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Books, babies, life, and everything in between!

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1. downstairs, a world away

By: Unknown, on 1/20/2016
Blog: Anita and Amit Vachharajani (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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to that neighbour i like,

to him, to his old-fashioned clothes,

to his young man's body

trapping an old man's mind,

to him, i want to say,

my parents moved away

from who you are now

about five decades ago.

in a clot of amber

you exist

between ages.

musical, kind,

dogmatic, superior.

you remind me of another,

a friend's father, a clever,

controlling man; patriarchal,

mellow, oily.

i don't know you well

though you remind me of camphor smells

from my friend's house;

of incense and incantations that

my parents refused to

embrace.

but you, i look at you,

fortunately childless, and diligently

happy, preserving, perhaps,

an illusion of your father's life,

like i try, sometimes, to preserve mine.

we'll never ever be friends.

but at times we talk, briefly,

about nothing of consequence.

at others, with discreet superiority,

i talk about you.

i wonder why you're jobless

and have not married;

i watch your bent back as it dips to

tend to the few plants in your terrace

before you wash the floor,

your shoulders set

somewhat righteously.

between our ancient neighbours

and my young family,

there you are,

young-old, old-young,

holding on to custom and

forgotten ways,

odd, laughable,

amber.

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2. Mud and Ash

By: Unknown, on 7/8/2015
Blog: Anita and Amit Vachharajani (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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‘These grass blades were his eyelashes,’ I’d say,

Pointing to the soil.

‘These big, bright lilies, probably

‘His teeth, broad, blinding.

‘He was impulsive, could be sharp,’

I’d say. ‘See those brambles?
‘Probably his tongue.’

She’d squirm, I know, at my words.

Embarrassed by this display of

Posthumous sibling rivalry.

You came ten years too late.

No use to me as a playmate, shrivelled and squalling,

The one whose ears, my crying, recently-widowed mother

Whispered a name into, thrice on each side.

And now, 30 years on, you’re ash,

Tied up in a square of red cotton,
Which the cousin warned us

Had to be kept near a lighted lamp.

I did that.

Mother, in her raging grief

Refused, politely, ritual relief.

A burial might have been better.

Something of you that we could still see,
Some mud, tinged maroon
With your drying blood.

Mud we would sift through fingers

Seeking, really, the brown comfort of your hands;

Mud we could gaze upon with eyes

Seeking your smile, those flashing eyes,
That sudden laugh.

‘These grass blades were his eyelashes,’ I’d say,

But now, all I know is that the wind

And the waters took your ashes,

Benign, insignificant, of no weight.

So different from everything

We ever knew

About you.

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3. summer

By: Unknown, on 4/28/2015
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this tamping down of feelings

this quietening of the heart

this shushing of the murmurs

this worrying of wrinkles

on the silk that rests inside

this buttoning down of greed

this tempering of rage

the quiet upheavals that

make up the unseen rebellion

of my days

0 Comments on summer as of 4/29/2015 2:41:00 AM

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4. Breathless in Fort Kochi

By: Unknown, on 1/13/2015
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For about six years after we got married, Amit and I only took small holidays to Goa and to Junagadh. One year, we decided to shoot for Kerala, where my family comes from.

In 2010, in rain-soaked, post-tourist-season Kochi, the streets were empty. It was just us, the locals and a few Kashmiri salesmen. That week the Synagogue was shut and the Mattancherry Palace murals were being restored. We only caught unintentional glances of the homes of Paradesi Jews – still occupied by families who seemed to embody Kochi’s fascinating and diverse history (in 2014, we saw that their homes were souvenir stores). The Kayal or the ominously swollen water body that flows by Kochi was surreal, and we stood at the jetty in the noon drizzle and watched it. The humped backs of a school of leaping dolphins – darker than the dark grey waters – were a surprise treat. I recently found a postcard we had got N to write and post to my mom about it.

This time was totally different. We had an agenda. No more being cheap dates. We had just a night and a morning there, and this time we hadto see the Mattanchery Murals (if I didn’t, what would I say to Amrita Sher-Gil, who loved them so?) and catch bits of the Kochi Muziris Biennale too.

The first evening we were in Fort Kochi was a pulsating polar opposite of our last, quiet visit. Amit and I stared at each other in shock. Wait, had we time-and-space-warped back to Chembur Station on a Sunday evening? The entire sea-front was chock-a-block with people. I looked around, and asked a man in Malayalam why there was such a crowd. ‘Beeenaaalay...’ he replied in a drawl. Who needs the pretentious ‘Bi-enn-aa-lay’, when there’s the much more sensible ‘Beenaalay’ at hand?

Walking ahead, we were startled by a ‘family’ of tightrope-walker-dolls which popped up suddenly, among a bunch of vendors selling laser-light-flower-pots and lighted yoyos. Standing under it, a father explained to his wide-eyed son, ‘Ida beenaalay kya vendi aana’ (‘This is for the Biennale’). Gulammohammed Sheikh’s ‘Balancing Act’ references a miniature painting from Rajasthan and has figurines of world leaders like Obama, Sonia Gandhi and Modi as tightrope walkers. Very striking – and poignant, I thought – given the times we live in. (For a closer look at the pics, please click on them – they should open up in a larger size!)

Kochi, I realized, had grown up and become slightly self-conscious. Hosting a Biennale is serious, grown-up business, and it takes a fairly mature government to get on the bandwagon.

The Kochi Muziris Biennale, with all its quibbles and problems, is pretty awesome. It’s awesome that 95 artists from 30 countries presented their works during the KMB, across 12 venues; that the location was faraway Kochi, and not the more accessible Delhi or Mumbai or Goa; that the artists were commissioned to work around Kochi’s maritime history; and that they were displayed in these monumental, semi-industrial spaces; and that the postal department was excited enough to create a special Biennale cancellation stamp about it (yes, lame-ish, I know, but still, imagine talking to the Post Office about Art!). Amazing it is that the KMB’s been organised by three artists and individuals (not by a governmental or corporate body, though there is a significant amount of government-corporate sponsorship). The above photo, incidentally, is of P Sreekumar, Postal Assistant at the little Post Office in the grounds of Aspinwall Hall, one of the Biennale’s venues.

The artist-organisers were evidently keen to rope in locals and there are these self-conscious signs everywhere, proclaiming that ‘It’s our Biennale!’ And going by the number of locals we saw, Kochi seemed to have decided – in its slightly sleepy manner – to agree with them. Sajan Mani’s banners declared (oddly in English): ‘My grandfather is not an artist’ – the hand-written bit in Malayalam, my mother surmised (because the print isn’t clear), says ‘Art doesn’t belong to anyone’. Which, as we will see later, is exactly the problem that some people have with the KMB.

Kochi has the most gorgeous historical mercantile buildings. Aspinwall Hall and the Pepper House and the Durbar Hall and the Spice Godowns and the Mill Hall – all impressive and all tainted by history, because they are, after all, symbols of ruthless colonial rule, of commerce and exploitation. It’s a large, evocative canvas of a city that’s just waiting to be painted on. (I decided to let go of my political problems with those symbols for a change, and gasped in suitably middle-class awe at the architecture. These marriages of form – between vernacular building idioms and European ones – and how they differ across India are so interesting.)

Kochi’s people – across class and religious lines – seemed interested in the Biennale. And if that isn’t delightful, what is? There were families all around us, and I heard one young student point out to Bose Krishnamachari and say to his friend, ‘Ada Beenaalay de main aal aana!’ (‘That’s the main guy of the Biennale’). Their faces were so bright, you’d think Mohan Lal and / or Shah Rukh had just walked in. Young couples with kids had travelled all the way from Vypeen Island across the Kayal and from the fishing settlement nearby to give the whole caboodle a look.

What works for the KMB is how the spaces meld with the objects on display – definitely a result of conscious choice. So while the 2.5 tonne steel bell put up by Gigi Scaria, called Chronicles of the Shores Foretold, is monumental, it also resonates with local history and environmental issues. The bell was hoisted up by the Khalasis of Malabar, I read in The Hindu. Apart from the holes in the bell's sides that are supposed to symbolise punctured time, and the lovely bit of Khalasi history that it brings to mind, I just loved the fact that to see it you have to come to the back of the building. Below the giant, shining bell are the plastic-bag-pitted coastline and the human beings who are employed to clean it endlessly; while looming up at you from the across the bay is Kochi’s container yard. Put it all together, and there’s a sharp, unmissable rap on civilization’s knuckles for you!

Aspinwall Hall, where we started, had Natraj Sharma’s Alternate Shapes of the Earth, tall stools, with bizarre models of possible earths at the top, and dusty mechanical works at the bottom. Very steampunk. I believe the series is a response to the 2002 riots in Gujarat. With a child in tow, one can almost never gaze patiently at art. But then one also sees more of the few things one does look at. N and I had a totally pointless discussion on sustaining human life on top of the odd but highly symmetrical shapes, and it was entertaining to listen to all the other kids ‘argue’ around us too.

If N weren’t there, discovering that the Pors and Rao’s black teddy bear, (which looked like it was made of solid plastic) was made of faux fur wouldn’t have been quite as thrilling. The pinpricks of light woven into the sooty fur thrilled her heart.

At Sushanta Mandal’s kinetic steel and soap sculptures, we paused to watch how bubbles were made by the incredibly crafted mini-mechanisms as they interacted with air and soapy water. We were suitably puzzled by Mona Hatoum’s exposed wires and bulbs, which were interesting, and made me wish I could have read up more on it.

In Hew Locke’s Sea of Power, the marriage of history and art is just delicious. British-born Locke makes massive ‘drawings’ on walls using black cord and beads. The sheer craft and detail of his work was startling and beautiful. In this interview, he says that he thought – like most Westerners – that Vasco da Gama was an explorer. He learned during his research that ol’ VdaG was, in actual fact, a bandit. He calls his work ‘a rambling narrative’. But honestly, huge, delicate, detailed drawings made of black cord and beads? Just unbelievable is what it was!

We walked past the film maker Madhusudhan’s Logic of Disappearance – 90 intricate black-and-white drawings, all three walls of them – and loved this one.

Stepping out into the sun, how could I not laugh out loud at Shanthamani Muddaiah’s Backbone, a sculptural installation in the shape of a large spinal column? With my back brace on, carrying my cushion, I had to selfie!

Sahej Rahal’s Harbinger was a whole lot of strange inside a sanitised, white-tiled, spice-sorting space within Aspinwall Hall. I loved the giant randomness of some of Rahal’s clay and hay works. Especially when they are placed next to the whimsy of his smaller ones. Overall the pieces were puzzling – is that a pterodactyl or a kite, the child asked before walking out to the swing tied to a giant tree outside. Amit and I lingered, simbly louving Rahal’s completely barmy and defiant pieces.

