Mangala Mami

I was baking a fruit cake today. 

One cup flour.

Half a cup each of sugar and butter.

Almonds.Raisins. Sultanas. 

As the kitchen filled with smells of fruit and nuts it took me down the memory lane once again. 

I was fifteen years old and I rode all the way to the IUCAA residential campus on my Atlas bicycle. It was a long way from my place but I loved it because it took me to one of the happy places in my life. It was Mangala mami's house. 

She is better known as the wife of my mom's cousin Jayant Narlikar but for me she has been the switch that turns on all the positive energy in you. Her house used to be fragrant with fresh baking at any given time of the year. She is an artist who was misled into being a mathematician and a really good one at that! I used to go to her place to study maths but it was the least of my interests then ( and I think even now). I was terrible in mathematics and if anyone has successfully made me think of that branch of science ( is it science really?) with some sympathy and compassion, it is Mangala mami. Just to explain how the medians of a triangle can be extended to make many more identical triangles, she once showed me the picture of hundreds of horses fixed into each other like a jigsaw. I never really remembered the triangles but I still remember the picture frame on her wall.

She is a perpetual student and her everyday life is filled with learning little things. My uncle goes around the world as a visiting lecturer in Universities everywhere. She comes back with a new recipe from every country. 

Conversations with Narlikars are really amusing. Jayant mama is frugal with words but whatever little he says is always one of the best jokes of the evening. Mangala mami does all the talking. She has something to say about everything. Whether it is the best place to get red meat in Pune or quotations from the Bhagwad Geeta! She will infuse your minds with bits of refreshing information as she brews a cup of tea with real gardenia flowers. Some smells get locked in your memory with certain incidents. The smell of gardenia flowers and french roses always reminds me of her. 

Sometimes, little things seem really daunting for me. At such times I have pictures of few strong women I have seen in my mind. Mangala mami is one of them. She raised three beautiful daughters and took care of demanding in laws as gracefully as she used to do a postulate on a piece of paper. Her slanting, pretty handwriting that never saw the limitations of margins. She used to write at the speed of light, giving neat "therefore" and "since" signs between all the lines and even saying it all aloud. She was expected to stay at home in the conservative and "cultured" Huzurbazar ( my granny's family) tree.  However you could see her  sitting on the lawn with all the servant's kids teaching them maths. Many of them ended up clearing their junior college exams and getting degrees. 

She is dressed in pastel colored saris and her hair is always falling out of the clip that she wears. Her fragile, porcelain hands and her spectacles that run halfway down on her nose make her one the most charming figures I have ever seen in my life. 

Get her talking about gardening and her face lights up. 

When her ever-so-strict mother-in-law was on her deathbed, Mangala mami encouraged her to walk by giving her one point for every step she took. It brought tears to our eyes to see the happiness on the terminally ill woman's face when Mangala mami gave her two bonus points for taking that extra step. The love of flowers runs in the family too and during her very last days Mangala mami wheeled her mother-in-law outside just to see the jasmine bloom. 

She would have her daughter's friends come over to get their difficulties solved in order to appear for competitive exams. She used to have her legendary "classes" at the dining table. With the oven buzzer going once in a while and her lectures happily intercepted by fruit cakes and tea. 

She goes round the world these days but she writes to me from everywhere she goes. 

When I wrote to her a few days back to get this recipe off her, she merrily wrote back from Johannesburg airport. 

Ten years ago, as I sat at the big dining table in the Narlikar house, eating my big piece of cake awkwardly as was trying to make sense out of a theorem, I would have never thought that I would be baking the same kind of cake one day. Now, as my house smells like orange peel and rum, I thank God for giving me someone like her to think about!!

Thanks Mangala mami!! I wish I could do better than this for you!

My Two Brave Ajjis

(It is July and I am putting on a year but this time, instead of being a drama queen and complaining about it I have decided to write about some of my fondest memories as a child. Please excuse the length!! )

My early days of childhood were a bit puzzling due to the presence of two grandmas on mother's side. I was told to call them Tai-Ajji and Kusum-Ajji. Kusum ajji was the calm and serene one who used to read and write. Who used to walk around the house and no one could hear the sound of her feet on the floor. Tai-ajji was the one who filled the house with laughter. She stormed in and stormed out of the rooms and always smelled like cloves. She wore a big kunku on her forehead that was meticulously made by sticking vermilion powder on an exact round plaster of bee-wax. I used to get up early sometimes to watch her make it on her forehead.

