Under the Mangalorean Sun

Mangalore looks like one giant fractal when seen from the skies. Each smaller fractal unraveling itself as we get closer to the runaway. It’s coconut trees as far as the eye can see, dried up river beds and mud roads that no one drives on.

---

The menu for the week ahead has been decided on Sunday evening. Monday, stingray and dal with bimbli. Tuesday, shark. Wednesday, squid. Thursday, mango curry. Friday, shrimp. Saturday, chorizo. Sunday, pork offal. 

---

Monday morning, I understand first-hand why the parents are wary of the BJP in Mangalore. At the grassroots, BJP hasn’t distanced itself from their communal agenda that’s exclusively biased towards the Hindu voter.

BJP’s local wing came around to distribute voter’s slips but ignored our house. Mom called out, “We vote as well!” The nextdoor teen who was part of this brigade came by later to hand over the slips. His macho BJP gang would rather not woo Christian voters. 

---

Monday evening, there’s a light breeze but the stickiness of the Mangalorean heat never leaves. A choir of young girls accompanied by an amateur violinist are practising for the upcoming Easter mass, the hymns dotted with the staccatos of a piano being tuned. The leaves rustle, it’s the two birds that have made their nest in the shrubbery of the orange trumpet flowers coming in at the end of a long day. The air is filled with the distinctive aroma of a Mangalorean Chicken Curry being cooked. It’s an overwhelming mix of chicken fat, coconut milk and bafat powder.

In this tiny little neighbourhood, It’s hard to not drown in the “archipelago of tongues.” The incessant chirping of the birds that visit Dad’s garden only adds to this cacophony of languages.

It’s a Catholic neighbourhood there’s Konkani everywhere. Konkani is the tongue of emotion. Of love, prayer, anger, disgust, indignation and outrageous gossip. In the early morning rush of kids running to school, in the lunchtime menus and recipes exchanged over fences, it’s the evening rosary that’s a funereal wail.

Kannada is for the underlings and the strangers who deserve politeness. I can hear the househelps’ Bagalkot Kannada meet the local dialect. It’s the sound of delays in the housework, of risky propositions - clothes being hung out to dry when the sky is overcast with rain bearing clouds. It’s also the neighbourhood gossip cloaked as conversation. The polite stories of those who don’t matter are heard in Kannada. These will soon be repeated in Konkani. 

Tulu is for the overlords, the powerful and the friends from the alley when you’ve thrown back a few drinks and confidence has made way for arrogance. In its street avatar, it’s taunting and mocking. My untrained ear associates it with drunk men on the road. It’s brawn and brusque. Perhaps that’s why it’s also the language of comedies on Mangalore TV, those that are so reminiscent of PTV in the early 90’s. Its rough edges can only be softened by the kori roti that Pallavi and her Mom discuss in their sweet lilting Tulu.  

Wednesday evening, I can feel the smoke stinging my eyes before I can smell it. The neighbourhood is burning incense to ward off mosquitos. The next evening, the priest will burn it during mass and then wave it in the general direction of the crowd. Who said the Catholic rituals aren’t paganistic in their origin and intent?

---

We planned to get to the polling booth at 7 am. A neighbour tells us there are long queues and these well-laid plans are promptly pushed out to a less humid hour. We make it to the booth at 10.10 am. In under seven minutes, we’ve voted, got our fingers inked and made our way back to the car. If only this efficiency wasn’t limited to the national elections…

We soon find ourselves at Big Bazaar which is giving away 10% discounts to anyone who turns up at the counter with an inked finger. Wonder how many went in to vote just so they could avail this offer.

For lunch, the mother has made mango curry. No guessing which party she voted for. The mango is sweet, the gravy thickened with ground urad dal. Are warm sickly sweet mangos to be eaten in peak summers? I know I’d prefer a cold glass of mango juice. I can’t say these things out aloud lest they offend Mom who’s relishing every last drop of that gravy.

Keeping with the tone of the debates (outrage! outrage!) on Times Now, the dinner-time conversation moves towards the controversial handouts. One Christian lady in the neighbourhood brings home 10 kgs of rice for Rs 100 from the ration store. She feeds it to her dogs. Somebody else is buying dal and rice from teachers at schools that serve mid-day meals. 

Local entrepreneurship at its worst, we’re at our outraged best. It’s been less than 10 hours since most of my family voted for the Congress.

All through the week I’ve been babysitting the grandmother. It’s an easy sell: The parents don’t have to be embarrassed by my absence at church. It’s replaced by a sense of pride, the grand-daughter is caring for the grandmother. They use the word “saakri” to describe the simple act of spending time with my grandparents.  Saakri elevates care-taking to the level of dharma and karma. It’s what disciplined people with a conscience do - it’s a good deed and penance rolled into one.

Grandpa had stories from the time of independence and I had stories about food, alcohol and travel. I prefer Grandmother’s stories to the sermons delivered by sanctimonious celibate men in church. Unlike my grandpa, she would rather not use her intelligence when deferring matters to God. But that’s ok. I enjoy her company - my time with her is peppered with coffee, loads of delicious Mangalorean food that my Mom doesn’t make and lessons in Kannada. 

By Sunday evening, I was impatient to get back to Bangalore and stuff my face with ghee cake from Cochin Bakery. It will be 3 months before I visit Mangalore again. By then it will be monsoon and the rains fix everything. Almost.

The Flower Sellers of Bhopal

Flower sellers at Peer Gate, Bhopal

Here florists do a lazy job of making jasmine garlands - they string them together using a needle. I remember my Grandma doing it differently with more finesse:  the flowers in bud stage placed diagonally and woven together. Here, this is what it is and this is how it shall be; the florist ignores us, chattering away on his Nokia and deftly piercing flower with needle and string.

