Suncatcher

My Ajji. 1935 – 2020.

The first portrait I ever drew was of my grandmother.

I was about four or five years old. It had been just me and Ajji at home. It was a little before lunchtime, when the house would smell of ash gourd saaru and thuppa, and rice huffed away in several cookers across the neighbourhood. The air was redolent, charged with getting things in order before the hungry crowd came home for lunch.

I don’t remember the particulars, but it is likely I was pestering Ajji for a lunch-cancelling snack. My favourite at the time was a fistful of hurgaDale, sugar and grated coconut/copra, something I ate with alarming frequency alongside mainlining palmfuls of spit-wet Bournvita. Having this far survived a plum 60-year life of nonstop child-origin bullshit, my frankly fed up Ajji gave me the only spanking she has ever given me. I remember being surprised, then wanting to come across as strong, unfazed — and my pride finally shattering when I couldn’t help but cry. Leaning fully into my bawling, I had slow marched back to our room, rubbing my behind. My frock’s bow had come undone and the ribbons had been trailing. I was hiccuping, my nose ran freely, my eyelashes were in clumps.

By then, I’d been used to placating myself while crying. Away from observing eyes, I would tire quickly and would instead engross myself with how teardrops were shaped, the sensations I’d feel when I’d squeeze my wet eyes, the oddities of my toes. There was always something to see, something to look at closer, something to commit to memory. My breath would steady to a snotty mouth-breathing while I amused myself with the universe of details that everyday brought: 

Ajji’s funny burp while she sat on the sofa with her fissured feet up on the teapoy, somedays doing the Kannada crossword directly in pen. Ajji’s nose. The small waves of Ajji’s hair. The print of her saree, how it looked when I eagle-armed swooped down on her lap and closed my left eye, then closed my right. I could bury my nose in its worn-to-tuft cotton and take a walk through the grove of her days: the washline, the rexona bath, flowers at every doorstoop. The garden, the store room, her groaning godrej bureau. My grandfather’s vest, my grandfather’s sofa-doily, my grandfather’s off-to-work handkerchief.

There were so many places to go wandering with my mind. On this eventful day, I’d gone wandering with a green crayon, all along our recently-painted cream-yellow wall.

The next part of this memory features me and my extremely angry mother looking perfectly pitiful. We’re scrubbing the bedroom wall with the kitchen sponge and a trough of soap water, hoping to undo my first ever portrait, mural, public artwork, and act of vandalism:

A sunflower, standing in its pot, leafy hands on its hips. It’s a female sunflower with two nose-studs, and hair worn in an Ajji-style bun. It is an angry all-green sunflower, and it’s screaming at an otherwise sunny and totally green landscape of house, garden, mountains, river, birds.

Portraits are about subjects, but also about what a painter feels about their subject. An electric meeting of two viewpoints: of watching, and being watched. 

Ajji lived a long and full 85 years. Her life was so full of stories and each story was a two-palms large pomegranate brimming with bright red rubies that I could spend all of my life just drawing and writing about. 

It amazes me even now — after haggling with the hearse in the middle of a pandemic, after tearfully whispering goodbye to her ashen bones — how nothing, not death, not the indignity of disease, not the acrid smog of grief, has truly been able to eclipse my Ajji’s sunniness in my mind.

On winter mornings and evenings, my dolled-in-the-sweater-I’d-bought-her Ajji would sit, powdery chinned, flowery haired, smelling like home itself, on the sofa in our verandah. Her arms would be suspended over the armrests of her seat, her glass bangles tinkling their way down. Her small torso would be sitting upright, eyes mostly shut, feeling the sun play on her face and back.

Everything twinkled in this light. Her nose-stud. The apples of her gigglesome cheeks. The silver of her hair. Her gently blinking eyelashes. A soft, diffused halo would spread around her mostly white and shiny head.

Ajji would catch the sun and hold it in her face like a giddy flower in spring. She just couldn’t help herself. Like a child off to play on a surprise-holiday. She’d show up and take it on the chin, everything, every perversion of chance that life threw at her, and she looked forward to at least… a sunbeam. It was her smallest, most private meditation thanking life’s rare ability to be kind. At least a sunbeam kind. 