When I spent my holidays in Kolhapur and sometimes caught a viral infection, I used to long to hug Tai-ajji and sleep and I can still remember how her sarees used to smell like burnt wood from the bath water that was heated on an earthen stove in the backyard.

It took me several innocent and happy years to realize that in reality she was my mom's step-mother and even now, as I write that word, I feel like I am describing an ugly,hairy mole on her face. All my uncles on my mother's side are my mother's step-brothers but it was so hard to relate the word "step" from the Cinderella story to the word "step" in our house-hold. I still regret the day I found it out, although I do not remember when and how I found out. Maybe it was through the afternoon bicycling sessions with my cousin, who was two years older and made sure that any new information about life reached my head right after it reached hers.

It was so unfair to put Tai-ajji in the class of angry step mothers from the stories I heard from my mom. She raised my mom like a daughter she never had. Took her along everywhere she went which included the houses of her "rich and famous" friends from the Marathi Film Industry that was booming in Kolhapur at that time. I honestly believe that if Tai-ajji had received any kind of advanced education, she would surely end up being a politician. She had the charm and charisma of a glib speaker and the ability to hold anyone in place with her sharp sense of humor. She even got my mom a small role in one of the Marathi movies made by her friend's husband and everyone remembers my mom from the film Dharmakanya.

All my mom's little dreams of tamarind and cucumbers outside the school, of watching Dilip Kumar movies and playing with marbles until the day went off were fulfilled by Tai-ajji.

Every time I think about the relationship between my mom's two moms, I am full of awe. They obviously never liked each other but the circumstances were such that they had to live in the same house while my grandfather was away for his jobs.

The house was big enough to fit three families, so space was not a problem but the crowding took place in everybody's minds. Each of the children including my uncles grew up with their own version of "My Father's Second Marriage".

They blamed and complained, sometimes, even used it as a blackmail but both the women stood dignified as ever. Kusum-ajji draped in her pristine silence and Tai-ajji in her merry laughter.

Tajee, as I called her fondly, had an army of friends. She would have put Orkut and Facebook to shame with her social networking. She helped people meet other people when they were in need. She always had a gang of "ill-behaved" old women around her. Who cracked mischievous

jokes like they were twenty years old.

She was also fond of keeping a nice garden. Roses, Gardenia,Frangipani,Dahlias and Tuberoses! Her garden was always blooming with something fragrant. She was also fond of keeping everything in order. She had pictures from years ago neatly pasted in a yellowed album. Her things had character. Even if she kept a little ten rupee note in her purse, when it came out it was Tai-ajjified.

Owing to my parent's hectic schedules and lack of leaves, Tai-ajji came to Pune every time I succumbed to measles or chickenpox. Away from school, safe in her hands, my sick days used to be the happiest days of the year. She used to leave a big pot with water under the sun and at dusk bathe me in it with Neem leaves. At six in the evening, both of us waited at the door for aai to come back from the institute. Then the three of us would have a relaxed cup of tea in the front yard listening to aai's proceedings of the day.

Whether it was moving houses, weddings of close relatives or just making lots of pickles before the summer got over, Tai-ajji was always a part of our lives. Even more so than Kusum-ajji.

When I think of her, a full spectrum of colours flashes in front of my eyes. She was a rainbow.

Every happy memory is somehow associated with her.

She also had a set of funny stories that all her grandchildren made her repeat over and over again. She let us eat half-dried rice papads as all the moms and aunts tried to shoo us away. She let us sneak out of the house when the sun was pouring anger and have popsicles.

When the girls came of age, she bought them all little things that she would want them to have as grown up women.

She loved my mom. I cannot fathom how she managed to have that kind of happiness in her heart when it came to my mom. It was not hypocrisy because I felt it when she was around me. It either takes immense courage or an innocent heart to do that. She never liked Kusum-ajji and was equally verbal about her dislike for her but how and why she ended up loving my mom so much is a big mystery.

I saw various facets of jealousy and humanity through them and then I came to envy my grandfather for being the man in the lives of two incredible women. How greedily we hold on to little things in life! Our happiness eclipsed by the fears of sorrow and our sorrows half-lived in the hope of happiness. Paralyzed by the uncertainties of things to come and ridiculously helpless we are, for we fear sharing spaces with people trying to own people we love! On this background, the mental image of my little mom holding Taji's little finger to get on a bus seems from a dream.

