Nuzhat and Khattu See The World

We were on our way to the airport for that flight back to Muscat. I was in my 20s, a young woman who had been numb for a few years, weakened from the onslaught of womanhood, a shadow of the unrestrained child I used to be, somehow always in a haze, always elegant and struggling to conceal the rest.

The clunky taxi, smelling like petrol and grease like everything else in industrial Lucknow, made a chaotic stop by a dusty gali. My brother, mother and I got out and met a gaunt dusty man at the entrance. Pigs, an unusual sight in the part of Lucknow I knew, snorted and squealed at what I learned was the entrance of the Muslim cemetery. My heart contracted with the indignity – didn’t this bother anyone else? Maybe the world was too tired by now. I didn’t let anyone know. No one would want to hear me.

The caretaker led us through what looked like a large field, dusty and barren with pebbles and stones scattered throughout. Suddenly we stopped, and someone pointed to the ground in front of me. Nuzhat Bua. She lay buried under where I stood. I wouldn’t even have known if the caretaker hadn’t told me. There was some sort of makeshift marker, a piece of wood or stone half sunk in the grass as if left by an ancient child on the grave of a beloved pet long forgotten. My feet tingled, my heart contracted – shouldn’t I not be standing on top of her? I didn’t want to hurt her, even though I knew I couldn’t.

I said nothing. We said a quick prayer. The caretaker hurriedly pointed to a similar spot on the ground where my grandmother, who had died many years earlier, was buried.

We were soon back in the taxi, and my story continued while Nuzhat Bua’s and her mother’s lay at the bottom of the pig-ridden cemetery in some odd corner of Lucknow that I have never visited since and wouldn’t know how to find again.

Many years later, when I had wrestled with womanhood and flung it to the ground, I would think of Nuzhat Bua again and again. She supposedly wasn’t very well-liked. Some people credited her sharp tongue with her never being married. I was too young to understand, but she was the only adult who ever made sense to me. I’ve heard the same things about me too as an adult, although the times are changing and such women are praised.

The last time I saw her, she was championing my journey to America. I don’t remember our last words, but I hadn’t thought that they would be our last. She hadn’t either. She had recently started travelling for leisure – Muscat, Jaipur, and Hong Kong – and was beginning to discover a friend and accomplice in me, a teenager perched on the precipice of childhood, the country of adults and the rest of my life within sight. We had plans to travel together, my functioning as her English-speaking companion as she took me around the world. I couldn't wait. Neither could she. It was so exciting.

Nuzhat Bua would die in six months, and I never saw her again except very suddenly years later at that cemetery where she still lies, possibly some of her genes part of my body as I move forward in life and see the world we were supposed to discover together. Since then I have seen many things. The Grand Canyon, Hollywood, the White House, Native American reservations, and the Ku Klux Klan. I have even been to Jaipur, straining my eyes to catch Nuzhat Bua still amongst the mass of humanity that is Anywhere, India. But I only see her in dreams, always telling her, “you shouldn’t be here, you are supposed to be dead.” I wonder when those dreams will stop and what it all means.

How To Bloom

My dear potted plant,

I love you. I bought you for cheap at WalMart a few weeks ago, but I loved you before then. I loved you when I was transplanting you into your new pot and packing fresh new soil around your naked roots in your new home, the patio of my apartment. I didn't hurt you when I did that, did I? When I had yanked you by your stems out of the broken little plastic cup you had come in, your roots looked so frightened, like a shivering little kitten that had got wet in the rain. You had looked so settled in the cup you had come in, decrepit as it was, but I knew you needed more space to grow. It must've startled you, having no soil to hold on to for a while. It must've taken your roots time to grasp your new soil and get used to the new watering schedule. Could you feel my love when I patted you down with rich, new soil in your new pot? I love you. All I want is for you to grow, for you to be happy. What else is there?

I know what it feels like to be uprooted. I know what it's like to have to transplant yourself time and time again. Maybe you were like me, a young sapling that had never known the soil its parent tree had come from. Maybe you were always the exotic plant whose foreign name no one could pronounce, the plant that no one knew what to do with. Maybe you won't take to your native soil again the way those who were never uprooted do. But that's okay. One can only be where one is, one place at a time. The best you can really do is give yourself some time to get used to your new home. I can promise you that one day your roots will grip your new soil and that your stems will rise crisp and fresh again. There is no shame in adapting to your new environment, and you will flourish if you let yourself just be where you are. It doesn't matter if people can't pronounce your name - they will come to you themselves when they see how comfortable you are in your own pot.

Your mother in all seasons.

