A Sordid Affair

It seems Amit is having an affair. Yes, after ten long years of faithfulness, apart from the odd fling or two, he’s now having a passionate and rather noisy affair, which is being conducted blatantly right under – or rather, right above – my very nose: in the upstairs neighbour’s apartment.

In their bathroom, to be precise.

The object of his passion is the plumber. That’s right, wake up and rub your eyes, I said plumber. The two of them, along with some other young men have been doing a lot of banging in the upstairs bathroom over the last ten days. (Pun intended.)

Ok, if you’re properly awake and interested now, I’ll explain.

It all started many years ago, when the paint started flaking off our bathroom ceilings and walls. This was a clear indication that the upstairs bathroom had sprung a leak. Or two. We could not really blame our upstairs neighbour for this – leaky bathrooms, it seems, are something of an epidemic around here. There has even been some speculation that the workmen, including the original construction workers, deliberately sabotage the plumbing to ensure that they or their brethren are always in demand. If so, their strategy seems to be working admirably.

In the course of the past five years, we have already ripped apart the upstairs bathroom three times, unearthed a leaky pipe – or, in once instance, a pipe blocked by a mountain of cement – fixed it, and covered it all up again. To no avail – the seepage reluctantly decreased, but never really went away.

At last, after delaying the inevitable for as long as he possibly could, Amit decided he would have to renew his long-dormant love-hate relationship with the plumber.

This time, he resolved, he would do it properly. So properly that it would never leak again for the next 20 years or so. The plumber assured him that it could be done and would only take three days. Four at the outside, he said.

That was two weeks ago. They’re still working on it, but things are not progressing very smoothly (to put it mildly). One reason for the slow progress is that Amit and the plumber are both two-timing each other. The plumber has a “day” job; so does Amit. Of late, though, it would have seemed to any impartial observer that fixing the bathroom plumbing was Amit’s day job, while his regular work was relegated to evening hours, or, more often, completely neglected. Despite his putting in long hours on this work, much of his effort seems to be going – so to say – down the drain. The workmen are being lazy, inefficient, uncooperative and playing truant as often as they can – which is to say, they are being workmen.

The first step in fixing the bathroom was ripping it apart and taking out everything that was in it. And by everything, I’m not talking about sinks and toilets; not even about wall and floor tiles; I mean EVERYTHING that was IN it. For five straight days, one or two disinterested workmen with flimsy scalpels scraped away gingerly at about 20 tons of brick and mortar until they had excavated a gaping cavity about two feet deep where the bathroom used to be. For most of the five days, there was a huge mound of debris piled up in the space outside the bathroom, which was at last carted down by the resentful workmen, and dumped just outside the building where it still lies, awaiting a decent burial (or re-burial, in this case).

Following this, there was a series of delays. Some delays were due to the appropriate tools and materials not being available. This was really infuriating for Amit, who, having honed his project management skills to a fine art in the course of his career, had been running around for days trying to procure the materials in time. Then, finally everything was ready for the first layer of waterproofing to be applied. This took about 20 minutes, after which it was left to dry overnight. When the workmen returned the next morning, they found a nice knee-deep swimming pool in the bathroom, rendering the waterproofing a non-starter. How the water got there remains a mystery; some have suggested that it was drainage (or sewage?) water from the bathroom one floor above that had flooded out through the open drain pipe, others said it must have come from the washing machine’s drain pipe – a somewhat less revolting prospect.

Once the water had been bailed out and the area had completely dried, waterproofing was applied in two layers, followed by a layer of cement. Next, the pipes would have to be laid. So, early on the morning of our eagerly-awaited tenth anniversary Amit drove off with one of the workmen, and returned a couple of hours later with a whole lot of horrible pipes and traps and other gory bits and pieces, which were flung into our balcony – and about 200 kg of cement and sand, which was unceremoniously dumped in our study! This material was supposed to keep the workmen gainfully employed for a couple of days, when Amit would be traveling on work. When he returned, he hoped to just check the work and then have the bathroom sealed up and returned to a functional condition in another couple of days.

However, plumbers make rubbish out of the best laid plans much more easily than they do with the best laid bathrooms. First, the plumber refused to do any work in the bathroom until the layer of cement had been cured. To add insult to injury, he took one derisive look at the pipes Amit had bought on our anniversary day, and declared they weren’t “good” enough. So he went off to buy some better ones – taking cash from me along the way. That was the last I saw of him. When I called him on his cellphone, he said the better pipes weren’t available, so, not knowing what else to do, he did nothing. Great. I tried to break this news to Amit as gently as possible, then I quickly hung up on him. Distance is supposed to make the heart grow fonder, but the last I heard, Amit was expressing an ardent desire to meet the plumber so he could throttle him.

Meanwhile, in addition to his guilt about neglecting his official work, Amit is also suffering from a severe guilt complex at the suffering we are imposing on our hapless upstairs neighbour, given that they have been so good as to allow us to destroy their bathroom. Currently, the seven people in their household are reduced to queueing outside the one functional bathroom, while their washing machine occupies pride of place in the kitchen, effectively putting paid to any efforts to actually do any cooking in there.

I pointed out to him that actually the said neighbour is not doing us any favour, considering it is his leaky bathroom that has completely ruined the paint in both our bathrooms and our dining room. By rights, we could sue him for it. If we were litigiously inclined, we’d have him running around getting his bathrooms fixed and getting our flat painted for us into the bargain. That sounds like quite a good proposition, until I consider that our leaky bathrooms are probably wreaking havoc on our downstairs neighbours’ walls. Perhaps it’s not such a good idea to set a precedent and open up a can of worms – I really, really wouldn’t want anyone doing this to my bathrooms.

I somehow get the impression that Amit has had enough of his plumber too. He does occasionally talk about tackling the second bathroom as well, but hopefully he will not want to prolong this affair for quite so long.

