Lisa Nops's Blog
January 19, 2014
My Third Place in Mumbai
After ten months of living in Mumbai, I am now finding my third place in the city. I have lived in more countries than digits on my hands and in every town I have always discovered a ‘third place’, somewhere inviting away from home, where I can spend hours collecting my thoughts, reading a book, or doing very little. In Mumbai I have three such berths.
This idea of the ‘third place’ came to me after watching "You Have Mail" by Nora Ephron the other night. The two protagonists played by Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks develop their friendship by meeting up at third places in New York. They bump into each other at Starbucks or in parks, and these informal, convivial quarters of community life offer them a neutral zone in which to hone in on their chemistry.
The concept of the third place is derived from the writings of the American urban sociologist, Ray Oldenburg. He believes every person needs somewhere to hang out away from their home. The first place is their house or apartment, and where people spend most of their life; the second place is the office; and the third place offers a home away from home in a community setting. In England pubs and parks provide such meeting spots; in Australia it has to be the beaches and Italian cafes; and in America, following the example set by Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in "You Have Mail", I suspect it could be Starbucks. But I don’t know America very well - I only watch movies made in Hollywood - and might be giving Starbucks too many plaudits.
My ‘first place’ in Mumbai is my apartment in Dadar. This is where I live with my very small family and a menagerie of pot plants that decorate every corner of the lounge room. It is a private place, comfortable, and homely. It has the advantages of having a communal gym and a swimming pool, and the disadvantages of having toilets and lifts that don’t work. The outside environment of Dadar doesn’t shy away from the city’s spirit. The lanes are crammed with shanty homes and pedestrians. The smells of spices and car fumes trickle through the windows of my car when driving into the suburb’s infamous roundabouts, the air waiting for the next wave of rain to wash away this peculiar incense. Around us there are street vendors, flocks of pigeons and piles of tattered plastic bags. Dadar can be described as chaotic and messy, but never, ever dull.
Even in the evenings the sky is plastered by fireworks, canons of colour disappearing into the darkness. There are more festivals in India than tattoos on David Beckham’s arms. Dadar, seldom quiet, celebrates the weekly festivals of India with a childish fever. People dance in the streets and throw paint at each other. In this ethnic chaos of religion and cultures, no one’s festival is forgotten. Never have I been so grateful for my partial deafness than when I fall asleep at 10pm, oblivious to the outdoor clatter of the street carnivals, bottle rockets and crackers which illuminate the sky.
A question mark hangs over what constitutes my second place in Mumbai. Officially, I am not working though I spend many hours behind my computer. My work is of a non-pecuniary kind. But I also spend an equal share of time travelling in our car, which must afford it the status of my second place. In the back of our sedan, I chat to my driver, Raju, who’s become a friend. We talk about everything from the monsoon rains to the state of the economy. Raju’s eyes are always fixed on the road. Motor cycles sway around us and cows bring the car to a halt as they stand rigidly to sniff for food. My body automatically switches on when I climb into the car, rocking forwards and backwards to the rhythms of the traffic lights, and the thumps of the potholes. I don’t think I even notice the hooting any more, hardened to the jamboree of drivers who embrace the signs on the back of lorries and tuk-tuks that tell them to ‘horn please’.
We all need a third place away from home. I thought it might be the swimming pool on my compound but the pool guard is too officious. A third place should be cosy and accessible. In the sprawling maze of Mumbai I have found the coffee shop at the Marriot Hotel in Juhu to be one of my nesting spots. Rubbing shoulders with Bollywood’s set has never been high on my radar, and this very coffee shop is plonked right in the middle of Bollywoodsville. I don’t know why but I like it. In this zone where the customers are more beautiful than in fashion magazines, I can easily spend two hours typing on my laptop, listening absently to the Hindi banter in the background. The waiters are efficient, chat to me as a friend, and the tea’s pretty good. It’s also located close to my daughter’s school in Santacruz.
Then there’s Reenek’s hairdressing salon in Bandra. In this setting of smiling faces, attentive beauticians and shampoo smells, I can quickly lose the trail of my thoughts to the comforts of a hair wash or a manicure. Reneek, the owner, is delightfully affable. She has given me more insights into Mumbai’s history and culture than any travel book has ever conferred.
On the weekends Serafina’s Italian restaurant in Lower Parel is our hang-out. It seems to sum up what I like in an outlet. The food is tasteful and reliable, and the customers treat Sally, our daughter, like every other customer in the establishment. They don’t flinch when she might drop a fork on the ground or pick up the food on her plate with her hands.
Of course, there’s no place like home. The routine of the day, slotted between the hours of 6.30am to 10pm, fall mainly in the confines of my kitchen and study. My apartment gives me structure and security. But I also enjoy the strange sense of retiring to the other quarters of Mumbai, my third places, that let me retreat from the responsibilities of my domestic life to tap into their energies and pleasures.
This idea of the ‘third place’ came to me after watching "You Have Mail" by Nora Ephron the other night. The two protagonists played by Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks develop their friendship by meeting up at third places in New York. They bump into each other at Starbucks or in parks, and these informal, convivial quarters of community life offer them a neutral zone in which to hone in on their chemistry.
The concept of the third place is derived from the writings of the American urban sociologist, Ray Oldenburg. He believes every person needs somewhere to hang out away from their home. The first place is their house or apartment, and where people spend most of their life; the second place is the office; and the third place offers a home away from home in a community setting. In England pubs and parks provide such meeting spots; in Australia it has to be the beaches and Italian cafes; and in America, following the example set by Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in "You Have Mail", I suspect it could be Starbucks. But I don’t know America very well - I only watch movies made in Hollywood - and might be giving Starbucks too many plaudits.
My ‘first place’ in Mumbai is my apartment in Dadar. This is where I live with my very small family and a menagerie of pot plants that decorate every corner of the lounge room. It is a private place, comfortable, and homely. It has the advantages of having a communal gym and a swimming pool, and the disadvantages of having toilets and lifts that don’t work. The outside environment of Dadar doesn’t shy away from the city’s spirit. The lanes are crammed with shanty homes and pedestrians. The smells of spices and car fumes trickle through the windows of my car when driving into the suburb’s infamous roundabouts, the air waiting for the next wave of rain to wash away this peculiar incense. Around us there are street vendors, flocks of pigeons and piles of tattered plastic bags. Dadar can be described as chaotic and messy, but never, ever dull.
Even in the evenings the sky is plastered by fireworks, canons of colour disappearing into the darkness. There are more festivals in India than tattoos on David Beckham’s arms. Dadar, seldom quiet, celebrates the weekly festivals of India with a childish fever. People dance in the streets and throw paint at each other. In this ethnic chaos of religion and cultures, no one’s festival is forgotten. Never have I been so grateful for my partial deafness than when I fall asleep at 10pm, oblivious to the outdoor clatter of the street carnivals, bottle rockets and crackers which illuminate the sky.
A question mark hangs over what constitutes my second place in Mumbai. Officially, I am not working though I spend many hours behind my computer. My work is of a non-pecuniary kind. But I also spend an equal share of time travelling in our car, which must afford it the status of my second place. In the back of our sedan, I chat to my driver, Raju, who’s become a friend. We talk about everything from the monsoon rains to the state of the economy. Raju’s eyes are always fixed on the road. Motor cycles sway around us and cows bring the car to a halt as they stand rigidly to sniff for food. My body automatically switches on when I climb into the car, rocking forwards and backwards to the rhythms of the traffic lights, and the thumps of the potholes. I don’t think I even notice the hooting any more, hardened to the jamboree of drivers who embrace the signs on the back of lorries and tuk-tuks that tell them to ‘horn please’.
We all need a third place away from home. I thought it might be the swimming pool on my compound but the pool guard is too officious. A third place should be cosy and accessible. In the sprawling maze of Mumbai I have found the coffee shop at the Marriot Hotel in Juhu to be one of my nesting spots. Rubbing shoulders with Bollywood’s set has never been high on my radar, and this very coffee shop is plonked right in the middle of Bollywoodsville. I don’t know why but I like it. In this zone where the customers are more beautiful than in fashion magazines, I can easily spend two hours typing on my laptop, listening absently to the Hindi banter in the background. The waiters are efficient, chat to me as a friend, and the tea’s pretty good. It’s also located close to my daughter’s school in Santacruz.
Then there’s Reenek’s hairdressing salon in Bandra. In this setting of smiling faces, attentive beauticians and shampoo smells, I can quickly lose the trail of my thoughts to the comforts of a hair wash or a manicure. Reneek, the owner, is delightfully affable. She has given me more insights into Mumbai’s history and culture than any travel book has ever conferred.
