Always With Me

Sunday, 8^th August 2021

Dear Ma,

I write this to you in mild disbelief. I half expect to walk into you tidying up the next room. That you would tell me of today’s must-read Indian Express article or order me yet again to abandon my decade old T-shirt. This I understand is no longer possible and I am here to talk about my memories of you instead.

My first memory, from long long ago, is your laugh, humming the eternally popular Ripon Street baaraat band tune “Tequila”, and a just-learnt-to-walk version of me stumbling along to it. You don’t drink and I can’t dance so this is a strange thing to recall. At the same time, it is so you. Your giggle and your endless stock of made-up games put you up as a firm favourite of generations of children, three your own and everyone else’s. The ease with which you engage a child’s endless energy is sure proof that you did never grow old. It is our privilege to have grown up under your joyful and imaginative attention.

My second memory of you is sombre. The impact that moving to Bharuch had on you, an out-and-out Kolkata girl uprooted from its urban bustle to a small back-of-the-woods town in Gujarat, into a world so different from what you had known. Your initial shock and your subsequent rising to the occasion were something that even a 3-year-old me could appreciate. As hundreds of your students and acquaintances from two-plus decades there will attest, Kolkata’s loss was Bharuch’s blessing. Adventure is often shown as conquering distant hills and forbidden valleys but the wonderful, protected life that you and Baba gave us 3 kids in a land so different from your own was no less exciting and brave.

My chosen third memory of you is more a running film than a specific span of time or incident. A camp-fire, a relentless passion for doing the right thing in the right way, which comforts greatly but occasionally burns. You do not appreciate half-heartedness in any form. I think you’ll agree that filtering your emotions isn’t your forte. You laugh as hard as you roar. You are a rock of comfort in critical times but don’t shy away from letting the tears flow either.

I remember the roasting you gave me when I, in teenage ignorance, ridiculed your favourite poet Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”. I recall your thirst for knowledge, a core trait shared with Baba for 49 years, which kept you learning and inquisitive all through, in your own words “up-to-date”. Cable TV, vacuum cleaner, washing machine, microwave oven, PC, laptop, smartphone – you negotiated through them all, living it up virtually as much as IRL. Your sudden revelations of knowing the latest Guru Randhawa song or the exact details of a Jason Statham fight scene leave me wondering who is the older among us.

I worship your energy in all that you do – host of a ridiculous amount and variety of get-togethers, most opinionated road-trip participant, queen bee of your Brahmo Girls school girl gang, painstaking saver of money for incremental improvements, teacher of history and English in all their nuances, writer book-lover librarian extraordinaire, setter of impossible standards for pet care, denouncer of political extremism and sloppy dressing (phew, that’s only about 10% of your abilities) – all with a warm heart and a booming voice. Your beloved parents, Dadubhai in his meticulous perfection and Dimma with her emotional core, live on and spread their goodness through you. Hope your reunion with them and waggy tailed Putputti is even more perfect than I can imagine.

You could have aimed for the stars with your intellect, education and capabilities but then you wouldn’t give yourself any relief from your duties as Mom either. Through sincere work in whatever life I choose, I hope to respect your ambitions and make a few amends for your sacrifices. I never got to tell you this while you were still here, but you are my hero and your life-story is the stuff of legends. Maybe I will write it all out someday, in all its pain and all its glory. Much as I will miss the immeasurable comfort that you gave me as Mom, I will also remain in awe of the relentless perfection that you sought as a professional.

The greatest regret of my life will remain not being right next to you when your time came. Those stories of my travel which will now remain untold to their most eager audience. That long list of your planned food items during my visits home will now each hurt in their own way.

“Kutush, don’t be selfish” was your one advice in life and I try to follow that within my own limited capacity. But I’ll make this one exception by claiming your time though I know that you’ll watch over everyone that you loved, not just me. In what seems to be the only consolation for your absence from this world, when roaming areas with limited mobile connectivity or on busy days, I no longer have worry about you worrying. Now I know you’ll be there with me, on every mountain trail, in every urban jungle, on every motorcycle trip. Friend. Judge. Guide. Mom. Always with me.

Lots of love,    
Kutush

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2021/08/always-with-me.html]

Compulsive Conquerors

There's something inherently violent about the word. Looking at what it meant to the people at the other end of the sword makes it twice as problematic. Yet without any hint of irony, virtual runners are awarded Conqueror medals for iconic (conquered) places like Machu Pichu and Kilimanjaro.

When it is about nature, the conquering word is even more misplaced. Reading a recent New York Times article on reaching the true summit of the highest peaks in the world, it was hard not to laugh at such a flimsy definition of victory. You make it up to the top or near-about on the very edge of your life, rush down after a couple of minutes - call that conquering? Did you really conquer K2, or did you barely survive it? A strange sort of vanity and many light-years from the truth.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2021/06/compulsive-conquerors.html]

Pahadi Aloo

Unsplash - JE Shoots

The subziwallah trundled along, his products on display. Mostly aaloos with a sprinkle of tomatoes for colour, a pushcart full of them. "Aaloo le lo, pahadi aaloo." [Potatos for sale, mountain potatoes]. My neighbour's iron-clad fortress burst open with him stepping out to "Pahadi aloo hi hain naa?" [Are there really mountain potatoes?]

