Ciao America, Ciao Italia!!

Well, I am off for a ten-day trip to Italy…to gorge on pasta, prosciutto and gelato, visit friends and family, inhale aria fiorentina and romana… and to repeat one million times “I am in Italy!!” in sheer ecstasy. Last time I was there, my friends threatened that if I said it one more time, it would be my last, as well as swore to engrave it on my heart before dumping my body in the Arno. I suspect they got the idea from fellow Italophine Robert Browning:
“Open my heart, and you will see
Graved inside of it ‘Italy.’”.

People often wonder how I came to learn Italian. The plan was to go to Italy and learn the history of Italian art…in English I presumed. Well, I presumed wrong. I guess I didn’t read the fine print. What can I say - it was the 70s. We didn’t read the fine print then. When I got to the Eurocentro School in Florence, I was given a form in Italian to be filled out. 

I caught the gentleman’s eye. Excuse me, I said politely, explaining that I needed the English form for the Art History course.


It seemed there was no forma in inglese, because the corso was in italiano.


Non c’é problema, signorina, the teacher Signor Piancastelli continued, as I stared at him, borderline hysterical.


Helllooo…it was going to be a problem. A big problem. How the hell was I going to learn the Arte d’Italia using only the words signorina, buona sera, and amore (all courtesy of paesano Dean Martin). And oh, spaghetti and pizza, but I guess you can’t count those.


Long story short, I took Italian in the mornings and learned about the great Masters in the afternoons. Six months later, with another language tucked under my belt and a lot of Chianti inside my self, I was equipped with what I consider the best language in the world.


Now my husband will seriously beg to defer, saying it is Urdu. And not that it is necessary, but he has composed a shairi in its defense:


Khilaa Ho Jis par, Khoobsurat GhulaabTo Kaanton se Bhari,
Daali bhi Achhi Lagti Hai
Urdu Zubaan ki, Baat hi Kuchh Aur Hai
Urdu mein Dee Huyee, Gaali bhi Acchi Lagti Hai


I will offer a translation, but be warned, it does get lost in translation!


Even if a rose bush has a lot of thorns, it still looks beautiful.
In much the same way, the Urdu language is so special that
even a curse sounds like music to the ears.

A Prosciutto-eating Vegetarian

Aah!! Prosciutto. A gift from the gods. Oh alright… from pigs first.


Whoever heard of a prosciutto-eating vegetarian? If you have read my previous blog, this may seem a bit hypocritical, and understandably also a bit confusing, taking into account that I am known as the High Priestess of Vegetarianism. Although, it must be admitted, that those close to me have ceased to be baffled by anything I do. According to them, I have long since checked into the Mental Marriott – with no check-out time in sight.


All through my childhood, we never saw meat on the table. My grandmother, or Ba as she was known, would have never allowed it. And neither would the cook. Our retinue of servants included a Brahmin maharaj, whose ‘twice-born’ self would have had an apoplectic fit had we even mentioned the word ‘meat’ - let alone bring any of it in the house or the inner sanctum of his kitchen.


In my late teens and early twenties, I traveled extensively out of India. Traveling around Europe in the 70s, I discovered that finding vegetarian food was akin to walking into an AA meeting looking for alcohol. In Germany, ‘curry-rice’ meant white, non-basmati rice with a liberal sprinkling of yellow curry powder. This concoction was in point of fact served to the three of us during a boat trip on the Rhine. At the bottom of this river there may still, as of today, repose three bowls of the stuff, probably in pristine condition - the fish refusing to eat it with the same disdain my sisters and I had shown. In Italy, there is only that much pasta you can eat every day, before it plugs up your system for the rest of the trip. In Spain, the paella always included fish and the only other viable option was eating patatas, which made us happy, because it tasted similar to the way maharaj made it (albeit sans haldi and jeera). But five patata meals later made us want to see never see potatoes again, in any form – so that pretty much ruled out eating pommes frites in France as well. In Switzerland, we survived on cheese for a week, till we never wanted to see cheese again, not even a cow. In fact, we would have dearly loved to wipe the smirk off Elsie’s bovine face.