Kusum-ajji never defended her place. She took it all silently. The anger, the hatred and the scandalized 1950s that never saw a divorce, although a lot of illegal second marriages. She prayed and put all her efforts into turning my mother who she is today. A silent, powerful woman raising another one. Kusum-ajji was all about poetry and classic humor. Well-read and well-bred, she came from a lineage of scholars and mathematicians, and just like her family, she was as humble as humility could ever be.
I cannot imagine why my grandfather would like two women who are poles apart and still be loved equally by both.
People get colors of sacrifice and they add up to make you fall in love every passing day. I think the three of them were somewhat like that. They all liked each other for various things and somehow they were all glad that each one had their position in a house full of three confused and angry sons and a little lost daughter.

When Taji was about to die and she was being taken into the hospital, she made my grandfather put the same big red kunku on her forehead, as though she was sure she would never come back. She was being taken into the ICU when she told the doctors to let her die if she was going to be rendered disabled. She passed away cracking jokes with the nurses and the doctors. True to her spirit. We all miss her.
I miss her the most when I walk by the garden and get a whiff of gardenia!!
Thanks Taji, in your way, you have taught me the most difficult lessons of life. :)

We just share!

My friends here keep having discussions about "communal living". 

Sometimes, when we are late in the lab and my friend's flatmate calls him to tell him what he is going to make for dinner, my friend goes," Who needs a wife when you have a flatmate who cooks for everyone exactly at seven?".

Housing in Brisbane is freakishly expensive. You pay somewhere between $400 to $500 a week for a decent house. It is easier with roomies though. When you can divide the cost of a three bedroom house between three people and share a kitchen.

Sometimes, you are blessed with flatmates who turn into best friends and living together becomes a constant party. When my firang friends go into one of these "futuristic" discussions about communal living, I feel like it is more like going retrograde. 

How about the Chawls in Mumbai? As a kid, I was fascinated by Pula Deshpande's accounts of the Chawls in Girgaon. Complete with fights at the water tap and young Gavaskar's honing their batting skills in the common chowk. People making booming families in a 10X10 room and neighbors being there for each other in every difficulty. 

The Westerners think that not giving children separate bedrooms has serious effects on their development but I think a moderate amount of communal living that has been going on in India in the form of joint families and chawls has actually helped people more than it has harmed them.

When we live close to people, happiness is shared and so is grief. 

We learn to look at ourselves as a little part of a big family, which is a close estimation of the reality around us. When everything we use, belongs only to us, it sometimes translates into our attitude towards people in our lives as well. 

Getting noticed in a crowd is harder, so we learn to develop something that sets us apart, more often than not, a great sense of humor.

Who can beat the innumerable cups of hot chai at each other's place? Card games going into the wee hours, broken hearts across broken balconies! Watching your childhood sweetheart get dressed for her wedding and leave with someone else, and your friends urging you not to miss the feast just because you think you are heart broken!

Chawl gossip must have eliminated the need for a television for ages and how many recipes must have been exchanged by neighbors from across the country trying to find their destinies in a metro!

I think for all the people who grew up in these intriguing paper-houses, the house left a bit of a character in them as well. I agree that it must be hard, but I absolutely disagree with the thought that it isn't healthy. 

In a country like India, you may not get as much privacy and space as you want but you definitely get a lot of other things that no other place can offer and how much place do we really need? Just enough to forget the abysmal loneliness that an empty heart makes. 

As my best friend puts it, "We are not here to own anything. We just share."

Riju

When I came to Australia, I wasn't exactly expecting that I would make a lot of friends right away. Somehow, I found friendship pretty soon with my flatmates Shruti and Riju.
However, I write this blog on Riju because she is one of the funniest and happiest characters in our lives.
Riju aka Rabdi Devi hails from Patna. She is complete with a glass-shattering voice and a Bihari accent that you cannot miss. A compulsive cleanliness freak, she kicks you out of the kitchen because she likes to wash dishes "her way".
Well, some of the evidently (un)cool things she has taught me are the Bihari Muhawras one for each exceedingly embarrassing occasion in your life.
Like once Shruti came out of her room with a posh dress and not-so-posh pair of osho chappals. Our Rabdi Devi sat on the couch like a Badshah and went ' yeh to jaise hum kahate hain..ke Upar Phit-Phat aur neeche Mokama Ghat"
( Mokama ghat apparently is a not-so-posh area in Bihar).
When I go on my legendary diets and skip carbohydrates for dinner she goes," Saee tumhe itna marenge na..ke baba ka bariyati dikhadenge".
When I don't find something I am looking for and it is right under my nose, she goes," Eh dekho ..aankh ke andhe naam nayansukh" ( Which is really true in my case because I keep getting compliments on my eyes).
When I fell sick a few months back, she put a black thread in front of the "Gods" in our house
(which is a nice cocktail from the North through the South of India) and tied it on to my wrist the next morning.
I have successfully picked up the nice Bihari accent and when I speak Hindi now, I speak fluent Bihari Hindi.
I keep speaking my mind when she is around and sometimes I accidentally tell her what the next item on my wish-list is. Then on a Sunday when I return home from the lab I find a Nike Yoga mat or a purple bandana waiting for me with suppressed giggles.
Cooking and grocery shopping with her is a pleasure. She taught me how to be economical. :)
Although I have still not learned it well, I do think of her reaction when I end up spending too much and check myself sometimes.
She recently got a good job in a child care center so she comes home and practices being "stern" with me these days. :)
Her determination and the sheer kindness in her heart makes her an extraordinary woman.
She is one of the people I thank God for. For without her, Australia would not have been so pretty for me. :)
Cheers Riju. Keep Rocking!