"Ekdum pahadi. Sau ke chaar kilo. Kahin nahin mileygaa." [Pure mountain. At Rs. 100 for 4 kilograms. Only from me.]

I was walking by and took a close look. My untrained eyes couldn't tell them apart from plains potatoes. Still, my neighbour's eagerness suggested that the altitude difference made a difference.

Indeed, the valley of Dehradun sits at the base of the Himalaya, that benchmark for mountain ranges on this minor planet and conceivably, these potatoes did have some mountain blood in them. Plus, there was also another link to consider, one which crossed two continents and oceans. It took this humble vegetable back to its origin, to the land of the Inca under the shadow of a mountain range different but no slouch itself when it came to mountains.

With the Himalayas and the Andes both featuring on the family tree, it couldn't get more 'ekdum pahadi' than that.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2021/06/pahadi-aloo.html]

Unsplash - Alexander Schimmeck

 

Hard Copy

 

It has been a little over 3 months since a standard component of my life has returned after a 4-year hiatus. Getting a newspaper in print is outdated and unnecessary. The inquisitive news-seeker has more than enough options online, saving a few trees along the way. The reason I am drawn to holding my paper in my hands, beyond the nostalgia, is the offline nature of it. A team of editors who I trust, Indian Express in this case, serve me the news they thought was important 12 hours ago. Yes, there is curation and there is filtering here too, yet it is the permanency of their choices that makes it seem more reliable to me. No one can get on a server to tweak the words or make the link disappear altogether. There is no chorus of clashing voices in the comments section assigning the news their chosen flavour of interpretation. Just facts and me. The editorial opinions too seem to be personally delivered and not having a space to immediately react to them allows me to process them that much more slowly. Slowness in an age of near instantaneous Internet may be a botheration to most but to me, it’s a luxury I scarcely believe I deserve.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2021/04/hard-copy.html]

Still Here: Notes from the Last Frontier

Their first appearance in my life was as the savages whose throats Buck (the dog hero of Call of the Wild) tears to avenge his last and most beloved human master before dissolving into the wilderness, becoming legend from mere flesh and blood. A strange weakness it was… to believe everything said because it was said by a Westerner, in this case Jack London. Growing up brought a better sense on how I was placed in the world by my place of birth and empathy for the savages grew astronomically. In a little while it became clearer that my own culture and geography fit much better on the savage spectrum than the civilized. “The Great Land” of Alaska (as referred to by a particular group of these ‘savages’) had managed to buck the trend of displacement and death which had swept through the lower 48 of the US, its soul retained as much as its native peoples. My visit to the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center was a meditation of sorts on how my understanding of Alaska had changed over the past two weeks. I had started off looking for the Alaska of adventure as seen by those airdropped in. I ended leaving with the perspective of those who had always called it home.

[http://bit.ly/16-alaska]

[Part of the Series: Notes from the Last Frontier]

 

 

Starstruck: Notes from the Last Frontier

Everyone was smiling. And I mean everyone. The trainers, the audience and the dogs. This wasn’t a performance. This was happiness on loop. At the dog kennels of Denali National Park lived government employees universally loved. With their grey and blue eyes, they jumped up and down in excitement to be chosen for the demonstration, to be yoked to the sled and make their way forward. For many in the audience, this was the whole reason why they were here in Alaska. This reads like hyperbole but when you are euphoric, all things do seem to be beyond reproach. The Park Rangers told their wards’ stories, of stocking up remote guard cabins and checking on winter visitors accompanied by a whole lot of teeth and fur. Of their impeccable intelligence and vastly varying personalities and of how only how they could do what was needed. Pulling puppies were tied alongside their mothers just to run along, not there for the load but there for the fun. The level of fandom was such that it didn’t even matter that it was summer and in the absence of snow, a sandy circuit was established for that purpose. Sled dogs did their thing and us groupies/stans/superfans let our cheers ring.

[http://bit.ly/15-alaska]

[Part of the Series: Notes from the Last Frontier]

Palaeo Goats: Notes from the Last Frontier

I went looking for giant vegetables but came back remembering the stares. Palmer in the Matanuska Valley of Alaska is known for world record size vegetables, the fertile soil and nearly 24 hours of sunlight of summer working in tandem to grow cabbages from your wildest dreams. Budget and rental car restrictions had required me to focus on the Alaska below the Arctic Circle, but this green and idyllic valley was where I met strange denizens from way north. Tracking signs for the “Musk Ox Farm”, I ended up face-to-face with what my untrained eye and lazy description would call midget bisons. Information boards told me that they were closer to the goat family tree than to cattle and how their evolutionary superpowers to withstand extreme cold meant that in the Palaeolithic age they roamed the Arctic tundra in the hundreds. Their down under-wool called qiviut being eight times warmer than wool and about a third finer than cashmere, finding a “use” for them helped them barely survive the onslaught of a particularly vengeful species. Shaggy, suspicious and ineffably cute, they gambolled about this resort created to preserve their population, both of us mutually casting curious looks.

[http://bit.ly/14-alaska]

[Part of the Series: Notes from the Last Frontier]