The Blog Test

Last year, I was offered the position of Online Content Editor at a leading daily newspaper in Muscat, Oman. As part of the interview, I had to write (amongst other things) two blogposts each for four articles that had been picked for me from the newspaper. The articles were about the high rate of accidents caused by local cab drivers, an all-female Omani sailing team, the Indian economy, and the disappearing coppersmiths of Pakistan.


Horror Stories from the Middle East
Growing up in Oman meant that stories of ghastly car accidents and the people who died in them were as part of your growing up experience as first lipsticks and first shaves. Maybe you remember them too. I once heard about young international school students – recently graduated seniors – who were drag-racing a few hours before their graduation ceremony. They died. Maybe you also remember the young Indian School Muscat boys who died somewhere along the Qurum highway when their car spun out of control and crashed into a pole? Their car caught on fire, and they weren’t able to get out because their legs were trapped under their collapsed dashboard. All the big papers in Oman carried pictures of their charred bodies still strapped to their seats on their front pages, and they quickly had to apologise for them in the public backlash that followed. I remember I saw that picture in the newspaper an hour before I took my first driving lesson. It had frightened me. My own brother was left paralysed from the chest down after his car fell down a hill on the way to Nizwa. What a way to grow up, hunh?

The Misunderstood Tarmac Monsters of Oman

Orange-and-white honestly scares most regular drivers in Oman even more than the dark-red-and-white of the nervous beginning drivers. Orange and white are the colours of the taxis here. I have been driving in Oman for almost 10 years, and I’ve driven extensively in America and Canada even, but I have noticed how I always seem to keep my car a little bit of a distance away if I can spy an Omani taxi with my own eyes or in any of the mirrors in my car. It’s become a subconscious thing even, like how the puny kid in school learns to make way for the school bully. Turns out though that bullies are often misunderstood and only need to be tackled head-on. Not a recommendation for the road though, but maybe these taxi drivers are not to be feared after all. Maybe they just need to be heard. Maybe they drive too much, maybe they don’t earn enough which is why they have to drive so much. Over 60% of the traffic offences in Oman are caused by taxi drivers. Why? Maybe it is time to really look into the lives of these people and see what is going wrong.

Trailblazers This Side of Arabia

What my family remembers from when they first moved to Oman in the late 70s is wide expanses of dust. A few buildings here and there but really just dust. I grew up not really interacting with any Omanis personally. I had an Omani family as a neighbor for a few years, but I could never really play with their kids beyond head shakes and crude kiddie sign language. It’s just how things were. The only other Omanis most expats ever really interacted with were the men minding the stores and the officers at the airports. People like that. Which is why I feel a funny sense of pride every time I now run into young Omani women working the hypermarket counters, and we can smile and even joke in our own English/Hindi/Arabic mix. My father never fails to remark at how proud he feels whenever he sees young Omani girls so confidently working everywhere he goes. At the shops in the malls, at government offices, even in his own office. The women of Oman are becoming global citizens. They take pride in their personal and professional lives. They have started steering their own ships. They can even sail now.

Stereotype Busters

I spent 10 years in North America. Most of those years came right after 9/11. I was a young Muslim kid then, and the anti-Islam onslaught that often used to dip in and out of anti-Arab and anti-Middle Eastern and often times outright racist sentiments confused me. It still does. Particularly how people used to say that Islam oppresses women. And to be honest, every time I had the opportunity to say something in return, I would bring up Oman. I grew up here and would use its example. I would say, but Oman is an Islamic country. Its ruler has even said that a country that ignores half of its population wastes 50% of its potential. When HM Sultan Qaboos first came to the throne, he established a school for girls where there had been none before. The women of Oman have inheritance rights, and they also get a dowry from their husbands. That is according to Islamic law. Omani women have climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, flown aeroplanes, and raced horses in the desert alongside male competitors. Oman now has its first female sailing instructors. Omani women are everywhere – in the air, in the desert, on the seas. Take that, stereotype!

Fashionable Money

I have an Indian friend. She grew up with me in Muscat and has been living in America for over 10 years now. A couple of years ago she posted something close to this as her Facebook status: “…wants to go for vacation to a place where the dollar is strong and the accents are exotic!” My response was, “Kerala?” My friend had laughed (virtually). She’s part South Indian.

These have been some of the benefits of growing up Indian overseas. We’d earn in stronger foreign currencies and then be able to purchase more in India. What a system, it made us rich(er)!

But maybe this is just how people who are from countries where their currency is weak deal with things. They leave their countries to earn in better values. In dollars, pounds, euros. It’s become a tragic status symbol now to say ‘dollar’ with a pseudo-American accent that one is never able to perfect. It’s even been a stereotype in India for many years now – the arrogant but silly non-resident Indian who looks down upon the Indian rupee. Have I ever been grateful while in India for my family’s foreign currency savings? Yes. I plead guilty.

