China Rose

On my way to work this morning, I picked up this flower. Bangla naam- Jawba phool. Scientific name- Hibiscus rosa sinensis. The two names have very different meanings for me. I taught a class on post-structural feminism recently. It took me a long time and multiple attempts of hitting my head on the wall to understand what is post-structuralism, what is feminism, and what is post-structural feminism in this context. However, it did help me develop an appreciation for the symbolic meanings of language once I vaguely understood the concept well enough to be able to teach it.

Jawba phool reminds me of Ma Kali. Of Shibpur, Howrah. And hajar haath Kali (goddess Kali with thousand hands, you should look up her picture. It gives me goosebumps, she looks so jagrata, so alive). All these are memories from my childhood, visiting hajar haath kali mondir in Shibpur and coming home to my grandparents’ place armed with two big bags of steaming hot boma. Boma means a bomb, and Chondi'r boma is the best alu’r chop that you will ever find. The story goes that Chondi, the inventor of boma, uses a secret spice recipe that no one else in the world has been able to replicate, and this humble family business over 3 generations did so well that he built a three-storey house. I do not know how much of this is true, but I do know that my mom spent years of her childhood bonding over boma with school friends, and I haven’t had it in decades now. So if anyone could get me hot bomas from Shibpur, you are my best friend for the rest of my life!

I don’t know how I jumped from jawba phool to boma, but the other name, Hibiscus rosa sinensis, opens up a whole new world of memories for me. I am in the ninth grade and Mrs. Khurana is our biology teacher. She has just taught us how to eviscerate the flower along its longitudinal axis to expose the reproductive contents using a dissecting needle. The catch is that during the practical exam, you only get one flower and one try to get it right. Sometimes, even surgeons are not as skilled as is expected of a 14 year-old. This would be followed by my vague attempt to neatly draw and label the parts of the flower, something I hated doing. I am so bad at drawing and sketching, I could not even draw a pumpkin, forget drawing the private parts of a dissected flower. I spent a good few months of my childhood surreptitiously plucking red flowers from the landlord’s garden and practicing my surgery skills on them. I might not know how to cook biryani or write R codes, but I can surely show you the reproductive parts of this red flower.

And of course now, the flower reminds me of the three-year old grandson of our neighbor who religiously sings me “mayer paye jawba hoye” in his mellifluous voice every time we meet. It is a devotional song dedicated to Ma Kali which means something like- I will be the flower of your feet.

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Thod(a)-Thod(a)

A lot can happen over a banana stem (thod in Bangla) from the garden. Sunday morning, I saw my neighbor chop a few of the banana plants in the garden. No idea what he was up to. Although I love the thod that my ma makes, I did not know what raw thod looks like. The neighbor-lady and I were chatting in the backyard when the neighbor-man handed me a shiny white, tube-like thing that looked like a rolled calendar, which was apparently the thod he got from the banana plant.

He put me in a huge dilemma with his neighborly kindness. I had never seen raw thod in my life, forget how to cook it. I looked at them helplessly and confessed that I do not know how to cook thod. “I love eating it though,” I added shamelessly, hoping that they would take it back and cook it for me. Instead, he asked me to try cooking it myself, explaining the basic steps.

Thod in hand, I called 911-aka-Ma. I think ma was more worried for me than I was. She again told me the basic steps. Keep peeling the hairy extensions, chop it finely, let it soak for a while in salt to get the moisture out, yada yada yada. In the meantime, the neighbor-man showed up and shared with me a bowl full of cooked thod, smelling heavenly of ghee and coconuts. Here is a person whom I have only known as a fellow faculty-colleague, writing papers and teaching classes, who chopped down the plant, sickle-in-hand, removed the thod, processed it, cooked it and shared it with the neighbor, and I am panicking.

Armed with ma’s verbal lessons, I decided to triangulate the information with YouTube videos. The first few I watched did not show how to process and cut the thod, they gave long lectures about how thod is good for diabetics, has lots of iron, yada yada yada. Finally, I found a few videos of villagers who grow and cut thod, sans any unsolicited gyaan about its health benefits.