And so, out of the humble desire to stay alive during my ‘phoren’ vacations and photo conventions, I turned to eating meat…which included prosciutto. And I was hooked. Like the Pope to his Bible.

An explanation for those that have never tasted it: prosciutto is cured ham, a specialty of Parma, Italy, salted and air-dried for up to two years. It is then cut into paper-thin slices and eaten raw, sometimes with melon or mixed in a salad.


When I moved to California in the 80s however, I became a born-again vegetarian. I think it may even be a law if you were to move here. Out of the 7.3 million vegetarians in the country, I would be willing to bet the hemp shirt off my back that half of them live in California. Another (big) incentive was marrying a devout vegetarian and die-hard follower of Gandhiji (never, ever, say Gandhi without the ‘ji’ in our house).


But giving up prosciutto? It would be like asking Charlton Heston to give up his gun. (I wonder if they did pry it from his "cold, dead hands”). On this one subject, therefore, I shrink from my veggie convictions and make an exception.


And yes, there is a major guilt factor, not to mention nightmares about being chased by machete-wielding vegetables crying “Leave pork off your fork!”


Glossary:


maharaj: cook
haldi: turmeric
jeera: cumin

Una Vegetariana in Italia

Sometimes, Good Plane-Karma kicks in, and we find ourselves next to an empty seat! We hold our breath with every passing passenger. We put a magazine or a purse trying to hold the seat, as if to reserve it. Good luck with that, I say… if it works.


On a flight out of New York, the good karma flew straight over my head, making a beeline for someone presumably more meritorious. Just as the doors were closing, a six-footer trundled towards the seat.


I sheepishly removed the magazine and my purse, and gestured towards the seat. He reciprocated with a chivalrous nod and “Signora”. Ah, an Italian. Benissimo. Instead of stretching out on two seats, I would at least get to practice a little Italian on the way to Milan.


The way Marino recounted it later, is that I practiced a lot of Italian. In fact, he said that I did not stop talking the whole seven-hour flight. (So I am not known for my reticence, I admit).


Well, that’s his version. Long story short, thanks to my wonderful conversational skills, combined with my charming personality, I was offered an invitation to stay at his house. I did ask him whether his wife was used to him picking up strange, garrulous women on flights, but apparently, it is modus operandi for most Italian men, be it on airplanes, or anywhere else for that matter. If one were to include the word ‘sexy’ (being one of the crucial criteria), it would be the modus operandi for all Italian men.


I declined the invitation to stay at their house, though taking them up on their offer for the tour of Milan. Marino and Donatella not only gave me the royal tour of Milan, but generously included my friend Herbie, who was visiting from London, as well. We saw La Scala, the Duomo and the Galleria and most importantly, they had procured tickets to see the Last Supper, followed by our supper – one which (thankfully) did not involve the killing of anything that once flew, swam, crawled or walked.

Spare the thappad… and you spoil the child

I was born the year Stalin died.

And my father was convinced I had inherited his soul.


So, whereas this was presumably good news for Stalin’s soul, it was bad news for my kids. No, I did not send them to the Gulag, however tempting it was at times. (It’s their parents who are doing hard labor to afford the tuition for law school and grad school).


Now prior to motherhood, I seemed to be the apple of my father’s eye. I could do no wrong. He beamed when he saw me, bragged about me when he didn’t, (Indian parents are not known to praise kids within earshot)… and then I became a mother... or Dictator Incarnate (as he saw it). No! No! No! is all he heard me shouting at the kids. Every visit to our house just underscored his sentiment that I had turned into a tyrant, imposing absolute rule and raising them with too much discipline.


Show me an Indian American mother (IAM for short) who has not called her offspring ‘eediot’ (or ‘stoopid fool’) and has not placed a well-deserved smack on his/her derrière, and I will show you someone who has the common sense to lie about it and do it behind closed doors.