Creative Accounting

I do not have a background in finance. Sure, I took some accounting and finance courses at university in the United States, but I don’t really have much of an understanding of how these things work in the long run. I taught myself the basics of personal finance from a book when I got my first full-time job in America. I remember how learning to manage my own money had felt – exciting! I also felt appalled at how simple it was to save money and how being smart with finance was more about making changes in one’s lifestyle.

Does that apply to countries? I won’t pretend to understand national level economics, but I do remember how the financial crisis of the United States forced the government and the people to face that maybe they spent too much and saved too little. In the run-up to the 2008 presidential elections, I remember Barack Obama always saying that America’s financial problems could not be cured overnight because they had developed over a period of time. Maybe India needs to follow that approach with the rupee too. But I wouldn’t know really, I am not an expert in these things.

Exploitation Along the Food Chain

Every time I have come across fun items overseas that looked suspiciously Indian, I would locate their tag to confirm where they had been made. If their tag ever said ‘Made in India’ or even ‘Made in Pakistan’, I would drop any ideas of buying that item. Everybody knew that these items from my homeland and related countries were marked up ridiculously high in foreign countries. I can get this 20 dollar piece for like 200 rupees in India, I would tell myself. That’s like 4 dollars. And it’s true. It’s depressing if you think about how that happens. I don’t know if there aren’t any laws in the countries were these artisans live or if existing laws are just not implemented, but these highly skilled workers who work in cottage industries and pass their trade down generations get exploited by everybody. They do all the work by hand and earn almost nothing for the effort that goes into it. Most live hand to mouth and probably don’t even realize how much money middlemen and suppliers and folks along the food chain make at their expense. It’s frightening. Almost makes me want to buy from them directly.

Rage Against the Machine

I often wonder about people who produce art in any form – paintings, drawings, songs, movies, handicrafts, ideas even – and why they are exploited. I don’t know if this is a curse of the Industrial Revolution which changed the way we assess and value the skills of an individual. The Industrial Revolution changed the way industries functioned. Skills that could be measured by numbers and produced instant tangible results were given the most importance. That is why math and science suddenly shot up in importance, and the arts started being looked down upon. One had value if one could fit in somewhere along the production line, if one could take orders and produce products over and over without fail and without question. That brought down the artist who had been valued in the age before the Industrial Revolution whose job it was to ask questions and provide meaning to this rat race that our world has become. You can find these artists in places like Peetal Gali in Karachi whose art is slowly dying because the government doesn’t consider their contribution to society important anymore. It might look like a case of laissez-faire at first, but maybe it’s a symptom of something much worse.

Stepping Out of Old Shadows

Last night I dreamt that I had gone back to school to join my old classmates, except that I was 31 and the rest of them were still teenagers. These dreams usually are panic-ridden for me because I feel like I have missed a lot of classes because I was out living my real life for over 10 years and will now fail my school exams.

 

It was different this time. I felt very confident and sure of myself. I knew that I could make up the missed lessons by myself. I knew that I did not have a year's worth of notes and that I would have to borrow someone else's and plough through them for my exams. I remember looking at other people's notebooks and wondering how much it would cost to photocopy all of it. Making up in a short period of time would be very difficult, but for the first time I knew that I could do it. No question about it.

 

I remember a slick young History teacher talking about Italy and showing off to my young and inexperienced classmates, and I wanted to tell him that I had written history books. He did not impress me.

 

A guy in my class tried to hit on me in a disrespectful way, and I turned back and put him in his place. I would've never known how to do that before.

 

I remember some parasitic female friends from back then, they were trying to put me down again in my dream, but I didn't feel like I needed them this time. I ignored them. They were children to me and not important at all.

 

In my dream I had just come from living in Delhi, working with NDTV, and visiting Bombay, and I felt so wise and confident. I had already lived in America and Canada. I had dealt with very difficult situations and had spent most of my 20s alone and in foreign countries.

 

I decided to leave the classroom early. I carried a huge camper's bag on my back, but it did not feel heavy at all. I was able to carry it very easily, which surprised me because I am quite short. My old parasitic friends tried to follow me but they couldn't. They were even treating me nicely because they realised that I had changed.

 

But I didn't need them anymore. I was not the same. I would never need to return to this classroom again.

 

I was smiling because I was free.

