What is traditionally called 'good news'

Two years and a bit is sufficient time to develop amnesia about the nights when one wishes that the baby's growth could quickly be accelerated to college-going age, about the time you touched new depths of inadequacy and were equally useless at feeding, bathing, diaper-changing and spit-up cleaning, about fretting about whether you were starving the baby because he never seemed to get enough, about waking up (if you ever got to sleep, that is) in a cold sweat worried sick about whether he was alright and had not flown off in the night.

Yes, two years and a bit is sufficient time to forget all that and just stare at the little boy in front of you and wonder where the time went, when did he learn to walk and talk and ask questions and demand treats and in general behave like the master and commander of the universe.

Two years and a bit allows you to get away from this little being that dictates every moment of your life and focus on that person who lives with you - your husband/wife.

Two years and a bit is enough to fool you into thinking that you are a pro at this game now and could prove it if you had the chance.

So yes, Adi, two years and a bit will welcome a baby brother or sister in late April/early May 2010. Badhayian and Mazel Tovs and Mubaraks all around!

As for Adi's reaction, I have tried telling him about the impending change in his life and I don't think he gets too much, other than repeating 'be carful of Mama's belly, there's a baby inside' several times each day. Whether this is an advantage or disadvantage of getting the second one when Adi is two years and a bit, only time will tell.

I kept thinking that I would announce it once my nausea had settled and the glowing skin and lustrous hair phase had started. That usually happens at three months. But more than four months into the game, I am still not there yet. Perhaps, this week, I keep telling myself.

But I guess now is as good a time as any given that M and I celebrate our fifth anniversary tomorrow. In fact, I think I will scribble a short note to him right here.

Dear husband of five years,

As we brace ourselves for the next exciting journey, I want you to know that I love you a lot and that your diaper changing abilities are unparalleled.

Happy anniversary.

Love

Me

As for you, gentle reader, the champagne is on me today.

Los numeros

Adi was watching a numbers song on YouTube this morning, you know where they create rhymes and songs around numbers. At one point, I clicked on a new video that he wanted. A little later, I looked up from my book to find him smiling, nodding sagely and saying, 'yes, yes, ok' to every number that was being shown on the screen. In Spanish!

This was most heartening. He already knows how to pretend his way through stuff he knows nothing of. And more, he actively participates in the same. Oh he is a chip off the old block alright. It would be unfair to say that I whispered 'my son, my son' while choking back tears but I did puff up like a toad in insurmountable pride.

How to bake a cake and end up with a mess in ten easy steps

Step One: Complain ceaselessly about the lack of an oven in your life and conjure images of the goodies that you would produce if only you had the right equipment at your disposal.

Step Two: Buy an oven (Morphy Richards, not recommended) after about five years of of Step One.

Step Three: After due consultation with the planets about the correct mahurat, decide that today is the day the oven gets unpacked and a chocolate cake baked.

Step Four: Make the driver run around in the quest for unsalted butter and fresh cream and such like and collect all the ingredients.

Step Five: Place laptop in the kitchen and play Nigella Lawson's recipe for homemade chocolate cake on YouTube, secretly wondering if one would become the same size by eating such copious amounts of sugar, flour and butter.

Step Six: Mix everything just as the good lady says, open the refrigerator to take out eggs when she commands you to add them to the batter and realize with horror that you in fact have only one egg at your disposal.

Step Seven: Snatch the security man of the building from his guarding duties and send him off to buy eggs, proceed to wait impatiently.

Step Eight: Put batter in glass baking dish in the absence of a cake tin and wait impatiently as it bakes, take a peek every now and then and feel very thrilled to see it rising mightily.

Step Nine: Take out cake after the oven pings and bid goodbye to dreams of presenting tempting photographs of perfect cake on blog as cake is baked only from the sides while the center is completely uncooked.

Step Ten: Scrape out the sides and put remaining batter in to oven to bake again, let the (new, sob) glass dish slip out of hands after the oven pings and spend the next forty-five cleaning glass shards mixed with the still-uncooked batter off the kitchen floor.

I am left with two alternatives:

• Give up on this domestic diva nonsense and stick to things that I do well. Like watching cookery videos.
  
• Go with the pro-mediocrity 'the woods would be very silent if only those birds sang that sang best' school of thought. This is a roundabout way of saying - continue making messes and you will get it right at some point.

Added after the initial tiredness and disappointment have worn off and some semblance of sanity and appointment (heh) is returning.....

