Believe, Hon!

Are you aware of the stereotype that media reinforces that men forget anniversaries and women get upset with them? Sean breaks that stereotype. I ask him “How long have we known each other now?” He knows the exact date, the exact number of years. I argue of course. “No no, it was this day of that month!” And he provides proofs and facts. I believe him then.

It has been 18 years of living together, raising a family, growing up in love. Life has been full of challenges, time for each other being the main one. The travels, the jobs, the juggling tire us both and romance often takes a backseat.

A few weeks ago, I put on a lovely saree, threw on some make up and went to the kitchen to show him my bedecked and semi bejeweled self, where he was flipping pan cakes for breakfast. “How do I look?” I asked. He quickly glanced up and looked back down at the browning pancakes.

“You look lovely. I like the necklace that you put on. Adds something more to the whole ensemble.” He said.

Sahana gave me the necklace on Mother’s Day and I have been wearing that since May. EVERYDAY! He never noticed!

“I have been wearing the necklace for the last 4 months for crying out loud! You never noticed???? You never look at me anymore? Is this what happens if one is married for 18 years???” I joke. I make it sound light-hearted, yet I am hurting a little bit.

He is, for a second stunned, at a loss, and then he comes back with an answer that he knows will get him out of the hole that he dug for himself.

I notice YOU! After 18 years I don’t need to notice any necklace or earring. I simply look at you, the natural you. I have always said you need no jewelry to be beautiful. I love the way you are naturally.

I grumble and groan. I tell him he is back tracking and covering up his mistake. He says “That’s my story and I am sticking to it, baby!” And laughs.

And I believe him. A huge part of me does. I believe him because it reminds me of the poem he loves, believes and recites. A poem by Pedro Salinas which he read to me when we courted, first in Spanish and then the translation, as I sang songs of Rabindranath Tagore for him.

To live I don’t want
islands, palaces, towers.
What steeper joy
Than living in pronouns!
Take off your clothing,
features, pictures;
I don’t want you like that,
masked as another,
always a daughter of something.
I want you pure, free,
irreducible: you.

Life together is not what it used to be 18 years ago. Our togetherness is spent talking about high school assignments, picking up dropping off children, text messages to each other. Yet, amidst all that, Salinas’s words remain, Rabindranath’s love songs remain. Pablo Neruda’s poem has the associations of that exquisite feeling that he wrote those words to give voice to our love.

September 8

Today, this day was a brimming cup,
today, this day was the immense wave,
today, it was all the earth.

Today the stormy sea
lifted us in a kiss
so high that we trembled
in a lightning flash
and, tied, we went down
to sink without untwining.

Today our bodies became vast,
they grew to the edge of the world
and rolled melting
into a single drop
of wax or meteor.

Between you and me a new door opened
and someone, still faceless,
was waiting for us there.

Pablo Neruda

All it takes is a moment of pause, a moment of looking back, a reiteration of some forgotten lines and I am once again the young woman in love. The heart drips with the oozy feeling of contentment. I smile and he smiles back.

I love it now!

Two American men took their newly wed brides to a baseball game for the first time. The brides belonged to two different countries, one came from India and the other from Peru. The game was a hotly contested one between two rivals. Both the American men were fans of a team from Boston. The women went to experience the all-American game of baseball, and perhaps to get an inkling of why this game appeals to so many in their newly adopted country. They failed to understand though. But not due to the lack of efforts of their very attentive spouses. The husbands bought yummy ball-park food, put their arms around their respective wives and whispered sweet nothings in their ears when they were not screaming at their team’s success, explained the rules and the reasons whenever they got the chance, yet the women found it hard to keep their focus on the game. They looked everywhere, sighed, stretched, looked at their watches and asked how long the game will last. The Indian one, a big fan of cricket, found this game terribly slow, which surprised her husband. Once the game was over and the ball-park spewed out thousands and thousands of excited fans onto the streets of the city, the Peruvian woman said to her husband in her endearing accent:

‘You like this game? But this is SO BORING!’

She spoke loudly enough to attract some looks. Her husband grinned, looked around and said, ‘Shhhhh…..!’

The Indian woman promised never to see another baseball game ever again. What a waste of time, she said. She could have read books in that time, she scoffed at her husband. And then her sly husband did something to make sure that she would start taking interest in the game. After 6 weeks of giving birth to their first child, when she was desperate to lose the baby weight, her husband urged her to join a women’s softball team. As I said, she was desperate to get rid of the extra pounds so she agreed. Being somewhat athletic, she caught on quickly and played in a local team. She had fun. But still she did not watch baseball. Once was enough.

Then she gave birth to a boy who lived, dreamed, breathed baseball. She made an effort then, to learn the game. She started watching it with the husband and the son. She learnt what tagging meant, she caught on to infield fly rule, she learnt about curve balls, sliders, knuckle ball, stealing home, double play, grand slam.

Now she loves it! She is almost as big a fan of the local team as her son. Almost, not quite. She discusses baseball with friends, neighbors, coworkers. She wears the jersey of her favorite player when she goes to watch a game and wonders how did she ever think the game was boring. Each wind up of her team’s pitcher is full of anticipation, each strike by the favored pitcher promising, each ball disappointing.

