Swings & Roundabouts

We gave P a big bday bash yesterday. We’d been telling him for quite sometime that for his 5th birthday, we’ll throw him a big party and we did. We invited every one of his classmates plus a few of his nursery friends as well as some desi friends whose kids fall in the 4-6 category. The pains started fairly from the word go. I did not have a complete list of his classmates and made do with an incomplete birthday list compiled by a mom and random inputs by P. Still, I managed to leave two children and when his teacher pointed that out, I furnished extra invitations for the two.

Then there was the RSVP. I thought it was the desis who could not fathom the whole RSVP concept. Turned out, the Brits were too. Or maybe they just decided to ignore the invitation. When there were two full days to the party, I had heard back from 30% of his classmates. But text messages kept coming in till 3 hours to the party from mums of supposedly eager children. We never said ‘oh no we can’t take them as we’ve finalised numbers’ as in typical desi style, we had ordered extra places.

Then there was the actual event. We arrived at the venue to find some parents already there. Though none of them had deigned to say more than the occasional ‘hello’ to me till that day, I still knew them all by face and welcomed everyone and tried to get the party started. None of them had a clue who I was. I am sure they must have walked past me most mornings. But none chose to retain an Indian woman’s face in their posh brains.

When the kids were busy bowling, S and I went around asking if the parents would like drinks etc, generally trying to play our roles of hosts to our best efforts. The firang had all gathered together, like nails to a magnet and S and I and our desi friends were stood a distance away from them, as always. Every now and again, the two of us would bridge the gap to ask them if they were comfy, to which we normally got curt nods. Though I smiled till my teeth ached, all I got from the other mums was random stern glances but no answering smiles. After a while, I got tired of being sidelined in my own son’s party, gave up the Brits as a lost cause, sat down with couple of friends and cousins and watched my son enjoy his party.

Then came the time to say goodbye. Other than P’s best mate, whose mum is the only one who treats me like I am human, NONE of the others remembered who the birthday child’s mum was. They ALL went to S’s cousin and said ‘thank you for inviting us to the party’, to which she said ‘thank you and there’s P’s mum, why don’t you say that to her?’. I ask you! Is it that hard to be nice? I am no alien, I assure you but I swear, last night, any alien would have been welcome in that gathering, not me!

To everyone thinking of the Brits as racist or discriminatory, I say this: they are not racist. I am no Shilpa Shetty but I tell you they are not. Why? Because they can’t be arsed. Intense feelings of any sort requires an effort and these lovely folks cannot be bothered to waste half that effort on the likes of me even to discriminate against me; so they just go on like I am invisible. Of course, our paths might literally cross again from Monday morning but they don’t give a shit. Even if they collide headlong into me, I would never cause a blip in their radars.

Sod you!

Dowry – the very word conjures up some real ugly images in my mind. In this day and age, when we are advancing technologically in every which way possible, I cannot fathom why this despicable practice of dowry still exists in our country.

Every day, many fathers of the bride are put through the wringer, trying to amass enough wealth to buy ‘suitable’ grooms for their daughters. And many men happily sell themselves for a few lakhs of cash, jewels, vehicles and even property. That may sound real harsh but that is what dowry means to me. One can justify it any which way they want, but in my eyes, if you are going to marry a woman, then it should be for who she is and the last thing you should be accepting is her father’s hard earned money.

The father of the bride thus pays for the wedding and all its accompanying expenses, reception and a hefty dowry whilst the groom’s family give a sambhandhi virundhu or the in-laws feast. How fair is that? Why should marrying a girl off break her father’s back? Of course, the giving doesn’t stop then, does it? There’s the first Deepavali, karthigai, Pongal, New Year, Kaaradaiyan Nombu and the other gazillion deities’ birthdays, for which the poor father has to shell out new clothes and jewels and other appropriate gifts. Once the grandchildren start coming, they add another dimension to the spending spree. No wonder some dads let out a huge groan on the arrival of a daughter, if the arrival means a monstrous, life-long bill!

How does it all work out?

