s envy had then blurted out, he wished he had been Anglo-Indian, that he had Keith or Alan for a name, that he spoke English with their accent. – English August, Upamanyu Chatterjee.

In my first year of college, on a wintry evening I fell in love with  Agastya August Sen, a snob and a dopey stuck among the primitives of  Madna. August, who “spoke, thought and respired”  in English.  August who had to survive, no matter what. August, a lover of jazz and who read Marcus Aurelius. And ever since that day, ever since I was 17, I  kept looking for him in crowded buses, in metro stations, in Nandan, in Rabindra Sadan, at Rotaract meets, at the university campus – in a Kolkata bustling with people but none like August.

No, I was not obsessed, I walked into it with my eyes open. I knew he was a storybook character. But he was the closest I had come to a suitable boy who believed in being unapologetic about his love for the Queen’s language and being uncompromising  for what he loved. That was where  my love story started and ended. With my ‘perfectionist’ core , I too wanted to sound like a native of the tongue I acquired, just like August. And my Bong crux yearned the glory of a well spoken, well read,  well bred and all the other kinds of “well” ness (of  Bangla) that a well brought up Bengali should be. Besides that, I too, in many  ways, had started to feel  trapped, living life among a well fed, ‘fair of skin’, pedigreed tribe – who flourished by weighing and selling  gold and silver by the gms. This was my Madna,  in the heart of a city caught in yore, among a confluence of  baniyas, mostly from the western part of the country, converged along the central artery of the city over the last century, lost in  a milieu who refused to   perfect the art of their mother tongue, leave alone the Queen’s tongue.

You see  my parents’  foresight had put us, my sister and me, through the rigours of “English medium convent education”. And I suppose it must have been there where the arranged marriage happened, between the love for the languages and me.  The prolonged presence of the  two languages, English and Bengali, made them a crucial part of my life. Hours of Wren and Martin, verse after verse penned by Shelley, Keats, Byron,   pages of Shakespeare, Shaw, Maugham; and then attending Ms Gomes’ classes on the nuances of Bangla byakaran, bisheshwa, bisheshan, kriya, sarbanaam, sandhi, samas, krit pratyay, taddhit pratyay, reading  and appreciating Bonophool, Moumachhi, Satyendranath, Rabindranath, Saratchandra, Bankimchandra – phew! So by the end of it all,  the lack of  linguistic perfection in a person left something incomplete for me. And at times it even denied me the simpler pleasures of teenage and youth.

At 15 ,  I received my first love letter, from a ‘eligible in all respect’ boy from the English medium missionary school down the road from mine. But even with stars in my eyes I halted my reverie midway – three grammatical errors and five spelling mistakes! I know, I will sound like my fifth grade English teacher here, but can’t help it!  Mrs. Mandel would always say, “the search of perfection begins with detecting imperfection” and I may have had taken it too seriously. Ahem, you think so too?

All through college and university Agastya had the last laugh. A crush coupled with a few skipped heartbeats would inevitably be followed by a not so pleasant dawning of realisation that I was very much rooted in Madna. Love would quickly be replaced by the axiom  that my search for linguistic perfection was actually a wild goose chase as none would pass my “litmus” test in speaking,  writing or even thinking in  proper, grammatically correct forms of the languages they inherited or acquired.

The news syndication, was where my lofty pride of “walking, talking and breathing” English met the first reality check. I realized even I made grammatical errors, misspelt words and to quote my erstwhile editor, I was at times “a disaster”. In other words, lofty me was humbled. My Editor-in-chief  ran every piece of edit through her washer and dryer before it could be put to bed. Reducing beautifully crafted articles into shreds, at times with a pair of shears, was her forte and my nemesis. But the company of the enlightened veteran also ratified my belief that I was not paranoid, that  my Madna was real and Agastya was right.

Finally, a serendipitous  meeting and a couple of paeans of love later, I married a Brit  by birth Bee who also happened to be a pedigreed Bangali, but by accident.  He had been the only beacon of hope after my unrealistic love story with Agastya. The Bee was flesh and blood, had a commendable command over English and the same unapologetic fervour for the tongue (excuse me, his mother tongue, being born there and all that) so I lost no time in saying ‘yes’ to him. His Bengali was nothing to write home about, and here I made an exception, lest I thought I’d die a cantankerous spinster and also because I was sure it would correct itself under my supervision.

But …

To be continued …..

 

I dreamed a dream….

 

I dreamed a dream in time gone by when hope was high and life worth living – Les Miserables

It was a dream. It was one of those dreams that puts the ever so restive soul to rest, a dream that gives a sense of roots to an ever searching soul, a dream that promises rain to the parched soul and a direction to the lost soul forever in search of its self.