Pepper House had, to my mind, the really yummy exhibits. I loved Benitha Perciyal’s The Fires of Faith, a rather melancholic assemblage of broken and damaged religious icons. What should one do with an idol that one used to pray to but that has suffered some damage? Is an imperfect idol an ineffective deity? That’s the sort of question that only makes sense in India – where so much on rests the perfection of our idols’ form. The one-armed, broken-legged, damaged icons seem so human, so sad.

Bharti Kher’s giant wooden triangles loomed at us from inside a large room in the Pepper House. Like a giant baby’s cradle toys, they hung from the ceiling and reminded me of the huge wooden dividers and protractors our maths teacher used to bring to class so that all 64 of us could watch her plot an angle on the board. Not surprisingly, Kher’s display is related to navigation and geometry. Called Three decimal points, Of a minute, Of a second, Of a degree , it’s great fun to look at. The Penrose Triangle is one of the geometric entities Kher’s work refers to.

Like a thumb tack bang in the middle of the lawn in Pepper House, stood N S Harsha’s Matter. It is a solid and life-sized monkey holding a ball and pointing to the sky with some urgency. Each time we walked in and out of the corridors of the House, going from room to room, from abstract installation to beams of light, we passed by windows through which we could see this fellow. Something about the solid real-ness of the monkey made me feel that he was the fulcrum of everything on display here. Like he was holding together all the swirling mini-universes of the other displays.

The last bits of the KMB we saw were the street art – the mind-blowing Debtor’s Prison by BC or the Backyard Civilization. I don’t think the piece was commissioned for the KMB specifically, but truly, what a treat it was to turn a corner of a road and suddenly see these colours and the details of the mural!

But the best of them all – the really clever things – were the anti-Biennale posters, stencilled and then stuck on to the walls of the Fort Kochi area using wheat paste. We were not there at the KMB long enough to see all of it, process it, love it and then question it. But others were, and Guess Who (an artist or a group of artists who feel that the Biennale is just an elitist exercise) is definitely perturbed enough to take to the streets themselves. The #heavymeaning image is particularly sharp! (Please do read more about Guess Who and their anger and their efforts in the TOI (who of course tried to ‘out’ them) and the BBC here) . Here are some of the brilliant images we did not see.

Having bought our tickets for the boat ride to Ernakulam, we were hanging about the jetty when Amit spotted these trippy gents – brought to you by the irreverent folk at Guess Who! I’m not sure, but I think this image of Che now nestled among newspaper readers was Guess Who’s work from a Biennale past.

So delightful, and such fun to see this mash up of Indian and Western icons (Mr Bean and his eyebrows as an upper-caste Malayalee gent is perfect and I wondered how I’ll ever look at him again and not think of Kerala).

If you’re a true lotus eater, this is most excellent – fantastic art pulled together by one set of hard-working people, and fantastic graffiti drawn by another set in protest. What’s not to love?

Pic credits: Mostly to Amit, and a few to me.

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5. Is that *really* the time?

By: Unknown, on 8/14/2014
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I grew up in a family where life was always just a little bit interesting – and often not in a good way. Both my parents were career people and our home was always full of people walking in and out. I had high-strung aunts, so yelling-matches between my dad and his sisters were par for the course. My mom, a true flower-child at heart, held a regular job and did everything that was required of her, while remaining stubbornly free and quirky in spirit.

So home was always just slightly off-kilter, a very informal, very to-hell-with-rituals sort of place. Not that my parents were itinerant or irresponsible – far from it. They were just your average hard-working immigrants who had a decidedly rationalistic outlook to life. I grew up without many of the rules most ‘70s kids had to deal with. I don’t remember having too many toys or clothes, but what I did have, as a gift from mom, for as long as I can remember, was the right to always, but always, voice my opinion and do just as I wanted. (And boy, did that come back to bite her!)

That air of informality made our home enviable to visiting cousins and friends. You could eat and slouch around and do what you liked – always accompanied by lots of mom-inspired laughter. I, on the other hand, craved a bit of structure. I looked at my friend Vasumati’s Tam-brahm family with envy. Their life was rigorously routine-driven. Each meal was precise (three lots of pressure-cooked wedges of rice with ghee, sambar and curd respectively), and they had regular pujas at home accompanied by a manically tinkling bell. Best of all, Aunty was a stay-at-home mom, while Uncle had a regular job (and didn’t take off on work like my dad). Then there were the exciting few days in the month when their well-regulated household went nuts. Vasu’s dad cooked frantically, the children were yelled at: ‘Keep away from amma!’, and Vasu’s mom sat in a room by herself. Things seemed briefly crazy and I sorely wished something like that would happen in our house. It didn’t, of course. Nairs aren’t usually hysterical about menstrual taboos.

My mom – ex-hostelite and career gal – was delightfully lax about everything. I could sleep in for as long as I wanted (a sin in other units of our family) and wear what I wanted, and not bathe if I didn’t feel like it. My hair was rarely oiled, and mom never insisted – unlike Vasu’s – that I always wear a ‘shimmy’ or a chemise under my clothes (for some reason, wearing the chemise under your clothes thing had become a sign of great modesty among families in our neighbourhood).

The one symbol of this pleasantly relaxed set up was our wall clock. It was a medium-sized wooden box, with a glass pane that had bunches of detailed curlicues embossed on it. The buds and petals of the pane hid a large steel pendulum that you could always hear, no matter what other ambient noise filled the room. The clock had to be wound regularly, of course, and often the adults forgot to do so. This meant that you stared at the same time for a few days, and the world still carried on. Then one of the grown-ups – a cousin or my mom or dad – would climb a chair and use a butterfly-like metal key to wind it up. There was a delicious whirring sound, and then, suddenly, the pendulum’s majestic tick-tocking would fill the room again.

When I was 9-and-a-half, my dad died. Much changed in our lives – I felt like I’d moved out of the pleasant fog of childhood into a crystal-sharp reality. With one less adult around, our clock got wound a lot less and developed an eccentricity. It began to gain time. Once wound, it would go faster by a few minutes every day. We discovered this quite accidentally. Initially, we could never predict how much faster it was – but in a while we figured out that it usually gained time in multiples of five.

So, if you were rushing for a train or a bus, and you shouted, ‘What’s the time?’ The reply would be, ‘8.45. No, wait, not 8.45, it’s actually... wait, we wound it last Monday, and it’s Saturday today, so, wait 5, 10, 15, 20... No it’s 8.25, actually.’ Phew! Whatever time the clock showed, you always knew that really, somehow, you were ahead of it. It wasn’t 8.45 yet, but when 8.45 happened finally, you would have already stared at that moment in time and laughed in its face.

When we moved up a bit in life, mom bought us a larger home, which had – hooray! – a real bedroom. And we had three clocks. The demented wooden one wasn’t thrown away – for some reason, it took pride of place in the hall. Things got even more interesting then. We didn’t have to add and subtract minutes now. We just had to shout, ‘What’s the time?’ and someone from hall would reply, ‘9.30inthehallclock!’ while someone else in the kitchen would shout out, ‘No! 9.10inthekitchenclock!’ And the person in the bedroom would holler, ‘No, it’s actually 9.15inthebedroomclock, I checked with the News time yesterday!’ You could pick your favourite clock to follow. And if you asked what the time was and the person in the room it was in did not reply, you could shout out, ‘...Inthebedroom? What is it? Tell me - quick!’

I still have three clocks at home. My bedroom clock, the one I peer at reluctantly every morning, is still fast by about 20 minutes. When I open my eyes and see that it’s 6.15 a m, I know that it’s 5.55 a m really, and yay! I have 20 whole minutes more to sleep! The hall clock is ahead by just 10 minutes, because it’s closer to the door. My cel phone shows the precise time, as dictated by the government of India. And the clock in Amit’s room is exactly on the dot.

Amit grew up in a universe far, far away from mine, and he believes that clocks should show the precise time, and that all the clocks in the house should march at the same pace. He doesn’t like it when I shout, ‘Hurry! It’s 10.20inthehallclock, but you can also chill a bit because it’s actually 10.10 inmyphone!’ From the bedroom, panic lacing his voice, he shouts back, ‘But I can see that it’s 10.35 here!’. It really annoys him that I laugh and yell back, ‘Come ON! You can’t go by the bedroom clock!’ Hahaha!

We had one of our serious, this-is-an-intervention type chats about it. Why, he asked me, can we not go by the actual time? Why must the right time be sifted through filters of wrong times – especially in the morning when we’re all trying to get the child to the school-bus by 7.53 a m precisely? I really had no clear answer for once, except that it felt – somehow – like a psychological advantage that I never wanted to lose. But how is it one, he asked?

Honestly? I don’t know. All I can say is that I remember the excitement of that moment in Around the World in 80 Days when Phileas Fogg and Passpartout return to London, dejected, believing that they have lost Fogg’s bet. Only to find out that they have, in actual fact, gained a whole day. The author – in a totally pedagogical exercise – explains how time is gained when you travel from West to East and back again, in small accumulations of 5 minutes each day, dropping like coins into a box. And something about that careful calibration of time – minute for minute – appeals to me, and makes me feel like I’m in a race against myself.

It keeps me tethered to that quirk-filled household of my mother's even as I obsess about stuff like breakfast, the two tiffins, the two precise pony tails, and so much else.

So yes. In short, the clocks in our house continue to be set ahead of time. For no particular reason.

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6. When you’re away

By: Unknown, on 8/2/2014
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Posted rather tentatively, a poetry :)

My effort this year is to stop being self-conscious as a writer. (I don't know precisely what that means, but I'll be damned if I let that stop me from posting it!) And so, an attempt at poems and their post-age. This was written in April, and it's now, what, August? So you can see how well that resolution is going. Feedback would be loved, appreciated, resented mildly, and yet, learnt from!

When you’re away

When you’re away,

I want to be in your thoughts.

In the laughter of a page,

In the whistle of trees as the wind plays,

In the particular blue of a flower or a breeze,

I want you to remember me

When you’re in a pool, gazing at pebbles intently,

Or in a room where the hush lives splendidly.

It’s not a lot;

I want you to always want to think of me.

Of course, I won’t be in your thoughts.

Your thoughts, free birds, will soar and fly,

Will want to skim clouds

And sip flowers for tea.

They’ll swim till they reach

The ink-blue sea.

And you may suddenly wonder

Who that dense blue reminds you of,

And you may ask yourself why.

But you won’t feel that inward twist,

That pang, that cry,

That mix of false memory

And very real desire.

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7. An article on Chembur for Timeout, Mumbai...

