A journey 'Scotland' in India

For most of the journey I slept. It was either drift away or chuck up, so I drifted.... into bouts of fitful sleep where I constantly dreamt of falling off the edge of the world.

The closer we got to destination Coorg, the more relieved I felt. Motion-sickness had pretty much evaded me following a year of bus journeys not less than an hour long, cramped amidst kind (but mostly non-deodorant wearing) villagers. But for some reason it reared its ugly head on this trip.
Winding roads and twisted trees, lack of oxygen (or so I felt) and the smell of air-conditioning didn't make the situation any better, so I stuck my head to the seat and forced myself to sleep.

I nearly screamed and threw up simultaneously when told the coffee estate was another 40kms further than we'd thought. Prepared to kill, my hands clutched the sides of the seat and the car wound its way up the hill until we were lost in the clouds.

...

Three kilometres up a stone track in a jeep devoid of suspension, I looked at one pair of eyes obviously sick of the journey and another suspiciously silent and hidden behind sunglasses. The third pair alternated between the rough road and the cigarette butt. Fuming and procrastinating, I was probably vocalising what everyone else felt but politely chose not to say - screw this journey and screw the roads in slightly more explicit terms.

The cottages were bare, shorn of luxuries in the most literal sense of the word. I could already imagine rats and snakes crawling through the chinks in the wood. But I wasn't worried about that. Thanks to Mr Sinus, someone would be up all night looking like she was being asphyxiated. It obviously wasn't the brightest idea to sleep in a log structure of sorts with wildlife creeping in and you creeping out every time you felt like a leak. Heaven only knew where the loos were.

...

I was happier on the journey going back than I was getting to Coorg. Not because I hated the place, but because I enjoyed it. We slept in a four-bed room with attached bath (hot water and all), spent the night in the balcony feasting on Coorgi-style pork, chicken, pakoras and KF. The trek was one I enjoyed after ages, despite the invasion of leeches, some of which - don't ask how - got up my shorts and stuck to my thigh. Blech.

We saw our first white elephant in the far distance...

It rained and poured, I got drenched and couldn't breathe, my struggling respiratory system echoing across the room and ensuring it was a topic of conversation the next day. Huh
Our home for the weekend was nestled in a valley full of coffee plants and the clouds could be seen suspended mid-way between heaven and earth.
We ate "home-cooked" meals, drank lots of strong coffee, played 'guess the nationality of the new guest' and forgot we lived and toiled in a dusty city a hundred miles away...

I've never been to Scotland, so I'm not sure why it's called the Scotland of India, but Coorg estates are some of the nicest places to spend a holiday. Just don't drive there. Bring your chopper.

The miraculous making of a conditional cook

Ever since I've been thrown far far away from home on work, it's been taken for granted that I'd learn to look after myself. Part of that has happened, part still taking place. Even in college, there were people you had to learn to like, others who forced you not to like them and those who made your life living hell even though you wouldn't like to admit it.

But apart from all the humdrum of making life a life, something just doesn't fit. I've actually had to get down and dirty in the kitchen (take a check on those filthy minds, people) and cook my own meals.

At home with the omnipresent mother, there's never a chance that you'd get into the kitchen, whether she asks you to or not. At college, you have to put up with the hostel food and you aren't allowed into the kitchen, whether you like it or not. In your own tiny rented heap-of-clothes-and-beer-bottles-away-from-home you have to spoon your own food into your mouth whether it tastes like food or not.

Roommates have given up charity cooking for one reason or other. For whatever reason, I've put on the apron and got down to work. Logically since my grandmother is the world's best cook, my mum and aunts coming in a close second and the sibling a distant third (though he would think otherwise) I would have turned into an amazing cook among the likes of Jamie (at home or elsewhere), Curtis and probably Nigella.

But as fate would have it, I've inherited half my father's cooking gene. He makes breakfast i.e. eggs - scrambled, bulls-eye, omelette, boiled. He also makes rice, curry, fish and fries better than McDonald's. And that's about it. As for me, I make noodles - cup, Maggi, Top Ramon with cheese, tomato, peas, capsicum and maybe some potato. Note to reader: Quit making gagging noises. But, I have also devised other ways of surviving on one stop shop consumerism. Bingo Mad Angles, Twix, the odd Bounty, salted cashew nuts and cheese.

I've actually been on the lookout for Nature Valley bars for the past year and cheese nachos for a few months. They seem to be off the shelves. Cookies of any sort are good, as long as they've got bits of chocolate in them. Pringles are for when I'm feeling rich or slim, either of which is rare. Although I have only recently discovered the "joys" of working behind an apron, good food is rare to come by.