Gods Behaving Badly

I came across this really creative book written by Marie Phillips.

It puts all the Greek Gods in 21st century London. All of them live together in a dilapidated old house and each of them has a day job. Aphrodite works as a phone-sex operator. Dionysus works as a bartender and a DJ. Artemis, the Goddess of hunting works as a professional dog walker!

They all are fed up living in the same house together and conserving their powers ( because they are no longer as powerful as they used to be in the olden times). Apollo , the Sun God, works as a substandard TV star and tries to entice mortal women (unsuccessfully) to change his painfully boring sex life. ( Apparently he is sad about the fact that Aphrodite is flawlessly beautiful for over three hundred years and making love is like recurring de ja vu!)

When Apollo's advances are turned down by mortals, he uses his powers to turn them into trees. When the other Gods find out about this, they make him swear on Styx that he will not use his powers to get even with sexual insults for a decade and the story takes a very funny turn when he actually breaks it and the Sun goes out.

Although it sounds somewhat like "Harry Potter for Adults" and it gets progressively predictable towards the end I was genuinely amused by the central idea.

It is crisp in places and I think it is really well researched as well. It comes with a British sense of humor so it is really hilarious in places.

It got me thinking, what if someone writes a book like this on Indian Gods. All the cities would be closed down at the same time.

There would be black flags outside the writer's house and a few Shiv Sainiks would beat the hell out of him when he goes out to get milk one morning. There would be a row over how the sentiments of Indian people have been hurt because of the contents of the book. Aaj-Tak would get lot of material for their "Breaking news" and they would leave Kareena Kapoor and Saif Ali Khan alone for a while.

Historians would protest because one group of historians would disagree with the order of Lord Krishna's 15886th wife.

The Shaivs and Vaishnavs would start fighting with each other because each one claims that their God was insulted more than the other's. There would be riots in some parts of Mumbai and a few buses would be burnt down.

The writer would be kept under house arrest with about fifty jobless protesters posted outside his house at any given moment.

All of this would get him on the best selling list and all his relatives reaching to his unborn great grandchildren would be ensured enough money to squander without getting a serious job ever in their lives.

With 33 billion Gods available to write about, it is a really juicy option!!

Viju Kaka

I had a unique childhood.  I had by some strange conspiracy of planets, some of the most intriguing people as a part of my early years. Viju kaka was one of them.

I remember him through the eye-span of a five year old so he was one of my heroes. He was around forty and single and lived in a queer little room in a chawl in Chimanbag. His room smelled of cigarettes  but I never felt uneasy. He had numerous boxes of tools lying about randomly in his room. A funny little spanner, a set of shiny pliers, cute baby screw-drivers and sand papers of all kinds. Being a girl, I was never fascinated by anything as much as by the little metal stool he had that I was fond of sitting on. It was something from my world that fit into all the little things around me.

He used to baby-sit me all the time. My mom left for work on Saturdays and my dad and Viju kaka met at a restaurant near by to talk politics over around sixteen and a half cups of coffee and a few cigarettes. I sat around listening to them or running around amusing the waiters. My dad then left me with him and went out grocery shopping exactly an hour before my mom's scheduled return. 

Viju kaka had this really rustic looking bike called "Bullet" and he made me sit on the petrol tank in the front. From the way it fired, we had named it "digee-digee" and I loved riding it. 