She went to a ball game recently with the husband and the son (the daughter refused to sit through it). And she thought back to her first baseball game at the ball park as a young bride, as she jumped up and high-fived the man next to her as a player hit a home run. She screamed with thirty thousand other spectators CHARGE, she clapped with them, she danced with her arms high and did the Mexican wave.

As she entered the ball park with thousands of other people wearing the same colored jersey as her, she felt a certain sense of belonging to the city which brought a smile to her face. She took off her sunhat and touched her chest as the national anthem was sung, and sang along. She noticed a dad with two little girls watching the game with their grandfather. The littlest one, maybe 3 years old, took care of the granddaddy by offering him drinks and putting her little head on his shoulder. She saw on the big screen, little babies whose parents held them in one hand and held a poster in the other, saying ‘Baby’s first ball game’. She noticed a son and probably daughter in law holding the hands of a very elderly lady as she navigated the steps to reach her seat with a wide smile on her face. She noticed the play of clouds up above and urged the husband to take a picture with his phone. She got teased for that, but the husband took the picture, anyway.

She smiled as she thought of her first game in the same ballpark all those years ago. She has adapted, adopted and grown indeed. She has come a long way.

Fragrance of life..

I seem to be losing the energy and spontaneity with which I opened the blog every day. I wrote with joy and with a happy carelessness. I got so much love and encouragement from friends and unknown readers. I lapped up the love and at the same time lost the spontaneity. I started considering how readers will rate the blog. I lost sight of the purpose of my blogs – to write down my ramblings, to archive my memories of my children’s fleeting childhood, to chronicle the moments when I first met my husband, how I fell in love and how we grew together. I did not visit the blog site for so long. Yet mama thought. She thought of how to keep her children safe, how to love them more, how to meet deadlines, how to balance expectations, disappointments, work, romance, needs and wants. And she thought of loving her blog again. She thought of writing here her ramblings, her dreams and hopes, snippets of her life – life as it happens to her and as she sees it.

I wanted to document a few conversations as Sahana turned 15. The first one happened at dinner a few weeks back. The topic was types of parenting and a fifteen year old’s feedback on it. Sean and I were curious to know what she considers good parenting, objectively. She said:

‘Well honestly, for us, you can do nothing right at this point. If you are involved and take interest in what we do, we consider you smothering and extremely annoying. We try to elbow you out. And if you let us be, thinking you are giving us space, we consider you apathetic and uncaring. We feel sorry for ourselves. So yeah, for these few years, mom and dad, you can do nothing right!’

Sean and I turned around and high fived each other. The pressure was off. We did not need to change a thing. We could not win. Oh, joy!

She laughed with us. We all laughed at the incongruity of the situation, the absurdity of it all, and the clarity of her realization and her observation.

The second conversation took place at a trattoria while having an Italian dinner in honor of her fifteenth birthday. Her words have stayed with me:

‘You know, I am very happy mom that you belong to another country and dad does the job that he does. You have always taught us that there is another world out there, our perception of the world we live in is simply a part of it. It is because of you we got to experience a wider world and different culture. And I am glad that daddy does what he does for work. He brings back the stories of the world he travels to which make both Ryan and I realize how blessed we are to have what we have. It teaches us not to demand but be thankful.’

It was her birthday, yet she gave me a gift.

Last night while we heated up food for dinner, we talked about our evolving relationship as she gets older. She gets angry with me often, whenever I deny her what she wants, yet in her ‘lucid’ moments she knows we are forever in love. She wonders how it will be between us when she is a woman. I said I will always be her mother yet at a certain age we will be primarily two women – confiding, needing support, love and affection. Two women who will know in their hearts that they have each other to fall back upon if the world fails them. The relationship attains somewhat of an equilibrium as the daughter grows up. She seemed to like that.

And this morning I saw these beautiful words:

And I wondered, is this how they will remember me? First love, first friend, first enemy, fragrance of life? Continue reading “Fragrance of life..” →

Quinceanera

As I held the soft, warm bundle that were you, my heart just filled with this overwhelming, melting, oozy feeling that I have never ever felt before. A feeling of intense love for your tiny being, a feeling of complete bewilderment that your perfect body grew in my own, a fierce desire to protect you from all the evil in the world – a combination of all these and many more. Oh, and relief too, when the neo natal doc pronounced you healthy. Even now, when we laugh together over a shared joke, I look at your crinkled eyes, your wide smile and all of a sudden, think back to the moment when I held you for the first time. I can still feel that moment of wonder when I realized I am a mother to this tiny being in my arms. I remember I turned to every single person in the delivery room as I held you gingerly, and thanked them profusely. I thanked them for giving me you, a little pink bundle of perfection.

You are fifteen today. Almost a woman. Yet sometimes, when I enter your room to wake you up for school or swimming practice, I see in your sleeping face the baby that your daddy and I brought home. I move your hair and plant a kiss on your cheeks. You smile a little, in your sleep. Perhaps, even in your state of blessed unconsciousness, you feel my love?

