Ganpati Bappa Morya!

Powai Lake’s lit like a Christmas tree. The approach road’s jammed, strings of headlights tailing off into the distance. Fireworks pepper the sky, and the night pulses with the beat of drums. Ganesh is going home.

One and a half days after Hindus welcome the figure of Ganesh into their homes, with special prayers and rituals, he’s carried out to be sent on his way again, by being symbolically immersed in a body of water. The enormous public Ganeshes, in communal pandals, remain in place until the end of Sarvajanik, after the full ten days’ celebrating. So, tonight is family night.

The family go to the idol-maker, to collect their Ganesh, and pay him in cash, wrapped in a mango leaf. The journey home’s precarious, because if the idol’s mishandled, and chipped or damaged in any way, the celebrations are over for the family, for that year. It’s with considerable relief, all round, then, that Ganesh is safely installed in the home, duly anointed with kumkum and presented with the traditional brass tray of fruit and vegetables, the PhalavaLi.

From our apartment, we walk round the block, into the centre of Powai, where it’s business as usual. People are shopping at D-Mart and Crossword, Papa John’s Pizza restaurant’s full, the paan-seller’s got his circle of punters, like every other night. It’s hard to find a pandal. “Rich people, no interested in Ganesh festival,” says Monu flatly. By the lake, where the labourers live in the no-lakh housing estate, there’s a pandal every hundred yards, so there seems some justification in Monu’s dismissive categorizing.

We leave the shops and restaurants, and walk down to the lakeside, following the sound of drums and singing. By the edge of the water, it’s like a funfair. Tuk-tuks pull up at the kerbside, and whole families spill out, in all their sequinned finery. Further along, in the lamplight, peering through a windscreen, we make out Ganesh sitting on Grandpa’s knee, in the passenger seat of the family car, Dad driving, and Mum, Grandma and the kids crammed in the back seat. The air’s electric with excitement and incense.

We’re a bit diffident about intruding – we’re not going anywhere unnoticed, not only do we have radio-actively pale faces, but we’re just about the only people not wearing orange – so we teeter diffidently at the entrance. Within a heartbeat, we’re hailed like long-lost relatives, with smiles and waves, and pulled inside. Within a minute, our hands are full of food.

Special dishes are prepared for this evening, and carried with the idol to the water’s edge, where final ceremonies are performed. Once food which has been offered to the deity, it’s considered to contain his blessing, and is distributed to share that blessing. Prasad. I have in my cupped hand sweets like tiny asteroids, shredded coconut, rice, shards of jaggery. Mr Roland, more conservative, accepts a green lemon.

Definitely spectators here, we’re longing to take photographs, but politeness stays our hands. After the fourth family take our photos, though – with or without the baby – we decide this can be a reciprocal arrangement, and Lord Lichfield gets the camera out.

Lining up by the water, a row of men - smooth-cheeked youths and grizzled elders alike - wearing orange or yellow t-shirts and loincloths. They stand, fidgeting on the uneven shingle in their bare feet, their chapals abandoned on the rocks. A family approaches, singing and chanting. “Ganpati Bappa...” shouts the man of the house. “Morya!” his family respond. “Mangal Moorti...” he calls. “Morya!” they finish. O Father Ganesh, come early again next year. It’s quite catching.

The Ganesh is handed over, on his plinth, to two of the bearers in the queue. Between them, they carry him to the lake, and one of them swims out, backwards, with the bobbing idol, so the family, on the shore, can watch their Ganesh enter the water. When the swimmer’s out of his depth, he lifts up the Ganesh, then plunges him underwater, then again, then again. When he immerges the idol for the last time, he puts a foot on him, to keep him submerged, until the lake seeps into the plaster. Ganesh, water-logged, is gone for good, thus safely on his way home to Kailash. The swimmer does a fast crawl back to shore, where he recovers the plinth, and deposits a symbolic nugget of river mud in its centre, before returning it to the family, who bear it off triumphantly.

The swimmers are paid, individually, by the family whose Ganesh they carry. They wait in patient line, but if a family tarries too long, chanting and waving and video-ing the departure of their Ganesh, the queue of porters gets restive, and encourages them to move on with unmistakable hand gestures and equally unequivocal unholy words.

We stand and watch, as family after family arrive, for the send-off. There’s no organised order of play, as far as we can determine, but the crowds seem to flow into order accidentally, like the Mumbai traffic at a crossroads.

An objective onlooker can’t help but see an element of competition, here, as neighbouring families strive to out-Ganesh one another, keeping up with the Kumars. It’s not a phenomenon exclusive to India, think of the flashing reindeer and inflatable snowmen which proliferate on English lawns in December. Not on the street where I live, obviously. Nor you.

