Just Me and My Backpack – Tomorrow – Don’t Forget!

My session is on Saturday at Koshy’s Chillout. Don’t forget!

Just Me and My Backpack

When my dear friend Chris suggested that I might like to talk about my experiences as a woman traveling alone – well, obviously, how could I refuse? I mean, it’s a subject close to my heart and one that I have much to say about. All I need is a captive audience.

And that’s how it’s come about.

Just Me and My Backpack
Travel stories from a woman who set out to discover the world with only her backpack for company.
Saturday, 26th November, at 6.30 p.m., at Koshy’s Chillout on St Mark’s Road
(Photos from my travels will also be on display.)

If you’re a hard-core traveler, this session is just right for you. If you’re an armchair traveler, this session is perfect for you. If you’re not a traveler at all – well, after this session, you might well become one. Either way, you know you’d hate to miss it. So don’t make excuses – just be there.

Now That’s What I Call Making Amends

In my last post, three weeks ago, I complained about how a top-end establishment like Taj WestEnd had not been able to do something simple like ensure that whatever they served me was gluten free.

This particular restaurant at Taj WestEnd has been our regular pick for Amit’s birthday ever since we got married in ’98. Thirteen years of unfailing patronage, even if only once a year, is quite something these days. Especially when the cost of a dinner for two has shot up from something close to 1k to something close to 5k – well ahead of inflation.

I had always considered Paradise Island – the Thai restaurant at Taj WestEnd – superlative. (It’s now called Blue Ginger, and it’s a Vietnamese restaurant.) Not only was the food exquisite, but the service was even better. In those early days, what I’d been most impressed with was the understated, subtle, discreet nature of the service. Staff were always alert, but not in your hair. Food was served at a comfortable pace and you were left alone to romance over it. You only had to look up to catch someone’s eye – but you never had to look up twice. It was one of the few places I’d ever been to, where everyone was served at the same time, and empty plates were cleared only when everyone was done. (At most high-end places, the former holds, but not the latter – clearing your plate as soon as you’ve taken what appears to be the last bite seems to be the favoured strategy.) I’ve been to many restaurants that serve good food, but very few where that is accompanied by a quiet and serene ambience and such excellent, understated service.

So last time’s experience was a disappointment at many levels. Drinks were served after the food. Salad and appetizer appeared together. The main course appeared almost before we’d swallowed the last bite of the appetizer. The server managed to drop some food on Amit’s mobile phone and didn’t even notice. Different people checked with us regarding our order. And so on. To top it off, my body complained the next day that the meal was not gluten free.

One thing hadn’t changed though – the food was still excellent.

If it had been the first time we’d been there, I might not have complained. It was just that over the years, we’d come to expect more than just excellent food – and we were still willing to pay the ridiculously high price for the whole package.

So the next day, we drafted a lengthy email to the general manager of Taj WestEnd, explaining our disappointment. I don’t think we expected anything in particular from that email – we just had to express it. I thought we’d probably get an apologetic response, at best. It was a pleasant surprise when the response was prompt and professional – promising to look into the various aspects we’d mentioned and get back to us. The following day – which happened to be a Sunday – we got a follow-up response saying that all aspects had been checked and changes would be implemented, without going so far as to admit that there was actually any wrong-doing on their part, but also without refuting anything or descending into a point-by-point response to our complaint. The tone was extremely courteous and dignified. Various people were copied on the mail. And – much to our surprise – it ended with a request that we pick a date of our convenience to go there for dinner as their guest!

At first, we were tempted to decline. We weren’t, after all, looking for a freebie – we weren’t that kind of people. But then – the email was so well crafted, so polite, sounded so much in good faith – it would have been churlish to refuse. If you complain, and a placatory effort is made, you are obliged to accept – you are obliged to give them a chance to fix things.

So we accepted.

Yesterday was the big day. The who’s who of the hotel had been warned and within five minutes of being seated (in a diametrically opposite corner of the restaurant from last time) we were surrounded by a phalanx of staff in a dazzling array of evening dress. Special note had been taken of my gluten intolerance and a customized menu had been created from scratch – I’m sure if we’d taken it to a lab, they wouldn’t have been able to detect even a hint of wheat or any other related product in it. They might have even sterilized the vessels before starting to prepare our dinner.

