November travels...

Were in the US - in the cold midwest, in autumnal New York, staying with my friends Anu and Arvind and New Jersey, staying with my friend Maria who has moved from New York to live on the banks of a river (traitor!).



It was a swift trip, a screening tour. And once you've been in a place very often, you don't connect to your surroundings as much as before - the changing of planes, trains and buses, the blur of screenings and Q and A.. it's just to the people who are now the map of that place, old friends and new friends..(and the new shoes of course, not pictured here, because now it's getting embarrassing).


A new friend I made was Deepti - hats off to her (not literally, since I love mine - in fact I lost it while in Champaign and we went back to look for it 6 hours later and they'd kept it for us!) - for being the main driving force behind organising some of the screenings.

But also she and her friends entertained me in style, with a delicious dinner and the most perfectly made bed in a room with yellow walls.

We did have an unresolved argument though - what is the design on the cheese - a flower (their view)? Or a pair of eggplants (my view)?


By the way, eat your heart out girls.. this is the loo in Oberlin College - the girls' loo! Made me feel I was showing the wrong film there! Made me feel we should have been shooting a Marlene Dietrich style item number instead..





Also while I was there, I met my friend Sabrina's new baby Matteo Su. Matteo is one of those funky feminist kids who carries his mother's surnames. His parents read him a book, in which there is a rhyme that goes
"why oh why, my little suimai
do i love you so much?"

Isn't that cute?! And here are the little suimai and his not so little Indian masi, snuggling up in the New York cold, dancing cheek to cheek.


Meanwhile it was Divali when I got to Maria's. John, her son, goes to a Quaker school and they're rather multi culti there so he'd learned all about Diwali at school and was rather excited about it (especially the sweets). So there was a Divali party, although, as a first for me, it was celebrated with cake. And don't miss the eager little white fingers clutching the table in impatient wait on either side...