By: Unknown, on 7/3/2014
Blog: Anita and Amit Vachharajani (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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...From many moons ago, be warned! This article appeared in a Timeout column (June 2011) on why you love a particular suburb. Mine was called 'I love Chembur'. The format has a short description of the suburb + some stuff it's famous for. Hence the 'gems' :)

Our little suburb has changed so much in three years - and not in nice ways either. Fewer trees, more heritage-category bungalows that have been demolished, more high-rises in their place, and a real-estate-market-driven 'Chembur Festival'. It's getting increasingly anodyne, and spiralling home-buying costs mean that more of the terribly-rich come in. And once that happens, there goes the neighbourhood!

Feels silly posting this now, so many years later, but the piece has its moments - I think!

I love Chembur

If you don’t know Chembur, then praising it is a bit like trying to sell you a date with an unattractive cousin purely on the basis of their wonderful personality. Because honestly, if you’ve lived here – however briefly – you’re bound to love Chembur’s tree-lined roads, its few remaining old Goan bungalows, and its still-extant sense of neighbourhood.

But if you’ve never lived here you’re likely to get caught up in minor infractions like the atomic reactor near the Turbhe (Trombay) Hills close to us; the fertilizer factories and refineries around us; and the noxious dumping ground further north in Deonar. All very bad for health, I’m sure, but like others who live here, I prefer the blissful path of denial. Because seriously, if an atom is split behind a verdant hill and I don’t hear it, it’s not anything to go nuclear about, is it?

Unlike the atomic reactor, the Deonar Dumping Ground definitely makes its presence felt – especially if you’re downwind. In fact, garbage is why the city first laid railway lines to the village of Chembur in 1906, bringing its refuse into Deonar, and with it, the start of construction. Goan Catholics came here between the late ’20s and the ’30s, followed by the Sindhis in the ’40s and South Indians in the ’60s. Hemmed in by the new middle-class colonies, Chembur’s original villages retreated shyly, and only a few still survive as pockets or gaothans. Distinctive neighbourhoods grew – the Marathi, the South Indian, the Sindhi and the Goan – each with a unique ethos. It’s wonderful to walk through the localities and get a sense of what it must feel like to live among people who eat, drink and pray like each other.

But you mustn’t think of Chembur as a bucolic hick-town. We’ve been groped by glamour in our day. Raj Kapoor built the RK Studios here in 1950, and between the ’60s to the ’80s, stars like Ashok Kumar, Nalini Jaiwant, Shivji-ke-filmi-avtar, Trilok Kapoor, the redoubtable Kishore Sahu, and lovable Dhumal lived here. Shilpa Shetty was my junior in school (I personally have no recollection of this, but hey, that was many surgeries ago!) and so, they tell me, was Vidya Balan. Anil Kapoor and Shankar Mahadevan attended the boys’ school across the playground from ours.

Neighbourhood gems:

Food at the Station: The market at Chembur Station has a powerful pull. Probably because it’s actually a foodcourt disguised as a shopping haven. Satguru Pavbhaji makes the stuff piping hot and you wash it down with sweet, sweet mosambi juice. Exactly the balm you need after you’ve dodged cars, hawkers, and people’s elbows to buy veggies. A particularly tasty Mumbaiyya version of bhel puri, made in very smelly environs, can be had at Gupta Bhel. Across the road, after the sun sets, the mutta dosai works some egg magic on the dosa theme. At Hotel Saroj, the Sweet Nazis will order you to queue up for their yummy faraal, and no talking in the line back there.

Sindhi camp: Morarji Desai, it is said, first looked at the rolling greens of the military-owned Chembur Camp area and decreed that it should be used to house Sindhi refugees. Slowly, houses, schools and eateries mushroomed on the stretch outside the Golf Club. Sindhi Camp’s ‘food mile’ is the culinary expression of a nostalgic community, and everyone’s invited to eat the chaats at Jhama and Sindh Paani Puri House, and the kheema and paya at King’s or Sobhraj. The man at the counter in Jhama is stern, but ask nicely, and he might tell you that Raj Kapoor often took their gulab jamuns to Russia.

Mallu joints: Built in the ’60s for the employees of Burmah Shell, the buildings of ‘Shell Colony’ didn’t meet the company’s standards. So the flats were sold in the open market to working-class families – mostly Malayalee. With time, some phenomenal Mallu eating joints grew around the area – like ‘Jose’ under the railway bridge, which served marvelous shark-fin curry and hot jeera water (it’s shut now). Pradeep near Sawan Bazaar makes a phenomenal beef fry, and at Sunny’s (opposite ‘Hot Baby’ Rasila Bar) fish is conjured into a mean ‘meen curry’.

Soul watch: In Chembur you could pray up a multi-faith storm. Apart from the many dargahs and the Turbhe mosque (one of the city’s oldest), Chembur has the stately OLPS Church and many Syrian Christian churches. The most interesting among its temples is the 400-year-old Bhoolingeshwara Temple near the Fine Arts Hall (and now the Monorail Station). It is chief among Chembur’s six or seven gaondevs, village temples which once stood at the ‘borders’ of the smaller villages here. Chembraayi, the gaondevi of Chembur, a shapeless stone form, wears a benign smile and presides over us from a ceramic-tiled room in Charai village, right inside Sindhi Camp.

Green memories: Chembur, I read somewhere, was named for the large Chimboree crabs that lived in its marshes. Just like Kurla was named for the Kurli crabs. The marshes have sadly been stamped out. And though Chembur’s tree cover has reduced dramatically of late, it still has many trees, and trees mean birds. In parts of Deonar and Chembur, you can sit in your balcony and see golden orioles, crow pheasants, magpie robbins, red-vented bulbuls and owls. Industrial development around Mahul has meant that not too many residential buildings came up there, leaving the mangroves for aquatic birds. Take a fishing boat from the Mahul Jetty to the few existing marshes ,and get up close and personal with Mumbai’s annual pink visitors, the flamingos.

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8. In which the Springs are Cleaned!

By: Unknown, on 4/20/2014
Blog: Anita and Amit Vachharajani (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Much to my regret, I have just one child. I totally adore her, but in an ideal world, I’d have had two kids. And we’d live in a house by the sea, with a dog, and I’d be writing picture books and teaching college kids for a living. I’d cook well, be clear-skinned, willowy, with a musical laugh. But the genie from the magic lamp just called, and he’d rather stay indoors and work on his world peace project.

Why do I miss having more kids? I grew up an only child till I was 10, and there’s a small shard of icy loneliness in my heart that just won’t go away. Besides, once you figure out that you can make your own people, it feels foolish to stop at one. Also, because I have just one kid, I feel I don’t have a learning curve – just big, giant learning potholes. Every challenge, every idiosyncrasy is new to us as parents-of-only-kids. No wonder second-borns are chilled-out. Their parents are past this overweening curiosity. They know it’s all happened before and will happen again. First-borns and only kids probably feel like they live in a fish bowl, with bloated parental fingers permanently pointing at them.

One such puzzle was that we could never, ever, ever start a project without N jumping in to ‘help’. But ask her to do the same thing on her own, and she’d baulk. Let me give you an example: N is learning to play the guitar. Ask her to practice and her moan is so loud and long that you’d think the siren in the nuclear reactor nearby had gone off. BUT if Amit were to pick up the guitar and attempt to play it, whoosh, she’ll be there like the Road Runner, whisking it out of his hands and hitting those chords.

Ask her to paint or try some art, and the kid sinks further into her book. To goad her into painting, I once picked up one of the cheap canvases we have lying around and applied a tentative brush. There she was, like a flash, grabbing another and searching frantically for a brush. I guess something deep inside children’s animal brains responds to the sight of their parents enjoying themselves with a rousing cry of ‘How DARE they!?’ Of course, it takes time for thick folk like us to learn how to use this instinct slyly – but we do get there eventualy!

Painting and art are big talking points in our house. Amit is an obsessive doodler and N loves to paint - if you don't ask her to. Vacations and holidays are usually spent in a morass of waking up late, eating too much, reading all day and then heading out for an evening of play / swimming / walking. Recent eye issues had the doc telling me that N ought to do fewer tasks that involve potential eye strain – less of reading, sewing, braiding scoobies, iPad-ing, etc., and more of what, I don't know! Since there are no sibs and no ‘building kids’ this translates into howls of ‘WHAT should I do?’

No point suggesting art, well, because. So I decided on a summer project: I’d do one piece of art every day for the next 30 days. I’ve been toying with this idea for a while now, and this article sent to me by my friend Alka Hingorani, art historian, loud laugher, teacher and scholar, really inspired me. But 365 days of art is just 335 too many for my lazy soul. 30 days sounds more like my speed.

This idea is not just part of my Evil Parental Outreach Program. I have a bigger agenda: clearing my own mental cobwebs. I love the internet with its impossible alleys of information, but there are days when I feel like a consumer of words and visuals, and not a weaver of them myself. I have a book to finish, but the white noise of life tires me, and inertia consumes the rest. Also, for the past few years, writing hasn’t been as much of a joy as it used to be (anyone noticed the fewer number of blog posts?). I’m hoping that the discipline of clearing my head to paint every day will help me steer myself back to enjoying writing.

The other inspiration has been my friend, filmmaker and maker, sewer of wonky dolls, builder of cardboard houses, writer of incomprehensible letters, Hansa Thapliyal.

Earrings Hansa once made me

Most adults I know would not bother with so much whimsical, hands-on creating for its own sake. Most parents I know would be too exhausted to even attempt it. Unless of course it was how they made a living. In which case, it doesn't really matter!

Bike-riding girl wends her way thru the landscape

Hansa builds little cityscapes with girls riding bicycles, makes small photo boxes with newspaper cuttings of her friends’ favourite artists and attempts small animations where she frickin’ makes every prop and character.

Shoebox house with driftwood tree

Detail from shoebox house

The great thing is that while Hansa is skilled and imaginative, she isn’t always neat. But the joy in her making is infectious – and best of all, it isn’t intimidating. I’m not as industrious as her – and I hope never to be :) but a little attempting to create will, hopefully, tickle the writing finger!

Couple seen through
rain - I think?

We’re two days down now in our summer art project, N and I, and I can already sense my internal discomfort, a restless shifting-of-the-feet. I don’t know what to paint. But I feel like I want to write a little. The good professor in the article said he reached the ‘what next’ point at the end of three weeks. Yoohoo! Guess who got there on Day 3?

The Fragrant Ant is mine and
the chalk pastel Waterfall is N's

Working with N and watching her is teaching me a lot. Kids have this way of demanding a lot out of every experience. They are not cheap dates. Everything they do, eat, hear, watch or play must satisfy them. If it isn’t fun, don’t watch it; if it isn’t tasty, don’t eat it. Simple. Which is not me at all. It takes me less than 5 minutes to decide on what I’ll paint, and then about 15 to 25 to do it, and about 5 minutes to admire it – mainly because my standards for myself are low. Then I look up and see N’s work. Which, because she’s 9 and less fearful than me, is fierce, joyful. She likes drawing realistically and therefore is a hard task master to herself.