I ate some chicken at a restaurant some time ago and slumped into slurpy reminiscence of mother's thick steaks and beef burger patties, cold chicken salad, chick peas and Aunty Lee's spinach and corn quiche and stuffed squid. Scrumptious. In sympathy of your deprivation, I will kindly leave out Nan's bakes, Aunty Rachel's awesome chocolate gateaux and light eclairs and finger-licking dishes made by my mother's other sisters. Note to reader: She has six.

To my undeserved credit, I have managed a prawn and fish curry, thrown together a fish macaroni and cheese bake, a miraculously unscathed vegetable and prawn pulao, a hardly-get-it-right parsi style fish curry and a few veggies the recipes of which I conjure up on my own. After all, it's my own to eat.

Oh MOTHER! Where art thou?

To those who "were there"

I want to thank you
Very sincerely
For showing me the kind of friend
I would not like to have
And more so, not like to be

You leave an unexpected brokenness
That only fools will dwell on
Perhaps I was finished with you
Before we even started
You're not even worth the pain

But haven't you realised?
You've caused a lifetime of damage
To someone who believes in close friendships
You are the thorn permanently stuck in flesh
That is bleeding the hurt away

Fly foul memory, away for eternity
Rest not on white hearts blinded by the ideal friendship
Take with you the thick palor of hopelessness
Take your pent-up, ghastly frustration
And vent it out on me.

*%$#@*&

I never expected it. Who hasn't had a fever and felt they were going to die, but not surprisingly, never really got there?

There had been a similar situation when I was 12. I thought I was going to die before my 13th birthday, or in all probability, on it. Nothing I'd eat stayed in. When my friends came to see me, I thought it might be the last time I saw them. I think I was laughed at when I voiced my concerns. Thankfully, I lived and learnt that it was "simply" a bad case of viral tummy infection.

This time it was worse. I was freezing, but it might have been the air-con. That really didn't explain the incontrollable rigeurs, splitting headache and weeping eyes. I don't like to cry in company, so every time someone looked at me quizzically I had to say "bad cold, watery eyes".

It went on for a couple of days after which I was admitted to the hospital. This was the most insane decision I thought my friend had made. I instantly felt fine as soon as the "admitted" word was mouthed. Slight fever, may be, but nothing a popped pill wouldn't help.

Still, it turned out to be my worst nightmare. I kept my friend awake for most of the night, screaming obscenities at no-one in particular and hospitals in general. I took about 5-6 jabs that night and they must have stolen a litre of my blood. Oh the pain, the agony! One of the jabs I bravely bore, silently, was administered "as a test", to see my reaction to the anti-biotics. I should have screamed my lungs out.

Two days later my left hand had mutated to accommodate a bucket of fluid just beyond my thumb. Bloody drips. It didn't stop there, no. They just squeezed, yes, squeezed out half my blood and shoved another needle into the other hand. The audacity of medical operations.

My mother finally arrived four days into my hospital stay. By then I was bored to death and the only words that came out of my mouth were: "I'm fine. I want to go home." No one listened.

Mum mainly cooked and told me what to do - how out-of-shape my house was, how she couldn't imagine the pig sty we lived in was actually something we lived in. She talked about recipes and what to cook, how to stay healthy and what to drink. The usual stuff mothers talked about.

Maybe it was mum's luck. After days of sucking on my blood for purely (so I would like to believe) sadistic purposes, they finally told me I had typhoid. Fine. So let me get over and done with it. I spent hours roaming the hospital corridors in the hope that the nurses would observe my perfectly healthy condition and kick me out without second thought. But they left me jailed for the rest of the week.

I was so happy to breathe fresh, clean, non-disinfected air. Aaahh. Wonderful. I'm never going back to hospital again. That's for sick people. I hadn't been there since I was born and I can't believe I went there and came out alive.

Anyway, for the record. My friend, constantly the victim of my discontented whining, thank you for braving the gross violation of conduct on my part and still staying my friend. Thanks (and no thanks) for the ride to the hospital in the middle of the night.

Everyone who visited me, brought food and kept me company (whether I was awake or not!): thanks a million. Much appreciated.

Doctors, nurses and staff of the hospital: How could you???? But well, I owe you.

Canteen: Gosh you suck.

Miss Neat

She's impeccably neat. Obssessively-compulsively neat with herself. I really couldn't say much for her home or work-station as I have been to neither.

But she passes by like a porcelain doll on stilts, placing one foot ahead of the other in an accurately-calculated step, down to the last fraction of an inch. Everything will be in place - her hair, make-up, necklace, earrings. I feel awfully uncomfortable in her presence.