Looks like I did not bake the cake long enough, that's all. And Adi polished off the parts that were baked ("Mama, this cake is not spicy"....thank heavens for that, my child). Hmmm, so maybe it does warrant a second attempt after all. Plus I guess, once is not enough to get a suitable return on that blasted oven.

Fool-proof recipes of chocolate cake are invited from readers. Plain sympathy will also do.

A little less conversation

Yes, so where were we? I was most thrilled with all the appreciation that you people showed for my abode and attacked my remaining house projects with renewed enthusiasm. One of these involved putting up some extra shelves in our bedroom (and when I say our bedroom, it really is just ours now and not an extended nursery but more on that remarkable feat later).

It started when I decided that we did not enough shelves in our bedroom. I need a place to hold my things, I told M. What things, he asks. Err, my water-bottle, my book and my glasses, I told him. If he was looking at the bedside stool, trying to communicate that that ought to suffice for my modest needs, he wisely kept his counsel. I proceeded to call a carpenter. I have fought with the last half dozen carpenters who have worked for me so this was a new guy. He looks remarkably unkempt, like there is an invisible hurricane perpetually blowing around his person. What he lacks in presentation, however, he makes up for in confidence. I showed him the narrow passage in the bedroom where I needed him to put up shelves.

Me: Blah, blah, blah. Put shelves here.
Carpenter: No shelves, I will make a showcase.
Me: I don't want a showcase, just a couple of shelves will do.
C: No, you need a showcase. I will make it. First class it will look.
Me: Er, ok. Now go away and start working. How long will it take?
C: Five days.
Me: Cool.

The money was decided on and he took over one of our parking places downstairs to start sawing and hammering. Five days came and went and he seemed to be nowhere close to done. I thought I would have a word with him, though normally it's my policy to stay as far away as possible from self-congratulatory, smug types.

Me: Arrey, kaam finish nahin hua?
C: Ho jayega, Madam.
Me: Theek se bana rahe ho?
C: Madam, aapne mujhe theek se pehchaana nahin. Main bade hisaab ka aadmi hoon.

Finally, three weeks after he had started, he came over to fit the unit into the room. Except that the door wouldn't close after it was put in. The hisaab ka aadmi had apparently miscalculated badly. What will you do now, M asked of him (fortunately for him, I wasn't at home when this fiasco was unfolding). After scratching his head for sometime, he dismantled the unit and took it downstairs again, mumbling something about having to saw a couple of inches off. The amount of activity that is going on in our parking lot, one would imagine I was planning to have a couple of windmills constructed.

A couple of days later, he came by again with his colleague/flunk, a singularly pitiable character carrying the two parts that constitute the shelf unit thingummy.

They put in the unit and what fun, the door still wouldn't close.

Me, with what Mills and Boons called a sardonic smile: Now what?
C, more scratching of head and consultation with colleague later: I will be back in half an hour after fixing this.
Me: Huh? What will you do now? Saw off more?
C doesn't reply and goes away

He came back after half an hour and the unit was looking really strange. Then I realized what had happened.

Me: Oh my god, you sawed it off from one end and attached to the other!
C: Yes, nothing else could be done in this time. But look, the door shuts now.
Me: But it's looking so ugly plus it's messing with my mind, this non-symmetrical....thing.
C mumbles some more and saunters off.

This time I followed him downstairs. He was telling his flunk to hack off some part and attach it somewhere else. The flunk looked really unhappy at this and came up to me.

Flunk: Madam, give me another day, I will fix it.
Me: Whatever. I just wanted a ledge to keep some books and things. I don't know how I got pulled into this.
Flunk looks ready to burst into tears at which point I hastily give in. Sheesh.

At the time of hitting publish, the original carpenter seems to have disappeared and has delegated his work to his flunk and some other fellows who are at it even as I type this. I have mentally written off both the shelves and the money that I have foolishly already paid them because you know a sky-high BP is not worth some planks of wood. Growl.

Now about our big achievement. Adi has now started sleeping in His Own Room and in His Own Bed. We bought him a new bed recently and made a big deal out of the new! big! fantastic! ness of the bed and big! brave! good! ness of the boy. He did not seem to buy any of it during the first daytime nap when he told me very clearly that he'd much rather stick to Mama's room and Mama's bed. I cajoled and coaxed and brought out the various teers that rest in a parent's kamaan. Beta, so ja warna Gabbar aa jayega, being my favourite. Finally sleep overtook his protests and he starting dreaming of a house made of Alpenliebes and Cadbury's Dairy Milk and completely free of parents constantly trying to put the fear of cavities and durrty durrty germs in his innocent mind.