On the way out again, we pass waves of new arrivals, and collect smiles and handshakes, as well as a palmful of fruit salad. Mr Roland declines, but I munch my way through chunks of apple and unpeeled lime, dotted with bright pippins of pomegranate. I have a furtive ball of modak, steamed rice dumpling, screwed into a tissue in my handbag, because I can’t swallow it, but I’m up for chopped fruit, any day.

At the entrance, there’s a right song and dance. A Ganesh has arrived, in a lorry, framed by fronds of palm, accompanied by a band of drummers and musicians, and an entire dynasty doing jigs and reels in its wake. Their painted statue is too beautiful – and surely too costly – to dissolve in the lake, but the belief is that Ganesh takes all your worries with him, so his loss is ultimately your gain. And there’s always next year, to look forward to.

La Donna è Mobile...

“Indian army,” says Monu, pointing at the five trucks lined up in front of us, going nowhere in the stationary traffic. They’ve drafted in the boys in khaki, to add backbone to Mumbai’s police force, during Ganesh Chaturthi, since, as well as being a time of celebrations, it’s a time of civil unrest. After the riots of 1992, the peace between Hindu and Muslim is only ever queasy, at best. Monu takes a hand off the wheel, to gesture at the trucks. “Army, all-time guns!” I look into the back of the open truck, at the crammed rows of soldiers in camouflage caps and shirts, leaning casually on their guns. I also see, peering closer between the rows, several bare brown feet waving in the air. ”These soldier, sleeping.” Course they are, having forty off-duty winks, just like the tuk-tuk drivers at the side of the road. I don’t know that I could concentrate on sleeping, with my nose pressed up against the stock of someone else’s gun, but perhaps this is what the military mean by fatigues.

Monu adjusts the garland looped round his three dashboard Ganeshes. Orange and yellow marigold blooms threaded together, punctuated with folded mango leaves, with a faceted disco-bauble, in eye-catching electric fuchsia, as the centre-piece. Thirty rupees, half price. A bargain.

We’re mobile shopping. I don’t mean, that we kerb-crawl, hopping into the car for the four seconds of pavement between shops. I mean, my phone’s given up the unequal struggle, and acceded defeat. Vodafone, nil – Monsoon, one. Vijay Sales is air-conditioned and roomy, with three uniformed assistants to every gleaming yard of glass counter. If you can plug it in, they sell it here.

It takes perhaps four minutes, to choose the only Nokia available, which doesn’t tell jokes, sing lullabies and double as a George Foreman Lean Mean Grilling Machine. “This model, no Bluetooth,” Sanjay the mobile-wala says, shaking his head, sadly. “This model,” I say, picking up my defunct phone, “I can’t work the calculator, so this model, no Bluetooth – no problem!” In a rare break from tradition, I opt for the pink version. I know, revolutionary. Sanjay returns, smiling, apologetic, destined to thwart. No pink in stock. By way of consolation, he brings me the blue one, which proves what I have long thought, that blue is my destiny. I’m not meant to stray beyond the turquoise-to-navy quadrant of the spectrum.

Another four minutes, and we have selected a small Philips cd-player. Silver and chubby, it also plays tape-cassettes, which only teachers and Indians still have on their shelves. Impressively, we’ve been in the store for under ten minutes, which qualifies as what Mr Roland calls “surgical shopping.” (Most men do not understand the concept of shopping as a pastime, I’ve noticed. “What are you looking for?” he will ask, helplessly. “I don’t know until I see it,” I reply, shuffling my credit cards, meaningfully.)

Just when we’re getting complacent about retail precision, it takes more than forty minutes, to pay. Our cashier, Ameeta, rejects Mr Roland’s credit card because he can’t prove he is who he claims to be. But, you never know when you might need to leave the country in a hurry, I think, so I have my passport about my person. My ID is documentable, even if I do look slightly like Myra Hindley before she had her roots done, so I still count as the better credit risk at Vijay’s. Ameeta sends off a minion, to the photocopier in the basement, so we watch the cashier beside her, stock-taking. The crumpled carrier-bag on her desk looks as if it might contain old gym-shoes, or last year’s Christmas cards, but she delves in, and draws out a fat wodge of banknotes, which she counts, moving her lips. (I’m desperate to know if she’s counting in Hindi or English. At our local D-Mart, many of the sales staff don’t speak English, so when you ask for sticking-plasters, for example, they have to whistle for their mate, then their mate’s mate, before they can be of assistance. If you should ever be stuck in Powai in need of plasters, by the way, ask for bandages. It’s a vocabulary thing.... And yet, in the middle of a stream of Hindi, they will give a price or a product code in English.) Our Vijay cashier wraps small torn strips of paper round each wad of counted notes, before she rubber stamps the bundle, four times, in the innocent belief that an elastic band provides some kind of security. A thin boy, with an even thinner moustache, approaches, on the public side of the cash-counter, to collect carboned invoices of the morning’s work so far. For the first time, I notice a plastic-mesh laundry-basket, at the feet of each cashier. The office-boy tips the baskets, one by one, into his own laundry-basket, and drifts back to HQ, kicking it in front of him.