On the weekends Serafina’s Italian restaurant in Lower Parel is our hang-out. It seems to sum up what I like in an outlet. The food is tasteful and reliable, and the customers treat Sally, our daughter, like every other customer in the establishment. They don’t flinch when she might drop a fork on the ground or pick up the food on her plate with her hands.
Of course, there’s no place like home. The routine of the day, slotted between the hours of 6.30am to 10pm, fall mainly in the confines of my kitchen and study. My apartment gives me structure and security. But I also enjoy the strange sense of retiring to the other quarters of Mumbai, my third places, that let me retreat from the responsibilities of my domestic life to tap into their energies and pleasures.
September 11, 2013
Mumbai's Monsoon
The monsoon is nearly over in Mumbai. It’s been a heavy drop of rain that’s fallen over this megacity. June and July were particularly soggy. The sky was thick with blankets of interrupted clouds, sweeping across the skyscrapers and shanty homes like invading aliens in battleships pelting bullets of water onto the scattering crowds on the ground.
I grew accustomed to the downpours. In Dadar, the suburb which I call ‘home’, rivers of water started to trickle through the streets to settle into estuaries that divided neighbour’s homes into atolls. I think Dadar should be called ‘Little Venice’ during the monsoon, separated by canals and linked by bridges of rubbish and marooned goats. On the worst days the laneway leading to our building from the main road was blocked by over a metre of water; commuters had to traipse through the highest spots of the channel to avoid a full-body rinse of their saris and suits. If I was the Governor of Dadar, I would invest in a gondola service akin to the ‘Boris bikes’ of London. It seems a better traffic plan than pedestrians and cars stuck in trenches of water.
Yet the city ticked along with little interruption. My daughter’s school in Santacruz was closed for a few days because it was left high and dry by the floods. Santacruz is another wet spot on Mumbai’s horizon. But her school, located on the third floor of a business building, was saved by its position. A castle without a drawbridge, it was marooned by its moat.
To fill in the school-free hours, stranded on the seventh floor of our own tower, we stared out of the tall windows of our lounge room onto sheets of rain and meandering rivers below us carrying withered banana leaves and plastic bags out to the grey sea. Nestled between the fluttering waters I detected islands of people, huddled in their makeshift dwellings, watching their plasma tv screens on the walls. They sat on plastic chairs submerged in muddy water that had carpeted their lodgings, the rainwater lapping continuously at their front entrances. Stationed well above the waterline, their televisions were left untouched by the endless streams of rain.
In this landscape of mud and water and rain, the grasses on the shorelines of the flooded plains came alive, creating smudges of greenery against the tarmac, towers and tawny clay. After struggling through a dry winter, the new leaves fluttered in the winds blowing from the south. The grasses were rich in native flowers and newborn kittens. Above them flocks of little egrets searched for signs of life in the grasses. While the kittens played innocently in the verdant plants, the insects came under the fire of the flying predators.
I am often caught by the survival instinct of the locals. Mumbai carries with it a certain degree of resilience. There is hardship on every street corner: beggars knocking on our car windows for scraps of food and naked infants squatting on the ground to pee. Not much is hidden. ‘This isn’t right,’ I often hear my inner voice cry out to them. During the monsoon it was no less galling. Still, they carried on. Food was collected out of the rotting rubbish left on the sides of the roads. Babies nestled on their mothers’ breasts. They huddled under the shelters of flyovers. I’ve asked myself a thousand times, ‘How do they survive?’ Some carry on.
I grew accustomed to the downpours. In Dadar, the suburb which I call ‘home’, rivers of water started to trickle through the streets to settle into estuaries that divided neighbour’s homes into atolls. I think Dadar should be called ‘Little Venice’ during the monsoon, separated by canals and linked by bridges of rubbish and marooned goats. On the worst days the laneway leading to our building from the main road was blocked by over a metre of water; commuters had to traipse through the highest spots of the channel to avoid a full-body rinse of their saris and suits. If I was the Governor of Dadar, I would invest in a gondola service akin to the ‘Boris bikes’ of London. It seems a better traffic plan than pedestrians and cars stuck in trenches of water.
Yet the city ticked along with little interruption. My daughter’s school in Santacruz was closed for a few days because it was left high and dry by the floods. Santacruz is another wet spot on Mumbai’s horizon. But her school, located on the third floor of a business building, was saved by its position. A castle without a drawbridge, it was marooned by its moat.
To fill in the school-free hours, stranded on the seventh floor of our own tower, we stared out of the tall windows of our lounge room onto sheets of rain and meandering rivers below us carrying withered banana leaves and plastic bags out to the grey sea. Nestled between the fluttering waters I detected islands of people, huddled in their makeshift dwellings, watching their plasma tv screens on the walls. They sat on plastic chairs submerged in muddy water that had carpeted their lodgings, the rainwater lapping continuously at their front entrances. Stationed well above the waterline, their televisions were left untouched by the endless streams of rain.
In this landscape of mud and water and rain, the grasses on the shorelines of the flooded plains came alive, creating smudges of greenery against the tarmac, towers and tawny clay. After struggling through a dry winter, the new leaves fluttered in the winds blowing from the south. The grasses were rich in native flowers and newborn kittens. Above them flocks of little egrets searched for signs of life in the grasses. While the kittens played innocently in the verdant plants, the insects came under the fire of the flying predators.
I am often caught by the survival instinct of the locals. Mumbai carries with it a certain degree of resilience. There is hardship on every street corner: beggars knocking on our car windows for scraps of food and naked infants squatting on the ground to pee. Not much is hidden. ‘This isn’t right,’ I often hear my inner voice cry out to them. During the monsoon it was no less galling. Still, they carried on. Food was collected out of the rotting rubbish left on the sides of the roads. Babies nestled on their mothers’ breasts. They huddled under the shelters of flyovers. I’ve asked myself a thousand times, ‘How do they survive?’ Some carry on.
June 13, 2013
My Take on Maslow's Theory in Mumbai
I lost my energy for storytelling well over a month ago. It’s all come down to my new apartment. We moved into our rented unit in Mumbai in mid April which, from a distance, is a glistening example of Mumbai’s emerging wealth. Tucked on the seventh floor of a skyscraper rising high into the city’s smog, the condominium is home to the country’s upwardly mobile classes. There is a manager of a chemical factory on the second floor and an owner of a textile mill living on another level. They have paid a New York price tag for their four-bedroom dwellings.
Beyond the wrap-around balcony and slabs of marble in the bathrooms, however, not much else in my apartment works to an American standard. Many of the accessories and appliances are quite old, possibly dished out of a pulled-down building, or sourced from the local market. Nothing much looks like it was procured from Macy’s. The owners of other units that I meet by the swimming pool are furious. They were promised a bit of New York in Mumbai.
As a tenant, I only have to deal with the daily disruptions of leaking toilets, dodgy electrical wiring and interruptions to the water supply. I can always move to another complex. Most housing in Mumbai, I am told, is just as unreliable. After weeks of supervising teams of technicians, I feel my apartment is just about livable. Why move now?
Corruption is an unrelenting thorn in the Indian economy. There are deals done behind closed doors and loose interpretations of contracts. My apartment is a micro-example of this rot of sleaze. There was clearly a lack of quality supervision in the building works, in combination with many corners cut for more profitable outcomes. Yet, when the construction is left with so many gaps in it, when the buck has been passed further down the chain, someone has to pay. In the case of our unit, I lost six weeks to supervising workmen for toilets that never stopped running or for wiring that tripped up when more than one air conditioner was turned on, along with paying many of the bills for the maintenance.
The earliest days were the worst. No sooner had our boxes landed in the apartment than two of the five toilets overflowed. There was brown water running, literally, through the apartment and out of the front door, roaring and foaming like the Mississippi River. The back toilet whooshed so much water down the lift well that two lifts were broken for a fortnight. I heard mutterings in the foyer from the other residents as to which apartment had caused this most unfortunate inconvenience. They knew it was someone or something to do with the seventh floor. I kept a low profile.
