Why I will call buaji on Daler Mahendi's birthday

I hate birthdays. The gifts are never good and the early-morning phone calls are frankly too many. I also hate birthdays of my kin because there are no gifts and the early-morning phone calls are still too many. What on Earth are you talking about, you may ask.

I am talking about this unexplained habit of Punjabis to not only wish the birthday boy/girl on his/her day but to also wish his/her father and mother, children, spouse, uncle and nephew, aunt and niece, friend and siblings... you get the idea. I am especially blessed because I had to love my chachi-chacha as much as I love my parents. So on the birthdays of my Dad, Mom, brother, Chachi, Chacha, their daughters and the children's spouses, I am flooded with phone calls.

And mind you, a true Punjabi will consider it bad karma to not make the above phone calls on every birthday. Now while I have accepted that I am doomed to Punjabi hell for all eternity where I will probably have to receive and make phone calls on Daler Mehendi's birthday too, my family members refuse to come over to the dark side and feel deep karmic satisfaction on waking me up at 6 in the morning on everybody's birthday.

You must be wondering about the logic of 6 a.m. calls and if you did not then, well you are now so I will tell you. This habit has lingered in my two buas since those days when BSNL had low STD calling up to 6 or 7 a.m. and to make use of cheap calling rates, the buas would invariably call us at 6 a.m. ALWAYS. See for them, 6 a.m. is well into morning. They have bathed and prayed and had their morning chai and मट्ठी and are ready to take on the world. 6 a.m. for the rest of us is that unholy time when you are expected to rise from under the soft and warm covers and rise from over the snuggly pillow, AND shine brighter than the bleak sunlight and shine through the depressing vacuum in the pit of the stomach that one tends to associate with early morning.

Which is why I hate my birthday and your birthday and everybody's birthday.

A few days back I was told through our highly unreliable channel of grapevine that one of my buajis is very unhappy with me and does not wish to talk to me.
Reader Alert!
The Kakkar and extended family grapevine use a highly complex code that translated this message into the following order by buaji:

Shweta must visit me today and spend not less than half an hour listening- with pretend or real interest about what is- as youngsters would say- "up with me these days".

So I reach buaji's house the same evening and am greeted with the incredibly out-of-tune singing of a few Sikh gentlemen on ETV Punjabi's Bhajan Hour.

Besides the depressing vacuum in the pit of the stomach that one associates with early morning, there is another nasty sensation- that of a sort of shrinking of the heart and inward pulling of the veins of the ears that one tends to associate with any form of devotional singing on TV, and that one especially tends to associate with the audio-visual unpleasantness of three or four elderly Sikh gentlemen wearing identical navy-blue turbans and sitting before musical instruments of choice, singing gurbaani or the shabad kirtan. It is downright depressing and when one thinks of the ETV Punjabi's devotional program, one instantly thinks of the English dementors that suck all happiness out of the soul.

So in the backdrop of this excruciating noise, I greet buaji and ask her how she has been. Within the next few minutes I am hit by two unpleasant realizations: one, I forgot to wish her for her daughter-in-law's birthday recently, which explained the grapevine code. But I would get over this. I would ask her to talk about her son and daughter-in-law in Australia and she would calm down and forgive me. But it was the second realization that hit me harder than the monotonous pitch of the shabad kirtan: I had chosen a Thursday to visit her.

Thursdays are bad. And not just because you cannot eat eggs that day. And not just because you cannot cut nails on the one day that you seem to remember to cut them. Thursdays are kirtan days at the Dargarh- a religious order that my buaji and other family members go overboard in following. Buaji is part of the कीर्तन मंडली there that meets on Thursdays at the temple, gossips a lot, sings devotional songs a little, eats fried food a lot and then calls it a day. The members of the कीर्तन मंडली reach their respective homes and thereafter spend the evening calling each other and gossiping about members of the मंडली among themselves. Well among all of them except the member who is being talked about, of course.

As anticipated, I crossed the first hurdle of forgetting to wish her on her daughter-in-law's birthday easily. I used an antidote that was made of a large portion of questions about little details of her son and family's lives and a small portion of giving information about her brother, i.e. my father who is gruff on the phone and so with who, buaji does not get to talk too frequently. It worked like magic and all traces of displeasure were gone in a few instances.

Now if you are wondering if there is a point to this story, here it is. I mean in the next few paragraphs. THE SECOND REALIZATION. कीर्तन मंडली and Thursday कीर्तनs. My Buaji likes to keep a healthy stack of ten-rupee notes in her wallet and over the years this stack has become quite obese. The कीर्तन मंडली also offers what we call अरदास, which is the process of offering 10, 50, 100, 500 or 1000 but mostly 10 unless you are in really deep shit but we digress now so I will end the sentence and tell you the money is offered as bribe to have the Gods grant the wish that the devotee makes.