The food was as good as ever. The service, of course, was not in the least bit discreet – every 20-30 seconds, one of a battery of people would hover within a two-foot radius of Amit’s head, more often than not stopping to enquire about something or other. Conversation was impossible! But this time, I could understand. Everyone there was on tenterhooks – these demanding, complaining customers had to be appeased! They even went so far as to ask precisely how many minutes interval we’d like between the starter and the main course. It was a little embarrassing and a little irritating to be fawned upon in this way – but I suppose we’d invited it on ourselves, so at least this time, I’m not complaining.

They made sure we had the same drinks as last time and in the same number – though I was offered a third and Amit said his two drinks were strong enough to count as four (he could hardly walk straight by the end). This was overdoing things, of course – we’d had no complaint with the drinks in the first place. But heck – it’s their idea of hospitality, I suppose. They tried to convince me to start with a clear vegetable soup, but I’ve never been much of a soup person, so I resolutely declined that. For starters, they’d made up our minds for us – we got tiger prawns so huge they must have been fed on steroids, and a raw mango salad that was delicious, and little bits of rice-and-tofu-something that Amit loved but I didn’t find too exciting. For the main course, our options were either a red or green curry with steamed rice, or a stir-fried preparation with a fried rice. I opted for the latter, so we got a lamb preparation, a grilled fish preparation, and a fried rice with loads of fresh and crisp veggies. Apparently, they did all this without any soy sauce – quite an achievement. (They must have done some serious research on gluten intolerance – in its most severe form, even soy sauce is anathema. For me, it doesn’t cause any problem, but they don’t know that and I don’t blame them for playing it safe.)

The best part was dessert. I didn’t expect much – last time, they’d brought a small piece of cake for Amit (gratis – since it was his birthday), nothing for me. That wasn’t quite the right thing to do, but then – I can’t eat cake, so I didn’t mind that part too much. This time, of course, was different. We were served a sort of fruit salad in cream (I hadn’t said anything about lactose intolerance!). The fruit was very finely chopped and obviously exotic fruit. I’m not sure what all it had, but there was certainly that kiwi fruit in there, and none of your papaya, banana, chickoo business. The “custard” wasn’t a custard of course, but it wasn’t plain cream either – some sort of milk-based sauce. It wasn’t overly sweet and with the tangy flavor of the fruit and – I suspect – some added spices, it had a delicious and quite unexpected flavor.

On Amit’s birthday, we’d parked the kids with friends and gone in a cosy twosome. This time, we’d taken the kids along. Naturally, then, everything they’d prepared to serve us had to be served to the kids as well. The kids don’t really eat much for dinner, and certainly not between 8.30 and 10.30 p.m. – but the hotel’s investment in giant size tiger prawns had to be doubled, as also the fruit-and-cream dessert. They also presented the kids with some china-figurine-type dolls at the end. Apart from that, they took every opportunity to engage the kids in conversation (with limited success, since the kids’ bedtime is usually 8.15).

It was all more than a little overwhelming. But – wow! This kind of action on customer feedback is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. A lot of companies could learn from this. These guys took a bad customer situation and turned it right around. Now, I’d go out of my way to recommend this restaurant to anyone looking for a top-class dining experience.

And of course we will be going back there next year. After all this, how can we not?

Not Fair!

When you spend 6k and change on a meal for two at a premium five star hotel on the occasion of the better half’s birthday and you inform multiple members of the staff of your gluten intolerance and you inquire about the gluten content of every dish you order… you really do NOT expect to end up with acidity and bloating early morning the very next day. Specially not when the dish you ordered was called “rice noodles”. I have had rice noodles times without number from Beijing Bites, your neighborhood Chinese restaurant, without suffering the slightest ill effects. Why, Taj Westend? Why?

Mrini and the Vaseline Jar*

There are a few rules in our home. One of them is, kids don’t touch stuff on the chest of drawers (COD) in our room. The COD is a repository of all sorts of critical and irrelevant things such as – today for instance – a bunch of Vicks cough drops; torn, used bus tickets; a few shop bills; some stones; a watch; a bank statement; a motley assortment of combs; a book, a magazine, and a collection of photographs.

Given the mission critical nature of some of the things that call the COD their home (the book and magazine, for instance), the do-not-touch rule is a very, very old rule. The kids know it and accept it well enough to pass it on to visiting kids. No issues there.