For a while I lost sight of what a normal day constituted in Mumbai. One of my major complaints was sleep. There is allegedly air trapped in the pipes which makes the whistling sound of a steam train. It’s quite deafening at midday; more than irritating when the big hand turns to midnight and I am woken up by the piercing pop of blocked gas. In one of my more sleep-deprived days, I considered hopping on a plane to Sydney for a good night’s slumber. Then, driving through the streets of Mumbai, I saw homeless people snoozing on the edges of the roads, curled into the cracks in the tarmac. Cars and tuk-tuks were hooting all around them and yet they seemed to be dozing soundly. I thought to myself: ‘stop whining, stop being an expatriate madam’. Over time, I’ve learned to snooze through many of the hollers of the night. I’m weary to it all, though. We’re paying New York prices and getting broken sleep.
Michael, my husband, has been mostly absent for the past two months. He’s embroiled in a work project in Kashmir and promises to be home for the weekend. Tired and distracted, he has his own issues to overcome. I must sound a bit dramatic on our evening calls when I constantly complain about toilets. Most of the appliances in the apartment are now working, thankfully. But I keep thinking of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs which I studied at university years ago. Without the foundations of sleep and shelter, how can anyone flourish in India? I continue to wag my finger at the culture of corruption here. My hairdresser told me yesterday that most of her Indian clients ask for the GST to be taken off their bills for their hair cuts and pedicures. If its citizens are reluctant to cough up to their share of the taxes, how can the government hope to pay for the infrastructure and education needed so desperately for this country’s progress? India will only ever fulfill its full potential when it addresses the ethos of corruption from the ground level all the way up to the top oligarchies. Otherwise, no one is working on a good night’s sleep.
Beyond the wrap-around balcony and slabs of marble in the bathrooms, however, not much else in my apartment works to an American standard. Many of the accessories and appliances are quite old, possibly dished out of a pulled-down building, or sourced from the local market. Nothing much looks like it was procured from Macy’s. The owners of other units that I meet by the swimming pool are furious. They were promised a bit of New York in Mumbai.
As a tenant, I only have to deal with the daily disruptions of leaking toilets, dodgy electrical wiring and interruptions to the water supply. I can always move to another complex. Most housing in Mumbai, I am told, is just as unreliable. After weeks of supervising teams of technicians, I feel my apartment is just about livable. Why move now?
Corruption is an unrelenting thorn in the Indian economy. There are deals done behind closed doors and loose interpretations of contracts. My apartment is a micro-example of this rot of sleaze. There was clearly a lack of quality supervision in the building works, in combination with many corners cut for more profitable outcomes. Yet, when the construction is left with so many gaps in it, when the buck has been passed further down the chain, someone has to pay. In the case of our unit, I lost six weeks to supervising workmen for toilets that never stopped running or for wiring that tripped up when more than one air conditioner was turned on, along with paying many of the bills for the maintenance.
The earliest days were the worst. No sooner had our boxes landed in the apartment than two of the five toilets overflowed. There was brown water running, literally, through the apartment and out of the front door, roaring and foaming like the Mississippi River. The back toilet whooshed so much water down the lift well that two lifts were broken for a fortnight. I heard mutterings in the foyer from the other residents as to which apartment had caused this most unfortunate inconvenience. They knew it was someone or something to do with the seventh floor. I kept a low profile.
For a while I lost sight of what a normal day constituted in Mumbai. One of my major complaints was sleep. There is allegedly air trapped in the pipes which makes the whistling sound of a steam train. It’s quite deafening at midday; more than irritating when the big hand turns to midnight and I am woken up by the piercing pop of blocked gas. In one of my more sleep-deprived days, I considered hopping on a plane to Sydney for a good night’s slumber. Then, driving through the streets of Mumbai, I saw homeless people snoozing on the edges of the roads, curled into the cracks in the tarmac. Cars and tuk-tuks were hooting all around them and yet they seemed to be dozing soundly. I thought to myself: ‘stop whining, stop being an expatriate madam’. Over time, I’ve learned to snooze through many of the hollers of the night. I’m weary to it all, though. We’re paying New York prices and getting broken sleep.
Michael, my husband, has been mostly absent for the past two months. He’s embroiled in a work project in Kashmir and promises to be home for the weekend. Tired and distracted, he has his own issues to overcome. I must sound a bit dramatic on our evening calls when I constantly complain about toilets. Most of the appliances in the apartment are now working, thankfully. But I keep thinking of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs which I studied at university years ago. Without the foundations of sleep and shelter, how can anyone flourish in India? I continue to wag my finger at the culture of corruption here. My hairdresser told me yesterday that most of her Indian clients ask for the GST to be taken off their bills for their hair cuts and pedicures. If its citizens are reluctant to cough up to their share of the taxes, how can the government hope to pay for the infrastructure and education needed so desperately for this country’s progress? India will only ever fulfill its full potential when it addresses the ethos of corruption from the ground level all the way up to the top oligarchies. Otherwise, no one is working on a good night’s sleep.
April 15, 2013
For the Love of a Curry
It’s a strange thing that restaurants and antique dealers come at the top my Mumbai list. Everything else that matters is scrawled in inked blots at the back of my diary. My relationship with food and furniture go back to the days when my Grandma gave me a cookbook and an interior design magazine for my twelfth birthday. This is not to say that I’m a great cook. Let’s say that I enjoy good food without the effort of preparing it myself. Nor am I particularly adept at decorating. My homes in the past have had a certain style but I can’t imagine Vogue Living will ever come knocking on my door for a photo shoot in the future. I just enjoy prowling around antique and home-ware shops.
One of the attractions of moving to India was to immerse myself in the cuisine. To savour the fragnant curries, the light chapatis, and dahls. There is no better way to experience a country than through its food. Certainly Bangkok’s exquisite fish curries have lasted much longer in my memory bank than its giant, golden Budha. No sooner had I arrived in Mumbai than I purchased a copy of the Times of India Restaurant Guide and short-listed five haunts in which to discover the joys of the local take on Bombay Duck.
Then in my second week here I succumbed to a Mumbai bug. Not of the edible kind; more of the kind that bubbles away inside your stomach. Months later and I’m still struggling to look at a curry without wanting to rush to the lavatory. I am now doing India without the curries. My palate can only be satiated by a bland diet of grilled chicken and steamed vegetables. Any Indian reading my daily menu will be shocked by its monotony. I am.
Even on my featureless diet, the restaurants in Mumbai are part of the good side of living here. I’m not a foodie either. I’m the last person to ask about a new restaurant. When the Masterchef judges in Australia quiz their competitors on the different names of pasta, I stop at lasagna. But I recognise the inventive menus of Mumbai, studded with creative soups, salads and souffles. There are metaphors for the Indian landscape in every dish. The red pepper and coriander soup I ate the other night had the reddened colour of the mountains to the west of Mumbai; later on the salmon, coated in turmeric, glistened of the calm sea outside. The food in India, whether disguised as western cooking or its own culinary fare, is ingenious.
The furnishings of the restaurants here seem to balance out the drama and colour of the food too. All calm and composed, the elegant fabrics and chairs take out the heat of the spicy dishes. The bistros are like small cathedrals, places of peace and worship, out of the mayhem on the streets. Maybe I have seen copies of these restaurants before in another country? They are still definably Indian. The culture of the people and land trickles into even the most western of settings. There’s something distinctive, Indian-centred, about the manners of the table settings, the way the napkins are folded, and the arrangement of the tall candles by the edges of the bread knives.
We are moving into our apartment at the end of the week. There’s been a lot of drama over our new residence. The Landlord took a while to install the lighting. Or was it the electricity? One week of works became six weeks. I’ve been told this is India and to expect this. I hope our home, much like the restaurants of Mumbai, will be an oasis from the traffic and fumes of the streets. I have already been to a nest of antique shops to find a cabinet for our new place. The 80 year-old mahogany chest, crafted by an artisan from my grandma’s generation, costs less than a pre-assembled trunk from Ikea. Window browsing at these antique shops is now a firm fixture in my diary. Michael has already commented that we mustn’t leave India with more furniture than we brought in. I suspect I’ll be throwing out the old rattan chairs and beds to make way for the colonial collections from this well kept secret of Mumbai.
One of the attractions of moving to India was to immerse myself in the cuisine. To savour the fragnant curries, the light chapatis, and dahls. There is no better way to experience a country than through its food. Certainly Bangkok’s exquisite fish curries have lasted much longer in my memory bank than its giant, golden Budha. No sooner had I arrived in Mumbai than I purchased a copy of the Times of India Restaurant Guide and short-listed five haunts in which to discover the joys of the local take on Bombay Duck.
Then in my second week here I succumbed to a Mumbai bug. Not of the edible kind; more of the kind that bubbles away inside your stomach. Months later and I’m still struggling to look at a curry without wanting to rush to the lavatory. I am now doing India without the curries. My palate can only be satiated by a bland diet of grilled chicken and steamed vegetables. Any Indian reading my daily menu will be shocked by its monotony. I am.