Armed with three sources of information (neighbor-man, ma, and YouTube), I fell asleep. The next day, off I went to work, but kept thinking of the thod sitting in my fridge. Looks like once you were able to chop it all, it did not take much time or drama. No onion or garlic peeling. No adding groom moshla or other spices. Simply temper the oil with mustard seeds and red chilies and cover and cook until done. This much, I could do.

I usually come home late (as late at midnight sometimes) but I was distracted. I wanted to bite the bullet and see how I cook it. By 3 pm, I was home.

Peeling and chopping was the hardest part. My hands ached for hours, maybe even a day, and what came of it after chopping reminded me of my friend, G, who knows that I hate chopping vegetables, my fine motor skills are horrible. Every time I visit her in Seattle, during cooking all my favorites, she makes me peel and chop vegetables. Sometimes, multiple vegetables. Sometimes, vegetables for things she will be cooking in a week, just to torture me in the name of meal preparation. And when she runs out of vegetables, she makes me break and chop Thenga (coconuts). No matter how well I try to chop, she always looks at the chopping board and says, “Maadu kannu podardhu” in Tamil, meaning, “looks like the cow gave birth,” referring to how messy the chopping board looks. She asks me to chop beans and carrots measuring 0.1 centimeters. Which fully-grown, self-respecting mammal with permanent teeth chews such small pieces, I don’t know. She claims that the way something is cut determines its taste, but I highly doubt it and think she puts me through these cutting challenges to mess around with me.

After 30 minutes of working out my biceps and risking developing gout in my hands, I was able to cut it all. It still looked like the cow gave birth, but I didn’t care. I can chew the coarse pieces. I was half-dead after chopping and was contemplating going back to sleep. But true to what people said, after the chopping was done, cooking was easy peasy. And just like that, from not knowing what thod looks like, I learnt how to make decent thod in less than 24 hours. I was so excited that I shared some with the neighbor. After all, I had to return the bowl and according to tradition, we do not return empty bowls.

And with that, at 5 in the evening, instead of working in office, I enjoyed my first DIY thod, right from the garden, and became the first person in the world to have it with shingara. I did not wait to make rice; I had no energy left. When the neighbor-man told me a few weeks back that if he runs out of food, he will start chopping banana plants, I was terrified. I thought that chopping things from the garden is a terrible thing to happen. However, it was far from terrible, and quite an enjoyable process. The thod tasted quite ordinary, but for me, it was the best thing I had accomplished that day.

I portioned it off and left some for the next day before coming back to office. I really hope that when that mocha (banana flower) is ready, they do not make me peel it too. I have never made mocha, and I don’t think I can keep getting emotional about food from the garden.

Like my friend recently said, “It’s the time you have wasted for your rose (watering it) that makes your rose so important.” That’s why I wrote this post, for posterity, so that I always remember how excited I felt to cook thod for the first time.

 

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My first time in Jugarat

In 2006, when I first moved to Seattle, I met a girl at the orientation who could not say Gujarat. She would call it Jugarat. I had even written about it. However, I had never visited Jugarat myself.

Fast forward to about two years ago, I visit Jugarat for the first time, and what an introduction to the place I get! I was so excited to see what Jugarat looks and smells like. To me, it was the mystical land of Krishna and Gandhi and Amul and Garba. I had heard some odd stories related to Jugarat, about how a neighborhood family from Kolkata had moved there and when the child came back, she would only ask “Kem chho?” Not a word of Bangla. Or how that family’s daughter in Kolkata had eloped with a Jugarati guy after the tenth grade, or how an uncle whose first wedding we attended went there and found a new, Jugarati wife.

I stuck my nose to the window pane of the aircraft, trying to get my first glimpse of Jugarat in the fading sunlight that evening.

