LOCKED UP

. Bai Goanna’s only business is to see what I’m doing and report it to Sri Husband. It doesn’t matter that TMC’s flowers are blooming on posters stuck on school boards and public signages, that AAP candidates’ banners are on every lamppost on Chogm Road, that the BJP and Congress are in the same frenzy-competition as Goa Forward and others in the fray, that sewage enriched seawater has made kalwaahn (oysters) less readily available and less tasty, nor that a third tsunami of Covid is imminent. One thing that interests Bai Goanna and Sri Husband is to spy on what I’m writing. The conversation on the above matters went something like this: Bai Goanna, naively: ‘What happens to the election posters afterwards? Are they torn and thrown in the dustbin or left as they are, to uglify the neighbourhood? Or do they use the other, blank side? Or will they be hot-mixed into tar and concrete to resurface Chogm Road after the next monsoon?’ Sri Husband, cynically: ‘Who knows? Who cares? Nothing will change whether or not you ask questions, especially questions with no answers. Or questions whose answers are obvious.’ Me, not voicing my thoughts: ‘Good that they’re arguing between themselves. Now I can concentrate on my writing, bhivpachi garaz na that I will be disturbed.’ The invasion of my privacy is their focus on any given day, so this intra-quarreling with no involvement from me is a pleasant change from the regular routine when they gang up and pick on me. Talking of my regular routine, I get some well-earned solitude when I drive to and from work. No colleagues, no family, just ‘me time’. Which is why I like traffic jams. First gear driving for an hour gives privacy, with plenty of scope to practice ancient Indian meditation techniques. Breathe in, out; stomach in, out; leg stretched, change gear, change foot from pedal to pedal, accelerator to brake; chew steering-wheel to rid the soul of negative vibes. Collectively, a hundred drivers of four- and two-wheelers turn necks from side to side, sharing compulsory relaxation/stretching exercises whilst Patience rules supreme. Some find it stressful, but what the heck, we’re all in Goa ‘for susegaad’*, correct? Whether on vacation or work? (* ‘for susegaad’ is a term I learnt from a visitor, a second-home Goemkar, not a tourist. Like ‘Goanese’ and ‘Cal-ung-youtay’, this is a newbie in my lexicon.) What should take ten minutes from Sangolda to Delfino’s via Chogm Road sometimes takes an hour plus even in the afternoon, at an unsteady 10-20 kmph. It’s good practice for slowness enthusiasts, because the speed limit on Atal Setu is 30 kmph. I have learnt to stick to 29 kmph, to the irritation of other drivers, even though no one is forcing me, and I know that the cameras that I cross are for show. I’m law-abiding—trained by Sri Husband, you know that-- and speed-limits are not to be broken. Even the two-wheeling honeymooners that race alongside on that same bridge, maybe drunk, maybe not, laugh into my windscreen as they pass. But, just as I don’t mind broken beer bottles on Baga beach or the hordes that make sure the Drishti guards are justifying what they earn, I no longer mind people not wearing masks and coughing into my face. Was born and raised in this country, have lived in Goa for decades, so am perfectly aware that rules cannot be enforced or followed except by a low-IQ minority like self and family. Why get stressed when one day everyone must die, no? Whether or not you wear a mask/helmet you will die, no? Whether you dash across the road in between speeding cars opposite the mall at Porvorim or you plunge into the Arabian Sea at low tide when the guards are telling you not to, you know you’re doing it because it’s kismet, not regulations, that will decide when you will exit the planet, right? Same-same about vaxines. Sorry, vackseens. No, wagsinations. Auto-correct is blocked, oof! Sri Husband puts his fingers on the keys: v-a-c-c-i-n-e-s. ‘There,’ he sniggers. ‘Write on.’ I do. Why rules are made is a matter for debate. Example: schools have been shut. The guard at our gate gets chided if he allows anyone inside without permission and screening and a louder yelling if that anyone isn’t following ‘protocol’. So, he makes sure he does his job. Says Sri Husband: ‘If nostrils and lips are covered, you’re happy; cloth mask, paper mask, mosquito-net mask, even socks will do if not a hanky or dupatta. You don’t allow covering the mouth with the palm, though, only because the Rule says, ‘wear mask’.’ I tell him with quiet confidence: ‘We follow rules. We also make sure hands are rinsed with a sanitizer.’ Quips Sri Husband again: ‘The manufacture of the dispenser, the stand for the dispensing bottle, the liquid inside the bottle are new and profitable businesses. You don’t do your own quality control, you buy the cheapest sanitizer available, in bulk. Every shop-owner and auto-rickshaw driver does the same thing.’ I agree with Bai Goanna when she says: ‘Whether the liquid, for some reason blue in colour, disinfects anything I don’t know.’ We recommend all those who enter school to carry along their own soaps/sanitizers/napkins in case ours aren’t up to the mark. We don’t have the stamina to respond to people who ask a million questions whose answers we don’t have: ‘When will school reopen’ ‘When will classes start?’ ‘How long will this virus last?’ ‘When will the government allow us to send our children to school?’ ‘Will the exams be online or offline?’ Different voices, different languages, similar words. ‘When will Lockdown finish?’ the words inadvertently escape my lips as I stretch halfway through my typing. I regret it the very next instant, because a raging debate follows on whether we’ve been locked up or down, inside the house or outside the office, or are we locked at all (considering we’re in touch with the world via the internet). Bai Goanna says, ‘Other than the first time, when we made so without milk, sugar, fish, fruit and cooked what we could pluck off the plants in our compound, we really weren’t locked, were we?’ Sri Husband agrees with her: ‘Even through the first few weeks of Lockdown 2020, people walked towards their villages far, far away. The lockdown or lockup was for the mildly privileged. The very privileged were in and out of Goa, the not so privileged were journeying by foot to remote areas and we, the sandwiched sections of society paid for Netflix, Amazon Prime, and allied pastimes.’ Some put YouTube to good use, learnt baking/chess. Some painted/wrote. Those who were WFH (working from home. If you’re not familiar with this, that means you’re doing something differently valuable, like cooking, raising a child, taking care of a parent or have a valuable life-skill like plumbing, carpentry, sewing) realized that life is about upgrading skills. What we learnt forty years ago may hold good for some. Only for some. Those who feel ‘quality of life’ is gauged by smelling flowers, watching and filming sunsets, rearranging the furniture according to vaastu/feng shui, and posting old photos on Facebook are the privileged ones. Just one percent of our population can do that. If you are reading this, you’re in that top one percent. Even as I typed on, Sri Husband mumbled: ‘Those with the real issues of lack of incomes, serious squabbles on the domestic front, illnesses not connected with these mutating viruses that couldn’t be dealt with as they should, whose children have lost two valuable years of learning, they are ones locked up in their karma, Covid or no Covid.’ Grudgingly, I admit: ‘True, that.’

The Budget Month

April, start of the new financial year. I have no idea why it cannot coincide with the regular New Year. “You,” accused Shri Husband, “have no idea about many things.” I chose to ignore His Sweetship until I was through with the typing. A quick googling told me the reasons (for the financial year starting on 1 April, not why Shri Husband was his normal, irritable self). One said: ‘The income relies upon the estimation of the yields that are harvested in the period of February and March. Thus, two months of span give government idea whether the revenue is going to increase/decrease.’ But, the mystery remains unsolved, like that of evolution of mankind, because there are other theories. One, the Income-Tax Act came into force from April 1, 1962. Second, it might have been to prevent year end accounting and balance sheet, etc., preparation coinciding with Holiday season of Christmas and New Year. Remember, before computers and emails (seems unbelievable that we lived through paper times), lots of work had to be done with ink and mental arithmetic. Papers had to be punched and filed (that hasn’t changed, hard copies are still greatly valued). Importantly, the files or copies had to be dispatched to a wonderland called Head Office, which often was in England. After that, the comments were written and the documents returned to have responses to comments noted on the files which were re-dispatched by sea to the land of the Rani. By the time the accounting for the year was over, it was April of the following year. Nothing’s changed, really, we’re still going bang into the 31 March deadline year after year, never smoothly sailing through it. Another reason: April coincided with the Hindu new year. This is a weak example, for many traditional businesses begin on Dassera or even the Laxmi Pujan done at Diwali. “But, then,” I read from the internet, “festivals like Navratri and Diwali fall in the month of October and November, followed by Christmas in December. These account for heavy sales for the retailers making accounting complex and time consuming.To avoid the collision of both so as each of the activity gets efficient time and attention, December might not have been preferred as the month of closure of the financial year.” I love Google, I said, as I got this information. The “grrrumph” sound from Shri Husband was best left un-deciphered; I’d rather not solve the mysteries of his mind. Importantly, India is not the only country that follows this trend. We have company: Canada, United Kingdom (UK), New Zealand, Hong Kong and Japan. In Delhi, the FM and the PM and the entire stable of television channels have already gone beserk over the national budget announcements and their repercussions on industry, farmers, tourism and what not. No concessions for freelance humour columnists. No sympathy either. At micro level, in a tiny office in a little Goan school, the accountants bend over ledgers, cash-books, vouchers, receipts and across that wonderful invention called Excel. For some reason, Excel has a quarrel with Tally, the finance software. Both have disagreeing totals. Same person making the entries from the same documents, but something or the other doesn’t match. Frustration means chai is needed. We have a moody electric kettle that refuses to work when we want it to. We budget for a new one and repairing is working out more expensive and getting readymade tea in a plastic bag from a nearby gaddo doesn’t satisfy the chai-drinkers. What follows the Excel-Tally disagreement are: • explanations (‘Vendor send previous full year’s newspaper bill after 1 April’), • digging into memories (‘Remember, the sewage overflowed and we got labour to clean it?’) • discovering scribbles on scraps of paper stuck in diary pages (‘Arre, I forgot to write this in the register, we had got the fire-thing refilled, no?’), • and manual recalculations help to match the figures (‘Better to do like this by hand. Computer must be wrong’). Finally, everyone’s satisfied. The income depressed me. A few parents, even those who are regular salaried government employees, resisted paying fees quoting ‘Covid’. The slum-dwelling, migrant labourers have been better behaved. The teachers—am proud of them—were willing to work for nil if things got worse. “We can’t waste the children’s year,” they said. If there is a Chief Principal in the Sky, s/he must have heard that and made sure we had just enough each month to pay the salaries. To the rupee. “Then,” said Shri Husband, as always looking over my shoulder to read what I was typing, “What was the case for ‘depression’?” Best to keep quiet, otherwise he gets into lecture-baazi mode. I didn’t even feel like telling him that many budget schools have done so poorly that they have either shut down or are on the verge of doing so. We’ve scraped by, thanks to the efforts of the teachers and responsible, decent parents. The expenditure, other than the meagre salaries of a budget school, was on electricity and water bills. Even the telephone didn’t get used. Stationery was hardly used as the summative examinations, unit tests, formative assessments, continuous evaluation (for those not in this profession, these terms are not synonyms) were held online. The lower-kindergarten students had spent an entire year in school without having seen a classroom or their teacher in real life. How to predict for the coming year, I mused, with the virus mutating from avtar to avtar? No one listens to my mumbling. Everyone gets on with the job at hand. We budget for masks and sanitizers. Liquid hand-wash. Floor-cleaning fluids. Disposable gloves in the first-aid kit. I recall a chain-owned beauty-parlour recently opened in Porvorim charged us Rs 100 for a tissue apron worn by the hair-cutting person, a flimsy mask worn by the one getting the hair cut, and blue plastic covers for the footwear (in case the virus energetically jumps from shoe to lip defying all expert predictions). I wonder what their budget looks like. These days I wonder what any budget looks like. Numbers-challenged me is fascinated by such things, like I’m fascinated by man going into space. Same level of difficulty. Second ‘grumpphh’ from Shri Husband, this time decipherable, but not for printing in a public space. The budget exercise is over. Estimates, guesses, calculations will play out in real time as the months unfold. Ruksana, Suhasini and Francis have breathed a collective sigh of relief that all was well. Mistakes were caught, errors rectified. Looking backward, I think, in a country where so much is siphoned off, so many under-the-table transactions happening, it’s a joy to know that there are many, many, many people living honest, transparent lives, where every annual budget is accurate and unchallengeable. Viva to the common man, the woman on the street, the little-folk of India.