Painting 1.5, wet butterflies

Painting 2, Day 2, a dragon in the making

She won’t stop at one painting, will do more when she’s in the zone, and if something’s ‘not coming out right’, she’ll work herself into a hissy fit of exhaustion and anger. If I suggest short cuts to her, I get such a snappy answer, that I’m reminded of Amit. All I want to is sit down with my head in my hands then. It doesn't help that I'm also the snack-maker.

Honestly, I don’t know if we’ll last out a month. I’ve broken my grandmother’s cardinal rule of not talking about something till it’s done and dusted (because, evil eyes!). I’m hoping that this post will force me to keep at it.

Right now, the fun is feeling like fun. How long it will feel that way, let’s wait and see...

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9. Yours, Mine and Theirs

By: Unknown, on 2/3/2014
Blog: Anita and Amit Vachharajani (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Amit and I have very distinct ideas about books and their ownership. I think books must be allowed to roam free. They must be given to friends, so that they can freely mess with other people's minds. I love stumbling into my books in friends’ houses. By equal token, if I borrow a book of yours, I might just forget I did, and I do believe that's not a crime. Because, honestly, if we guard our books too much, how will they ever meet new people?

Since I also v. much love the act of buying books at random, I have to give them away so that my house doesn't crumble under their weight. And then sometimes, with some books I adore, I really feel that if you’re my friend, I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t share this piece of literature with you, right here, right now. You may get on with your life; but if I don’t press that book into your (possibly reluctant) hands, I’ll never forgive myself.

Amit, on the other hand, would like to build a stack of lovingly-gathered books. Then he’d like to climb on it and sit there and be watchful, while his friends admire the stack. It’s a healthy enough sense of collector-ship, except he takes too much joy in the sheer possession, I often tell him. Don't get me wrong – he's a lovely, generous man, and he'd give you the shirt off his back; he'll gift friends books, and lend them books, but in his head, unlike in mine, the 'nice distinction between meum and tuum', as P G Wodehouse puts it, hasn't been completely wiped out with a water-soaked sponge.

And then comes the moment when I want a particular book. I miss it, I need it. And I know we have it somewhere. So I indignantly ask Amit where he put it. Gallantly, he looks for it, he doesn’t find it, we dredge our memories, and of course, flashback to scene of the wife forcing book into bashful guest’s bag. I look shame-faced; Amit is pissed off at the wasted time and at my now-what-will-I-do expression. The thing is, when the book’s gone, no one misses it as much as I do.

Between us we've managed to accumulate a decent stack of children’s picture books – old and new. And the pride of the stack is certainly our little trove of vintage picture books (Indian, Western and Russian) that Amit has bought over the years, trawling used bookstores in the cities he visits. The collection is safe and has grown – probably because he has tucked them away in a cabinet way below my limited bending-range. There's no way I can force unwitting children to take them home. Out of my reach, they seem to have bred and had babies.

We love American vintage picture books, but we grew up in India in the 70s. Our childhoods (tragically TV-less) sparkled with Russian picture books. Being a ‘friendly’ country, the Soviet Union pumped the most beautiful children’s books into India. They were meticulously translated and printed. While American books of the '60s and '70s were beautiful, some pictures in the Soviet books bring back visceral memories of being small and entirely fascinated by a specific image. Often it's an image I've clean forgotten – a memory I never knew I had. But when I see it now, in that newly-bought-old-picture-book, it's back. Sudden, sharp, evocative, and smelling of being 7-years-old again.

Two of the books we recently found did that for us – The Live Hat for me, and the The Brave Ant for Amit. Here are images from some lovely old picture books (uploading pics on Blogger is not fun – or satisfying!).

A Live Hat by N Nosov. Translated from the Russian by Fainna Glagoleva. Illustrations by I. Semyonov. Progress Publishers, 1977. I had completely forgotten this book, but seeing it had me reeling with memories of a summer evening and mum giving it to me – she'd bought it on the train coming home from work. I took it with no sense of gratitude at all, and lost myself in it immediately. That picture of the crawling hat was genuinely stirring and a bit scary! Lovely, crystal clear images of the entire book here. I love the one of the boys throwing potatoes at the hat – but you'll have to go to the link to see it!

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The Brave Ant by Tatiana Makarova. Illustrated by Gennadi Pavlishin. Translated into English by Fainna Glagoleva. Written circa 1940, English translation: Progress Publishers, 1976. When we found this book, Amit gasped because it brought to mind his many attempts to draw out the luminous pictures as a kid. Truly, my image doesn't do justice to that respectable mosquito and his leaf-letter! Try this page for a few images from the book. You'll have to scroll down, though.

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Life with Grandmother Kandiki (below) by Anna Garf. Illustrated by Victor Duvidov. 0828511829 In wraps. Translated by Joy Jennings.

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Gallant and Dopey, Pages from a Dog's Scrapbook, by Marjorie Turner. Raphael Tuck & Sons, Tuck Books (more about them and their lovely postcards later!). 1930. Please head to Cyndee Marcoux's page for see some really good quality images of each page. Two below are from her pinterest page.

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The White Deer, (below) a Latvian Folk Tale. Translated from the Russian by Fainna Solasko. Illustrations by Nikolai Kochergin. Progress Publishers, 1973. The most jewel-bright of all the books we have!
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The Wolf who Sang Songs by Boris Zakhoder (below). Illustrated by V Chizhikov and Translated by Avril Ryman. Progress Publishers, 1973. You can see beautiful scans of whole pages of the comically-drawn book here.

And then the most traditional and yet bizarre-looking of them all, Alyonushka, (below) Russian folk tales translated by Irina Zheleznova and Bernard Isaacs. Illustrated by Igor Yershov. Progress Publishers, 1989.

The orange octopus acting as the sea-god's mount is so unusual and so much fun – as lovely as these warriors flying on horses against the sunset!

While hunting for these books online, I ran into another visceral-memory-stirrer-upper. The dusty, yellow-blue drawings for Masha's Awful Pillow. Those pictures of Masha kicking the pillow, her bright blue bed, and Masha sitting next to a kennel are, well, things I didn't know were lurking in my head. Now to find the actual book :) Yay! More book-crawling needed!

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10. Let's ban longing

By: Unknown, on 1/22/2014
Blog: Anita and Amit Vachharajani (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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A post after so long, and sadly, tis a poetry :) Something I wrote a couple of months back, and didn't immediately set on fire because I sort of liked it... and stewed over and fretted over and hemmed and hawed and backfooted over it. I like it because persistent rain and water pouring in through walls is a peculiarly Bombay experience, where it's like the rain takes over our lives - and our homes and our roads - for a bit.

I think it's a sad poem, and I rarely write sad, so I like it all the more for that.

Tell me what you think.

Let’s ban longing.
No more should it be allowed to seep into the mind like rainwater that comes in from the poorly-built window next to the porous wall.
Use newspaper, quickly, in sheaves, to suck up the water that seeps in without pause,
And hope that the rain, with its delirious smells, will stop.
But rain, like longing, knows how to defeat you into quiet hopefulness.
It knows the power of perfume and persistence,
So that finally, all there is, is abject surrender to the wetness.
Let’s ban longing.
Let’s say no more of this shit.
Let’s stop the clouds from gathering droplets into themselves
And swelling up till they can hold it in no more.
Let’s sit by our feeble selves and protest.
Let’s ban clouds from gathering and letting go of their promise at our windows.

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11. Of history, roads, mother and coffee

By: Unknown, on 9/4/2013
Blog: Anita and Amit Vachharajani (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Taking my mum on an outing is not an easy task. She has a dodgy knee, and in the interests of not getting in the way of frolicking youngsters like Amit and me (both over-40, fairly unfit, and not given to frolics), she refuses to join us. The dogged resistance has lead to such resplendent fireworks between us in the past, that of late, when she says ‘No’, I just nod and move along.

This time, I made her an offer she couldn’t refuse: a trip into South Bombay on the recently-inaugurated Eastern Freeway, a project that she, as a Civil Engineer with the Govt of Maharashtra, had actually been involved with from 1990 to ’92, and at different points in her career intermittently. (For the longest time, the GoM had just two women engineers in its employ, and mum was one of them. She’s all kinds of brave, efficient and awesome – and it’s not her fault that she happened to spawn a lazy daughter!)

Anyway, so mum and I and young N set off to South Bombay via the Freeway. I’ve been on it about seven times so far, and each ride is like a trip on a giant wheel for me. I don’t actually stick my head out of the car window and scream ‘Whheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!’ as we zip along that smooth, smooth road – but that’s only because I don’t want my driver to realize exactly how much of a loon I am. Inside my head, though? That’s exactly what I’m doing.

But why this uncontrollable urge to scream, you ask? Because a trip from our neck of the woods in Chembur to South Bombay by the other route, via Sion and Dadar, takes 60 minutes on a good day, and 90 on a bad. The route is clogged with traffic and is long. Plus, what with the potholes having annoying bits of tarred road still stuck on them, the going is far from smooth.

The Eastern Freeway ride, miraculously, brings down our travel time (on good days, and during the off-peak hours) to 25 or 30 minutes. And it’s not just fast, it’s also a spectacular and scenic tour of a stunning, almost steampunk narrative of Bombay’s recent history. To me, the route's like a visual fossil of everything that was unique about this city once – its robust manufacturing and industrial past, and its varied mini ecosystems – none of which seem relevant anymore. Inevitably, the stretch will be ‘opened up’ to builders, so that we can have one more ugly, anodyne Hiranandani, BKC or Bhakti Park.

But for now, I’m in love. I love the tunnel you zip through to enter the Freeway (‘Like in Temple Run!’ N shouts); and I love the patches of mangroves and salt pans that still survive (once such a common sight). But most of all I love the wet, industrial-looking, moss-covered structures of mysterious use and vintage around Sewri and Cotton Green. The giant Mazgaon Dock – which I’d never seen before – has impossibly tall cranes and through them, I love the glimmers I catch of what I’m assuming is the Arabian Sea. Finally, you’re gently lowered on to P D’Mello Road, where of course, reality, potholes and traffic jams await.

Everyone who has been on the Freeway oohs and aahs. I do too. All seven times that I’ve been on it I’ve gushed, and I will, I promise, gush some more in the future. I refuse to let the novelty wear out. ‘There’s Wadala!’ I shout, ‘Sewri!’, ‘Parel!’, ‘Cotton Green!’, ‘Dockyard!’ – it’s like going to Fort on my favourite Harbour Line train, only more dream-like because you’re actually flying over it all, and none of it smells of fish – or bodily functions.