You were born on a Thursday, the day of Goddess Lakshmi according to the Hindu mythology – the goddess of wealth. As we brought you home from the hospital, the landlady of our apartment in Delhi, stopped me to see your face as she thrust in your tiny hands an envelope full of money. She said, ‘Lakshmi has come to you on a Thursday!’ Your dad and I laughed.

Your dad boasted while you were still nestled within my body that he is an expert in babies, coming from a family of six siblings. I, being an only child, often expressed doubts about my abilities to keep a baby alive. I admitted I was clueless and all the books I read provided only theory. Your dad said, ‘Don’t worry, I know everything about changing diapers, bathing new borns. I will teach you!’ I, having never even seen or held a new born, believed him.

Then came the time to bathe you, for the first time. I handed you over to him and sat nervously watching. His hands were shaking and you were slippery. It was clear he did not know what to do with you, despite his bravado 🙂 . I almost died a thousand deaths in those few minutes in the fear that he will drop you. After five minutes, I could not bear the agony any longer, I took you back, ‘I can do this. I will do this!’ He handed you back and I cleaned you – fearlessly. As I look back, I realize motherhood came to me naturally. Taking care of you became my second nature, I did it with ease. Your daddy was of course, a huge help.

Your daddy and I decided to be with each other for many reasons, we discovered we completed each other in many ways. You, my dear girl, brought even more joy in our lives, than we thought was even possible. I have so many happy memories of the two of us sitting around you and watching you for hours, laughing over your facial gesture, gently sliding our finger into your closely fisted little fingers, tickling your tiny little toes and marveling over your belly laughs. I still can hear it!

We suffered from the agonies that all first time parents suffer from. We analyzed every cry, we tiptoed to your room when you were sleeping to make sure you breathed. We debated and read everything we could lay our hands on whether to lay you on your back, on your tummy or on your side when you slept. We asked innumerable questions to veteran parents and got patronizing and indulgent smiles. We proudly held you out for people to admire (you were really a very cute baby) and I frowned inwardly when people wanted to hold you. I antagonized a few family members by asking them to sanitize their hands before holding you. I really didn’t care what they thought. Your safety from germs was my primary concern.

You grew like a sunflower nourished by all the love not only from your parents, but your grand parents, uncles, aunts, neighbors, friends and teachers. People near and far loved you dearly and enriched your life with their happy presence. And you enriched theirs with your baby talk, toothless smiles, curly haired cuteness.

You made us parents for the first time. We learnt to be a parent by making mistakes with you. We learnt to create boundaries, we learnt when to give in, when to stand our grounds.

At fifteen, the worries remain for us. The reasons have changed. The overwhelming love that we feel for you for just being YOU remains, sometimes due to the conflicts that love is perhaps not as evident to you. But that first overwhelming intense love that we felt when we first held you follows you around faithfully. It will always follow you as long as we live. We do not sometimes, and may not see eye to eye always, but the love for you is permanent.

I want you to grow up and soar high with that knowledge. On your birthday, and for ever, do know please that you are intensely loved and lovingly cherished. I hope on your birthday, you will take a few moments to feel the love that surrounds you, make it a part of your essence and then when you go out to the world, spread the love on. We all know the world desperately needs it.

Happy birthday, my love, my dear, dear girl. Spread your wing, you will always have our love to fall back upon, if you so need, as your safety net.

The heart picks up…

I woke up to gentle nudges from my mother.

‘Uthe por. Khela shuru hobe, dekhbi na? (Wake up, the game is going to start. Won’t you watch it?)

I used to wake up, rub my eyes and turn my attention to the already blaring TV set. A football match between two countries was set to begin in a World Cup tournament. It was perhaps 2 or 3 in the morning, and most likely I had school the next day. Yet, she woke me up. Yet, she let me watch. When my father chided about school and health, she said, ‘There will always be school, but Football World Cup comes around every four years!’ I have seen very few football enthusiasts like my mother and thankfully, she has passed on her zeal for the game to me. I learnt the rules of offside, the different positions of footballers and other nuances of the game from her. Football, for me, is so much more than just a game. It is the companionship of my mother and sometimes father, sipping cups of tea in the middle of week night and watching athletes fight it out over the possession of a ball on the field. It is the resounding GOAAAAAAAAL erupting in the neighborhood at the dark hours of night when a foreign team scored (India never had a team to field in the global arena and still does not). It is the collective joy of our favored team’s win. It is the combined sadness of an entire community when our favorite team lost. Football was my first means to connect with the world without quite being aware of it. It certainly was a means to bond with my football crazy city of Kolkata.