A man stands barefoot on the ledge which runs round the cash-desk, doing a spot of painting. He steps off the ledge, onto the cashiers’ work-surface, to swap his paint-brush for a hammer, then climbs back up, to nail a strip of plastic edging, over the still-wet paint. His sidekick’s in the music centre showroom, the other side of the plate glass partition, with a tray of emulsion and a roller, less than a foot from the home cinema display. They don’t do Closed For Refurbushing, here, which I find utterly charming.

We manage to pay, at last, with only four signatures, and are given a letter of ownership, together with a certificate of exit. We go to two separate counters, to collect our new belongings. Then, at the door, we’re stopped by the security guard. He has not missed a heartbeat of our transactions, since there’s precious little else going on, on the shop-floor, but we have to open our bags while he checks that the product code on the goods tallies with the numbers on the exit certificate. He sends his friend, to bring our salesman, just to double check. You can’t be too careful, can you?

As Monu nudges the car out of the surprisingly leafy car-park, we pass yet another security guard. He’s using one plastic garden chair to sit on, and another to rest his bare feet. He’s fast asleep.

Ganesh Chaturthi

Happy Ganesh Chaturthi! Today Mumbaikers celebrate Ganesh’s birthday, and pink elephants are definitely on parade. The building sites are silent, the school-rooms are empty, everyone’s on holiday.

Time was, the goddess Parvati needed a guard for the door, because she wanted to have a bath. She made Ganesh out of what she had to hand - sandalwood paste, for her bath - and breathed life into him. When Shiva came home, Ganesh challenged him at the threshold, so Shiva lopped his head off. I imagine it didn’t take long, for Parvati to point out to her husband the error of his ways, but there could be no quick-fix, because the head was nowhere to be found. Shiva sent out his troops, to bring back the head of the first animal they came across facing north, the propitious direction. They came across an elephant, and the rest is Hindu history.

Bhavika-didi brings a small Ganesh to school, as a visual aid. Well, he is supposed to be the Supreme God of Wisdom, and the Remover of Obstacles, so it makes good sense. We are doing Ganesh, for our Caring Lesson. She's ready to begin, so I unwind my handbag from round Sadabh’s neck – he’s pretending to be me - and it occurs to me, not for the first time, that I am not so much an assistant, as a distraction, in the classroom. We face forwards. I love being read to.

The shops of Mumbai are bristling with statues, tiny hand-held ones for domestic use, to elephant-sized Ganeshes which need a flat-bed truck for transport. They have collections, within each community, to buy not only the statue (the big ones cost more than £200), but also the pandal, the temporary pavilion, set up for the shindig. Built of scaffolding and blue plastic sheeting, they’re swagged with organza inside, decked with garlands and strings of twinky lights to within a two-watt bulb of their lives, and they make Oxford Street at Christmas look subtly underlit.

The gods came to Shiva and Parvati, Bhavika says, to ask which among them was the chief god.
“Whom do they ask?”
“Shiva!”
“What do they ask him, who was chief.....”
"God!” Bhavika’s brilliant at question-and-answer routines.

The Mankhurd children are fizzing with excitement – I’m feeling a bit giddy myself, and I don’t even know where the story’s going. They fidget, spilling out of their padmasan, then quickly scramble their limbs back into position. It could be genetic, or it could be my wonky knees, but my padmasan’s still a bit lop-sided, even after weeks of sitting on a concrete floor with only a rush mat for solace. Bhavika’s too discreet to mention it, but continues with the Ganesh-tale.

Shiva decrees that there will be a race. The gods have to go round the earth three times – or “thrice” as they are fond of saying here – and the first to report back to Shiva and Parvati will be declared the chief god. Ganesh is more than a little cheesed off, at this point, and who could blame him? His own parents, and they cut him no slack...

Ganesh Chaturthi is a moveable feast – like Easter - somewhere in the last week of August, and the first week of September. Hindus believe Ganesh bestows his presence on earth among his followers during the festival, and when he leaves again, he takes their troubles with him. No wonder they sing and dance in the streets.

“Ganesh has which vahana?” asks Bhavika. Even I know the answer to this. - All Hindu gods have a vehicle, a vahana, which is unique to them. This bearer always takes the form of an animal – for example, Shiva is borne on a bull, and Parvati on a lion. Ganesh’s vahana is ............ a mouse. You can see why he might be a little put out, that the chief god is to be chosen by means of a race.

“Does the mouse go fast or slow?”
“Slow!”
“If he goes slow-slow, will Ganesh win the race, or lose?”
“Lose!” The situation's not looking great for Ganesh.