Anyway, back to the beginning of this trip. Mum was strangely silent as we turned the roundabout at Chembur and rode the ramp to the entrance of the tunnel. You must know that my mum is an extremely positive and cheerful soul normally. She's forever the one making people laugh and has made a religion out of spotting silver linings in passing clouds. Just as we rolled up the ramp, I couldn’t stop myself from asking, ‘Amma? So? What d’you think?’ I was expecting her to smile, and to feel, oh, I don’t know? A measure of excitement, perhaps.

But she was strangely grim. She pointed out to a large residential building. ‘That thing wasn’t supposed to be there because it was on the path of the Freeway. We didn’t allow them to go ahead with it. But later, they bribed someone...’ All her work life, mum had dodged the bribe bullets by the simple expedient of not taking any. It sometimes made things awkward at work, but being a gentle, very pragmatic soul, she managed to opt out without ruffling too many feathers.

We drove on, and mum continued to look stoic. She pointed out the salt pans to N and commented on the boards put up next to the oil storage tankers to block them out. Finally, in an injured tone, she said, ‘This Freeway took too much time to come up. In a developed country, it wouldn’t have taken so long. It should have been ready by the ’80s or the ’90s’. Ah. Professional angst.

When my brother and I were growing up, mum often told us about the Freeways and East-West link roads that Wilbur Stevenson Smith, the traffic engineer from Harvard, had planned in the ’60s, keeping in mind how Mumbai would grow and what could be done to decongest it. Of course, like all un-dutiful children, we barely registered anything she said, till, now, here we were, riding on a part of that vision. And sensing her frustration – finally. Smith’s ambitious plans are only just coming together, in disjointed bits and pieces, rather like homework being done by a reluctant and stubborn child. (To know more about how the ‘Eastern Island Freeway’ was part of a set of roads planned in the ’60s, read this Mumbai Mirror article.)

All in all, I was feeling a bit deflated by the time we finally descended onto P D’Mello Road, glad, in some ways, to be back on the familiar potholes of Mumbai. We quickly wrapped up the one errand I had to run (yes, with the Freeway being here, that’s how we roll, yo!). And then, much to N’s excitement, we headed – as promised – to the new Starbucks at Horniman Circle.

I love how the Starbucks there looks. So grown up, unlike, say, a Costa. No peppy reds and forced cheer. All high ceilings, rough floors, mud browns, yummy, faux-outpost-feel. The sort of place where Indiana Jones would go to grab a coffee if he was in the mood for it between crashing a temple or two. That sort of a place – without the bullets, the whips or the Nazis. So we enter, me all set to go weak-in-the-knees once again at the sight of the distressed decor inside the heritage building. I want to point out to the ceiling height and the intricate wooden jaali work on the arches to mum, and I just know she’ll admire them as well...

Or so I imagine. ‘Why is it so... so... old-looking?’ she asks. Suddenly I’m conscious that everything is a slight variation on the same dull shade of brown, that the chairs don’t match, and that the lighting is warm but on the duller side. I pay for the coffees and quiches and am told that I’ll be called soon. In a few minutes, a blood-curdling yell rings out: ‘ANITAAA!’ Startled, I jump out of my seat, and finally, mum cracks a smile; in fact, she laughs out aloud. ‘It’s like how they call out to you when you’re being summoned at the High Court! Hahaha!’

I have the good sense – from previous experience – to hide the bill. And fortunately, our food tastes fresh and good. But a couple of things are still bothering mum. There’s a map of the world in the centre of the room. The map is made of jute and is appliquéd, and is meant to look old and worn. ‘You can’t see a thing! What’s the use of it?’ It’s just decorative, I suggest. ‘Decorative?’ she asks, utterly gobsmacked that badly-embroidered jute can be a part of someone’s idea of interior decoration.

Below the pointless map are sacks of coffee. ‘Why are there sacks right in the middle of the room? Is that where they store the coffee?’ No, I think not, I reply. ‘Then why keep them right there in front of everyone?’ I tell her – and cringe as I do so – that ‘it’s part of the look of the place’.

Meanwhile, piqued by all this talk, N gets up and strolls over to the sacks. I watch as she gives them a couple of tentative pokes and then looks puzzled. She ponders over it all for a bit and then runs back to us saying, ‘It isn’t full of coffee! It’s full of pillows!’

Mum turns to stare at me. Pillows?? I start to feel like I’m having a brain freeze, just a little, because I know the world is completely out of whack for this 70-year-old engineer, and how, honestly, do I even begin to not explain but justify the concept of ‘faux’ to her? At that moment, I’m not sure I could explain it to myself. I put out a hand and said, ‘Amma, it’s because they want it to look like they are storing sacks of coffee here, but they don’t want to actually store the coffee in there. That’s why they are stuffed with pillows.’

Mum continues to look puzzled. I begin to feel a bit worn around the edges. But miraculously, the interlude seems to have cheered her up enormously. And I’m happy to report that we had a smashing, altogether pleasant ride back home.

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12. Sssslip into ssssilent sssslumber...

By: Unknown, on 8/3/2013
Blog: Anita and Amit Vachharajani (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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The half-woman-half-beast, scary and yet pathetic somehow, hesitated at the door of a bus. Suddenly, there was the deafening thunder of stampeding cattle. The sun set in a black-and-white sky, and two large, ghostly eyes stared down; bearded goons appeared; there was the helpless pall of death, and I woke up terrified and howling in the dark, inconsolable. I was 7 or 8 years old and most of these mixed-up images were from a movie I’d watched a week ago, called Do Aankhen Barah Haath.

Do Ankhen... was V Shantaram’s 1957 classic on the rehabilitation of criminals. It was visually powerful and dramatic in a grand, pull-out-your-guts-and-roll-in-them way. I’d been raised on the tepid diet of 1970s Indian television, and the film didn’t so much blow my circuits, as it smashed them and danced on the pieces. My Do Ankhen... nightmare continued to terrorise me for a year or two.

My parents were very concerned – and very sleep-deprived. They tried everything – from a gold bracelet with the hair of a temple elephant woven in, to rubbing my head in circles, and asking my friends who told me ghost stories to stop (they didn’t, of course). When nothing else worked, in desperation, my non-religious mom told me the story of the reformed criminal Valmiki, and how hard it was for him to say the word ‘Rama’. Would I like to chant the word to induce sleep? I did, and went a step further: I chanted one ‘Rama’ for myself and one for my grandmother, who, being old, was a poor sleeper too. I bet she slept off faster than me though!

There’s no denying the fact that parents love their children most when they are fast asleep. And they’ll try everything to reach that state of pure love. Including bedtime rituals, which are, really, a sweet way to give someone the bum’s rush into slumber. But like me, most parents also love bedtime rituals, because after the chaos of getting kids changed, there’s that special time when it’s just the two of you, and the deep connection that is created.

Warm milk, stories, read-alouds, chats, prayers – there’s a whole spectrum of things parents try. Of course there are blunders aplenty (what would this column be without those?). My cousin regrets having got his baby addicted to being rocked to sleep. She was heavy, and their backs paid for the indulgence.

A friend’s baby held his mother’s neck while nursing, and wanted his back patted too. If mom did the patting wrong one night, he’d insist she get it right. The habit persisted and now that he’s 9, the neck-holding-plus-back-patting has his parents annoyed sometimes, and at others, happy to still have a physical connection with their son.

When my daughter was little, we shared the bed with her and a minimum of four dolls. In the middle of the night, one doll would invariably go missing. She’d wake us up to search for Komoika, Patty, Bumble or Kitty, and I’ll say this: it’s not easy telling one idiotic doll from another at 2.48 a.m!

My favourite bedtime-ritual-story features an old friend who, at 4 years, would go up to her great-grandmother at bedtime, and watch admiringly as the old lady rubbed a black nut-like herb on a stone. The resulting paste was applied to the toddler’s eyes, along with a good dose of castor oil. Next morning, the little black-eyed-pea’s eyelids would need a solid wash before they could open, but she refused to stop the practice.

Rituals reassure us and connect us to one another. For a bit, they calm the beasts that rage inside our heads, and serve as a psychological bridge from one state to the next. I love hearing about my daughter’s day and enjoy her questions. But there’s no denying that the moment I love the most is when she pauses mid-sentence and declares peremptorily, ‘Now I’m sleepy!’. And then proceeds to go right off to sleep.

This article first appeared in the DNA of March 24, 2013.

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13. Losing my tongue

By: Unknown, on 5/4/2013
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In Hindi films from the ‘70s till the late ‘80s, the new-bahu-of-the-house made it her job to dismiss traditions. She refused to breastfeed her children for ‘the sake of her figure’ (SHUDDER!); went to parties; taught her kids the twist and the rumba; threw out her weeping in-laws, and, significantly, foretold a switch from the matrubhasha to English.

My cousins and I watched these films enthralled. They wept; being younger, I just gaped. Somewhere these films mirrored our lives, because in the ‘70s, as second-generation immigrants of a certain class in Mumbai, we were already losing crucial links with our mother tongue, Malayalam. We went to English medium schools, spoke Malayalam only with older people, and parodied the ‘Mallu’ accent. We weren’t taught to read and write Malayalam because we already had English, Hindi, Marathi, and later, French, to deal with.

This shedding of the mother tongue would return to fascinate me years later when I studied Linguistics and learnt about language loss and language ‘death’. When individuals and communities slowly let go of their mother tongues, a point may be reached when no one speaks the language any more. Many Indian and world languages have ‘died’ for socio-political or economic reasons.

In 2010, Boa Senior — the only surviving speaker of one of the Great Andamanese group of languages called Bo — passed away. With her death, her ancient language, full of stories, songs and myths, is now extinct. With every language that dies, we lose a part of our shared history.

Today, fewer people in cities teach kids their mother tongues - their reasons range from the socio-economic, to the psychological and the political. I’m often asked why parents should teach a child Marathi, Punjabi, Kannada or Oriya when they have to go to school and study English or Hindi. It’s a perfectly valid question. I am a Malayalee who reads, writes and thinks in English. My husband is a Gujarati, who is literate in his language. My mom and I speak good Marathi, and both of us read it too. Hindi is all around us — in films, songs and casual conversations.

But we still screwed up. We just couldn’t keep up with the simple rule of teaching babies multiple languages: one person talks to the baby in one language exclusively. This way there is no confusion; the child knows that this specific ‘code’ or structure will work in this ‘domain’. And, miraculously, most children can learn multiple codes and structures. Since ours was a mixed marriage where we also worked together from home, English became our lingua franca, and unfortunately, by default, our child’s mother tongue.

Teaching kids multiple languages does not impair their intellectual growth. In most cases, the more ‘codes’ and structures you impart to kids — without confusing them — the sharper they tend to be. Being multilingual can delay age-related mental decline, gives you a better ‘ear’ for languages and better communication skills. Most importantly, it fosters linguistic diversity and gives children a deeper understanding of different worldviews.

