Ye ghar bahut haseen hai…

Have spent the last three weeks converting a bachelor pad into a home. Here’s a list of things you need to do, fellow geek-marrying women, if you venture into this exercise:

1. Find out how much the boy earned last month. Spend half of that sum on brooms, mops, cleaning liquids, cleaning solids, cleaning gases.
2. Open his clothes cupboard and pick every alternate shirt/t-shirt. Spilt them at the sides. These are your cleaning rags.
3. Wear a plastic bag over your hair, and scrub, swoosh, wash, rinse, mop etc.

Ok. None of this will make an iota of visible difference, except the net weight of the house will be 5 kilos lower. So move to phase 2.

1. Get furniture. At this stage, the boy might show symptoms of angina, stroke, or the flu. Ignore and Persist. Smart women will have had “the talk” about furniture well in advance, and when this stage comes, the boy will be a resigned-and-even-hyperenthusiastic partner in the shopping crime!
2. Begin with a cupboard for your clothes. Yes, so you brought three bags (one very small) of clothes. Add a dash of “you should have married a typical woman and then you’d know” in case the protest over this issue crosses 3-decibel muttering. Set up your cupboard and you’ll have your revenge when you catch the hero preening in front of the long mirror on the cupboard!
3. Get some cool storage space for his geeky stuff. This makes him enthu on shopping trips and shows him that he needs more shelf space for his CDs than you for your clothes. Remember, guilt is good!
4. Rip the archaic strings that hold up the prehistoric curtains. This will make him worry about the safety of the house that the landlord has left in his care. Don’t stop to wonder why dirty curtains are ok with him, but half suspended curtains aren’t. He will summon the landlord to stop the crazy wife, and the landlord will appear not only with a gift, but encouragement to change curtains, and will offer plumber and electrician help, which is much needed.

Simultaneously, or later, you can set up a kitchen. Here are the steps:

1. Throw away everything on the shelves currently. Save the pet jars and wash them and dry them.
2. Get a fridge. Ignore eye-rolling. He thinks one can live without a fridge. But then he also thinks one does not need three suitcases (one very small) of clothes. So get a fridge.
3. Get a gas connection. Setting it up makes him feel important and useful. Also the click of the lighter is a big event.
4. Get utensils. Be ready to field questions like “aren’t the ones we have already enough?” “what are you gonna use THIS for?” “so many?”… By now he will realize that resistance is futile and will silently hold the bag in a corner while you whip up a frenzy at Big Bazaar.
5. Get grocery. At this stage, he’ll be happy just being allowed to write out each individual item in his expenses sheet separately, instead of “home stuff” or “grocery” as you’d have put it.

Keep up the scrubbing and mopping everyday for at least three weeks, With any luck, you’ll be halfway through at the end of that duration. Here’s the rest.

1. Get curtains. Put them up. By now the boy is totally tuned into what’s happening and picks up a matching bedcover in the shop!
2. Home cooked food, and a cleaner floor, should have become incentives by now for boy to love the house that no longer looks or feels like his. Your moment of triumph will be when he brings in a friend to see the place, even before he has your permission (not clean enough yet, what will they think of me)

And then one day when you come from work and turn the key in the doorknob and hastily enter before the neighbor lady strikes up a conversation, you’ll see not a Ramsay Brothers film location, but a home. And hopefully a beaming boy at the clean dining table waiting with chai/for chai.

P.S.: The boy previewed this and said he fell for it all only because he wanted to. Ten extra points to you if you can hoodwink yours into believing that!!!

Crawling Back Into Blogging

Just settling into married life, with its blissful moments like when you wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of a savagely overfeasted rumbling tummy and realize it ain’t (just) yours, or when someone murmurs the most romantic words ever into your ears: “Let’s go buy a gas stove”
Back to work and trying to salvage a hint of normalcy in a world turned upside down…So long, and thanks for all the mithai….



Pic by the matchmaker himself…. What could be better!

Pigeon Post From London

Just pic abhi. Words after hunnnymoon...

Threshold

So I’m 12 hours away from metamorphosis: from Inky-Ji to InkyG. And no smart ones today….just butterflies in my tummy, nose-wiping into my mummy, and a humble request for the blessings and best wises of all who still visit this neglected abode of mine!