Have you ever picked up a glass marble and held it up against the sun? Have you watched the colours of the marble then drip through your fingers, roll down your hand and scatter like drops of rainbow around your feet? My dream was just like that. Like a  green marble dripping the golden sunlight and then bursting into drops of translucent rainbow at my feet.

Last time I remember dreaming such a dream was in my childhood, on a summer evening  in a house buslting with people, as I sat in the balcony watching the evening darken into night. The cool summer breeze grazed through my hair, a heady wisp of  jasmine  lifted from the neatly woven strands precisely coiled into a heap on a  platter to allure the sleepy neighbourhood and half of a crescent moon hung in the sky. And I thought the dream would never end, that times would never change, that I would never depart and all would continue to be the way it was.  

But dreams are after all to be woken up from, and that happened when I grew up. The adult  understood that it was but a dream.

My prevailing dream had the same tranquil air. As if my weary soul had found the oasis it desired, as if my vagrant gypsy mind had found a home, my yearning for calm had found mooring in a placid harbour, as if a  friend had reached out to catch my tears and replace them with laughter.

 It was the same languorous evening slowly melting into the night, a soothing wind caressed my face as it swirled upwards from the rain soaked grass, a night bird flew past my window soulfully calling out to its mate and everything enticed me to linger a while longer. And every time I wanted to depart it became more real asking me to relent, urging me to stay and imploring me to believe that it would never end.

And then I woke up. It was time for the dream to pass. The rain it brought was to change into a dry, scorching day; the friend it promised was to become a stranger again; the chaos that I had lost for a moment was to return; the soul was again to became the nomad in the desert.

 

Confessions of a wired mind…

The strolley standing in the dim foyer was packed and ready for the next 4 days. The Nokia sat on the centre table with its new Matrix sim-card, the sticky ‘post it’ with a note of the flight details and the hotel numbers hung on the refrigerator door. The Bee’s Blackberry came alive with the chauffeur details of his cab. And soon after a peck on the cheek and a bear hug later the Bee disappeared into the mi-conic lift, on his way down to the waiting car.

I made the usual big mug of coffee and made my way to the lounge chair. The little red book awaited me on the corner table,  a book where I scribbled down chores that needed my attention in my leisure. It held a list of books to catch up on, a list of  ‘must watch DVDs’ and all that. I ran through the list absent mindedly, while my mind was busy putting together another list. There were some significant others that had started to distract me of late, somethings that I thought kept me in touch with the time, in touch with myself.

There in my camera’s memory chip were pictures from several social dos and images of our weekend frolics that needed to be uploaded, tagged and posted on Facebook and Flickr.  The mobile camera went where the camera didn’t and captured on the spur of the moment slices of life  – they made for great candid camera moments to be shared on Facebook. Sassy snippets waited in my Twitter ‘favourites’ inbox to be ‘tweeted’ and to become status updates on Facebook. My Linked-in contact list required a spring cleaning, as did those on Facebook and Twitter. That reminded me of the interesting links I needed to link on my Facebook and Twitter profiles.  And then there were those who shied away from social networks, and I liked to keep in touch with them on the mail. So a number of birthday greetings, travel plans and general keep in touch ‘feel good’ forwards waited for my attention in my mailbox. Of course, I almost forgot about the post that waited to be published on my blog’s dashboard. Silly me! And my R had handed me a list of tracks to be downloaded on to the iPod. I was getting forgetful, I chuckled to myself.

Of late, I  had secretly come to love the ‘social networking Diva’ tag a friend of mine generously bestowed on me and I wanted to make good use of the following days to retain the position, I told myself! My reflection on the mirror didn’t interest me anymore as much as my profile picture.

Thus elated by my current disposition, I made my way to the  den, where my sojourn awaited me. The room, being at the back of the house had a tranquil air. The palm by the window swayed in the gentle breeze. The armchair sat merrily with the floor cushion at its feet. The books lined the bookshelf in neat rows. Everything was in order, just the way I liked it. The table – wait! Was I dreaming? There was something amiss!

There was a void, a numbness was gripping me, my vision was blurring. But even in that disoriented state, through the blur all I saw was a gaping, empty spot. The space between the printer and the scanner, where the laptop usually sat snug as a bug on a rug, was empty! Everything else was in order – upto the umbilical chord of the broadband modem, lying listlessly, detached from the computer.