The night duty has been taken over by M. The idea is to lie down with Adi and tell him stories till he drifts off but more often than not, when I go to check on them, I find M sound asleep and snoring loudly while Adi is wide awake and perks up when he sees me, often asking in a clear voice - Hi Mama, what are you doing? Finally about an hour after this circus is kicked off, the child falls asleep and I drag the husband back into our room.

One would think that now that I don't have to carefully contain my girth in the two feet of space that the little master used to afford me, I would sleep well and deep. But that doesn't take into account the maa ka dil. At first I was waking up every half hour, worrying that he would kick off the covers/saunter off outside the house/get bitten by insects/other bizarre fears but now I am sleeping better. Plus he walks into our room whenever he wakes up and climbs in. The best part of this gradual weaning from co-sleeping was that there were no tantrums and no tears, which I find very difficult to handle these days.

Oh and my second book has been approved by the publishers (remember, I was nervously awaiting news from their end?) and after doing my usual wild jig around the house, I decided that the time had indeed come to start work on the third one and so I have. It is different in both scope and style from the first two so I guess budhaape mein kaam karna parega. Judging by the previous two, more reclusive and anti-social behaviour will be part of the writing process. I know Agatha Christie wrote a book every year; I wonder if she ever needed to lock herself away from the outside world.

On parenting

I was recently asked to contribute to an e-magazine. This is the unedited version of what I wrote for them. It lists down ten things that I personally try to live by as a parent.

On Parenting

My husband says that the only life-changing event in a person’s life is becoming a parent. He is probably right. I did find myself making a few adjustments when I moved out of my parents' house to go away to college; a little later perhaps I learned new tricks of survival when I stepped into a life of cubicles and water coolers; I definitely mellowed down a little when I got married, but nothing comes close to the what I felt when a squalling bundle was handed over to me. If one were to insist on similes, then a truck hitting you at full speed or falling out of an airplane would probably come close. In a nice way, of course.

At least, most of the time.

If someone was to ask me what I have learnt in the years since I became a parent, it would fill a book. And did. My personal top ten pearls of wisdom would be the following.

Keep your sense of humour handy at all times. It will come in useful when the baby has spat up on your office clothes, the older one has missed the school-bus, the maid wants to know what to cook given the refrigerator has run empty and the nanny has taken the day off.

Accept that the child will know that you love her, irrespective of the choices you make. You can chose to stay at home, work from home, go to work part-time or chase that CEO's chair with all your might, the child will sense that she is priority.

Don’t let guilt get the better of you. Of course you feel it, we all do. Whether it’s taking an extra ten minutes to get dressed or spending some time at the gym, a parent's lot is to worry about whether it is at the expense of the child. I don’t think there is a device made yet that can drain parents of guilt. But buying the child another toy will not resolve it.

Give your child the best of you. Understand the best aspects of your personality and spend the time and effort to pass them on to your child. If you are a voracious reader, read comics and simple stories to him. If you could have been a leading artist (or better still, are), splash about colours with the child.

Set limits. It's surprising how early they start to understand the difference between what is acceptable or and not. Prevent them from growing into obnoxious adults. For the world’s sake.

Set examples. If you cannot practice it yourself, forget about teaching it to the child. It is a little difficult to deny junior an extra chocolate when you have trouble not buying a new designer watch for no special reason.

Set them free. It does not matter how fabulous you are. Your child still needs the freedom to become his or her own person. The road to parenting is fraught with challenges for control freaks.

Realize that your time together is limited. Empty-nesters are always left wondering where the time went. Try not to spend too much of it fighting and arguing.

Have fun with them. Once in a while, stripped of responsibility, look at your children as people and be amazed at what fantastic, interesting people they are.

Love them with all your might. Nobody said it was going to be easy but if there is one investment worth nurturing in life, this is it.

You can read the article by going to this website and clicking on Haute Wheels, which appears on the left at the bottom of the page..

Mi casa

I have been dithering over the house pictures for the longest time. But no more, today a complete house tour has been organized. Well, it's not as much a tour as a 'take a look' given that it is a Mumbai flat, not a mansion but I thought I would walk you through it anyway. Without much ado, chez Parul.



This picture was taken on Diwali, hence the toran at the door.



This mirror hangs alongside the passage. Now this passage is awfully narrow and I have been thinking of some way to bung in a shoe-rack here but haven't been successful so far.



Just next to the mirror, our keys and the ubiquitous tea-light holder. I love tea-lights and often add mogra essential oil to the diffuser. Of course, the other day, my boy got hold of the bottle of the said oil and was smelling like a sackful of mogra flowers the entire day. Less reputable comparisons came to mind but I remembered my tehzeeb just in time.



