Senses..

If you close your eyes and think about a smell that means a lot to you...what comes to your mind?
Whatever it is, there must be a special reason why one smell comes alive so vividly. For me it is the smell of "shiuli" flowers or night flowering Jasmine. The smell is so fresh in my memory..the month of October meant Durga puja & the jasmine flowers, in the garden, like stars on the ground, were a harbinger of festivities.

The smell of rain drops on sun parched earth...so earthy!

Certain smells linger in my mind because they meant so much to me and I still yearn for them.

The smell of "khichudi" with dollops of ghee on a rainy day WOW!It is special not beacuse of the food itself but because it was a family time, relishing "khichudi" with my parents & sister.
For that matter, I could tell the clinking of my Mom's bangles, even if she was not within sight.
The smell of my dad's aftershave... I could go on & on....

Battle of the bulge

I am horizontally challenged. Period.

All the body shapes -apple ,pear, cone, hour glass(ofcourse not) do not apply to me. I am stretched in both directions from cheeks to calf. But the irony is I have been on a diet since I have had a memory. No I am exagerating but you can assume I have been on a diet since a long long time. You name it I have done it - cabbage soup diet, GM diet, No carb diet, low sodium diet, high protein diet, potato only diet.

What then goes wrong? Some loose weight to get healthier, some to look thin, some to get into their old pair of jeans but I try to shed the kilos to go on a binge and in the process gain the lost weight! When all else failed, I brazen facedly flaunted what I had - strutting my spare tyre. I concluded, from the looks around, I didn't have a figure to die for.

In order to justify my weight I have devised some brilliant excuses - I am a mom(moms are allowed the luxury of a paunch), slow metabolism(deteriorates with age), cold country ( have you noticed butter melting in hot conditions but turning rock solid in the freezer), busy life and no time to exercise and ofcourse genes!!!

I know I need more than prayers to shrink my size. Beleive me, I am trying but the post dinner desert glues itself to my waist, for no fault of mine :D

The true meaning

Ever wondered why people talk just for the sake of talking? I have and am still wondering.
Like when someone asks "does your daughter go to a school?", I barely stop myself from retorting "No I have forced her into child labour". When aqcuaintences who havent bothered to call on you, mistakenly bump into you, suddenly very concerned, accuse you of hibernating "where have you been","well, to London to visit the queen". It's funny and you need to brush off (in your mind!)any verdict passed about you being callous.

I am (ONLY)socially, too good to mouth my inner feelings so all I do is acquiesce and marvel at the foolhardiness with which some people leave you speechless with their act(literally)!

Homeless

Yes, that's what I feel now. I do have a roof over my head but it's the inner quest to feel at home in a place away from home. There were days when I missed India so much, I was going about day to day life with discontent and yearning to get back home, to belong, to conform....
I had two choices- to crib, harp, feel miserable or adapt. I chose the second option, a truce with the turmoil within, or so I thought.
I took a trip back home, only to realise I was still not at home, in my own home. I had changed, everything else was, as it was. I was lost and felt homeless. I did enjoy my moments back home but things which had never bothered me earlier, came to surface and I didn't dare to get vocal for fear of being called snobbish.

I am more at peace today, to the point of being stoic. Memories of "good old days" are ensconced deep within, like having loved and lost. It was another time , another world still very vividly alive within me but I do not delve into it. I am living my dream of dwelling abroad..and wishing I had never dreamt so.

Princess of the palace

As a kid I remember playing a game wherein we had to sing princess of the palace lost her shoe. It never made an impact on my mind, never thought of myself as a princess of any sort. But these days when I see the commodification of princesses or rather the disney princesses, I am concerened about the ramifications, being a mother of a girl.
My four year old girl is swallowed into the princess world, hook, line and sinker. In these times when we talk about women shouldering equal responsibilities as men in every aspect of life, how can I let my daughter grow up believing life is but a fairy tale, all she has to ever do is dress up & wait for some handsome prince charming! All my attempts to infuse some sanity into the pristine mind of hers' is in vain. She is under the impression that once she grows up , some prince will woo her off her feet & they can live happily ever after. We have had to shelve away her jeans and trousers and anything remotely bearing a masculine hint. The predominant colour is pink and bed linnen to glass everything has a princess imprint. Thanks to the hoopla surrounding disney princesses,my tiny tot believes muscles are for men and she is conscious about her look, hair style et al at this tender age.
I wish the Swedish fictional character Pippi Longstocking was a role model to young girls. Pippi is assertive, brave and can lift a horse with one hand! I feel, she is someone young girls should emulate and not the princesses clad in beautiful clothes and rendered useless otherwise. In a way this sows the seed in the mind of a young girl that girls are meant to be pretty, kissed, danced with and married off, which is so contradictory to today's woman.
I sincerely hope this is just a passing phase and my girl will come out of it unscathed, believing there's more to life than mere looks and princes.