These birthday celebrations last ten days, and conclude with the immersion of the idols in a body of water, sea, lake or river. Ganesh is carried into the water, to send him on his way back to Mount Kailash, where his parents live in perpetual meditation. (Hindus and Buddhists make pilgrimages to Kailash, in the Tibetan Himalayas, although they are forbidden to set foot on its slopes. Out of deference to their beliefs, no other climber sets foot on the holy mountain, either.)

But, Ganesh isn’t the Remover of Obstacles for nothing. He leaps on his noble steed, the mouse, and runs rings round his Mum and Dad. Three rings, to be precise. He then says, his parents are the world, to him. Thus he fulfils the task. Shiva acknowledges not only his son’s filial devotion, but also his wisdom, and declares Ganesh the chief of the gods. The children cheer. I have tears in my eyes. (It’s like the infant school nativity: I have no defence against small people with tea-towels on their heads, nor against clever elephant-boys, it now appears.)

“So, at the temple, Ganesh is always...?”
“First!”

This year, having solicited the blessings of Ganesh for spiritual and material success in any auspicious undertaking, the big focus is on the environment. The Indian on the street is encouraged to enjoy an eco-friendly Ganesh Chaturthi, and the message is rammed home by politicians and soap-stars alike. Originally, when the festival was privately celebrated, at home, the models were made of clay, and would dissolve harmlessly in river or lake. For the last century, Ganesh Chaturthi has been a public event, thanks to Lokmanya Tilak, a social reformer, who wanted people of all castes to have a common meeting-place. Increased demand has meant the idols are now made of Plaster of Paris, which is slower to dissolve, and poisons the water with toxic elements. Fish die in their thousands, at the end of Ganesh Chaturthi. So, it’s go back to terra cotta, or introduce the recyclable Ganesh. The jury's still out.

“Who did Ganesh show respect for?”
“Parents!”
“We must respect our parents and elders! Whom do we respect?”
“Parents!”
“And?”
“Old men!” says Kajal, cross-legged next to me. I think this is not going in any good direction, and, if you ask me, it’s high time Bhavika-didi got out the teaching-clock, for a bit of practice with our quarter tos and ten pasts.

Monsoon Virgins

Monu looks at me, tentatively, through the rear-view mirror. “You angry, Mam?”

Angry? The only reason I’m not doing a jubilant double somersault with a back flip, is that I’ve got my seat-belt on. Not especially angry, then.

“Eight day late. Tariq say, Mam very angry!" Monu’s best friend, Tariq, has been our fill-in driver for the week. He wears a baseball cap, and drives carefully, always smiling, never late. What he doesn’t do, is channel-hop on the radio, to find my favourite song (Pehli Nazar Mein),or pre-select the lightest bags of shopping for me to carry from the car, or draw my attention to passing bullock-carts, if I’m gazing out of the wrong window, or smile and nod, at street barbers. In short, he’s not Monu.

“Not angry,” I say, “sad.” I tell him about the spore invasion, in the flat, and he tells me about his father’s farm, in Lucknow. He shows me a picture of Shikha, who is very beautiful, as I secretly suspected, thus not like a buffalo, after all. A hundred and one percent happy, all round.

It turns out, the creeping mildew’s our own fault. The owner of the flat – who owns the whole of the top floor, in fact – comes to highlight our shortcomings, as tenants. When he arrives, slipping his shoes off at the door, Mr Kumar fails to strike me as a South Asian potentate, more like just the bloke next door. As it happens, that’s exactly what he is – eight months, we’ve been chasing him, to sign our Hiranandani gym application, and he lives on our landing. Or rather, we live on his. He insists I go into his apartment, to check its mildewlessness.

I get a crick in my neck, swivelling round to drink in all the lusciousness: he has a plasma-screen the size of a billiard table, a life-size oil-painting of his mother (or her mother, I guess, or even his mother’s mother), and a tasselled jhula, rocking lightly, in the breeze from the open door. He also has a gated staircase – to the roof, I can only imagine? (Would you go to a roof-terrace barbecue, thirty-three floors up?.... Quite. I decide not to feel peevish about not having a balcony.... Although next-door have adjoining double balconies, from either end of the football-pitch-sized living-room... Still a mile high, though. No, really, no balcony is fine....) Maybe Next-Door is an eastern magnate, despite everything. Slack-jawed, I forget to eyeball his walls, and pad home, barefoot.

Ventilation’s the answer. Locking up before going away, we do what any sane person would, and batten down the hatches. One of us (the one whose mouldy chinos we throw away, the one with the dainty respiratory tract, the one who wasn’t in Africa at the time, in fact) – leaves the air-conditioning on, as an added pre-cautionary measure. So, for a fortnight, the cooled air has nowhere to go, except to condense on every surface and create a cosy home for wandering microbes.