The thing is, certain items that routinely rest on the COD, also routinely get moved around. Prime candidates for this kind of volatility are my cellphone, my book/magazine of the day, and the small jar of Vaseline. This last named usually ends up on the floor next to our bed (mattress, I mean; we sleep on a mattress on the floor), because I often apply it to my feet last thing at night. Sometimes, it gets put back on the COD in the morning, sometimes it doesn’t. Last Sunday, apparently, was one of the days it didn’t. I thought the kids knew well enough not to touch residents of the COD estate even when those residents were temporarily residing elsewhere, but apparently I was mistaken.

Normally, we are generally aware of what the kids are up to and where they are. Last Sunday afternoon was no different. We’d been out shopping and having lunch. We got back and sent the kids off to separate rooms in the hope that they would sleep. Since Tara was in the kids’ room and Mrini was in our room, we took ourselves off to the study to put some distance between them and us and to get some rest. It was at least an hour or so before we roused ourselves. By then, Mrini had vacated our room and gone to their room. Tara was asleep, Mrini was playing quietly with some toys. Since she often doesn’t sleep in the afternoon despite our best efforts, this was not very unusual. I looked in on her and she gave me a “See, I’m being such a good girl, quietly doing my work” look. At that point, I should have guessed, but I just smiled at her and let her be.

It wasn’t until I was in bed at night, reaching for the Vaseline jar that I noticed anything amiss. For one thing, the Vaseline jar wasn’t visible – either on the COD or next to the bed. I picked up the bedsheet and found the jar under it. By this time, I’d already noted a peculiar stain on the bedsheet that looked rather oily. It wasn’t wet, so obviously Mrini hadn’t accidentally wet the bed – she hasn’t done that for years. Besides, then she would have been wet too. Without worrying too much about it, I got into bed, picked up the top sheet, located the Vaseline jar underneath it, picked it up and almost dropped it right away. It was disgustingly oily and slippery. And – there were only microscopic quantities of Vaseline left in the jar – which had been 80% full the night before! Aha! So that was what that look was for. That was why my bedsheet had an oily stain on it. Amit added that that was also why the bathroom tap had had a thick layer of grease on it when he used it earlier in the day.

Vaseline and five-year-olds – made for each other – not.

———————
* I wrote this one some time ago and it was lying in my Drafts – apparently I forgot to post it. It still doesn’t mean that I’m “back” to blogging.

Tara and the Whistling Class

I have known how to whistle ever since I was a child. I don’t remember when or how I learnt, but I have the vague impression that I worked at it. Both my parents whistle and even my sister knows how. There was a point when whistling a particular way was “the” way to call one of the dogs. The other two didn’t take to it so well.

I still whistle quite a bit. Despite my best efforts to teach him, Amit never got it. He says his father can, and – what’s even more surprising – that his father tried to teach him when he was small, but he never got it.

Mrini has been trying to teach herself to whistle, off and on. Mrini’s ability to teach herself things, and to work persistently at something till she gets it is quite remarkable, so I expected her to pick it up sooner or later. But the way things turn out it, Tara was the one to get it. She just got it one day, by chance, and having got it, she kept doing it until it was clear that she could whistle at will. Obviously, she was immensely proud of this new accomplishment. Strangely enough, she learnt to whistle in instead of whistling out. Whistling in is not, in my experience, so effective at producing a melody as whistling out is. I showed her how to whistle out but she still hasn’t got it. Mrini, significantly, has stopped trying.

Tara is a sweet, considerate girl. She often does things just to tease Mrini, but, having teased Mrini sufficiently to draw the first indication of tears, she almost always relents and gives in – which usually involves handing over whatever prized possession she has managed to get hold of. So, pleased though she was to be whistling, she didn’t try to flaunt it in Mrini’s face too much. However, she was soon trying to whistle along with songs that we listen to in the car on our drive home. Mrini hasn’t said anything much, yet. And Tara? You know what she has to say about it?

“Mama, now I know how to whistle, can you put me in a whistling class?”

I even did a Google search, but it is as I feared. It broke my heart to tell her – we don’t actually seem to have whistling classes in Bangalore. But I like the way she thinks.

Not Too Much?

As most of you know, we are building a house. Amit is in charge of the project, and I mainly exercise veto power – which I use sparingly (in my opinion). That explains why we’ve ended up with a mud brick construction and just narrowly avoided composting toilets that flush using sawdust instead of water.

