I’m 29. I should have had a husband by now. A well-groomed, kind, and ambitious husband who hugs me and tells me I’m pretty and buys me small, meaningful presents. I should have had a baby by now. The other day I saw a small, fat baby wrapped up in winter wear in the arms of his young mother, rubbing his face into hers, and I honestly felt like someone was stabbing me in the heart. It was all I could do to hold myself up and not crumple like the paper a half-written poem was abandoned on. By now I should have had a house of my own with a kitchen of my own where I could exercise my culinary talents and then invite all my yuppie friends over to parties where I would wear nice clothes and look like a real woman, all made-up and perfumed. I do look great when I’m made up. I am a great cook too. I can make roti and even pizza from scratch. I bake like it’s nobody’s business. You should try my Chicken Biryani, my Karhai Chicken, and my Chicken Sweet Corn Soup.
But you can’t. Because I live as a paying guest where the kitchen is hardly equipped for anything more than boiling eggs. You can’t see how great I look in makeup and nice clothes because I don’t wear any, because the smog that hits me when I ride an auto rickshaw would ruin my face and my clothes. I’m having to relive my student years, right back down to the ghhisi piti jeans, cheap sweatshirt, sports shoes, and baseball cap – attire that is an insult to a woman’s body. One of the bathrooms in my PG has a resident lizard. The sink only runs boiling hot water, and the sink in the other bathroom only runs icy cold water. Someone stole my favourite hoodie from the clothesline up on the terrace. It’s not fun washing my own clothes anymore. My hair is falling out. I thought I’d paid my dues – I lived like a pauper at university, had my heart broken a number of times, and got used to eating meals and going to the movies alone. I’ve worn donated clothes from a church, skipped on personal grooming until I looked like a cavewoman (and then some), and had tears burn my eyes because the winter wind was going through my bones. Later I had a beautiful apartment with a soft cream carpet, huge beach-house windows, a vaulted ceiling, and a shower curtain with butterflies on it. I wore smoky-eye makeup and sexy heels because my new car could protect my makeup and my clothes from the elements. I turned heads in my bouncy skirts. I even used to live next to a Hope Hill. Hope Hill! Could anything sound more meadow-like. And you know what – I gave it all up. Because even the corpses at the local funeral home could be made-up to look alive!
Now I live in one of the most unsafe cities in the world for women. I’m the oldest in a class where ¾ of the folks are in their early 20s and have never had to file their taxes. Most have never even left the subcontinent. I have no handsome husband, no gurgling baby. I used to think that I’d have all those things by 24. All my old school friends on Facebook now suddenly have spouses in their display pictures. I am still listed as in an ‘open relationship’ with my female best friend who’s getting married on Christmas Day. I’m sure most people think I’m really a boy. Every Corolla – heck, every sedan - that passes me by taunts me like a rejected lover, reminding me that I gave it up for this, for standing by the road covered in traffic exhaust and dust, trying to catch an auto rickshaw. That perfumed woman I see in the driver’s seat, the one with the sunglasses and winter boots and lip gloss – she used to have my face once upon a time.
And insha Allah, she will again.
Friday, December 24, 2010
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Set to stun
"Charlie X", the first episode of Star Trek I ever saw:
Kirk: Charlie, there are a million things in this universe you can have and there are a million things you can't have. It's no fun facing that, but that's the way things are.
Charlie: What am I going to do?
Kirk: Hang on tight and survive. Everybody does.
Charlie: You don't!
Kirk: Everybody, Charlie. Me too.
Kirk: Charlie, there are a million things in this universe you can have and there are a million things you can't have. It's no fun facing that, but that's the way things are.
Charlie: What am I going to do?
Kirk: Hang on tight and survive. Everybody does.
Charlie: You don't!
Kirk: Everybody, Charlie. Me too.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Monday, November 15, 2010
NDTV Journal: weeks 7-11
Dr. Prannoy Roy wasn’t always the man with the famous beard. Once upon a time he was 18 years old and working at a London grocery store. He admitted to my NDTV batch that he wasn’t very good at his job. He said that he knew, for example, where the can of mushrooms were, but whenever a customer would ask him for it, all the cans up on the shelves would start to look the same to him. His boss helped him out the first few times, but then fired him with the grand declaration that the young Roy would never amount to anything ever in his life. Dr. Roy acknowledged that, as an 18-year-old, he was crushed. I’m not sure but at that moment, I think I saw that 18-year-old resurface on the face of the 61-year-old man sitting across the desk in front of me, but that was for just a second.