Oh, we IAMs are smart!!! Give us some credit. Of course, we are not going to give them a good thappad in plain sight of someone who would use their iPhone to take a picture and then call Social Services. When the brats scream and throw a tantrum in {insert store}, we take them by the hand firmly and tell them in {insert Indian language} that if they didn’t stop it right that instant, thaher ja! they were they were going to get a tight smack when we got home. The smile on our faces while we are enacting this charade routinely brings nods of approval from bystanders, who imagine an ideal world, in which all parents have the same patience as these immigrant mothers.


Both my kids insist that ‘thappad’ was the first Gujarati word they learned. (It may have been ‘jhapad’ actually). On a visit to India, my son mistakenly asked his grandmother for a thappad, instead of a pappad. The shocked look on my mother-in-law’s face prompted me to play innocent. It was laughed off and attributed to her approaching loss of hearing. 


I must admit, however, that vacationing in India gives one plenty of opportunities to dole out the occasional thappad. The annual two-week vacations in the motherland turned them into wild junglees, negating all the years of positive conditioning, and leading me to implement severe behavior modifications upon our return (can you tell I work in Special Ed?). Between the grandparents and a horde of doting relatives, both the kids were also given free reign of the apartment, the servants, a car and driver and a carte blanche to do what they wished…but best of all, the phone number of Smokin’ Joes Pizza and Baskin Robbins (would you believe they deliver?). It was their idea of Utopia, made especially enjoyable, because their mother left them (almost every day) to go shop like a maniac, lunch at Swatis and dine at the club with her friends.


We had a No Lying policy in our house – which was not restricted to the kids. I would therefore, be upfront and tell my son, who was in throes of the Terrible Twos that I was, in fact, totally lying when I said we were going to the park. Sobbing up a storm, he would insist on the truth and I would shout (à la Jack Nicholson) “You can’t handle the truth!” (I leave it to the reader to choose what was worse: the insanity mother or the inanity of the son).


I never did any of that “Wait till your father gets home!” business. In fact, it was preferable to punish them before their father came home, who often fell in with the opposing counsel on the Stalin theory. For every No! that I barked out, they would just come back with: I will go ask Papa, he will say Yes.


And what’s with the “Go to your room!” punishment? So they can watch TV, play PSP, use the computer or text on their phone?? I don’t think so! When they got too old for the thappad, I had to think fast of an alternate, appropriate punishment. That’s when the ingenious The Wall idea was born. It was our very own personal Wailing Wall, for the many tears that were shed facing it. The idea is fairly simple. Just make the kid stand and stare at the wall. And do nothing. You may think this is not so bad. I urge all mothers, IAMs or not, to try it. It drives the kid absolutely crazy. Five minutes of staring at a white wall (a painted one if you have been following too much HGTV) and the kid starts to fidget, stand on one foot and then the next, twitch restlessly, cry, and then swear never to do anything bad…until they forget and it’s back to the wall.


So, I implore you, do not spare the thappads and spoil the child. And maybe you will be spared of interrupting your daily program to visit your offspring in Juvi Hall.


And…a message for the soul of Josef Vissarionovich Stalin: you are in good company. My father also referred to my sisters as Hitler and Mussolini.


Glossary:
thappad: smack
jhapad: smack (a little stronger)
thaher ja! just your wait!
pappad: thin, crispy flatbread (also called pappadum)
junglee: wild (from 'jungle' - duh!)

Saved By a Bladder

หล่อนตบผมครั้งแรกของคุณและให้เกียรติ !!


If you couldn’t read that, it says Thur-thob-shan-korn! That’s what I would have said to the judge. I’m getting ahead of myself here, imagining myself in a courtroom setting, facing some serious consequences.


There are some hair-raising tales out there about people who have been imprisoned in foreign countries. An American caned in Singapore for vandalism, an Australian in Thailand for stealing a bar mat (what the hell is a bar mat?), two unmarried English tourists in Dubai, imprisoned and expelled for having sex (if that were a crime in the States, you’d have to appropriate a few major cities to serve as jails).


I was luckily spared of being another statistic in the news (not to mention my husband hauling my sorry ass out of a Thai jail), because of an urgent need as expressed by my bladder.


