Siyaah Haashiye

Travel Tip: I am ashamed to confess that I never could distinguish who is from where just by looking at them… not even the Chinese… I keep thinking they are from Burma. Or, horror of horrors, via surnames… so no, I do not know where Mehras come from… or Sharmas… I just know the Iyers and Chatterjees and that I think is because mom used to tell me about them in her bedtime stories. Aside. If she told them to me, do they not then become my bedtime stories instead? Aside over. And yet here, I can always thump my chest with conviction and proclaim to all, sundry and Australians that awast there matey… behold there a damsel from India… yes, it is just the damsels… it’s not that I have anything against Indian men… on the contrary, I am purr-fectly fond of Chunnu-the-chaatwala… it’s just that the men don’t wear gendero-national-blah indicators in the form of kaajal… or insist on calling it kohl. In fact, in most cases inst. kaajal is also eminently indicative of age and/or ideological leanings of the particular specimen in hand… it is quite easy for the expert to tell apart a feminist from an anarchist from a deconstructionist from a bebopper from a librarian predicated solely on the quality, quantity and strokes of kaajal involved. So now you know… not that you wanted to… but Jeopardy worked in mysterious ways.


Flow of Reason: “The Shop Around the Corner” followed by “You’ve Got Mail”… that my freiend, is the flow of reason… and I am going to let that misspelling remain as much as it is against my firm convictions that the Giant was the first Chipko… because it is a statement… and I’m out of kaajal… and if you hadn’t guessed that by now, then you don’t exist.


P.S. In continuation of living with Mallus in Hyderabad and learning Malyalam, I am now living with Columbians and Germans and Slovenians and Japanese and learning Korean… I personally view this progression as highly typical of my life thus far. You might not… but you don’t exist anyway so what the hell.