The deal is that he’s in charge of the plan and execution, I’m in charge of interiors. Of course, with pale pink mud brick making up in every square inch of every wall in every room, there’s not a lot one can do with the interiors, but I have plans (and I’m not saying a purple sofa won’t feature – anything to liven up the place).

The one thing we’re both fighting over, however, is neither the building itself, nor the interiors – it’s the garden space. When I say “garden” I really mean the little strips of open space at the front, back and sides. We don’t have a farmhouse, after all, or even a mansion – just a small plot hemmed in on all sides by other small plots with big houses. So there’s not a lot left over for the “garden” – so inevitably, what there is, we’re fighting over. Amit, obviously, wants his precious vegetable garden. I’ve promised him the four-foot strip on the west side of the plot. In return, I get the front, the ten-foot driveway on the east, and the 6-foot back yard. Fair and square, don’t you think?

Mud brick is a deadly boring thing, all earthy pale pink and drab as could be. One can’t paint over it, so what I plan to do is to add colour by way of creepers, where possible, and trees. I’m not much into flowers – silly, pretty little things. I like my plants to be big and grand and stately. Amit is pleading for a mango tree, but I also need some colour – apart from green. So here’s what I’ve planned.




Aren’t they gorgeous? It’s going to be Cassia Fistula (yellow), Delonix Regis (orange/red), and Laburnum Mimosaefolia (purple) in front, and at the back, a gigantic Cassia Javanicus (pretty pink).

The laburnum, jacaranda, and gulmohar were no-brainers. The trees are breathtakingly lovely when they flower and they all flower around the same time. They’re all common in Bangalore, so I know they’ll grow well and I know roughly the size and shape they grow to. And I can just see them crowding up the front, right corner of our little plot – a bright burst of colour on the second-floor level and a lovely mosaic of colour on the ground.

The Cassia Javanica is a tree I didn’t know anything about – other than the fact that it grows in Cubbon Park and if you happen to be driving down Cubbon Road at the right time of year and stop at the Minsk Square intersection, it’s quite possible to wish that the light wouldn’t change for a few weeks, just so you can drink in the sight in peace. It’s an absolutely glorious specimen, and the fact that it towers above and delicately frames the statue of King Edward the whatevereth (who I always thought was King George the somethingeth, but was disabused of the notion by this article) doesn’t detract from its charm at all.

Now if you consider the footprint of each tree and then consider the canopy of each tree, I’m not sure that our little plot actually has the space to accommodate all four trees. Remember there is supposed to be a house there as well. But by the time Amit is done with his mud brick construction, I will need a splash of colour to make the place worth living. Orange, yellow, purple, pink, that’s all. That’s really not too much to ask, is it?
———————
Photos from the following websites:
http://usagi-hideaki.deviantart.com/art/Cassia-fistula-tree-210109906
http://justmylittlestory.blogspot.com/2011/07/gulmohar-tree.html
http://www.treknature.com/gallery/photo188831.htm
http://www.flickr.com/photos/20353348@N00/860662692/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Sometimes… Good Things Happen to Good People*

The other day, I got an IT refund cheque. This was a complete surprise. It was for Assessment Year 2008-09. In that year, I had a tax consultant who helped me with my taxes. The fellow was a moron and the following year, when he made my acknowledgement out in the wrong name, I got rid of him. But in FY 2007-08, he did my taxes and he did them wrong. I didn’t even know he’d done them wrong. I still don’t have a good idea about the exact nature of the error(s) he made. But last Saturday, when Amit went to our old home to pick up the mail, he called me to say there was a cheque for me from the IT department, for 36k and change. I’d better hurry up and cash it before the IT gods change their minds, he said. The cheque was already six weeks old.

Last year, I had a different tax consultant help me with my taxes. This man riled me up too – because he was stupid, inefficient, and terribly slow. I’ve realized that I’m a person who handles stress very badly. My strategy, therefore, is to avoid stress altogether by getting things done very far in advance of the given deadline. This works well – except when it comes to tax. Because I’m terrified of the whole tax calculation process, I try to use the services of a professional when that time of year rolls around. All these professionals land me in soup, because everyone wants to get things done on 30th July for the 31st July deadline. I want to get my stuff done by 30th June. Nobody understands this. So they don’t lift a finger to help until I beat them up with a stick – metaphorically speaking; though there’s no telling what I would do if I could only get them within hitting distance of a stick – and by then it’s usually 25th July. And I’m getting ulcers.