The dowry generally gets decided post-horoscope matching, when the families get together to ‘talk’. Most shareef families do go through the rigmarole of ‘Oh no, no we don’t want any dowry’, ‘But you must!’ etc. After a few minutes of arguing along similar lines, the groom’s family generally finishes with a classic, ‘well we do not want any dowry but we will not stop you from doing whatever you want for your daughter.’ How brilliant is that! In one stroke, the Rs 15 lakhs cash, jewellery for Rs 10 lakhs, couple of plots of land and a car are all labelled as ‘gifts for the girl from her loving parents’ rather than ‘dowry’ and the so-called bitter pill goes down easy. Masterful!

It is not just the lower income groups that get mired in this practice. Dowry is rampant in the mid-level and higher income groups than the lower ones. One of the most shocking things I found out after my own wedding was the concept of dowry for the sister-in-law. That really takes the cake. Apparently, the girl’s poor father generally gives the groom’s sister a chunk of money, apart from the requisite clothes for the wedding for herself and her family. WTF? Now we actually pay them to bully us? Or is it to make sure the girl doesn’t have to go through the ‘traditional’ bullying that the SIL is paid off?

What I don’t understand is, how do these ‘manly’ men justify this to themselves? Our men, who consider most things like a wife addressing the husband by his name as a slight, how the hell do they square it to their conscience so they are more than fine with the wife bringing in so much of money, jewels and property? Correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn’t you want to buy your wife what she wants and thus show her what a man you are?!

In these days of feminism and equal rights, practices such as dowry and the other hideousness of sati etc, have no place in society. A woman should be able to become someone’s wife and daughter-in-law purely for who she is; she shouldn’t need anything else to oil the wheels. Think about it: if the only way you can ‘get’ a ‘decent’ son-in-law is by paying hefty sums, then he’s probably not worth it!

Last Sunday, the three of us went to a fourth birthday lunch party. Typical desi get-together, with six kids and sixty adults gathered around a cake for a child’s party. Invitation said ’12 – 4pm’, so we timed it so we reached the venue by 12.30pm. Host was there but there was no sign of the wife or the birthday child, for that matter. They were home, getting ready. Right.

S tells me this is quite common in their circles. He has rarely gone for a party in his Telugu community where the host was at hand to welcome folks. They generally join the party at least an hour after the time specified in the invite, dressed up to the nines. My roof-top 21st birthday, with the whole family in the thick of things, threw him off, apparently. Why? Because we were all there – at the specified time.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought it was generally part of the host’s job description to welcome the guests and introduce one guest to another, get the conversation going and generally circulate so no one feels odd or left out. Wrong! If I go to a party, I am to entertain myself, make sure I introduce self to others if I didn’t want to be a social pariah. Whilst I am not saying that I will stand there like a pillar of salt till someone is presented to me like I am the Queen or something, I rather thought the hostess would do her bit too.

Now S and I are from different communities; he’s Telugu and I, Tamil. This poses no problem when we meet Tamilians as having grown up in Chennai, S speaks fluent Tamil but faced with traditional Telugus, we run into sticky wicket fairly straight off the bat. They cannot wrap their minds around our mixed-background concept – they start rattling in rapid Telugu to me and when I blink and say ‘no Telugu, only Tamil, pliss’, they give me a blank look and escape before I can say boo. Or if S is around, they stick to talking to him along, while I hang around like the handy fifth wheel.

What’s with the habit of talking to just the ‘head’ of the family and leaving the ‘tail’ to fend for itself? That pisses me off so much! I am generally a non-person, hanging back with a silly smile on my face while folks talk ‘matters’. Oh let’s not forget, they turn to me every half hour to ask if I have eaten. What? Am I there only to stuff my face? (Is it that obvious?)

Then there’s the whole segregation thing. As soon as we enter the party venue, S has to go and be with the guys whilst I have to do my sickly-smiley bit with strange womenfolk, who all, of course, know one another. Why should every desi party feel like a Muslim wedding*+, where the men and women are kept in different zones? Why can’t we mingle as couples? I have noticed this just amongst the South Indians; North Indian men don’t seem to have the need to leave their womenfolk around the same time they remove their footwear.