I grew up in those dark days of no internet and no cable. Our entertainments were limited to newspapers, magazines, and the limited shows that Doordarshan provided on television. But those were enough to fire up our fervor for football. After watching an early morning football game we would go to school and analyze each shot, each miss, each corner, each penalty. We would defend our favorite soccer player and berate the opponents. We read up the sports pages and spouted statistics to impress. During lunch and recess, we would take a temporary break from playing basketball and kick around a soccer ball pretending to be Zico or Zidane. We would talk of nothing else. What else was there to talk about when the World cup was being fought over in the global arena? We lived in football haze. And how we loved that. We would get home, finish our evening chores, get to bed and set the alarm for the next game. My mother, I remember, watched the game and cooked the next day’s meal before dawn so she could rest the following day. This became our routine for the entire month. We lived during the night and drooped during the day. We were football owls.

The road side dadas (local neighborhood boys) hung the flags of their respective teams by the roadside and set up shrines to their football teams complete with garlanded photographs of the footballers. Our paara (neighborhood) donned the yellow and green of Brazil. Our next paara sported blue and white of Argentina. There were trash talks galore:

‘Ja, ja neche neche goal debo toder!’ (Get lost, we will dance into your goals!)

‘Dekhe nebo, dekhe nebo toder!’ (We shall see!)

All good-natured, all in good humor. But these built up the ambiance and that whole month of the tournament was nothing like ordinary times. Most of my friends, family, acquaintances were caught up in football fever. Our schedules, lives, homework, jobs rotated around the schedules of our favorite teams. In public buses and trains complete strangers either bonded over Bebeto’s crib dance or exchanged heated words over Maradona’s controversial goal. There was either hate or love in my world, there was very little indifference. You were either a friend or a foe. There was nothing in between. There must have been folks who did not care for our frenzy. For us, they simply faded into oblivion – for that month. And after the Final game was played and the after the Champion team lifted the trophy, we walked around for a few days in a daze, lost, dejected and unsure of what to say when football talk died down. Commuters looked forlornly out of the windows in silence and snapped at fellow commuters, we picked up the basketball again in school, we lovingly looked at our scrapbooks full of pictures and statistics of the World Cup tournament till we put them away and forgot about them, our mothers became the dragon ladies, stickler for rules and disciplines. And life, for a while, lost its color. Till the next craze – local football, Wimbledon, cricket whatever. And the fan frenzy returned with a vengeance.

I am a middle aged woman now as Soccer world cup 2014 gets underway, living in a country where soccer is not a religion. I am a chauffeur, chef, educator, counselor, disciplinarian, hugs giver – or in one word, a mother. I don’t have enough time to indulge in football frenzy anymore. Yet, I can’t seem to help it. I have the schedule posted on my refrigerator wall, I have the games highlighted, I have time set aside. And thanks to Facebook, I get to watch the game with my fellow enthusiasts who are scattered all over the world. We discuss the game, we berate teams, we trash talk, we laugh together and we plan which games to watch together virtually. It is not the same as watching it with my mother in the middle of night and with the entire neighborhood, but it works quite well.

I surprise my new friends with my soccer zeal. Do you even know anything about the footballers in the Brazil team that you are cheering for, they ask! I do not know a thing! I do not have any statistics or any information on the players of Brazil memorized anymore, but does that really matter? The support for my team is not dependent on any of that. I say Brazil will win simply because I believe. Yes, they were the world champions five times, yes they play amazingly beautiful football but most importantly the faith comes straight from the heart. The heart does not care for numbers or reason. It just remembers the passion of the past, the moments that I have lived during past Football World Cups and it simply picks up from there.

And non soccer enthusiasts? I love you deeply, I really do but you simply do NOT exist for me till July 13th 2014. I hope you don’t mind. It is not personal. 🙂

A woman and a mother too.

My mother at an event giving her first public speech ever.

That is my mother’s picture that you see up there. My mother, who just the other day said to me, ‘Nijer jonye to anekdin bachlam. Ebar ektu anyer jonye bachi!’

(I have lived for myself for a very long time, now I want to live for others)!

My mother was the extroverted extension of me while I was growing up. I was a quiet shadow behind my gregarious, fun loving mother. As I look back, I realize we were just that – an extension of each other. I did not know where she ended and I began, till I started branching out to become my own person. Since I was so intricately woven into her being while growing up, I did not consider her as a woman in her own right. She was my mother and that was the whole of her. The perception was selfish and yet that perception arose from a blind love too. Only when I became a woman and looked at my mother from the perspective of a fellow woman did I see the complete portrait of her. Not just the unidimensional one of a mother but also the little girl, the young woman, the young bride, the rebel, the survivor, the fighter, the whole entity of who she was and who she has become. Her journey, if you will, as a woman.

She fought for her right in the patriarchal family that she was born to right from the start. Fiercely competitive, she fought for her place with her brothers and boy cousins and strangely enough, she got it too. Stories of her spunk and competitiveness have been told and retold by her peers and elders with indulgent laughter. I have heard so many stories beginning with, ‘Tor ma….bapre, koto golp.’ (Your mother….oh dear, so many stories..)!