So last year, when I got impatient waiting for this man to send me the final little changes to my tax work, I decided I’d got enough to go on, and I would be able to fill the form, generate the xml, and file it online all by myself. Sigh. I did everything ok, but in one small column somewhere, where the date should have been December 2009, I put in December 2010 – a date still several months in the future at the time. Sadly enough, the tax spreadsheet didn’t even complain about this.

In February this year, the IT department sent me a notification by email. I was terribly busy, so I glanced at it and filed it away. In June, I got another notification, which I treated similarly. So it wasn’t until July, a whole year later, when I actually read the third notification, that I realized what they were telling me. They were telling me two things – first that they had tried to deliver my refund and failed; and second, that the refund they were trying to deliver was substantially less than I expected (because of that wrong date, which caused that transaction to fall in the next financial year).

I wasted a lot of time, energy, and stress hormones following up with my tax consultant. It was July – he was just starting to work on other people’s current year’s tax returns. He wasn’t interested in some failed refund for some previous year. He didn’t return my calls, didn’t reply to my mails and generally acted as if I didn’t exist. Naturally – he’s not my tax consultant anymore.

In the end, I tackled the problem head on. I spent a whole day fiddling around on the Internet and finally I had it sorted. I had filed a rectification return correcting the wrong date; I had updated my PAN card to my new address in the hope that the refund would come to our current address (it had gone back three times, apparently, with the message “no such address”, and I have no idea why that should have been, considering they had no trouble delivering my windfall return from an earlier year to the old address where I no longer reside); and I had, for the nth time, sent my updated address and bank details to the IT gods along with a prayer to them to return my hard-earned cash to me, with interest if you please.

Oh, and I had also filed my current year’s tax return – two weeks ahead of the official deadline, even if two weeks behind my own internal deadline.

I was exhausted but cautiously optimistic. This might work.

And, finally, against all odds, it did. First I got an updated PAN card, and then, almost two months later, I got an updated statement from the IT gods, agreeing with my rectified return, acknowledging that no refund had as yet been paid (hallelujah!), and dispatching a cheque for the entire amount due – with interest.

And today, I got the cheque! Wonders will never cease.

——————

*In case you were wondering, I’m the good people referred to in the title. I am.
Don’t laugh.

It’s Yesterday Once More

Way back I don’t even know when, Amit bought a Sony twin deck cassette player. If you’re 20-something and you’re reading this, you probably don’t even know what I’m talking about. But this was a Sony cassette player and it served us well for many, many years. Towards the end, when we’d given up listening to tapes, we used it as an amplifier and speaker system to rig up to our WorldSpace receiver. Yeah, that was before WorldSpace went bust, which was devastating for me, because where else can you get to listen to that diversity of music all in one place? Granted that all I ever listened to was UpCountry, but hey, there was tremendous diversity on UpCountry too.

Anyway, when we moved out of that house and into this one, we didn’t rig up that system – we didn’t have WorldSpace anymore anyway and tapes had become fossils long ago. We still had a much loved collection of cassettes, but, like our collection of much-loved books, it remained boxed up in our store room for many months.

Enter V, our newest cook and all-in-one. She, her husband, and their three-year-old daughter are caretakers of the empty (haunted, so they say) house just behind ours. When we go up to our terrace, we are talking distance from their bedroom window. From our kitchen, we can hear pretty much everything that goes on in their small home. Apart from their occasional tendency to turn the music up too loud, it’s ok. In fact, it’s quite convenient when we need to tell them something.

Theirs is a simple life. Some might call it tough. They are employed by a wayward father-son duo. The son always wants to kick them out, the father wants them to stay until they are old and grey. Apparently, their employers don’t appreciate large families, so V and her husband have concealed from them the fact that they have an older daughter – who stays with an uncle and aunt in another part of the city. She is 7, extremely pretty, and calls V – who is her biological mother – auntie.

Their younger daughter is small and seems a little under developed for a three-year-old, but she’s healthy and happy. She’s never had a single inoculation or vaccination of any kind because her mother has a thing about injections. Recently, when she had a bad stomach upset, the doctor gave her a de-worming medicine. V threw it away “because she didn’t have worms.” Now she has live worms in her stool.

