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Itemised for your reading pleasure.
1. Why, why, isgmail googlemail working on Pedar's laptop but not mine? I can check my mail on his, but would appreciate my father not knowing that I occasionally write porn, kthxbai. (Though I'm sure he already knows. His policy is never to get involved in the bits of my life that make him headdesk. Which is, now I come to think of it, an entirely mutual but affectionate policy, and possibly the reason why we have such a good relationship. This is far too long a digression to go in parentheses. I do apologise.)
2. Why, two hours after eating two scoops of basmati rice, a fair-to-middling helping aloo gobi, two paranthas, dahi bale with imli (accurate translation is beyond me at this point, I'm sorry), a banana, some apple-and-carrot salad, and a slice of chocolate and marscapone cheescake, can I be hungry again? How is this even possible? And why does said hunger manifest itself as a desire for microwaved scones, of all things?
3. Five thousand words of Remus/Tonks. Remus/Tonks. Five thousand words. That does not want to finish, possibly because of its utter lack of any narrative structure whatsoever. Why. Just, why.
4. What is it that that turns intelligent, professional NRI men and women into raving lunatics at the drop of a pakora? (Okay, that one was gratutious. Some of you may have heard of the pakora's sadly inferior cousin, the onion bhaji.) Mani - if you're reading this, be warned: I'm dying to see you, but it's going to be one of those weekends, so come prepared. For my non-NRI friends - that is to say, nearly all of them, and if anyone reading actually is an NRI then I really want to know about it - some explanation of this. NRI stands for "non-resident Indian", and they are a breed of people unto themselves. This weekend, my parents are holding a party. It's a party to celebrate my mother's return to general medicine, but the pretext wasn't really needed. When I first came down from Oxford, I helpfully made a list of the thirteen people who were invited. Since then, my mother has been inviting one person here and another one there and the list has now had stapled pages added and run to forty-five people. My mother being my mother, she is doing the cooking herself. She is, of course, a magnificent cook - I am middling and would never be trusted for something like this, oh, no - but there are such things as temporal and spatial constraints that I have as yet failed to convince her of. The list of food, and dishes, and paper plates to buy, and people to phone, and so on and so forth, is getting longer by the minute.
I am a little dubious, but only a little, as I know how these things work. It will all be fine, for a given value of fine. People will pile in, the earliest about an hour late, and remove their shoes at the door, and if female, will immediately demand to know what they can do in the kitchen, and if male, will congregate with all the other men and have very manly conversations about manly things in the living room. (My greatest pleasure in life, or one of, is wandering haphazardly in and breaking into a conversation about, say, politics. Said conversation will quickly and irretrievably break down into an analysis of why I didn't follow my parents' footsteps and go into medicine.) Of course, of the forty-five people, seventy-five percent will be practising doctors and the remainder not utilising their qualifications. It is a fact of life.
In the meantime, the small and not-so-small children will be in a room upstairs. The ones who are at school together - Merchants', undoubtedly - will be in a corner bitching about it, and there will be a lot of awkward silences broken up by demands for ice-cream. At which point the whole house will become telepathically aware that dinner is ready and there will be a mass exodus to the kitchen. Where the men and women will suddenly and enthusiastically greet each other, introduce venerable old grandmothers here from India, and then someone whose colleague's friend's brother-in-law just came back from India himself will prompt a conversation about the good old days back home, culminating in an obscure joke (possibly about Lalu Prasad) delivered in rapidfire Hindi and a burst of laugher from all present except those under twenty-five and the Tamil speakers.
There won't be any alcohol. Okay, a little - there won't be any Muslims there, after all - and it will be doled out in secret corners as not to upset the venerable old grandmothers, but everyone left their inhibitions at the door anyway. When the night winds down in the wee small hours, sleeping children bundled into cars, paper plates crushed into carpets, there will be vociferous demands that we must do this again some time, when X or Y gets back from India, and agreement on all sides. On Monday, in school, all the people who were there will look steadfastly at the floor when passing each other in the corridor and pretend they've never seen the other person in their lives.
...okay. Clearly I have been waiting to say all of that for a very long time, as I appear to have typed the last four paragraphs in one furious burst. To be clear, I regard my culture and my family's with nothing but fondness and pride, really. They're just... overwhelming. At times. I found it quite revealing that even at Oxford I ended up creeping to the weekly Hindu aarti with a palpable air of guilt, because I need that in my life. You need that, and it's not a Great Mystery of the Universe.