A gastronomical journey...

Ideally one should eat to live but reverse is true for me and it shows on my waist line.I am grateful to my Ma and Baba, I still appear slim to their myopic eyes.Food is often on my mind and I try to recreate magic of the past(in food matters).One such magical comfort food that comes to my mind distinctly is Khichudi(with a dollop of ghee) with hot alu bhaja or begun bhaja or potol bhaja.Khichudi was synonymous with rain, during my childhood.If it was raining, then we had hot khichudi with deep fried vegetables.But it never tastes the same...as it did once upon a time.
Durga Puja meant luchi and alur dom and bonde for breakfast.Lunch was again a spread of pulao, cholar dal, tomato chatney,chanar dalna,kaanch kolar chop, chaler payesh etc. etc....havent had so many varieties of food at one go, since ages.Anything festive in a bengali household would mean consuming mishti doi..it surely is a piece of heaven.I have some how perfected the art of making mishti doi and hence dont miss it, no matter where I am and also got my daughter hooked to this very bengali delicacy.
I distinctly remember a puja at one of our relative's home,sometime in the month of November and waited for it all year round as the Natai Chondi pujo meant pati shapta,narkoler pithe, puli pithe among other dishes.Janmashtami meant gokul pithe.Winters meant lots of notun gurer payesh and i just can't get over the aroma of it.
The Sunday breakfast, lunch and dinners were something to look forward to.Breakfast would consist of kochuri or singada or dosa but soon I'd be famished, on hearing the pressure cooker whistle to emanate the aroma of kosha mangsho...aahhhh....mutton with potatoes and loads of oily gravy on steamed rice, nothing like it on planet earth.I craved and dreamt about kumdo fuler bhaja, during my pregnancy as dear hubby scoured many parts of Mumbai but all efforts were futile.I did more than make up for it on my next visit home.Food needs no reason-pregnant or not, binge.
The every day food that we had at home, now seem rare treats, courtesy lethargy,my impaired culinary skills,unavailability of raw materials and my yo-yo calorie consciousness.Food, now is more of improvisation of things available, thinly lined with home grown tastes.Ma's day to day recipes are to be tried, tasted(often disastrous versions of the original) on weekends.I have picked up new recipes, tried and liked new dishes but always yearn for the very ordinary yet delectable diet of a quintessential bengali.

A ray of light...

Last night when i was nearly dozing off to sleep, my 3 year old daughter fanned my face with her story book...a distinct sense of deja vu prevailed and my mind slipped down the memory lane into the bylanes of my childhood.The summer evenings coupled with power cuts or load shedding as they are known wasn't as murkier as they ought to be.
I remember Ma, kaki(my aunt) finishing off with cooking dinner and getting ready with bhajabhuji and mudi to be munched on during the power cuts, on the terrace.The cool breeze on the terrace did bring some respite but what was really apealling was the munchies and being a part of the gossip that my Ma and kaki had about their work places, about their in-laws(most interesting!!!), their friends, grand mothers, price of vegetables and weaving matrimonial alliances between children of their aqcuaintences.Some evenings, I was spending this "power cut" time with my Baba's camp-Baba and kakus(uncles).Their agenda for discussion was entirely different-Mohan bagan, East Bengal, European soccer,Kapil Dev, Gavaskar and the futility of all political parties(somethings never change!).
I actually looked forward to the power cuts because they meant a one and half to two hour hiatus from studies.Well, I could study with light from battery operated lamps or lanterns but i did not on the pretext that it hurt my eyes and my Ma gave in.As the power would be back, everyone got back to their mundane tasks of late evening, primarily watching TV and us kids had to get back to studies.If I still lingered on the terrace Ma would go ballistic about how I was wasting time, what would become of me, admonish that kids from middle class bengali families have only one route to rise in the rung than their predecessors-study!
The candescent memories of power cuts are cocooned in my heart and maybe my kid grows up to think that I belong to the dark ages, cherishing memories of power cuts!!!Never mind...