Covid Events 2021

We’re unlocking ourselves; senior classes and colleges have tentatively opened, Board-examinations have been slotted for May 2021, more than a month later than the usual times, but we’re still teaching on WhatsApp. Mid-year, who knows, the National Education Policy might jolt Goa into improving the lot of future generations: and make government teachers, well, actually teach rather than punch in every morning to justify getting salaries. Actually, I must add, contrary to expectations, the teaching community did very well through the online classroom phase. Some, who hadn’t known how to handle a cellular phone learnt within seven days to record and air lessons on YouTube and take tutorials over Zoom or GoogleMeet/Team. (BTW, I used the word ‘cellular’ phone because according to Shri Husband, who claims—perhaps rightfully--that his English is better than mine, a ‘mobile’ phone should be able to move on its own or be driven, not carried.) Now that the Calangute hordes have gone back to re-infect folks in Karnataka, Maharashtra and wherever else they drove here from, the traffic has thinned on CHoGM Road. (Note: CHoGM is the correct spelling. Chogum is not.) Familiar local thug fights, over long-festering family-feuds, unpaid rents and scarce parking-spaces, have re-started as the drunken tourists have gone. We’re venturing (“Please write ‘masked, sanitized and distanced’,” dictates Shri Husband, peering over my shoulder) out of our territory, our village home, after three-fourths of the year. One (rare) thing we both agree upon: we don’t take punga with any virus. It took god knows how many centuries to eradicate ‘Devi’, the dreaded and highly infectious small-pox which left people with no eyesight and with ugly pock-marks on their faces even when they survived. Praying/fasting didn’t help, inoculations did. Remember polio? That awful virus which made people get sudden high fever and flaccidity and left them lame and helpless for a lifetime? How many drops for how many children over how many years have now conquered it… do the math to see how difficult it was/is to tame a rogue virus. Again, prayers/fasting didn’t work, the vaccine did. If the above two paragraphs were frightening to read, that was the intention. Covid-19 is no common cold. It’s not a Goan/Indian/Asian thing either. Get used to the idea that it’s a ba-ad infection and the only way to beat it is by taking precautions. “Masks, hand hygiene, distancing,” repeats Shri Husband in his irritating (he’s always correct, that’s what makes it irritating) way. So, with every precaution carefully taken, we chose to attend whatever we safely could of IFFI, and the Kesarbai Kerkar Sangeet Sammelan. IFFI first: I missed three days because although the documents were loaded (‘up-loaded’ – that was Shri Husband’s voice in my ear—‘although in your case, loaded might be correct, too.’), no acknowledgement came through my email. A visit to the (really helpful, cheerful and efficiently staffed) counter at the ESG worked. I got my card in a jiffy. After that, we booked our tickets online and dutifully saw what we were entitled to. It wasn’t the same. No queues, no arguments, no wrappers/tissues or tempers flying around. Some things were unchanged: blimp-shaped women wearing translucent dresses with easily viewed, brightly-coloured, gaily-printed underwear competing with similar-looking/dressed men. Filmy-creative-artsy devil-may-care attitudes are fun and common at such events. Staid old me notices and stores in the memory such things. As well as the soggy popcorn at Inox and cold chai in teeny steel conical tumblers at KA. And announcers with semi-Indian accents (love ‘em). College-student ushering highly enthusiastic cine-philes and time-passing retirees, fingering the micro-keyboards on their gadgets at sonic speed as they multi-tasked, messaging friends, checking our e-tickets/temperatures, chit-chatting as they did so. Guards who didn’t look like they were themselves secure, what to say about keeping us that way inside/outside the auditoria. Inside the theatres, it was a pleasant surprise that there was no national anthem to stand to. Aside: we weren’t the only ones who were carrying tiffin from home, going by the dabbas on the table outside the entrances. Missed the out-of-Goa regular IFFI buffs. The Kesarbai Kerkar Sangeet Samaroha: a big, big treat. If I had the money, I’d visit Salzburg or the Sydney Opera or Broadway. If I had the political clout in this country, I would charge that kind of money for attending these utterly delightful concerts. I read that it’s amongst the ten best classical music festivals in the world. With good reason. The curation, the quality of singers, the backdrop (every year it’s memorable) is of very high standard. Shri Husband says so, too, and we all know how hard it is to get a kind word out of him. In spite of the cheer in my life, cannot end this column on a happy note this time. Reason is the Farmers’ rally in Delhi. Biting cold, injustice, the might of the State on protestors, the goons who may have infiltrated the crowd, the forced-to-forget problems of the ex-Servicemen of this country who are asking for their dues--refer ‘One Rank One Pension’ or OROP-- for the last couple of years. Governments may mean well, may want India to be catapulted into the league of the Developed Nations, but if earlier we were terribly slow, now we’re pushing things through without dialogue/discussion; that means many points get missed, often vital ones. Listening to vox populi is democracy. I read today that in the Andamans, bridges will be built. The pros to the population and the cons to the environment need to be discussed over by experts. Without the inputs of environmentalists, modern town-planners/designers and the local population, there will be cause for alarm. In Mollem, the people let the government know they were serious about what they wanted. See what happened about getting the IIT to Goa? People may be unlettered, but we cannot assume they are unintelligent. Development is necessary, so is caution whilst driving towards it. I benefit from the flyovers and broad roads because I can reach Kala Academy, my Pandharpur for all that’s fine in my world, with ease. But there are no footpaths for me to walk on, to reach a grocery-store. No clean/comfortable/regularly-run, fairly-priced, ticket-providing buses that will take me from my home to wherever I want to go. No taxies that won’t fleece me unfairly. In the meanwhile, the broad roads will take many big cars which will keep burning expensive fuel as they search around for parking space. The fields on the sides that grew food, that made Goa pretty, are getting smaller and drier. The number of coconut trees is dwindling as also the number of climbers to get those coconuts down. The newer, more productive varieties of the nut have a different taste and texture. The beaches, once the pride and joy of Goans, have as many plastic bottles/packets as footprints. Or more. “Now look who’s giving the lecture,” Shri Husband said. Always has the last word, he does.

THE NEW NORM

To figure out a new norm, I figured out the old one first. 1984, Bhopal Gas Tragedy, Union Carbide responsible. We made our first many bucks by selling certificates. For a whole year, and the following decade, anyone who wanted to submit to the government that they, or some member of their family, had suffered due to the killer, debilitating gas, came to us. We made a file for them, with certified true copies of their birth certificate, income-certificate from their Panchayat, ration-card and medical certificate, too. We gave death certificates of relatives, real or imagined, for a higher fee, naturally, for they were more difficult to procure (regular printer refused to print because of a superstition). That file would get them a pension for life. Or a one-time grant or some facility or the other from the government. Some even managed to get maal from the company, directly. Smart people. And what did we get? A fee, an income. We did so many people so much good. We also bought our first car. Cars. 1993, the Latur Earthquake. God was kind; we added a floor to our house. Competition had come in, but we were quick. Temporary huts, roofs, beds, gas-cylinders, sale of farmland, licences, paperwork in government offices to apply for subsidies, grants. Our rates were low: two per cent of what anyone got. Fifty rupees extra for the trouble we took to help people out. Competition was negligible. The 2000s have been generous. The Gujarat earthquake. We filmed doctors bandaging wounds, people digging trenches, pitching tents, cooking and transporting food and sold the footage to news channels. We changed with the times. Our rivals were still selling certificates. We’d moved on. Experience matters, see? I didn’t have to worry about my daughter’s dowry. Or my sister’s daughter’s. I donated a hundred and one gilded coconuts to the Siddhi-Vinayak temple. Nothing’s too good for one’s favourite deity, no? 2001, January, the tsunami. We gathered truckloads of clothes, rations, medicines. People were ready to buy cooking oil, petrol, soap, water. Wherever we went, whenever we set up shop, whether in Tamil Nadu or Andhra, it was hard work. Businessmen from all over the country were setting up shop. We had expected to make a tidy profit, but no, the competition kept the prices low. We didn’t make a loss. That’s all I can say. 2006, the Mumbai floods. no luck there. That city has its own network. We did some business and stayed put, which was good, because we do some dhanda annually, nothing spectacular, but regular stuff. Plastic-sheets and gutter-cleaning labour-contracts, mainly. Herbal teas and immunity-boosters were good investments, yes. Natural disasters are a boon, yes. 2013 and 2019, Uttarakhand cloudburst and collapse. We ran there as fast as we could. We’re the experts. We can give you any disaster material anywhere in the country, anytime you want it. Glucose biscuits made locally, packed with wrappers to make them look like the real stuff. When you’re hungry, been out of food for three-four days, tastes the same, whether the biscuits have paraffin or maida. One hundred and ninety-nine percent profit? Arrey, multiply that by ten. You want drinking water? We give. You want paracetamol? We give. You want to call the Army? Ok, we have our limitations, but we try. If you pay, we try. 2020, January. We got a whiff that something was happening, weren’t sure. March, the Pradhan Mantri, bless his chest, announced the Lockdown. Covid-Corona, Virus-Shirus, curfew. Wah. Milk, dal and rice, wheat and sugar, there was money to be made, we thought and the family sat to bounce ideas. It led to nowhere, too many players around. Then, we learnt about the PPEs and masks. When the planet bowed to the whims of a mutant-nucleic-acid, we weren’t prepared, I admit. We learnt overnight, like a million-million others, to do things together that we’d never done before. Online education and WFH is what you think. We’re different. Standing in our balcony at 2000 hours, one particular evening, clapping and banging our thalis with spoons, we realized where the future lay. We raced to make or buy and sell elastic-eared masks. Paper ones, jute ones, synthetic ones, cotton ones. With stripes and zari-work, masculine-looking ones, colourful checks for the style-conscious, bright-motifs for toddlers and old-fashioned ones for old people. Millions of masks at a profit of Rs. 1 per mask comes to… do the math. Disposable gloves, aprons, head-gear. Home-made sanitizers, sanitizer-bottles with/out pumps, sanitizer-bottle-dispensers with foot-operated levers. Chaandi hi chaandi—no, sona hi sona. Life is good, Corona-mata ki jai ho. One of my cousins is negotiating with a dozen hospitals for ventilators and another is having discussions about garbage-removal/disposal contract with a couple of MLAs. Viva. The other day, I walked into a new beauty-parlour at Porvorim. Nothing they can do can make me beautiful, for that I’d need a jadugar, no less, I agree. What impressed me was, they were charging Rs 100 for a safety ‘kit’ which including plastic footwear covers. Now, to tell customers that the present mutant might jump from ground to nostril and endanger all around was novel. I came from there a wiser woman. The new norm requires one to be quick-thinking, a step ahead of the others in the race. It’s not about selling home-made ladoos/chaklis. It’s not about tailoring your own clothes or making family movies and putting them on YouTube/FB/Instagram to bore relatives on the other side of the planet. The new norm is about frightening people or convincing them that they should be frightened—or at least more responsible until the vaccine takes over—and buy chappal-covers in barber-shops so we can enjoy the hospitality of Bank Managers, get a free diary/calendar for 2021. It’s when you compare the new norm with the old that the picture becomes clear: whilst change is the only constant, as things have been, things remain.