On that day, buaji was given responsibility of the collected अरदास money and I saw with dismay as she extracted her wallet from her purse and retrieved a 100 rupee note from it. And then another one.

I will put in the 200 and take 10s for this amount from the अरदास bag, she announced, untying the knots atop the bag. Now the answer to why this announcement by buaji caused me dismay lies in the fact that the women at the कीर्तन मंडली always seem to have really greasy hands and so when her phone rang for the customary gossip post-कीर्तन, she handed me the bag and began her chat as I started the tedious work of taking out one ten rupee note at a time, unfolding and un-scrunching it. Maybe it was the background music from the Bhajan Hour on ETV Punjabi or maybe it was the weird smell of oil from the bag of greasy notes but after the 7th note or so, I fell into a kind of daze. Somewhere in between buaji hung up the phone but never got back to the most boring job on the planet where I was sure I was a temporary substitute. Eventually I finished piling the stack of notes for her, which the blessed woman made me count thrice before putting into her wallet (how she fit the notes in her overstuffed wallet has since been listed as one of the unexplained mysteries of life).

In the process of the above stuffing, she found a 500 rupee note in her wallet. So she took it out and looked at it, deep in thought while the Sikhs on TV continued their monotonous melodies. Then she thought some more and finally said- "change ते किन्नी वी हो, काम आ जांदी है. इक्क कम् कर, पंज सौ दी change कड्ड दे.

I am never again NOT calling buaji on everybody's birthday. Including Daler Mahendi's.

Living up to the dream

Remember the mystery I was talking about yesterday? Well it so happened that a few months back Monu's future family told us about the entrance exam for SBI Probationary Officer and so without giving it thought, we naturally all signed up for it. In the first week of our enthusiasm of the great 'sarkari naukri dream', we bought books and study material from all over the place. We even studied for a couple of days, Monu Rahul and I. Then it obviously fizzled out. Here the problems start.

You would think a father would know his daughter's habits and quirks after 25 years. That is not the case with my old man. See he tends to get excited with every dream I conjure of a well-paying career and though I obviously lose interest in a while, he tends to cling on the dream. Now I got over the SBI PO dream as soon as the books came in but my father went overboard with it. The most difficult thing to do is not play along with the parents' dreams for you. So you don't do it. I mean not play along.

I had put in my resignation at work and was supposed to finish there by the end of July. Now Dad, in his excitement to see me through the PO exam began insisting that I quit work in the middle of the month and get down to serious studying. Let me tell you something about the old man... it is impossible to reason with him. It won't work. He knows no reason and lives in that time where his word was the law, except that there was no time as that so it is mostly imaginary.

So after 15th of this month, I was officially not working, at least in my dad's eyes. Now it is all ok for me to say "yeah yeah I am not working" but what do I do in the work hours when I am actually working and Dad calls every hour, as he is wont to do? Here comes the next lie then. I sign up for imaginary PO coaching lessons and tell Dad I am at the classes that last for the six hours during which I am actually working. So he does not call and we get through that phase too.

In the last few days leading up to the exam today, I have been studying when I was actually sleeping, studying when I was actually crashed before the TV set, studying when I was gossiping with friends and studying when I was doing everything anything else but studying.

Watch me explain why I failed the test to my old man!

Announcement

Dear readers,

I have written my updates but I will not post them today. Why I will not post them today is something you will learn tomorrow when I do post the update and you read it.

Mysteriously,

Shwet

The months leading to Monu's wedding Series: "Waif bina laif"

Dear friends, I am being harassed. And Chacha is being harassed too. Not separately. We are being harassed at separate times but by the same people and about the same issue. See Chachi left for Delhi recently when the Chandni Chowk and Rajouri Garden traders announced sale on their wedding collection. Monu took a few days off from work and with what my source Sonu tells me, the mother-daughters trio has been all over the city scourging for the very best in wedding bling that is available in the "moderately-expensive" budget.

