parotechnics

You wait for the rain, sweat running down every crevice, corner, surface; humidity sitting like a hippo in the air between you and the wall. Then it rains and there's mud in and filth in every corner, crevice, surface of your body and the world. The auto wala says to me, arre baarish,maidam, na aaye tho tadpaye, aaye tho sataaye. But I love it. I love the sheeted light, the unchanging silver grey day, the kids looking like flowered humpbacks with their big bags under their raincoats. The day causes no anxiety, no requirement to react to changing temperature and signs of time. Coffee at 6:45. A window to watch trees, water, birds from. That voluptuous monsoon feeling. Makes you forget for a minute that the clothes which have turned your bedroom into a deeply unglamorous dhobi ghat haven't dried for three days.

Spent just two days in London and there was a certain sweet decadence to it, a certain freedom. Visits to other cities are always touched with a sense of the dutiful and the utilitarian. But the fact that I'd been to London several times before freed me. I was there for a thingie at the Tate Modern and they'd put us up in a hotel close by. I never really left the environs - just sat around by the river, walked around the exhibits, just let the time go by and the light slide on. There was just one afternoon when we had to go to lunch at the Italian embassy. I took my friend Ruchir along and he duly photographed the food, giving me a holiday from my normally self embarrassing behaviour. I should add that this was completely his own craziness, not mine imposed on him. Husseyn, one of the artists from Istanbul, who owns some very fly shoes, and various flamboyant T-shirts and loves to drink as much as Ruchir, got along famously with him, although he kept calling him Richie. From no...

First time going into town after being away for four months. I get off the train and cross the road and this is what I see. I nearly screamed. Yes, my thoughts exactly - what the eff? Is it all a bad dream? Well, thanks to the internet, you can go back and find an explanation for at least some of life's mean tricks - well maybe not explanation, but someone to blame, which is better. http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1100566 So typical - of course we'd like some public art and of course one girl's goose is another girl's gander or whatever - but why should what we get have to be so ridiculous, so ham handed? It doesn't matter if it's the government or the Indian Merchant's Chamber they seem bent on preventing people from being surrounded by any thing of beauty. Bole tho.. kuchh bhi.

In the MOMA store in New York in the kids section I found a little toy. . It's one of those prismatic thingies that help you to take cabaret style pictures-the kind which indicate the villain has drunk too much and now his lust has multiplied to 6 Bindus instead of 1. Bring it on babay! Anyway the look on everyone's faces when they see it is the same as the villains': delight, anticipation, covetousness and mental math and geometry and whatever else, at the possibilities.. Look what it can do.. It caused Nandini to peer at it in delight Witness, my friend Sanjay My friend Me But best of all, my cutie Imran, Samina's son, who has lately learned to whistle and does so like he's practising for an audition of some 1970s Bollywood orchestra. However this picture did not have a happy ending. Imran took such a shine to the object that he wanted to keep it and tried to clutch it, hide it behind his back, pretend to play with it for a long time in the hope that I'd forge...

Delhi summers have an inescapable quality. They make the kharbooza, tarbuz, aadu, aalu bukhara, dasehri,langda, litchi, cherry fruits plump up and glow orange, yellow, red, like the little suns. But the heat is intense, encompassing, draining energy and protest. Surrender is the only response - laying down your arms and lying down on your ass the only option. For this reason, once I got to Delhi I was fat with inertia, wanting to wallow in the cool waters of home, the curtain dark afternoons reading comics and murder mysteries, the hum of coolers and ACs, the bed made by someone else, the special food for the visiting badi didi. Summer temperatures and feudal ease are a deadly combo, I admit. Meena, my mum's cook, stood in the kitchen's heat as the morning grew hotter, slow cooking meat pulao on my last day there. But finally she laid down her arms and her ass and embraced the cool floor and the open door. My surrender was less wholesome. Samina and I went for pedicures one day...

Back in very hot Delhi, I feel lethargic, lazy and loutish. I have to be lured out by various means - well only one means works really and that's decadence. So I readily agree when Swati suggests we meet for boozy long drawn out lunch at Mainland China, despite my suspicion that she has chosen Mainland because it is owned by Bengaalees. When I get there I see that Imperial Garden which once stood next door has shut down because their lease expired - now just an inscrutable Chinese sign over a bricked up entrance of a building being re-organised. I felt sort of sad looking at it. I always hate it when the old gives way to the new and all that other zen stuff... We are the first to arrive and more or less the last to go at Mainland China so it's a good thing we were paying customers. After her first capiroshka Swati felt despondent (or maybe drunk) and also like going to the loo. She returned with a shawl much to my amazement. Swati has been known to do several outlandish things ...

It was my last day in New York and it was crazily hot - full preparation for returning to the Indian summer. Of course I had a gazillion last minute things to do, including some mailouts at the post office. So I walked to the post office in the sweltering heat, dripping sweat and period blood, stood in a long line while Americans did the nice thing and chit chatted with the postal workers instead of just getting on with it. A woman in front of me was reading the New York Times and started a sort-of-conversation with me. The kind where she's addressing the world, but I am the only one smiling politely in response. She complained about the Republicans and George Bush, quite loudly. Her tone veered dangerously between political indignation and post office line rage. Then she started complaining even more loudly about a) there being only two windows operating when a while ago there were four b) people taking too long at the windows instead of just getting on with it. ("She's ...

That is New York. Word...No Doubt.. as Riley Escobar would say.

On Mother's Day, Saadia, who I bonded with on the basis of same taste in clothes and similar shopping mania, Tulin - Maria's Turkish friend who is a famous style consultant in Istanbul and has columns with glam pics alongside and also features on Turkish Page 3s - Nur (Tulin's aristocratic aunt) and I went to Harlem for a gospel brunch in Harlem. But since the sound engineer had an accident or something, we barely got to hear any gospel! We had to be content with southern fried chicken. A little mimosa drinking made the lack of music bearable. When the sound engineer arrived he did not look like he'd been in an accident so we gave him beady looks but he kept acting busy and ignored our collective glares. So we had to be content with Tulin's fantastic eyelid and hair trick in the entertainment department. Later we walked around Harlem, and took in the sights. I must say I generally agreed with the Harlem Point of View as expressed by Puppy.(please check out legend u...

Went to see my friends Krishna and Gisele in Toronto mid-May. It must be the first time in a decade or more that I went somewhere to simply meet my friends. Of late life has always taken me to a place where there were friends, but the reason for being there was always work. It must be that way for most people now - because folks kept asking what had brought me to Toronto and they'd always be a bit surprised that it was just to see friend. It's a liberating thing to just be seeing friends. And so nice to see them in their homes, to see how the colour of a wall has changed, go with them to their favourite shop or Chinese restaurant, just be part of that texture and know them more fully as them, not only in relation to yourself. And a lovely thing to know you've known each other for years - Krishna and I became friends when I used to work for Anand so that's really prehistoric times: 15 years now, and Gisele and I have been friends for over 10. Clancy, Gisele's cat was...

My friends Maria and David have adopted the most sunny tempered, lovely girl called Rose. She's a feisty little thing, talking talking talking walking walking walking carrying a purse, pushing a stroller, wearing her "we're not in Kansas anymore" glittering red shoes, or her payals from the Indian masi, insisting that her brother John's turn on the TV - "it's a-over". She's figured out how to change stations on the radio and dance little lady dance. Irresistable... Meanwhile John has his own trick even when he's not wearing his Superman costume - staring at the TV without blinking even once, I am sure of it. Rose, as Supergirl is an avid apprentice of her big brother though and getting their fast.