Mad Desperate Scribbles That Were Breaking My Heart

A year ago, a year after living in squalor in Delhi and seeing some things too closely, I picked the corner table in the dark Ruby Tuesday in Nehru Place. It had been one of my favourite restaurants in the US. I remember how I used to go there with a boy who was my friend and whom I secretly liked and always ordered salmon there with him. I remember one young waitress - a white girl - who wore a Celtic cross. I like Celtic culture, I'd told her. She had been very happy.

 

She was not there at the Ruby Tuesday's in Nehru Place. The boy I used to like wasn't there. That had been a few years ago, they were a thing of the past. I was in Delhi now. I had been in India for a year looking for something, and I had bottomed out because my time there had taken from me instead.

 

I ordered a dish I can't remember and took out a piece of paper from the raggedy bag I had carried as a reporting intern at NDTV. I had so much to say but no one to say it to. No one who would understand the things I had seen and the things I had understood and the things that were racing in my mind and not letting me rest. I had taken to scribbling on pieces of paper because my thoughts felt like scribbles in my mind, like bits of torn paper that even when put together were not adding up, and I continued to scribble at the Ruby Tuesday's in Nehru Place:

 

"I was raised in comfort. I always had enough to eat, my stomach was always full, I barely ever sweated. Then what am I doing here? This country, this nation is filthy. Have you ever looked into the eyes of the average citizen here? Their eyes are hollow, and they look back at you, asking you - why are you here, aa hee gaye tum [in Hindi and Urdu]? And why did I return? To mourn a time of my life that is never coming back. And what now? My tears have been shed, I can go back to my life, where I came from, the world where I'm never hungry or too hot or too cold. So why can't I leave? What is it about this nation of shattered dreams, shit, and piss and bacteria that is not letting me go? I can't be one of them. I never was. I am part of nowhere. But they think I'm a part of them. What do I tell them, that this isn't my life, that I have to go? Where do I go to now that no other place can ever feel like home? What now, what now, why won't you let me go? You don't know me, I'm not one of you. I never lived here before this year."

 

Method Writer

Newspaper cutting from Muscat about an opera set in ancient Egypt

 

I'm writing a book on ancient Egypt, and while I am not allowed to say much more about it, I want to share that this project is different because it treads a fine line between fiction and non-fiction. It's difficult making a setting come alive when no one's really seen it, and I have found from experience that whenever I have to write about an era gone by, it helps to immerse myself in as much everyday detail about life back when. Seems like I write best when I can shut myself in a room and feel like I'm walking amongst the people I am making up and eating the food they are eating and feeling the fabric they are wearing. When I was a little girl and used to live mostly in my head, I had become a little obssessed with ancient Egypt and had wanted to live there. This was in the time long before the Internet or easy access to books, but I still remember a children's book about ancient Egypt that I had borrowed from the British Council library in Muscat, Oman. I can still see the book open before me to a page where the artist had drawn the picture of an Egyptian home. The artist had also drawn people walking about the mud house - through the door, on the stairs, in the kitchen. I felt like they were my friends, that if I went outside I would run into them. Of course I knew them. These little people made of ink, they had names and hobbies.

I later went and rebuilt the house using a shoebox and used my miniature animal toys to play in it. My favourite was the cat that was of the colour of the chicken curry my mother would make. The cat was always the heroine of all my games, and often another animal would be in love with her, but she would be too alone in her great thoughts and adventures to notice.

These days I feel like I'm living in ancient Egypt again. I've come across similar drawings of houses in all the research I've been doing about that time, and I think I've lived in all of them. Everytime I research this way and after my project has been finished, I carry with me a feeling of fondness for that time, that country, those people lost in the dust. I think of them often like I would of an old lover I once sparkled my eyes at because he smiled at me. It almost makes me cry sometimes.

No Pet of Mine

I hate keeping birds in cages. The whole time I was growing up in Oman my mother and I would clash over the sort of pet our family could have. I wanted a hamster, but my mother wouldn't let me have one. I then wanted a cat (I'd called many places that had cats up for adoption but my parents never helped me get beyond that point) but my mother wouldn't allow an animal indoors. So I took to making friends with the neighbourhood alley cats. Over time they figured out where I lived, and one started regularly giving birth in our ground floor balcony. Every 6 months for a few years. I'd bring those kittens inside to play with when they got older. Those were my happiest moments. Kitties playing with me, lounging about in my lap because they trusted me. Because they wanted to play with me. Because we were different animals but we understood each other through our eyes and body language. I miss them. My lap has been empty for so long.

My mother thought the safest pets to get were birds. Over the years we bought single budgerigar pairs - I always got to pick the colour - because we'd heard that they'd lay eggs and have families. We knew other families whose budgies bred like rabbits. And smelled like them too. Now that I think of it, I don't know why it was so important that we have birds that breed and have families and generations. In cages. What was the point? So that it would amuse us? Oh, look, they're like us too!