What we should have done (now they tell us!) was to turn off the AC and leave all the windows ajar, to enable the free circulation of air. Where we come from, we’re bred to be more concerned with the free circulation of thieves and vagabonds, it goes against every instinct to fling wide the casements and high-tail off to the airport. I suppose, you don’t need a burglar-alarm, a hundred yards in the sky, unless Spiderman gives in to the dark side. Still, we’ll know, next time; the rainy season won’t catch us on the back foot, again. Pity the monsoon doesn’t reach Nottinghamshire, we’d be a fount of meteorological knowledge, and a boon to all who knew us.

Maybe the habitual hardship and misery of the monsoon dictates that this should be festival season, Christmas in December. Last week, it was Janmashtami, Krishna’s birthday. A moveable feast, like Easter. Terracotta pots, dahi-handi, are filled with money and strung high in the air. Youths make human pyramids, to reach them , and claim the booty within. These days, they can contain hundreds of pounds’ worth of rupees. In Mumbai alone, more than four thousand dahi-handi dangle in the streets, to tempt the Krishna gangs.

When Krishna was a child, he lived with a cowherd, Nand, and his wife Yashoda, who fostered him, to protect him from his wicked uncle, King Kansa. Krishna was full of mischief, and used to steal butter and curds from the pots in the dairy. Yashoda would hang them up high, to hide them, but Krishna found he could reach them, by climbing on the backs of his friends, which gave rise to the tradition of dahi-handi.

Mr and Mrs Andrew and I see dahi-handi being made, in Kumbharwada, the pottery of Dharavi, in central Mumbai. The clay is drawn from a nearby estuary, then trodden to soften it. In the workshop of the potter we visit, the clay has been prepared for the next day by his own mother. She sifts it through her fingers and thumbs, to find and remove any small stones, then divides it into slabs, weighing about twelve kilos a-piece. The potter’s finished for the day, when we put our heads round his door, but he takes a block of clay from tomorrow’s stash, and switches his electric wheel back on again. He apologises that the clay is a little soft for working, because it normally would have the chance to dry out a little, overnight. From the one block, he makes eight pots in as many minutes, fat-bellied and identical. Each litre pot, once fired, sells for five rupees. The pot-man on the street sells them on for ten rupees. This is what India means by “disposable” – not tissues or nappies or tablecloths, which take years to biodegrade, but terra cotta pots, which will melt back into clay, earth to earth.

If it’s still Krishna you’re wanting to celebrate, and you’ve got more than ten rupees to spend, you can buy a silver figure of him, with his lovely bride Radha, at Frazer and Haws, in Bandra West. It will set you back more than Rs 79,000 (a thousand of your English pounds). Something for every pocket. As they say, it’s a broad church.

I know the weather’s not playing fair, in the North. I know that rivers are bursting their banks, changing course, and wiping whole villages away. But it’s more real to me, that Monu’s Mum is having to hand-rear Lali the calf, because her mother drowned in the flood. Fields of crops are under water, none to eat, none to sell. It’s going to be a tough year, in Uttar Pradesh. Small wonder, that our Indian Boy was eight day late.

Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back

“Excuse me, are you real?” asks the man, eight or ten steps below me on the escalator. We’re suspended in the atrium of In Orbit mall, gliding towards the ground floor. Allergic to confrontation, I slide my gaze sideways into the middle distance, focusing on nothing. It’s not hard, when myopia is your factory setting.

“Excuse me, Ma’am? Is this eyes really you?” He points at his own peepers, then mine. Guilty as charged, I say, Mum, Dad, brother, sister, and me, I say, all blue eyes. This is how I was born. “Thank-you! Thank-you so much!” The escalator tips him out at street level, and he turns left, heading for Life Style. He’s beaming, like I’d just given him a winning lottery ticket. I try to reduce my beam to a smirk, and turn right, towards Shoppers Stop. Here we are, again: India.

Coming back after six weeks away, I thought India would be a constant, in the flickering kaleidoscope of life, but it’s changed. It’s still monsoon, but a weary monsoon. I look at the grimy bedraggled streets, and struggle to remember the triumphant first rains, when umbrellas blossomed on every pavement, and laughing children waded in the floodwater, playing with plastic bags and paper boats. You’d think three months of relentless rain would wash the city clean, but you’d be wrong. The all-pervading dust simply turns to mud, and the street dogs are grubby and wet, instead of just grubby. It’s like the end of summer, in England, when the leaves on the trees look fed up and jaded, as autumn limbers up, in the wings. The monsoon’s nearly ready to be over.