That leaves Chacha and me in the house. Although a little lost without our mother hen (i.e. Chachi) we are quite capable of handling all the affairs of the house all by ourselves. Why I am asserting this here will come later. First, let me expound on the "lost without our mother hen" bit. See Chachi has, in the 26 years of their marriage, never left the house for more than 24 hours without Chacha. There have been many people who have not been in the house at any given point of time but Chachi is not one of them. She is NEVER not at home. So we don't know what to make of this absolutely unprecedented situation where Chachi is not at home and Chacha is at home and I am at home and that too for a whole 5 days! So we keep roaming around here and there, and are generally quite out of sorts if you know what I mean. For example, the other day I walked into the house to find Chacha sleeping on the sofa in the drawing room and mumbling "chai Geeta chai" in his sleep. When at home, Chachi makes tea for the both of them at 4 and I believe this is the biological clock in him asking for his post siesta-that-stretches-into-2-hours-of-sound-sleep tea. Other times, he wrings his hands (partly also because he is not drinking these days) and says "इक्क बीवी है, कित्थे चली गयी?" Such is his state of agitation at such times, poor boy that I refrain from commenting on the first bit of his ridiculous statement.

But other than these odd bits of incidents, we are running the house pretty smoothly. But buaji and badi mummy (Rads' mom) pooh and pah at our (genuine) claim. They refuse to believe that we can handle basic cooking duties and cleaning up routine in the absence of our above-mentioned mother hen.

Now you may smile affectionately at this description and think "how sweet". Well, stuff it. Because it gets really complicated. At the base of this complication is the fact that Chacha and I run on a biological clock that is clinically late. So every morning, we are running about here and there, racing against time and trying to make it to respective appointments on time and in the usual course of things, Chachi is there to miraculously ensure that we do. But these days while she is away, our already-late schedules are made more ineffective by the phone calls. The harassing phone calls that always follow the same pattern:

1. Exchange greetings

2. Answer questions about the previous day's dinner and say how absolutely marvellous it was and yes we finished the rotis and yes the vegetable was sufficient for the both of us and no there was no need for daal, while anxiously looking at the time. Repeat the same sentiments from Chacha too, while still anxiously looking at the time.

3. Refuse invitation for breakfast and remind the ladies that Chacha eats only fruits for breakfast and I eat only eggs for breakfast, which I make on my own. Refuse invitation for a change in routine and say it is the one routine we like so we will stick with it. End this phase by saying "very sure, definitely not changing mind".

4. Check phone screen about the call-waiting beep and realize with rising panic that it the other woman calling. So if one is talking to buaji, the waiting call will be badi-mummy's and vice-versa.

5. Refuse invitation for lunch and dinner. Refuse again. Refuse for self. Refuse for Chacha. Give reasons:

a. We can cook - rejected by the caller

b. We have a perfectly-functioning kitchen in our house and we can cook- rejected by the caller

c. We have vegetables in the fridge that will rot if not cooked- rejected with the demand that the vegetables be sent over to the caller's house so that she can cook it for us, which is worse than a. and b. because there is no vegetable blooming or rotting in the fridge so then you have to buy the vegetable and deliver it to the caller's house.

d. I want to cook food today- rejected with exclamations of "what utter rubbish", "since when do you want to do anything" and other derogatory remarks. Still, this is better than c.

6. So you finally give in and say yes, please cook for us, which takes us to the next level.

7. Negotiate rotis. She will say 4 each and a few extra in case Chacha or I am extremely hungry, I say 2 each. She says ok 6. I say 4. She says 6. I say 4. She says 6. I say OK.

8. Negotiate the meal after the one she is making. She will then say she will prepare dinner too. But here you have a stronger hold only if you have lost this battle with the other caller and given her responsibility of preparing dinner. Because otherwise, if you plead cooking on your own, it will take you back to step 5 and 6 and 7.

9. Negotiate place of eating. She will say come over and eat with us. You will say no thank you, I would prefer if you sent it in a dabba through somebody. She will grumble and insist but not argue too much here because that is what Chachi wants- for somebody to always be home.

10. Provide information on what the other person (For bua- Badi mummy; for badi-mummy: bua) has prepared and sent and what the other person will prepare and will send.

11. Hang up and then immediately answer the other's call. Repeat steps 1-10.

12. Scream to the Gods to return our chachi to us before dashing off to work.

Oh and if you want to offer the suggestion to disconnect the phone, let me tell you here it wont work. They have our mobile numbers and if we switch off those too, they will come home and have the above conversation in person.

Besides being chronically late, the other Kakkar character that Chacha and I and many of our kinsmen and kinswomen and kinschildren have been generously gifted with is an incredibly short bout of stamina for people who eat so much. So by the time we return from work every evening (or in Chacha's case afternoons), we are done. We are exhausted, drained, we are ready to give up on this world and life and we are not ready to talk another word beyond this unnecessary cribbing. This, incidentally also happens to be the time that buaji and badi mummy begin their calling-routine to check if lunch was OK, if tiffin was OK and to re-confirm the dinner bit. Buaji especially likes to call every few moments and give an update on what she is making. This starts a day in advance when she goes to the market to buy the wretched vegetables and goes on until she has packed the food in a tiffin and is just leaving now to stand outside her house and wait for the office boys to pick up the tiffin.