On the way back from Vietnam and Cambodia, we had a short layover in Bangkok. I had joined a group of women from India and while it had been a lot of fun eating bhel and thepla on the bus and playing antakshari, it had also been very exhausting to deal with their total lack of regard to the sight-seeing, the frenzied shopping and… the innumerable pit-stops. Were I to visit Cambodia again, I could lead you not to Angkor Wat, but the exact location of the WC (close to the South Gate, on your way to Phnom Bakeng).

Forty Indian women’s bladders are synchronized to Swiss perfection – everyone wanting to go to the loo at the same time (and every ten minutes or so). The mere sight of a placard showing the outline of a female form would excite them the way Tiger Woods gets excited when he sees the outline of a female form.

A word about toilets all over the world… if you can excuse the digression. Those a bit queasy about this topic can skip this paragraph, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. There are instructions on how to use a squat toilet - instructions your mother failed to give you, if you were brought up in the West. Travel to the East often enough, and you get to be a professional squatter. In many of the Asian countries, you do not need to look for the sign, but just let your nose lead you. Should you find a Western type, consider yourself lucky, but in most places you will find your typical hole-in-the-floor squat toilet, with the two porcelain, ridged foot-steps on either side. Basically, you put your feet on the steps, squat and aim into the basin. You would be well-advised to stock your pockets with wads of toilet paper, this being as rare as soap near the sink.

In Vietnam, the toilets were dirty enough to rival those in India. Rolling up their pants or lifting their saris, the women tread gingerly inside, squealing in disgust at the wet floor (they squealed a bit louder when I suggested it may not be water).


And…back to my story. The tour guide was becoming increasingly incompetent as the days passed. Leading a bunch of menopausal women around South Asia can do that to you. We just wore her down with our incessant needs for vegetarian food, firm mattresses, constant information about the itinerary, etc. All this, plus having to deal with their indifference to punctuality - a concept totally alien to the Indian psyche.


The group was verging on total anarchy by the time we reached the airport and I was fairly frothing at the mouth. We stood at the immigration, holding up the line. Some women couldn’t find their passports, some couldn’t find their glasses to look for their passports and the rest couldn’t find their purses to look for their glasses to look for their passports.


Passing through security, it was much the same story. To speed up the process, I started to help the ladies, the incentive being that the quicker we got out of there, the quicker I could go relieve myself. I stood at one end of the conveyor belt, handing the carry-ons and the purses back to their respective owners. Common sense not being a prerequisite to getting a job at the airport, and blind to the fact that we were all together, the security woman thought I was stealing the purses. What part of seeing me handing them back to the women couldn’t she see? Gesticulating wildly and shouting in her dipthonged Thai, she then, gasp! had the audacity to smack me on my bottom.


Stunned for a second, I stood on the cusp of going postal or turning the other cheek (pardon the pun).


Now, in certain countries, this would be considered sexual harassment and if she ever brought her Bangkok butt in my sue-happy country, my soon-to-be lawyer daughter would have her ass in jail before you could say Pad-Thai.


I came out of my shock and did what any mature, self-respecting adult would do. I smacked her back. Then I shook my fist in her face and said “Don’t you dare hit me!”


Still seething with anger, I grabbed my own purse off the conveyor belt and stormed off to the bathroom.


When I came out, my sister caught hold of me, quasi hyper-ventilating. Two policemen, hands on their holsters, had run past the bathroom in search of the brazen tourist who had dared strike one of the government-employed security guards. (Even if she did slap the tourist first).


My anger fizzled out of me like air from a popped balloon, replaced by sheer cowardice and agitation. I sat at the gate waiting for our flight to be called, with my big, fat American ego tucked between my shaking legs and only remember breathing once I was safely back on American soil.


Glossary:


bhel: snack


thepla: spicy, tortilla-ish snack


antakshari: or antyaakshari is a combination of two words "Antya" (last) and "Akshari" (letter). A musical game where two or more teams sing songs one by one, following a certain sets of rules. In its simplest form, the two teams just sing songs starting with the last letter of the previous one.