And the cliques! I tell you – women in cliques are vicious. Avoid them at all costs. I do. At every gathering, there is at least one coven of women, sitting with plates piled high with food and sharpening their claws on some poor socially inept souls like me. None would even dream of trying to take someone who doesn’t know everyone there like they do and taking them under the wing. Why bother when you can have much better fun cackling about them instead? They might leave their pointy hats at home to confuse the likes of me, but I can spot them nonetheless.

But what takes the cake about the whole shindig is, when I’d finally bid adieu to the host, hostess and the few who deigned to drop a few words in my direction, they would normally turn around and tell me ‘oh, you must visit us at home sometime real soon.’ That always makes me open my eyes wide in shock and I have to bite down on my tongue real hard to stop me from blurting: ‘For what? Another dose of this?!’

But, being the typical bharatiya naari, I grin inanely and say ‘of course you must visit us too!’ and run for the hills.

*No offence meant to any Muslims and their customs – just using the phrase as a way of explaining things.

After years of dodging the issue, I am accepting it. What has prompted this revelation, you ask. Yet another blowout with S, after yet another crowded desi gathering and I’m throwing in the towel. Why am I so? Well, for starters, I do not get along with everybody. Who does, you ask. Good q. Nobody but they mask it better. I don’t. I always thought I will not be a hypocrite and be false to someone when I think they are crap. By that, I do not mean I am generally rude to people or anything silly like that. I just remain a bit aloof – well I do that till I become comfortable around a person, before I let my guard down. And if it turns out that the person cannot be trusted, then I don’t ever let my guard around them. Is that wrong? Well, I thought not but S thinks I intimidate people. How, when I try my best to mask that I am intimidated by most people out there?

To explain my case, let me tell you the story of this Telugu family we know. The child’s dad works with S and we’ve been to their house a couple of times for lunch and they have been to ours once and though I wouldn’t say we became bosom pals, I thought I was still quite nice and pleasant to her. S says I intimidate the female half of the sketch by speaking in English all the time. Give me a break here: I am a Tamilian while they are Telugu. They have lived in Madras for couple of years and though the girl’s picked up some Tamil, it is way different from mine and I speak Tamil very fast anyways. As I don’t speak any Telugu at all, I thought ‘let’s stick to English’. Well, hey, we live in England and all that. But no – apparently not. By speaking in English to desi folks, I intimidate them.

S also claims that I am socially inept. Why? Coz we do not have a major social life and a big group of mates. This sort of links to the point I made above and he says it is all a part of the social fabric. Being a hypocrite, I ask. Being friendly without trying to be a soul mate, he says. But I do not act nice and friendly to someone to their face and then bitch about them behind their backs now, do I? That’s besides the point, apparently.

Some people also go off me mysteriously. Don’t know why. Let me give an example – there’s this fellow mum at P’s school who was also in my dressmaking lesson with me. We used to get along fine then and used to stop now and then at the school gates to exchange pleasantries. Couple of months back, she told me she was thinking of looking for a job and I suggested my place of work. She said she will ring my mobile so I’ll have her number to give her more details. She never did. When I asked her the next time I bumped into her, she made some excuse, said she can’t go back to work just then and hurried off. We have been a strictly ‘hi’ and ‘bye’ duo since then.

I thought I at least belonged in my safe, cyberworld. But no. My social ineptitude followed me there too – when I met up with two of my fellow writers at DC, I thought things went swimmingly. But further emails have been unanswered and plans to meet up at a later date politely ignored. See, I told you it was me.

I always thought I was sort of like Howard Roarke, the rebel who refused to conform to norms and let society dictate terms. I will be a person by my own rights – not a fake smiling and back biting one; just a genuine one, in a WYSIWYG format. But nah, apparently not. I am wierd.

We have a mini-library of sorts in my team, at work. Well, mini-library seems a rather grand way of describing what it is, a collection of books, but we take it very seriously – we even have a librarian to monitor the traffic! Most of the books in this collection are light, even frivolous read – none of the blood chilling or brain workout-y type of books I’d like to get my teeth into, so I generally
stay away from it.