It’s not over, in our apartment, though. There has been an invasion, in our absence. Walls, ceiling, furniture, clothes – every surface is covered with wispy fungus. We strip the bed and bin the bedding, irrecuperably black-spotted. My favourite kurta has grown an extra layer of gauzy mould, which happily washes out, but Mr Roland’s chinos are beyond saving, ditto my suede sandals. Crocs go in the washing machine, to un-fungus. The trays of salt in the wardrobes, our Heath Robinson dehumidifiers, are standing in water. All our Fabindia furniture – bookshelves, bedside cabinets, console and laundry basket - is whiteover with mildew. The drawers are warped and wedged shut, the lid’s buckled, and we could wish we had gone for plain, not latticed. Sheesham’s no fan of the monsoon. And so say all of us....

The wisdom of hindsight comes rushing in, too late as per usual. In HyperCity, as soon as the monsoon shows its wet nose round the door, there’s a whole aisle devoted to covers – handkerchief covers, television covers, saree covers, microwave covers, transparent blouse covers (that’s the cover, not the blouse.... I’m supposing...). You name it, they’ll zip-lok it into plastic for you, and now I know why.

We spend the whole of Sunday, cleaning the walls with a pan-scourer, and excavating the King and Queen of Nepal from beneath their shroud of dust and mildew. Disgruntled doesn’t come close. Try hysterical. It’s like being burgled, but without anybody to arrest. Violation.

We move into the Rodas Hotel for the night, since Mr Roland’s alveoli aren’t up to spores, and I try to get my 10,000 rupees’ worth out of the occasion, steeping in a cocktail of revitalising ginseng bath foam, and bio-basil hair salad, and aloe vera lotion. I line the little bottles up along the edge of the bath, hopefully. An hour later, I emerge, corrugated and unsmiling - there’s only so much you can ask, of bubble-bath.

So, our Indian home has been taken over by microbes. The mango season is over. We have no internet connection. The al fresco lighting-shop on Adi Shankaracharya Marg, which never fails to lift my spirits, has packed up until the sun comes back, ironically. And, the unkindest cut of all, Monu’s not here. He’s still in Lucknow, with his Mum, and his newly-met bride-to-be, Shikha. I did say, as I left, in July, that, if his Mum needed him, he should stay. But I didn’t mean it, obviously. And he’s got a return ticket, I checked.

All things considered, Mumbai has not got a great deal going for it, currently. I have the resilience of a tooth-pick, slightly used and infinitely snappable. Mr Roland, solicitous, wary, asks what he can do. Take me home, I say, fingering my passport.

Then, not on a white charger, but in a white Airbus, come Mr and Mrs Andrew, to save the day, and our Indian adventure, and quite frankly, our marriage. In the forty-minute trip from the airport, I say more words, than in the whole of the preceding four days. Common courtesy obliges me to pull my face straight, for once. The Hostess with the Leastest. It’s almost painful, smiling.

Welcome to Mumbai, I say. This is our poxy flat. Here is your room, with the unmade bed and the excessive spore-count. Would you like a cup of tea after your flight? Oh, no milk, forget the tea. Would you like a glass of tepid water, instead? Very refreshing. There’s nothing for lunch, because I haven’t been here for six weeks, but I know where the shop is. Unless you fancy parmesan cheese and mango jam? Mr Roland’s hysteria-antennae are twitching, as well they might be, and he slopes off to work, in a dutiful but cowardly manner.

Mr and Mrs Andrew and I – duly restored by above-mentioned tepid water – tiptoe across the building-site which is leafy residential Powai, to sample the moderate delights of the Haiko retail experience. To whit, we buy a kilo of tomatoes, a bunch of coriander, a fistful of cucumbers, and a bag of milk. We pick our way, over the open manholes and pitted roads, back to Verona (the scenic route), where we lunch in splendour on tuna salad. “What lovely wall-hangings you have,” says Mrs Andrew, guava-juice in one hand, ladleful of oil in the other, for pouring on troubled waters...

By the time Mr Roland reappears, several hours later, the status has found its way back to the quo.