As a young woman in early seventies when women’s beauty was measured by the length and width of their hair, she went to a salon and cut it all into a fashionable page boy cut. Her society, family and friends were aghast. When covering a woman’s arms was the norm, she went and fashioned sleeveless blouses. There was talk. Married at 19 and a mother at 20, she did not have a chance to finish her graduation, so she went back and finished it when her child was 6 years old. I remember the celebration. When leaving your child and going out to work was frowned upon, she went and got a job. Almost everyday she came home with a book for me, so I was happy as a clam, waiting for her and a book at the end of the day. When women thought husband and hearth were the purpose of their lives, she declared loudly she did not like cooking and cleaning. Life has to be more than just that for a woman. She devoted her time to reading and on her child instead – reading Bangla literature to me, telling me stories that I still remember, reading poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, Sukumar Roy, relentlessly helping with whatever I needed help with. She fought with everyone and provided the best education that she could for her only child going beyond the family’s means. And she told me again and again that I was no less than a boy no matter what society wanted me to believe.

In her personal life, she always tried to break the glass ceiling by pushing a little more. She will perhaps be the first to admit that she made mistakes along the way. But she did not let that stop her from following her heart or taking chances while always choosing the best for me. Now that I look back, she truly lived for me, and then for a while, through me. When I went to college, the dynamics changed and she became an extension of me.

The woman who wanted to do things differently could not contain herself in her retired life. When I set her free, she soared. Yes, I set her free from my dependance, need and my responsibility. She and some like minded friends opened an organization to help the unfortunate men, women and children. I was uncertain about this venture but as she grew I looked at her with utter amazement and then pride. The picture above is from one of the events that her organization organized in Hridoypur Pronobananda Kanya ashram – a school for orphans. When I skyped with her later she said, ‘I was so nervous talking in front of all those people. I have never done it before.’

My father said, with a proud gleam in his eyes, ‘Your mother was very good!’

Life is a journey, I hear. Some rough terrains, some smooth sailing, some uphill battles, some downhill glides. Towards the end of our journey some of us get bogged down by the stress of it all, some of us choose to sit and rest and look back satisfied at the path they traversed, while some get a second wind, take flight and soar high. They finally get to spread their wings after all the responsibilities are done. The shackles that they sometimes willingly and sometimes unwillingly tie to their feet fall free with a resounding, joyful clang. My mother got the second wind. She is flying.

I look up to her flying high and unmindfully hug the shackles that tether me to the ground now. The shackles that I love more than my life. I smile upon them as I turn my face skyward. I say to myself, ‘One day I will learn to fly. One day my time too will come. One day I will grow up just like my mother!’

Happy Mother’s Day, Ma.

The indignity of it all.

Disclaimer: This blog has some gross stuff. If you are squeamish about doggy doo doo, please stop reading now 🙂 !

If not, here is a story:

‘Bring a urine sample and a fecal sample when you bring Sage for his annual check up. And collect the first urine in the morning, that gives us the best information about his kidney functions.’ The vet tech informed me as she gave me an appointment for Sage’s annual vaccinations and well check.

‘Ummm, urine sample?’ I gulped nervously.

‘Yes, our records show that he hasn’t had a urine culture done for the last three years! It is time for one!’ She said sternly! I could hear ‘you negligent doggie mother’ going through her head.

‘Ok, Ah, I will try!’ I was still squirming, feeling judged.

‘Just take one of your throw away plastic containers and hold it under him as he raises his leg to pee! You will be fine!’ She tried to be reassuring.

Poop, I wasn’t worried about. Don’t I pick up his poop everyday to keep our environment clean? Don’t Sean and I get into a poop counting competition – who collected more poops from our backyard? Yes, the fecal sample is a piece of cake! What? You don’t like that analogy? Well, should I say fecal sample is a walk in the park, then 🙂 ?

The only time I collected urine from Sage was when he was less than a year old. The vet’s office had given me a tray and asked me to hold it under him when he peed. I came home with some trepidation about the whole thing about collecting pee and felt irritated that I had to be the designated one to do this job – the mother, of course.

I remember the day being extremely windy. I remember Sage being exasperated with me and then decided it was a game I wanted to play with him. He kept running away and play bowing, ‘Catch me if you can!’ He was still a puppy and hadn’t acquired the dignified disposition that he has now. I had led myself to believe I had trained Sage to do his business on command. On shivering, cold nights, I held on to his leash and said, ‘Hurry up!’ When he did his stuff, I gave him a treat. He is an extremely smart dog, he caught on quickly. The day of urine collection, ‘hurry up’ command failed. Long story short, I got the urine sample somehow. I remember the urine blowing in the wind and me blowing with it. Anyway, the deed was done. I ran it to the vet’s office, paid a bunch of money to get the urine tested. Sage was proclaimed disease/germs free and I felt the money and the effort was well worth it.

I do not know how I managed to dodge the urine check up for the last couple of years. I probably said I won’t pay for it, the accusing eyes of the vet be damned. This time however, the vet tech’s serious accusatory tone was my undoing. Also Sage is 4 years old, still young but getting up there. I acquiesced.

The appointment was at 9:30 in the morning. I did not sleep well the night before devising different strategies for collecting pee. When morning dawned, I was loath to get up because of the unpleasant task that lay ahead.