Even on my featureless diet, the restaurants in Mumbai are part of the good side of living here. I’m not a foodie either. I’m the last person to ask about a new restaurant. When the Masterchef judges in Australia quiz their competitors on the different names of pasta, I stop at lasagna. But I recognise the inventive menus of Mumbai, studded with creative soups, salads and souffles. There are metaphors for the Indian landscape in every dish. The red pepper and coriander soup I ate the other night had the reddened colour of the mountains to the west of Mumbai; later on the salmon, coated in turmeric, glistened of the calm sea outside. The food in India, whether disguised as western cooking or its own culinary fare, is ingenious.
The furnishings of the restaurants here seem to balance out the drama and colour of the food too. All calm and composed, the elegant fabrics and chairs take out the heat of the spicy dishes. The bistros are like small cathedrals, places of peace and worship, out of the mayhem on the streets. Maybe I have seen copies of these restaurants before in another country? They are still definably Indian. The culture of the people and land trickles into even the most western of settings. There’s something distinctive, Indian-centred, about the manners of the table settings, the way the napkins are folded, and the arrangement of the tall candles by the edges of the bread knives.
We are moving into our apartment at the end of the week. There’s been a lot of drama over our new residence. The Landlord took a while to install the lighting. Or was it the electricity? One week of works became six weeks. I’ve been told this is India and to expect this. I hope our home, much like the restaurants of Mumbai, will be an oasis from the traffic and fumes of the streets. I have already been to a nest of antique shops to find a cabinet for our new place. The 80 year-old mahogany chest, crafted by an artisan from my grandma’s generation, costs less than a pre-assembled trunk from Ikea. Window browsing at these antique shops is now a firm fixture in my diary. Michael has already commented that we mustn’t leave India with more furniture than we brought in. I suspect I’ll be throwing out the old rattan chairs and beds to make way for the colonial collections from this well kept secret of Mumbai.
March 25, 2013
Mad Expatriate and Buffets in the Hot Indian Sun
Sunday buffets and I go back a long way. That’s more of a sign of how long I have been an expatriate, rather than any partiality for spending my Sundays in a hotel dining room. I can’t recall ever going to a hotel for lunch in the years when I have lived in the western world. There it was the return to the traditional Sunday roast, shared in the company of family and close friends. Sundays were always a busy time. They were characterised by a rush to the supermarket before the mid-morning queues clogged the cash tills, slicing and dicing the vegetables in 15 minutes, and later on trimming off the goblets of oil forming into a thick layer over the gravy.
Returning to the expatriate pond in Mumbai late last year, I can already count up four hotel Sunday lunches. The long buffet feast has, once again, taken over the Sunday family roast. It’s a far easier exercise. Shopping for the ingredients, cooking for ten, and washing-up piles of greasy dishes are no longer part of my weekend repertoire. Instead I am at one with a glass of champagne resting by my hand in a hotel dining hall, where plates of grilled prawns are brought to my table, and where I find the chatter of expatriates, eating and drinking noisily around me, all disarmingly familiar. They, too, are shunning the hot Indian sun.
My earliest memory of the expatriate Sunday buffet dates back to - ahem - the late 80s. Living in Kuala Lumpur in our mid 20s, my husband and I discovered the joys of the hotel smorgasbord. This was a time when we partied hard, when we generally didn’t get to sleep until 3am after a busy Saturday night. As I said we were in our mid 20s. By the time we woke up to the stinging Malaysian heat the following Sunday at midday, we retreated to the air-conditioned hotels for breakfast. But we were always too late for the hotel breakfast and lunch became our first meal of the day. Soon enough our friends joined us in the dining halls of Kuala Lumpur’s five-star hotels. The tradition of the expatriate Sunday buffet became locked in our diaries.
Other countries came and went over the years; hotel buffets were tried and tested along the way. They were all brilliant. Then our daughter, Sally, arrived which formed a barrier to eating out much. She has autism and social activities, such as a long Sunday buffet lunch, were a grueling exercise. Our last buffet for a considerable time was in 2006 in Bahrain. In the Middle East buffets are much bigger affairs than in Asia. I think the heat and sand sends westerners indoors to the chilled lobsters and bubbling champagne. We had joined friends at one of the top-notch buffet haunts in Bahrain and lost Sally for five minutes. After hunting around the hotel’s bathrooms and pools, we found her standing under the dripping chocolate fountain in the dessert section of the dining hall. She was grinning with contentment, her hands gushing through the running sauce, sending rivers of chocolate goblets all over the surrounding tables. The flummeries and custards on the cake stands were drowned in the lava flow of the chocolate explosion. I never found the strength in my character to return to that hotel again.
The long, post-postponed buffet is once more a feature of our Sundays in Mumbai. Sally is older and wiser, and much more comfortable with outings. We are also much older and wiser, and don’t go to hotel buffets any longer to recover from the night before. We haven’t ventured any further than the local buffet at Fratelli Fresh at the Renaissance Hotel. We ate there yesterday. My taste buds are still alive with the smells and pungency of the freshly made pasta, roasted beef and mango brulees concocted by the Italian chef. If only he could bring out the Nigella in me and I could replicate just one of his dishes in my kitchen. Looking down at my stomach, I am trying not to think too much of what my doctor might have to say about the return of this expatriate habit. My waistline may well be a casualty in this wonderful luncheon affair but, all things considered, it’s a small penance to pay for the absence of shopping, cooking and washing-up that gobbled up so many of Sundays back home.
Returning to the expatriate pond in Mumbai late last year, I can already count up four hotel Sunday lunches. The long buffet feast has, once again, taken over the Sunday family roast. It’s a far easier exercise. Shopping for the ingredients, cooking for ten, and washing-up piles of greasy dishes are no longer part of my weekend repertoire. Instead I am at one with a glass of champagne resting by my hand in a hotel dining hall, where plates of grilled prawns are brought to my table, and where I find the chatter of expatriates, eating and drinking noisily around me, all disarmingly familiar. They, too, are shunning the hot Indian sun.
My earliest memory of the expatriate Sunday buffet dates back to - ahem - the late 80s. Living in Kuala Lumpur in our mid 20s, my husband and I discovered the joys of the hotel smorgasbord. This was a time when we partied hard, when we generally didn’t get to sleep until 3am after a busy Saturday night. As I said we were in our mid 20s. By the time we woke up to the stinging Malaysian heat the following Sunday at midday, we retreated to the air-conditioned hotels for breakfast. But we were always too late for the hotel breakfast and lunch became our first meal of the day. Soon enough our friends joined us in the dining halls of Kuala Lumpur’s five-star hotels. The tradition of the expatriate Sunday buffet became locked in our diaries.
Other countries came and went over the years; hotel buffets were tried and tested along the way. They were all brilliant. Then our daughter, Sally, arrived which formed a barrier to eating out much. She has autism and social activities, such as a long Sunday buffet lunch, were a grueling exercise. Our last buffet for a considerable time was in 2006 in Bahrain. In the Middle East buffets are much bigger affairs than in Asia. I think the heat and sand sends westerners indoors to the chilled lobsters and bubbling champagne. We had joined friends at one of the top-notch buffet haunts in Bahrain and lost Sally for five minutes. After hunting around the hotel’s bathrooms and pools, we found her standing under the dripping chocolate fountain in the dessert section of the dining hall. She was grinning with contentment, her hands gushing through the running sauce, sending rivers of chocolate goblets all over the surrounding tables. The flummeries and custards on the cake stands were drowned in the lava flow of the chocolate explosion. I never found the strength in my character to return to that hotel again.
The long, post-postponed buffet is once more a feature of our Sundays in Mumbai. Sally is older and wiser, and much more comfortable with outings. We are also much older and wiser, and don’t go to hotel buffets any longer to recover from the night before. We haven’t ventured any further than the local buffet at Fratelli Fresh at the Renaissance Hotel. We ate there yesterday. My taste buds are still alive with the smells and pungency of the freshly made pasta, roasted beef and mango brulees concocted by the Italian chef. If only he could bring out the Nigella in me and I could replicate just one of his dishes in my kitchen. Looking down at my stomach, I am trying not to think too much of what my doctor might have to say about the return of this expatriate habit. My waistline may well be a casualty in this wonderful luncheon affair but, all things considered, it’s a small penance to pay for the absence of shopping, cooking and washing-up that gobbled up so many of Sundays back home.