Story Time

Monu and I are reading “The Magician’s Nephew.” We were doing grammar, but he can spot the difference between the simple present and the continuous present, with one brown eye closed (more than can be said for the majority of native English speakers, I fear) – so I thought he was ready for literature. If you’re wanting a parallel text in Hindi, it’s either Narnia or Harry Potter, down at Crossword. I choose Digory and Polly, with the promise of wardrobes to come. I wonder what Monu will make of it, but he wipes out my misgivings immediately, “Very nice, nice story.” Bring on Mr Tumnus.
We run across the phrase, “as quiet as a mouse,” and I stop. (Did CS coin this phrase, or does Oxford claim professorial immunity, to the blood-on-parchment law about avoiding clichés? Just wondering...) “Do you know what a mouse is?” I ask. Monu doesn’t so much as lift his eyes from the text. “Small rat.” A few pages further, we come upon “guinea-pig.” Not a simile, this time, a real one, as used by wicked Uncle Andrew in his magic experiments. I explain about pets, and cages, and flick up a gallery of guinea-pigs, on Google Images. Monu takes one look. “Is rat.” No, I explain, flicking again, “THIS is a rat.” But he won’t be said, our Indian boy. “All rat.”
Back at Matheran, horse-leader, Krishna, kindly points out local fauna, as we clip-clop by. “See, Madame,” he says, “Indian squirrel.” It takes me a moment, to unpick his words and understand them, because he says “squirrel” without any vowels. You try it. In any case, when I locate the sqrrl, spiralling up a tree, it turns out to be a chipmunk. Or possibly a chpmnk, I don’t know, I can’t see properly without my glasses. I know, they’re related. But related isn’t the same as, is it? Do they call lions and leopards and fluffy tabbies all cats, then? You don’t get whole raw wildebeest, in the Kit-e-Kat aisle, at Sainsbury’s, do you? As Bhavika-didi says daily, “Opposite of different is?.... Same. Opposite of same is?.... Different.” Couldn’t have put it better, myself.
Meanwhile, my Hindi vocabulary’s growing somewhat slower than moss. My acquisitions are slightly random, but still precious. I can say ladder – siddi – because we pass a B&Q-type small-small shop, every day, and love – pyaar – because there’s a new film out, "Thoda Pyaar, Thoda Magic" – Some Love, Some Magic, and washrooms – sulabh. Other than these wayfaring gleanings, I’m still stuck at the fruit and vegetable stall. It comes in handy all the time, though. The assistant in Life Style’s helping me compile a name plaque, on a wooden rack. He offers me a small picture tile, to fill in the end gap. “You want this, madame? Is Indian religious symbol.” It looks like a pot-plant, to me, but I humour him. “This, leaf, this, coconut,” he explains. So it is. “Like at weddings?” I say. “Coconut - nariyal!” I’m showing off, now. “Madame, you speak Hindi!” He puts his hand on my arm, delighted. I’ve got myself up a gum tree, here, no mistake. I’ve already used up half my Hindi facility, and he’s wanting to chat. I confess to ignorance, and drift off, blushing, to pay, while he glues my plaque together. He gives me an extra layer of bubble-wrap, for at least trying. Sukriya, I say, unable to quit while I’m winning. Thanks.
At the jewellery counter, next door, in Spencer’s, I learn another new word, firozi. It means sky-blue, and I can’t think how it’s evaded me all this time, given my preferred slice of the rainbow. “This black, this red, this firozi,” says the bangle-wallah. I slip the blue one on. “Look! This bracelet very nice!” he says, pointing. “Look! This salesman very good!” I reply, pointing back. I buy all three, anyway, just to prove myself right. One girl wraps them, while four more assistants parade the rest of the stock before my eyes, tempting me with what they call the “buy-one-get-one” offer. Head of Sales writes down “firozi” for me. “Kali, lali,” I say, pointing to the black and red bracelets. I only know this because that’s what Monu’s Dad calls his two calves – I’ll let you work out why. (As a person who called her black cat “Blackie” I have no criticism to offer, at this point...)The salesman looks at me, and writes “kaala” and “lal,” but he’s just being pedantic, in my opinion.
Monu’s boss goes to see “Thoda Pyaar, Thoda Magic” and says it’s rubbish – no romance, no action, “Three hours, all bored bored.” I see a poster for it, in English, which translates “pyaar” as “life” not “love,” so I question the oracle. “Life, love, same,” he shrugs. Back to same and different, then. Shikha, Monu’s unseen bride-to-be, is a lucky girl, if he thinks life and love are the same thing. The prospect of marriage no longer daunts him, now he’s breathed in and out a few more times. “How’s the happiness quotient?” I ask. “One hundred and one percent!” he smiles.
At the where’s-my-hankie? sad end of for better, for worse,“U Me aur Hum” - out on dvd at last. It’s months since I bought the soundtrack – they launch film music before films are released in cinemas, here - so I warble along happily to all the songs. What’s more, with benefit of subtitles, I can now find out for the first time, what I’ve been crooning, all these weeks. Poor Piya’s diagnosed with Altzeimer’s not long after the first anniversary of her marriage to Ajay. When she nearly kills the baby, by forgetting she’s put him in the bath, Ajay has to have her committed to a care home. Several song and dance routines later, he’s smote by conscience, and brings her home again, where she belongs. It doesn’t say, but I presume he baths the baby, from now on. Fast-forward twenty-five years, and they’re celebrating their silver wedding, on a cruise, with resuscitated son bringing in the cake, at the end. “All people, all-time weep,” says Monu. There are wet eyes, in our house too - pass the Kleenex - and Mr Roland’s so traumatised, he falls asleep. In all fairness, he’s had a hard day.