I never felt attached to our birds. We would bring them home from smelly bird shops in a shoebox that had holes stabbed into them with a knife or scissors. I remember sitting in the back seat of our car with the shoebox in my lap and feeling the birds scraping across the cardboard as they blindly slid around in the dark. Then we'd move them into their cages. Were they supposed to be pleased about that, their brand new cage? I hated seeing them sitting all day long in there. There was no room in there for them to properly fly even; how suffocating would that be, how maddening. I'd wonder how I'd feel if I was made to sit in a cage my whole life, even if I got all the food and water I needed.

I never took ownership of our birds, I left them for my mother to tend to. I'm not the one who put you in that cage, I think I was trying to say, your imprisonment is not on my head. I'd stop by to say hello to them every once in a while though. I liked my cats because they were free, because they didn't make me feel guilty, because they could do what they wanted and come back to me when they needed me.

At least the birds weren't alone. We always bought single pairs, so at least they had each other to talk to. Sometimes they'd chirp so much and for so long that my family would want them to stop, to let us take our afternoon nap in peace. Sometimes they'd chirp all night long, so we'd have to drape a cloth over their cage to put them to sleep. But at least they had each other. I liked it when they talked to each other, I wondered what they were talking about. I always wanted them to have something to talk about. I always wanted them to nibble each other's beaks, it made me happy to see them have each other. They were technically not my pets, but I still felt bad for not setting them free. What would my parents say if I just shook them out of their cages and let them go? We must've had at least 20 birds over the years, and I kept an emotional distance from every one of them.

And they'd always die. They never seemed to lay eggs in our house. It was always the same story. The chirping bird couple would chitter-chatter for a few months, then one day when I would go to say goodmorning or howareyou then I'd find one lying dead on its side at the bottom of the cage. The other bird - the husband/wife, I could never tell - would be sitting quietly in the corner farthest from the dead bird. And it would never sing again. I would feel bad for it and spend more time talking to it, but it never really noticed me. It would just sit there by itself and not move much. Definitely not say much. I'd bring my cats over to meet it; at first the bird would feel frightened and move away into a corner, but over time it learned to not fear my cats even if they were lying sprawled out over its cage.

But it was always a matter of weeks before I found the bird dead too, lying on its side with its eyes shut. Have you ever seen a dead bird? Have you ever held it? It feels light, like it's made of wood chippings and sawdust. I was always surprised everytime I held a dead bird because it felt like it ought to have been heavier. The closed eyelid of a dead bird always looks like it belongs to an old man, a tired old man who is tired of life and tired of blinking and wants to sleep. It's wrinkly, it's thick and thin at the same time. The claws are always curled into a loose tired fist. It looks asleep. It looks too still. Too still.

I hate keeping birds in cages. I hate it. I want them out there, living out their lives, flying wherever they are supposed to go. I don't want them dying on my watch, not on my watch, not on my conscience.

C/O Anybody

Find me in the bottom-right corner.

 

I was standing outside the NDTV corporate office in New Delhi, chewing some gum. It's an old habit of mine that my family has always strongled condemned as American. When I was in high school in Oman I was a fan of bubblegum. I liked grape-flavoured Bib Babol, and in college in America I discovered a strange new watermelon flavour. I used to enjoy blowing bubbles but I have now settled for the less effort of chewing gum. Even if you give me bubblegum now I'll probably just chew it and not put in the effort of bubbling it.

 

I carried this gum habit of mine to India in 2010 when I joined NDTV's year-long broadcast training programme. On that one particular day I was standing outside the building, probably on a break, with a few friends from the programme. They were talking about something, and I was chewing some gum I had bought from the dhaaba that smelled of excrement just down the very short, busted inner street the NDTV office was on. As my friends kept talking, I absent-mindedly flipped the gum pack over and glanced at the address at the back. That's another habit I've had since I was little. I always look at the address that's printed at the back of gum packs everywhere. The address is always of somewhere else, a big city far away - usually in America - that I've only ever seen on television, or a small city somewhere else in the world that had made a pack of gum for me that passed through goodness knows how many unknown hands across the world into mine. I always wondered what the building at that address looked like. Was it a skyscraper or a factory in the country? What if I wrote a letter just to say hi and mailed it out to that address? Who would receive that letter? Who would open the envelope and touch the paper I had touched? Would it be a woman called Susan or a man called Colin? Would they have straight hair or curly hair? Would they be happy? Would my letter make some difference in their lives? Would my life mean something suddenly just because they knew I existed? I would wonder. So much. In a casual glance that had become an automatic reflex by now. I don't even think about it now everytime I flip over my packs of gum. I don't look at the whole address, just the city, state, and country. I feel attached to all the people whose lives are linked to all those addresses in all those faraway cities that are on streets that have their own stories. It feels like looking at a photograph made of words. Like the pack of gum is a phantom letter that was sent to me. It's almost a lonely feeling.