It's All Relative

As I picked my daughter up from school one afternoon, her first grade teacher pulled me aside. In a conspiratorial whisper, I was told that Meera had been caught lying. Quelle horreur! Now, whereas she was not a perfect child (although she will claim otherwise), she was not given to lying. Pulling the fire alarm in kindergarten, yes, but not lying. Soaking the carpet with a garden hose through an open window, yes, but not lying.

Mrs. Franklin reproachfully informed me that Meera insisted she had two sisters, but her chart very clearly showed that she had only one brother. Is there anything the teacher should know (maybe that my husband didn’t?).

I sighed. Her two ‘sisters’ were her cousins. There is no word for ‘cousin’ in my mother tongue. Go figure. We have a name for every relative under the sun, but no ‘cousin’. Great offense is taken were you to use the word. In order to save face, we use the term ‘cousin-sister’ or ‘cousin-brother’, hoping to keep them (and Mrs. Franklin) content.

We may not have ‘cousins’, but make up for it with a million aunties and uncles. Any, and I mean any, friend of a parent, or older Indian is called an Uncle or an Aunty (which makes it extremely convenient when you cannot remember their name). The Aunty and Uncle are attached to the first name…so it would be JayshreeAunty or RamanUncle and not Aunt Jayshree or Uncle Raman.

What if it is a blood relative? Ay, there’s the rub. There is no relying on the generic English words “uncle” and “aunt” for this case, each one being given its own nomenclature. A father’s brother is known as kaka (oh, go ahead, be juvenile and have your little snicker), his wife would be a kaki. A father’s sister is known as foi, the husband fuva. A mother’s sister is known as masi, the etymology of which is endearing to know: ma (jai)si which translates as “just like mom”. A masi’s husband is a masa, and a mother’s brother is known as mama, which understandably leads to some confusion in foreign countries.

Befuddled as yet? Good, let’s move on to the in-laws. A husband’s brother, should he have more than one, has two separate designations, the older one being jeth (the wife a jethani) and the younger one being a deeyar (the wife a derani). A husband’s sister would be a nanand and a wife’s sister a sali. Mother-in-law is a sasu (hopefully a good one) and father-in-law a sasra.

There are a few more, but I think I shall stop here, or you will stop reading.

I should add the caveat that these are all Gujarati words. India has a hundred plus languages (18 of them official), and let’s not even get started on the infinite number of dialects.

It is to my shame that I admit to Gujarati being almost like a foreign language to me. While I can recognize the words individually, string them together and you lose me totally. At a recent wedding, a relative was introduced to me as:
aa mari kaka ni chokri ni nanand ni jethani. (Translation: this is my dad's brother's daughter's sister-in-law's older brother’s wife). By the time I was digesting this, it was my turn to be presented. This is what I was: her diyar na sasra na bhai na chokri ni chokri. (Translation: her husband’s younger brother’s father-in-law’s brother’s granddaughter).

It sure makes up for the lack of the word ‘cousin’ doesn’t it?

Last and Final Call

“Last and Final Call for Flight ***!”

Aah. They are playing my song. I love to be the last one on the plane. Carrying a small bag on board gives me the advantage of not having to charge in at the first call, just to secure valuable overhead compartment space.

Walking down the aisle, I hold my breath and say my little Seating Prayer. Please, not next to the mother with crying baby. Please, not next to the two small brats. And please, please, definitely not next to the FOB wearing winter jacket. In summer.

FOB + jacket + 90 degree heat = BO. Formidable BO.

My good karma kicks in and I pass them all.

Hold up in aisle. Man blocking way, unpacking paraphernalia from his carryon that he absolutely cannot live without for the forty-minute flight.

Here I am. 25A. Phew! Seated in 25B is California-looking chick.
California chick = thin = I get to keep all 106 sq inches of space. My space.

I really have nothing against a person’s race and religion. It’s just a person’s size that bothers me. Hold your outrage and hear me out, please. I am just as much an egalitarian as the next person, but it’s just their size on an airplane that bothers me. When I have paid a king’s ransom to sit in a metal cabin, in an area smaller than a chicken coop, I want to fill every square inch of it with my own arms and legs, and my own bony body.