At the airport, I decided to use the restroom before picking up my bags. There were parallel stalls inside the restroom, all occupied, and I was surprised to see four parallel lines in front of those stalls instead of a single one. Back then, anomalies like this were out of my schema of understanding things; of course now, I am used to anything, even the lack of lines. So I had to choose any one line and hope that someone was not stuck inside that stall creating a bottleneck.

I waited patiently, and as the line moved forward, suddenly, I heard firing. It was the kind of fear-instilling firing that one does not easily forget. I heard loud firing from all the stalls- boom boom bam bam boom! And without realizing, thought bubbles started forming in my head. In those thought bubbles, I saw pictures of dhokla, thepla, fafda, handvo, khandvi, all under various stages of digestion. I clutched on to my chest instinctively, not knowing if I would survive the firing.

Finally, the firing stopped, almost all at once, and there was a deafening silence. The doors to each of the stalls opened. From inside, I saw four very fat women in saris emerging out victorious, slowly moving towards the wash basin.

Very wisely, I decided to turn back and run out, not looking back. I could empty my bladder later. I did not have it in me to go ahead and cross the war line after all that firing.

That was my first introduction to Jugarat.

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Recapping the past decade

The one thing that Covid-19 has given many of us is a lot of time to stay at home and reflect. That is what I have been doing since March. I was thinking that if someday, my memory left me, I would not know who I am. My basic fabric, the blueprint of who I am will go amiss. I know that we are into the fifth month of the year, a year many want to wish away, but the start of this year also marked a fantastic end to a decade (2010-2019). Here are some of the things I will remember the last decade for:

I restarted my PhD for the second time and also earned it. This time, my PhD made me leave Seattle (the “best” coast) and head diametrically east. It brought new experiences, new friends, and new adventures. I miss those three years and keep wishing that one day, I could return. From the beaches of North Carolina and Virginia to the mountains of upstate New York, the ocean of Maine and the beaches of Florida, I drove everywhere. From Boston to Princeton to New York, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Richmond, and Orlando, I made new friends everywhere. 

The last decade also marked my transition from science to social science research. The transition brought its own challenges of learning an entire new field. Each field is a new way of looking at the world, and this new lens taught me to look at the world in a different way. 

I grew an inch taller.

2010 is when I first traveled Europe as a tourist. That was also when I got a taste of backpacking and traveling alone, and there was no looking back. 

Half-way into the decade, when I got a job in Germany, I was thrilled. Over the next few years, I lived, worked, and paid taxes in the USA, Germany, and India. Germany for two years was another nice experience. I lived right by the ocean and woke up looking at the sun rise by the water and the ships dock right outside home everyday. Germany is one of the prettiest places I have ever lived in. Again, this is another place I keep wishing I would go back to, maybe for a year or three. 

I got my first faculty job. And my second one too.

I traveled Cambodia with dad. And Thailand. And Nepal. I got to see Angkor Wat and the Annapurna range. The decade opened up Asia for me and made me realize there are so many places I haven’t traveled.

I discovered the joy of living in hostels. I discovered Airbnb. 

I got to work in one of the renowned schools in India. All these months later, I am still in awe of this place!

I became a home owner.

I traveled to 32 new countries. And I am not talking about airport layovers or watching television at a hotel in Dubai because my connecting flight leaves tomorrow.

I regret that I didn't learn a new skill or a new language.

Okay, I was kidding about my height!

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Air (un)conditioning

I moved to a new home in December, then started traveling for work. I thought that once I am back in March, I will set up the home, buy nice furniture, buy an air conditioner. I was about to spend part of the summer in the US and Germany anyway, so I did not bother. 

And then, the pandemic happened.

Now, I am stuck in the 45 Celsius (and rising) heat, without an AC. And this is only May. This house is so intelligently built, it is freezing in the winter and blazing in the summer. Add to it cooking, cleaning, and all the household chores that make you hotter (pun unintended). Even in the middle of the night, the fan lets off a plume of hot air from the overheated ceiling. The mattress absorbs all the heat. I have never had so much hotness in life. 