Spending is an Art or My Heroes 2020

There’s a difference between expenditure and waste. Wonderful words. I typed them on the screen and read them aloud and I was going to expand on them, when I could type no further, because Shri Husband peeked over my shoulder and made a nasty comment. Because he had nothing better to do. Because he is presently partially locked, and it doesn’t matter to him that all of us are. He scowls nevertheless, thinking he alone is being punished for something that is not his fault in any way. He is, therefore, in a permanently bad mood (since it’s a continuing condition, can’t really make out what the triggers are, honestly). When the government says ‘bhiu-pa chi garaz na’ and the doctor says, ‘take all precautions, mask-wash-distance, it’s a bad infection, this corona virus causes’, can’t blame him now, can I? They say, and I have read, that full un-locking (or should I say locking-up?) will take years if not months, vaccine or no vaccine, because the no-one’s sure how the virus will behave and mutate. So, bored in the interim period, he’s (Shri Husband, not the doctor) ready to pick on anyone. Mainly, me. I erased what I’d written. “You mean ‘deleted’,” said my personal, domestic interferon (what an apt word to use in these Covid Times, heh, heh, to describe Shri Husband). “Whatever,” I retorted, typing on, hoping my months-long-grown hair would block his vision. No such luck. “But it’s true,” he said, agreeing with me in a grudging kind of way, “Spending really is an art.” He must have heard this in childhood or read it on a car-sticker or something. Can’t believe he could come up with something so profound. “Means?” I said, hoping to shut him up. Usually, when I ask such questions, he gets up and walks away. He didn’t. Instead, he told me: “Spending, whether of time, energy or money, is a habit. A habit is an acquired behaviour pattern that is followed so regularly it’s almost involuntary. Examples of spending habits might include shopping for trivia on pay-day where money is concerned. Where time is concerned, getting up late in the morning and watching television at night and then panicking when the deadline for the column is very close.” He was getting into lecture-baazi mode, so I kept typing, bashing on regardless, ignoring him. That’s the best thing to do, I’ve learnt. In bygone years, I have known housewives who sorted out the husband’s salary (in those days wages were disbursed in cash even if the earner wore a white collar) and put fixed amounts in envelopes labelled ‘bread’, ‘eggs’, ‘butter’, ‘daal’, ‘soap’, ‘gas’, ‘milk’, ‘vegetables’, etc. Oh, and ‘matches’, for induction and micro-wave cooking didn’t exist even in fantasy stories. Nor did the internet. Or the mobile-phone. It was always a mystery to me what they did if they needed extra salt, sugar or oil in a particular month because the ants attacked a dabba or carelessness led to spillage. Shri Husband felt, still feels, that wives like me “would take out from one envelope some money and put it in another to neutralize a deficit in the latter and play musical envelopes till the end of the month”. Not true, but I don’t protest. I still know families who budget their EMIs, credit-card amounts, birthday-party gifts expenses, Netflix charges, petrol-bills, medical insurance and stuff. As an afterthought, they add school-fees: I should know, have been phone-chasing defaulters since the beginning of this academic year. But I stray… Smart people manage and manipulate their twenty-four hours. Shri Husband snorted: ‘Smart’. I knew he was thinking of, or referring through that snort to those like me, who need twelve hours sleep, some minutes snatched through the day and, steadfastly, many hours at a stretch at night. They also need to chew their food well and sit before, during and after meals/baths or returning from or before going to office/market. How to spend time calls for another column. Some are good at energy-conservation: they peel garlic while the milk is on the boil, run the mixer whilst the pressure-cooker whistles, sweep and mop whilst the washing-machine churns. Wise they are, for they accomplish much through the day. “And,” mumbled the man in my life, “some are otherwise.” Before I could react, he rectified that and said, “You do manage a lot of free time, I must admit. Teach me how to do it.” When he asks a favour like that, I go chup. He believes I’m a creative person. He also believes that lazy people are creative: they think of ways to get out of energy-expending situations. We both appreciate—and you know it’s rare for us to agree upon anything at all-- those who know what gives them pleasure: music, trekking, bird-watching, growing vegetables, collecting mouse-pads (or wrist-watches, which is my hobby, ahem), brewing wine, making jewellery, baking sour-dough bread, travelling, clicking photographs, etc. Those are the people who rule the money they earn. Money doesn’t dictate that it should be saved or splurged upon short-lived joys like buying shoes you will wear but once and then let the fungi and mould feast upon them. “The same,” said Shri Husband, indicating that I should take down what he’s saying, “is true about spending/wasting time or energy.” I have noticed that those who are careful with money are careful with time and energy. I saw Shri Husband nodding. In agreement. A never-to-be-forgotten moment. It was then that the Universe colluded: we both simultaneously heard the news that Mr. Ranjitsinh Disale had won the one million US dollar Global Teacher Prize for being an exceptional teacher who made an outstanding contribution to the profession. There were 12000 applications and nominations from 140 countries. The gentleman is from a Zilla Parishad Primary School in a place now prominently on the map: Paritewadi, Solapur, Maharashtra. That was impressive. We were delighted. More joy: Mr. Disale shared half his prize money with the other nine finalists. Which means half of more than seven crores in Indian rupees. Each of the other finalists will get, thanks to Mr. Disale’s generosity and consideration, fifty-five lakh of our currency. Whew. Shri Husband said, “He’s only thirty-two, and he knows how to spend correctly.” We’ve learnt a big lesson from someone half our age. I thought—Shri Husband all but forbids me from thinking, says it tires my brain, but I think anyway—that just as important was the fact that the person who constituted this award in 2014 was also an Indian, Mr. Sunny Varkey from Kerala, a businessman and long-time resident of the UAE. He heads the Varkey Foundation, which is a charitable organisation dedicated to changing lives through education. Imagine spending a million US dollars per year on a prize. Another man really knows to spend; for once, Shri Husband and I agreed yet again. In this Year that Changed the Planet, at the tail end of the year, I virtually met my heroes 2020. These two men, may their tribe increase, have shown how when time, energy and money are correctly utilized—‘spent, not wasted,’ Shri Husband reminded me--- magic happens.

A Festival of Scraps and Leftovers.

What’s the word for the last gooey rice-and-gravy slurp of a meal which we Indians 'mop' up with our fingers? I can’t get up from a meal unless the plate is ‘wiped’ clean. Four fingers of the right hand caress the plate in a circular, scooping motion. Some law of physics attracts and holds together near-liquid dal/curd combined with a quarter fistful of rice, flavoured with the last bit of fried fish or dry vegetable. It’s a skill as complicated, but messier, as eating non-filleted fish with chopsticks. It’s childhood conditioning: ’don’t waste food’. How my polishing a plate would help anyone starving anywhere in the world, I didn’t understand, but the mantra stuck. There were more ration shops than private grocers where/when I was a child. In the early days of my marriage, I often cried over curdled milk (no fridge), collected multi-ingredient one-pot-meal recipes (I owned ONE kerosene-fuelled wick-stove), and cooked with whatever was seasonally, locally available (nation-wide transportation was primitive). Erratic electricity supply meant undependable running water. I enjoyed solitude in remote corners of Uttar Pradesh, through bitter Kashmir winters, drought-stricken Tamil Nadu and in Punjab through its troubled years. Cellular phones, cable-television, and the internet were decades away. I learned from neighbours/acquaintances ‘make-do recipes’ with whatever the neighbourhood grocer sold. I became clever at creating recipes out of odd ingredients. Be informed, there’s madness in the methods. I’ve always had a pukka roof over my head and enough food on the table to welcome guests, but because of circumstance, frugality ruled. So, when the lockdown was announced, I went into kanjoos-mode immediately, stocked until 14 Apr 2020. Gas, check. Oil for cooking, check. Milk powder, in case fresh milk was rationed and we had problems with the fridge. Rice, for making idlis and dosas, too. Flours -- wheat, jwari and nachni. Pulses -- rajma, chana black/white, matki, kuleeth, moong, masoor, alsande. Onions and potatoes. Fruit and fresh vegetables that lasted, like gourds and apples. Masalas. Sugar. Soap and scrubbers. Eggs, bread, butter. Done. Since we can’t trust the voltage in our village, I chose to not stock anything that ever swam, flew or trotted. The freezer held icepacks for predictable headaches. Presently, all vegetable trimmings, rinds and peels are used to make stock for soup or dal, or grated to plump up polle. Early every morning, I soak a fistful of a whole pulse. Shri Husband, peering to see what I was typing, said ‘soaking a pulse’ sounded strange. So, to rephrase: I soak a fistful of one of the pulses mentioned above. And not in rum/brandy as Shri Husband hinted; plain water works. After sunset, I strain it and allow it to sprout overnight. The following morning the grains’ nutritive value is increased multiple-fold. (A good way to cheat price rise, too; you get more value per rupee spent when you soak-sprout seeds). A different pulse is soaked each morning, for variety. After pressure-cooking, I add to it cut drumsticks and the odd pumpkin flower, both freshly plucked, and cook again. Salt and dried kokum bring alive the curry, a tiny piece of jaggery neutralizes the tanginess, a pinch of haldi and spoonsful of the impulse-driven masalas are added. Lastly, I temper it with mustard-cumin-methi seeds and some curry-leaves, again freshly plucked. The last sentence is the post-speech ‘Jai-Hind-Jai-Goa’ of every recipe. Mandatory. Occasionally, I garnish with a spoonful of fresh coconut gratings and a few chopped coriander leaves, the metaphorical ‘icing’. There are no restrictions on playing around with ginger and garlic for those who swear by their medicinal properties. Gardening and I are incompatible. But, in times like these, I rise to the occasion like a German hausfrau during WWII. On Day 1, I buried the sliced tops of onions and garlic in soil in a discarded plastic container. Two weeks gone and I have micro-greens for salad. When, in 1969, the Shiv Sena riots to chase away all ‘Madrasis’ introduced me to my first curfew, I was twelve. Cauliflowers, carrots and peas were luxuries, then. Mother used pumpkins and bottle-gourds to make interesting baked dishes. I boil cubes of the gourd/pumpkin flesh, mash coarsely, add salt, pepper, dried herbs, oil/butter, sautéed cashew-nut bits, grated cheese to taste, some milk-powder, blend an egg into the mixture, then bake until set. I don’t worry about proportions unless things go terribly wrong (much like governments worldwide). Retrieving/salvaging takes a lot of imagination. Shri Husband, intruding: “You should know. New mistakes every day.” My Goan genes miss xit-kodi. Unusual times call for sun-dried, gas-roasted Bombay-duck/mackerel, whose smell I love and most non-West-Coasters abhor. My logic: if people can have nutri-nugget korma (ugh!!), no reason why I should not have salted shrimps with brinjal. My stock of dried fish is packed in ten—ok, exaggerating—four layers of plastic bags, each held firmly with a rubber-band. These packets are kept safely in my grandmother-in-law’s heavy-gauged, tight-lidded brass dabba. I removed my virus-proof mask to sniff the stuff before I put it on the gas to roast. Love that raw smell. Shri Husband spent that morning in the balcao. I should do it more often. I was living through an ingredients crisis; the internet told me tomato leaves were edible. We had them as a side dish, lightly tossed in garlic butter: served that plant right for not producing fruit. Snacks comprise fried peels of gourd/pumpkin. Potato, that import by the goras, now beloved of Indians as stuffing in another import, samosas, unites humans from Alaska to Australia. “Other than the Corona virus?” quipped Shri Husband. Lockdown means monotonous meals, a reminder that I have food. Hunger, an indication of good health, unattended can lead to illness, death. I watch in dismay workers trudging home, pockets empty, stomachs rumbling. Curfews are often indefinite. This one’s unrestricted, planet wide, a first. I would kill for mangoes with cream right now. Or a bite of ripe banana. Others would kill for scraps and leftovers. If the virus doesn’t get them first. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sheela Jaywant is a humour columnist and short-story writer who likes to hear from her readers on sheelajaywant@yahoo.co.in

