YEN MA??

It’s really funny. You are walking about, always doing your own thing. You don’t hide anything from your parents; you tell them what you are up to in life. They try to make you do some things, but considering your record, they also know that you aren’t going to listen. And despite their slight unhappiness at your ‘lack of respect’, you know they respect your independence. (Sample: Amma with a mixture of pity and slight disapproval, on meeting this really chamathu, super obedient, good second cousin of mine after years: “Ayyo. Look at him. I feel really sad. He listens to his parents too much.”) But being parents after all, they do throw in the occasional emotional blackmail: “We trust you, so don’t do anything that would put us to shame.” But they are quite secure, because they know you can’t keep your gob shut, and have to come running home to tell them everything. Your mother knows your deepest secrets. She often disapproves, but always lets you do your own thing. She tells you not to get into trouble, but lets you fight your own battles. Your mother herself is not the conventional mother, you know. She is fiercely independent, and really cool herself, so you think anything goes.

Not. Their apprehension comes out in the weirdest ways. (This is what I find funny, like I said in the first line. Got sidetracked somewhere in between. Zzz.) I had decided, for personal reasons, to wean off my scooter. They thought I was being stupid then, wasting so much time and tiring myself out on the bus. But as always, I turned a deaf ear, and took to darling PTC anyway. Now, even if I really am tired, and want to use the bike on weekends, Amma starts to plead. “Please vendame. Take the bus. I’ll die of paranoia.” This, after years of you driving all over the city on your scooter. And when you decide to go anyway, they want you to message as soon as you reach, and message again before you leave and everything.

Even though it made me feel really liberated, it did irk me, just a little, when Amma wouldn’t call to ask if I was ok, when I had been out for hours and all. “Nee lam oru Amma va,’ I would ask her when I came back home, and she would roll her eyes. Now she has swung to the other side of the spectrum (and this I would attribute to her learning to message, and using her phone a lot – a big deal for my technologically challenged mother). “Message when you reach. Message me when you are going to leave. Message me if you get caught in traffic.” Even when I am travelling by bus. Imagine the number of instructions when I go to multiple destinations. *shudder*

I remember the times when I had to go to Shrimati class at 5; how Amma used to just roll of the bed, give me my milk, grumbling about not being able to sleep, and go straight back to bed in record time, even before I left home. Now, she wants to chaperon me to the bus stop when I leave home before 6. And when I am coming back home after 10, I generally find her standing at the bus stop, waiting to receive me, like I am arriving from Amerikkai. Zzz. Supremely irritating.

The Amma who told me to whack a staring bastard right across his face, now tells me not to make eye contact and avoid trouble. The Amma who wanted to chase me out of the house as soon as I finished school, now has conditions. “Delhi le velai panna kudadu. Bombay venna udren, pozhachu po.” The Appa who let me taste from every one of the little sample liquor bottles he brought back from France, now pulls a straight face and looks down when I tell him I tasted a friend’s drink. The Amma who had smoked one cigarette in college, because she wanted to try it, now glares at me, when my hair smells of smoke (My college canteen is a chimney with a roof). The Appa who used to buy me nice kutti skirts from everywhere he went on tour, now tells me to be careful when I wear short T shirts. The Amma who is slightly foul-mouthed herself, now asks me to shut up, when I inadvertently say “Shit” or “Bloody” at home. The Amma who used to laugh when I narrated drunken capers of friends, now clicks her tongue when I come back to tell her that beer was circulating in the party I had just been to. Even though she knows I don’t drink. The Amma who used to threaten her Amma saying she was going to elope with a Punjabi or Gujarati, now tells me, “Only Brahmin boys. Nyabagam vechuko.” The Amma who might have expressed thrill earlier, now looks scandalised when I tell her I am going to join the Pink Chaddi campaign.

‘Epdi irunda neenga, ipdi ayitele ma…..’, I say, like Sivaji in Vietnam Veedu. But they know that despite my irritation and indignation (and secret amusement), I will do my own thing anyway. I can hear them sighing behind me. And Amma saying, “Moni. Enkitte pesadhey po.”

OF FOOD, FOOD IN BENGALURU AND FOOD AT ADIGAS (IN THAT ORDER)

I am a good eater. Not of the monstrous quantities type, but of the loving food type. I moan when I eat good rasagullas, smack my lips after a good pizza, and thank god for every wallop of butter he sends my way. I am the sort who would try every dish in a buffet (only in moderate quantities, if I may add), except those with revolting kathirika in it. Hell, I even try out kozha kozha vendaka, which my settu friends style-ly call bhindi, like it’s the coolest thing around. And now, I have the dubious distinction of having tried out EVERY single item on Adigas’ menu in the four days I spent at Bengaluru, for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

 

Any self respecting, authentic Madrasi would have relatives in Bengaluru. Somehow, being as authentic and self respecting as it gets, I’ve been to Bengaluru probably 7 times in my entire life, staying at Appa’s cousin’s place each time. But now, thank god – no one will cast aspersions on my Madras-ness anymore – Appa started work at Bengaluru a couple of months back. My cousin moved there a few months back too. So this trip was going to be different, you know, not just a polite staying-over at a relative’s, careful not to step on anyone’s toes. Naturally, I was excited, considering that a whole load of close relatives were also going to be there then. So, a few weeks back, when my Bengaluru friends were talking of eatouts there, I asked them to recommend some places for me to drag my folks to. And what I got was: “You are vegetarian no? Just please yourself with Sukh Sagar and Shanti Sagar.” That did not please me. I had vague memories of eating idlis for breakfast at Shanti Sagar years back. And the idlis by themselves were not memorable. Suddenly, I wasn’t excited about going to Bengaluru anymore.