I’ve moved my makeshift bed to every room to see which one feels a little better- the ground floor bedroom, the ground floor living room, or the upstairs bedroom. The suffering is all the same. 

I’ve considered sleeping on the open rooftop, but fear being bitten by bugs and mosquitoes. Worse, imagine waking up and seeing a monkey sidling up to you. I’ve also considered sleeping in the office, either on the floor or atop my wooden desk, but fear the bugs, the hiding lizards, and my own snoring alerting the security guards and a consequent email on the notice board the next day. 

Everything I cut for food, I try applying it on my face to see if it would cool me down. Cucumbers, lemons, melons, and papaya have worked out great! Tip: Cauliflowers and eggplants don’t help!

I updated my playlist to play all the Raag Megh Malhar songs. And it started raining in Kolkata!

Watering the plants is my favorite chore now. Most of the water goes on me.

I’m fantasizing about an ice bucket challenge. Right now, I could eat ice for breakfast, lunch and dinner. 

I am trying to look at the positive side. Less electricity bills. Absolutely no need to work out. Reliving childhood nostalgia when we had no AC.

When most people around the world are working from home, I am going to office every day. Even on weekends and holidays. I stay there as long as I can, staring at the AC and fantasizing about stealing it.  

I keep watching winter videos of Switzerland on Youtube, hoping that it helps. It has. By now, I know all the names of the Swiss counties. There is nothing left for me to see in Switzerland anymore. 

Some activities are a complete no-no. Not getting embroiled in Facebook fights. No reading romantic stories. No watching kissing scenes in movies. No horny thoughts. Complete abstinence from all activities that tend to raise the body temperature. 

I look at old pictures of me wading in the snow the one terrible winter I spent in Nebraska, hoping that it will produce some cooling effect. 

I chant this mantra to myself, “Evaporation causes cooling!” 50 times every day while sweating, hoping that all this positivity will get me through till the end of summer in November. Here is another one. Close your eyes. Imagine there has been a power cut. Now open your eyes. Look at the ceiling fan still working with gratitude. You will not feel as hot after that. 

I think of life as a Bikram hot yoga class, a meditation retreat, or a tropical vacation. People pay a lot of money to get some of these experiences. I’m getting it for free. 

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Food (scarcity) for thought

I am not easily perturbed by news of the pandemic, but today feels different, hollow. Last evening, the municipal corporation announced a lockdown-within-a-lockdown starting midnight where all supplies are suspended till May 16 except milk and medicines. As soon as the announcement was made, thousands of people flocked to stores to stock up. People only got a five-hour notice.

 

It wouldn't have mattered to me even if I had known. I came home from work and slept off, slept through the announcement and woke up only at midnight. Not that I would have rushed out anyway.

 

Even a few days back, the campus store had crates of eggs. I did not buy because I still had seven eggs in my fridge. My first thought following the news was, the eggs would be all sold by now. I was right. The entire store is empty other than the last few packets of biscuits and cookies. I looked at the aisles in dismay. I had been eating clean for a few months now (minimal processed food, large servings of fruits and vegetables and home-cooked food) and was feeling great. Would I have to resort to buying junk food if I ran out of supplies? I was wondering when I saw a person check out 15 packets of popcorn and about 50 packets of jimjam biscuits, vanilla sponge cakes, chocolate muffins, salted peanuts, and Haldiram's bhujia sev. Thankfully, I will not have to resort to eating junk food anymore. The person took it all.

 

Next, I went to the faculty lounge which had seen better days. We used to have fresh lemon water, buttermilk, an assortment of tea and coffee, another Cafe Coffee Day coffee machine and what not. Today, there were the last few bags of tea, no coffee, and someone left a bowl full of sugar. Looks like we ran out of sugar packets too.

 

Next, I went to the cafe to see how they are doing. They have groceries for the next four days or so and are still serving paneer and porota and chole, but no more vegetable fried rice, lockdown shingaras, or anything for that matter that requires vegetables.