But one day, a random thought struck me and I actually went through these books. Most of them were written by women and covered subjects such as shopping, clothes, dating, partying, drinking, sex… ‘chick lit’, as I describe it. Not that I have anything against such things, I even borrowed one such book when the library was shut. As I was reading all about three enterprising women and their ideas to nab themselves a dishy guy, I couldn’t help wondering how come we have no such books in the desi market.

How come us desis girls don’t muck about such light material? Lord knows we could tell the world a thing or two. How tough it is to walk past a crowd of roadside romeos without batting an eyelid; how to cross the road opposite Ethiraj College (in Chennai) without getting run over by blokes driving outsized bikes; how to go on a date without grandparents and assorted relatives spotting you around the countryside. There’s also the intriguing life of upstairs-wali Mallika and her shenanigans, the old boy next-door and what he gets upto when maami goes to the market, Flat Association President mama who makes sheep eyes at Lily aunty’s cleavage at the committee meetings… well, you get my drift?

Why is it that the desi literature scene so heavy? Is it because us desis cannot read chick lit or anything half so flimsy? Do we need meaty subjects all the time? Why? Why can’t we kick back with the tale of Meena and Seema as they try to plot their way around their workplace, trying to get past the letch Mohan or Ammu, as she tries to solve the mystery of who-put-the-salt-in-the-soup-and-ruined-her-dinner-party?

I say the desi lit world needs some input from the likes of us Desi Chicks. The Jhumpa Lahiris, Arundhathi Roys and Kiran Desais can have their hard core, heavy works but we need some fresh, new blood from some regular Janes too.

What say my gal pals?

A quick glance at a poster advertising Diwai celebrations while driving through Ealing Road last month led to us standing in a gusty wind at 7:00 pm on a dull autumn evening last weekend. Even as the crowds gathered around me, I couldn’t help thinking that I might possibly be the only mug who has travelled 30 miles to stand
there in that spot so assorted garishly dressed people could parade about the streets.

After trying different methods to keep ourselves warm – stomping feet, swinging our arms about, scoffing hot samosas – we finally heard the faint sounds of, wait for it, bagpipes! I really thought I was hearing things when this van with a massive figure of papier-mache Ganesha came slowly, leading the procession. Following at its heels were a number of desi bagpipers, replete with tika and all! Do not make the mistake of asking me what it was all about!

Next came floats in the form of the many and varied Indian gods and goddesses as well as children dressed up as gods children dressed up as gods, butterflies, peacocks and some other far out creations. There were also various Swami somebody or the other and their followers, singing bhajans and my personal favourite, three jolly characters, dressed as Ram, Lakshman and Sita, showering blessings on everybody in sight! The rear was brought up by another ‘band’, playing amongst other tunes, ‘Lajja Lajja’ and an auto advertising Sony Asia Max!

As most of the people standing around me followed the last of the ‘floats’, I decided to follow suit. I learnt along the way that we were en route to the park where the fireworks display was to be held. On we went, singing and dancing (well, in my case, prancing about trying not to step on my neighbour’s toes yet again and earn one more hot glare) and finally entered Barham Park and therein, bedlam.

There were at least a squillion people there, everyone one of them hell bent on squashing my foot to dust in order to get two and a quarter steps ahead of me. Inside were the usual Fireworks night extra fittings – slides and rides for the little kiddies and the older ones as well as the cotton candy and hot dogs stands. But clearly audible well over all this racket was this stage.

With bass volume almost three times louder than the treble, music was pumping out of the massive speakers that flanked the stage. A handful of skimpily-clad teenage gyrated to the beats of Dus bahaane kar ke leh gaye dil while the assembled crowd seemed to go mad with every thump. When the MC announced that the next performer was to be Jassie Sidhu, the girl next to me, who was till then merely content with jogging my elbow and screeching in my ear to Nach Baliye, went catatonic and did her best to push me out of her way to get herself as close to the stage as possible.