Dr. Prannoy Roy is now my boss; he is the founder and Executive Chairperson of NDTV. Wikipedia calls him a ‘media baron’, and I wouldn’t hesitate to say that the whole of India probably knows who he is. That really means something in a country of over 1 billion people, a nation where approximately 1/6th of the world’s population resides. Dr. Roy’s got a whole lot of other complicated entries on his resume – Economics graduate from the University of London's Queen Mary College, PhD in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics, Chartered Accountant, Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. He has also taught at the Delhi School of Economics and has served as Economic Advisor to the Government of India. He’s been involved in the media world since the early 80s and has made a name for himself as a journalist, election analyst, and anchorperson. He told me that he too had worked with Deloitte for a while but had got bored.
Back in school, an English teacher had once told me that I had terrible style and that I thought too much of myself on two separate occasions respectively. The latter comment was made in reference to a poem I had come up with in a moment of complete angst. It was called ‘I’ll Reach the Top’. I was 14 years old then.
As a college student in the United States, I dreaded one photo editor at the university newspaper where I worked as a writer and photographer. The guy was White American, younger than me, a journalism student, and not only was he the most hated person in the newsroom, but on one incident he insisted that an English word I said existed did not exist. I hated how he assumed that he had the final word on that for some vague predestined reason.
As a foreign IT professional in the United States, I was struggling to carve time for what I really wanted to do – have a book published. I was desperate. I had once promised myself that I would be published by 24, and here I was pushing 26. So I forsook my feeble social life for daily writing time and socializing with a local writing club which was mostly white and over 50. For the first year, most people there didn’t even know my name, but they eventually learned how to pronounce it and ended up teaching me many things about the writing business. A number of them were published many times over.
One year I attended a writer’s conference in Oklahoma City. I remember how when I told a Deloitte coworker about the conference, he raised his fingers in the shape of quotation marks and said, “you mean, “writer’s” conference”. He then laughed in my face.
At the conference, I was terrified. Here were more old white people from the Bible Belt of America. The angry black woman I was set up to room with at the hotel spent the weekend telling me how no one wanted to buy her tome of a novel because it was about a black woman. I had finished my first book by then and was looking for a publisher. I’d pitched it to an editor who was interested at first but politely declined a couple of months later over email. Another editor wasn’t so nice – he said my work was so boring that it put him to sleep in the first few pages, but that he’d try and fish out the rest of manuscript if he could ever muster the bother. Over the next few months I sent letters to about a hundred publishers across America, and only got back 25 rejections. The others never replied. There were a handful of publishers who were interested, but they too turned me down in time. That manuscript has since been put on the backburner.
While I retreated to lick my wounds, a random publisher from Delaware that I’d never heard of got wind of me somehow and asked me to write some books for them. I am now working on my 4th book, and I’m still not sure how the folks at Mitchell Lane Publishers got to know of me in the first place. I need to investigate that one of these days. Or maybe I’ll just let the mystery be for when someone makes a movie about me.
Dr. Roy did go back to find that grocery shop in London. He saw that it had shut down a long time ago.
I didn’t get a book published by 24, but by the time I turned 28, I had had two books published. The first one happened to be released one day after my birthday.
Dr. Prannoy Roy is now my boss; he is the founder and Executive Chairperson of NDTV. Wikipedia calls him a ‘media baron’, and I wouldn’t hesitate to say that the whole of India probably knows who he is. That really means something in a country of over 1 billion people, a nation where approximately 1/6th of the world’s population resides. Dr. Roy’s got a whole lot of other complicated entries on his resume – Economics graduate from the University of London's Queen Mary College, PhD in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics, Chartered Accountant, Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. He has also taught at the Delhi School of Economics and has served as Economic Advisor to the Government of India. He’s been involved in the media world since the early 80s and has made a name for himself as a journalist, election analyst, and anchorperson. He told me that he too had worked with Deloitte for a while but had got bored.
Back in school, an English teacher had once told me that I had terrible style and that I thought too much of myself on two separate occasions respectively. The latter comment was made in reference to a poem I had come up with in a moment of complete angst. It was called ‘I’ll Reach the Top’. I was 14 years old then.
One day I’ll be,
Up there, you’ll see,
I’ll be the best one day.