The Corona Virus in Porvorim Goa

I was boarding a Mumbai-Goa flight. As always, I looked around to see if there was anyone I knew, who looked familiar, to chat with. This was at 0300 hours. Everyone around me was wearing masks. I didn’t know nose and mouth masks came in such variety. Plastic ones with punched holes, the usual porous green and white tissue ones, some resembled foxes’ noses in colour and shape and others were triangular-folded handkerchiefs knotted at the back of the head. At the main entrance, I wondered how the guard (masked himself) recognized who was entering with whose identity-card or ‘photo-proof’ as he called it, considering that all he could see was the eyes and forehead of the person presenting it. “Irregular protocol,” Shri Husband agreed. Cheers to the Corona-V, after four and more decades we agreed on something without arguing. The girl at the counter didn’t need to ask me questions more than once because she could hear me and read my lips. Because I was unmasked. The virus was a ‘maybe’ attacker, whilst any mask is sure suffocation for me. I took my own precautions by sitting next to masked persons so that I got filtered air to breathe. If they had germs to share, those germs would get right back into their own nostrils, I reasoned. (“Stupid logic,” remarked Shri Husband. Why he wanted to read over my shoulder what I typed I don’t know. Gave both of us a headache.) The others’ mouths could be made out through the masks. Whatever they spoke was indistinct and lots of guesswork, shouting and gesturing happened before the communication was complete. Sample question: ‘Sir, aisle or window seat?’ Answer: ‘Ju oo half a cee er da aafoo?’ After a couple of frustrating minutes, the mask was momentarily removed, exposing the to-be-dead-if-infected, near panic-stricken passenger to unfiltered air. Passenger quickly spat the words “Do you have a seat near the bathroom?” and before you could say ‘covid-19’, adjusted the mask and elastic to shut the mouth again. No one seemed to mind removing the mask-filters whilst consuming chai and samosas, though. Inside the aircraft, we were all zombies, having spent most of the night awake, a large majority of us ‘faceless’. Back in Porvorim, Goa, following the Centre’s advisory to take precautions against this micro-sized part-living part-inorganic creature that was killing planet earth’s most important biped, the CM announced on a Saturday evening, on television, that schools were to be shut till the end of March. I celebrated. Prematurely. No students to come to school, I read the soft-copy circular on Whatsapp, but exams would be held as scheduled. Confused, my colleagues and I waited ‘virtually’ for another circular from the God of Schools, the Department of Education, or the ADEI. (Aside: my colleagues say ‘Dipaamen’ when they refer to the former. Dropping the ‘r’ and both the ‘t’s, I have learnt, is the Goan thing to do. The long form of ADEI has been long forgotten. We all know that when a notice/ circular/ letter/ anything comes from the ADEI, we must jump and do whatever is ‘ordered’, unreasonably late though it may reach us. Now I find the same folk saying Coyona Viyus. Peculiar Goan thing.) Doctor friends sent scientific facts—I’m convinced by them-- to say:- • we were and have been for a long time more at risk of dying from multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis or plain old diarrhoea than this new pathogen that doesn’t survive at Goan summer temperatures, • that Corona was heavy enough by virus standards to, if exhaled in a sneeze or cough, drop to the ground and not bounce back into another nose, • that we needed to worry only if we were immuno-compromised, old and frail, or plain unlucky, • that hand-washing with soap and water before and after touching suspect surfaces (including other people’s hands) was not inferior to expensive and out-of-stock ‘sanitizers’. • that the collective immunity of the sub-continent was possibly better than that, say, of the Canadian population, as we were regularly exposed to garbage, sewage, pollution and mostly not in air-conditioned environments. Other friends sent other ‘facts’—I’m unconvinced by those—to say:- • cow urine would solve this health problem amongst others. My retort: bull-shit. Why it (cow-urine, not bull-shit) could never stop or cure small-pox, leprosy or diabetes amongst the old-fangled diseases, I don’t know. • that if I suddenly and permanently converted to veganism and additionally cut off onions and garlic from my diet, I’d be protected from harm. Here, there was some confusion on Facebook, because one party insisted that garlic was medicinal and another said it was not sattvic (pure) for human consumption. For some reason, that diet hadn’t saved anyone from renal or cardiac failure or any dreaded illness. Wondered why. • that this virus was created to teach the western world a lesson, etc. Um…we have some organisms that teach us lessons, like the amoebae, the Salmonella typhimurium, the vectors causing leptospirosis, malaria and dengue, etc. India is dealing with them on war-footing, too, but the media doesn’t give it credit for that because the western world might not be interested in those headlines. We, as responsible citizens, decided to self-isolate ourselves. Of course, the poder, the nustekar, the bai who got the bhaji from the fields, the linesmen from the electricity department and those digging our roads were at work. No one had told them they should restrict themselves to their huts. They couldn’t afford masks/ sanitizers anyway. I don’t know whether they used soap or had running water, but that was not the time to ask. The policemen were manning their posts. No shops were shut. Those highest at risk-- doctors, nurses, technicians, taxi-drivers, bus-conductors, were doing their duties diligently, not taking rest, not looking for glory. Whilst Twitter told me the number of deaths due to the C-V, I googled to find out how many died in rail/road accidents that very week, in India. I don’t worry about the planet or humankind. I don’t worry about the country or the state most times. My world is restricted to my home in Porvorim. When this self-confinement to contain a pandemic had to be tackled, my worry was spending twenty-four hours without respite, with Shri Husband and Bai Goanna at home. It was panic time for me. I carefully re-re-heard what the CM had said on television. School would be shut for students, but exams would be conducted. Teachers and the rest of the gang had to clock in. I had to go to school. I smiled. Shri Husband grunted. Amicably, I think.

Free Samples

Come January and sales representatives from publishers come to my office, carrying bundles of books in big canvas bags, or holding them by the tough thread that holds them together. The watchman doesn’t bother about getting their names entered because they’re unable to liberate their limbs from the heavy wares they are lugging, to sign, and he’s illiterate. If they were saleswomen, I think they would have carried the bundles on their heads. “Or,” said Bai Goanna, joining Shri Husband to peer over my shoulder to see what I was typing, “they’d use a second-hand foldable pram to wheel the stuff from their scooter to your office. Women are smart.” I agreed silently about the smart bit, but prams? Doesn’t occur to her that some of these marketing types might come in four-wheelers, mostly the bread-box Maruti Omni that none else wants? Folding prams, come to think of it, are practical solutions to take to the market, a trolley-substitute, see? Then again, anything on wheels would be defeated on the way to my office; like any decent path in India, it is strewn with pebbles, gravel, twigs and every and anything that would rip the tiny metal balls out of a bearing and break a pram into many useless angular pieces. “That sentence,” pointed out Shri Husband, “sounds awful.” He could have used the word ‘inelegant’. I didn’t—never do--- have the courage to say ‘then don’t read it, stay away’. I just ignored him and typed on regardless. Where was I… the publishers send book samples, several per subject per class. Doesn’t sound like much until you do the arithmetic. Take LKG (lower kindergarten, which takes children between 3.5 and 4 years of age, approximately 2.5 feet in height) as an example. The children have to ‘learn’ line drawing. If they are clever, they do patterns and colouring as well. The little ones spend three hours in school, in which, besides doing a page of work, they have to sing a verse, memorize numbers and tell us the names of their grandparents if they have any. How many books do you suppose each child would buy for the year? I have seven SETS of books for pattern writing, joining dots, gluing cotton swabs and reading aloud, each set containing at least ten books. Do we really need so many publishers printing out the same stuff? At nearly the same cost? So many, many ‘samples’ are gifted to each school, with ‘not for sale’ or ‘complimentary copy’ stamped prominently on the front cover or first page. To prevent ‘misuse’. What misuse could one think of for a hundred pattern-writing books? Now, multiply each set by thirty-five students. Go on, do the maths. By the time I see what the teachers are selecting for the fifth standard, I’m exhausted. I’ve watched them go through tables-books, small sums, problems, divisions, decimals and …wait until I tell you about the high school workbooks. The Devnagari script books are, like the script, complicated, with red and blue lines with broad spacing, medium spacing, narrow and very narrow spacing. The mathematics notebooks have squares of varying dimensions: 1 cm square, 1.5 cm square and worse. There are ‘un-ruled’ books, too. Would you believe, there are at least a dozen different kinds of blank-paper books for art. Did I tell you about graph-books? If the government and/or activists are serious about saving the Earth/trees, by law we should be using only slates. Consider this: if a book costs Rs 100, the supplier gives a discount of 30% to the buyer (parent) and another 20% ‘concession in cash’ to the in-between (i.e. school). And schools, the salesperson tells me, do make profit on the sly thus. I’m stupid, he tells me. I agree. Husband and Bai Goanna also agree. For once, we’re on the same page, the three of us. Now, if we dismiss the supplier from the chain and connect directly with the manufacturer, a student can actually buy an item for 40% of the printed price. Nice, no? What is true about books is true about cosmetic products in a more complicated way. When I buy a toothpaste, I’m paying for research done a century ago, plus the cost of the company’s marketing director’s ‘with family’ holiday abroad, the advertisements showing twenty-metre smiles on hoardings on way to the Dabolim airport, the plastic-coated cardboard box and heaven knows what else. Of course, I buy toothpaste for oral hygiene, but that’s not the point here. I need friends who are dentists (or purchase managers in hotels) who can gift me some tubes; am sure they get plenty of free samples. In the hospital where I once worked, receiving free samples was a way of life. The MRs (as Medical Representatives of pharmaceutical companies are known) came in hordes. On days when the patient-footfall was low, MRs occupied all the benches, laptops on their… what else… laps, typing away, resting their bags by their feet. The moment they saw Target Doctor, the computers were speedily put away, the bags swung on backs as they hurried into the clinics. Those bags contained syrups, capsules, pills, little devices to check sugars/salts/whatever was the latest fad. To be given free, of course, with ‘Physician’s sample, not to be sold’ boldly printed across the label. Samples were often accompanied by calendars, pen-stands, watches (now definitely not in vogue), note-pads, mouse-pads, mobile-phone covers and other cute goodies to make prospective prescribers happy and motivated. “What,” asked Bai Goanna, “About foreign trips and sponsored conferences?” “She,” said Shri Husband before I could answer her, “will write about it later, in another piece. That’s beyond the scope of this piece.” Correct for once, I thought, keeping my thought to myself, adjusting my posture to prevent them from reading further what I was typing. Tea-bags, cosmetics, paan-masalas, pickles, choorans and chivda, everything has giveaway samples these days. We pay for them when we buy the actual stuff, never forget. The good quality stuff needs no small introduction. No matter what the marketing gurus say, a Wendell Rodricks (a man I deeply admired, may he rest in peace) product is to be cherished for design and quality. Word of mouth works best. Just wondering, are any free samples involved in big money products like fighter-aircraft, ack-ack guns and submarines? Never read about India getting free helicopters on ‘trial basis’. “You’re ignorant,” chorused Bai Goanna and Shri Husband, adding, “Remember how we damaged the Tejas (train, not plane) seats on its trial runs?” Sigh. Yes. Said and done, I love free samples. Don’t we all?

