On the Eve of Battle

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I don’t like cricket. Oh no.

I love it!

….sang Reggae band 10cc in 1978. This Friday, thousands will be heading for Trent Bridge in Nottingham to watch the India-England test match with this mantra in their heads.

I will join them on the 2nd day, to sit high above the action with my husband and his friends. As always, we will be buffeted by strong winds up there in ‘the heavens’, holding on to each other so we don’t get blown off! It will drizzle through the day, my extremities will freeze, and the damp will find its way into my bones through layers of clothing. The men will fortify themselves with a tad too much of ‘a little something to keep them warm’, whilst I keep the soggy sandwiches company. But at no point will I consider leaving or opt out of our day at ‘the crickitt’ the next year.

This mystifies some of my English friends who are either disenchanted with the game or never got into it. I cannot make them understand without teleporting them to the Eden Gardens in the late Eighties where I watched the elegant Azharuddin score a poetic ton, or into any ordinary Calcutta home in the climactic moments of an Indo-Pak one-dayer, when family and friends (and a few strays from the street) are huddled around the TV, eyes glued to the screen, hearts beating in unison, till the last ball is bowled. Each doing what they fervently believe they need to, to see India to victory-crossing their fingers, praying under their breath, or scrambling at the last minute to tug on those lucky socks! And the jubilation, that feeling of sheer ecstasy when India won; I know it’s been a while but can you remember that charged atmosphere, the surge of people on the streets, the noise of every radio and TV in full blast, and the fireworks that lit up the night sky?

How can I explain to the uninitiated that I love cricket because it connects me to my fellow Indian and allows us to experience a shared high every now and then?

So, march on, Time! On Saturday, I will be there in full regalia, in saffron, white and green bits and bobs cobbled together from the depths of my wardrobe (pity I couldn’t find any face paint). I will nail my colours to the mast and look pityingly upon those who do not feel the same fervour. I will stand up and be counted, despite the vertigo that drawing myself up to my full five feet in those dizzyingly high stands can trigger. I will endure the gimlet eyed scrutiny of overzealous security personnel because I must be there for the boys (no, not my husband and his friends, the Indian Team)!

And then, if it turns out to be a beautiful day when I can watch my favourite sport basking in the mellow English sun, I shall pray for rain!

The Food of Love

Also on MSN India
If you are looking for that oysters-dipped-in-pink champagne recipe (always served wearing red stilettos and nothing much besides), or you want to know whether white shallots from Albania munched at bedtime will rekindle passions, this isn’t the page for you.

I am not withholding information hoping you buy my new cookbook out in stores now (you’re confusing me with Nigella Lawson, it’s easily done!); I simply don’t know and wasn’t planning to find out.

We don’t have oysters or shallots flown in from Albania very often, but we are always a happy twosome in the kitchen, cocooned in the smells and billowing smoke of our dish of the day. Sometimes we are just adding our own twist to a family recipe, or creating flavours of our very own.

My husband is the latter kind of cook, experimental and daring, with a flair for chucking things into the pot and getting it right. I am of the former school; I usually start with a recipe from my mother (or some other accomplished cook in the family), find that I don’t have the ingredients I need, and then, put in tentative new touches, adding more as the pot bubbles and lets off fragrant steam and I gain in confidence, to create a new variation of an old favourite.

It doesn’t always work; I have served my husband, my new boyfriend then, Shrivelled Shrimps in Gritty Tomato, and my visiting family, my usually good Coriander Chicken, in a watery grave.

Sometimes I get distracted, as with the shrimps, when I thought I’d scrub up nice before he arrived, leaving them to simmer. They withered and died instead. That he ate it with pretended gusto was testament to how much he wanted to keep seeing me!

On the rare occasions that our usually happy equation isn’t working, my husband will throw in a fistful of ingredients using his unerring feel for the right quantities, whilst I gingerly sprinkle little bits of this and that; his flavours drown out mine and we end up with a hotchpotch instead of a hot pot. I must admit it works best when he takes the lead and I play apprentice; he is an artist in the kitchen and that’s the only place I’m prepared to be obedient.