V and her husband can’t ever leave the house at the same time, not even on weekends, because their employer might turn up at any time and he expects them to be around. So they can never go out loafing or to the market together. They buy all their groceries at the nearest (but not necessarily cheapest) corner store. V had to leave a job at another house because her employer said it kept her away from his house for too long. On top of it all, there’s always the danger that their employer might actually succeed in selling the house (at an exorbitant price) and then the new owners might throw them out at a day’s notice.

V and her husband are from Darjeeling. They grew up together, fell in love, and ran away together. V’s mother died when she was young and her father remarried. She has no contact with any of her family members anymore. She says she had an election ID card in Darjeeling and maybe a ration card as well, but here she has no documents. No address proof. So they have no bank account. We are their bankers. Their other employer is more of a Shylock, paying them salary arbitrarily, frequently three weeks late, and not always in entirety. They have no recourse.

What they do have, is a mobile phone. I don’t know how they got one, without address proof, but it’s all they have. It’s their music system, and their movie hall. They might not be very literate, but they do know how to get movies onto that tiny device and watch them on the postage stamp-size screen. That’s their daughter’s primary source of entertainment (and education). Apart from that, they play music as loudly as they can as often as they can. Thankfully, it’s Hindi oldies, so we don’t mind.

Some months ago, I gave them the old twin deck cassette player. It needed some fixing and it took them all these months to get it fixed. V wasn’t keen to leave it at the shop because, she said, they might take out good parts from it to use on other systems. But they got it done at last, at a grand total of Rs 240. I’d given them half a dozen tapes along with the music system – all Hindi oldies. Yesterday evening, I was treated to my namesake song, Anamika, wafting through the kitchen windows with all the robust roundness that a Sony music system can produce even in its old age – and it was quite a treat, after months of suffering the tinny sounds produced by a cheap mobile phone with the volume set to maximum. This morning, V’s husband was lustily belting out an old Hindi Bollywood love song in accompaniment to one of our old tapes. They hadn’t ever played that song on their mobile phone, but he knew all the words anyway. V, who was working in our kitchen at the time, was telling me with subdued enthusiasm that only three of the old tapes I’d given them were currently working. The rest were being dried out on the terrace. They’ll probably work once they dry out, she said, smiling happily.

The fact that their employer actually managed to sell the house yesterday and that they don’t yet know what the new owners are going to do with them didn’t seem to dampen her joy much.

Five

I’m short of sleep.

On Sunday night, I was up till midnight trying to finish the book.

On Monday night, I was up till I don’t know when, actually finishing it.

On Tuesday night, I was up till 11-ish, baking.

On Wednesday night, I was up till midnight taking photographs.

Last night, I was up till midnight fighting a battle with a small fridge, large quantities of leftovers, and a vast cake.

Yep, it’s that time of year again. The twins turned five yesterday.

Despite it being a weekday and not even a Friday at that, we had their birthday party in the evening. This meant three levels of preparation. Fudge and cookies for school; cakes for daycare; and snacks and dinner for a few friends in the evening. All to be organized on a working day.

I was hoping to do lots of fudge and no cookies for school, but even three cans of condensed milk turned out only 60-odd pieces of fudge. Not enough. So I sighed and started on the cookies at 8.30 on Tuesday evening. All would have been fine if only I’d remembered that the butter paper I had at home was not proper butter paper. I laid out one set of cookies and popped them in the oven and ten minutes later I saw the mess – the “not proper” butter paper had melted into the cookies. Great! Twenty cookies down the drain. They’d have to make do with the remaining 45, which I hastily transferred into greased baking tins. Ten broke while extracting. Now we were down to 35 cookies. It’d have to do. I spent an hour wrapping the fudge and cookies nicely on Wednesday night, in between keeping an eye on the cakes and helping Amit with putting up a nominal amount of decoration.

The kids wanted all sorts of cake for their birthday – Spiderman, Ben10, Winnie-the-pooh, Cars, Mickey Mouse and whatnot. I can’t do that stuff at home. And at 450 per kilo, with a minimum size of 3 kilos, I told them if they wanted a fancy cake like that, they’d have to settle for one cake between the two of them. They agreed and settled for a close-up of the face of Spiderman, 2.5 kilos.