Mumbai to Goa by Air.

They say experience teaches you much. In my case, I learn everything through making mistakes. I’m quite an expert at that, make new ones every day. Or so saidShri Husband and Bai Goanna once. I’m going off-track. Let me tell you about what happened recently. We were going to Bombay (sorry-sorry, Mumbai… just tells you how old I am) by aeroplane (I refuse to say ‘fly-by-air’ like some people do.)Shri Husband and Bai Goanna were discussing the nitty-gritties of how kitty (rememberlittle ‘Maows?’) was to be taken care of in our absence. Fish had to be bought, cleaned, sliced and frozen in meal-sized packages. Maows eats only fresh bangde, sans innards, heads, fins,tails. A packet of cat-biscuits (dry, stinky stuff that comes in sturdy plastic packets) was fetched from our friendly neighbourhood ‘supermarket’. The latter is neither ‘super’ nor quite a ‘market’, but keeps essentials. These days, pet food (for fish, dogs, cats but not cows/buffaloes/goats) is listed under essentials. We bought it just in case the bangdefell short (growing kitties have surprisingly big appetites). Introducing her to the insta-food was easy. Like humans, cats figure out that all things fresh and healthy aren’t as tasty as the made-from-scraps, full-of-vitamins, dehydrated-first and reconstituted-afterwards, well-advertised titbits. One sniff and Maows fell in love with the ‘niblets’. Sigh. Poor local ‘bangde’. Going by aeroplane is a big deal for me. I recall reading about pilots who bought their licences and were candidates for crash-adventures. My ears pain. I feel like vomiting. If I get a middle seat I have elbow-stabbers on either side. If I get a window, it’s either above the wing or on the sunny side. As for the aisle… either the trolley gets stuck just where I am or the others in my row have enlarged prostates/undersize-bladders. Or the flap of the luggage-bin above my head keeps snapping open, threatening to allow a heavy knapsack or five to descend upon my skull. (“What’s to fear?” Shri Husband wants to know, “When there is nil grey matter to spill? Nothing to lose.” Harrumph, I snort, but only in my mind.) I worry about picking up someone else’s bag from the carousal and (the consequence of seeing a mystery-movie in college) being the innocent victim of a murder. “Paranoia,” Shri Husband insists.“Without reason.” “Crazy,” Bai Goanna agrees. I say nothing. They won’t understand. No one understands. I let it go. Anyway, we didn’t get tickets on the same airlines, but the flight-timings were identical. Considering only one aircraft can take off at an instant from Dabolim… it didn’t take me long to figure out how they worked it. One flight took off on time, the other was delayed, naturally. Also, the timings indicated that the flight-duration was over an hour and a half. Goa-Mumbai, I read, takes, or should take, fifty-five minutes. So, even if the flight is late for technical snags, security reasons, VIP movement, quarrelling crew, when it lands, it’s mostly ‘punctual’ and gets some rating for the feat. Neat trick.(The next time Goa Today’s editor asks me how long it will take me to write a piece for him, I will say ‘six months’. Won’t he be impressed when I mail it in as many weeks? Ha, am I a good learner or am I a great learner.) FYI, Goa airport food outlets can compete with airlines’ meals, so bad is their fare. We didn’t suffer. Like good(read ‘kanjoos’)Goans, we carried with us water (drank it up before Security) and sandwiches (half were finishedon the way, well before we reached Vasco), wafers (same as ‘chips’) and curd (later mixed with aforesaid water and a packet of homemade masala to get instant buttermilk.) At the airport, as we moved towards our respective gates, our ‘cheerios’ turned to ‘oh-nos’ when we realized that although we were headed to Mumbai, one flight was landing at T-1, Santacruz, the other at T-2, Sahar, a distance of 30 mins. (In India, lest you be unaware, we measure distance in the time covered by taxi. We in Goa measure distance by fare; like, my home is twelve-hundred bucks from the airport, and it’ll shock you to know how little that is in kilometres.) Railway stations have no such complications. Tivim or Carmali stations may force you to ‘land’ on the tracks because the platform is shorter than the train (has happened!), but it’s not Mapusa at one end and Margao at the other. My village mind is imagination-deficit; when I heard this T-1-T-2 thing, I gave up wondering how big Mopa airport was likely to be. No connection, just my wandering mind a-wondering. Through the journey, we pondered what Maows might be doing. The moment we landed-- two on-time and one delayed by an hour-- and until we met again, yet another hour later, we phoned our neighbour to check on her (Maows, not the neighbour). Over the weekend that we were away, the ‘wado’ kept an eye not on our property (jungle, really) nor possessions (no self-respecting thief would covet them), but our cat. V, who had the key to the house and access to cat’s food, told me Maows wouldn’t touch a morsel unless she stood by. She had to wait until Maows’ meal was over. In spite of the fact that we had trained Maows to use a particular window to exit and enter, she made V’s life miserable by wanting to use the ‘human’s’ door. Cats have intelligence, don’t let any dog-lover dispute that. Mumbai has its charm. The Metro-digging is going on from Andheri-Seepz to beyond Churchgate, which means more than half the city is semi-paralyzed. The very-slow-moving traffic reminded me of the Mandovi-bridge jams over holiday weekends. But none was seen pouring beer-froth over another’s head in the middle of such a jam: tourists in Goa give us entertaining moments, don’t they? Back home now, with Maows on lap and laptop on table, I’m making a list of ‘lessons learnt in the first month of 2018’. 1. When you leave a cat at home, alone, keep out only those clothes you don’t want shred. 2. When you have forgotten to switch off a light or fan, keep aside extra money for the electricity-bill of the next month. 3. …(word limit up, more next time.)

Ban the Bhiknna

Whilst the rest of the country’s discussing on television whether it’s a good idea to ban beef, in my corner of the village, I’m wondering what to do about the hundred odd ‘bhiknna’ that lie fermenting in the soil, quite literally raising a stink. (For the ‘bhailley’ who haven’t a clue what ‘bhiknna’ means: in Konkanni, we use the same word for groundnuts and some people also use it to describe the edible jackfruit-seed, but here I’m talking about the cashew-nut.) Technically, it’s not the cashew-nut that lies fermenting in the soil, it’s the yellow, pulpy fruit whose flesh is acrid and is the source for the stinky ‘feni that tourists think we Goans drink all day long. In my vado, there are several dozen cashew trees, none intentionally planted by the dwellers. In years gone by, squirrels and other pesky creatures played their role in transporting the nuts hither and thither. The big, bad monsoons encouraged them (nuts, not squirrels) to sprout and grow, year by year, into productive trees. Trouble is, the trees are now adults and giving us trouble, shedding sickeningly smelly fruit over the roads, on roofs and inside compounds. Carefully though I tread, I occasionally step on one, it gets squelched and my nostrils and olfactory lobes suffer for hours together. Nowadays, no one comes to pick the nuts, either, for money or love, and the fruits lie rotting everywhere. Cash crop my foot. Driving taxis for the whites (racist term, commonly used hereabouts) is what parents encourage their children to do. When I came to settle in this village, if there was a heap of cashew fruit sulking in the corner of a garbage pile, cows and pigs would slurp at the rotting mess, clearing it up in minutes. I don’t remember any heady stink. Today, no pigs to be seen and the rare cow that comes a-wandering prefers to poke her nose into any plastic bag that floats her way. I’ve noticed that many cows eat the bag along with its contents. I wonder why any beef-eater would want to eat the meat of an animal raised on such food, but then, as Shri Husband points out to Bai Goanna in an aside, I have a tendency to ask stupid questions. I get unwanted vibes where/when-ever I go to eat in other peoples’ homes. Meat-eaters look at me askance because half my family is vegetarian. Vegetarians keep me at a distance because I have family/friends that eat meat. Flesh on hooves, covered with feathers or scales, inside shells… abstinence from these, for religious reasons, I can understand. But recently, I had guests who avoided all of the above, plus didn’t ‘touch’ ‘masoor-daal’ and mushrooms. Nothing to do with allergies. I was informed that “we don’t eat” the stuff followed by “in ‘ours’ it’s not considered nice”. Comprehend? If you understood what that meant, you’re a true-blue Indian from India. You will then also understand that ‘we’ don’t eat non-veg/onion/garlic on Mondays, that Tuesdays and Thursdays are also vegetarian days, that some people are extra-devout on Saturdays, that food specific to certain days can be consumed on ‘non-God days’, etc. Wednesdays and Sundays are ‘safe’. You annoy none of the million gods no matter what you eat on those day. No, wait, Sunday is Ravivar… if you worship the Sun-god, then that’s not a safe day for you. A true-blue Indian will be unaware that the term ‘non-veg’ belongs to India. In other countries, the concept of having different kitchens/utensils/people for cooking flesh/non-flesh is not understood. I digress. Since most of our local cows have either died of starvation or got killed by speeding vehicles, the stink of the rotting cashew fruit has ‘intoxicated’ my life. Shri Husband pointed out to Bai Goanna: “She talks nonsense without any help.” Bai Goanna retorted : “Writes, not talks.” Shri Husband said: “Same thing.” I spent some afternoons collecting the fallen cashew fruits, separating the seeds from the smelly, soft flesh and drying them. I made a fire with twigs, put upon it a perforated metal sheet, and roasted the seeds. Burnt my fingers, and made an oily mess trying to skin them. Some seeds were barely roasted, others were burnt and fragmented. Yet, all whom I offered them to agreed that ‘this taste’ was incomparable. Everyone who eats off a barbecue sighs with delight about the aroma of smoke. To me, effort-to-enjoyment ratio didn’t match. I won’t do it again, will leave it to enthusiasts who like to eat wood-fire-cooked ‘jevonn’. I’ve been informed by neighbours that the un-picked seeds littering our locality are likely to sprout and grow into trees. In the years to come, I will get ‘gassed-out’ by the smell each summer. But, who knows, some bright minds might decide that, like beef, intoxication is not something India should have… the cashew came from foreign lands, was unknown in Vedic times, etc., … so ban, or at least the fermentation of, the cashew fruit. Don’t know whether that falls under the purview of ‘swatchha Bharat, nitall Goem’.