See you on the other side of tomorrow!

Geek Inviting Other Geeks For Wedding

"Hey, I’m getting married to Inkspill, and here’s the card… I made the card in Adobe Photoshop, and I used a Microsoft product for the header! Expression Graphic Designer, and I imported it in Photoshop! Yeah we got them printed… no we planned solid colors but the printing shop guy’s printer’s configuration (and here I believe it takes off into a language other than English), so there’s this cool gradient that’s come up on its own… and cut and we got envelopes and stuck that “Om” tile on it…I’ll send you the e-card also! It looks a little different on the LCD screen!"

Dear Geek Bhais who got the above-mentioned cards, if you're reading this, don't forget the MAIN message...please come to the shaadi and bless the happy couple. The verse invitation below is not applicable to you...

Pappu Pass Ho Gaya!

Got good tidings from London today. I passed my course. Now I have an MA and an MSc. Now thinking of getting an MCom and then an MBA. Is there anything I’m missing out?

LSR aur LSE ke baad ab? LSD?

Mere Yaar Ki Shaadi Hai!

Thirty days to go. And here’s the wedding card we would have printed if we had our way:

Dear XYZ/Respected XYZ,

We are soon getting married, but do not get excited.
We like to keep things simple, so you’re not invited.
We saw you at a wedding kicking up a fuss
And we are not having the same done to us
You will “misread the route” and come hours late
And we’ll just wish you had misread the date
You will dress up all fine, and land up at the venue
And criticize the décor, the music and the menu
You will eat till the floor under your feet is shaken
And then clamber onstage and have your picture taken
You will get us a gift that we will never use
So you are not coming. Pliss to excuse!
Our parents, perhaps, if they love you a little more
Will have a box of laddoos delivered at your door.

Regards
Bride and Groom

Har Ghadi Badal Rahi Hai...

Ghar ki har ghadi alag waqt bataati hai
Aur kyun nahin?
Waqt kahan sab ke liye ek sa hota hai bhala?

Padhai ke kamre mein din raat baraabar hain
Amma ke kamre mein ek ghanta tez, mere mein ek ghanta dheemi,
Ghadiyon ke hisaab se to hum sabhi sahi waqt par uth lete hain na!
Daftar ke kamre mein hamesha zara tez, bahut kaam hai bhai

Aur rasoi mein?
Wahan to waqt hai beti ki shaadi ka.

Koi ghadi shayad standard time se milti bhi ho,
Par zyadaatar ne apne standard khud banaa liye hain

Sanjay

Surely he must curse
His boon as he sings
Of the deaths of sons
Before crippled kings

Paparazzi

Amma bhi Razzi.
Looking for Kazzi…
(Sorry!)

Am expecting to spend my life tagging along behind photographers in Lal Bagh. The one on the right is B, who owns the humongous lens that the boy on the left covets…

Taken with the boy’s camera, and therefore not accepting full blame for bad picture quality. That camera does not like me on either side of itself!

Yellow Pages

A unique kind of cleaning project is on at home these days. I’m clearing out stuff that I have collected over the years as a kid, a young girl, a not-so-young girl and as an almost elderly woman. These relics, some precious and some trash, need to be examined and kept or thrown away, since I am about to leave the babul ka ghonsla et al…

Mom has already collected all that stuff in a bright blue travel bag ( I’ve been away so long that the charm of bidaai is almost gone) for me to go through. So I’m suddenly faced with years of memories neatly piled up. Yellowing paper to keep or throw as I desire.

First up was a certificate from school saying that I used to study there and that “I bear a good moral character.” This flimsy evidence is essential and sufficient for getting admitted to Delhi University. So I’ve folded and saved my yellowing good character and kept it safely among childhood report cards and hospital documents from when baby Inky was born with the loosies and all else normal…( Was I a loose character at birth then?)

Various bits of prose and poetry written on scraps, printed on A4 sheets, scribbled and doodles in various classrooms down the long road of my formal education…mock prayers in Sanskrit between sheets of chemistry equations (to be learnt, not deduced, and therefore unloved) a ten page essay on the evils of illiteracy in India (very cocksure and pedantic, written at 14 I think) and pages torn from newspapers and magazines where I had the honour of being published…what am I supposed to do with all these except read them, smile or cringe, and throw most of them away? I don’t feel a shred of remorse when disposing of these childish scrawls, not because I think I’m much cooler now, but because documentary evidence seems so redundant when proving to myself that I have always been a freak! To be fair, I have saved some specimens, for mom to beam over till the fragile paper disintegrates into the dust of oblivion and stupidity.