Here I must give you a brief description of Sage. A friend described him aptly – he is that kind of dog who gives you the feeling that he will don his bifocals and read the Sunday New York Times. He is dignified and Sagely. He never grabs a treat from your hands, but takes it between his teeth daintily. He stares down his food but doesn’t eat it unless he hears the magic word ‘ok’. He doesn’t break his ‘stay’ command (unless given by Ryan) till we say Ok. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. His wild side comes out while playing with his 8 year old human brother (who, he considers a fellow puppy), when people come to the house, he goes overboard showing his love and errrr….when he discovers fox poop. He rolls in it! Other than these indiscretions, Sage is very dignified. And so am I.

So a dignified dog and a dignified woman were on a mission – to wrestle some pee out of the dog and collect it in a container.

I put him on a leash and took him out at 7:30. Hurry up Sage! Sage knew something was up since I had a container in my hand and a leashed walk this early was highly unusual. The usual routine is a grumpy woman opening the back door for him, first thing in the morning. He wasn’t going to make it easy for me. Of course!!! He sniffed and sniffed and my hopes leaped. Maybe now, may be now! Now???? After 10 minutes, I gave up, came back in to yell at Ryan to get ready for school. Sage looked at me with his beautiful, chocolate drop eyes, ‘What is wrong with you, today???’

I didn’t wait for Ryan to get on the bus, like I usually do. I gave him a kiss, said goodbye and took Sage for a walk, armed with the container, a ziplock bag and a big plastic bag to hold it all. My focus was only on the dog, or rather on his back legs! When would they rise, when would I hold the container? It rose in a while! I jumped ahead and put the container under him! The leg dropped. I had collected a single drop! Literally, a single drop! On top of that I got a look from Sage which said, ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOINNNNNGGGGAAAA???’

You’ve got to be kidding me!!

I realized then as I straightened up and looked around me in frustration, that each driveway had children and their moms standing, waiting for the elementary school bus. I had started walking too early. And they were staring at me, at my container and my baffled dog.

I was too determined to turn around. I wanted the job done. The dignified me wanted to dig a hole and hide in it but the ‘let’s get this done’ me wanted to get this DONE once and for all. I plodded on. Sage, finally lifted his leg at his favorite fire hydrant and let out a stream. Elated, I crouched down and held the container, ignoring the warm spray on my hands. And then he dropped his leg. And his leg hit the container held in my hand. And the container dropped from my hand! I looked in horror as the precious yellow liquid stained the white snow!

Now, I am not the one the one to curse. But once in a while, I reach my limit. This was my limit!

SHHHIIIT!!! I semi-yelled.

And then I heard a whisper, ‘What is she doing, Mommy?’

Another whisper, ‘I don’t know honey! Shhhhh….!’

I did not look. I knew it was one of the little kids waiting for the bus. I pulled down the brim of my baseball cap with my unpolluted hand and walked on without looking back.

Finally, Sage did do his business. I did get adequate sample. Sage could not figure out my erratic behavior and I did not explain.

We went to the appointment armed with our booty. Sage shivered and asked me repeatedly to take him home. He got 4 shots, lots of love, bunch of treats and a clean bill of health. All’s well that ends well. I will not do this urine test for him for the next three years. He’d better stay healthy!

Oh, the indignity of it all!!! But the clean bill of health makes the pee collecting effort, somewhat, worth it.

Thou shalt not judge….or in my case, thou shalt not presume!

I go to an inexpensive hair cutting salon for primarily two reasons. I can not justify spending a bunch of money on a hair cut, it is just not that important to me, and secondly, the beautiful, decked up stylists intimidate me. I like this particular chain of hair cutting salons where the stylists come primarily from South East Asia. I have been going there for the last 8 years. While I do have my favorite, I can’t always make an appointment with her due to our mutual schedule conflicts. When I get into her appointment book, I feel a joy comparable to winning a lottery. The joy, not because I will come back with a Vogue’s front cover worthy hair cut but simply because I love talking to this gentle, unassuming, kind lady from Vietnam. She always remembers my children’s name, their grades, she inquires about Sean. I like to know about her aging mother, her only son’s summer internship, her husband’s failing health. We are not friends, yet we share some meaningful slices of our lives with each other as she gives shape to my hair. I cherish that.

The times I don’t get her, we nod to each other conspiratorily as she looks up from whose hair she is styling and I follow the stylist I got that day. Every stylist I get, I get a story as well, a quick peek into another individual’s life, that they willingly share. I hear about a promising footballer’s high school football team, as his mother cuts my hair. I hear the hidden pride in the mother’s voice as she tells me he is a scholar athlete. We commiserate on parenting woes and both agree it is the toughest job on earth. I congratulate her on raising a great young man. Another stylist complains to me her husband doesn’t support her in teaching her biracial child her language – Spanish. She is from Colombia married to an American. A different stylish calls me ‘honey poo’ and ‘sweetie pie’ as I try hard not to stare at her HUGE false eyelashes. They don’t always give me great hair cuts, but I feel at home with them. And that comfort, to me, is important.