I see why my grandfather’s rocking chair was poised opposite her sun-seat.

In her last decade, Ajji’s life was upended in Parkinson-tempests. With every stroke after pin-prick stroke, we watched her mind retreat into her slowly locking-itself body. But we were also lucky. We snatched months, weeks, then days, hours, then tv shows, boxes of sweets, and rolls of monaco, then mere minutes with her, when she’d be here. When she’d ask me why I hadn’t yet dyed my hair, or say something that sounded like a hello and a goodbye, till one day she’d just set her eyes on me, and only the flicker of a sunbeam passed her faraway eyes.

I miss Ajji very much. I miss her bubbling, belly-bobbing laughter. I miss her bELE saaru. I miss how much she loved me, how much she loved us, how much she loved a simple thing like soft winter sunshine.

My Ajji.
1935 – 2020.

140: Bullet Journal, hey!

One day back in May, extreme fundae maven, tasteful item-number maverick, and #1 reason why mothers are naming their child so, Aadisht, asked what the big deal was about Bullet Journals.

I accidentally kinda sorta answered this on Instagram Stories (instagram login needed!), so I’m schlepping it here too. Here we go!

(Extremely) simply put, BuJos break calendar years down into manageable timelines –

  • To help you plan and put goals and tasks into their appropriate buckets (yearly, monthly, weekly, daily goals)
  • To offer you retrospection with different lenses (what happened today, what happened this week, this month – though this leg tends to be heavily skewed to the daily)

The information is compacted using bullets instead of running sentences, and codes tracked with an index.

It’s not uncommon to see beautifully brush-lettered, watercoloured, carefully art-directed layouts of BuJos on Instagram. They’re used to track just about anything from finances to water intake to TV watched to circulation of salad dressing. There’s a tonne of gorg. stationery taking cue too (par exemple: this coffee journal, sketch journal, travel journal). But overall, there seems to be a super-creative, artsy and craftsy, expensive, heavily key/legend-ed *look* to BuJos that could come across as intimidating.

Just like the path to knowledge, god, or that other obvious analogy, there is more than one way to do this.

Before I get into that, let me get something pressing out of the way. I hate the nifty, smarmy coinage, BuJo; it has the cult-vibe of OPOS and smacks of AoL yuckery.

So Bullet Journals, hmm?

  • They’re quick
  • …also because the idea is to keep them with you wherever you go
  • They’re super-flexible and customisable — usually a stumbling block in standard diaries
  • They’re focussed: you want some sort of direction in/template for what to keep track of everyday
  • This isn’t a priority for everybody – but just like old school diaries, they can be made pwuddy and treated like a creative exercise too.

I devised a retrospective system of my own using the parts of the Bullet Journal system that I found most beneficial.

I have some creative chops, but painting and lettering isn’t something I want to do everyday. I recognise that if I mandate it to everyday, it is going to be a hurdle. The creativity in this for me, is in devising the system itself and breaking a complex question into simple, measurable parts.

The result?

Treating my days like a data set answers questions for me in this fashion:


A few questions came by. And yes, I couple this monthly tracker with a to-do list, and a daily bullet-style summary.


A part of this exercise for me is that it’s an excuse for me to work with stationery after a day of screens. You could do this on Git. You could just as easily do this on Excel and spin them pivot tables, you Spreadsheet Jockey you.

And now, some words of …discouragement:

  • You’re going to fail a few times. In the beginning, in the middle, in the end.
    • when you lose interest
    • when you get a hit of accomplishment (like quitting smoking for about a month: nice to know you had it in you after all)
    • or, best case scenario: when you’ve found closure on all the tabs you wanted to keep
  • It is going to frustrate you:
    • Bending the timeline to suit your cause is going to be gnarly
    • You may start too ambitious – it only means you have to make it more basic
  • It will take some of your time and attention – but ONLY at first, it gets almost reflexive if you let it. I’m venturing a guess that it’s a bit like growing a beard.
  • It is going to be MESSY at first, so start in a notebook you aren’t too attached to (you know, Canara Bank type diary, or that glittery flowery notebook someone gifted you three years ago), or start on loose sheets of paper that you can stick into a more favoured diary
  • Have extremely basic expectations:
    • Admit to yourself this IS a commitment for it to be meaningful in any way
    • Just start with wanting to make this a part of your everyday – then go pedal-to-the-metal
    • Make the system really easy and intuitive for you – like I said: recognise what your hurdles could be and simplify it for yourself
    • Finally, be honest, nobody has to know what you’re measuring, nobody cares if you’re failing at your goals
  • Social Media can somewhat be your friend
    • If you run on validation fuel*, share your progress: a week of table conquered is such a high – acknowledge this and applaud yourself!
    • Repeating myself – don’t fudge your data because you don’t want people to know you suck at restraint or discipline
  • You won’t find *answers* here:
    • At least, not most obviously
    • Getting to the right question will take trial and error. Lots of error.
    • Any which way, be prepared to be *surprised* by your data; like any data, it will give you insights
  • This is not a sign that you have it together
    • It is, however, a route to get there
  • It’s ok to ditch this altogether and do something more worthwhile with your time: I mean, in ten minutes, you can watch half a Brooklyn 99 episode.

In concluuuusion: this has proved helpful for me. It’s well-suited to my attention-incapacitated, stationery-hungry, colour-fueled upstairs. In especially dark periods when I ~feel~ I haven’t accomplished jack, this has q. visibly demonstrated otherwise, or has simply been proof of life.

* I actually tracked this for a month, but I needed to rephrase the question and metric.

# My apologies for the less than ideal image grids; my blog’s layout favours text.
^ Of course you’re welcome to share the contents of this post, but please link back and credit me!

My favourite picture of me.

Me, about 5 years old.
This is my favourite picture of me. I am about 5 years old in this, and I have no memory of this photograph being taken. It was taken in the corridor of our first-floor house in Hanumanthanagar. Judging by my expression, I gather that my grandfather has taken this picture.

My grandfather had a very strict idea of how portraits should be shot: dead center compositions
against humble backgrounds. He’d order his subjects to offer a small smile that wouldn’t alter the general structure of the face, and he wasn’t big on goofy grins. My stance here (even to this day) is my general understanding of formalness.

At home, photo-shooting meant an occasion of dignified behaviour. Photographs were expensive and we were allowed just one chance at committing something to forever. So it called for us to make it a picture that we – both photographer, and photographe-e – could cherish. Given I am wearing my favourite plastic-pearls necklace and a stone-encrusted sticker bottu, there was probably a small-scale festival (not a Gowri-Ganesha; perhaps an Ayudha Pooja) in progress.

I love this picture for the details of me that it includes in its confines, and outside of it.

Details

I have never been comfortable being photographed. From a very young age, I knew that a photograph was some moment of truth that had been frozen forever – and so my face, my expressions, my demeanor in them were all very true things, and I was accountable for them all. Growing up, I entertained the rationalization that my moments were moments, fleeting, and to dignify them with the gift of eternity, as with a photograph, was somewhat pointless. Not much of what I do, and what we are doing, deserves a photograph.

And yet, this is a photograph of me. A photograph I love, because it conveys to me the absolute trust that I had surrendered to the able hands and eye of my grandfather. That as always, he knew what he was doing. He knew what wealth he was saving. And I was right.

For today, this photograph is not just a picture of little me, but a hoarding of forgotten details that this older me finds valuable.
me-02

I savour old pictures of me, my family, friends, even strangers. But what I enjoy even more, is asking
questions about the details in them. Is the suit you’re wearing in it, yours? Did your mother knit you that sweater? Was there a fight before this picture? Why are you standing in height order? Do you also remember how the straw mat you’re sitting on would leave itchy imprints on your bottom and on your thighs?

Because of this picture, I remember a tiny me filling up a medium-sized bucket, leaning over to one side to counter its weight, carrying it carefully, without splashing, a mug bobbing inside, and pouring a measure of water into each pot in this garden here. I remember dribbling drops, like a libation, over the heads of money plant creepers. I remember the hiss of thirsty earth leaching water, and me gripping my toes against the resistance of wet rubber slippers. I remember this being my duty before I bounded off to go and play.