February 25, 2013
A Bad Hair Day in Mumbai
A friend told me that living in Mumbai can be like a game of golf. There are a few twists and turns along the way. It’s as unpredictable as the weather in Melbourne. You might start off your day well, driving a clean shot straight onto the greens, but then, plunk, your next ball lands into a muddy pond. The following one falls into a clump of trees. By the end of playing 18 rounds of golf you are starting to question why on earth you play this game. Mumbai has this sort of effect. I’m told with practice and patience that it improves. I plan on staying the course with Mumbai as I can see its hidden delights. Mumbai is, after all, like a game of golf. It’s a difficult game to learn.
I write this because I had a particularly bad week. I discovered that our removalist in Sydney has doubled their fees to ship our goods to Mumbai. An ocean away from Sydney, my ability to negotiate with them is next to impossible. I suspect we are going to have to pocket out another $10,000 for our worldly goods. Such are the hidden horrors of moving abroad. Then the real estate showed me properties resembling an Indian sewer. As acid started to froth from my mouth after the fifth property, the agent countered that I hadn’t mentioned ‘cleanliness’ in my brief to him. Later on, I found ticks in the sofa of our serviced apartment. Sally picked up a bug at her new school and was home, sick again, for the rest of the week. Michael and I caught her illness over the weekend and spent much of Sunday wrenching over the basin in the bathroom.
It was only fitting that I headed straight to the hairdressers to sink into a black, leather armchair and to wallow in self-pity. I don’t often brood but I had decided to be in one mother of all sulks today. But there was a catch. My stylist, who told me he comes from a state of India bordering Burma, was warm and affectionate. A nanny in disguise, he pampered me with cups of tea and stories of his home town. He summed up the make-up of my hair, painted and folded it into neat layers of foils, and then left me to rest for two hours in my chair. By the harried expression on my face, he’d worked out that I was a customer who wanted to forget the horrors of ticks, toilets and her ghastly packer in Sydney. Within hours he had washed away my blues and lightened up my shades of grey. I call it a kind of coiffure enlightenment.
My stylist’s shop is part of the international franchise of ‘Toni and Guy’. In Mumbai it bears all the hallmarks of a ‘Toni and Guy’ store across the globe. From New York and Tokyo to Jakarta, the stylists are dressed in a hip salon code, their hair tasseled and tussled into a solitary line at the crest of their heads, and their pencil thin jeans, belted below their waistlines, look as if they could drop to their ankles with one sneeze.
Behind my chair in the salon there was a knot of western women also hidden under coats of silver foil. Rising up from under our white salon robes and plastered in foil, we must have looked quite extraordinary to a local spying in from the street outside. For a while there I resembled Albert Einstein testing his theory on electricity. The ends of my hair stood on end, poking out at right angles to my scalp, and bristling with a type of magnetic energy.
It is the simple happiness of a lick of paint on my hair that has turned my mood around. My stylist has proved to be a rare find too. On my next visit to his salon I hope that my hearing will be better attuned to Hindi English. He told me the name of his home state but it was lost in translation. Many of the Indians say they speak my language but their brand of English is as indecipherable as listening to Japanese shopkeepers. However, no translation has been needed in my stylist’s transformation of my hair from a frizzled mop to something quite magnificent that’s shaved five years off my face. The bonus at the end of my heavenly treat was that I paid less than half of a comparable cut-and-colour in Sydney. If my calculations serve me well, after 85 visits to this salon I might just cover the additional costs of our move to Mumbai. By then, I might also have found the Rorry McIlroy in me and learnt to play this game called golf.
I write this because I had a particularly bad week. I discovered that our removalist in Sydney has doubled their fees to ship our goods to Mumbai. An ocean away from Sydney, my ability to negotiate with them is next to impossible. I suspect we are going to have to pocket out another $10,000 for our worldly goods. Such are the hidden horrors of moving abroad. Then the real estate showed me properties resembling an Indian sewer. As acid started to froth from my mouth after the fifth property, the agent countered that I hadn’t mentioned ‘cleanliness’ in my brief to him. Later on, I found ticks in the sofa of our serviced apartment. Sally picked up a bug at her new school and was home, sick again, for the rest of the week. Michael and I caught her illness over the weekend and spent much of Sunday wrenching over the basin in the bathroom.
It was only fitting that I headed straight to the hairdressers to sink into a black, leather armchair and to wallow in self-pity. I don’t often brood but I had decided to be in one mother of all sulks today. But there was a catch. My stylist, who told me he comes from a state of India bordering Burma, was warm and affectionate. A nanny in disguise, he pampered me with cups of tea and stories of his home town. He summed up the make-up of my hair, painted and folded it into neat layers of foils, and then left me to rest for two hours in my chair. By the harried expression on my face, he’d worked out that I was a customer who wanted to forget the horrors of ticks, toilets and her ghastly packer in Sydney. Within hours he had washed away my blues and lightened up my shades of grey. I call it a kind of coiffure enlightenment.
My stylist’s shop is part of the international franchise of ‘Toni and Guy’. In Mumbai it bears all the hallmarks of a ‘Toni and Guy’ store across the globe. From New York and Tokyo to Jakarta, the stylists are dressed in a hip salon code, their hair tasseled and tussled into a solitary line at the crest of their heads, and their pencil thin jeans, belted below their waistlines, look as if they could drop to their ankles with one sneeze.
Behind my chair in the salon there was a knot of western women also hidden under coats of silver foil. Rising up from under our white salon robes and plastered in foil, we must have looked quite extraordinary to a local spying in from the street outside. For a while there I resembled Albert Einstein testing his theory on electricity. The ends of my hair stood on end, poking out at right angles to my scalp, and bristling with a type of magnetic energy.
It is the simple happiness of a lick of paint on my hair that has turned my mood around. My stylist has proved to be a rare find too. On my next visit to his salon I hope that my hearing will be better attuned to Hindi English. He told me the name of his home state but it was lost in translation. Many of the Indians say they speak my language but their brand of English is as indecipherable as listening to Japanese shopkeepers. However, no translation has been needed in my stylist’s transformation of my hair from a frizzled mop to something quite magnificent that’s shaved five years off my face. The bonus at the end of my heavenly treat was that I paid less than half of a comparable cut-and-colour in Sydney. If my calculations serve me well, after 85 visits to this salon I might just cover the additional costs of our move to Mumbai. By then, I might also have found the Rorry McIlroy in me and learnt to play this game called golf.
January 29, 2013
Swapping Brush Turkeys for Crows
I’m on the high seas again, cut loose from everything that I took for granted in Australia. We moved to India at the end of December for Michael’s work and I’m finding the waters here follow quite a different course to my home town of Sydney. The supermarkets don’t sell my favourite items, I’m at a loss to understand the local lingo, and the sky is thick with human pollution. My only reminders of my past life are stuffed away in my two suitcases, along with Sally and Michael by my side.
Looking out of my hotel window onto a mish-mash of shanty homes and medium high rise buildings, I have to remind myself every day that I made the right decision to move here. We’re still not sure if we’ll be based in Mumbai or New Delhi so our hotel, located in central Mumbai, is our temporary home. Already it has a family feel. The sofa is splattered with the leftovers of Sally’s dinners and the books that I promised myself to read for the past twelve months have followed me here, continuing to collect dust on the bedside table. I find that bedside tables always look the same from a certain angle, layered in identical books, crushed newspapers and stained mugs.
If I roll back one month, I was living out a scene set in Sydney’s suburbia. The picture was timeless. There were my two Burmese cats sunning themselves on the balcony, Sally was reading on the wooden floor decked out in rugs and toys, and outside the air was filled with the squabble of Brush Turkeys at war with the local moggies. Pungent and rowdy, the smells and sounds could have been replicated just about anywhere up and down the NSW coast line. My forefathers would have tasted the same Eucalypt tangs and heard the racket of the roosting turkeys a century earlier. It was a daily drama that almost escaped me, as if my ears had dimmed out to the orchestra of the Australian wildlife that played outside my bedroom window from dawn to dusk.
In the new setting of Mumbai, the heavens are blanketed by the smog of car fumes and factory waste. The space is grey and opaque, as thick as a mist rolling off the Blue Mountains. Predatory crows circle the skies in packs. My Burmese cats have been replaced by Fatty 1 and Fatty 2, who are two local stray cats fed by the westerners inhabiting our hotel. They are nurtured every morning with ample dishes of boiled eggs and grilled meats pilfered off the breakfast tables by the guests. Fatty 1 and Fatty 1 slightly remind me of Sir Winston Churchill. They enjoy the establishment of the hotel, their eminence in the local cat order, while their exaggerated girths, hanging over their waistlines like puffed up balloons, mark their good fortune. If I offered one a cigar, I’m sure he would be puff on it slowly, blowing rings on guests walking past him.