On a Saturday morning, I went to get a hair cut and found the place teeming with customers. As I waited, I played the guessing game, which stylist will I get that day. I knew all of them except one. She was elderly, somewhat stooped with age, frail with thick glasses, of South East Asian descent. She was at the front of the store struggling to understand the workings of the computer as she tried to take payment from her customer. The customer, a middle aged woman, was obviously in a hurry to be on her way, as she made certain gestures of impatience and mumbled under her breath, ‘oh dear Lord!’ The elderly woman was trying all sorts of keys and was getting increasingly flustered as the impatience of her customer rose. The manager finally came to help and I discovered her grasp of English was seriously lacking.

As I said earlier, I am not discerning about who cuts my hair as long as they have a license, yet I found myself wishing that I don’t get the elderly lady. I had already judged her seeing her lack of computer skills, her flustered demeanor, lack of confidence that I perceived. I got her, though.

‘Next!’ She said.

As I followed her to the chair, I thought to myself, so I will go home with a bad haircut. No big deal, my hair grows fast. It will be fine in 2 weeks.

‘Shampoo?’ She asked.

As she shampooed my hair, I started to relax under her gentle, yet firm massaging of my head. And like a predictable fairy tale ending,she gave me the best cut that I have ever had in that place! She didn’t speak much English, but that has never deterred me from conversing with an individual. In the course of 20-25 minutes, she not only gave me a fantastic hair cut, she also imparted life lessons like the purpose of life, selflessness, needs versus wants and that much sought after happiness that can be found in simple things. She said she had been a hair stylist all her life in reputed salons. But she doesn’t do it anymore because now she has a little grandson who needs her. Her daughter doesn’t earn enough to pay for childcare, so she gave up her career to care for her grandchild. She said there is no end to our wants and needs, and yes she needs money, yet she is not ready to trade the joy of watching her grandson over dollars. She is ready to go without. She opted for happiness at this point in her life. She takes her grandson to free library classes and playgrounds. She pushes him on swings and chases butterflies, she pets puppies with him and goes to pet stores to look at kittens, she cooks his meals and puts him down for naps. And she tells him stories. Life couldn’t be better. I saw her smiling through the mirror as she talked and I smiled with her.

‘Looks like you have a sweet young man to keep you company!’ I said.

‘Oh! He sweet! You see picture?’ She laughed with a young girl’s trill.

‘Yes please!’ I said.

She stopped cutting my hair midway, got out a picture of a chubby little 2 year old from her wallet and handed it to me. I cooed over it and the proud grandmother stood tall in her diminutive frame, smiling the sweetest smile.

She resumed her work, and I silently chastised myself for presuming. I strive not to judge, yet I fail.

As she swung away the protective cloth from my body she asked me,

‘You like?’

She made me look good, very good.

‘I don’t like it. I love it! Thank you. May I have your card?’ I asked.

She handed me her card with a smile. She works just one day a week, when her daughter is home to take care of her grandson. I left a large tip, not just for the hair cut but for the life lessons as well. And, perhaps, atonement?

Despite..

Kolkata comes back in my blogs recurrently. I go to Kolkata in my mind, to roost perhaps, when my reality gets too overwhelming. Writing about Kolkata, thinking about my time there, gives me a strange sense of calm. Quite ironic really, considering the controlled chaos that Kolkata is.

Whenever I go back home, I look for continuity. I search for the city I left behind. The fast changing face of the city baffles me mostly. Like a typical Non Resident Indian, I lament the loss of the city’s uniqueness and despise the generic look of it with gated communities, huge, impersonal, air-conditioned malls, McDonald’s golden arches and KFC’s red and white General’s face, coffee shops in every nook and cranny. Kolkatans snort at such romanticism. It is easy for you to romanticize, you don’t have to deal with the daily inconveniences, they say. And they are right. No city stays frozen in time. They develop, they move up and move on.

My yearning for my old Kolkata remains, though. I desperately seek out the old city and find it still hidden beneath. I find the iron filigreed balconies in old mildewed buildings that have escaped the real estate developer’s greed (It is a matter of time). The conference of crows on the antenna of our neighbor’s terrace, the dome of the Science city as I sip my afternoon tea on the terrace of our building and look towards the horizon, the lonesome coconut tree that reminds me how green Kolkata used to be, the little boy completely immersed in flying his kite, the intense cricket match on the street in front of my house, the woman of the house stretching out her laundry on the laundry line on her terrace, Ram Krishna Mission’s dome standing tall in its white splendor and the smiles that envelope me in its warmth as I step off the taxi with my luggage ‘Didi, kotodin thakbe?’ (How long will you stay, big sister?)

I found such continuity in the general demeanor and even the physical frame of the conductors of public buses. The customer service is still as I remember – impersonal, very effective, functional and rough around the edges. The physical appearances seem the same – lanky, young and somewhat reckless. My main means of transport, when I go back, are the rickety mini buses, public buses and auto rickshaws. I observe, with amusement, as the conductors continue to do the ‘phraaaaak’ sound with the tickets in their hand, reminding the passengers, with that sound, and their voice ‘Ticket, ticket!’ The bus drivers still drive recklessly, overtaking the bus in front to get more passengers.