My idea of the ‘food of love’ is not any of the exotic recipes peddled by TV chefs, it isn’t even about that old adage- ‘the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach’. It wouldn’t be true in our case, would it? It isn’t even true the other way ‘round, because what first impressed me about his cooking wasn’t how good it was (which it was) but that we sat and chatted in his kitchen while he cooked (luurvved the masterful way he crushed the plum tomatoes, by the way!), that it was all done in a jiffy, with plenty of flair but no ceremony, and that the conversation flowed easily through the evening from food, friends, family, films, travel and back again. And that none of it was a chore!

Of course, cooking can be drudgery. I should know, I used to hate the little kitchen in my old house because it was where my ex-husband cooked his favourite food-'ready meals' in the microwave, and where year on year, after a long day at work, I would wash the dishes in the grey light filtering through the ugly lace curtains his father had given us. I didn’t think I would ever enjoy cooking but all that changed when I bought my freedom and the house. Suddenly, the kitchen (minus the lace curtains and the ex-husband) was a charming haven, and concocting dishes with fresh ingredients, an exciting adventure.

I’m no expert (its Dr Ruth you’ve got me mixed up with now and I’m not impressed!) but my experience tells me that enjoying the everyday things together makes a big difference-a shared love of good food and its preparation, or even that most tedious of tasks-grocery shopping. We actually like shopping for food, at farmers’ markets and delis and quaint little fresh food shops, which usually require a drive out into the countryside and necessarily, a picnic on the way back!

So, I don’t know about you but I won’t be buying any pickled Bushbaby brains to take to bed with me anytime soon, local cheese and crusty bread in a wooded copse on a sunny day will do us fine.

A Slap in Time...

Have you ever wanted a really big, wet, cold fish to slap someone around the gills with?

I find that I need a ready supply of such fish to get slap-happy with, especially when it comes to fictional characters.

Inveterate readers will know what I mean. You feel compelled to finish the book, but the spineless hero or wilting heroine makes you want to slit your wrists with their dithering and mewling and general inability to get things right. You scream at the pages, you toss the book aside and stomp off, you return in the hope that they have taken heed and changed their ways, but no, there they are still, half an hour after you delivered your heated diatribe, wringing their hands and wondering what to do! At times like this, you want to give them a good shake and a resounding slap and send them on their way (in the right direction for a change) with a flea in their ear.

Take, for example, the book I finished yesterday-I won’t mention the title because books get passed around my family of rabid readers and this one hasn't yet-the author of this novel has generously endowed the book with two simpering heroines instead of one. As if that wasn’t enough to satisfy what she imagined was the readers’ hunger for doormats, she has also thrown in some listless men who suffer from the same inertia as her heroines. The book is well written so I finished it but towards the end I was restlessly moving from room to room, willing the characters to get on with their lives, hoping my show of energy might rub off! Rub off it did, but alas, they hadn’t listened to a word I’d said, and made quite a mess of things.

Imagine, I told my husband last night over a delicious melon and salami starter, you are a pale and elegant woman standing on a bridge over a fast flowing river, holding a gun. He said he felt rather more like a hungry man eager to get on with his nice melon and salami starter, but I digress. This woman is being approached from either side of the bridge by her lover and her sister (the sister thought this lover was her's, if that’s not too confusing) both of whom want that gun to kill the other. If you were the elegant alabaster woman on the bridge clutching this gun, what would you do?

You would drop the gun into the fast flowing river and say bye-bye. Problem solved- gosh, what a no-brainer! But the author obviously thought this lacked drama and what her silly addled heroine really needed was a terrible dilemma that would tear her apart; she needed to decide whether to kill her lover or her sister, so she could swan about tragically thereafter, when all she was required to do was play Pooh-sticks with her firearm!