Um. Back to my microwaved scones, then.
1. Why, why, is
2. Why, two hours after eating two scoops of basmati rice, a fair-to-middling helping aloo gobi, two paranthas, dahi bale with imli (accurate translation is beyond me at this point, I'm sorry), a banana, some apple-and-carrot salad, and a slice of chocolate and marscapone cheescake, can I be hungry again? How is this even possible? And why does said hunger manifest itself as a desire for microwaved scones, of all things?
3. Five thousand words of Remus/Tonks. Remus/Tonks. Five thousand words. That does not want to finish, possibly because of its utter lack of any narrative structure whatsoever. Why. Just, why.
4. What is it that that turns intelligent, professional NRI men and women into raving lunatics at the drop of a pakora? (Okay, that one was gratutious. Some of you may have heard of the pakora's sadly inferior cousin, the onion bhaji.) Mani - if you're reading this, be warned: I'm dying to see you, but it's going to be one of those weekends, so come prepared. For my non-NRI friends - that is to say, nearly all of them, and if anyone reading actually is an NRI then I really want to know about it - some explanation of this. NRI stands for "non-resident Indian", and they are a breed of people unto themselves. This weekend, my parents are holding a party. It's a party to celebrate my mother's return to general medicine, but the pretext wasn't really needed. When I first came down from Oxford, I helpfully made a list of the thirteen people who were invited. Since then, my mother has been inviting one person here and another one there and the list has now had stapled pages added and run to forty-five people. My mother being my mother, she is doing the cooking herself. She is, of course, a magnificent cook - I am middling and would never be trusted for something like this, oh, no - but there are such things as temporal and spatial constraints that I have as yet failed to convince her of. The list of food, and dishes, and paper plates to buy, and people to phone, and so on and so forth, is getting longer by the minute.
I am a little dubious, but only a little, as I know how these things work. It will all be fine, for a given value of fine. People will pile in, the earliest about an hour late, and remove their shoes at the door, and if female, will immediately demand to know what they can do in the kitchen, and if male, will congregate with all the other men and have very manly conversations about manly things in the living room. (My greatest pleasure in life, or one of, is wandering haphazardly in and breaking into a conversation about, say, politics. Said conversation will quickly and irretrievably break down into an analysis of why I didn't follow my parents' footsteps and go into medicine.) Of course, of the forty-five people, seventy-five percent will be practising doctors and the remainder not utilising their qualifications. It is a fact of life.
In the meantime, the small and not-so-small children will be in a room upstairs. The ones who are at school together - Merchants', undoubtedly - will be in a corner bitching about it, and there will be a lot of awkward silences broken up by demands for ice-cream. At which point the whole house will become telepathically aware that dinner is ready and there will be a mass exodus to the kitchen. Where the men and women will suddenly and enthusiastically greet each other, introduce venerable old grandmothers here from India, and then someone whose colleague's friend's brother-in-law just came back from India himself will prompt a conversation about the good old days back home, culminating in an obscure joke (possibly about Lalu Prasad) delivered in rapidfire Hindi and a burst of laugher from all present except those under twenty-five and the Tamil speakers.
There won't be any alcohol. Okay, a little - there won't be any Muslims there, after all - and it will be doled out in secret corners as not to upset the venerable old grandmothers, but everyone left their inhibitions at the door anyway. When the night winds down in the wee small hours, sleeping children bundled into cars, paper plates crushed into carpets, there will be vociferous demands that we must do this again some time, when X or Y gets back from India, and agreement on all sides. On Monday, in school, all the people who were there will look steadfastly at the floor when passing each other in the corridor and pretend they've never seen the other person in their lives.
...okay. Clearly I have been waiting to say all of that for a very long time, as I appear to have typed the last four paragraphs in one furious burst. To be clear, I regard my culture and my family's with nothing but fondness and pride, really. They're just... overwhelming. At times. I found it quite revealing that even at Oxford I ended up creeping to the weekly Hindu aarti with a palpable air of guilt, because I need that in my life. You need that, and it's not a Great Mystery of the Universe.
Um. Back to my microwaved scones, then.
