Experiences

How relevant can a play that was first staged in 458 BC and won a goat as a prize in the Festival of Dionysius be to our lives now? I was cynical. Damn it, the hole burnt by the 75 USD I wasted on that completely puerile, award-winning musical on Broadway with a far shorter history still smoked in my purse. But it was a beautiful day outside – sunny and warm after 10 days of gloomy, cold, and wet weather. The play was happening practically next door and was priced at an affordable 14 USD. I’d never watched a Greek tragedy in my life and I had promised Geetha that I would come back and bore him with it. So off I went to watch what I thought was an ambitious presentation of the entire trilogy of Oresteia by Aeschylus by the Bradley University Theater group. Of course I had my reservations: I wondered how were they going to make me care about a story so bloody and unrelatable – hell, the plot outline sounded like a handbook on “How to kill your family and come up with convincin

Sunday, 10:00 am, New Jersey : It was a 36-month old boy, an 18-month old girl, a room full of lego blocks, and I. We built a car, an unbalanced bird, and an abstract building and transferred a basket-full of toys into a small box. I happened to look out of the room—the girl’s mom, who had entrusted me with the kid while she had gone to have a bath, had finished and was sitting in the living room browsing through a magazine. I think she was testing how far I’ll go without feeling suckered. Sunday, 2:30 pm, New York Penn Station : I was at the metro card vending machine when I discovered that I had lost about 80 USD of cash to some kleptomaniac. Damn! Damn! Damn! Sunday, 3:30 pm, West 49th : Could a hotel room be any smaller? Hell, it was so small that they had a custom midget iron table, no dresser, and a chair, which could be reached only by rolling across the bed. But what a location! Times Square was just two minutes walk away and it was next door to a Broadway theater. Sunday, 8:30

The Chihuahua from the house across the street looked picturesque, if such a thing was possible. But then, anybody peering around cherry red drapes and out of a window of a pastel-colored Victorian-style house overlooking the bay on Mason Street in San Francisco had an unfair advantage in the looks department. I returned its curious gaze forlornly, for I was heartbroken. I had known that summer romances never lasted, but this one had been all too short. It had blazed with sun and passion for four unforgettable days and now it was time to say goodbye. I sighed and perched myself uncomfortably on the peculiarly narrow swivel seat in the bus shelter. A cable car lumbered by. The operator recognized me and waved. I grinned at him, feeling like the butt of a cosmic joke. Someone out there had known that I was a pushover when it came to random whimsical behavior and had woven up an elaborate web of seduction. How else can one explain the curious incident of the Singing Chinese Lady? I

This July 4th weekend, kids ruled Chicago. I surrende r it to the little five-year old guy at the dolphin amphitheater at Shedd aquarium, who casually turned, encountered this unbearably cool thing called a prosthetic leg belonging to the cheerful man sitting behind him, and proceeded to spend the next five minutes in wide-eyed, fascinated wonder. His dad looked uncomfortable and embarrassed, but not my little champ. He was trying to decide whether the man possessing a half-metal, half-plastic leg was a super hero. I genuflect before the three-year old girl at the Navy Pier bus terminus who stood her ground against the press of humanity trying to get into the CTA # 66 after July 4th fireworks. There were at least a million people on Navy Pier that day and at least 25% of them lined up to get into the popular # 66. It was an elbow-to-elbow, cheek-by-jowl, survival-of-the-fittest run to the bus. “Hey! Excuse me!” my Joan of Arc protested from somewhere in the region below our collec

It was A’s birthday. 30th birthday, we were misled to believe. We were eager to admit another brother into the 30’s club—damn those pesky 20’s! L arranged for a surprise party. She’s good at organizing such things—she’s young, energetic and bored. Plans were made: dinner at TGIF and bowling/pubbing later. We decided not to go dancing—mainly because we were so regular at the one decent club that Peoria boasts that the big, burly, and scary bouncer recognizes us and chats to us about the weather instead of giving us the mean, you-are-suspect-even if proven otherwise look. L was in charge of logistics. She will bring a clueless A, F will bring his family, D will pick me up, and V will act fast and loose until the last minute. D was stuck with chauffeur duty because the poor man was working late that day. I like D—he’s 40, so that there is no generation gap yawning between us like with those irritating 20-somethings; he’s got an acerbic wit; and he can do a mean Indian-accent impr