One tradition continues, I discovered. The conductors continue to slap the side of the bus twice as the bus approaches a stop helter skelter, and yell, ‘Ekdom bendhe debe. Ladies, baccha ache!’ (Come to a complete stop, there are ladies and children who will get off)! Men don’t get the special treatment. As a fiery feminist in my young days, this discrimination made my blood boil. But now, this gesture brings a smile to my face. I smile because I have learned to pick my battles and also perhaps, I find another facet of Kolkata that remains unchanged.

I remember the tight grasp of my young mother’s hand, as she unsteadily made her way to the door of a moving bus with me in tow, shouting to the young conductor, ‘Bhai ekdom bendhe dao, baccha ache!’ (Brother, bring the bus to a complete stop, I have a child)! I did the same with my children. I held Ryan’s hand tightly and made sure Sahana held on, as I made my demand to the conductor, ‘Ekdom bendhe dao, baccha ache!’ The reply was standard as well, ‘Haa didi, ashun!’ (Yes sister, come) !

It was raining as we made our way back home from the bus stop. Monsoon in Kolkata is beautiful to watch from a high rise building and terrible to endure if one is on the road. As we carefully avoided the dirty water, potholes, garbage on the streets and rushing traffic, Sahana touched my arm gently and said, ‘This city is so full of love, Ma!’ I smiled in the fading light of the cloud covered sun. ‘Where did you find the love?’ I asked.

‘Did you see how the conductor cared? He brought the bus to a complete stop for us and even helped Ryan get down by holding his hand!’ She said.

Despite the gloom, I found my sun. And despite the squalor, Sahana found love.

The messenger ladybug.

Host of memories came crashing down by an inconsequential ladybug. As I turned on the ignition of my car, harried and stressed and late for work, a lady bug landed on the windshield with a light plop. And it brought back memories of a curly haired little five year old girl squatting on the driveway, brows furrowed in fierce concentration, counting the dots on a ladybug.

My daughter was born in India and was raised by not only her parents, but by a village. Her universe consisted of parents, grandparents, a plethora of uncles and aunts, little friends who grew up with her, adopted grandparents (our landlords), adopted uncles and aunts (our friends in the Indian city where we lived), domestic help, who was an integral part of the family. Her life was enriched by the love and nurturing of all – family by blood and family by association and friendship. For the first five years of her life, it was a party every day. Playdates, frolic in the parks with little friends, visits to Kolkata whenever opportunity arose, travels to exotic places with mom and dad. And peacocks and lady bugs. We had three resident peacocks in the neighborhood, who sometimes came to visit us in our balcony. When Sahana, Sean and I went for our walks in the neighborhood, Sean made horrible peacock noises, much to the chagrin and embarrassment of his wife and amusement of his toddler. He expected to get a response back from the peacocks, but his peacock call wasn’t authentic enough and he never heard back from them. The aunties and uncles who walked around our neighborhood always chuckled at the white man’s perseverance.

And there were lady bugs galore. Ladybugs or ladybirds, was a huge topic of debate between me, the native of a former British colony and my husband, an American, the pollutant of Queen’s English. The ladybugs/birds featured a lot in the children’s play. They counted them, counted the dots on them, let them crawl on their hands and laughed at the sensation. Despite the usual sicknesses, Sahana had a fulfilling and happy time. She thrived in the love.

Then we moved. We came to a new country, a new state, a new home and to loneliness. Before we built a new circle of family and friends around us, that is exactly what we came to – loneliness. From the constant buzz of family, we moved to the thrum of crickets outside our suburban home. During this time, one day, I saw little Sahana crouching down and looking at a solitary lady bug in the driveway of our new house.

‘What are you doing, baby?’ I asked as I lowered my heavily pregnant body next to my little girl.

‘Mama, look!!! A ladybug!!! Mama, do you think this lady bug has come all the way from our neighborhood in India to see how I am doing? Do you think it missed me? Now that it has seen me, will it fly back to Anushree and Rohan and tell them about me!’

As I write this today, eight years later, my eyes tear up at the intensity of her homesickness she must have felt then. That was the magical age of unending possibilities and ‘anything can happen’s! I kept the magic alive and said,

‘That is exactly what the ladybug will do, honey! It will take your news back to your friends!’

She turned her attention back to the ladybug and said,

‘Ok, go tell Anu and Rohan, I miss them. And tell the other ladybugs, I miss them too!’

With that she walked away with a stick in her hand to explore other treasures.

She doesn’t look for ladybugs anymore. She deals with the complicated world of high school, she reads “To kill a Mocking bird” and writes papers on “Female infanticide in developing nations”. She is slowly becoming a thoughtful, mature woman. Dreams have changed, magic is dealt with skepticism. But since I am the treasurer of HER childhood memories, I chronicle this faithfully, in my heart and in this post. I do this for her, and perhaps, more for me. Who knows one day, when she turns back, she will look for this little nugget of gold. A forgotten moment, yet etched forever in her mother’s memory.