 

 

But Appa took me to Adigas for dinner on my first day there. Appa’s excitement was not merely palpable like it usually is; it was extraordinarily vocal for a quiet man like him. Appa, the simple soul that he is, always regards expensive food with a certain degree of wariness, and always manages to find some fault with the service, the ambience or the napkin colour. But he completely trusted inexpensive food in clean surroundings, and he had pledged his allegiance to Adigas. And I pledged my allegiance to Appa. I was looking forward to it.

 

Oh. My. God. Everything was right about it: the taste, the hot metal of the spoons, the non-fussy presentation, the little chunk of melting butter on my ho dosa, the happy faces, the bustling interiors, Appa’s knowing smile as he watched me gape, everything. But the prices were all wrong. I could have rolled on the floor and bawled. I felt so bad for the guys running the place! Just HOW could they keep it running by charging 12 rupees for a karabath with that offending slice of tomato on top, with as many cups of sambar as you want? How? Now I knew why my classmates thought food in Madras was expensive. Feeling gratitude and sympathy, I nearly went to the counter guy and bowed in deep respect, until Appa pulled me back.

 

Thus, I went to Adigas every day for the next 3 days, to try everything on the menu. And every single day, Appa bundled me off into the car before I did anything to embarrass him and the people who worked there. With occasional change in eating patterns in the form of sandwiches and lassi at Cool Joint, Spanish Rice at Jaya’s place, cke at Café Coffee Day and DBC (although the peanuts on top really truly killed me), my gastronomical experience was complete. Now I officially love Bengaluru.

 

I know that the next time I walk into Saravana Bhavan, I am likely to spew venom and plant a soonyam or something. Because, when I was standing at an Adidas showroom after buying Appa’s third branded T shirt, and my first, staring blankly at an Adidas Club poster, (of which I could become a member if I made a purchase of over Rs. 2000) a familiar voice said over my shoulder, “We can only become Adigas Club members.” He’s right. And oh, I am quite nasty to my rivals.

THE DREADED HOMECOMING

 It didn’t seem like Salem at all, the roads we were driving on. The only Salem I knew was the ‘humped’ road leading to the circle, the street to the left of the circle, with the Salem Rotary Club at the street end, leading down to Sathi’s house on the left, and our house on the right. It was the house in which Appa and his siblings had grown up and the place where my cousins and I always spent our holidays together.

 

Holidays at Salem were almost entirely spent at the house – sleeping in the “AC room” that had no AC, sitting around on the red oxide floor listening to Meenamma talk about our parents as children, exploring the endless collection of books my grandfather had put together, reading a book sitting on the kitchen counter while nibbling on a piece of tamarind, sucking nectar from the little wild flowers that grew in the front yard, jumping off the compound walls and running into Aachi’s house screaming all the way… There were also hours filled with nothingness. We would just walk about in the rooms aimlessly, stare for hours at the peacock tile façade in the middle of the hall, swing back and forth (with our feet) on the wooden grill door leading to the backyard, soak idly in the water tank and mock-retch while our brothers emptied their bladders in the gutter running by the side of the house. There was never a need to step out of the house, because there was not one boring moment.

 

But the house wasn’t just a place where some of my most memorable moments were spent. It was the big 2-storey house my great grandfather had built in the plot with the address 13, Sahadevapuram, when he moved to Salem to start a hotel. It was a house that had seen everything – happiness, prosperity, the birth of several children, the death of one, sorrow and great financial decline. So it wasn’t just a holiday getaway. It was a sort of homecoming, a coming-back-to-my-roots experience for me. I could connect to every brick in the house, even those in the scary corner of the flight of stairs leading upstairs and the dingy bathroom at the end of the house. 

 

But we weren’t going there now. I remember the intense shock I had felt a few months back when Appa had told me that my uncle had to sell the house because of deep financial trouble. I remember how I had felt something inside me die when I heard the house had been demolished to give way to a swank apartment complex. I remember having carefully avoided the subject when I spoke to my cousins on the phone. But now there was no avoiding it. There was no way I could not come to Salem, and now, no way I can not go to the little 2-bedroom house that my family had rented in an obscure area called Maravaneri. What kind of name was that anyway?

 

I shut my eyes tight as I was driven down to the new place. I tried not to listen to Appa wondering aloud if the house could accommodate all of us. I wanted to jump out of the window when my uncle reassured Appa that it would. I didn’t want to cry. And then the car stopped. I pretended to be asleep, if only to delay the inevitable. But my excited relatives pulled me out of the car. The first thing I noticed was the gutter running outside the house, very similar to the one that ran inside the old one. And then, the almost identical front yard with the same wild flowers outside. I looked at Appa; he was smiling alright. Taking a deep breath, I walked into the house, my ears muted to all the voices around me. The same couches and chairs, the same TV, the same chest of drawers and the same photographs, if only in a smaller space. My favourite pillows and blankets on the same beds in the bedrooms that didn’t have as much moving space. My cousins looked the same, the curtains were the same, the books were the same and the old chestwood table on which Appa and his siblings had scribbled on as children was still there. The bathrooms were better lit, and there were no scary corners. The bricks in the walls were not the same, and the stained glass ventilators were missing, but the house smelled the same. Meenamma would still put little balls of food on my palms. Tears threatened to run down my cheeks, although for different reasons. It wasn’t quite the same, but it was still home. Little thrills and scraped knees would still feel the same.