Can you imagine my frustration? Do you remember wanting to tear your hair out when luckless, steadfast Melanie continued to stand by her man despite his mooning around Scarlett O’ Hara in ‘Gone with the Wind’ or the feeling of unalloyed irritation with Mary Boleyn when she moped around every royal palace in England because her sister Anne wouldn’t let her see her own children in ‘The Other Boleyn Girl’? Now, orders from the Queen or not, I would have just grabbed my kiddies and skedaddled, wouldn’t you?

I’m sure you can think of countless examples of such idiocy. And why is it that it is more often the lot of women characters than men- this burden of folly, the lack of good sense or ability to make a decision or stand up for themselves, when in real life we are strong and determined and usually get our man/job/last chocolate in the box?

Perhaps they are masochistic, perhaps they enjoy being trampled on. I say, sisters, we could all do with a big store of wet, cold fish to slap some sense into them, 1920’s comic reel style, as they deserve (soon as we’ve figured out how to cross the fact-fiction divide)!

And a large order of rotten tomatoes for their authors when they come to town.


P.S. Yes, yes, I know Margaret Mitchell is dead, please don’t point that out.
P.P.S. Pooh-sticks: not a scatological stunt but a game invented by Winnie the Pooh

Shades of Madness

OK, so my blog is a riot of incandescent colours.

I like bright and the longer I live in England the more I like it. On a beautiful day, England is a technicolour marvel- endless fields of red poppies, emerald green meadows, red brick toy towns nestling amongst them and just the bluest of blue skies. But a lot of the time, unfortunately, it’s shrouded in a steady grey drizzle, and that’s certainly true this summer. Luckily on our wedding day a month ago, we had the most glorious sunshine; it came out of nowhere, melting away at the end of the day for the rest of the summer.

You never really get used to a sodden grey world. Although England can be truly lovely in the sunshine or when frosted with snow in winter, all the woollies and romantic log fires on this itsy bitsy isle cannot stop the damp from creeping into your bones. And then it heads north for the little grey cells and that’s when madness sets in.

You crave warmth and colour to an unnatural degree; you find yourself buying big, furry, orange and purple jumpers (not one orange and one purple, but both together-stripey, like a bumblebee on LSD) ignoring the little voice of your Fashion Sense wailing inconsolably in the farthest reaches of your mind. You itch to filch your visiting sister’s many-hued ‘monkey cap’. You get into a crowded tram and think thoughts that would have been unimaginable in a similar situation in Kolkata; ‘How nice of this smelly old man to want to keep me warm!'

As the coldest months approach, you might even get a bit SAD. I scoffed at Seasonal Affective Disorder when I lived in sunny Kolkata and a hapless uncle (distant, I hasten to add) in Finland got it, yanked out all his hair, danced on tables and pulled faces at my aunt whom he pretended not to know (all in public), and then took himself off to an asylum by the Black Sea to recover from the trauma of having flipped his lid.

In England, we all get a bit SAD after Christmas, when there are still three months of winter to live through but no further festive loot from friends and family to cheer us up. Here, there is no exodus to the Black Sea or its equivalent, but there is a heightened sense of injustice and a flood of bitter complaints from just about everybody from the PM pontificating on telly to the office ‘hygienist’.

The English feel hard done by at the best of times but when the weather is really bad, they would even waylay a one-armed Rwandan boy soldier to sob on his shoulder (the remaining one). ‘Mustn’t grumble’ they cry, ‘but my life is the most blighted on the planet. It has rained all week and my Petunias are dead’. In the past, going out and bagging a nice sunny country would have done the trick, but this is a habit some of them want to kick. Now they resort to retail therapy, they buy bright clothes; ‘big boned’ women go marauding through malls to get themselves some eye-popping pick-me-up pink.

I am bitching, but really, I shouldn't; I may not be 'big boned’ yet but I have occasionally succumbed to the lure of luminescent raiments, as confessed earlier. It is also a rare sunny day and my beautiful garden beckons. Most of all, I am now married to the most wonderful man and I have this bright new blog to get me back into writing after seven long years.