The Other Female in Shri Husband’s Life.

Shri Husband’s fallen in love. I’m far from jealous. I welcome the lack of attention. My ‘sauten’ has a tail, four legs and a whisper-mew that not even God can hear. How she came into our lives is a story by itself. A co-passenger on a Konkan Kanya journey exchanged phone numbers with me. I fall for the ‘we must meet again’ line and in some kind of stupid ‘josh’ end up doing such potentially dangerous things. This co-passenger was harmless, though, I thought, and once in Goa she really did connect with me. “My neighbour has this cute kitten” she wrote on WhatsApp, the sentence accompanied by a photo to prove it. Shri Husband, who hated felines until that moment, figured that it would be good to have a creature that eats cockroaches and spiders to save on pest control expenditure. Little did he know that the wiles of the yet-another-female in the house would change his life drastically. She’s officially named ‘Maows’, which rhymes with ‘mouse’, confusing people, rodents and the other cats in the neighbourhood when we call out to her. Bai Goanna calls her Chingi and I call her Chicktu… because she’s always clinging to Shri Husband (the other reason is because I’m Chick-one, see?) As practical first-things-first sort of people, we trained her to use a litter-box even before she had her first sip of milk in our house. She took to the cardboard-box lined with newspaper and did her ‘business’ dutifully in it. Till she discovered that there was more drama if she did it in the kitchen sink or fresh laundry pile. She hasn’t done it so far—in the kitchen sink or laundry pile, I meant-- just threatened to, but it was enough to have us running around, ‘koyto’ in hand, wanting to kill her then and there. That she’s still alive speaks much for her agility and the state of our aging reflexes and aching joints. Many are the times I’ve vowed to feed her to the monkey that occasionally visits our plot. Bai Goanna tells me monkeys are vegetarians. One taste of cat-meat might help them change their habits, I retort. When she sleeps or begs for something, it’s heart-melting. That look, oh, that look. Google told us inoculations against rabies and cat-flu were necessary. Getting in touch with a local veterinarian wasn’t difficult as Goa has a good doctor-patient ratio for pets. Astrid Almeida has further confused our cat by calling her MyLittleFriend. The cat doesn’t know what her real name is. Neither do we, although she’s been with us for a couple of months now. We have, within jogging distance, a couple of dog-spas and –salons and one clinic run by a dog-psychologist and –behaviour-therapist. Nothing for cats. My neighbours, ‘niz’-Goemkars all, consider cats as neither pets nor pests, just nuisances to be tolerated, like ‘jalleraan’ (mosquitoes, you know, in Konkanni). The cats that hover around ‘nustemkarnni’ Rose-Marie’s wooden plank when/where she sells fish each evening, are so tough, we could send them for the Olympics. I’ve seen people click their pictures. If ever you pass our village Panchayat in the evening, stop by for a ‘dekho’ where Rose-Marie squats to see what happens. It’s a very Goan activity, feeding fish heads, tails, fins and insides to cats. Dogs are named and called affectionately, ‘Tommy’, ‘Shivaji’, ‘Sultan’. The one in our ‘waddo’ responds to ‘peto’ (Konkanni for pet) or ‘guddo’ (good-dog mispronounced). Cats, poor things, are shooed away and seldom have decent names; ‘hoosh’ and ‘huttt’ are terms snapped at them whenever they come to close. In spite of having thin skins, cats don’t care. You can’t make the tiniest dent in a cat’s self-esteem no matter how many curses you hurl at it. I’ve observed that. Shri Husband, ever poking his nose into my affairs and articles, said: “You have so much time to observe such things. No wonder the dusting, chopping, shopping, cleaning, cooking, doesn’t get done ever… never mind on time.” I didn’t say a word. No point. Men are from Mars, etc. Also, Bai Goanna has pointed out that the lesser I do, the more he helps. I’m using that observational data to advantage. Cat has grown from kitten to adolescent. Lanky, adventurous nuisance. She gets into the fridge/wardrobe and after the door is shut, mews. We can’t make out from where the pathetic sound is coming and a frantic indoor hunt follows. In the compound, she climbs trees and is terrified of looking down. Shri Husband gallantly puts a ladder against the trunk and climbs up to rescue her. She goes further up and hisses and claws at him. Temptation in the form of fish-heads gets her safely back into his arms. Both behave like honey-mooning tourists crossing Chogm Road: disjointedly leaning towards each other, not bothering about what people will say, purring and cooing, petting and cuddling. Pets make people do strange things. Imagine a no-nonsense type A man behaving like this with a whimpering, spineless female. (Famous last words.) Now, cat has found herself a playmate-boyfriend. They chase the hose when we are watering the plants. He comes close to her, she spits viciously, he doesn’t mind. She invites him to share the fish she has for breakfast, he eats it all and she has to spend the rest of the day hunting moths, frogs and little birds for food; she doesn’t mind. She treats Shri Husband as a great big mouse and jumps all over him when he lays himself down to rest after a hard day’s work. Chiding, however severe, doesn’t work. A dog would have shrunk in shame if the Master had raised his voice, and behaved well for the rest of its life. The cat is Goan, doesn’t bother about wrong-doings being corrected, penalties are mere inconveniences. Shri Husband won’t give up. Conscientiously tries to remedy her ways. The government should employ him in the yet-to-be-formed Ministry of Morals and Ethics. Until then, I must share Shri Husband’s energy and affection with a furry, four-legged softly-mewing female.

The Gagging Reflex

For the last couple of days, I’ve been reading all over Facebook about how people are being gagged by the government. The internet in general and Facebook in particular are my link with the real world. I sit in a corner, in my end-of-the-road house in a non-descript village, surrounded by jungle, away from sand, surf and tourists. Post after post tells me India’s being gagged. I narrow my search in the newspaper for ‘public transport’ and ‘garbage’ headlines, my areas of interest these days. No gagging of voices anywhere. Taxi-drivers/owners and passengers are both cribbing loud and clear. As are locals and tourists alike, regarding disposal of plastic bags, sanitary napkins, biscuit-wrappers, banana peels, half-eaten wada-paavs, etc. The gagging business has got me curious. Familiar faces shout out of my television screen in decibels whose vibrations scared away the two-metre monitor lizard that was sunning itself in our compound last week. Those voices have been unchanged for years and unchanging in their ways, ruled by the advertisers, day after day, 24-hours/day. To switch channels, one has to choose between insane yelling, vigorous hyperventilation and boredom, with program-repeats every couple of hours. Methinks, some form of gagging would be a good idea. I read some old opinions on military affairs in Kashmir and naxal-territory written by a novelist. Was impressed. The author should pronto be made a starred general. Those who do professional courses and put themselves at risk on crazy heights in miserable weather are wasting their time. All they need to do is check with her how to sort out complicated political stuff and convince the powers that rule, and the powers that divide, and some violence-happy guys, and make peace prevail. She hasn’t written for a while. If she’s been gagged, she should be un-gagged immediately. In a democracy, all PoVs should be heard, even absurd/irresponsible ones. I hear friends discuss how such-and-such politician hasn’t kept his/her word and is so-o corrupt. That’s what politicians do. And no one’s being gagged (in India) for saying so…yet. And no one’s discovered (anywhere) a method to gag a politician…yet. Over the phone two acquaintances from Delhi tell me about the happenings in JNU: one says the government has no business to stifle students’ voices, the other says students should get involved in politics after their studying years are over. This is life in a free country, everyone voicing contra-views. Gagging will kill that charm. An ex-colleague from the hotel industry tells me how putrid the health care industry is. Medical professionals say a few greedy ones are giving them all a bad name. Builders/industrialists say you can’t stop progress; environmentalists say you mustn’t destroy the earth. Such a cacophony. When irritated, I feel, gag ‘em all. Parents say dilute the school syllabi; the government says fail nobody, and when the school-children become young adults, they don’t get jobs because they don’t have skills. So many people complaining, so many complaints. More the merrier. Complaining is our birth-right. In calmer moments, I feel, gagging will destroy this national pastime. Actually, when I began doing homework about gagging, what should or not be gagged, I was expecting reporters, anchors, people around me to feel nauseated, be throwing up. Because gagging is what happens when an ENT surgeon shoves a spatula into my mouth to depress my tongue or a dentist opens my mouth wide and wider until my insides protest with a couple of unexpected, involuntary, violent consecutive jerks. (Doctors/dentists/nurses dealing with the likes of me get nightmares: of that another time.) Gagging is what I did as a child… when the thin cream that happened on the surface of cooling coffee/tea got inadvertently swallowed. Gagging is one reflex that recognizes whether a patient is unconscious or dead. And the health of Freedom in a nation. Nowadays, everyone in Delhi-Gurgaon is wearing masks and keeping windows closed. Some are not daring to even do pranayama in case they inhale too much of that dense fog of smoke and grime. When I listen to what’s making everyone wheeze and choke there, what makes me gag is the question “What has the government done?” We all know the government is irresponsible. It’s been like that for almost 67 years, nothing new about that. What makes me gag is that no one’s asking us citizens what we have done to reduce the pollution that’s causing everybody to cough and gasp. I don’t hear anyone insisting on having comfortable and reliable buses so that they don’t have to use cars. Or bicycle-tracks. My point: want single-use cars? Want multiple cars per family? Then learn to gag. The air clogs poor lungs, rich lungs, middle-class lungs, healthy lungs, ill lungs, domiciled lungs and lungs passing through. Masked and yet-to-be masked nostrils means a lot of money to be made for certain manufacturers. India’s on the move. A trillion-trillion masks to make. A billion-plus of us are ready to pollute, and in all parts of India, too. I don’t hear anyone volunteering to stop or reduce using air-conditioning, or burning crackers/sparklers. Using wood for cremating the dead adds to the smoke. Electrical burning pollutes less. Do we insist on the latter? Nah, tradition is more important, gagging be damned. Burning in the fields in another, major, problem. But not the only one. We’ll soon have packaged air. Some years ago we thought bottled water was not possible. More packaging, more plastic in the gutters, more burning of garbage, more fumes, more gagging. Some guru will invent and broadcast the gag-pranayama on tv. And we’ll have families/schools doing this together: “on-the-gag, get-set, breathe”. The media says: “The government must do something.” We have our rights, the government has the responsibility. To me the biggest gag moment of all is hearing a fellow countryman do ‘khaak thoo’. India has the distinction of being the only country in the world that has a problem with disposal of spit. Any ideas how we can deal with it? Want to start a Gaggers’ Group? Feedback: sheelajaywant@yahoo.co.in.