Then there are certificates, for everything from having overcome my neo-natal loosies to having aced exams. They look quite impressive, though, so I’ll keep them in case I need to floor educators or employers at some stage, they’ll need to know about my academic excellence and peristaltic control…

There are class notes from advertising school, which I’m keeping for the time being. That was my first stint away from home, and is an interesting anthropological study. There are also letters I wrote home and letters mom wrote to me (so far back in the Stone Ages, that she actually wrote “It is so nice that we have telephones and can talk once in a while”) Mom and I were reading each other’s letters last night and realized we hadn’t changed as people at all, despite technological advances such as cheap internet, cellphones, and medication for genetic insanity.

I also have autograph books from school “you are shakespear” and college “you have the cutest smile muah” and ad school “maaaaaa!”. I’ve kept these diaries which inevitably say “keep in touch” but I’ve thrown away phone directories with these people’s names and numbers….not only are they in different places, but they’re no longer relevant to me…

I’ll leave behind a much lighter blue bag when I go. Heavy hearts and light bags make for good bidaais, don’t you agree? :-)

P.S. Forgot to add that I have ten thousand attested copies of all the documents needed to apply for a higher education. Keeping them. You never know... :P

Pack Maadi

Ok. Almost time to go back home to Dilli. About a month in Bengaluru draws to a close. A month of steaming idlis and piping hot sambhar eaten in various “sagars” and “gardens” in a rush to get to office in more than eager autorickshaws on less than meager roads. A month of office lunches and the too-cold office with the too-hot language flying about…. A month of “Aishwariya ka naya version de na!” and “Sachin ki diary kahan hai?”

A month of long walks to dinner places which more than make up for the calories consumed over the meal….A month of strange languages and familiar smells, a lot of laundry, a lot of fun, and, for some reason, a lot of Bryan Adams’ “Please Forgive Me” (Bengaluru is a uniquely apologetic city: this song plays EVERYWHERE)…. A month of quick and smart wedding shopping (mangalsutra: 30 minutes. Wedding sari: fifteen minutes. Groom’s monkey suit: 15 minutes) and slow and lazy coffee and book browsing sessions…

Delhi has family. And roads. And right now, some good weather and fun melas. Reasons enough to go back: but not for long, eh?

Arrey! London is also ex-home: and to the girlie walking in Mayfair with that angry and dejected face... “aa jao ya bulaa lo”…

Highly recommended read of the day

Grrr!

I am verrrrrrrrrrrry angry. I could crack a few skulls.

But hey, I saw this sign outside a doctor's office today: "Health is the remedy for Happiness"
Maybe more of us should fall ill.

Debris

Rantypants! Rantypants! What do you say?
Nothing, O Nothing, I threw my pen away
Rantypants! Rantypants! Why don’t you blog?
My ink is all dry, and my mind is a fog

Don is bad. Dor is good. Delhi weather is good. Bangalore weather is good. Delhi airport is good. Bangalore airport is bad. Kingfisher is good. Jet is ok. Delhi sweets are good. Bangalore sweets are ok. Finance is ok. Fiance is good. Bas.

And oh, I have not replied to a single Diwali wish I got by email or sms. Just don’t feel like doing it.

Inkyji

That is all he sees. No wonder...

Spill

Had a long and terrifying nightmare about an egg-shaped tumor in my head, and a heartless doctor telling me I had a one percent chance of living if I let her drill a y-shaped bore in my skull and destroy the tumor, after which I’d have to spend 90 days in the hospital. All I wanted was a hand to hold, and that is not a luxury that people who live alone have; even in their dreams.

Ok. Too much sadness. Now for grossness. I woke up from the dream with a faint but familiar bad odour assaulting my nose. I tried to turn over, but the bed…under…my…bum…was…wet.

Ok. I decided not to panic. Maybe I had wet my bed. If people can have heart attacks because of dreams, bed-wetting is minor. Who am I kidding! Eeeeyaargh….I had wet my bed!!!!! I NEVER wet my bed as a baby! And now???