How to Lose ~40 GB in Minutes!

Do you want to lose ~40 GB off your hard drive? Here’s how I did it.

You’ll Need:

1 Microsoft Vista Home Premium (a flavor of Windows that is particularly lousy)
1 Ubuntu 7.10 (a flavor of Linux)
1 Hard disk (in my case, 250 GB SATA hard disk – you’d think losing a mere 40 GB wouldn’t hurt, but you’d be wrong!)

Procedure – In Five Easy Steps:

1. Load Windows Vista
2. Enable System Restore (don’t ask me how – there was an option somewhere and apparently I checked the checkbox)
3. Partition the drive and load Ubuntu into the ~150 GB partition, leaving Windows with ~75 GB (apparently, with a 250 GB hard disk, you actually get only ~225 GB memory; who knows why?)
4. Now, you’ll find after a few months that your Windows partition has run out of space. This is – as you discover after a great deal of research – because your data is taking up only about 20 GB; sundry program files and data are taking about 10 GB; the recycle bin has about 5GB; and something called System Volume Information is eating up about 35 GB!
5. Since you habitually use Ubuntu to access Windows files, you can easily navigate to the $Recycle Bin and the System Volume Information folder and check that there’s nothing that looks remotely relevant in there. So, you simply delete the contents of these folders (or delete the folders themselves), thus freeing up 40 GB on your disk, right?

Wrong! If you do this, Windows, being kinda stupid, doesn’t realize that you have actually deleted 40 GB, and will not free up that space. Even if you made a copy of that data before deleting it, and then you copied it back afterwards, trying to fool Windows into thinking it was never deleted at all, it won’t work. Windows will not copy it back onto the freed up memory, but will gobble up another 40 GB for that data (a 40 GB which I did not actually have to spare in that Windows partition). In fact, there is just no way (that Amit has been able to discover after some research on the Net) to get Windows to realize that 40 GB of data has been deleted and that it should therefore politely let go of that memory, thank you very much.

In short, don’t try this at home.

And if you happen to know of a solution to this one, please, please tell me, pretty please, I need my 40 GB baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack…

Vista Sucks… Ubuntu Rocks!

Having got myself the latest-greatest Intel processor with coke and fries on the side, I found that Microsoft XP could practically not be loaded and that’s why I got stuck with Vista Home Premium. I don’t know whether Microsoft has it in for me personally, or whether they just enjoy making loyal customers suffer, but Vista was never kind to me. First, due to some peculiarity of the hardware/software combination, it took my geeky husband and one friend more than a week of after-office hours to get it up and running. Once they finally managed to get it to work, it took me only a very short time to find out just how defective it was.From day to day, I was constantly faced with new problems. One day, the front USB hubs stopped working; the next day, it was the back USB hubs. Not, mind you, that the front ones ever resumed work once the back ones went on strike. The microphone never worked, and pen drives plugged into whatever USB hub happened to be working at the time promptly claimed to be corrupted, despite working sweetly on other (older and less sophisticated) computers. My digital camera, which comes along with original software on a CD, worked at random, sometimes asking for a driver, sometimes happy to drive itself. The network connection mostly never worked, except sometimes, when the display claimed that it wasn’t working, when it was. Connecting to another computer didn’t throw up any error – it just took about 45 minutes to copy 6 Kb of data (on an 11 Mbps WLAN!)

I finally got so frustrated that I mentioned to Amit that even Linux would be better than this.

Now, to fully appreciate the depths of my frustration, you have to know that Amit is a hardcore Linux loyalist who has spent about 80% of his waking hours trying to persuade me to switch to Linux. I have stoutly remained a Windows loyalist – in the face of much adversity, I must say – claiming that typing gibberish into a black screen and getting gibberish in reply was not my idea of fun. Give me GUI, I said, and turned resolutely back to Windows.

Now, here I was, in complete and utter despair, pleading for Linux!

Hardly had I uttered the magical words, than Amit was on the Net downloading a fantastic amount of data that took about 48 hours to complete. Once done, I had a brand new Linux-based OS – Ubuntu!

When Amit starts messing with my computer, I usually get out of the way real fast. This time, I didn’t really have to. Before I knew what was going on, my OS was up and running – off a CD. I could access all my Windows files, the network connection worked the way it should, the USB hubs worked, even my camera was detected and connected without a hiccup. I had Open Office for documents, GIMP for photo editing, FireFox for surfing the Net, and some other stuff that I don’t need. What’s more – everything worked! The only things that didn’t work were the microphone, and certain Windows-specific applications like Nokia PC Suite.

I have to admit that running an OS off of a CD while accessing files stored on the computers hard disk was a new concept for me. I have never really been able to mentally separate the data from the OS and imagine accessing one without using the other. Apparently, the computer has no such problem – apart from being a bit slow due to the OS being on a CD, there was no apparent difference at all.

Instead of spending days and weeks installing stuff, Amit spent not even a few hours and my computer was a good as new. Better than new, in fact, considering what a pain it was when it was new and loaded with Windows.

I’ve been a staunch Ubuntu convert for a couple of weeks and I have to say that the OS has not troubled me at all. It has a decent Windows-like GUI and is far, far more usable than ruddy Vista. I’ve taken it off the CD and got it running off an external hard drive now, so the speed is pretty good too. It seems that I’m not using SATA on my hard drive any more, but if this set-up works, I really don’t care. I still have Windows on the hard drive and I have the option to boot from Windows any time I want to, but I really really don’t want to.

Ok now, if you’re thinking this reads like an advertorial for Ubuntu or that I’ve been paid to write this (hey, there’s a whole industry that revolves around that concept) – I haven’t. It’s just an honest, genuine user experience – and a good one, for a change.

A Few Loose Nuts

Thank goodness for shoddy workmanship.