Laif, as chacha is prone to saying these days in his ridiculous Punjbai pronunciation of perfectly sane English words, without Waif is difficult.

The 'Nothing else to write about' Series: Har Shri Agencies

We run a small business here, which is called Har Shri Agencies. We are distributors of Milton and a few other companies. The business is in a perpetual state of recession owing purely to bad management and we really don't care. In the not-so-bad times, we operated out of an office and a godown. Later, in the downright shit times, we moved the godown to our house for many years. I was a kid then and would spend hours reading there among the buckets, water bottles, casseroles and a large assortment of such goods and our drawing room, with its ceiling-high rows of cartons of Milton goods and impossible narrow passages to navigate through, in between was the most magical place in the world for me. We eventually moved the business back to an office and a godown but the memories of those good times linger on.

Har Shri Agencies is like second home and the men who worked here when we were Rugrats-like work here today too. Rajesh bhaia is one of those people who have been around since forever. He was 18 when he started work at Har Shri Agencies and that was in the year 1994. The six of us were, then enormous blobs of lard between ages 4 and 12. How we managed, for 8 odd years to fit in a poor little Maruti every morning to be dropped off to school is a mystery that the best scientists won't venture to unravel because they know they cannot. Why I mention Rajesh Bhaia will come at the end of the post.

The best thing about Har Shri Agencies is that the boys who work here do very little actual work that relates to the business and a lot of other household work. So Gurmeet Bhaia gets milk from the dairy every morning and drives buaji to the temple every few days. He will also go to pick up family members from the railway station. Rajesh Bhaia gets vegetables, bread, eggs and other groceries. Akhil Bhaia usually pays Sonus Internet bills and gets her phone recharged too.

Our newest addition at Har Shri Agencies is Vinay, a guy with some qualifications for a change who had joined us in the hopes of diligently running Tally accounts and working with Chacha in handling the day to day running of the business. The poor guy soon realized that with Chacha, there is no day to day running of the business. Chacha spends a couple of hours at work, at best and that time is spent meeting people who want to consult him about his astrological prowess. In this scheme of things, Vinay prints birth charts from the software that he has installed on the office computer. I have been trying to explain to Chacha the concept of job satisfaction but the man is as thick as the come! I got up this morning and read something in the local classified that made me laugh: a quarter-page advertisement asking for people to call on a mobile number to consult on astrological matters. There will be three consultations per week and the clients should pay a certain quoted amount only when they are satisfied and if they so wish to. The number belonged to Vinay and I called him just for the fun of it, though he seemed to think it was quite unfunny!

So back to Rajesh bhaia- he is getting married a few after Monu and it is uncool because he says he may not be able to make it to the wedding. But today while talking to him after a long time (we were waiting for a bank employee to complete and hand us some papers and you know how efficient THEY are) I realized that these guys have been part of the entire ride with us- the highs, the lows and the statics.

The "nothing better to write about" series: Meeshu का नाड़ा

That is where all of this started from: Meeshu's नाड़ा. Monu and Rahul now being engaged, they can officially go to and return from Delhi together. But while Chacha is a religious follower of "reach-the-railway-station-an-hour-before-the-train-arrives-on-the-platform" and often literally pushes us out of the house exactly 80 minutes before, to cover the 15-minute distance to the railway station, our to-be relatives are so much more cooler. Rahul especially, works on GMT and is known to proudly exclaim "there is still seven minutes before the train leaves" on reaching the platform in a state of breathlessness from running. This pride will quickly wither in the next few seconds under Monu's.... well withering stare (no literary genius here, sorry) but that is another story. Which I will tell you now briefly: see poor Monu gets stuck between her overly-cautious father and overly-adventurous fiancé (these adjectives are to be used in the very specific context of catching the train ONLY) and since she cannot berate the former, it must come out on the latter.

The last time they came, Monu and Rahul were to return to Delhi by the A/C Special Train that leaves from Doon at 11.35 p.m. Chacha is usually in a state of happy-tipsy-and-more by then so I decided to go with him to drop Monu at the station. My sister and I dallied, she changed her clothes thrice and I persisted in hugging Chachi goodbye which made Chacha wonder out loud and quite close to my ear if I had been gulping down his drinks when nobody was looking (I cannot afford to now follow this conversation but you must know I had several scalding things to say about it) but we eventually had to leave, and reached the platform with over an hour to spare.