Sometimes, he used to be busy fixing something in his room and I used to hang around opening boxes and being overwhelmed by the amount of disorganization that he could tolerate. Compared to our house then, which was I guess the humblest we ever lived in, his room was like being in a Wonderland. There was no kitchen, but a little gas cylinder with a burner just enough for making a cup of tea whenever he felt like. There was no bedroom, just a bed which looked like it was ever willing to sacrifice its purpose as a bed for a work bench. A lonely table fan that turned its head to a different corner and circulated the yogi air in the room. A big gramophone that played jet black discs when my dad and Viju kaka had their contemplative cups of tea. They were the ferocious men in the seventies so they usually had really (pointless) intensive discussions over politics that could be true ( or pointless) either way. However, they amused themselves with speculations. Even now, every time I see men talking about politics, I turn into the same five year old that I was back then and wander off, keeping my eyes on them and my mind elsewhere. 

He had invented a fictitious character called "Sugandha" to get me to behave myself. So every time I threw a tantrum he used to tell me how Sugandha never does these kind of things because she is such a good girl. She could dance,sing ( whenever they wanted her to impress guests), tell stories and she also helped her mom in the kitchen. I used to be raging mad at this epitome of goodness in a little girl's disguise. 

He used to take me around on his bike all over the city when he was running errands and baby-sitting me at the same time. So I was taken to oily and greasy service stations and made to wait for long hours till someone helped him out. He kept me entertained with his stories and I never got bored. 

I don't know what happened but we lost touch with him for a long time. In the meanwhile I grew up and those childhood flashes of memory were sewn together by "facts" that my parents provided about everyone. I got to know a lot of things about all my childhood idols that I could have done without knowing. Through coffee conversations and old-friends-getting-together-after-a-long-time events, I realized that what I saw of Viju kaka was really a very tiny part of what he was known for and somehow my mind refused to see him as a complete person. 

I met him again years later and he was true to his image in my mind, for he showed up with a big bar of chocolate even though he knew I was almost seventeen. He was married and lived in another town. I tried finding that "deegi-deegi" guy in him again but the effort was futile. 

At such times I truly regret growing up. Somehow when you are around three feet tall, you make up for all that you cannot see by your innocence. I had filled my gaps with my own imagination and I really liked thinking about Viju kaka the way I thought of him when I was five. Back then, the stench of nicotine made me feel safe! It reminded me of the little room with a lot of tool-boxes that I was "set free" into!

To Find or not to Find

Today afternoon my labmates and I discovered something really serious.
We were sitting there in front of our "designated" machines pretending to be busy when one of "us" got bored and came over for a chat. Soon the other joined us too!

Then as it follows when three chemists/physicists get together , we all got contemplative. It was so easy for Archimedes to go "Eureka!!!!" in the bath tub. Or how Newton just had to sit under an apple tree and suddenly reveal gravity to us.
Today everyone knows about gravity and buoyancy forces.
That is the problem!!
They have already discovered all the easy things and left all the difficult ones for us. That is why research seems so difficult! That is why we get lost in complicated hydrogen bonding and solvatochromic dyes.
Now that I am doing a PhD, I really want to invent something. If invention is too much of an aim, I at least want to discover something but I think there is nothing left.

Newton also apparently invented the catflap
He made a flap for his cat so that she could come visiting him in his lab whenever she felt like without bringing any light with her and upset his experiments. However, when she had kittens, Newton was so eager to please them all that he made several small flaps for the kittens too just to realize that they merrily followed their mum through the bigger flap!
Now that he is so famous, this story becomes a "cute" Newtonian story. If I had done something like that, I am pretty sure that people would roll their eyes and go "Gosh that is so much like you!! You are beyond help".

So the point is that there is nothing really left for me to invent or discover ( except maybe if I want to "discover" myself or something) and in order to be applauded for the silly things I end up discovering now and then ( Like the exact proportion of peanut butter and jam so as not to get the sandwich soggy or leave it dry), I have to invent or discover something obviously big first.
Every now and then, I do a scifinder search on my research topic and find that people are adding bits and pieces of publications to it. The scientific community is always gripped by a constant fear, " What if my current work is being published somewhere?".
We are constantly scared of some Su Chang or Sreedharan Ramaswamy Iyyer trying to write a paper on what we have been doing over the past few months.

I have decided to get over these fears though. Who are we to "discover"?
It is all already there. We are merely writing papers and amusing ourselves.
Even if we remember Newton and respect him it is his work that really matters and not his name! =)
I guess it pays to be philosophical and lazy at the same time but I genuinely hope that I discover something! =)