I don’t know if my grandfather wanted to capture all of this. But I’m grateful he captured whatever he did.

We are seldom the heroes of our youngest photographs. We had no say in who we were in them. And yet, years later when we look at them, we find our own versions of us in there, lurking in unlikely places. Maybe in the things that the photographer chose to leave out. Maybe still in the frame, just out of focus.

For example, there is enough in here to remind me just how much I hate crotons.

134

On days I am unsure, I take heart in certain certainties: the gratification of popping open a vacuum-sealed bottle. The feel of my toes in my bedtime socks. The openness of a good-natured dog. Morning light on my carpets. Ghee and steaming rice and salt.

This past year, I have been frequently unsure. Of my shoe size. Of what exactly a cooking instruction has meant. Of whether “this past year” covers the time frame I have in mind. Of if I feel like pizza, crackers, or nothing for dinner. Of where the time goes between mornings, and if my shirts have gotten too big for me.

Unsure of whether I had read this story or that, and what I’d felt about each. Unsure: about feelings being things worth feeling sure about.

But, there are certain certainties, and sure sureties. The shock of tabebuias and the thrill of double rainbows. The ache of unsent letters and ungiven gifts. The shriek of the first breath I will draw in a cold swimming pool. 06:30 in Ode to a Sunny Day. Butterflies before reaching the airport. Figs and Feta cheese. Dirty blue jeans. “That’s all?” when I see my savings. My name, written in somebody else’s hand. A delicious first line. That I will fail at love, at least once a day. That my lip will tremble when Amelie turns to her tinkling curtains to find only her cat. That every day, there is nothing more useful to carry than a thimble of grace.

That so often, certainty is surprise.

133

Habitat:

A billowing of curtain
A bloom of tissues
A breeze of newspapers
A dock of dishes

The babble of kettle
A whistle of window pane
Eddies of fallen hair
A gurgling washing machine

A clap of laughter
A meadow of books
Crags of peeling paint
A thicket of socks

A tree of tired jackets
A sunset of dust
A marsh of spent tea-leaves
An autumn of pizza crust.

132

I sat beside an old, old man on the train.

His face was a careful collection of lines: big, ragged brackets mounted on top of each other. The entire time, he sat with an indulgent smile, his shining cheeks prodding his eyes to shut and truly savour his joy a little longer — because before him, stood his apple-faced granddaughter. He held a delicate sweater in his large, shaking hands, perhaps amused by how impossibly small it seemed, perhaps afraid of how fragile the moment was. He eased the little girl’s arms in with elaborate care, patiently coaxing her spread eagled fingers through the sleeves. He paused to inspect her dew-drop fingernails. His thick fingers took great pleasure in their struggle to needle the pomegranate-seed buttons in their eye-holes; one by one, station after station, dreading the fast-approaching last button.

The Ways We Leave

You know you have left only when you come home again.

You are greeted by the smell of garlic in hot oil. Of the smell of your mother’s Sunday henna ritual. The smell of your grandmother’s evening flowers gently nagging your grandfather’s morning aftershave. You are warmed, welcomed, then shocked by the smell of your home, a smell that you had never known or noticed but now feel with a pang in your alien chest, a sensation that tingles your nose, with either the threat of tears or just the feeling of a new stimulus — for your nose is now the nose of a bird that has left the nest it was hatched in.

You are conscious of the space you take. Your fingers take a pulse longer to place the switch to the tube light. Your bed does not remember your shape. Your plate is at the back of the shelf. Your toothbrush is now used to clean your father’s shoes. You find sentiment in coincidence: how, just like you, your mother brushes the crown of her head with the back of her hand when she kneads dough for chapatis, or how, just like you, your grandfather tsks and disciplines a wayward newspaper. The couch feels plush and delicious, and you can swear your grandmother’s hands have grown softer when they weave your hair.

Everything is predictable, yet nothing is the same.