Today, I collected some pearls. Soft, velvety, gleaming white little pearls. I watched them spill on to my palm and run off my fingertips. A sob and a catch… “Are you crying?” “Yes I am. Didn’t you call because you knew I would?” Did I? My mind went back to an evening in Hyderabad, 15 years ago. My cousin had been struggling with a bad cold and homework. She was so cranky that she had picked up a pointless fight with her mother. My aunt had gently sent her to bed. I watched another warm pearl land on my palm. My cousin was 12 years old at that time. What do I do with you? Perhaps a warm glass of milk and a cozy tuck in to bed are what you also need tonight. Where is your mother? I carefully picked up all the pearls from the ground and put them in the glass jar I kept. My jar of little treasures was fast getting full. Oh look at that pink Ruby there. “Please, please don’t call anybody! I’ll handle it! Please don’t call! Then everything will get into a tizzy! I’ll do anything—I’ll get na

Hammering it in Circa 1987; Thiruvananthapuram A sunny late afternoon I was at school. To be more precise, I was on a stool, in my classroom, hammering in a banner, at school. A sexagenarian schoolmaster stopped short at this sight. “ Pattathi kuttiyalle (aren’t you a brahmin girl)?” he asked. “How come you are doing this?” My jaw dropped at this question. I was a 14-year old proto-feminist, struggling with Gandhian philosophy and passionate about Communism, but none of these had a bearing on my being so occupied that afternoon. I was working on the following uncomplicated logic: there was the banner, a few nails, a hammer, a stool, need for the banner to be aloft, no volunteers, and yours sincerely, able-bodied. Ergo. I suppose the master’s question could be rationalized—he was, after all, a provincial schoolmaster, on his post-retirement second stint, a representative of a crazy age that was on its kamikaze way of being irrelevant. It was just ironic that he was objec

The little neighborhood on the banks of a green river where I spent all my childhood was like a ghost town when I visited it a few years ago. The alleys were much narrower than I had remembered them, closing in, claustrophobic. The houses used to be much bigger in my childhood. Now they all seemed to have shrunk, aged. And I couldn’t find my friends. Not a single one. I sometimes wonder whether I had imagined it all. The big gang, hide-and-seek games in a cocoa grove, radio performances, ramparts of the ancient temple ruins, and lily ponds around school. “School? Oh I hated school—don’t have any pleasant memories,” said one gang member when I met her in Chennai briefly, 10 years ago. The Orkut community on my neighborhood has no familiar faces. Maybe I never existed there. Or maybe I was always a visitor, an amusing outsider. “Gosh, your Malayalam has such a strong Tamil accent! You’ll never get it right!” Being an outsider—oh, I do it well. “Do us a favor—don’t even att

The small bus shelter, filled to the rafters with people, stank of stale cigarette smoke and poor personal hygiene. Mira put one foot into it like the proverbial camel and shuddered. The driving snow stung her eyes like pins. She ducked behind the stained plexi-glass wall of the shelter. The notorious Midwestern wind found its insinuating way to her bones, cutting through the wall and her layers of warm clothing. It was a mean evening to be out on the street waiting for a recalcitrant bus. And peering through what could be spit stains—she remembered standing next to a disturbed teenager who was on a mission to draw spit graffiti on the shelter walls some days back. It had at least been a warmer day. She had been more fascinated by the boy’s sister—for wearing a spaghetti-strap top on a November afternoon from which her ample breasts were flowing out and for keeping up a normal conversation with the boy as he went, Spit! Spit! Spit! Mira did a discreet little jig to keep warm and

I mixed equal shares of eating, shopping, and travel and created the perfect holiday season. Starting with the Christmas potluck at office which had an enormous dessert table, literally creaking under the weight of calories it carried to the Shrimp Quesadia at Baja Fresh, it was one long eating fest. Followed closely by shopping frenzy – from Northwoods Mall, Peoria, to Jersey Garden Mall, it was easy to be carried away by the press of humanity and the lure of deals and blow up a lot of money. And by traveling to New York, I made up for missing Diwali this year. Here are some highlights. Silent Night at Wuthering Heights Powder Hills, Morris Plains, NJ, had one thing in abundance this holiday season – mood. Swirling mists, dark wooded slopes, still houses, and gloom all around. I saluted the imperative by nursing a dark mood an entire day. It had its moments too – I tried to climb up an iced slope, slipped, and slid all the way down, ignominiously and inexorably. Luckily, no witnesses.