Once there, Monu immediately took to pacing up and down the platform in agitation while Chacha and I demurely sat down on one of those hard, green benches on railway stations. Our usual habit at such times is to make fun of people and pass smart comment on their appearance or behaviour, in Punjabi. Coz its not half the fun if it is in English or Hindi. Chacha had just delivered his favourite "ऐ कुड़ी है कि मुंडा है" (is that a girl or a boy) for a man with a ponytail when I saw HIM. Jackpot!

He was standing a little way from us, alone and a little way from the rest of his family, which does not imply that his family was standing next to us. It also does not imply that they were not standing next to us but that is the case, here. Back to the man.

Height: Tall (I cannot do that thing when you look at somebody and go "oh he is 6'3")

Weight: A slight paunch and sagging cheeks but not fat per se (I cannot do that thing for weight, either)

Hair: Salt and Pepper; ditto for beard (it was a real beard, not one of those goatees or French beard)

Attire: Starched, white kurta-pyjama and white sandals

Overall look: Impressive, except...

So I nudge Chacha to divert his attention from ponytail-man to the white kurta-pyjama man and I say nonchalantly "कोई इन्ना आखो नाड़ा बंध लवे" (somebody ask him to tie his नाड़ा), for the white string from his pyjama was hanging down all the way to the ground and would have gone further down had it not been a नाड़ा but since it was, it just ended up in a puddle of sorts on the ground where the man stood. Then I waited for Chacha's alcohol-laced mind to join the dots and when he finally did, we roared with laughter and kept at it, for quite a while without the slightest inclination of being subtle. After a while, Chacha, eyes still streaming said "that's MEESHU" and burst into another peel of laughter.

So I obviously wanted to know who Meeshu was. Turns out, he is distant distant DISTANT family and before I tell you the tale that Chacha told me, I have to say I do write awfully long introductions. Meeshu is about chacha's age and they went to college together back in the day. He is supposed to be a miser and a is also said to harbour a conniving mind and he is supposed to take after his father.

The story of Meeshu took us back in the day that my Chacha was a little boy and maybe India was not independent yet. My buaji Kamla, who is Chacha's older sister had had her रिश्ता fixed and this was the time when the family was still living in Vikasnagar, which is about an hour from Doon. Punjabis have not changed in the ages and as soon as a couple has been hitched, the one thing that the girl's family will incessantly worry about is offending the groom and his family. This includes extended family. What I mean to say is that the worrying on part of the girl's parents includes either immediate or extended family of the bride offending either immediate or extended family of the groom.

Meeshu's dad used to run a टांगा (horse-carriage) in those nice days before cars came. After a visit to their future daughter-in-law's home in Vikasnagar, my buaji's mother-in-law was returning to Dehradun in Meeshu Sr.'s टांगा. She was talking animatedly about our family, with her daughter when Meeshu Sr. turns around and asks if they are talking about Ram Chameli (my grandmother) and her daughter. Buaji's mother-in-law says yes they are and he says why! what a coincidence, he happened to be Ram Chameli's nephew. Oh how wonderful, she says and chit-chats with Meeshu Sr. all the way. So you can understand how incredibly offended she was when, on reaching her destination Meeshu Sr, without the smallest signs of hesitation quotes 2 annas and takes it too! Actually, you cannot understand but just do for the heck of it.

A few days later, my grandmother receives a तार from the groom's mother stating of this unbearable insult where the groom's family had to pay money to the bride's side. It took a lot to make right the no-wrong!

The original Meeshu grew up in his father's footsteps and went to the same college as my Chacha. Their fee was rupees 135 per year and Meeshu spent a blissful four years at college, extracting rupees 135 every month from his unhappy dad. But to make up for all the money that he wasted on his son's education, Meeshu Sr. would put Meeshu to work during the University's summer breaks. So during the summer months, Meeshu's voice could be heard through the alleys and lanes of Vikasnagar, selling ice-cream. Sometimes when Meeshu Sr. wanted to get in my grandmother's good books, he would send Meeshu with his cart to her house to treat everybody with free ice-cream.

It was great to learn these ancient unwisdoms. Alerted by our raucous laughing, Meeshu's son-in-law pointed out the obvious and had the Rapunzel of Meeshu's pyjama restored.

By then, Rahul appeared on the scene, breathless from all the running yet proud about his arrival 7 minutes before they were due to depart, and Chacha and I returned home once the train chugged off.