Our apartment, which is about ten years old and which we own, is if not the epitome, then at least a pretty good example of shoddy workmanship. According to those who know, the foundations and basic construction quality are sound; but when it comes to the plumbing, the painting, the woodwork, even the plastering of the wall, it leaves a lot to be desired. I never thought I’d have cause to be grateful for this.

Typically, I sneak in my shower in after the twins’ bath and before their lunch. I say “sneak in because I have to be pretty quick, else they’ll fall asleep before eating lunch, which is a headache for me.

Today had been a typical day thus far, so I went into the bathroom as usual. What was new was that I decided to bolt the door from the inside – I haven’t done this so far, when if I’m alone in the house with the twins, so that they can see me and not feel worried. Today, I thought they’re well adjusted enough to not notice if they don’t see me for a few minutes, and a few minutes of privacy while bathing is always welcome.

No sooner had I shot the bolt from the inside, than it occurred to me that perhaps this was a dangerous thing to do. The reason is, the bathroom door has a latch on the outside as well, which is just about within reach of the twins if they stand on tiptoe. It’s the sort of bolt that slides into a hole in the frame and the twins have figured out how it works, though it’s not yet in the list of limited activities (such as come, go, give, take) that they can carry out on instruction. We have the same sort of latch on the other bathroom door as well as on the two verandah doors, but the only one the twins can successfully operate is the one on the verandah that opens off their room. On the other doors, thanks to shoddy workmanship, the alignment of bolt and hole is not perfect, so you need to hold the door (sometimes very firmly indeed) with one hand and shoot the bolt home with the other. This is thankfully still beyond their abilities.

Unless, of course, you helpfully bolt the door from the other side. I had never checked this (never having tried to bolt the door from both sides at once) but apparently bolting the door from one side causes the bolt on the other side to become perfectly aligned. Just as I bolted the door on the inside, I wondered whether this would actually make it possible for the twins to bolt it from the outside.

Before I could so much as complete the thought, I heard the bolt outside neatly slide home.

Horrors!

I hastily unbolted the door from the inside, hoping the bolt had missed its destination, but tugging on the door only confirmed my worst fear – it certainly hadn’t.

I immediately called out to the twins, hoping they would obligingly undo the action, but that would really have been asking for too much. I didn’t even know which twin was responsible for imprisoning me – when I stepped into the bathroom, neither one was in the immediate vicinity of the door (which just shows how fast kids can move when faced with an opportunity for serious mischief).

At first, I told myself it was only a minor matter, I’d be out in a few minutes. But slowly, as I looked around the bathroom, realisation dawned: it was very possible that I’d be stuck there till evening!

There was absolutely nothing in the bathroom that could be of the slightest help in my predicament. No phone – who carries a cellphone on them when going for a bath? No pointy metal object that I could slide through the crack where door met frame and try to manipulate the bolt. I tried to use a tube of shampoo as a wedge (why does shampoo come in tubes nowadays? it used to come in bottles), but it was completely useless. I could not see any way that bath soap, detergent, mugs and buckets, or a bath towel could be of any earthly use in persuading the bolt to slide out of its home.

I tried to think things through. I wasn’t expecting any visitors. If anyone did ring the doorbell, it was unlikely they’d hear me shouting from the locked bathroom. There was a window, but our downstairs neighbours would be out, their house empty but for their two dogs. I was due to attend an online meeting at 1 p.m., but my unexplained absence would likely occasion only mild surprise, not alarm. Amit might call at some point, but if he couldn’t get me on the phone, he’d simply surmise I was busy with the kids and forget about it. If I couldn’t find a way out on my own, it looked like I’d be stuck here till 6.30 or so, when Amit would (hopefully) come home and let me out.

To top it off, I was nude, with only a bath towel at my disposal. Even if any alternative manner of rescue could be found, I wasn’t sure I’d want to be rescued by anyone other than Amit.

Meanwhile, the kids needed their lunch, their tea-time milk, and their various diaper-changes.

The worst part was that this scenario was not entirely unforeseen. Amit and I had discussed what we could do in such a situation, and had agreed that we probably needed to get the bolts shifted up on the doors, out of reach of the twins. We just hadn’t got around to doing it.

After thinking everything through, I decided there was nothing for it but to apply brute force. Pity that I’m not (in my opinion) much of a brute – Amit would certainly have yanked the door off its hinges at the first try. It took me several desperate attempts before something gave on the outside and the door opened a crack.

But only a crack – I wasn’t home and dry yet, but at least things were looking more hopeful. I tried slipping my hand through, but the crack was much too narrow. So I applied myself to pulling the door with renewed vigor. All that happened was that, with the next tug, the handle came off into my hand!

This was not so good. There was nothing else substantial enough to tug on on this side of the door. True, I could use the detached handle as a level, but it didn’t look like it would stand up to much. Luckily I could curl my fingers around the edge of the door and tug on that directly, but I didn’t think it would be as effective as the door handle had been thus far. All the same, that’s what I did, bracing myself against the wall with my left hand and tugging with my right.

And a few minutes later, the second set of screws holding the bolt in place came out with a loud pop, sending the bolt skittering on the floor a distance of several feet – and I was out, free.

Which is why I say, sometimes you have to be jolly grateful for shoddy workmanship.

I Still Prefer Nuclear

Man, it’s good to be home.

Having said that, I must add that the eight days of eternity were not that bad… or at least, not as bad as I thought it might have been. Some of the battles were lost, it’s true; some were won; and some were never fought. The “fishes” were not quite as troublesome as I had anticipated; I was very happy to see that nobody fed the kids anything that we said was on the list of banned substances; the twins’ daily schedule was adhered to fairly regularly, with some variations; the language seemed more comprehenisble to me than ever before and I even attempted some genuine communication from time to time; and I managed to get away with only one sari-day.