Around the corner, a little further down the lane, there are eight elderly ladies, scruffy and boney, sitting cross-legged on the road begging for money. I’ve been told not to give them money as it only encourages their trade. Covered in tatty saris, it’s hard to believe they have the means to work any more. They are overlooked while we indulge the cats.
India is by all accounts entering a new age. On the streets and in the shopping malls there are symbols and insignias of its hungry new wealth and prosperity. You can find just about any international designer here. Nestling behind forbidden walls lie swish boutiques offering a tempting range of designer clothes at a third of the equivalent price in Australia. But only a fraction of the city’s population is permitted through the formidable gates securing these shops. Entry is based, I imagine, on where you sit in the caste system.
Once I step outside of the commercial fortresses, I am hit by the clamour of the city’s streets. The noise is relentless. Cars toot to signal their intentions and factories drum to the beat of their busy machines. There are so many cars on the roads that two lanes make four lanes, or six, depending on the time of the day. Suzukis and Mercedes Benz jostle for driving space between bullock carts and auto rickshaws. And, for all this mayhem, there is order. I haven’t come across too many accidents yet.
There are threads of India’s medieval past interwoven between the tokens of its modernism. India has over 540 tribal groups who continue to speak their own languages and uphold their traditional practices. Sally and I went for a drive to a hill station yesterday and saw men, half my age, wearing a simple loin cloth as they herded goats along the road. Young girls were washing plates in their make-shift homes, dressed in vibrant saris, their hands painted in henna. They have inexplicably retained their curious and enchanting customs in spite of the pull from the commercial world.
Yet, not all of the traditions of this country are so laudable. I was warned about the predatory nature of the local men before arriving here. Personally, I have only come across softly spoken men, but I’m only seeing half the picture. Middle age and the isolation of living in an expatriate bubble seem to be protecting me from the worst of India. A rape case is allegedly reported every 20 minutes here. It’s a horrifying statistic that has been brought to the world’s attention by the appalling attack on the female student last month by six men on a bus in New Delhi.
Out of this crime has come some good. The rape case on the bus was so galling that there has been an uprising, of sorts, in the streets of New Delhi. India is having its own ‘Arab Spring’ driven by a call for better recognition and rights for women, and a shift in culture within the male dominated judicial and political apparatus that upholds these vicissitude values. As with the Arab Spring, social media is driving the momentum for change.
It’s hard to associate India with its ignominy towards women. There is a lot of laughter on the streets of Mumbai. The locals tell me that there is a less crime here than in New Delhi. The competition simmering between Mumbai and New Delhi reminds me of the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne. Maybe Mumbai has its own brand of equality. Or the locals here see New Delhi as another state, with its set of beliefs and atrocities. They certainly didn’t join their sisters and brothers in the capital city by rallying on the streets against the abysmal levels of rape across the country.
By entering a nation of over a billion people, I have awoken my senses to the extraordinary chasms between human beings. The cultures and countryside around me are poles apart to Sydney, fecund and extraordinary at times, crushing and devastating at other moments. I might not like everything that I see but I am adjusting to this new terrain. On our walk around the hotel grounds this morning, Sally and I talked in broken English to the ladies tending to the gardens. Dressed in tatty green uniforms, they had decorated their hair in sprays of red and yellow flowers. They laughed gently at me when I acknowledged their handiwork and then carried on gardening. In the heat of the tropical day they can still create beauty in the garden’s beds or in their hair. I must learn their craft during my time here.
Looking out of my hotel window onto a mish-mash of shanty homes and medium high rise buildings, I have to remind myself every day that I made the right decision to move here. We’re still not sure if we’ll be based in Mumbai or New Delhi so our hotel, located in central Mumbai, is our temporary home. Already it has a family feel. The sofa is splattered with the leftovers of Sally’s dinners and the books that I promised myself to read for the past twelve months have followed me here, continuing to collect dust on the bedside table. I find that bedside tables always look the same from a certain angle, layered in identical books, crushed newspapers and stained mugs.
If I roll back one month, I was living out a scene set in Sydney’s suburbia. The picture was timeless. There were my two Burmese cats sunning themselves on the balcony, Sally was reading on the wooden floor decked out in rugs and toys, and outside the air was filled with the squabble of Brush Turkeys at war with the local moggies. Pungent and rowdy, the smells and sounds could have been replicated just about anywhere up and down the NSW coast line. My forefathers would have tasted the same Eucalypt tangs and heard the racket of the roosting turkeys a century earlier. It was a daily drama that almost escaped me, as if my ears had dimmed out to the orchestra of the Australian wildlife that played outside my bedroom window from dawn to dusk.
In the new setting of Mumbai, the heavens are blanketed by the smog of car fumes and factory waste. The space is grey and opaque, as thick as a mist rolling off the Blue Mountains. Predatory crows circle the skies in packs. My Burmese cats have been replaced by Fatty 1 and Fatty 2, who are two local stray cats fed by the westerners inhabiting our hotel. They are nurtured every morning with ample dishes of boiled eggs and grilled meats pilfered off the breakfast tables by the guests. Fatty 1 and Fatty 1 slightly remind me of Sir Winston Churchill. They enjoy the establishment of the hotel, their eminence in the local cat order, while their exaggerated girths, hanging over their waistlines like puffed up balloons, mark their good fortune. If I offered one a cigar, I’m sure he would be puff on it slowly, blowing rings on guests walking past him.
Around the corner, a little further down the lane, there are eight elderly ladies, scruffy and boney, sitting cross-legged on the road begging for money. I’ve been told not to give them money as it only encourages their trade. Covered in tatty saris, it’s hard to believe they have the means to work any more. They are overlooked while we indulge the cats.
India is by all accounts entering a new age. On the streets and in the shopping malls there are symbols and insignias of its hungry new wealth and prosperity. You can find just about any international designer here. Nestling behind forbidden walls lie swish boutiques offering a tempting range of designer clothes at a third of the equivalent price in Australia. But only a fraction of the city’s population is permitted through the formidable gates securing these shops. Entry is based, I imagine, on where you sit in the caste system.
Once I step outside of the commercial fortresses, I am hit by the clamour of the city’s streets. The noise is relentless. Cars toot to signal their intentions and factories drum to the beat of their busy machines. There are so many cars on the roads that two lanes make four lanes, or six, depending on the time of the day. Suzukis and Mercedes Benz jostle for driving space between bullock carts and auto rickshaws. And, for all this mayhem, there is order. I haven’t come across too many accidents yet.
There are threads of India’s medieval past interwoven between the tokens of its modernism. India has over 540 tribal groups who continue to speak their own languages and uphold their traditional practices. Sally and I went for a drive to a hill station yesterday and saw men, half my age, wearing a simple loin cloth as they herded goats along the road. Young girls were washing plates in their make-shift homes, dressed in vibrant saris, their hands painted in henna. They have inexplicably retained their curious and enchanting customs in spite of the pull from the commercial world.
Yet, not all of the traditions of this country are so laudable. I was warned about the predatory nature of the local men before arriving here. Personally, I have only come across softly spoken men, but I’m only seeing half the picture. Middle age and the isolation of living in an expatriate bubble seem to be protecting me from the worst of India. A rape case is allegedly reported every 20 minutes here. It’s a horrifying statistic that has been brought to the world’s attention by the appalling attack on the female student last month by six men on a bus in New Delhi.
Out of this crime has come some good. The rape case on the bus was so galling that there has been an uprising, of sorts, in the streets of New Delhi. India is having its own ‘Arab Spring’ driven by a call for better recognition and rights for women, and a shift in culture within the male dominated judicial and political apparatus that upholds these vicissitude values. As with the Arab Spring, social media is driving the momentum for change.
It’s hard to associate India with its ignominy towards women. There is a lot of laughter on the streets of Mumbai. The locals tell me that there is a less crime here than in New Delhi. The competition simmering between Mumbai and New Delhi reminds me of the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne. Maybe Mumbai has its own brand of equality. Or the locals here see New Delhi as another state, with its set of beliefs and atrocities. They certainly didn’t join their sisters and brothers in the capital city by rallying on the streets against the abysmal levels of rape across the country.