The streets are unbelievably clean. People quietly sweep the streets gathering flowers, leaves in newspapers. I don’t see where they dump this waste, a vegetable seller with a cart brimming over with greens impatiently kept asking me to get out of his way. I am a clumsy ladki in places like these.

Remember Monsoon Wedding where Vijay Raaz chabaos a single sunshine yellow marigold? There are gendaphool garlands piled up everywhere. Weddings indeed look better in shades of orange, gold and marigold. 

Paranoid Android

This happened last evening: I’m standing outside office on the dark lonely but traffucked street that runs by Alliance Francaise, trying to hail an auto. I see a guy in a white maruti 800, yawning and at the same time, driving towards the pavement. Everyone has had a long day, I think to myself. 

Next minute I see the car next to me. There’s a bearded guy in a black tee waving frantically asking me to get in. WTF. My god, the guy’s grinning AND waving. *blink blink* WTF. It’s strange the ways your brains has all these thoughts buzzing around for that fraction of a second: I could get a lift till the signal. OMG, what am I thinking. That guy could be a rapist. Why is he so persistent.

Then it strikes me. That’s my friend, Nakul. Absolute horror to serendipity in 30 seconds. 

-

Standing on that stretch of the road always leaves me afraid, vulnerable and defensive. I don’t want to stand too close to the edge of the pavement while I’m hailing a rickshaw because I don’t want a guy on a bike to grab my boobs or mow me down while he attempts to beat the traffic by driving ON the pavement. I shouldn’t be distracted by my phone while I hold my bags close so that nobody has easy access to my body parts. And god forbid, somebody tries grabbing the phone while I’m busy ensuring I stay aloof and my body, defensible.

Nakul makes for a good anti-climax, a friend remarked.

Yup, that. I don’t like being on my guard all the time. I don’t want to think the worst of every man who passes by. It also makes me very angry- when these very real fears are dismissed as paranoia, the workings of an overactive imagination, when good intentions are almost always overshadowed by the what-if. On my worst days, I wish upon them nothing more than what I go through: why must I alone be full of fear, be up for grabs every time I’m out in public. Y'know, I just want to hail an auto-rickshaw and go home. Why must something as mundane as that be so hard, so agonizing?

A snapshot of a memory

I get a lot of flak for this picture and all the flak has everything to do with the camera in the picture. I want to get that camera out of the way: Yes, I own a DSLR. No, I’m not a Photographer. Peace?

A picture is worth a thousand words. Here are the first 32: You see me clutching a DSLR, you can’t help but notice the verdant surroundings, you may or may not notice the tiny droplets of rains on the window reflected in the mirror.

**

The details matter. Everything matters, in the end. The curve in the road, the rough patch on the tree bark, the colour of her hair under the Bangalore sun, the butterfly shades, the blue of the car- was it aquamarine? Was it turquoise? Was it peacock blue? It matters, all of it. Because we assemble our picture of reality from details. Our ideas about reality come from bits and pieces of experience. It is these experiences that we assemble together, forcefully fit together into something that has a consistent narrative - something to reinforce our belief in our reality. We tell stories to ourselves, and to others. These with the passage of time become memories. But memories? Memory is an elastic affair. We remember selectively, just as we perceive selectively. We have to dig through perceived, remembered and experienced events, in order to figure out what really happened and how we want to remember it, how we choose to remember it.

**

Here’s what you don’t know:

This was a picture I shot one weekend in October 2010. It may have been the second weekend or the third weekend, my memory fails me. Brm, K and I were driving to Coorg.

2010 was a year of heartbreaks. I had returned to India in July 2010. It was Sidkid’s birthday - September 19th - when Brm flew back to India, nursing a broken heart. K was rekindling forgotten friendships and finally allowing time to heal wounds that cut deep. Sidkid was dealing with a personal tragedy.

Remember when we were kids, how we would swoop down, rush in and pull a friend to her feet when she fell? Remember the urgency in the moment to help the friend out? When we didn’t debate and argue back and forth with ourselves if we were crossing lines, overstepping boundaries, bringing down fortresses.  October that year demanded just that kind of swooping down to pull our collective heaps off the floor. One weekend was spent digging into Creatine rich food in Bangalore, on another we drove to Pondicherry, and yet another we almost drove to Calicut.

But it was the weekend we drove to Coorg that I want to remember.

K was driving, I sat next to him demanding chai, Brm dozed off at the back. We were driving through a tiny village dotted with shops, goats and the occasional farmer hitching his lungi and walking the road that never seemed to end. It had started to drizzle and we stopped by a tiny tea shop with asbestos sheets for a roof.

There was something extraordinarily comforting about that moment: the promise of rain, the thought of chai and the warmth of friendship. And really, it takes more than just rain, chai, verdant surroundings and friends to create the rush of sensations that make us feel safe, calm, and cared for. There’s a complex interplay of memory, our own personal histories and quite a bit of brain chemistry, and while some basics apply the specifics are highly personal. For that moment and for now, those triggers of nostalgia will have to do.

**

The problem is that memory is endlessly colored by our imagination, perceptions and beliefs. If there is a story that we wish to believe, our perceptions will modify what we see to fit our beliefs. We don’t see things for what they are but as we are. We remember things incorrectly or differently, our memories change over time.

The brain creates, omits, confabulates, denies, accepts, suppresses, confuses and even distorts. We may think we see it all and know it all but through our biases - our perceptions - the brain may just be blind to what is actually going on around us. The perfect replica of reality as it is/was won’t exist in our brain and therefore in our memories there is no way to separate what appears as reality from reality itself. The brain is all we have.

**

We lose context when hurtling through the daily milieu of our quotidian lives. I needed a picture, this picture any picture as an anchor. What has been captured by this interplay of science and technology and light is the only thing that won’t change when everything else does.