But as a parent, I firmly believe in going with your child’s specific developmental needs. If your environment has many languages and your child is coping well, that’s great. But if there is a problem and the doctor suggests you to stick to one language only, please follow that advice. To get our kid past a speech hurdle when she was two-and-a-half, we were asked to use just one common language: in our case, English. Today I’m sad she doesn’t speak Gujarati or Malayalam, but I’m relieved we got past that logjam.

To preserve the world’s fragile linguistic diversity, UNESCO celebrates February 21 as International Mother Languages Day. Do your bit for linguistic diversity — talk to your kid in your mother tongue a little. You’re not just teaching her words — you’re sharing a whole history and a unique worldview!

This article appeared in the DNA of Sunday, May 6, 2012.

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14. A day in the life of...

By: Anita & Amit Vachharajani, on 12/28/2012
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When the British Council had a proper library in Bombay, with a proper (and delightful) children's room, we made a trip once a month. And joyously let N play with the various (germ-filled, no doubt) soft toys and big books there. There was this one picture book I spotted, which was drawn like a comic book, with panels, that were close, neat, busy, and overwhelmingly red-pale-yellow-and-black in tones. It didn't look like any of the other white-space-filled picture books we'd seen, and I took a look. It was Father Christmas (1973) by Raymond Briggs.

Now normally, sentimentality tends to sicken me, and so I keep away from books full of silly tropes on festivals. But this one seemed strange, with a grim, definitely unsentimental Father Christmas (and from now on, I'll just call him FC) on the cover. I think what got me was the thermos in the satchel. When the book came off the lending list and on to the withdrawn one, it came home with us!

Full of what a critic called a 'gloomy magic' the book begins with FC waking up from a dream of a sunny beach, slamming his alarm clock which shatters the warm dream, and realising that 'bloomin' christmas' is here again. He is a curmudgeon, and sets about doing his chores carefully, grumpily, sincerely. Feeding his pets - a cat, a dog, a few reindeer, making his tea and his breakfast, packing sandwiches and coffee in a thermos for the journey.

He flies over all sorts of weather (mostly Western) and lands in odd places like sloping roofs with inconvenient chimneys (from the sleigh-parking point of view) and small vans with no chimneys (from the entering point of view). And igloos ('At least there are no chimneys!'). Not to mention the pain of getting gifts into a lighthouse.

The details in the book are what get you - the small things, the large, the ordinary, the quotidien. Like FC sitting on a roof, eating his sandwiches and listening to the weather forecast. Like him getting caught among bloomin' TV aerials (remember it was written in 1973 :)) and tripping on bloomin' cats. He gets a cold, has to climb stairs, stairs, stairs, and finally, someone has the brains to leave him some alcohol.

When he is nearly done, he runs into a milkman. The milkman was Briggs' tribute to his own father, a milkman, who had a similar duty - one of waking up early, and setting off to make deliveries - every day, come rain, shine or snow. All of FC's troubles with snow - even his morning chore-doing - were Briggs' father's too.

When he gets back homes, finally, FC is a sooty, cold, tired man. But he does his chores - feeds the animals, keeps them warm, then bathes, puts on some talc, curls up with travel brochures featuring warm places, cribs about his presents and finally, makes himself dinner!

Then he gets to bed, gives his dog and his cat wrapped gifts and looks at the reader and barks out a 'Happy Blooming Christmas to you, too!'

I'm not always a great fan of Briggs' work, and often, the palette leaves me cold - perhaps because the colours and treatment belong to such a different cultural context. But Father Christmas is unique. It's warm, it's detailed, it talks of a working-class life. It is like a stubborn little bubble squeezed into a hard day - all the realities of a working-class day, with a little dream inside it - of warmer places, other joys, and of course, of present comforts...

The other Briggs N really took to was Fungus the Bogeyman (1974), so full of dirt and grime and boils and slime, that I wonder what appealed to her. But appeal it did. Again an amazing book, drawn with so much love and detail and colour, that it seeps into your mind (yes) and makes you smile!

If you want to see all the pages of Father Christmas, go to Michael Sporn's page, though I strongly recommend finding the book in a library first. Or buy it here (I don't like this cover though!) . To read more on Fungus, click here.

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15. Of Readers and their Rights

By: Anita & Amit Vachharajani, on 9/24/2012
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For those of us who work from home, Facebook is the sort of space that gives us the feeling that we don’t. It’s like the office canteen: we go there to see who is ‘wearing’ what today; we smile at how pretentious our colleagues are; and we flaunt our flashy new phones, pens, cars, cats and children’s first prizes. It’s the 15-minutes-in-the-sun that Andy Warhol promised us — outside of TV.

And every now and then, things of beauty and innate value pop up on Facebook. For stay-at-home moms like me (and non-moms as well) it’s a window into magic which happens elsewhere in the world of art and technology. Thanks to Facebook shares, I’ve seen lots of lovely films, art, craft, writing – and cakes! One of the nicest finds recently has been a 20-year-old book called The Rights Of A Reader by Daniel Pennac. A friend shared a link to a hilarious promotional poster of the book drawn by Quentin Blake. The title was intriguing. Whoever heard of rights for readers? I ordered the book to find out.

A writer of children’s books, Pennac is also a parent and a teacher. And The Rights… grew from his experience of trying to inspire a bunch of not-so-bright teenagers to read. Pennac examines three fundamental issues: how much small children love hearing stories; how wonderful it is when they discover they can put letters together and actually read; and how between parents and schools, we push kids away from books in the years that follow.

Pennac’s tip for getting kids — of all ages — to read is simple: read to them. If you are a reader, chances are someone read to you when you were small. This is instinctive with most parents. Present reading to the child as an engaging activity that you love, and the child will grow to love it too. I know this is true because my mom patiently read to me till the day I took the book out of her hands.

There are habits that foster reading — we all evolve these instinctively for ourselves as readers. Pennac calls these ‘reader’s rights’. It’s just that when we become parents and teachers, we forget them. Readers, for instance, have the right to skip pages. We all do this, but not many of us like our kids doing so. Also, readers have the right to not read and the right to read anything – anywhere. Even comics while sitting on the pot.

There are many parental habits vis-à-vis reading that Pennac disapproves of. Monitoring children’s reading is one, as is the need to test kids and ask them to ‘describe’ what they just read. I’m guilty of both. Because I want to be a part of her life, I often ask my daughter what happened in the book she just read. She loves telling me about them on some days, and on others, she does not, probably because as Pennac observes, ‘Reading is a retreat into silence… it is about sharing, but a deferred and fiercely selective kind of sharing’.

I love my kid reading Horrid Henry, Judy Moody and Junie B Jones. I never insist on ‘the classics’ or even Enid Blyton. But she wants to read Harry Potter — which her father and I think is too emotionally sophisticated for her. Growing up, our parents never ‘curated’ our reading. I find it odd that we should so instinctively want to control hers. I read James Hadley Chase, Nick Carter, Sidney Sheldon alongside the classics — one kind of book only sharpening my appreciation of the other.

To some of us reading is a special kind of oxygen. We need it. Others don’t. As parents and educators, our job is simply to enable kids to read. Whether they read later or not is their choice. As Pennac reminds us, while it’s fine for a child to grow up and reject reading, ‘it’s totally unacceptable for someone to feel that they have been rejected by reading’. Wise words indeed!

This post first appeared in the DNA of June 10, 2012.

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16. Of Readers and their Rights

By: Anita & Amit Vachharajani, on 9/24/2012
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17. How corporate practices can shape nations

By: Anita & Amit Vachharajani, on 4/25/2012
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I’ve noticed that historical books written about India during the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries fall, perforce, into one of two categories: either they are mind-bendingly dull text books or they are lyrical post-modern takes on how ‘cool’ the Companywallas really were. I looked at my review copy of Nick Robins' The Corporation that Changed the World, with its crowded text, its maps and graphs, and winced: dull text book, it was.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. This is one of those rare things in non-fiction: an Unputdownable. Robins’ account of the East India Company’s business practices in India is a riveting blend of crisp, almost thriller-like writing with a great amount of intelligence and passion. While we all pretty much know the broad outlines of what happened, Robins looks at that time in Indian and British history so closely, and with such a unique perspective, that you can’t help but be swept along on his fascinating journey.

Robins’ aim through this book is to examine the East India Company – the world’s first multi-national corporation – in the light of its business practices. He finds insider trading, exploitation and greed – pretty much the basic template for multinational corporations of our times. Though the Company operated nearly 400 years back, its methods are uncannily familiar. There was the same hunger for monopoly, the same irresponsibility, and shockingly, nearly the same amount of unaccountability.

And as Robins gently unfolds page after page of the Company’s history, you see his point. As it gained more monopoly over Indian trade, the Company became a policy-maker by default. Placing the fate of an entire people in the hands of a few businessmen who were driven by ‘persistent share holders’ led to the inevitable: famine and the destruction of a thriving textile industry. India, as he puts it trenchantly, was basically screwed over by the Company.

Robins slides the reader smoothly into the historical, always pegging his narration on individuals and not mere dates. To this end, he harnesses Victorian ‘corporate’ art, cartoons and poetry; Ghalib’s verse; local legends and stories of real people. There are some amazing accounts of people who history books rarely have time for. Like Rajah Nabakrishna, the Indian merchant, and his interaction with Hastings; the Armenian traders based in India who actually managed to take the Company to court in 1777; and the miserable conditions of lascars, Indian sailors who made up a quarter of the Company’s sailors, and were later abandoned on the streets of London in the 1700s.

Robins links the various forms of the Company’s cruelty to ‘geographical morality’, a frighteningly hypocritical belief system. It condoned everything from slavery to drug-trafficking and undemocratic practices so long as it happened in a different region, to people of a different religious persuasion or colour. Cornelius Walford, writing in 1877, observed that in the 120 years of British rule in India, there had been 34 famines, as opposed only 17 in the entire two millennia that went before. When famine struck, traditional rulers like the Mughals would punish hoarders and give away grain for free. This is contrasted with the Company’s response, which was to do some of the hoarding itself!