The walk through the hall. Both M and I have a huge weakness for UP and Kashmiri carpets. When we have enough money, rugs from Morocco and Turkey will follow but for now, these do nicely. I think.

This is our sitting area. I realize now that I should have fluffed up the pillows and cushions a little. Coffee table began it's life as a dining table but has been demoted since.



Being on the first floor means we don't get as much natural light as we'd like. This handblown glass Preciosa chandelier is switched on more often than we'd like. Incidentally, we have light-saving/LED bulbs everywhere and I can tell you from personal experience that it makes a huge difference to the electricity bill.



The dining room. It has a wall full of windows on one side.



Our dining chairs. The Italian fabric bears the marks of the toddler already (carefully concealed in the picture).

My candle-stand and diffuser spend their lives sitting on the dining table. Both bought many years ago at Good Earth. Good purchase in hindsight because I haven't grown tired of them at all.



The planters that sit on the sill of the dining room windows. Ghanta Singh hangs above them.



I love terracotta animals and things. This frog sits in one of my planters, croaking at passersby. Now let's step into my favourite place in this house, Adi's room.



This room thankfully gets a lot of sun, specially in the mornings. We have our tea and Adi his milk in this room. We got the table and chairs from Popcorn Furniture. The gray pants in the background behind the Rajasthani trunk are the maali's as he waters the plants. Given that M and I don't have one green thumb between us but love greenery, this guy's job is rather critical. Pigeon is not part of property.



Couple of details from our bedroom. The clock is fake antique looking something. I liked the design and picked it up but it doesn't keep very good time. The brass urli, bought from Dhoop, one of my favourite stores in Bandra is sitting under the bench, not been packed yet after Diwali.




Detail from guest room/spare room/parents' room. I had my mera walla cream moment with the Asian Paints people while having this particular niche in the wall painted. I wanted this exact shade of turquoise and after much brow-beating I finally got it. The Tanjore painting was made by Amma (M's mom) in 2001. Her father was an artist and she makes these paintings to keep the art alive.



This is my small study. It was being used as a drying area by the previous owners, as you can see by the clotheslines outside the window. I had a wooden floor put in and covered the whole thing with blinds and now I have what Virginia Woolf called a room of one's own. I love that writing desk and I love my big leather chair and often write here.

So yes, there you have it, my labour of love. It's far from complete, of course but then a house is perpetually a site under construction, isn't it? Hope you enjoyed the house tour.

Edited to add: Most pictures taken by the good man and husband with his Nikon D 80 camera using either his 50 mm f1.8 or his 18-135mm f3.5 lens. Not that the photography mumbo-jumbo means much but still, I aim to impress.

Khaana and memories ka khazana

I saw this tag at D's and it tempted me immediately. It asks of you to describe the five most memorable meals you've had. I wrote this post and realized that memorable meals are not about the food alone. They are about the people you eat them with, the people who prepare them, what your senses feel and record of the moment and indeed, about the time of your life when you have them. In chronological order, my top five:

Chaat chaat kar plate saaf kar di, by God: The mohalla where my mother comes from has a halwai at every corner and trips to Nani's house meant being treated regularly to rabdi and samosas and kulhad ka doodh. Clearly, when they said Nani ke ghar jayenge, mote hokar aayenge they meant it literally. Once we went to Nani's house, we were all free birds. We ran from house to house without much supervision. Mom did her own thing, meeting her extended family and friends. So it is surprising that I remember Mom and self trooping off one day to eat chaat at a really obscure shop when I could not have been more than 8 or 10. The shop was a soot-covered affair with an old man sitting at the karhai and frying some delectable looking things. He greeted my mother as if she were a child and asked if he could prepare two plates of his famous chaat. We sat on wooden benches and waited for the man to weave his magic. That chaat, what do I say? I can only hope I can eat it again once in my life, that the shop and the shopkeeper have both not fallen prey to the passage of time. The aloo-tikki was crisp on the outside and soft inside, the dahi was cool, the sonth was perfect, the hari chutney was delectable and the whole thing stayed hot till the last bite. So when I crib about the soggy puris and the ubiquitous hara dhaniya on them, it is for a reason. I have already been to chaat heaven.