Addictions

Bai Goanna bought herself a weighing machine, which she calls ‘the scale’. She now weighs herself every time she goes from kitchen to bedroom, front door to bathroom, verandah to cupboard. No matter where she has to go, she takes a detour via the machine. This happens several times a day. She lovingly dusts it, adjusts the calibration, weighs herself again and sighs every time. No idea whether the sighs are triggered by loss/gain. No idea also whether the grams can thus change from hour to hour through the day. I tease her about any ‘gram-matical’ changes. At night when she wakes up… immediately remembers ‘the scale’ and finds her way to it. “It’s an addiction,” Shri Husband snorted. I kept quiet. He says I’m addicted to books and to my writing. Maybe. Wikipedia says, ‘Addiction is a medical condition characterized by compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli, despite adverse consequences’. On analysis, I am compulsively engaged to reading whatever I can lay my fingers on, including shampoo-bottle labels, despite consequences like the daal on the stove burning. As always, Shri Husband’s not wrong. Poking his head over my keyboard, he read what I’d typed and remarked: “Say I’m right, don’t say it in a convoluted way.” That’s his addiction, to comment on everything I say/do. Going by the definition, medical or not, addictions are common. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have one. I know people who are addicted to finding out about what’s healthy and what’s not. It affects their lives. They stay away from white foods like sugar, maida, even milk. If they’ve read about oats/cornflakes providing required nutrients, they consume tons of those, cooked or raw. At other times, they switch to unpolished fov/nachni-satva. If probiotic and fruit yoghurt sounds better than dahi, that becomes the food of the season. If the latest hysteria says liquidise and drink papaya leaves to cure dengue or some other dreaded disease, that replaces their usual quota of freshly extracted karela/wheat-grass juice. What, I asked a friend who was on a satvik diet, would eating only fruits, sprouts and gourds minus onions, garlic and root vegetables achieve? S/he replied, “Keeps one heathy.” “What exactly does ‘being healthy’ mean?” I asked aloud, no one in particular. “Not being ill,” said Bai Goanna. “Having peace of mind,” added Shri Husband. “And no addictions.” Never mind gambling and consumption of liquor/ tobacco/ drugs, there are people I know who are addicted to shopping. Come bonus, come salary, come cash received as gift, and off they trot to buy something they just don’t need. Life is short, they say, why not enjoy it whilst one can? Mid-spectrum are friends addicted to hoarding: money in bank, buy-two-get-one-free items stored in their cupboards, neatly folded plastic bags in drawers, pairs of shoes under the sofa, pens and more pens in stands on shelves and so on. And at the other end of the spectrum are those addicted to not spending at all. Make do is their motto. If addiction has negative connotations, then this kind of miserliness could be considered a positive trait, more so in the days of dropping interest rates. “There’s a difference between habit and addiction,” Shri Husband said. “‘Habit’ is old-fashioned,” I informed him. “It’s like, these days, haircuts are amazing and everyone says everyone else is looking so-o lovely and fantastic even when they’re dull, stupid, boring and ugly. You don’t say ‘I love’ potato-chips, you say ‘I’m addicted to’ them. You don’t say you’re fond of your new phone, you say you’re addicted to it.” I further explained. “Addiction is the new interest.” There are people addicted to visiting doctors at the slightest discomfort, real or imagined, and those who will land up in an ICU when all the nature-cures, and alternative medical therapies have failed. There are spiritual/ity addicts, whose rapidly increasing numbers are such a boon for entrepreneurs and rogues alike. Wear a robe and an impassive expression on your face, stick on a beatific smile, rephrase what the old texts say and voila, you’re in business. Name, fame, money, politics… in the service of religion, addiction works for both the giver (person in robe) and taker (lay bakras looking for the ‘peace and happiness’ that has eluded mankind since religion was born). The wisdom/philosophy distilled through the ages doesn’t have a role to play in religion, not any longer. I’m addicted to stretching exercises. Call them yogic asanas or physiotherapy prescriptions, a couple of doses gives me my high for the day. And I’m addicted to the internet, that OMG-what’s-happening curse of the young, say the parents/teachers of this era. To them I say, it’s not the technology that’s evil, it’s the sites you choose. From the internet, I got these quotes that indicate the seriousness of addiction to mind/physiology altering substances. “The mentality and behaviour of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help, they have no hope.” Russel Bland. “The unfortunate thing about this world is that good habits are so much easier to give up than bad ones.” Somerset Maugham. “At first, addiction is maintained by pleasure, but the intensity of this pleasure gradually diminishes and the addiction is then maintained by the avoidance of pain.” Frank Tallis. The one I found scary. Took me some minutes to understand it: “I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster, or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of death from being a total surprise.” Chuck Palahniuk. What really happens: “Addiction doesn't kill the addict. It kills the family, kids and people who tried to help!” Anonymous. My chief addiction is writing. It doesn’t kill, maim or make me ill. I will not call it an addiction henceforth… diversion/pastime sounds better. Using the correct word makes a difference. Feedback: sheelajaywant@yahoo.co.in

Cops and Jams.

“Too bad,” Bai Goanna said as we were driving towards Panaji, “The jams we have these days.” Shri Husband, who always takes things literally and has the imagination/diplomacy of an ant when it comes to dealing with Bai Goanna said: “What’s bad about strawberry/mixed fruit? Red in colour, sweet to taste, packed neatly, loved by young and old, been there for years. What about it is too bad?” Bai Goanna rolled her eyes and rephrased what she’d said: “Really bad, the traffic jams we have these days, especially between Porvorim and Panaji.” Shri Husband’s twisted logic: “Would you be happier if they existed between Vasco and Margao or Pednem and Mapusa? Just asking.” “No,” Bai Goanna responded as gently as she could. “I don’t like traffic jams. Anywhere, anytime. Right here, there’s no space at all, between cars, in between lanes. See those ambulances? Must be transporting very ill patients, no? No one’s moving to the side to give them place to go.” “Where can any vehicle move?” Shri Husband uttered the truth. Then he said: “Both patients and vehicles are wailing in despair. Sad.” Bai Goanna took over: “Look at those taxies. They’re in such a hurry… maybe to make sure their passengers don’t miss flights or trains. And those women on the scooters, must be mothers racing to fetch their children from school. People must be heading for exams/interviews, worried about reaching on time.” “And,” Shri Husband interrupting her, looking at someone in the rear-view mirror, “people who can’t bear the thought that they’ll have to miss the first few minutes of a movie. They honk so much.” “Everybody honks,” Bai Goanna said, “out of frustration and irritation.” “Does it, will that make this traffic move?” Shri Husband can’t bear to hear anyone speak more than two sentences max, before he barges into any dialogue. “Look at those chaps coming from the back. They’re trying to overtake, adding to this chaos. They’re blocking the on-coming traffic as well, converting snarls to stand-stills.” Often, he’s says something that makes sense and Bai Goanna and I have to keep quiet. But Bai Goanna was in a spirited mood. She said: “It’s the fault of the cops, you know.” “I don’t see how,” said Shri Husband. “Tell me how it’s the fault of the cops.” “They don’t know how to handle traffic,” she said with an air of ‘I’m-going-to-win-this-round’, adding: “They’re not tough enough to handle so much traffic.” There was a drop in the conversation, something that happens periodically in any conversation. Amongst the three of us, conversations ascend from debates to arguments in very little time; the latter sound like quarrels in mere moments. Full blown fights never happen, have never happened. Regarding the future, our motto is que sera, sera. But the amount of noise we made inside our car and the gesturing we did whilst talking, worried the neighbours. Car-neighbours in that traffic jam, I mean. We had plenty of audience around, though with all the windows up, bless the a-cs, only expert lip-readers would have known what we were ‘discussing’. However, as I said, there was a lull in the conversation. At such times, Shri Husband seizes the opportunity to talk… not that he needs to be given a chance or encouragement. “We need fewer cars on the road, not wider roads,” he said. “Haan?” said Bai Goanna, her eyebrows hitting the top of her forehead in surprise. “How so?” “We need more parking space, we need to enter crowded towns. Bypasses have their advantages, but …we need less vehicles on the roads.” The firm tone was scary. Bai Goanna doesn’t get scared easily. “So-o, will you walk everywhere you go?” “We need to car-pool. We need buses, public or private, comfortable and reliable. See all these people stuck in their cars, one or two persons per car. If they had an option of travelling in a clean, maybe air-conditioned bus, they might take it; it’s much cheaper than taking one’s own car and one doesn’t have to do the first-gear-second-gear exercise, one can read/browse on the move.” “Who’s going to walk to the bus-stop?” Bai Goanna pointed out. “You have to walk to a bus-stop or have someone drop you there by car/scooter. Villages could have satellite/shuttle services at fixed/convenient times for short trips from waddo till main road.” The idealist Shri Husband versus the practical Bai Goanna. Sometimes they reverse roles, though, so it’s hard to predict at the beginning of a dialogue who will play which role for the day. She: “I wouldn’t mind walking to the bus-stop, will exercise my limbs, give me a chance to breathe in the outdoors and meet my friends enroute. But…” Always that qualifying ‘but’. She continuing: “…I can’t stand the garbage heaps that I have to pass. Inside a car, all ugliness gets shut out.” Shri Husband added: “Everyone thinks like you, so we get traffic jams.” She: “It’s the fault of the cops. They can’t handle the traffic. They should have diverted the vehicles some other way and avoided this.” He: “They may have considered it and had a reason that you don’t know anything about.” She: “I’m a tax-payer. I expect all government servants to do their jobs well.” He: “The government servants expect you to shoulder your responsibility, follow the rules of the road, obey traffic regulations...” She: “Cops have to make sure no one breaks rules.” Our in-car battle had warmed up. He: “You can’t have one cop per car, like you can’t have a municipal worker for every person who litters/spits.” That’s when we noticed the number-plates. Various scripts, different languages, fonts and sizes… some ‘arty’ ones we couldn’t read. If the cops were to challan them all, the traffic jam would have carried over to the next day. We discovered the causes for the jam: a broken down vehicle and crowds of long-weekend visitors. I’d sat through the dialogue without saying a word. I’m impressed with myself, I can stay quiet sometimes. Feedback: sheelajaywant@yahoo.co.in