 

As I walked back in the 45 Celsius heat, I thought about the days of yore when interviews were followed by grand faculty lunches with fish, meat, fruit custard and rabri (along with several main courses). I thought of faculty meetings and an unending supply of cha, shingara, dhokla, peyaji, and anything you fancied. The campus dogs look so emaciated; they are mostly sleeping all day because they have no energy to move. One of them whimpers on seeing me, telling me that it is hungry and asking for food. Its rib cage is jutting out, I can count it's ribs. It breaks my heart. I have no food with me.

 

I see my faculty-neighbor walking by. I stop to say hi. His spouse told me this morning that I should let her know if I run out of food. Her generosity embarrassed me. I am a single person, they are a family of four, yet they are thinking of their neighbors. The faculty tells me the same- let us know if you need food. I ask him what will happen if things go drastic? "I don't know," he has that contemplative look. "Maybe I can start chopping the banana plants and cook its stems." He is not joking. Thod (banana stem curry) is a popular food we eat, but for someone to seriously consider chopping trees from his garden sounded scary. If it came to that, I do not even have tree-chopping or thod -skills.

 

I came home and took stock of my fridge. I haven't eaten meat in more than 3 weeks, lacking some level of animal protein, but things are not bad for me. I have multiple levels of protection. The fruits and vegetables will last me for the next few days. Then I can switch to dry food (daal sheddho, khichuri, bhaat, oats). If needed, I can go out and get milk. If nothing, I have some adipose I have been storing for the last many years. I know that by the time I run out of all my options, the lockdown will be over.

 

When a pandemic doesn't target your stomach, it targets your head. It brings bizarre thoughts. Did my education and skills teach me to survive a catastrophe? Sure, I can cook, but can I chop down a tree? Or barbeque a bird? Or milk a cow if it comes to that? I was distracted with these thoughts while cooking and I forgot to peel the potol (pointed gourd). With the thick peel on, the curry tastes awful. Normally, I would throw it away and whine to my mom. Today, I ate the potol with peels and did not even bother complaining. 

It is stressful to think of things I do not have or cannot control, so I take stock of the things I have. I have some food (both perishable and dry). I have on-campus community support. I have clean drinking water, electricity, an air-conditioned office and a home with a fan. I have a job and an office that someone comes to clean every day. That should be enough to get me through. With this comes the realization of how hollow some of the core things in my life have become. When you are hungry and thinking of how to procure food, you do not wake up in the morning and wonder what papers you will publish this year and what international conferences will you go to this year. I am not going to chew on my research papers or my 10-page long CV to stay alive.

 

I absentmindedly look at the world data on Wiki. Cambodia, Nepal and Bhutan have no reported deaths. Some of these countries, I have been to as a tourist. Then, some of the developed countries I have lived in or aspired to be in have their death counts in thousands. Nothing that had glittered once feels like gold anymore. Everything has boiled down to the basics now- stay at home, eat when hungry, drink when thirsty, do not get infected, keep calm, take care of your mental health, stay alive, and take it one day at a time!

 

Once the lockdown is over and COVID-19 is past us, the first thing I will do is order a plate of Kolkata mutton biryani (with a boiled potato and an egg). I know that we had broken up last year. But I have thought of you every day, especially during my last four weeks of forced vegetarianism. And I have realized with unambiguous clarity what my heart truly loves and wants. Quoting Catherine from Wuthering Heights,

 

“My love for lockdown shingara is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for mutton biryani resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am mutton biryani! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”

 

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Irrfan Khan

My life is a little richer because I have Irrfan Khan movies to watch. About his brilliant acting, there is nothing I can add that people haven’t already said. I love his movies because the moment he came on screen, I felt that everything will be alright. He will take care of everything. It's a feeling I cannot fully explain, I do not know what would be fine and what he would set alright. His movies had that kind of a calming effect on me.

 

I loved him in all his roles. A lot of people remember The Namesake as their favorite. I have a slightly unconventional choice. I absolutely loved his small role as the slightly eccentric guy, Monty, in Life in A Metro.