By entering a nation of over a billion people, I have awoken my senses to the extraordinary chasms between human beings. The cultures and countryside around me are poles apart to Sydney, fecund and extraordinary at times, crushing and devastating at other moments. I might not like everything that I see but I am adjusting to this new terrain. On our walk around the hotel grounds this morning, Sally and I talked in broken English to the ladies tending to the gardens. Dressed in tatty green uniforms, they had decorated their hair in sprays of red and yellow flowers. They laughed gently at me when I acknowledged their handiwork and then carried on gardening. In the heat of the tropical day they can still create beauty in the garden’s beds or in their hair. I must learn their craft during my time here.
January 8, 2013
Putting Up the Flyscreens
I recently flew from Sydney to Mumbai with my fourteen year old girl, Sally, who has severe autism. She loved the journey. Everything, from the sight of the large jumbo jets parked at SydneyAirport to the roar of the engine as our plane heaved into the air, caused her to scream in delight. I’m not sure if either her pleasure or her energy was matched by our fellow passengers, but they didn’t tell me as much. Well, admittedly, some did with their looks. Flying brings out a unique type of intolerance in some travellers.
We are leaving Australia once more for another posting, for another adventure abroad. I was as restless as a monkey in a cage in Sydney. Not that I have anything against Sydney. It’s one of my favourite cities. I love the harbour, the Northern Beaches and my mates there. Yet I couldn’t settle. I caught the expatriate bug sometime in the 1970s when living abroad with my parents and have never been able to shake it off.
My husband, Michael, and I had talked about moving back to Asia for some time. A trip to the UK via Hong Kong last August rekindled this fire. I had in mind a posting to Indonesia, something close to home, so when Michael told me that we were heading to India with his work my initial response was ‘But I said Indonesia?’ He replied, ‘Hey, it’s close enough. India starts with an In and ends with an A.’ For a couple of weeks I didn’t think much more about India, retreating into an effortless head space that said let’s pretend this isn’t happening. One day I reluctantly read a book on India, followed by another. Then all I wanted to read were books focusing on the country. In a reverse of sentiment, I packed my bags two weeks ago with a measure of excitement about moving to this diverse and rich culture.
My flight to Mumbai brought to mind many other long journeys with Sally. This trip was just as exhausting as the rest but this time around I didn’t seem to care so much about the other passengers’ feelings towards us. In spite of my seemingly cool composure, I’m often moaning inside on a plane journey with Sally. You know the sound of a babbling baby on a plane? Yep, it might be us, except that Sally is much older than a baby. It leaves with me with a feeling of despair and despondency. Time, thankfully, seems to have eroded many of these attacks of anguish. My skin is tougher, wiser. I now see the looks of disapproval on the strangers’ faces in a room, or at the airport, or on a plane, but I don’t see them as much either. I call it the flyscreen effect. The comforting thing about flyscreens is that you can look out from the safety of your arm chair but catch only what you want to see.
Does this mean that I am an embittered person? Am I less mindful of others’ feelings? Nope. I think there is a still a kind and compassionate person inside there. I’m just more resilient to others’ expressions. I also hope that Australian society is mature enough now to accept everyone in their society, disabilities and idiosyncrasies and warts and all.
I have been in Mumbai for all of seven days now which, admittedly, only gives me a sneak insight on this dazzling place. My first impressions run along everything that I had read about in the Lonely Planet guide: a messy city, polluted, a contrast of the extremes of rich and poor people, and, yet for all of this, it’s likable. Mumbai reminds me of a set of dentures whose beauty is masked by too many stains, cracks and lack of care. Behind the grime lies the architecture and soul of a magnificent city, once the jewel in the British Crown. There are avenues lined with proud, statuesque buildings, hidden under grime and decay. The edges of the well designed avenues fight for space against open rubbish, mangy dogs and makeshift homes constructed out of others’ leftovers. There is a song in the air filled with Bollywood music and the tooting of the traffic. Sally is transfixed by the colour and confusion; I’m agog at all the culture.
When Sally and I flew into Mumbai, our plane closed in over a range of flat-roofed mountains resembling a checkered grey and sandy tablecloth. If a Martian had arrived on Planet Earth and landed on this mountain range, it would have thought our planet was disarmingly similar to his own home. But if the Martian had arrived further west and planted itself into Mumbai, it would naturally think that Planet Earth is a populated and polluted place. Mumbai, I have read, is the most densely congested city on the earth. It feels busy. It looks tightly packed from the air too.
As the plane descended onto the tarmac, we flew between suburbs of densely packed apartments glued together by wedges of slums. In every corner of Mumbai there are shanty homes sealing up the cracks in the spaces. The poverty is relentless.
You can cushion yourself quite easily from this other side. We are staying in a spacious serviced apartment featuring a swimming pool that overlooks a lake allegedly populated by crocodiles. Michael’s driver drove Sally and me around Mumbai yesterday. When we had half an hour to fill at the end of the outing, he took us to one of the top hotels in the city for a coffee. I had never seen such grandeur. And I have lived in the ostentatious splendour of the Middle East. In the foyer there was a scattering of well-heeled gentlewomen. They shared the same countenance of those with a certain wealth: it’s a gaze that passes over you, an invisibility, making you feel slightly unnoticed. So I got the impalpable look of not quite existing on this Planet Earth. Except that these very women glanced back at us. Not at me, exactly, but at Sally. I think Sally’s disability was as alien to them as a Martian landing on Bond iBeach. When something is so unusual, so disarming, it makes you look twice. We rarely get the second look any more in Sydney.
I hope that I never see past the disadvantaged people of this country. Michael says there is poverty and wealth everywhere in the world, and you can’t sit in places like Australia or England and pretend such extreme poverty doesn’t exist. I hope, for my part, that my skin doesn’t thicken to the point where I find myself overlooking the slums, the beggars and the naked children here. Empathy is what hopefully nourishes and comforts us as human beings. While my skin is thickening, it’s a special kind of coating: one to protect Sally and myself from the unguarded looks of others. It’s a shield constructed exclusively for Sally. I mustn’t be guilty of putting up the flyscreens too much, otherwise I might overlook those less fortunate around me.
We are leaving Australia once more for another posting, for another adventure abroad. I was as restless as a monkey in a cage in Sydney. Not that I have anything against Sydney. It’s one of my favourite cities. I love the harbour, the Northern Beaches and my mates there. Yet I couldn’t settle. I caught the expatriate bug sometime in the 1970s when living abroad with my parents and have never been able to shake it off.
My husband, Michael, and I had talked about moving back to Asia for some time. A trip to the UK via Hong Kong last August rekindled this fire. I had in mind a posting to Indonesia, something close to home, so when Michael told me that we were heading to India with his work my initial response was ‘But I said Indonesia?’ He replied, ‘Hey, it’s close enough. India starts with an In and ends with an A.’ For a couple of weeks I didn’t think much more about India, retreating into an effortless head space that said let’s pretend this isn’t happening. One day I reluctantly read a book on India, followed by another. Then all I wanted to read were books focusing on the country. In a reverse of sentiment, I packed my bags two weeks ago with a measure of excitement about moving to this diverse and rich culture.
My flight to Mumbai brought to mind many other long journeys with Sally. This trip was just as exhausting as the rest but this time around I didn’t seem to care so much about the other passengers’ feelings towards us. In spite of my seemingly cool composure, I’m often moaning inside on a plane journey with Sally. You know the sound of a babbling baby on a plane? Yep, it might be us, except that Sally is much older than a baby. It leaves with me with a feeling of despair and despondency. Time, thankfully, seems to have eroded many of these attacks of anguish. My skin is tougher, wiser. I now see the looks of disapproval on the strangers’ faces in a room, or at the airport, or on a plane, but I don’t see them as much either. I call it the flyscreen effect. The comforting thing about flyscreens is that you can look out from the safety of your arm chair but catch only what you want to see.
Does this mean that I am an embittered person? Am I less mindful of others’ feelings? Nope. I think there is a still a kind and compassionate person inside there. I’m just more resilient to others’ expressions. I also hope that Australian society is mature enough now to accept everyone in their society, disabilities and idiosyncrasies and warts and all.
I have been in Mumbai for all of seven days now which, admittedly, only gives me a sneak insight on this dazzling place. My first impressions run along everything that I had read about in the Lonely Planet guide: a messy city, polluted, a contrast of the extremes of rich and poor people, and, yet for all of this, it’s likable. Mumbai reminds me of a set of dentures whose beauty is masked by too many stains, cracks and lack of care. Behind the grime lies the architecture and soul of a magnificent city, once the jewel in the British Crown. There are avenues lined with proud, statuesque buildings, hidden under grime and decay. The edges of the well designed avenues fight for space against open rubbish, mangy dogs and makeshift homes constructed out of others’ leftovers. There is a song in the air filled with Bollywood music and the tooting of the traffic. Sally is transfixed by the colour and confusion; I’m agog at all the culture.