I moved my leg and the whole sheet was wet! Holy Moly! Surely one cannot pee that much and not know!!!! Or can one??? Omigod…I decided to go to a kidney doc and a brain doc as soon as I got up!

Grossed out, I sat up in bed. When I did that, I could not believe what I saw.

The whole room was swimming in two inches of water. The end of my sheet lay there dipped in the room-soup.

Only a dinosaur can have that kind of bladder! I was elated! I had not wet my bed! Capillary action had!

The roof was not leaking. The bathroom taps were firmly turned off. I sloshed out of the room and followed a thin trail of water…which was coming from the guest house kitchen, where a pile of dishes were blocking the sink, into which a tap was silently peeing.

Bleaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

I woke up the attendants. (Good thing I was too tired to change last night). Between the two of them, they shut the unshuttable sink tap. Then I helped them get the water out of my room (left alone, they were unlikely to finish before the polar ice caps melted, and then they’d have to begin all over again…sheesh! I made a global warming joke…very bad). Armed with buckets, mops, and dust pans (for scooping water!), we removed SEVEN big buckets of water from my room in about an hour.

So hey, if you plan to dream about someone boring holes in your head, check the kitchen taps, and wear a diaper or something…

Krrrrrrrr KrrKrrKrr

Nothing. Just needed a scratching post.

Slice-Of-Life

..Or, “Did that whole previous phase ever really happen?”

The boy took me out for a fancy lunch last weekend. Dessert was ice cream with some Goan specialty called “bibinca”. He assured me it was a million times better than apple pie (which is a big compliment, and even I’ve not been called better than apple pie yet). So coming back to bibinca, it’s apparently made of bread (see comments for details, and google before shooting your mouth off on your blog), and it was basically thin strips of bread-y stuff hesistantly sticking together. One strike of my hungry spoon sent them flying in different directions, their bonds with each other turning out to be not much more than the fact that they were together in being called bibinca, and would not be called so otherwise.

And that’s how it feels with my life right now…there’s so little that holds together London and Bangalore, SE1 and BTM, Regent’s Park and Lal Bagh, Foucault and Sachin Tendulkar…except they’re part of the bibinca called Inky…oye! ……Bibinka!!!!

TeeVee!

Have been lying around every evening watching TV, “connecting with my audience” as part of my after-work training-cum-entertainment programme. Must say the activity is much more fun that I remembered it to be. There is a lot to be said about the molten feeling of peeping through sleepy eyelids at the inane TV programme and then having just that bit of wakingness left in you that is needed to switch off the TV (first, unsuccessfully with the cellphone and then successfully with the remote control) and sink into deep sleep.

P.S. The astonishing number of hair oil and banian ads on TV seems surreal. There’s this whole parallel universe where people keep soiling their banians with the excessive oil dripping from their heads.

Unrelated: Am planning office uniform for myself: Oversized kurta (increasingly difficult to procure), contrast churidar, mismatched dupatta, Bata flat sandals, laptop bag (side/back) cellphone and badge maala, flowers in hair and silver earrings. Not bad, eh?

Bangalore 101

1. Idlis have the magical property of disappearing from your tummy an hour after you have eaten them. Two idlis do not a breakfast make. Supplement with something.

2. The speed of walking on the rugged terrain of the main road pavement is considerably enhanced by wearing flat shoes instead of heals, so factor this in if you are planning to avoid being the first one in office (loser!)

3. Apparently, if you want to wear jasmine in your hair in the morning, you need to buy it the night before, when people are actually selling it, and not in the morning, when your best shot is yanking some off the head of a lady running to catch a bus.

4. Paying five extra bucks for breakfast to have it sitting down is not a bad deal, since no enthu kid comes and wipes the drop of sambhar off your table seven nanoseconds after you spill it, making you feel guilty for existing. Also, you catch interesting conversation, and do not look odd as the only woman in a herd of men having stand-up breakfast.

5. All the food is vegetarian and cheap. 25 pence each for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Awesome!

6. The autorickshaws are not half as mean as the Delhi ones, and it is quite appropriate to stick your tongue out at Bangaloreans who claim that they have terrible traffic jams each morning. They should try being in a vehicle on the Strand, or on Waterloo Bridge!