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18. Mommy Maddest

By: Anita & Amit Vachharajani, on 2/26/2012
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To people who don’t have kids, all parents appear the same — a large, quivering mass of dementia. Loopy adults who hover around small human beings, cooing, muttering, and fussing. I mean, who in their right minds and over the age of 25 would obsess over tiffin boxes, water bottles, medicines and fussy, large bags full of sanitisers and safety pins?
People who have kids, that’s who.
Certainly, we can be broadly classified under the title of Parentis Lunaticus, but if you were to look at us carefully, you would see subtle differences. And the best place to spot these differences is outside the average well-heeled school. This is where parents of a certain class gather in large numbers at regular intervals — and gravitate towards others who are a little more like themselves. (When I say ‘parents’, I really mean mothers; because despite my best efforts to not think in stereotypes, rarely do I see dads in these primitive huddles!)
Waiting to give their kids dabbas or to pick them up, are armies of mommies. Some are exquisitely coiffeured, perfumed and designer-kurta-clad; others are in the JLo/Beyonce mould, bumble-bee-glares, skin-fit jeans and all. Then there are those who wear leopard-print stilettos to match leopard-print capris in the exact same colour as their recently-gone-blonde hair. The rest are a broad swathe of well-dressed women, with a few stragglers, like yours truly, who look like they barely managed to pull on something before leaving home.But the real difference between us moms is not how well-groomed we are. It is the level of naked ambition we feel on behalf of our kids. Everything we wept at during Taare Zameen Par is quickly forgotten once inside the bubble of naked ambition and hysteria that exists around schools. This is Comparison Central, where certificates for extracurricular activities won by kids are shown off, gifts for teachers are secretly planned, and next year’s classes are discussed.
Generally, you can spot the really ambitious moms easily. Firstly, they talk non-stop in glowing terms about their kids and the classes they go to, and secondly, they flatter teachers and sidle around them on occasions like Teacher’s Day, Christmas and Divali, coaxing them to accept cakes, gifts and bouquets.
Each school has its own demographic, and in ours, the most ambitious moms huddle in two large and mututally-exclusive clusters. The larger, chattier cluster is made up of Gujarati moms. The smaller is made up of equally driven South-Indian moms (being a Malayalee married to a Gujarati, I scuttle around the fringes of the Southie cluster).
Each cluster has its own mores and manners. The Gujju moms have all the hottest tuition teachers and classes on speed dial. They know everyone who matters on the PTA; have direct access to the teachers, and can tell you the best places to eat, play or study. Nothing can come between their kids and success or happiness, because all’s fair in love, dhando and education. But refreshingly, they also believe in th

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19. New books mean new joys :)

By: Anita & Amit Vachharajani, on 2/1/2012
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and bringing joy into my life on an otherwise dull day was this new book, drawn by the wonderfully talented shilpa ranade :)
it was written three years back and has been two years in the making, but what a louliness!
more strength to pratham, the guys who have created this space for affordable picture books that are pulished in english but are also translated into 5 other indian languages. i'm waiting for my language copies - hindi, kannada, mallu, marathi etc :)

http://store.prathambooks.org/ecommerce/control/productSummary;jsessionid=9BC0CC919785102DE21870846F1C64A5.jvm1?productId=9788184792706

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20. Mixed nuts!

By: Anita & Amit Vachharajani, on 1/17/2012
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as a boyfriend-starved college student, I knew one thing for a fact: the dreary Sahara desert of my lovelife was made more wretched by the fact that I had grown up going to an all-girls’ school. Boys were exotic creatures for us. We only met them inside the pages of books. In college, where they appeared in human form, we had no idea what to say to them.

While the co-educated girls seemed to make male friends easily, our little gang of girls-schooled late-bloomers found ourselves in fairly splendid isolation. We weren’t sad about it, of course, but we did conclude eventually that all-girls’ and all-boys’ schools were the earthly representations of hell. It was weird, because unlike the co-ed girls, we were actually very uninhibited, we laughed loudly, talked a lot; were witty, uncensored and hilarious. What we were not able to do, though, was have normal, relaxed friendships with boys. We swayed from being arch and flirtatious to completely stern and reproving.

My little girl goes to a mixed-sex or a co-ed school. One day, in Senior KG, she came home and told me that a boy had put his head on her lap and kissed her. Images flashed through my mind: Silsila. Rekha’s head on Amitabh’s lap. Mist. Flowers touching. Bees buzzing. Major coochie-cooing. I sat up with a start and asked my husband if I should go talk to the teacher about this Emraan-Hashmi-in-the-making. ‘No!’ replied the co-ed schooled man, ‘You’ll just traumatise the poor boy!’

Feeling traumatised myself I remembered my mother’s utter terror of co-eds and her dire warnings against sending her granddaughter to one. Mom went to a convent school and then studied engineering while staying in a girls’ hostel run by nuns. The Mother Superior there often warned them with these wise — and rather poetic — Malayalam words: ‘Whether a thorn falls on a grape, or a grape falls on a thorn, the grape is the one that gets hurt. So STAY AWAY from college boys.’ The story usually sent me into peals of laughter, but that day the thought of soft fruits and sharp objects terrified me.

Post that, there have been no romantic adventures so far and we have reached Class 2 without any need for major hysterics on my part. But I’m slowly beginning to wonder if mixed-sex education is the solution to the world’s ills that I had imagined it to be.

Studies show that co-education makes children conform to gender stereotypes — in the UK, for instance, girls in same-sex schools did better in Maths and Science, just as boys in same-sex schools did better in Languages. I personally feel that same-sex schools allow you to grow up without being sexualised too early.

We live in fairly frenzied times. The films and adverts our kids see are full of highly sexualised images of picture-perfect girls and women. Even on children’s channels, ads talk about milky, age-defying skin and tangle-free hair. I fear — perhaps without reason — that when you grow up in a co-ed, there’s going to be the added peer pressure of always appearing attractive to the opposite sex. Can you be yourself, gender-unstereotyped and, perhaps, un-cool?

Once when my daughter complained about a boy hitting her in class, I told her that I went to a school with no boys in it. Her eyes widened. ‘Reallllly??’ she squealed, ‘But WHY?’ Umm. Just. Then I asked her if she’d like to go to a school with only girls in it. Wouldn’t it be nice? No, she shook her head vehemently. ‘Boys are fun. Only girls would be boring.’ Interestingly, many studies show that overall, children in co-eds are under a lot less stress than their counterparts in same-sex schools. That must explain the ‘fun’ bit!

Less stress for the kids, no doubt, but probably much more for the parents! I know what I’m going to do for the next 10 years: sit in a corner, close my eyes and hold

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21. Magic by Any Other Name

By: Anita & Amit Vachharajani, on 12/6/2011
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December. That time of the year when my little daughter’s sense of magic fights with her awareness of the real world – and loses. She comes from two generations of fairly laidback, irreligious, non-ritual-practicing people on both sides of the family, and is probably hard-wired to grow into a non-believer.

But all children need some magic in their lives. And by magic I mean that basic human urge to try and explain natural phenomena. Life. Death. How people were made. How the sun and moon were born. Or why cutting onions makes you cry. This need to explain – to basically create a beginning and an end for ourselves and our experiences – is a very human one. And perhaps it is the fount of all religious thought.

Both the thinner half and I had fairly non-religious childhoods. Our irrational cravings, therefore, are those inspired by the popular culture of our youth. Thanks to Linda Goodman, I can’t begin my day without reading my horoscope in three newspapers. The man saw E.T. in his childhood (an experience he is unlikely to let me forget) and probably because of that believes firmly in life on other planets.

But religion and ritual do offer great comfort. Ursula LeGuin nailed it when she wrote, ‘In our loss and fear we crave the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.’ When I am calmer, when someone I love isn’t unwell, I’m all scientific and agnostic. But it doesn’t take much to bring on that helpless feeling – a minor fall or an eye infection can terrify me. And then I’ll leap frantically across to the other side, promising coconuts, Saturday temple visits and Hail Marys.

Every now and then, I worry about my daughter not having a framework of belief to reach out to in times of distress. Then I drag her off to the temple. But since I can’t sustain the momentum, it falls slightly flat. She remains curious and watchful, but I can tell there’s very little real, emotional connect.

My mother, who life has badgered into non-belief, worries about this. Don’t ask me why. ‘Your child doesn’t believe in god!’ she says frantically, ‘Do something!’ I try not to remind her that she was the one who told the girl, at 4 years of age, that god didn’t exist, that temples and churches were just full of statues and pictures. At that time, my 26-year-old brother had just met with a fatal accident, leaving us hurt and bitter. It’s hard to always watch what you’re teaching a child.

When my kid lost her first tooth, I suggested the tooth fairy. She laughed at me. So I threw away all subsequent teeth. A year later, her friend lost her first tooth and got a gift from the tooth fairy. ‘There’s no such thing as the tooth fairy,’ mine declaimed. ‘I’ve lost so many teeth and never got a gift!’ The friend replied, ‘That’s because you don’t believe in the fairy!’

And that’s how she learnt, at 6, that sometimes it just pays to suspend disbelief, and hold out your hand. So the next tooth was saved, and the tooth fairy visited us. But Doubting Thomasina re-surfaced. Our long, hair-splitting discussions always ended with me saying helplessly, ‘Well, yes, she doesn’t exist, but if you want, you can think she does. And anyway, you got a gift, na?!’ Like my friend Hansa says, finally, chances are the only deity she'll believe in will be the tooth fairy!

Now it’s Christmas again, that time of the year when

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22. What Ramesh found...

By: Anita & Amit Vachharajani, on 10/20/2011
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For years now, Ramesh has had my loyal custom. Back in the '80s, when I first spotted him outside Ambedkar Udyan, I was a humongously fat teenager, and he was a really thin young man in his 20s. He had strangely 'new' looking books. Unlike most street book sellers, he wasn't selling used books. His were all new, all titles that would - for sure - excite my young reluctant reader of a brother. I didn't know then that what he was doing then was selling the West's inventoried books - or books that are 'remaindered' in the warehouses, and are later auctioned off to distributors. Everyone has a favourite book guy. In Chembur, Ramesh happens to be mine.

So The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Isaac Asimov's Futuredays (it had lovely cigarette card representations of what people in fin de siecle France - 1899 - thought life held in store for the world in 2000; each card was wondrously illustrated and juxtaposed with a brief discussion by Asimov. The best part - it had me panting with excitement - was how he found the set of cards in a toy shop in Paris); the book of the movie Young Sherlock Holmes; and many more that I've forgotten about.

Cut to 2001, Chakala, deep dark Andheri East, walking around with Amit. I'm a lot less humungous, and we are crawling the lanes of our new-found suburb, trying to find something other than shops full of Chinese-made figurines to stare at. I see a book seller with books like The Animal of Farthing Wood and a series that has English being taught using Asterix comics. Delighted I look up at the seller, and whatdjaknow. It's Ramesh, plumper, older. We both grin and laugh and get down to the business of books.

2004, Chembur, and there's Ramesh again suddenly at his usual spot near Ambedkar Udyan. We buy tons of books form him, and finally, give him lots of our pulp crime novels. We find copies of Hoot with him, and colouring books, and more novels, and more vintage children's books. Last week was a bonanza though. Look at all that he had for us!

The Keeping Quilt by Patricia Polacco, the story of a Russian migrant whose mother and extended family make a quilt using old clothes belonging to relatives.
The quilt sees many generations of her family thru many

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Deepa Krishnan said, on 10/21/2011 1:56:00 AM

Awesomeness. BUT it is missing photu of said Ramesh :(

Priya said, on 10/21/2011 2:37:00 AM

Oh Ani this is such a beautiful post - what a lovely way to describe the joy of reading, through Ramesh and then the boy eating the books! Simply delightful.