Thandi hawaein, paranthe lekar aayein : This was when I was about 14 and in Class IX. Our (sad, sad, sad) school was pretty big on debates but did not have a debating team. For every inter-school debating event, students were asked to prepare and then the best were picked out to represent the school. This may appear to be hugely democratic but in reality, this left the field open for the teacher's pets (clearly, I was not one of them; else I would have called it hugely democratic and left it at that). Now I quite liked the idea of getting on stage and declaiming about this and that till the cows came home and having junta applaud me at the end. So when a school in Mussourie invited us for a Hindi debate, I jumped at the chance. All sorts of politics ensued but I managed to get selected (there is a God and he loves misfit teens). Imagine getting to go out of town for a school event! In my tame life, this was pretty big. When we (the teacher in charge, a classmate and self) arrived in Mussourie, the cold was enough to freeze our teeth off. It was unrelenting. I have spent many years in Dehradun but still, I don't remember the valley ever getting as cold as those few days in Mussourie. It went right through my two layers of sweaters and school blazer and entered my hands and feet and stayed there. Anyway, so we did really well in the debate and I got a prize (not first; else I would have mentioned that, yes?). Suddenly the path to becoming the teacher's pet seemed to be smooth and easy. When we came back to the hotel where we were being put up (that setting I am going to use in a book someday), the teacher asked us if we were hungry. Err, yes, we said shyly. She called one of the hotel staff and asked him what would be available. Aloo parathas, he said. Well, bring them on, she said. When the steaming hot aloo paranthas arrived, they were accompanied by a suspect looking ketchup. I don't know whether it was the kaamyaabi ka nasha, the chattering teeth or the ghostly hotel setting but those aloo paranthas were nothing short of divine.

Papa kehte hain badi bhujiya khayega: In college at Delhi, I stayed with a bunch of girls in PG digs. It's a very common thing to do in Delhi because of limited seats in college hostels and most of the colonies around North Campus are teeming with householders willing to give one or more floors of their houses to students from all corners of the country. Our flat provided us with a kitchen complete with a gas stove and LPG connection but none of the eight residents could cook and the aromas of cooking masalas would emanate from the kitchen only when someone's obliging mother arrived. The rest of the time, we made do with the dabbawallah, as in the food he brought. Burnt rotis, watery daal and the cheapest rice on the market. Apart from ribs that stuck out a mile, we also had people falling ill all the time. Also, because the food was so bad, it was hardly eaten. The rest of the time we snacked on tea (excellent because the tea leaves were real, unadulterated Darjeeling tea leaves that my flatmates got) and bread and aloo bhujiya. I still eat aloo-bhujiya and bread and I still remember those times. We might have been miserable then but through the looking glass of the passage of years, they sure look like the good old times now. The friends I made then, those lovely Sikkimese girls, are my friends even today.

Italian mein pizza ko kya kehta hain: Time took a turn and one moved up in life. Foreign holidays became possible and we ate in many different countries and many different cuisines but food was never really a priority. We often bought bread, cheese and juice from the nearest supermarket and ate when we took a break from sightseeing. The fact is that after we got married, M was in a hurry to show me all the things that I wanted to and he already had - Venus De Milo, The Birth of Venus, Michelangelo's Dying Slave, The Sistine Chapel - not surprisingly, there was not much time or money left to eat. All this changed when we went to Italy. Because we had limited money, we went in freezing winters. We first went to Florence and checked into the small hotel where our room had a view of the Duomo, no less. It was already late in the evening and we were starving. There was a small market nearby and we walked into the first restaurant that we came across. The cook there was a handsome man and after duly winking at me whipped up some zuppa de verdura and margarita pizza that made me want to shift to Italy permanently. Such simple ingredients and yet, what magic those Italians conjure. No, I will never forget my first Italian meal. In Italy, that is. Ever.

Yeh khana kya Alibaug se aaya hai: I think I have written about this before. We went to a resort in Alibaug in June last year. They have a restaurant called Kokum and Spice where we had one of our meals. We were the only guests there, given that the property had barely opened. The chef himself came out to take our order and explained that he specialized in coastal cuisine. Normally when coastal is followed by cuisine, we vegetarians beat a hasty retreat, carrying our sattvik tongues elsewhere but in this case he was convinced that he could feed us and while he was at it, whip up some khichdi for the child. Now I don't know if it was a case of naya-naya mulla going dohra in namaaz or the astoundingly fresh spices that he used but that meal I will not forget till my dying day. What flavours, they just burst in your mouth. The aroma filled your nostrils and entered your heart and made unforgettable memories out of the food. I have been telling Mahesh that we should make a day trip to Alibaug just for lunch one of these days. Let's see how that goes.

What a lovely tag, I say. I could write and write and not get tired. If you are a foodie, you should take this up. Trust me, you'll have fun.