Amit and I even managed to leave the kids alone and go out for walks together a few times. True, it was mostly when the twins were in bed and fast asleep, but once we left them when they were wide awake in the evening. According to subsequent reports, they were not exactly happy about seeing both parents walk out the door, but they did not cry while we were away. When we returned after about half an hour, though, Tara immediately came to me, took my finger in her hand and promptly burst into a flood of tears! Strange…

Anyway, considering we have never left the kids alone with anyone else till now, it was a landmark of sorts. We aren’t really considering baby-sitter arrangements till they are a bit older and able to talk, so it was good to get even those stolen half-hour walks together.

Being in Calcutta with kids was a different experience for me. It forced me to drop many reservations, just playing with the kids and being my usual goofy self in front of the Family. I didn’t feel the need to get away from people and find some space for myself the way I usually do – I could do much the same thing just by getting engrossed in the kids. Plus, of course, the usual activities in keeping the kids fed, bathed, and rested gave me enough time to do “my own thing”.

I, of course, came in for a certain amount of indirect criticism and a certain amount of indirect praise. Everyone seemed to think that the kids were completely under-dressed and that they ought to have been swaddled in sheathes of warm clothing from head to foot. Since Amit and I were in summer clothes, I completely ignored this advice, even though Tara had a cold and Mrini developed one towards the end. They must think I’m the most callous mother ever, but I simply don’t see why I should shroud my kids in warm clothes simply because everyone else thinks it is cold. And runny noses are a normal part of toddlerhood, to be endured and largely ignored, if you ask me. I refuse to be one of those paranoid, hypochondriac parents, or let my kids become that way.

The praise was for a rather unexpected reason. Apparently, it is highly commendable to quit your job and be a full-time mom without an ayah (maid to look after the kids), as opposed to being a working mom, or even a full-time mom with an ayah. And not just “an” ayah, but one per kid. I’m not sure why, but having opted to bathe, dress, feed, and play with my kids seems to have earned me serious brownie points in the Family.

The kids, for the most part, enjoyed the trip. They didn’t get unduly upset by the flight, the change of location, the presence of so many new people, or the frequent outings and exposure to yet more people. They ate well, slept a lot, and were generally happy – with a couple of notable exceptions.

On the day of the big function, the kids’ feet never touched the ground, they were passed around from person to person like cushions in Pass the Parcel. Of course, they mostly enjoy being picked up, so it shouldn’t have been a bad thing, but they also do need to run around and do their own thing after a while – which they absolutely couldn’t. By late afternoon, they were grumpy… and then there was a photo shoot. These photo shoots are those formal affairs where everyone is made to line up and say cheese. With 40-50 adults and several children to arrange, these tend to be noisy and time-consuming affairs. Naturally, the twins were squirming like snakes and demanding to get away after five minutes.

But then, that was only one day. The bigger problem was that on the other days too, there were simply too many people always picking up the kids. I was frankly surprised to see how people will insist on picking up the kids even when the kids make it quite clear that they don’t want to be picked up right then. And then, of course, they mostly do want to be picked up, which only adds to the problem. In just a few days, Mrini became unbearably clingy and whiny, always wanting to be picked up by anyone, but preferrably by me. Over the last few days, this manifested in her clinging to me like a limpet. She howls even if Amit holds her. Thankfully, though she was whining in the taxi on the way home, when we got home, she and Tara plunged into their toy box in utter delight and proceeded to create chaos and pandemonium in the house in their usual manner – so that was a relief.

Naturally, I can see the benefits of having a large family when you’re handling two small kids. Having lots of people around not only lets us get some time to go out together, but also means there are always people willing to feed, play with, or otherwise look after the kids, leaving only the diaper-changing activities to the hapless parents. But, if the flip side is that the kids are going to become whiny and indisciplined… well, I think I’ll stick with nuclear.

What Have I Let Myself In For?

To think that I actually agreed to this! What was I thinking?

I’m talking about the upcoming eight days in Calcutta, of course. As the travel date approaches, the very thought is giving me the heebie-jeebies. I have written before of how I am decidedly NOT a joint-family type of person. But, in those happy days, I reckoned without the twins. Twins add hitherto unconceivable complications to the situation.

There is, first, the usual matter of logistics: where do we sleep, when do we sleep, till when do we sleep, how and with whom do we sleep… and so on down the line, substituting “eat” “bathe” “use the bathroom” etc for “sleep” (try it, you;ll get a better idea of what I mean.) To this, we need only add the various considerations of keeping the twins safe (from staircases, for instance) and keeping the house relatively intact (glass-fronted cabinets, TVs in various rooms at various heights and so on).

Then, there’s the matter of various minor battles. Foremost, is the battle of the fishes. I say fishes, because there are so many of them that simply using “fish” just seems plain insufficient. For me, as for the twins, one small, boneless piece of fish is about the maximum one can stomach. The battle begins at the second piece and lasts all the way up to the fifth piece. Then there’s the matter of the million bones per piece – I will, no doubt, have the pleasure of removing the bones for not just my own benefit, but worse, for the twins. Worse, because for them, every tiny mistake could cause a crisis.

Another battle is of time. My preferred timings for meals is roughly 8 – 1 – 8; for the twins, it is 8 – 11.30 – 4.30 – 7.30. In Calcutta, the default is something like 9.30 – 2.30 – 10.30. Naturally, sleeping and waking hours get pushed out accordingly. This absolutely wrecks my biological clock and now with the twins to cater to, it is going to wreck my central nervous system as well. I hate being so, but the fact remains that I am an extremely time-oriented person and it is quite (inordinately) important for me, where it concerns the twins, to adhere to some sort of schedule in the interests of health (theirs) and sanity (mine).