You find new things: new rubber bands, new dupattas, new blankets on newly drawn washing lines. New brands of shampoo, new pamphlets for new insurances against new diseases. The kin of new house-help in their new but your old clothes, new phone numbers on new post-it notes. New whites in hair, new wrinkles in hands, new nicks on chin.

The things you have taken away have left discoloured spaces and these spaces now wear a patina of dust, a cataract of finely ground finality, a veneer as thin as new skin that aches all the way to your core. This was you. This is now you. The story has moved on in a way that feels like a gasp of air in a swell of oil. The suitcase you wheeled out held your earthly possessions, and also the sum of your molecules that make you you, wheeling that suitcase. You moved away your things, and you; at once Fed-Exed everything to your future, and everything to the past, and now what is here is you, holding your toothbrush that you brought from what you call home, mouthing the ghost of a feeling you call home.

Home is where you feel homesick.

New White Rain

A version of this appeared in Mint Lounge on July 19th, 2014. Do click through for more deets on planning your own trip there!

I was 27 years, one month, and three days old when I touched snow for the first time.

It had been a long wait. I had taken an overnight bus from Bangalore to Hyderabad, a day-and-a-half-long train to Kolkata, an overnight train to New Jalpaiguri, and a-day-and-a-half long bumpy drive along a mud-and-rock-road into North Sikkim. 2660km, four days, and six halves of the antiemetic tablet Avomine later, I had come far enough to see my dreams of snow crystallize into the here and now. I was standing along the snow-choked Gurudongmar Road in Sikkim, worried that my tears would freeze to ice.

The friends that I was traveling with and I had one thing in common: none of us had seen snow before. We – two Malayalees, two Kodavas, one Chennaiite, and one Bangalorean (me) – had all dutifully gone on Kullu-Manali/Darjeeling holidays with families over the years. We had been content to look at far off snow-capped peaks without ever touching or seeing snow up close. And so, our mission on this trip was to travel to Sikkim’s famed Lake Gurudongmar – the country’s second highest fresh water lake, at an altitude of 17,100ft. in the Kanchendzonga range of the Himalayas, frozen over this early in the year – to claim an ultimate glittering prize that had eluded us all these years.

About 105km from Gangtok, we reached the Lachen checkpost in pitch-dark, at 10pm. The guards granted us permission to stay the night at Lachen, but warned us that the road further up was snowed in. They said it was highly unlikely that our jeep could take us far on the snow-jammed roads, and that proceeding by foot would be… (meaningful pause). We fell silent. We wouldn’t be seeing what we had come so far to see. Sensing our disappointment, the guards told us that we could go as far as our jeep would go the next morning, but (firmly) suggested that we not take undue risks.

At 6:30AM, the AccuWeather app on my smartphone read 2°C. I paced the balcony of our homestay with a cup of yak tea, taking in more than what was in my cup. Just meters away, row upon unruly row of sugar-dusted pines defied gravity to stand at attention on mountain slopes. A road traced its way around the mountain, wound like buntings on a Christmas Tree.

I swallowed another half of Avomine.

Fortified with two t-shirts, a sweater, a sweatshirt, and a couple of scarves, I joined the others as we bundled ourselves into the jeep. Each of us sighed, lost in private fantasies of what the near-missed frozen lake would’ve looked like. We would’ve stayed in our worlds, if it weren’t for the view.

Gurudongmar Road ribboned together mountain after snow-heaped mountain. Scraggy arms of oak reached out to the sky, proffering white soot. Pinecones drooped, heavy with icicles. Blades of grass wore diamonds for dew. In the gorge far below, the slate-emerald river Teesta winked in the soft sunlight. The snow on the road ahead went from muddy to sullied by occasional tyre-tread to plush white duvet. At about 40km from the lake, our jeep began to fishtail. The driver killed the ignition and looked out the window, thoroughly bored – the universal sign for “This is it. We aren’t going any further.”

Snow, I soon found, does not crunch.