I thought I'd seen quite a few children's books living in the US but I've probably not even scratched the surface - I hadn't heard of any of these.

Anita & Amit Vachharajani said, on 10/21/2011 4:28:00 AM

deepae, planning to rectify today. amit's camera on blink. and peope dont shoot so well on iphone. but will try. actually also wanted to interview him... let's see. photo toh mangtaich hai.
priya, thank you, thank you!

Banno said, on 10/21/2011 8:41:00 PM

Lovely post, Anita. How strange that Ramesh should move localities with you.

Anita & Amit Vachharajani said, on 10/21/2011 9:22:00 PM

i don't think he was moving as much as trying different localities to suss out which one works the best for him... am glad he's struck roots - like me!

Playing by the book said, on 10/22/2011 12:44:00 AM

I wish I could do some book buying from Ramesh!

sathish said, on 10/22/2011 6:23:00 AM

Ah. Lovely. That is a great feast. Brian Pinkney, Oliver Jeffers, Jon Muth - wow. that is a wonderful collection from some wonderful authors and illustrators.

Ali said, on 10/22/2011 7:47:00 AM

Wow! So grateful that Zoe (Playing By The Book) tweeted a link to your blog. I can't wait to see a photo of Ramesh!

Banno said, on 10/22/2011 8:21:00 AM

Yes, probably he felt that living around your locality was the best thing for his business. :)

Anita & Amit Vachharajani said, on 10/22/2011 8:28:00 AM

zoe, i'll bet ramesh wishes that too! ;) banno, you're probably right. sigh. he must have me all figured out! sathish, indeed it's a feast... ali, so glad you came here, and zoe, thanks a ton for tweeting about the post!

Anita & Amit Vachharajani said, on 10/22/2011 8:28:00 AM

ali, deepa, when the photo is up, i'll drop you a line!

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23. Forgiving mom and dad

By: Anita & Amit Vachharajani, on 10/2/2011
Blog: Anita and Amit Vachharajani (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: DNA, small blunders, Add a tag

As a parent, there’s just one thing I’m totally certain of: no matter what you do, you’re wrong. You’re either too strict, or too lenient, or too nice or too nasty, too loving or too emotionally reserved.There’s more good news: you’ll only realise the complete error of your ways about 15 years from now, when you look back with hindsight, and see all the things you did that you shouldn’t have. Don’t ask me to prove this — I just know it the way a flower knows when to bloom, or the way we know that every year, come monsoon, Mumbai’s roads will feel like the surface of the moon.

You always start off with the hope of becoming your ideal of the best-ever parent — the best-pal parent, the pushiest parent, the most-free-spirited parent, etc. I aspired to be a combination of the parents I had plus the sort of parents I wished I had. After seven years of trying, I can freely admit to absolute, humbling failure. I had a wonderful role model in my mother, but turns out I’ve all her few faults and none of her virtues.

One of the things I know I’d love to give my child is the sense of freedom that my mum instinctively gave me. The feeling of total acceptance was the best thing about growing up in my family. I don’t remember mum ever laying down the rules or yelling at us (though her mother — my grandmum — more than made up for that).

But growing up with very few rules unfortunately leaves you unequipped for the harsher realities of life and work. So my totally inspired and unique plan was to raise my child with all the love and freedom my mum gave, plus a sense of discipline.

It didn’t quite work out. Turns out that I have my grandmother’s hissy tongue and temper, and her need for discipline, plus my own inherent laziness and indiscipline. And while I refuse to push my kid hard to succeed, I don’t have my mum’s true sense of laissez-faire either. I do however have her high levels of maternal anxiety. As Himesh Reshammiya once said: It’s Complicated.

As parents are we very different from our own? I think we spoil our kids more — we are wealthier, busier, and it’s easier to buy toys than to give kids time. In 15 or 20 years this will come back and bite us on our butts for sure. Unlike us, our parents were also a lot more secure about their methods. Whether they were beating us up or spoiling us silly, they did it with the firm conviction that they knew what was best for us. Or maybe it just seems that way now.Perhaps each generation of parents has to re-learn the skills of passing on the rules of living.

Sometimes parents succeed and raise happy, well-adjusted people, and others, well, don’t. I remember reading Philip Larkin’s (1922-1985) poem This Be the Verse, and going saucer-eyed at the eff word in it. I didn’t get it then, but now, with more perspective on what it is like to be both a parent and a child, I do.

In three very tight stanzas, Larkin spells out his bitterness:
They **** you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

The poem becomes kinder towards parents in the second stanza — after all, he writes, they were screwed up by their parents too. The solution? Stop having kids and deepening the ‘coastal shelf’ of misery. Larkin’s advice doesn’t work because nature’s urge to multiply is — thankfully — stronger than good poetry.

Sometimes I think the greatest lesson we can teach our children is how to be kind - so that when they grow up, they can look back at our mistakes with a large measure of forgiveness!

(This article appeared in the DNA of Sunday, Oct 2, 2011, in my column called 'Small Blunders'.)

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24. Interviewed by the Timeout!

By: Anita & Amit Vachharajani, on 9/26/2011
Blog: Anita and Amit Vachharajani (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Shinibali Siagal, Gijubhai Badheka, Timeout, Add a tag

Found in Translation
What kind of stories do children find appealing? Strong narratives, arresting visuals and irreverent ideas are crucial, according to children’s writer Anita Vachharajani. Gijubhai Badheka’s Gujarati folk tales not only meet these criteria, but like most folk tales, are also a combination of the absurd, the philosophical and the fun. A contemporary of Mahatma Gandhi, Badheka wrote a variety of children’s stories, which were later retold and illustrated in Hindi by author, painter and cartoonist Aabid Surti. Associated with children’s publishing since 1998 and author of children’s books Amazing India and Nonie’s Magic Quilt, Vachharajani has translated Badheka’s folk tales into English that include a set of two books titled The Phoo-Phoo Baba and other Stories (Volume I) and Uncle Know-All and other Stories (Volume II). She has used both Badheka’s and Surti’s texts for the English version. In an e-mail interview, Vachharajani tells Shinibali Mitra Saigal that folk tales show kids how “sense and nonsense can be tossed together for fun.”
What prompted you to translate Gijubhai’s Gujarati folk tales?
My husband Amit is a Gujarati, and he introduced me to these folk tales. Gijubhai was an educationist who propagated freedom and love as being central to the process of learning. I translated some of Gijubhai’s nonsense verse for The Tenth Rasa: The Penguin Book of Indian Nonsense Verse, edited by Michael Heyman. Later, the editors at Pratham Books asked me to translate Aabid Surti’s Hindi re-tellings of Gijubhai’s stories. I worked with both the Gujarati and the Hindi texts.

Which was your favourite Gijubhai story in the collection and why did you like it? Each one was a discovery. The one I had the most fun with was Uncle Know-All. It's about an old know-it-all who lords over a village of fools and the bizarre nuggets of wisdom he doles out. It had a really weird and completely irreverent feel .

What is more difficult? Writing an original story or translating one? Both are challenging. When one translates, one has to make sure that the text lives and sparkles in the target language as well. In an original story, you can take the narrative where you want to, whereas in a translation, your path is more or less decided for you. Your job is to make that path as rich and joyous as possible.

Can you always retain the subtle nuances of the original? You do lose some nuances. It’s inevitable. But you aim to capture the spirit of the original, without becoming heavy or pedantic. Also, even as you lose one set of nuances, you create others. Since I had both the Hindi and the Gujarati texts to work with, I could see that each version was slightly different. It’s an intuitive process and every re-teller of a story – especially in the folk tradition – makes choices and decisions to suit his or her style. Gijubhai himself was re-telling some of these stories, and you can sense that the language – informal, chatty – is entirely his own.

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25. It takes a village... even to have fun!

By: Anita & Amit Vachharajani, on 9/11/2011
Blog: Anita and Amit Vachharajani (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: DNA, parenting column, dna small blunders getting kids to read, Having friends, Add a tag

Was the world a better place when I was growing up? Life was harder, for sure. Mom was an office-goer, grandma was strict, teachers were sticklers, and worst of all, TV had one black-and-white channel where the highlight was aapan yanna pahilat kaa - a show that listed out names and descriptions of missing people. If we were really lucky, we caught the fleeting, animated Amul ad.
My daughter has it easier - freelance, stay-at-home parents; a choice of wildly similar cartoons and reality shows on TV; and apparently, a liberal academic system. What does she lack that I had? I guess the answer is friends. Friends who live nearby and are just one loud, afternoon-nap-ruining yell away. We had this growing up - friends who were always ready for play, fights, trips to the corner shop and sharing comics.
Now we live in a neighbourhood of low-rises, where all the young people have left, following jobs that take them to where other young couples - and their kids - are. We live among retirees and are indisputably the only people of child-bearing age around. Our kid, therefore, has no playmates.
In fact, our neighbourhood is so kid-free that BMC’s Pulse Polio staff took a long time to figure out that we existed and needed reminders and booster doses. This may make no sense to the un-kidded among you, but those with kids know that the Pulse Polio people are the most dedicated sniffer-outers of children under five. It took them time to find us, and that is saying a lot. When they found us, they shook their heads in wonder and said, ‘Kisko maloom tha ki iss building mein bhi bachche hai...’
So we started taking baby to the garden. The few kids who turned up there were a floating population. The only permanent people were the grannies, and though our child loved playing with the arthritic old ladies, it was obvious that she needed peers.
Young couples with kids automatically seem to gravitate towards the newer gated complexes, and since we couldn’t move to one of those, playdates seemed like a solution. But fixing up ‘appointments’ for toddlers is an insanely awkward and pointless exercise. Firstly, it’s not like you’re walking into the neighbour’s place for a game of ‘house-house’. So it’s not casual. The moms and dads have to like and ‘approve of’ each other. Then schedules have to be discussed and tweaked. It all begins to feel way too strained, artificial, and too much like work.
What I wanted was for my kid to have a village of her own. A set of friends to play, fight and gossip with every day. Children need to build relationships outside the comfort zone of families, so that they understand the dynamics of social intercourse. This knowledge is so important that most tribal societies have formal spaces like youth dormitories and age-sets to foster it.
Just when I was about to give up hope, I met an old schoolmate in the garden, who generously said, “Come play in our building, there are many kids.” So I located her building, about eight streets away from us, full of young people, their kids, and their friends’ kids. A small oasis of 25 children! Presto, my daughter had her village, albeit a bit further from home th

an I liked.
At first, playing with peers was difficult for her. So far her playmates had been obliging adults. Children are instinctively not polite or obliging to one another - with them, you have to, like in the jungle, earn your stripes. So every evening would end in a fight and her howling loudly, and y

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