Horror of horrors, we will also have to face the sweet battle. I, of course, have 32 sweet teeth, so it shouldn’t have been a problem for me – except that 31 of my 32 teeth seem to prefer cakes and ice creams over mishti. Mercifully, my lactose intolerance provides a handy excuse to get me out of the 823 sweet-eating opportunities per day that I would rather avoid. Unfortunately, it also means that the 215 opportunities for yummy sweets like gulab jamun and mishti doi must also be passed up with an expression of stoic regret. The twins, who have not been fed much sweet by us thus far, will also have ~1000 types of sweet thrust down their little gullets. Doubtless, they will love it… and therefore refuse to eat anything that’s not sweet not only for the eight days there, but also for the next two months back home.

Dressing is another battle I am bound to encounter. Of course, the entire immediate family (only about 20 people) knows that I wear jeans about 95% of the time. The extended family (the other ~60 people) have seen me only on formal occasions, when I’m dutifully bound up in a sari. This was just about manageable for special occasions when we didn’t have kids – now, with two, it is almost entirely out of the question. I mean, just imagine diaper-changing with a sari flowing all over the place for the twins to play with… Luckily, there’s to be only one function which involves the entire extended family, and I’m considering giving in and actually wrapping a sari around myself for that day (or half-day, if I have my way); but for the other 7.5 days, I’m hoping to get away with jeans, or at worst, a couple of salwar-kameez. This is sure to ruffle some feathers, as we’re going to have to make a few social calls, which ideally should not be done with the smiling mother wearing jeans… but it really is beyond me to manage two small kids and a sari (all the while conversing fluently in Bengali) – something’s bound to come undone!

The biggest problem, which, as of yesterday evening is causing me seriously sleepless nights, is of the relative-naming convention. I have, of course, faced this problem on many occasions already, and have just about come to grips with who’s who to whom… but that was before the advent of the next generation. Now, everything’s changed – not for me, but for how each uncle, aunt, cousin, grandparent and their sisters, brothers, parents and children should be addressed by the twins. Inevitably, there will be situations when somebody is calling the twins, and I am expected to tell them, “Go on, your such-and-such uncle/auntie/whatever is calling you, go to your uncle/auntie/whatever…”

Yesterday, I spent an hour after dinner quizzing Amit on the manner in which each type of relation would transform into something else for our kids – for example, all older brothers (about 43 of them if you count only first cousins) become jethus and all younger brothers become kakus; except for an older brother-in-law, who becomes a pishimoshai, despite being habitually addressed as brother. You’d think that someone who’s been brought up in this system would have all the answers down pat – it is the same set of transitions for every new generation, after all – but no; Amit actually had to have a 15 minute discourse with his father to clear up some of the finer points. Then, what hope is there for me, who’s not yet got past first base even after ten years of marriage???

The more I think of it, the more the eight days seem to stretch into eternity. Perhaps it would be easier to break a leg and call off the entire trip.

Never Say Yes

On Monday, Amit, who was recuperating from home, and I, who was working from home, sat down to a simple homemade meal at lunchtime, when the phone rang.

There was absolutely nothing noteworthy about this, because the phones – all four of ‘em – had been ringing off the hook with worried family members demanding hourly updates on his health. On this particular occasion, it was his Calcutta Aunt, who, yesterday, had wanted to know why our household hadn’t a thermometer to its name and had made it plain that this was a shortcoming to be rectified at the earliest opportunity. He therefore hastened to assure her that a thermometer (a digital one, with read-outs in both C and F) had indeed been procured, and, what’s more, had shown him (to my utter disbelief) to have no fever.

The Aunt, thereupon, suggested that a distant (not very distant “relatively” speaking – nor, unfortunately, geographically speaking) branch of the family resident in Bangalore be informed of the situation, so that they could provide succour – or something like it.

The thought so scared Amit that he immediately resolved to get well without further delay.

The situation with these rellies is such that when DDB visited Bangalore, though he is equally related to them and to us, he not only didn’t stay with them, he went to great lengths to stay away as much as possible. A great deal of energy went into plotting, scheming, and strategizing devious ways and means of encountering them for the minimum possible period of time. The main intention was to “drop in” without notice, create a lot of noise and confusion, and escape quickly before arrangements for a meal could be made. This escapade would also have to be carried out at the last possible moment in his stay, to avoid invitations to subsequent meals together that would inevitably ensue should they be given any advance notice of his presence in town.

In these endeavors, Amit was a willing and active participant. Though he sometimes agrees that we “should” be more sociable with this branch of the family, he never goes so far as to actually act according to this good intention. On the rare occasions that he is called upon to explain this reluctance, he says that developing any kind of warm relationship here would upset the delicate balance between various other factions of the family, including incurring the wrath of his father – something to be avoided at any cost as it always results in great damage to the phone bill and the ear drums.

So, he vehemently assured the Aunt that he would doubtless survive the day and it was only merely a small, tiny little passing flu and there was no need whatsoever to call in the heavy artillery and that he would call and tell her the moment he felt better or worse or just the same, so why bother these other folks.

The Aunt, who has learnt a few tricks to justify her white hair, demanded to speak to me.

The problem with my conversing with any member of Amit’s family is that they thoroughly overestimate my language skills and assume that I understand everything they say, when in fact my comprehension consists of 10% understanding, 80% inspired guesswork, and 10% non-committal replies to mask a total lack of comprehension. So, when the Aunt admonished me to keep her updated on the situation (or that’s what I thought she said, using inspired guesswork), I readily agreed. Only after a few moments did I realize that what she was actually asking me was whether I would update the distant rellies on the situation – and I had agreed!

I hastily recanted, and handed the phone back to Amit to do further damage control.

Moral of the story: Inspired guesswork is all very well, but never agree to do anything!

Surviving…

…but only just.