I’ll be so big,
That all you pigs,
Will have nothing left to say.
I will, just wait,
Be so, so great,
I’ll outshine all of you.
I’ll be the CREAM,
Just let me dream,
I’ll make my dreams come true.
Up there, you’ll see,
I’ll be the best one day.
I’ll be so big,
That all you pigs,
Will have nothing left to say.
I will, just wait,
Be so, so great,
I’ll outshine all of you.
I’ll be the CREAM,
Just let me dream,
I’ll make my dreams come true.
As a college student in the United States, I dreaded one photo editor at the university newspaper where I worked as a writer and photographer. The guy was White American, younger than me, a journalism student, and not only was he the most hated person in the newsroom, but on one incident he insisted that an English word I said existed did not exist. I hated how he assumed that he had the final word on that for some vague predestined reason.
As a foreign IT professional in the United States, I was struggling to carve time for what I really wanted to do – have a book published. I was desperate. I had once promised myself that I would be published by 24, and here I was pushing 26. So I forsook my feeble social life for daily writing time and socializing with a local writing club which was mostly white and over 50. For the first year, most people there didn’t even know my name, but they eventually learned how to pronounce it and ended up teaching me many things about the writing business. A number of them were published many times over.
One year I attended a writer’s conference in Oklahoma City. I remember how when I told a Deloitte coworker about the conference, he raised his fingers in the shape of quotation marks and said, “you mean, “writer’s” conference”. He then laughed in my face.
At the conference, I was terrified. Here were more old white people from the Bible Belt of America. The angry black woman I was set up to room with at the hotel spent the weekend telling me how no one wanted to buy her tome of a novel because it was about a black woman. I had finished my first book by then and was looking for a publisher. I’d pitched it to an editor who was interested at first but politely declined a couple of months later over email. Another editor wasn’t so nice – he said my work was so boring that it put him to sleep in the first few pages, but that he’d try and fish out the rest of manuscript if he could ever muster the bother. Over the next few months I sent letters to about a hundred publishers across America, and only got back 25 rejections. The others never replied. There were a handful of publishers who were interested, but they too turned me down in time. That manuscript has since been put on the backburner.
While I retreated to lick my wounds, a random publisher from Delaware that I’d never heard of got wind of me somehow and asked me to write some books for them. I am now working on my 4th book, and I’m still not sure how the folks at Mitchell Lane Publishers got to know of me in the first place. I need to investigate that one of these days. Or maybe I’ll just let the mystery be for when someone makes a movie about me.
Dr. Roy did go back to find that grocery shop in London. He saw that it had shut down a long time ago.
I didn’t get a book published by 24, but by the time I turned 28, I had had two books published. The first one happened to be released one day after my birthday.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
You Can Say That Again
"Somehow this village of roses was not so foreign to him. His intuition told him that he belonged here, if only for a short period. This would be the place where he would rekindle the fire for living that he had known before the legal profession stole his soul, a sanctuary where his broken spirit would slowly start to heal. And so began Julian's life among the Sages of Sivana, a life of simplicity, serenity and harmony. The best was soon to come."
- Robin S. Sharma, 'The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari'
- Robin S. Sharma, 'The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari'
Sunday, October 10, 2010
NDTV Journal: weeks 5 and 6
A number of my NDTV batch mates had crowded around the TV - the Ayodhya land dispute verdict was going to be announced any minute. Some of my batch mates were seated, some remained standing, and some were ferociously switching between TV channels. I was seated on a chair at a table directly in front of the TV. The longer the verdict went unannounced past its deadline, the closer the crowd began to move in, crushing me into the table until I was closed in from all sides.
I felt self-conscious about being the only Muslim in the group. Was anyone watching me, ready to challenge me about what I dared want the outcome of the verdict to be? In the flux of identities in my inner world – non-smoker, woman, friend, Sunni Hanafi, daughter, author, NRI -, I felt my Muslim identity being forced into the foreground. I didn’t want to be a Muslim that day, but it was like in 1992 and in the years that followed - you were either a Hindu or a Muslim, even if you just ‘looked like one’.
Someone placed their chin on my shoulder. I don’t have a sister but it felt like something a sister would do. I felt comforted, like I had not been abandoned just yet. Was it Apoorva, the Hindu girl from my hometown of Lucknow?