 

 My friends kept talking. And I noticed that the address on the pack of gum I was chewing from was of New Delhi. Oh. How funny. I was in New Delhi.

 

I looked over the rest of the address, curious about if I had been to those areas in Delhi yet. It said 'Okhla Industrial Estate Phase III'. That's where I was at that very moment. I felt a little bit excited and a little bit sick, but I don't think anyone noticed. The floor of my stomach tightened a little bit as I moved my eyes to the building number in the address.

 

206.

 

Wait a second.

 

The NDTV office, the one I was standing outside of, the one I was spending around 10 hours in everyday, was 207.

 

I suddenly felt weird. Frightened even. I almost felt panicky.

 

My friends were still talking. I lifted my head away from the pack of gum in my hands and looked at the two buildings that were on either side of the NDTV building. I saw 206.

 

Oh my God.

 

I suddenly blurted out to my friends that we were standing next to the building whose address was on my pack of gum. They smiled and thought it was cool, and then went back to their conversation. But I felt so strange, excited, frightened. I felt like I had arrived, that I had made a connection, that in all my travels to find the truth, to find life, that I had finally arrived. At an actual address. I had finally shown up at the right place. Those people at those addresses that I'd always wanted to give my life meaning, one of them ended up being me. 'Somewhere else' was finally 'here'. I could rest now.

  

 

The Bombay Girl from Elsewhere

"Where are you originally from?" I asked the young Times Now graphics producer who had been raised in Kolkata and gone to college in Delhi. She wore seeing glasses, a dark blue summer dress, black Roman-style sandals, and her long dark brown hair was loose about her shoulders and back.

"Oh, you will have never heard of it," she had said, "it's a place called Saharanpur in UP."

She was ready to move on to the next subject, but I didn't let her. "Saharanpur, of course! I've stopped there before while travelling between Lucknow and Delhi; they're known for their pottery!"

The girl perked up, and we chatted for the next half hour about our experiences as women in the anachronistic Avadh Dust Bowl. I will now always think of her everytime I see the mug I bought from a roadside street shop in the middle of nowhere in Saharanpur in 1997.

The Song on the Radio

"Saajan!" I shouted in the crowded NDTV shuttle, but the song on the radio meant nothing to my friends. How could it, I realised, they were all mostly born in the late 80s. The movie had probably come out before they started kindergarten. Everyone in the minivan - other NDTV employees whom I didn't know - looked at me; none of them remembered Saajan.

"You know, Saajan!" I continued, returning their startled gazes. "The Madhuri Dixit/Salman Khan/Sanjay Dutt love triangle! Sanjay Dutt was a poet whose pseudonym was Saagar?"

Everyone was looking at me funny. Who was this crazy woman having a happy meltdown to an old Hindi movie song on the oldies radio channel? Was I the only one who remembered how Saajan had turned India and even Pakistan upside down with its solid starcast and Pankaj Udhas songs? When did Saajan become an oldie?

"Haanji, the songs were very nice," said the usually silent driver quite suddenly, "jiyein toh jiyein kaise bin aapke."

I was happy.

A Death in Bombay

A crowd of men with handkerchiefs wrapped on their heads carried a large coffin through a drizzly sticky muddy busy inner Bombay street.

The coffin was covered with bright green fabric that had Arabic calligraphy on it and strings and strings of red roses and white jasmines.

People stopped to watch as the men quickly moved the coffin into the back of a waiting ambulance.

Some of the bystanders touched their hearts with their fingers and then kissed them.

A small crowd of the nearest passerbys - Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Parsi - started to gather because Death will someday touch everyone.

It is the great equaliser, the unifier.

And I remembered a dream I had in high school half a lifetime ago where I was wandering in some dirty Indian city, and I saw both Hindu and Muslim funeral processions passing by in front of me.

In my dream, I had heard a disembodied voice telling me not to stare because that's how riots get started.

Today I saw my first Muslim funeral procession, and I chose not to stare because I didn't want to make a circus out of it.

As I quickly averted my eyes and started to move on, I passed an Indian man who could've been any Indian man mumbling to himself, to no one, to everyone.

The only words that made it to my ears as I passed him by were, "it's not polite to stare at these things..."