One for Jamie and Nigella

Yesterday, you’d have thought it was the monsoon. Schools were closed, but not the office, to the chagrin of administrative Mumbai, including Mr Roland. Hours of serious rain, until the chocolatey floodwater was swishing right up to the tops of your wellies. Even when it wasn’t raining, it felt like it was still raining, the humidity was so high, crinkling the papers on our coffee table with damp, even through closed windows. The dusting of grime’s now iced firmly to the glass panes, but it gives me the bends, just thinking about cleaning them, so we’re getting used to the new defused view, up here on the thirty-third floor.
Today, not a drip.
The fruit and vegetable stall, on the street corner, below our apartment, has moved back to its original pitch, now the road-works are finished (Indian-finished, I mean with a souvenir heap of leftover grit and rubble, as a testament to industry, for the next eight months, or until they dig the road up again, whichever’s sooner). Such hither-and-yinning is of no avail: whichever side of the crossroads the Veg Man pitches, he’ll have soggy root ginger and wet lemons, as soon as the cloud bursts, because it’s in a dip. The retail instinct’s indomitable, here, though. Unaccountably, the lighting shop, closed since the beginning of June (no lights on, but somebody’s home), has opened for business again, stringing up a selection of new pink chandeliers, between two leaning trees, rosily winking to tempt passers-by. The chandelier family had retreated under a yellow tarpaulin, as big as a double garage, but with fewer amenities. They’ve now have popped out again, on the offchance of a little trading, between showers. I don’t see anyone stopping to buy, though. Monu always slows down, as we pass by, so I can rubber-neck properly.
At school today, we make fruit salad. First, Varun-bhaiya takes a select group to market, to market, to buy a fat mango. I give Varun the benefit of long experience: I tell him to count his charges, before he goes, and to bring the same number back. Preferably the same ones. The smalls, meanwhile, are in a ferment of excitement. They must go shopping with their Mums every day, to the same street-stalls, but this is by way of being An Expedition. (I tell Monu, the children have to do their own shopping, to see how many bananas they can get for ten rupees. If I had ten rupees, I say.... and he laughs. We both know that I would come back with three wrinkled grapes and half a banana, without supplementing the budget....)
We do “Community” in a circle, and I get to read the questions. “What’s your favourite thing about school?” I ask Aanchal. She holds her hands out, with a coy smile. “My favourite thing about school, is teacher,” she croons, her head on one side. (I’m very susceptible to a bit of verbal. On the street, a boy’s trying to wheedle a coin out of flinty-hearted Mr Roland. “Maharajah, one rupee!” he begs. I’m just curling a derisory lip, because Mr Roland patently fancies himself in the role, wouldn’t he just, when the beggar-boy turns to me. “Maharani, just one rupee!” I’ve never been called a maharani before, I’m just handing over bank details and arranging for a standing order, when Maharajah spoils it all, and drags me away...) Poor Aanchal, it so nearly works, her winning line in flannel. It’s too late, though, I’ve already asked Bhavika-didi if I can have Swapnil to take home with me, at the weekend, and she definitely said, “Yes.” I have witnesses. I just need to re-arrange my packing a little bit. I can bring the forty-seven sacks of Hibiscus Tea, next time. Or maybe I could also jettison the consignment of elephants-in-elephants, for the time being, and bring Aanchal, too?
The happy shoppers come back, twittering like a bunch of parakeets. I count nine, and look anxiously at Varun, but he gives me the thumbs-up: nine was the allocation. He only just brings back enough children, then. While the fruit salad is being chopped up, onto a tray, in the corner, on the floor, we limber up with a bit of work on opposites. This is one of my favourites, because I like watching Bhavika-didi do fat and thin, in her Lulu-husky voice, mirrored by the rapt audience at her feet – although Khaja and the gang couldn’t look authentically fat, even if they jumped into a barrel of melted chocolate and rolled around in Coco-Pops for a bit.
Then it’s time for our picnic – the children have never sat so still and straight. The fruit’s doled out onto little squares of newspaper, cupped into waiting hands. As well as the statutory mangoes, it turns out to contain not only cucumber but also tomatoes, in an interesting new take. And the sliced bananas are tossed in, skin and all. I’m looking dubiously at the portion in my hands, when I notice Varun refuse his, and the mango-slice screeches to a halt, half-way to my open mouth. Does he think the children need it more than he? Or does he quail at eating banana skin salad, with yesterday’s news printed on it? Or is it – surely not? – a hygiene issue? Too late, now, for misgivings. In for a paise, in for a rupee, I always think, though I do delegate my banana to Raj, cross-legged by my side. Tomato and mango’s quite an interesting combo, after all, once you open your mind and your tastebuds to a new experience. Expect it, next time you come to dinner at my house.