In 1992, our old Muslim moholla in Lucknow shut its black iron gates for the first time in decades. My mamoo and mumaani hid their children, a 5-year-old boy and a 3-year-old girl, in an empty water tank on the terrace. The rifle they used to scare monkeys away with was kept ready to protect themselves from a different kind of intruder this time. The voices out on Victoria Street were loud – the old chowk area had gone mad.
I was 11, in Muscat, Oman, and very angry. For the first time, my family would not let me spend the day at my best friend’s house. Her last name was Kothary.
Things felt strained between the adults in the Indian community in Oman. The Muslims felt afraid of the Indian Embassy, so they withdrew to themselves. They prayed hard for peace at milaads and for someone’s son who had gone missing in India. There was no Indian cable TV in Oman in those days; my mother had only found out about the demolition through the BBC News’s Urdu Service on her radio. Cell phones didn’t exist. People still yelled over international phone lines, if they were able to get a connection at all. India felt far away, like a fortress we couldn’t get into, like a madhouse the people we knew couldn’t get out of. I saw a number of grown Muslims cry and say, “there is no place for us in India anymore”.
I don’t have many relatives left in India. Many families were split in 1947, and many began to leave India during the wars with Pakistan. That’s the first time some strange boys mocked my mother on her university bus and asked her whom she’d cheer for during an IndoPak cricket match. Many more of my relatives left India during the 90s. Why did I, after having lived my whole life overseas in safety, choose to come back to this legacy, these echoes? The India of innocent summer vacations in Firangi Mahal in old Lucknow never will be again. But for now, the Hindu girl’s chin on my shoulder makes me feel like it could.
I felt self-conscious about being the only Muslim in the group. Was anyone watching me, ready to challenge me about what I dared want the outcome of the verdict to be? In the flux of identities in my inner world – non-smoker, woman, friend, Sunni Hanafi, daughter, author, NRI -, I felt my Muslim identity being forced into the foreground. I didn’t want to be a Muslim that day, but it was like in 1992 and in the years that followed - you were either a Hindu or a Muslim, even if you just ‘looked like one’.
Someone placed their chin on my shoulder. I don’t have a sister but it felt like something a sister would do. I felt comforted, like I had not been abandoned just yet. Was it Apoorva, the Hindu girl from my hometown of Lucknow?
In 1992, our old Muslim moholla in Lucknow shut its black iron gates for the first time in decades. My mamoo and mumaani hid their children, a 5-year-old boy and a 3-year-old girl, in an empty water tank on the terrace. The rifle they used to scare monkeys away with was kept ready to protect themselves from a different kind of intruder this time. The voices out on Victoria Street were loud – the old chowk area had gone mad.
I was 11, in Muscat, Oman, and very angry. For the first time, my family would not let me spend the day at my best friend’s house. Her last name was Kothary.
Things felt strained between the adults in the Indian community in Oman. The Muslims felt afraid of the Indian Embassy, so they withdrew to themselves. They prayed hard for peace at milaads and for someone’s son who had gone missing in India. There was no Indian cable TV in Oman in those days; my mother had only found out about the demolition through the BBC News’s Urdu Service on her radio. Cell phones didn’t exist. People still yelled over international phone lines, if they were able to get a connection at all. India felt far away, like a fortress we couldn’t get into, like a madhouse the people we knew couldn’t get out of. I saw a number of grown Muslims cry and say, “there is no place for us in India anymore”.
I don’t have many relatives left in India. Many families were split in 1947, and many began to leave India during the wars with Pakistan. That’s the first time some strange boys mocked my mother on her university bus and asked her whom she’d cheer for during an IndoPak cricket match. Many more of my relatives left India during the 90s. Why did I, after having lived my whole life overseas in safety, choose to come back to this legacy, these echoes? The India of innocent summer vacations in Firangi Mahal in old Lucknow never will be again. But for now, the Hindu girl’s chin on my shoulder makes me feel like it could.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Blue Collar
My autorickshaw driver this morning was a Muslim. I'd guessed as much from the Arabic inscriptions on the shiny decorative CDs that were hanging above his steering wheel, but I wanted to be sure, so I asked him. "Bhaiyya, aap Musalmaan hain?" I said as we reached the NDTV office and I began to fish around my wallet for 40 rupees. I could only see the back of his dark head as he nodded and said yes. A red-and-white keffiyeh was tied around his neck like a piece of thick rope.
I asked him if he thought any riots would break out in Delhi after the Ayodhya verdict was announced today. He didn't think so. He said that the people of Delhi lived together in so much diversity. People don't get communal in places like that.