By now, the average reader will be aghast, appalled and affronted by the sheer lack of political-correctitude. I would request you not to get your knickers in a knot… as the man said, it just makes you walk funny. I repeat: I have no objection to anyone’s size and girth as long as you keep it in your own space. Your space.

On one flight, a lady the size of Texas had conveniently lifted the armrest and spread herself on 66.43% of my seat. You will forgive me. Marriage to an engineer means that precision is as important as fidelity. I squeezed past into my window seat and used a shoe horn to fit my torso into the remaining 33.47%, arms and legs contorted into the window space. Confrontation (as well as math) not being one of my strong points, I sat pretzel-like, biding my time, willing her to get up. Sure enough, she did – may God bless her bladder - and bam! Down went the armrest!

Agent has secured her territory. All clear. Over and out.

Sour-Face for Prime Minister

It was unfortunate that my father did not look after his heart the way he looked after me. He worked relentlessly, traveled a lot and ate whatever came his way, with obvious detrimental results as far his health was concerned. When his arteries starting clogging up, he came to the States for his angioplasty…and brought the family doctor along. Most people bring medicine with them when they go on a trip, my father brought Dr Ambalal, the stalwart family physician, who had been with us since our childhood.

For a doctor, he seemed extremely reluctant to hand out prescriptions and drugs. For an Indian, he was surprisingly tall, dressed impeccably in a crisp white shirt and the usual cream-colored suit (did he own only one?), with stark, black-framed glasses, and smelling of cologne and cigarettes. He cut a fine and scary figure…scary, because to a small child he represented the monster, who came to your house to give you shots. This was the time that my sister Varsha chose to hide, and when found, would shriek bloody murder and it would take all the servants in the house to pin her down. This revelation will come as a big surprise to my relatives who have known her as Walkeshwar no Vagh. Not so tough, was she then, my middle sister and my teaser and tormentor for all those years of my childhood. A detailed account of the mental anguish and torture inflicted upon me will be revealed in my tell-all memoir. Varsha has her lawyer all ready on speed dial to sue me for libel. It is unfortunate that all my witnesses are long since dead, and the only corroborating evidence will have to be given by my psychiatrist.

Anyways… back to my father. Given a clean bill of health after the angioplasty, he typically went back to his hectic lifestyle and so, five years down the line, he needed to come back…this time for a bypass. The first trip had made the doctor lose half his hair and out of an intense desire to keep what was left, bowed out of accompanying him again. The chaperoning fell to my sister Nina. I joined the two of them and we flew down to Houston.

Hip-Hop, I went ker-plop!

When I was growing up in India, I associated the word hip-hop with what you did while playing hopscotch. It has a different meaning for me now.

Drum roll please…I joined a hip-hop class. You can stop laughing. Of course, at no time in the future will you see me breaking or popping - not talking bones and arteries here. Although... Right now, I can barely make it through fifteen minutes of class, without holding my sides and gasping for breath.

You can laugh now.

When I first entered the room, I did a quick check. Anyone older than me? Check. Anyone more square than me? Didn’t think it was possible, but check. This is the Rec Center, after all, not South Central LA.

I had my own rules.
Rule number one: Don’t take your eyes of Holly, the instructor.
Rule number two: Don’t look in the mirror – which I shouldn’t have to expound, if I was following Rule Number One.

It was tempting, however, to glance quickly at the mirror – narcissism vs rank idiocy. I choke back a laugh. Look at that clumsy old fool wearing the Walk for Hope shirt … oh. Never mind.

I hang back at rear of the room, near the door that says EXIT (just in case). Pretend to warm up, to look as if I have been doing this all my life. I stop after the first stretch, in case I pull a hamstring. Holly walks over to her boom-box and the music starts with the bass on crunk and at a decibel level that cause the death of what is left of my hearing tissue. It is Busta Rhymes who is busting out a tune that is about to bust my butt (and my back).