Fear of Exams

Bai Goanna checked with some book on English grammar called ‘Wren and Martin’ and let me know that a student took an examination and a teacher gave it. Always thought it was the other way around. I’m sometimes wrong. To distract her, I said, “These days, the full word ‘examination’ is used only in government and other out-dated communications.” Ignoring the distraction, she continued: “A doctor gives a patient an examination, a structural engineer gives a bridge an examination, an art-historian gives an antique statue an examination…” you get the idea, when Bai Goanna talks, she gives a full lecture. This topic came up because she was assuring me that I wasn’t the only one who got nightmares about being in an exam-centre staring at a printed question paper, making no sense of anything in/on it. She said her nightmares included running out of ink, not finding the pen/ruler/eraser, missing the bus and therefore reaching just as the papers were being collected and worst of all, getting a mathematics paper when she’d prepared for geography/English. Had to agree, her nightmares were worse than mine. Mine are restricted to not knowing the answers and fearing the red line on the report-card with an ‘F’ marked somewhere. I know people who get stomach upsets, loss of appetite, sweaty palms, dizzy heads, a craving to eat forbidden snacks/sweets or a sudden/illogical wish to see Radhika Apte (or Fawhad) hours before exams are due to begin. A few, a really small percentage, feel like meeting their teachers/tutors/principals to seek blessings and stuff. Rare breed. Those kinds regularly do their homework on time through the year, have ‘difficulties’ two evenings before every unit test and ‘last-minute’ notes to revise. I shudder to even imagine what their nightmares are like. For theirs is the tension, the (they and their parents believe) power and the glory, forever and ever, amen. Poor things. At least one can wake up from a nightmare and heave a sigh of relief. Before every paper I’ve ever taken, I’ve prayed to each god I had heard of, irrespective of religion. I’ve even prayed to ancestors of classmates to intervene on my behalf and make me magically know the answers to simple and trick questions. The mantra of students before exams, like the belief of visitors in ICUs and participants in Kaun Banega Karodpati, is: ignore no god however insignificant, offend none, please all. Who knew which one would/could benevolently provide easy questions/answers/marks? Before an exam, goes the rule, never take punga with Luck. Charms work, they say: small lockets dangled from the neck, marbles in pencil-boxes, frayed ‘blessed’ threads tied to wrists, photos of Mary/Saraswati tucked into pockets, ash/dried flowers from places of worship put into pencil-boxes, etc. In the tea-time of my life, I’ve got involved with exams again, this time from the other side of The Desk. Never had I imagined that I would be giving an exam. Never mind in what subject and which institution. I had to evaluate the very lot of students that I’d taught. Scary thought, that they might have taken everything I’d said seriously. I had to sift between Very Good, Good, Fair, Satisfactory and Fail. I had to set questions, give marks, calculate grades, ranks. Made me nervous. My regard for my old physics/chemistry teachers (may their souls be resting in The Great School in the Sky), spiked when I reckoned how much time/effort they spent trying to appraise what we’d learnt in their classes. Like me, they must have wondered, were my/their lesson plans clear? Methods effective? As students, my friends’ and my days were spent in a haze of clever jokes. We didn’t have sms/whatsapp; we had our own means of triggering giggles. Technology changes, human nature doesn’t. Daydreams were fantastic escapes from the tedium of formulae and theories. I wondered how much of what I had slogged over had been retained by the students. If it was >5%, I’d give myself a party. As a teacher, I think differently. I went through the syllabus prescribed as well as the syllabus I’d covered, delved through topics/chapters which I thought were important, to dig questions from. I rearranged words to make simple questions look complicated, to get the young minds a-creaking. Then I sat down to decide how many marks to allot to each question. I said to Bai Goanna: “This exercise of setting a paper is an exam of sorts for me. I don’t know what to include and what to leave out.” I’m not into CBTs (Closed Book Tests), but they’re essential. Everything can’t be copied/downloaded from the internet. Brains must be used sometimes. I threw in an essay. The topic: “Me, Five Years from Now”. Mean teachers give mean topics. In my class, the vocal ones chorused: “Give us hints. Tell us, tell us, Miss, ‘what will come’.” “No,” I said, my voice sounding unfamiliarly stern even to my own ears. “Everything is equally important.” Words imbibed in childhood stay in the memory, at the back of the mind, to be recalled in times like these. As the day of the examination approached, I got the jitters. What if the class didn’t turn up? What if it did but I couldn’t find my sheaf? What if a large number of students submitted nearly-blank sheets? What if the paper was so easy that everyone scored a hundred per cent marks? What if my grading wasn’t fair? What if there was a re-exam for whatever reason? What if… the nightmares continued, the perspective had changed. It’s ordained, in the field of education, that a taker of exams someday a giver shall become. These days, male teachers are rare. In my schooldays, there was equal gender distribution. Our female teachers wore skirts, even short and smart ones, or saris. The salwar-kameez was a no-no. “It’s the tension of giving an exam that has brought to your mind this irrelevant, unconnected, long forgotten ‘fact’,” Bai Goanna said. Maybe. Feedback: sheelajaywant@yahoo.co.in

A Weekend in Mumbai and After

          On late visarjan night, the walk in the rain from railway station to home was not nice. People, going for or returning after drowning (can’t call it an ‘immersion’ after knowing how it’s done) the Ganapati idols, needed a tot of liquor to revive/relax them during/after the dancing. Dancing meant flailing limbs in all directions, dismayingly ungracefully, with un-co-ordinated pelvic thrusts. Heads that rolled/bobbed vigorously on necks made me giddy to even watch. Subsequent days, I imagined, would involve casual/sick leaves and visits to spine/neuro surgeons to get relief from cricks and sprains. And ENT specialists, too, for the drums were big and loud, the brass-clangers bigger and louder, giving aches and hearing loss, no doubt. To describe the scene in two words: Dirty, Avoidable.

          Visarjan over, the municipal workers slaved the entire morning cleaning up the streets. In spite of our cribs, these guys work. We should do our bit by reducing the quantity of garbage. But what the hell, the reduce-reuse-recycle mantra is for activists, not us, right? We’d rather live with the dirt, thanks, and complain about what the government doesn’t do.

          No government has the courage to say: keep your religion in your homes, don’t let it spill onto the streets. Majorly guilty are the Hindus and the Muslims. The Jains/Sikhs/Christians a little; Parsis and Jews are too few to make a dent in traffic/crowds. If I’ve missed some religion, please send me a mail, I’ll include it the next time.

          But Mumbai got back to normalcy immediately. Shops opened on time. Peons/clerks/drivers/maids reported to work. Local buses/trains were on schedule.

          Of the many things Goa can learn from other places, Mumbai’s public transport should be top of the list. The kali-pilis don’t mind the Ola-Uber competition. Imagine that; none has ever gone on strike for putting metres on cabs/autos either.

          One evening, I attended a classical music program in someone’s house. Of a pukka, national-level, famous singer, not the offspring of a couple dying-to-show-(our)-child’s-talent. Gracefully laid table with a few well-made snacks, a great sound system and thirty-odd persons sat quietly to enjoy a good performance. Someone took the mike and explained the raag, the poem/lyrics, the history behind the gurus of the singer and of their times, the language, the instruments accompanying them and the musicians who played them. A few weeks ago, at KA, I’d enjoyed a wonderful program like this one. But…and this But says is all…the announcer or MC or compere or presenter kind of ruined the evening. She was a Ms T. She ruined the experience by using, in her minutes-long speeches (yeah, several of them) absurd and unnecessary adjectives--- ‘majestic’, ‘wonderful’, ‘outstanding’, ‘divine’, ‘spiritual’, ‘fantastic’—without telling the audience anything about the singer or the singing.

          Dinner was in a very clean, inexpensive downtown hotel. We have many such in Goa. What made this one different was it was managed and run by an institution that looks after and trains destitute girls. The quality of the food, choice of menu and most importantly, the cheerful efficiency of the girls have won this place its customers. It doesn’t need advertisement. Word of mouth recommendation keeps it crowded. More kudos followed later: we exited from the back of the restaurant… it was as clean and tidy as the front. That Dirty-City could have spots like these was a revelation. Another lesson Goa can learn, cleanliness is doable at individual level.

          A board at Dadar station said passengers/visitors could have access to free WiFi. I tried. It was a fast connection. A million heads had bowed down to their cell-phones at this station. A tribute to technology. I wondered just what those million heads were looking at and thinking of when they were using that free-WiFi connection.

          That’s when I read the news on the little screen of my instrument: “Seventeen jawans of the Indian Army were killed at Uri in Jammu and Kashmir.” While life was going on with the office-goers, school-kids, hawkers and time-passers doing what they routinely did in their waking hours.

“More will die of the injuries caused by that devastating fire,” Shri Husband said.

Mostly in their twenties, fathers of toddlers, husbands of young women, sons of toiling farmers, these soldiers were/are the reason I am comfortable doing my thing in my home/city/state. I write the way I want, move freely, speak my mind, read the books and see the films I wish to, thanks to them.

I owe them, paid by my taxes and through my government, appropriate and the best gear, training, transport, equipment, support, intelligence and good decisions to be taken by the babus and mantris so they can do their jobs well. Selfish reasons… so I can live in secure comfort.

I asked Shri Husband, “Why do babus and mantris make decisions for them?”

“Because we have a democratically elected civilian government,” he said.

“If they make the decisions for them, they should share the terrain and the dangers, know about the profession of fighting a war, right?”

Shri Husband fell silent. He never admits it when I’m right.

One co-passenger commented: “Neither country will use the nuclear bomb.”

Another replied: “You think ‘they’ are going to shower flowers on us in war?”

I said to Bai Goanna, “I don’t like war. War breaks buildings, roads, water-pipes, electrical connections. War means no medicines when you’re ill, stinky food when you’re hungry. War means gaping wounds, fractured bones, loss of limbs, bullets in spine ---paralysis---, splinters in flesh, injuries in eyes, deafness in ears, coffins and cremations. I’m a lover of embroidery, poetry and music.”

“If,” Bai Goanna interrupted sombrely, “You must have that stuff, someone has to guard your home, your country and its borders.”

“It’s a complicated issue,” Shri Husband pointed out, “Beyond the scope of your column.” 

Perhaps. But can’t I send our soldiers, through this column, somehow, my deep salaam/namasthe/pranaam/salute? Can I? I wonder on my journey back.

 

Feedback: sheelajaywant@yahoo.co.in