A Good Idea Turns 16

Like 2012, 1996 was an Olympic year. That was the year I turned 15. That was also the year my high school in Muscat, Oman, was turning out an Olympics-themed issue of our school magazine.

My English teacher was in-charge of putting this issue together, and I had very excitedly gone up to him with an idea I had had. I had told him that I had the lyrics of the Gloria Estefan song 'Reach' and that it would be a great idea to include those lyrics at the very end of the magazine. The song had been released as part of the Olympics, and its lyrics were very inspiring. These were the days before the Internet; song lyrics were either published in expensive or hard-to-find (especially in Muscat) book collections or on a flimsy sheet of printed paper inside the pastel-coloured plastic cases that some audio cassettes came with. I had an ear for song lyrics and usually wrote down those of my favourite songs and shared them with my friends who desperately wanted to be able to sing those songs correctly. I had found the lyrics of 'Reach' in a youth magazine and had torn the page off and saved it. I still have it with me somewhere.

But my teacher ignored my idea. He never even shot it down, he just plain ignored it. He almost made me feel like I wasn't there standing in front of him. I even think he looked over my head and continued about his business. I didn't know why then. He was an unpleasant sort of person, and I now can recognise him as the sort of person you don't want to hire or work with. I've met people like him over the years; these are the people who recognise a good idea when they see someone else come up with one, and some dark bitterness in them makes them want to kill it immediately. They do this by using humiliation, shame, discouragment, mockery, or repeated silent dismissals. My teacher used the last technique on me on this particular occassion. He used the others on me and other people the rest of the time. For everything. These kind of people ought never to be allowed near children who can't recognise or know how to interpret this brand of toxicity. These are the kind of people who can never be happy for someone else, who flinch at the sight of a smile, who feel relieved only if they can say or do something to dampen another's success somehow and get them to just.stop.smiling. These are the kind of people who feel big by making others feel small. My teacher had once told me that I thought too much of my poetry and that I was arrogant. I hadn't understood what he had meant, I was chirpy, chatty, and quite sensitive about feelings that belonged to me and also to other people .

The lyrics never made it to the school magazine. I still think including them would've been a great idea. So here is the song. It's songs like these that make me want to direct and edit a music video someday. It's people like my bitter high school English teacher that keep people from reaching. Thank goodness we eventually learn to recognise them and don't let them get in our way.

Some dreams live on in time forever

Those dreams, you want with all your heart

And I'll do whatever it takes

Follow through with the promise I made

Put it all on the line

What I hoped for at last would be mine

If I could reach, higher

Just for one moment touch the sky

From that one moment in my life

I'm gonna be stronger

Know that I've tried my very best

I'd put my spirit to the test

If I could reach

Some days are meant to be remembered

Those days we rise above the stars

So I'll go the distance this time

Seeing more the higher I climb

That the more I believe

All the more that this dream will be mine

If I could reach, higher

Just for one moment touch the sky

From that one moment in my life

I'm gonna be stronger

Know that I've tried my very best

I'd put my spirit to the test

If I could reach

If I could reach, higher

Just for one moment touch the sky

I'm gonna be stronger

From that one moment in my life

I'm gonna be so much stronger yes I am

I've tried my very best

I'd put my spirit to the test

If I could reach

If I could, If I could

If I could reach

Reach, I'd reach, I'd reach

I'd reach' I'd reach so much higher

Be stronger

Hijab + hood = hijood

From a Times of Oman special in the sports section called 'Ramadhan and Muslim Athletes: Overcoming Greater Obstacles.'

Small Dog, Big Fight

Aw, an essay I had written as a 22-year-old applicant for the Mercedier Cunningham scholarship at the Oklahoma State University, Stillwater. I had not won, but I can admire the little chipper's spirit!

---

Statement of Need

“Small opportunities are often the beginnings of great enterprises.”

Demosthenes

300 something years before Christ, in the part of the world that once used to be the magnificent Greek Empire, one self-conscious under-confident youth struggled with a weak voice and poor delivery. But later in his lifetime, he metamorphosed into an awe-inspiring fiery political orator. Today, Demosthenes is remembered as a great, no, the greatest of Greek orators. And over 2000 years later, hundreds of lifetimes past, the Mortar Board of the Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, felt compelled to quote him in the 2004-2005 edition of the Mortar Board calendar.