The family came and went. The computer workstation finally arrived in a nail-biting climax minutes before I left for the airport. Amit was sitting (dharna) at the shop in Comm Street threatening dire consequences if the damn thing, which was supposedly sent by auto ages ago, did not land up at our house in very very short order.

That apart, the weekend went off peacefully, with only

• two sessions of waterworks (three women under practically the same roof for three days, what do you expect?)
• three meals out
• four trips to the malls and MG Road (each lasting about 5 hours; with cumulative damages somewhere in the range of a million dollars, or so it seemed)
• half-a-dozen squabbles about picking up the bill (my father’s totally pig-headed, and so am I)
• about a dozen bottles of alcohol down the collective hatch (beer, wine, vodka, whisky, and occasionally a mad mix of all of the above with a dash of orange juice!)

Unfortunately, despite my best efforts at forcing it down everyone’s ungrateful gullet, only half the frozen meat was consumed, which leaves my fridge still overloaded with two giant boxes of roast turkey and leg of lamb.

We dropped them to the airport yesterday morning and now, a scant 24 hours later, the house is back to its usual state of controlled chaos, the guest bedroom is as messy as ever and its little luxuries have been carted back to their rightful abodes in our bedroom. The washing machine is chock-full of bedsheets, as usual. All’s well with the world.

Three Weekends of Chaos

Two weekends ago, Amit and I had a long and serious conversation, at the end of which we decided…. Wait for this… that we really, really needed a second workstation at home. The reason was that, when we both work from home (whether working hours or evenings or weekends) one of us gets the workstation and the other gets the dining table and unadorned laptop. So far, I had been the “other” and hadn’t really minded. But now, I decided I needed the monitor to work on photographs (because the definition of “working from home” includes doing personal computer work using the home laptop and laptop screens don’t show true colors) and so Amit got to use the dining table. This was ergonomically so highly unsuitable for his build, that a new monitor was immediately purchased.

If you’ve stopped blinking at that brilliant non-sequitur, you’ll realize that this was just Amit’s way of getting us to buy a slim, flat, no-butt, BIG, sexy monitor, purportedly for me to use. This new monitor would sit on the dining table, and so would I (at, that is, not on) and I would use VNC (which it took him all day to configure on my office laptop – DON”T ask me why) over wireless to use the home laptop for photo-work. Amit, as before, would sit in the study, with the old (please note, the old) monitor at the old workstation.

That was the plan.

It didn’t last long. A few hours after the new monitor arrived, it had been firmly installed in place of the old monitor, and the old monitor had been firmly dumped in the guest bedroom cupboard (DON”T ask me why), where it was entirely inaccessible to me.

Thereafter, we spent that entire weekend trying to come up with a plan for how a second workstation could be concocted with the furniture we currently had in the house, because I could certainly not be expected to move the heavy, old, fat, ugly CRT monitor onto and off of the dining table every time I needed to use it. Amit enthusiastically set about dismantling a trolley that had always been part of our dining room furniture, intent on turning it into a workstation. After struggling at re-engineering it for one-and-a-half days, he was reluctantly forced to the conclusion that it was eminently unsuitable for workstation use. By that time, we had already purchased a replacement for the dining room, which I had spent roughly eighteen hours screwing together. It was a great example of totally unskilled carpentry, but it served the purpose and was a little more elegant than the trolley it had replaced.

So now we had a spare trolley, a spare monitor (not to mention a keyboard and mouse that had somehow slipped into the shopping cart along with the monitor), even a spare power strip, and still no second workstation.

Finally, last Sunday, after much discussion and experimentation we realized that none of the furniture we had at home could be adapted to workstation use, and we’d have to bite the bullet and go buy a ready-made workstation. So, like fools venturing where angels fear to tread, we hopped into the car and headed for Central Street. This, as many of you know, is stone’s throw from Shivajinagar – and that day, there were plenty of stones being thrown in the neighborhood of Shivajinagar, but of this small matter we were blissfully unaware. Pleasantly surprised to find little traffic and easy parking, we walked into the nearest shop, stated our requirements and were informed that the workstation would be manufactured and sent to us the next day, Monday. Of course, in the event, no workstation reached us on Monday, as Central Street closed down less than an hour later and did not reopen till Tuesday.

Now, the reason that it becomes really critical to get that big, fat, old monitor out of the cupboard in the guest bedroom and decently housed in the second workstation is that my parents and sister are visiting this weekend. And this weekend begins on Thursday!

My parents will not be staying with us due to various reasons too complicated to go in to here, but my sister will. And I can’t very well have her open the door of her cupboard and find the backside of a hulking big monitor staring her in the face. Well, I suppose I can, but I’d rather not.

The advent of parents and sister has also made a lot of other activity necessary. For starters, cleaning up the house, an activity which is usually only undertaken under threat of death or in-law visitations; since neither situation had threatened for several months now, the house had returned to its customary state of being, namely subdued chaos. The guest bedroom has a tendency to become a junk yard in a very short time, so enormous amounts of junk need to be unearthed and shifted out (to the study) whenever visitations are impending. The cupboard has to be emptied, the carpet has to be laid out, and the bed has to be re-discovered and made. Making the bed in a proper “western” style (bottom sheet, top sheet, with blanket laid on top and sheet turned over the blanket-top, bed-cover tucked under and over pillows with pillow-cases matching the bed-sheets) is exhausting at the best of times and doubly so when the bed in question is a 40kg cotton mattress spread on the ground adjacent to the wall and needs to be hefted this way and that in order to tuck in all the spare miles of sheet.

Additionally, I have the delightful tasks of cleaning bathrooms, tidying the study, and changing all the covers and runners in the living room.

As if all that weren’t enough, I found that my house-cleaning maid has been shirking work in a big way (what’s new about that) and that the balcony attached to the guest bedroom had about 25 kg of dirt in the far corner, and, what’s worse, some horrible weed had begun growing in it!!! I got so mad that I managed to scrape my thumb and cut my finger (and will probably develop tetanus) trying to clean all that.