A quick rewind to yesterday,  to a brief conversation over dinner between the Bee and me.  I painfully recollected a mention of a presentation the Bee was to make to an august company at an international seminar on the necessity of listening posts in the current recession hit corporate world. It brought me back to real time and I remembered blowing a kiss at the Toshiba, cushy in it’s leather bag, slung over the Bee’s shoulder as he disappeared into the mi-conic lift.

 

My Kind of Girl

I remember starting to read a book a long time ago, Moner moto Meye by Buddhadab Bose. I also remember abandoning it midway. Pining about unrequited love, hopelessly brooding about “love is somewhere else, in the distance, even if maybe it’s only a wish for love, only imagination – not real” – all that had not made any sense then, when I was all of 19.

Recently I read the same book in English, My Kind of Girl, translated into English by Arunava Sinha. I picked it up from where I had left it at 19. Now I discovered the picture painted in those pages, the poetry hidden in the prose. Buddhadeb Bose’s “moner moto meye” (loosely meaning a girl to my heart) remained “moner moto” – a beautiful picture, most often out of reach, a memory of youth, a memory of the brush with love for the first time, rekindled in the minds of four Benagali babus spending a wintry night together in a railway waiting room, suddenly stirred  out of the abyss of their middle aged mind by a newly wed couple who “stood there for just a few moments, said something softly before they turned and left”.  And “that seemed to blow a breath of warm air through the wintry waiting room” and they embarked on a journey of sharing their stories. The stories shared over steaming cups of coffee revolved around  each of their “Kind of Girl”  and why they  all “wanted to see her for one time as a real person”.

The language was simple, only at rare occasions with a small twist or a quick turn of phrase which made the experience real, the image real, making the book un-putdownable. I could almost read the Bengali phrase hidden in the English words. I visited Paltan in 1927, I sat and watched Makhanlal’s father clean out a big platter of food accompanied by several bowls of delicacies and then “embracing … bolsters in readiness for … sleep” – images that are typically Bengali but sincerely rendered in English.

“Is the memory of happiness that has passed, happy or sad?”

It spoke to me, I felt the thrill of love, and I felt the pain, the hopeless hope, the fear to accept love and then regretting it, rejection in love and the bravado in the face of it. It was alive with  images of middle class Bengali life in the middle of the 20^th century, the restrictive norms of rights and wrongs passed on to  the younger generations so that they too stuck to their middle ground and chose the easy over the right.

The book also had it’s light, breezy moments when the fickle female heart found respite in the obvious, the regular, the ordinary – or whimsically soared, being the object of affection of three not so urban males only to be swept off her feet by someone “Fair of skin, dressed in a dhoti and kurta made with a fine material, he turned your heart into a flying bird with a subtle fragrance if you went near him.”

I do not regret not reading the book back then, when I was 19. It may not have spoken to me the way it did now and I may not have listened to it with rapt attention as I did now.

 

Of suburban dreams and a birthday…..

The road crosses the intersection and slopes down towards the sleepier part of the suburb, leaving behind the rushing traffic, the departmental store, the new apartments and the quaint restaurant at the corner with a breakfast menu. Yesterday we, the Bee and me, sat by the french window of the restaurant dreaming our usual dream of “higher aspirations” over tall cups of  “Long Americana” and breakfast, higher floors, higher purposes, higher goals et all.

It was shortly after the ‘rush to reach town’ had ebbed, so the intersection was quieter. The broad, empty stretches of the sidewalk, the sleepy suburb slowly waking up to the day, the rainwashed trees starting to glisten in the sun stealing in through the chinks of the sparse clouds…. I wanted that moment to stand still forever, wanted to go on sipping the fresh coffee forever, wanted to sit with the Bee and go on dreaming forever, wanted to just sit at that table by the window and stare  outside forever. It was the morning of my day and I wanted to soak in all that was around me and delay the day from ending quickly.

The reverie was halted abruptly, a call was buzzing silently for me on my phone. I could have ignored the phone, but not this call.

“Feels like yesterday, when you were looking at me with those new eyes as I held you for the first time and here I’m wishing you on your birthday again!” effused the most familiar voice of my life, my Ma. “Happy Birthday!”

The same day in the afternoon I walked down another road of the same suburb leading to another intersection. This intersection at this time of the day remained chaotic. As I waited among the milieu of mothers, fathers, grandparents, drivers, maids of all shapes and sizes waiting for the children to run out, a soft tug at my hand made me turn. She stood there  with an angelic smile lighting up her eyes. There lay on her little outstretched hand a birthday card, made with pages torn from her exercise book, with red and pink hearts, a tiny poem and “Dear Mumpa, happy birthday!” written in it.

The evening brought a drizzle, a cake with a single candle, a group of friends, a bundle of wishes and a much delayed ending to the day.