“Crunchy” is an adjective apt for wafers and chips. But here was a softer, more wholesome sound. This was something buoyant and light, like Soufflé, or sponge cake. Every descriptor I could think of was in relation to food, because my first impulse on seeing real snow was exactly the impulse I’d had as a six year old seeing it in National Geographic photographs: I wanted to eat it. The early March sun’s warmth touched my ears and told me this spectacle of white was a daily miracle; a transient one that was melting soon, and so I must grab this newness with both hands – hands that I promptly de-gloved and plunged into this inviting blanket of cake-icing. Every substitute I had made do with in my playing years, soap suds, cotton, foam, crystal salt, bubbles of thermocol, all failed as points of reference to process this new, bewildering texture. I didn’t know where the snow-flake ended, or where the flurry began. I threw a handful up in the air and watched it disintegrate and fall and catch at my hair and eyelashes. 

What was I, as Kamala Das says in her poem, An Introduction, “South Indian, very brown”, unworldly in the ways of snow, going to do with it? Every snow-centric activity I could think of I had gleaned from popular culture: snowball fights, sledding, skiing, making a snowman with a carrot nose, fashioning a snow angel, Olympic figure-skating. Was there an Indian way of playing with snow? A snowball lagori, a snow cricket? An actual ice-spice?

How familiar is the rest of India with snow? What is Indian snow like? Is it as mercurial as its sibling, the Indian rain? What does snow mean to those of us so far away from the Himalayas? I thought of the word for snow in my mother tongue, Kannada, which borrows the Sanskrit word, hima. Hima, which is the root of the word, himalaya, had now become the derivative of it. It was how my grandmother likes to say, “Hima is what you would find on the Himalayas”.

Reaching snow anywhere in the subcontinent takes considerable effort. Snow dictates its appointments; who it meets, when, where, and how. Snow is found almost only in the six Indo-Himalayan states – Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim, the northernmost wedge of West Bengal, and Arunachal Pradesh. And only March favours snow-tourism. Too early, and half the roads and viewpoints are shut. Too late, and the snow has thinned or melted. Perhaps this inaccessibility, this whimsical nature of snow is why it is perceived with some exoticism far down the country. Informing friends and family of trips to these northern states usually invites an, “Oh! So did you see snow?”

Down South, snow has a “foreign” status that’s usually reserved for travelling abroad. It is so far removed from our understanding, that until online shopping, looking for snow-gear was an expedition in itself. (Bangalore, for instance, had only Commercial Street’s Eastern, and eventually, Western Stores to turn to.) For couples of a generation, snow was a special aspect of honeymoons. And now, snow calls forth associations with grueling mountaineering, and increasingly, Bullet rides. Having seen snow was once an accomplishment, much like having travelled by air before the 90s. Now, having seen snow is a sign of being well-travelled, of being possessed by modern-day wanderlust.

Back at the jeep, dusting snow off my elbows and my knees, I struggled with how to articulate, translate, and internalize this quick-melting poem in my hands. A cold breeze tugged at a few snow-heavy branches overhead and stirred a pitter-patter. This was it: my first, private snowfall. And I found myself humming Vairamuthu’s words, scored by AR Rahman for the 1992 film, Roja.

Pudhu Vellai Mazhai.

New white rain.

Mushroom Soup for the Vegetarian Soul

So this appeared in Mint Lounge on May 31st, 2014. It was so much fun writing this. And I think I’ve received my first few zealot commentary, mails, and criticism for it. But more on that some other time.

It was my third day in class I at a new school. My first friend, Farah Naaz, opened her rectangular stainless-steel tiffin box, and then its smaller rectangular compartment. She clapped her hands in glee, poked at the immiscible mass in there, licked her finger, and squealed, “Goat brain!”

I was disappointed: The brain did not look anything like the brains I had seen in cartoons. It even managed to look harmless, somewhat like my mother’s tomato pachadi. It seemed incredible that something like this innocuous mass could faze, even terrify, my cockroach-bashing, mali-thrashing grandmother.

Vegetarianism was handed down to me like knock knees and unmanageable hair. It is so ingrained in our family that my ajji, like several other sweet, middle-class Kannadiga grandmothers, cannot get herself to say “non-vegetarian”, and refers to the whole class of meat as “NV”. She does not have patience with fish, poultry, red or white meat: It is all a tut-tut brand of “NV”, pronounced envy.