Naturally, whenever I’m doing all this activity, Amit is busy watching tennis on TV, which leads in short order to an extremely volatile situation (him shouting at the television set and me shouting at him).

Once I had the house looking almost respectable (but for the monitor in the cupboard, where skeletons should be), Amit mentioned that the car could do with a bit of a clean-up as well. I told him to send it for servicing, and guess what? He did. Instead of fixing the problems with the zip-zap-zoom locking (no, that’s not the brand name, but you know what I mean) they made it worse, and now the back door will neither lock nor unlock centrally. But at least it looks clean and smells nice.

On our last trip to Metro (stocking up on liquor for the parents), we had made a monumental error. We sampled the cold meat cuts by the meat counter and enjoyed them so much that we picked up a roast leg of lamb, and a roast turkey leg and breast. Total cost: ~Rs 1200! Since we hadn’t bothered to check prices when picking up the cold meat, we almost swooned on the spot when we saw the bill at the checkout counter. How could we have spent Rs 1200 on 2 kilos of non-veg?

Our fridge being too tiny to accommodate 1200-bucks worth of non-veg, we sent the turkey home with some friends (hoping they’d eat it and we could then charge them for it) and stuffed the lamb leg into our freezer. Somewhere during the following two weeks, the shock of the price tag wore off and we braced ourselves to thaw and taste the lamb. It was quite nice… it’d do nicely for the impending family visit. I thawed it overnight and sliced it into sandwich-size chunks for our lunches.

Now it’s Wednesday and I’ve almost caught up with the laundry overflow from last weekend’s cleaning spree, and the car servicing has set us back and extra 800 bucks spent on getting the upholstery spruced up (a first!). This is time for me to catch my breath before my family lands on Thursday evening. After that, it’s going to be a long weekend of food, booze, shopping (my mother’s all-time favourite activity), talking nonsense and stuff like that. I’m looking forward to this.

I Prefer Nuclear

Or let me put it this way: I cannot conceive of ever living in close quarters with a dozen close family members and preserving my sanity. And by close quarters, I mean, like, a radius of 100 km.

Three continuous days of serious overexposure to in-laws was enough to have me praying to be back at home – a most unusual sensation while on holiday. And it’s not that there’s anything wrong with in-laws in general or even with these in-laws in particular: some of them are even quite nice people. It’s just that I’m not the sort of person who enjoys being surrounded by 25 people at any point in time time and certainly not for three days at a stretch.

We stopped at Cal and deposited The Aunt safely at home on 14^th. We had a late lunch and an early dinner at the family home and – since I spent the entire time in my grubby jeans – it was not too uncomfortable. The only incidence of any astonishment was when a cousin-sister-in-law observed with horror that I was intending to mix fish curry into my rice-dal-potato mixture and indignantly snatched the latter off my plate and admonished me in an extremely no-nonsense way that I should do no such thing. She then proceeded to dump fresh rice on my plate and pointed out that I hadn’t scraped the curry together in an acceptably appreciative manner. Under her eagle eye I quietly mopped up every last molecule of curry and proceeded to swallow the fish without diluting it with dal and potato.

The holiday in Darjeeling and Pelling was a welcome interlude – more on that in another blog.

Then, on 21^st, well before breakfast, our train pulled in and we were back in Calcutta. On this day a real ordeal awaited me: a Family Gathering. Diwali had not been enough of an excuse to lure people to this dreaded event, so Amit’s birthday was thrown in as an added attraction for the occasion. This was something people would find hard to avoid, because he is virtually the apple of The Aunt’s eye – and everybody listens to The Aunt. Soon after breakfast (which was at 11.30 a.m.), the house began to be flooded with visitors.

Amit’s father had ten siblings, so things were pretty complicated for me. All the father’s brothers could be addressed as uncle (kaka) and their wives as auntie (kaki); but this would not hold for the father’s sisters and their spouses! Elder first cousins would be addressed as dada and didi, usually with the first name pre-pended; younger first cousins would be addressed by name and, if much younger, using the least formal manner of address. But. Age gaps between generations tended to blur and relationships shifted depending on who was speaking. So I had to be constantly on my toes to figure out not only whom I was speaking to, but also whom they were speaking about. I mean, if I was speaking to an uncle and he referred to “babloo” I needed to know whether this was a sibling of his, a nephew, a son, or a grandson; and if he were a son or nephew, whether he was younger than me or older; and then I had to figure out who that person was and how I should respond to a simple question like “where is babloo?”

After eight-and-a-half years of marriage, I could hardly say, “who???”

To make matters worse, not all who came were directly related to Amit’s father. Some were relatives of cousins-by-marriage. Some were off-spring without parents, wives without husbands (and vice versa) and sons of fathers who had been excommunicated from the family and who were, therefore, to be ignored. At one point, a Senior Member of the family looked grimly at a young girl sitting close to me. “Who’s she,” he hissed at me suspiciously. Since I was entirely clueless, I ignored the question, but later on I learnt that she was – hold your breath – the daughter of the brother (or was it sister) of the wife of the son of The Aunt. In short, a cousin’s niece by marriage. I trembled to not know of such a close connection!

Things were *not* simplified by Amit. Whenever I looked for him, he had disappeared into a cozy nook with a favourite uncle or cousin, leaving me to fend for myself. People would walk up to me and say, “remember me?” and I would smile blankly and say “of course! How could I forget?” and not have a clue who they might be and whether I should ask after their spouse (or had I already spoke to him/her; or were they unmarried; or had the spouse died recently, or, worse still, years ago?), their children, or their parents! At one point I cornered Amit and asked him about two women who had walked in together and here’s what he told me: “They’re married to two brothers who are the sons of one of my father’s four sisters. The brothers’ names are X and Y and you will meet them tomorrow. I don’t know the wives’ names, I don’t know which brother each wife belongs to, and I don’t know which are their children, their names or ages, or what they do.” Very helpful.