Let’s extend our stay in the present day for a little while longer. In 1981, I was born an Indian citizen in the Middle East, and my parents financed my education (and my life really) ever since then. Of course, every cost associated with me increased many, many fold when I came to OSU in 1999 to start working on my undergraduate degree, what with tuition for international students being almost three times as much as their in-state counterparts, all the while converting a fistful of foreign currency into a lot less dollars. I worked as many hours of part-time jobs as my status as an international student would allow me, but at the end of the day, that only helped provide pocket money. All the same, I tried to look at it all through an entirely different perspective. I chose optimism and struggled to view hardships as opportunities, small yet path-forming.

Today, I am enrolled in the Management Information Systems Master’s program, and for as long as I have been working hard at it, I have been trying to support myself in some measure with a financially more satisfying status as a graduate/research assistant. I’m not financially independent yet, but I’ve been seizing whatever opportunities have been tapping at the door of my life. Carpe Diem has become the tune my soul’s been dancing to. It’s not a new dance; I had been taking baby steps during my undergraduate years (albeit unknown to me at that time), clumsily tripping over myself and often feeling graceless and frustrated at my ineptness. Teeth-gritting perseverance, however, made the tune louder and faster; the dance trickier and nearly acrobatic. Today it is a much-cherished intuition.

The opportunities have been getting bigger swiftly, and I’m almost afraid to break for a breather and inadvertently (shudder!) slow down. I do not know what great enterprises these opportunities herald, but today I feel the need to quote a countryman of Demosthenes’, Pindar the great poet. He once declared, ‘learn what you are and be such’. A merry dance my Greek friends lead me at from across the millennia. The real world awaits me at the end of my life as a student, and in mirthful anticipation of what wondrous new melodies lie in the vast unknown, I can hardly dance any faster.

Everybody's Favourite Aunt

Aunt Alice's advice to my teenage self in a November 1996 issue of Young Times. Remember her? Good times, good times.

My Friend the Astronaut

It's 2012, and Sunita Williams is making headlines in India. She is an astronaut with NASA and is going to be heading back out to space. She is also of Indian origin from her father's side.

I heard about her on TV a few hours ago here in Muscat, Oman. All the Indian news channels are talking about her.

And I suddenly miss Kalpana Chawla. Do you remember her?

It was 16 years ago in 1996 when the world first heard of Kalpana Chawla. I was 15, and it was such a huge deal for me as a young Indian school kid in Oman to hear about a female Indian astronaut. There were no Indian news channels in those days, but I did rip out stories about her from a youth magazine I used to subscribe to. How amazing was she! In those days I almost used to live in an alternate universe where the Star Trek world was real, and here was an Indian girl like me who was going into space. The final frontier! From NASA! As far as I was concerned, NASA was the real world's Starfleet Academy, and I had a crazy amount of respect for that. I had another Trekkie friend in high school who had a thing for Mr. Spock (I was a Kirk girl myself), and all I ever heard her say was that she was going to grow up and work at NASA too. It felt nice to have one of our own - brown skin, black hair, black eyes, a name that didn't sound like Smith or Sarah - out there, someone who was actually going to see the final frontier my Trekkie friends and I were always obsessing about.

The next time I heard about Kalpana Chawla was many years later in 2003. I was 22 years old and emotional-light-years away as an undergraduate student in my final semester at the Oklahoma State University out there on the American Prairie. A tragedy had occurred, and the Space Shuttle Columbia had disintegrated - along with everyone on board - over several miles in Texas while re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. From what I remember, it was because of a faulty heat-resistant tile on the body of the shuttle. The shuttle had burned up and fallen apart out there in the next state in a region only 4 hours away from where I was. And Kalpana Chawla had been on board.

The American news channels had carried stories about the Columbia crew for days. One of them told a story about Kalpana, about how she had felt while looking at the Earth through a window from inside the Columbia while in space. She had seen her own reflection looking back at her, and she had been able to see the Earth in her eyes. And she had said that the Earth had looked so beautiful and so calm and quiet out there in space, and that if everyone could see what she had seen, that no one would fight each other anymore.

I miss her today. I've never had any real-life role models, never really looked up to anyone particularly while growing up, but she had felt like someone I had known. Her smiling pictures in her astronaut suit, the ones from NASA with the American flag watching over her from behind almost like it had her back, those pictures felt like she had been smiling at me. Like she knew me too. She had kind eyes. She looked like a nice, normal person. Kalpana my friend. I miss her today.

Those Evil Ad People

Prrrrooobably not the kind of beauty Eleanor Roosevelt was talking about.

The Cleric's Worst Nightmare

The end of the world is upon us: people now get fatter during Ramadhan, and Kate Moss is the face of Harper's Bazaar Arabia's Ramadhan special (her naughty bits have been covered quite literally for Heaven's sake).

Omanland



Title: Open for Tourism

La Vida Loca



Title: Living on a Visa