That was for the evening party. We’d also planned to buy two smaller cakes for cutting at daycare. But the daycare co-ordinator told us on Wednesday evening, when we were discussing plans for the kids’ birthday (apparently Mrini had announced at least four or five times that it was her birthday on Thursday, so we know someone was excited about it), that commercial cream cakes were causing illnesses in kids – throat infections and stomach upsets. I don’t really see the connection between cream cakes and throat infections, but on the spur of the moment I said, “Ok, fine, I’ll do the cakes at home myeslf.” Which is why I wound up running out for eggs at 8.30 in the evening and taking the last of the baking out of the oven around 11 p.m. while finishing up wrapping and tying 45 pieces of fudge and 35 cookies.

Decoration was supposed to be Amit’s department, but since when do men know how to do birthday party decorations? Obviously, I was roped in. Once the decorations – such as they were; I don’t know much about birthday party decoration myself – were in place, the cakes were out and cooling, the fudge and cookies were wrapped and the gifts and clothes had been dug out of their hiding place and placed carefully on the dining table, it was time for a photo shoot.

At five, you’d think the kids are too old for stuffed toys, wouldn’t you? So what’s that horrible teddy bear doing there? Well, ever since we can remember, Mrini has had her baby, a stuffed panda called Pranav-the-Panda (though he wasn’t always called that). A long time ago, Tara had a baby which (or rather, who) was a stuffed teddy bear without a name. When the girls started pulling the stuffing out of him by the fistful, we threw him out. This year, when we asked the kids what they’d like for their birthday, they didn’t have any real ideas. Then Tara said, you know Mrini has her baby Pranav-the-Panda? Even I want a baby teddy bear. I don’t have my teddy bear any more.

Here’s a photo of the kids with the panda and the teddy bear from three years ago.

Well, when she says it like that, we don’t have any real choice in the matter, do we? So a teddy bear was duly found and christened Zazu. (I don’t know why – maybe because they’re five years old, that’s why?) Interestingly, he was christened the day he was bought, even though he was “born” only yesterday. Their other gift was a jigsaw puzzle apiece. It’s interesting that though Tara got two gifts – a puzzle and Zazu – and Mrini got only one, Mrini wasn’t in the least put out by this.

For birthday clothes, the kids had a pair of dungarees each with an accompanying T-shirt, and one of those frilly “princess” frocks each. Obviously, I wanted them to wear the frocks to school. Obviously, Amit wanted them to wear the frocks at home in the evening. One girl wanted to wear the frock to school and the other wanted to wear the dungarees. I exercised my powers of persuasion to the utmost, with the result that both girls decided to wear the dungarees to school. I pointed out the difficulty they would have going to the bathroom, but to no avail. They got into their dungarees and put on their new shoes which were completely inappropriate with the dungarees (since they were intended to go with the princess frocks). Since I don’t believe in forcing them to wear something I want them to wear, I cribbed and complained and mumbled under my breath but let it be. They usually take the school van, but out of some vague idea of parental pride (which would have been much better suited to the princess frocks, in my opinion) we had decided to drop them to school, along with their bags of goodies. That done, they were on their own till we picked them up at daycare in the evening.

Fortunately, I was working from home yesterday. Most things had been organized, but I did have a dozen or so balloons to blow up. If you go to one of these commercial birthday party venues, you’ll find hundreds and thousands of balloons but they’ve got it all wrong. Balloons are not meant to be strung up to look pretty. That’s ok for about five minutes. After that, they should be pulled down for the kids to play with till they burst. And for that you don’t need hundreds of balloons – something between 10 and 20 will do. At least, that’s what I thought while blowing up the balloons the hard way.

At 4, I left home and picked up paper plates and bowls, salty snacks from Nilgiri’s and the Spiderman cake from Sweet Chariot, and deposited everything at home. Then I raced off to pick up the kids from daycare. Getting them dressed for the party was the usual chaos. Then our friends turned up and for several hours there was even greater chaos. The biryani we ordered at 7.15 turned up spectacularly late at 8.45, prompting some people to leave almost without eating. Apart from that, things went according to plan without any significant spillages or breakages. It’s true that it took us an hour and a half to get things sorted out and put away after the party was over, and that we collapsed in bed around midnight… but it’s also true that – at some point of the day – we looked and felt like this.