Experiences

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....

They announced on TV that it was going to be a white Thanksgiving. They showed impressive satellite photographs with an ominous haze over the Midwest. It reportedly snowed in other parts of Illinois and Ohio, and even in Boston, but here in Peoria, it was zilch, nada, ille. It rained all day on Wednesday though—icy, pissing rain with the wind-chill driving the subzero temps even down. I sat up half the night on the eve of Thanksgiving, not wanting to miss the first snow of the season and the first snow of my life. I went to bed a disappointed woman and stayed in it most of Thanksgiving as a protest against the unsporting weather. But little did it care. On Friday, I realized to my chagrin how deceptive the bright sunlight was. The six-minute walk to the bus transit center almost froze me to death. And when I struck out like a dude in the evening to capture the winter sunset, it took mechanical devices to get my numb fingers unstuck from the camera and straighten them. Satu...

I sit down heavily on the tree stump and reach into my satchel for the bottle of water. Almost empty—gosh, how long have I been walking? I look at my watch—12:00 noon. It can’t be! I started the trail at noon! It was one of those mornings—I had gotten up late, missed the bus I was supposed to catch and had reached the Nature Trail center much later than I had planned. I remove my watch from my wrist and examine it—obviously, my brand new Swatch “Sweet Sarong” had stopped around the time I started the trail. Strange! I give it a final futile shake and wear it back. I look around. Where am I? I could see that I had climbed higher up on the hill. The forest is considerably denser than the trail below. It is definitely chillier and gloomier here. I shiver and pull my jacket around myself tightly, as a strong gust of wind rustle the trees and shower fall leaves all around me. What trail am I on? I pull out the map. I open it and grin sardonically. I am extremely directionally cha...

Did you hear about ero-tourism? It isn’t as bad as it sounds. Its etymological root is a combination of the Greek god of love, Eros and tourism – the idea is to discover love while traveling. It’s a new fad in experimental tourism, advocated by Joel Henry. It’s all about two people going to a destination separately and using their love/knowledge of the other as a GPS to find each other. I discovered this concept in an in-flight magazine and was thoroughly excited by it (oops, pun unintended!). And last weekend, I synthesized the concept and pushed it to a new level. My travel plan went something like this: Destination: Chicago Knowledge of city: Almost none Bio-compass: Non-existent Ability to read maps: Laughable Travel companion: A new friend Plan: Explore Budget: Shoestring Well, it was a thrilling experience, to say the least. We randomly got down from the CTA train somewhere in downtown and ran into a Halloween Day parade, complete with several bands, hundre...

Prettiness’ got nothing to do about it, we discovered. It’s about the desperation you show to get on to the said bus and your willingness to dash to the middle of the road and stand intrepidly on its way. But I am getting ahead of chronology here. It all starts with the way Peoria has been showing off to a pretty girl called Monjima. There’s no other way to describe it. I mean, how often do you walk into the neighborhood mall and into approximately 10 live tigers, from the Siberian feline to the pitch-black puma? How often do you run into an Irish festival, complete with Guinness and folk music, when you are just out on a walk? How often do you saunter at 10 pm at night on the main street of Peoria and encounter five people holding up placards decrying the war and lustily asking to get the troops back home? Seriously—10 pm in the night? Don’t even get me started on the weather—it’s been unrelentingly hovering in the 90s the past three months; now that Monjima is here, it’s at mild seve...