 

Life in A Metro released around the same time that I was meeting a lot of guys with the possibility of marriage in mind. It was a strange stage in life filled with annoyance, uncertainties, disappointments, and hopelessness. It would be fair to say that I disliked almost everyone I met. Twenties are also the time when you are not quite sure about who you are and who you could be. You put up with a lot of bee-ass in the name of societal conformation (I love the thirties that way! They are so freeing!). So many of my evenings were spent in faltu, never-ending chain of mindless conversations and small talk. Looking back, I hated all of it, but I digress here.

 

Watching Monty at 28 had given me a lot of hope. Here is this character from a movie who has met 29 girls so far, who is real, as real as it gets. Remember him ogling at Shruti's boobs and later telling Shruti, "gaadi garage se nahi nikalogi to pataa kaise chalega ki light green hai? Take your chances!"-- "How will you know the light is green unless you take your car out of the garage?" Or when Shruti professed her love for him while he was mounted on a horse for his wedding ceremony, all he could come up with was- "But the blouse and petticoat have been stitched for the other girl, why didn't you tell me before?" No matter how bizarre the situation was, he always said or did the right thing. I had connected to that character like no other.

 

I watched Life in A Metro again after I heard the news of Khan’s passing. When Rajesh Khanna passed, both my mom and grandma spent every day binge watching his movies and crying. This went on for a month. I don't typically cry while watching movies, but I relived the feeling of that hope that he gave me as Monty. I celebrated his life through his movies. He will live on among many of us forever through his movies.

 

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Lockdown diaries

For posterity. Today is May 2, 2020

 

Six weeks of lockdown over. The government just announced a 2-week extension.

 

Last restaurant visit: March 16^th. Healthy breakfast of mihidana, mishit doi, filter coffee, and aloo’r porota at Cal 27.

 

Last flight: March 18, from Kolkata.

 

Last biryani (homemade): March 18.

 

Haven’t stepped out of home since: March 19.

 

1 USD = 75.84 INR.

 

Daily activities: Cooking, doing BJP (bashon, jhaadu, pocha).

 

Newly gained knowledge: What plants grow in my garden. Also, it takes approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes for a thorough jhaadu pocha of the house.

 

New daily addiction: Shingara and cha.

 

Current weather: 43C/27C.

 

Biggest challenge: Surviving at home without air conditioning.

 

Thankful to: 1) My sister for helping me figure out Bigbasket slots. 2) Friend for telling me to sleep putting on a well-wrung, wet towel. This has cut down time to fall asleep from 4 hours to roughly 1 hour.

 

Look forward to: Kakima’s collated corona memes (try saying that fast).

 

Mental health measures: Asking people politely not to send me Whatsapp forwards. Blocking those who cannot follow instruction.

 

Not missing: Waking up to an alarm clock every day. Knowing what day of the week it is.

 

Something I look forward to: Cooking every day. 

 

New companion: YouTube.

 

Highlight of the day: My plant is sprouting jasmine flowers and I have the time to notice it.

 

Bad joke of the day:

Colleague: “Do you know about IS-LM model?”

Me: “No, I only know about SL-IM models.”

 

In-house murder of the day: Usually I see lizards feasting on tiny insects. Or I unapologetically kill ucchingdes with my slippers. Early this morning, I saw a mid-size cat in-hiding, hunting down a large pigeon. Think about it. A land animal so agile that it could hunt down a flying animal much larger than the size of its mouth. Well, I am no saint to be preaching cats about eating vegetarian, but this national-geographic-moment in my garden made me dizzy and sick.

 

Biggest realization: I love this social distancing and slower life. No unnecessary meetings where nothing useful gets done, clingy students asking for my time, pressure to socialize or comb my hair daily, reading restaurant reviews and planning Friday nights, look nice, book a cab, take a flight, go through security checks, be somewhere, say something, look nice.    

 

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