She is hardly ever around, just passes by in a stately aura with a trail of not-so-neat almost adoring friends following closely behind. But you know when she passes. The air is broken with the friction between obssessively impeccable and incorrigeably untidy. There's a slight click-click on the tiles and Miss Neat floats by, swishing her hips carefully eyed by 20-odd pairs of male eyes full of hope and an equal number of female eyes full of perceived disdain.

I've had more than one opportunity (I'm not sure whether it classifies as one) of being in the women's rest-room when she walked in. They are usually quiet entries, where she sneaks up on you. Perhaps she does not want to be noticed for not having her make-up on right. But she doesn't know it's fine - exactly the same way it was when she arrived at work in the morning.

She will proceed to comb her hair that has already been combed, pull it through into a pony-tail or curl it into place. Her manicured hands and shapely nails will pull the zipper of her clean (disinfected?) handbag to rummage neatly - if one can do that according to the laws of life - through its contents and retrieve a lipstick. It's really not needed, but it seems like a ritual now.

Carefully, with deft hands and keen eyes decorated with mascara, she outlines her mouth and purses her lips for effect. I am way passed my comfort zone and really, don't see me as a stalker or confused heterosexual. No, this is not attraction. It is wonder, amusement, repulsion and awe all rolled up in one.

I sometimes have the urge to shake her like a rag doll to stop her from being so perfectly "Barbie"-like. But then I stop myself. She just might break.

Coffee break at work when it's raining outside

You sit on the steel chair lost in a large room full of others just like them, nursing a cup of free coffee. The deep smell wafts into your nostrils as you lose yourself in a maze of time, watching the rain drops fall in a movie-like fashion - slow and meaningful - outside the glass windows.

It's that time of contemplation, dreaming, hoping and pining. Your coffee break at work when it's raining outside. You realise you're hungry only on some occasions like these. Other times, you just sit alone and ignore time passing away. The atmosphere is so meditative when the clouds burst. Rain falling like a sheet against reality, screening you from what you wish to hide. You wonder about silly things. At least I do! - How big is a raindrop to grasshoppers? Do ants drown in the flood of a puddle? What would it be like if I was that small? Stupid existential questions of what ifs and how sos.

It still isn't nice having to go back inside when it's pouring outside. So you struggle to rise and help yourself to another thermacol cup, unmindful of the damage to the environment, arguing with your own mind that you deserve another shot of diluted caffeine. You slump back in your chair and revert to the comfortable vacuum of bored expression. Doodles on the table-top and eavesdropped conversations are such time-consuming and interesting passtimes.

You decipher gossip from the table nearby and feel good about your wonderful ability to understand the complexities of an unknown relationship just by listening to a stream of bitchy words. If someone you know passes by, you smile vacantly and get back to listening to the conversation, uninvited. It is still raining outside.

Alternatively, if you are the chatty sociable sort, you will still be in the cafeteria only this time with friends or colleagues. The conversation will be among yourselves and the bored loner seated at the table near you will be patting his back as you regurgitate gossip. You still spend hours at the table, eat the over-priced food, drink the free coffee, be anti-institutional and plan for the weekend.

Finally, whichever sort you are, you decide it's time to go. There's work a-pending and a boss to satisfy. You stand, stretch (as inconspicuously as you can), drag your feet to the office and give the world outside a last parting glance. It has stopped raining outside.

ZZZZzzzzzzz....

Bliss. Quiet oblivion. Unknowingness, fuzzy images (sometimes) surrounded by darkness. A curtain away from reality.

I try to fight the shadow, swim back to consciousness, reaching for the veil to pull away the darkness and see my window.

Tiny slits open. A flash of light, and grills, very conspicuous in my frame of vision. Steady breaths get steadier, slow with the rise and fall of my chest. I sink back into the darkness.

How long has it been? Half an hour, an hour, ten minutes? It feels like seconds...

I reach out again. A watch appears in my head, numbers and a voice, my voice saying "Nine. Work at nine."

Now I can imagine where things are... I see the window, the cupboard, the clothes. Though they have no clear outlines, I ready myself for the familiar.

With a great amount of energy and an equal measure of will power, I force my body to sit up. My head follows suit.

Hair obscures vision. I draw my hand mechanically, like the driver of a machine, wipe the hair from my face and let it fall lifeless. I lean against the wall and sleep again.

I jolt awake. I've had a dream, but that is not the reason for my wakefulness. Strangely, I am alert. My body is mine again and my head connected with it.

Refreshed, I stand, steady myself from the slight spinning. Then down a glass of water and I'm off to the loo to pee.

If I just had the time...