I have to admit this was the first time I had even heard of this bloke and when he started belting out a bhangra number, it just sounded like the other songs of the same genre that I have heard before. But I am sure he was glad that the crowd didn’t agree with me. He continued to enthrall them and then finally, at about 9pm, the fireworks display started. Bright sparks, in a myriad of different hues, took over the skies amidst shouts of ‘Happy Diwali’.

Happy Diwali indeed!

August 15 – whenever this day comes around, it always brings to my mind, the song “Fanaa” from the Mani Ratnam movie Ayutha Ezhuthu (Yuva in Hindi). Sid and Trisha are bouncing up and down on the dance floor and Trish quips “this is my last August 15″. This bought a huge bubble of laughter to my throat when I watched the scene for the very first time.

Never once in the 23 years that I spent in India did I actually acknowledge August 15 – certainly not by celebrating it at the local disco! But that’s in the past. Being gazillions of miles away from the homeland makes the well of patriotism rise up and swell periodically and August 15 is recognised with the cry of “Happy Independence Day” at the sight of every desi.

At the height of irony is my location – celebrating Independence Day, sitting comfortably in my chair in merry England. Well, what does that say? I suddenly realised this yesterday when I blurted out to my colleagues “Well, hell, tomorrow is Independence Day” and one of them went “Isn’t that on July 4?”. To which I parried “Only if I am American, which I sure ain’t!!”. This brought the question, “Who did you get your independence from then?” I just looked at everyone and went “Well, you lot!” and there was absolute silence for two minutes after which one went “oh, yeah” while the rest just grinned.

All this brings to my mind the question – how to commemorate our Independence Day? I do believe it should be celebrated in some way, at least as a way of appreciating and recognising the sacrifice of the millions of freedom fighters who cheerfully gave their lives so their future generations could breathe the free air. (Quoting Rakesh Mehra here!) We all know who Bhagat Singh is now, thanks to RDB – but how many know Vanchinathan, who was strung up in the rail station of Maniyachi? There are so many unsung heroes, who deserve to be remembered.

In that sense, should Independence Day be more of a Thanksgiving Day?

I have been living outside India for five years now and I haven’t forgotten the advice one of my close friends, who was living in America, gave me. She said ‘the NRIs are the worst kind of hybrid people you can bump into – and bump into them, you will. They have shed all the good qualities of our culture and have grabbed hold of the not so nice ones of the Western culture. The resultant mix isn’t a pretty sight.’

I thought this was just my ole cynical mate being her usual, you know, cynical self. But in these five years, I have come across some people who have really made me think about those comments made by my friend. From what I have seen, these beauties can be slotted into the following categories:

The Queen Bees: these are the women (ladies?) that have been settled in the foreign country for at least a year more than the earliest emigrant. They tend to act quite hoity-toity to the newcomers and have an affected accent. Getting invitations to their parties would be quite hard.

The Gatherers: These are the women who make it a point to make new friends. It is almost like a mission – they’d rather have 1000 entries in their address book under ‘Acquaintance’ than one under ‘Friend’. What’s more, they shed old friends like old clothes – once a new face comes in, old ‘friends’ usually become stale to them.

The Uppity ones: These are the grand-dames. They will never talk to anyone unless they are addressed to first. Even if you literally walk into them on the streets, they will pretend not to have noticed you till the minute you say ‘hello’. Their offspring are usually reputed to emulate Abhimanyu – whatever the apple of your eye has done, theirs has done at least a year before.

The ulta-desis: These are the ekdum desi women. When they go home for the holidays, they preen about in jeans and talk with a false accent about Tesco and Sainsbury’s to the complete awe of the village. But when they land at Heathrow, out come the salwar kameezes and the tika bindis.

Apart from these, there are also the normal, seedha-saadha ones like Yours Truly, who doesn’t fit into any of these and has a grand time observing the antics of the various members of the above mentioned groups. ?

[This is not an attack on anyone out there – just a satirical look at some of the unfortunate beauties I have met so far in my life! Get out your bottle of Humour potion and take a hefty dose of it before you delve into the blog. ]