I asked him if he thought any riots would break out in Delhi after the Ayodhya verdict was announced today. He didn't think so. He said that the people of Delhi lived together in so much diversity. People don't get communal in places like that.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
After Dark
Two minutes into my nightly ritual of putting my clothes out to dry on the clothesline did I realise that something was different. It was dark, almost one in the morning. I was on the terrace of my paying guest accommodation. My ears pricked. Was it the moonlight? I looked up at the half moon. I looked down at the dark green tiled floor and stepped into a spot of moonlight. I stood there for a minute. No, that wasn't it.
I climbed further atop the terrace, up the dozen or so black iron steps to the place where the water tanks are kept, carefully hidden from view. Some of the girls in the PG often come up here to smoke at night when the weather is good. They play songs up here in the dark on their cell phones and talk about boyfriends and unhappy family lives.
There was no one here now. There was the horizon - the tops of sluggish houses and tall neon-lit hotels in the east, and dark treetops in the west. The new metro train sped along the eastern horizon. A solitary plane swam in the inky sky. A dog howled.
Then there was silence. For the first time since I'd arrived in Delhi, the city was quiet. The great monster was asleep. Delhi was at peace.
I climbed further atop the terrace, up the dozen or so black iron steps to the place where the water tanks are kept, carefully hidden from view. Some of the girls in the PG often come up here to smoke at night when the weather is good. They play songs up here in the dark on their cell phones and talk about boyfriends and unhappy family lives.
There was no one here now. There was the horizon - the tops of sluggish houses and tall neon-lit hotels in the east, and dark treetops in the west. The new metro train sped along the eastern horizon. A solitary plane swam in the inky sky. A dog howled.
Then there was silence. For the first time since I'd arrived in Delhi, the city was quiet. The great monster was asleep. Delhi was at peace.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
My Big Picture
It's been a month since I've entered the 'scary' world of the media, and I've been thinking: is the ideal journalist pushy, aggressive, maybe even disrespectful? Is that what is required? Is that what it's all about, the bottom line, and nothing else? Somehow I don't believe it.
The Wind And The Sun, an Aesop's fable
A dispute once arose between the Wind and the Sun, which was the stronger of the two, and they agreed to settle the point upon the issue - that whichever of the two soonest made a traveler take off his cloak, should be accounted the more powerful.
The Wind began, and blew with all his might and main a blast, cold and fierce as a Thracian storm; but the stronger he blew, the closer the traveler wrapped his cloak around him, and the tighter he grasped it with his hands.
Then broke out the Sun. With his welcome beams he dispersed the vapor and the cold; the traveler felt the genial warmth, and as the Sun shone brighter and brighter, he sat down, quite overcome with the heat, and taking off his cloak, cast it on the ground.
Thus the Sun was declared the conqueror; and it has ever been deemed the persuasion is better than force; and that the sunshine of a kind and gentle manner will sooner lay open a poor man's heart than all the threatenings and force of blustering authority.
The Wind And The Sun, an Aesop's fable
A dispute once arose between the Wind and the Sun, which was the stronger of the two, and they agreed to settle the point upon the issue - that whichever of the two soonest made a traveler take off his cloak, should be accounted the more powerful.
The Wind began, and blew with all his might and main a blast, cold and fierce as a Thracian storm; but the stronger he blew, the closer the traveler wrapped his cloak around him, and the tighter he grasped it with his hands.
Then broke out the Sun. With his welcome beams he dispersed the vapor and the cold; the traveler felt the genial warmth, and as the Sun shone brighter and brighter, he sat down, quite overcome with the heat, and taking off his cloak, cast it on the ground.
Thus the Sun was declared the conqueror; and it has ever been deemed the persuasion is better than force; and that the sunshine of a kind and gentle manner will sooner lay open a poor man's heart than all the threatenings and force of blustering authority.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Breakfast Fruit
The poor little dark boy with the shy smile and bright eyes was serving breakfast as usual at the NDTV cafeteria. He probably didn't know any English, so I asked him in Urdu for the fruit of the day, did they have any bananas? He shook his head and gave me a pear. It was of an odd shape so I asked him in Urdu again, was it a pear, a naashpaati? He nodded, his eyes uncertain for a second, as he replied, "pine.ap.pil". I said okay and left him to savour the triumph - he'd used a new English word today.
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