When I did meet the brothers the next day (without their wives) it turned out that my other half did not even know which brother was which!

I was further gratified to be present when The Aunt roundly scolded my father-in-law for not recognizing people and entirely dismissed his somewhat school-boyish plea that he did not do it on purpose. “It’s well-known that you don’t recognize people. Why, you didn’t so much as greet ABC!” she said with great annoyance. “Who is ABC?” replied my father-in-law in some bewilderment, and on being further admonished promised to make it up by talking extra to him the next time.

One thing was simplified: the business of touching feet. Amit said that he touches nobody’s feet except for The Aunt’s. Great! When we got married I had gone around touching everybody’s feet – even one of the servants who looked quite well-dressed! At that time, everyone laughed, but I would not be excused for making any mistakes this time round.

There’s a subtle protocol to touching feet in a crowd: you go from senior-most to junior-most and stop when you reach your peers. Imagine me getting through that maze of protocol without offending half a dozen people! So as the elders from various branches of the family filed in and took their places, the youngsters from all other branches of the family went from person to person, bending and touching and bending and touching. When the eldest surviving sibling appeared, even all the old people queued up in front of her. And I sat and watched in stony silence. Amit had tactfully disappeared again, damn him!

Then, the next day, things took a dramatic turn. You see, it was bhai phota, otherwise known as bhai dooj. To those not in the know, this is a festival that comes two days after diwali and involves sisters praying for their brothers and getting gifts from them in return. To the accompaniment of many sweets and a fantastic meal prepared by the sisters for their beloved brothers. Accordingly, at the ungodly hour of 9.30 a.m. before I’d had a bath and shed my thoroughly disreputable nightclothes for some glamorous day clothes, the house was crawling with brothers. One of these – for complicated linealogical reasons that you don’t want to know about – was the brother of Amit’s mother, who is not – shall we say – on very good terms with Amit’s father. This alone made him an extremely Important Personage.

To begin with, I could not be relied upon to recognize this Important Personage despite having visited his house eight years ago, so the Aunt took care to “introduce” me to him. As I approached him, this Important Personage straightened himself in his seat in a way that clearly indicated he was expecting to have his feet touched; and I just casually strolled past him nodding politely. Well, it would have created a total ruckus if I had given in to the body language and stooped in front of him (of all people!) when I hadn’t done so for any of the respected elders hitherto. And it would have seriously put my beloved father-in-law’s nose out of joint as he told me later that he had had every intention of calling us and warning us to do no such thing for this particular person! Phew.

The festival rolled on along its way and I took refuge in the kitchen, where, even after I was decently attired in the new salwar-kameez gifted to me by the Aunt, I slaved over the hot stove happy to be away from the Diplomacy, Protocol, and Polite Conversation of the living room. This act of abject cowardice was misinterpreted as dutiful-daughter-in-law conduct and earned me brownie points with all who noticed!

Afterwards, I hung around while the senior members were being waited upon at the dining table. The younger lot were still being blessed and exchanging gifts and as I (luckily) had no brothers in this milieu (brothers-in-law, apparently, don’t count, though cousin brothers do), I was spared that ritual. I was happy to lounge in the background of the kitchen, occasionally moving a dish from point X to point Y, or turning on the microwave to heat something.

When there are many guests for a meal in this household, there’s no question of everyone eating together. Meals are served in batches; the elders and the men and children are waited upon by the younger women; every item is dished up in plates or individual tiny bowls and seconds are ladled out as required. The meal proceeds in several courses with rice as a staple from start through to desert. In this case it started with ghee, dal, and fish cutlet, proceeded through chilli fish, mustard fish, coconut prawn, on to a dry masala chicken, and was followed by rice pudding, sweet curd, and sweet tomato chutney. Eight courses in all – and all homemade that very day!

While the guests tackled the fish, my favourite cousin sister who always supervised the cooking and the serving suddenly disappeared to take her place in the second round of the blessing ritual, instructing me to proceed with the serving. This was catastrophic! Half a dozen Senior Family Members chomping on fish and she expected me to oversee the next several courses? Me, with my broken Bengali and total lack of the formal form of address? Me, with only The Aunt to guide and advise? ME???

I must have done alright, because the Important Personage went so far as to praise the “serving”. Huh? If you eat at someone’s house, you praise the food, the décor, their clothes and appearance – who praises the “serving”?

Anyway, shortly before 3 p.m. the rituals were over and the last batch of lunch was in progress. The last batch included Amit and me (and, by the way, the interchangeable brothers). The previous batch, including the Important Personage, sat in the living room, replete, dozing lightly but refusing to go lie down in one of the many bedrooms. Now as the clock crept around to 3 p.m. Amit’s eyes were holding a silent but urgent conversation with The Aunt. His father was to come by at 3 p.m. and the Important Personage, far from retiring to a bedroom behind a closed door, was entirely present in the living room, thoroughly visible from the front door. It was – he explained to me later – a potentially explosive situation. Who knew what would happen were they to set eyes upon each other? I was deeply involved in the several layers of fish and had no processing power to spare for these delicate family dynamics, so I missed the early signals altogether. But even I could not miss it when Amit almost jumped out of his chair staring at a message on his cell phone. “He’s reached,” he shouted to The Aunt, abandoning the silent methodology. The Aunt, galvanized into action, swept hurriedly to the door and could be seen whispering through the metal grille. I did – at least – notice that it was strange that she did not let him in but sent him away without so much as opening the door!

There was a release in tension so palpable that even the dead fish on my plate noticed it and went limp with relief.

All of which is why I say: give me nuclear any day!