When Sally and I flew into Mumbai, our plane closed in over a range of flat-roofed mountains resembling a checkered grey and sandy tablecloth. If a Martian had arrived on Planet Earth and landed on this mountain range, it would have thought our planet was disarmingly similar to his own home. But if the Martian had arrived further west and planted itself into Mumbai, it would naturally think that Planet Earth is a populated and polluted place. Mumbai, I have read, is the most densely congested city on the earth. It feels busy. It looks tightly packed from the air too.
As the plane descended onto the tarmac, we flew between suburbs of densely packed apartments glued together by wedges of slums. In every corner of Mumbai there are shanty homes sealing up the cracks in the spaces. The poverty is relentless.
You can cushion yourself quite easily from this other side. We are staying in a spacious serviced apartment featuring a swimming pool that overlooks a lake allegedly populated by crocodiles. Michael’s driver drove Sally and me around Mumbai yesterday. When we had half an hour to fill at the end of the outing, he took us to one of the top hotels in the city for a coffee. I had never seen such grandeur. And I have lived in the ostentatious splendour of the Middle East. In the foyer there was a scattering of well-heeled gentlewomen. They shared the same countenance of those with a certain wealth: it’s a gaze that passes over you, an invisibility, making you feel slightly unnoticed. So I got the impalpable look of not quite existing on this Planet Earth. Except that these very women glanced back at us. Not at me, exactly, but at Sally. I think Sally’s disability was as alien to them as a Martian landing on Bond iBeach. When something is so unusual, so disarming, it makes you look twice. We rarely get the second look any more in Sydney.
I hope that I never see past the disadvantaged people of this country. Michael says there is poverty and wealth everywhere in the world, and you can’t sit in places like Australia or England and pretend such extreme poverty doesn’t exist. I hope, for my part, that my skin doesn’t thicken to the point where I find myself overlooking the slums, the beggars and the naked children here. Empathy is what hopefully nourishes and comforts us as human beings. While my skin is thickening, it’s a special kind of coating: one to protect Sally and myself from the unguarded looks of others. It’s a shield constructed exclusively for Sally. I mustn’t be guilty of putting up the flyscreens too much, otherwise I might overlook those less fortunate around me.
September 16, 2012
Writing the Great Tome can take a while
Ideas hit me with the regularity of my alarm clock. I start them and I drop them. With every change in the season, I have joined Salsa dancing lessons at the local community centre, only to drop out of them after five weeks. I have enrolled in more French classes than Woody Allen has made films. Yet, for all of my falling in and out of grand ideas, I have seen one or two of them to their full completion. This happened with writing my memoir.
Many of us think about writing the grand tome, the one that will jostle for shelf space with J.K. Rowling at the bookshop. I had images of the front cover even before I had plotted out the story line. Writing my ‘book’ had sat in the back conscious of my mind for many years. One morning, while I was muddling through another mini-crisis that had interrupted my autistic daughter’s home programme, I thought that my time had come to write it all down. I had a story to tell.
So off I went with the speed of a wombat crawling through the snow. The words lingered slowly in my thoughts; the sentences had the twisted and tangled resonance of a cracked window screen. The first chapter took three months to write and, even then, it was re-written a year later in the matter of two hours. The first lesson I learnt in writing my memoir is to have a clear structure of the story line.
In this puzzle of writing, just as mysterious as understanding my daughter’s autism, I kept going. Sometimes the words came naturally, whizzing and zipping in abundance, and then the ideas came to a screeching halt.
I started to talk about writing my memoir. The disarming part is that when you are unpublished, many people don’t believe that you will ever get published. I was treated with a listless curiosity, as if I was stepping out on a treacherous journey of no return. ‘Another wannabe writer,’ I could almost hear them whisper to themselves with a wearisome voice.
The next lesson I learnt was to engage an editor. We had moved to Pittwater in Sydney, renting a house overlooking Refuge Bay. I had written a good chunk of my memoir by now but I wasn’t sure if it was worthy of publication. I was so embroiled in my own tunnel of thoughts that I couldn’t see the good sentences for the bad ones. And I was getting stuck on the bad ones. My editor didn’t use a red pen but I could almost see her red markings on the computer screen when she returned my manuscript by email. Her feedback was unobtrusive, poignant, and had the effect of liberating my thoughts. Within six months, I had finished the book.
Most of my published book was written while living in Pittwater. Much of my earlier work, jotted down while living in the Middle East, was discarded. I wonder if the magical qualities of the Pittwater life helped with my progress or whether I had sorted out my writer’s angst by the time we had moved back home.
Our rented bungalow, typical of the plantation homes in Pittwater, poked out of the hills that line Refuge Bay. Save for the decks, it was mostly hidden under a wild, bushy undergrowth. Across my computer screen, I looked onto sailing boats bobbing with the tides. I enjoyed these distractions. The cockatoos, basking in the knowledge that they had found an audience in me, would sway like pendulums in the gully below our house. They watched me as much as I watched them. There is no beauty in the call of the cockatoo but it had an edifying effect on my writing. My ideas and sentences rolled in with the surge of their screeches. Writing in this environment was safe and secure, a refuge from the swings and tides of caring for a severely autistic girl. I was no longer muddling about in my own inertia.
We left Pittwater at the end of last year and my book was published in May this year. I miss Pittwater with the longing of a paradise found and lost. We return on weekend breaks, having moved closer to the city of Sydney, but I often dream when we will return again for good.
Many of us think about writing the grand tome, the one that will jostle for shelf space with J.K. Rowling at the bookshop. I had images of the front cover even before I had plotted out the story line. Writing my ‘book’ had sat in the back conscious of my mind for many years. One morning, while I was muddling through another mini-crisis that had interrupted my autistic daughter’s home programme, I thought that my time had come to write it all down. I had a story to tell.
So off I went with the speed of a wombat crawling through the snow. The words lingered slowly in my thoughts; the sentences had the twisted and tangled resonance of a cracked window screen. The first chapter took three months to write and, even then, it was re-written a year later in the matter of two hours. The first lesson I learnt in writing my memoir is to have a clear structure of the story line.
In this puzzle of writing, just as mysterious as understanding my daughter’s autism, I kept going. Sometimes the words came naturally, whizzing and zipping in abundance, and then the ideas came to a screeching halt.
I started to talk about writing my memoir. The disarming part is that when you are unpublished, many people don’t believe that you will ever get published. I was treated with a listless curiosity, as if I was stepping out on a treacherous journey of no return. ‘Another wannabe writer,’ I could almost hear them whisper to themselves with a wearisome voice.
The next lesson I learnt was to engage an editor. We had moved to Pittwater in Sydney, renting a house overlooking Refuge Bay. I had written a good chunk of my memoir by now but I wasn’t sure if it was worthy of publication. I was so embroiled in my own tunnel of thoughts that I couldn’t see the good sentences for the bad ones. And I was getting stuck on the bad ones. My editor didn’t use a red pen but I could almost see her red markings on the computer screen when she returned my manuscript by email. Her feedback was unobtrusive, poignant, and had the effect of liberating my thoughts. Within six months, I had finished the book.
Most of my published book was written while living in Pittwater. Much of my earlier work, jotted down while living in the Middle East, was discarded. I wonder if the magical qualities of the Pittwater life helped with my progress or whether I had sorted out my writer’s angst by the time we had moved back home.
Our rented bungalow, typical of the plantation homes in Pittwater, poked out of the hills that line Refuge Bay. Save for the decks, it was mostly hidden under a wild, bushy undergrowth. Across my computer screen, I looked onto sailing boats bobbing with the tides. I enjoyed these distractions. The cockatoos, basking in the knowledge that they had found an audience in me, would sway like pendulums in the gully below our house. They watched me as much as I watched them. There is no beauty in the call of the cockatoo but it had an edifying effect on my writing. My ideas and sentences rolled in with the surge of their screeches. Writing in this environment was safe and secure, a refuge from the swings and tides of caring for a severely autistic girl. I was no longer muddling about in my own inertia.
We left Pittwater at the end of last year and my book was published in May this year. I miss Pittwater with the longing of a paradise found and lost. We return on weekend breaks, having moved closer to the city of Sydney, but I often dream when we will return again for good.
