A heavy conversation

I was standing in the corridor watching the grey skies, enjoying the nice breeze and minding my business, hoping that it would rain. I felt someone walk by behind me and then stop.

"You've lost weight, no?"

I cringed. I remembered attending a gathering recently when someone said that if you have to compliment someone, you don't have to say, "You look nice, have you lost/gained weight?" Just say, "You look nice," and leave it at that. Don't add your expert opinion about why that person is looking nice. I loved it!

So back to this impending conversation. Whenever someone tells me something like this, I have this inexplicable need to justify why they might be mis-observing. My usual replies are:

No, it must be an optical illusion... hahaha!

No, I just got a haircut and look different.

No, I am just wearing bright colored, fitting clothes.

These justifications are unnecessary. It doesn't matter whether I have lost weight or not, I could just give them the answer they want to hear, and they will leave me alone. In this case, I had two options- a yes or a no. If I said that no, I have not lost weight, that would prolong the conversation about why that person is right and I am wrong. Very calmly, I said, "Yes, I have lost weight."

I thought that the conversation is over, that the person would leave me alone and move on with life. They did not. I was not anticipating what came next.

"I will not be diplomatic and say that you did not need to lose weight. You did. And looks like you have indeed lost weight."

I grimaced as the seemingly well-meaning person walked away. I so hope that commenting on body weight becomes unconstitutional and banned by law someday! Like I say, there are mostly four unimaginative ways many people greet me here---

Roga hoye gechish!
Mota hoye gechish!
Kalo hoye gechish!
Forsha hoye gechish!

You've lost weight!
You've gained weight!
You've tanned!
You've become light-skinned!

sunshine

Checking up the doctor

Humor makes light the gravest of illnesses. At the doctor’s office, the doctor turned out to be a cute guy. Back home, the discussion naturally boiled down to, is he single? Could he, all cute and nice smiles and nerdy glasses and all, be single? The discussion took various turns, with the over-protective dad frowning as if the daughter finding someone cute is a terrible thing to happen to humanity, and the mom going off on an unending rant about how she let go off so many opportunities by getting hitched early in life and how I should continue valuing my freedom to do whatever or live wherever I choose to.

Apparently I have a psycho-magnet inside me, which is how I attract all the psychos in my life, she claims. Very oddly, she reminded me of the last time a guy I was interested in came home (odd because I could not even remember who the guy was), and she had put on her designer blouse and silk sari in the summer heat and cooked up a storm, even forgot to serve him posto because there were so many things to eat, yet there was no tangible outcome (tangible meaning a wedding in the timeline). I have no idea why mom chose to wear a designer blouse to impress someone I was interested in, or why does she even remember what happened in the last decade, but that's beyond the point. Both the parents started reacting as if I am underage or the doctor is underage. They both looked like they are suffering enough in their own marriage.

However, grandma became my hero. In between all this verbal commotion, she spoke up.

"We need to find out if the young man is single to begin with," she proclaimed. And how?

"I'll come with you the next time and while he is examining you, I will start making small talk. Small talk how? Ki baba, kemon aacho, bari kothaye? Barite ke ke thake?"

How are you doing? Where is your home? Who else lives in your family?

Will old grandma accompany her grandchild the next time to the doctor, holding her walking stick with shaky hands? Will grandma make small-big-talk, like she promised? Will the cute doctor turn out to be single?

I may or may not get hold of the doctor, but I hope that I can hold on to my cute, loving grandma till the last day of my life.

Update: The doctor turned out to be single. I happened to lose interest in him.

Dad sighed in relief. And my mom acutely observed (and remarked): "I think you are looking for a manager in life, not a partner."

I think she might have a point.

sunshine

That deadly concoction of motherly love!

One of the big, big things about living in desh (country) is that I am only one short, direct-flight away from baadi (home). Given the law of averages, this had to happen after 12 years of hopping trans-continental flights for 36 hours and going through multiple immigration and security checks. I have visited home about ten times in less than a year now, and every time, I come back with bags full of cooked food that lasts me a few weeks. If you ever want to know what you could and should not bring in an airplane, ask me! But more on that later.

This time, I came back from a crazy mom slaving in the kitchen for days to cook up a feast-to-go and running after me to take it all. My Aviation-IQ went up after a comically dark stint with the mango, and if there is one piece of advice I could give, it is to NEVER take aam pora’r shorbot concentrate (raw mango concentrate) in an airplane.

Amid a crazy morning after momma and grandma painstakingly packed me food for an army, she looked at me with puppy-eyes to take that raw mango concentrate that I was resisting, the one she had prepared with a lot of love and spices (pepper powder, mint, and a gazillion other things). I was arguing that I will not carry anything in a yellow water bottle with something she made to shield me from the 45 degree Celsius weather and prevent me from getting heat strokes. I have extremely low karma ratings as far as being a nice child is concerned, so I finally gave up.

I don’t know all the chemistry that went into whatever happened, but that bottle passed airport security miraculously. That same bottle would have led to a 3-hour long interrogation in a dark room in the US, leading up to them labeling me a budding terrorist and denying me entry for the rest of my life. But I digress here.

I boarded the plane and settled in with a rather steamy novel that I was going to read in the next few hours. As I was stuffing my backpack in the overhead bin, something prompted me to take that bottle out, lest it leaks. I imagined everything that could go wrong, and the worst circumstance that came to my rather unimaginative mind was a loose lid and spillage. I placed that bottle in between my feet while the airplane took off.

I knew there was a pop-sound as soon as we were airborne, but I thought it was someone goofing around and recklessly popping open a can of soda. Looking back at life in slow motion, most things often make perfect sense. Within the next 5 minutes, just when Jack was about to kiss Stella after 2 months of abstinence following a one-night stand, there was a louder pop-sound. This time, I looked below, and to my horror, the bottle had popped open with enough pressure to spit raw mango pulp all over my white clothes. An onlooker would have wondered how scared I was of flying that I could shit all over myself publicly in the middle of the day, the one of the semi-liquid kind, with telltale signs of the yellow spillage all over me.

I rushed to the restroom, the bottle in hand. It broke my heart to throw it in the trashcan, but I could not have salvaged it. I spent the next 20 minutes wiping the yellow goo off my clothes and sat through the rest of the plane ride shivering from wearing wet clothes as well as getting dirty, judgmental looks from the passengers. The swag with which I had entered the aircraft was all gone. I sat nervously like a mouse for the rest of the ride, praying that I do not hear another loud pop-sound from the restroom with some poor soul inside freaking out with their pants half-on and the pilot rerouting the airplane because there was yellow goo all over the ceiling.

Looking back, I can see why it was a bad idea to bring something that releases gas in a pressurized cabin. Mom does not fly, but I do. The rest of me and my food made it safe, and in case you are dying to know, it had chicken curry with posto, jhinge posto, potol posto, uchche bhaja, lau er torkari, lichu, jamrul, ruti, half-a-dozen gondhoraaj lebu, and even the bhaja jeere moshla for the mango drink. All this because I have a crazy mom who gets powered up listening to stories of people carrying things like ghee made out of barir gorur doodh (unadulterated milk from a cow someone keeps in their home), kilos of maach bhaja, and dhoka’r dalna, and tries to outshine them!

sunshine