I grew up in a milieu that encouraged this NVing. Meat-eaters were talked about in hushed voices. Houses were leased on the basis of whether tenant families cooked meat or not. The nearest butcher shop was about 2km away, far from the main road. The neighbour’s roosters clucked about, gratefully untouched. “Non-veg jokes” exchanged between slightly older children were literally so.

Maybe it was the zeitgeist, unconscious censorship, or just coincidence, but looking back, even the imagery of food in the domestic comics I read seemed sterile. Unless the story demanded it, food illustrations in Tinkle comics (and by extension, Amar Chitra Katha) were mostly vegetarian. Suppandi visited the market and returned with legumes and gourds peeking from his basket. His employer ate from thalis where rice was a tiny white mountain and rotis were ellipses accompanied by circles of non-committal sabzis (vegetables). Raja Hooja preferred fruits. Raghu hated his spinach. And Uncle Anu’s club got by with chocolate, pav buns, and browning cut apples.

In a New York Times article, author Lara Vapnyar writes of dreaming about exotic things to eat in Cold War Russia. And like her, in a pre-Internet age, my trysts with meat were those of vicarious adventure and fantasy. Meat was a “foreign” idea that I discovered in glossy interior decoration magazines left behind by NRI (non-resident Indian) aunts. Here, I saw Thanksgiving turkeys with socks and skin like honey-glazed tote bags. I devoured Enid Blyton stories where “bacon” and “ham” mingled with my own breakfast of toast. I was fascinated with how Archies’ Jughead with his half-mast eyes polished off hot dogs topped with zigzagging mustard. I wondered: Was a hot dog really a dog? A Dachshund in a bun?

I would carefully examine what the characters in Asterix ate on each adventure: shiny double-humped camel meat in Persia, delicate quail on a galley to Egypt, cold cuts looted from pirates and loaded up on a magic carpet to India, chains of sausages in Belgium. My mind boggled at Obelix’s staple boar glistening on a spit. I was tickled by Tom, Disney’s AristoCats, Top Cat, and other cat-toons that dug up fish bones as the universal sign of destitution.

This curiosity with meat was not unique to me. My mother, aunt and I were keen followers of Khana Khazana, a TV cookery show that demonstrated an impressive range of NV recipes. I remember my mother would evade moral conundrum by watching the ingredient section on mute.

I’m certain, also, that we weren’t the only NV-curious family. A look at the menu in the glamorous A/C deluxe side of a darshini (stand-up eateries in Bangalore) reveals much about the middle-class vegetarian’s complex feelings for meat, and the preoccupation with wanting to recreate meat in the vegetarian world: Gobi 65, Paneer Tikka, Veg Biryani. In Mumbai, I found the Jain Omelette that substitutes eggs with besan (gram flour) and proves that besan is best in laddoos and face packs.

The classic vegetarian’s first brush with meat is usually “by accident”; by way of a “chicken something” construed as gobi manchurian. Some see this as serendipity. Some reach for mouthwash. I tasted my first bit of meat as a consenting adult, without much ado, and found chicken to be wildly overrated, but mutton wonderfully distinct. I decided I don’t quite like the texture of meat. I’m happily a staple vegetarian, but I’m curious about all the things people eat. And so, today, my bucket list includes unambitious items like pepperoni (why did I bother), eggs benedict, escargot, caviar (never again), bratwurst, Goan sausages, pho, soap, and chalk.

I like quoting a friend who says that once you’re an adult, congenital vegetarianism is a choice. When I eat out, I find that vegetarianism is harder. At most popular upscale restaurants in Bangalore, only about 30-35% of the items on the menu are vegetarian. And that includes the French fries offered as starters. This is not a case for vegetarianism, or against the secondary treatment of veggies by evil restaurateurs (I usually forgive them when I get to dessert). But it’s surprise: that living in a world which loves its non-vegetarians, I was so insulated from meat.

Maybe my vegetarianism runs deeper than my genes. I recall how in class VII, at the library, I came to question Chicken Soup For the Soul: I mean, what’s wrong with cream of mushroom?