Say What?

There is a drive to push Hindi usage in government offices. There is also a drive to go digital, but some drives, like cars, move faster than others. So, we still receive my father's pension-related information from Delhi via snail mail, not e-mail. But there is clear evidence of the other drive in full momentum. 

This is a letter we received recently. To clarify, the address my mother gave them was this:

Firmly Rooted Bungalow 

Village Sidhbari

PO Rakkar 

HP....

Here is what came as the address on the letter. 

The only field translated into Hindi was "Firmly Rooted". The words Village and PO were not 

So, mind you, you are right now in a Bungla called Majbooti se Jad Diya! 

Talking of translation, let me recount another episode from a couple of years ago. Actually, I was reminded of it because of the Vote Fraud issue currently in the news. A few years ago, I was trying to find the locations of our voting booth for the local elections. I was majorly impressed when I was told that the information was available online. Online! Wow! That's my world. I can navigate that! 

So, I went to the website. But everything is in Hindi. Shuddh Hindi. As is my habit, I look for a way to see the information in English. Lo and behold- there is a button that says English. I press it and the information is in English! Yay! 

But wait! What the hell is this? Who is Moon Bliss? And Love Creeper? And Diametre?

Any software person will tell you that when developing software apps, we mark certain fields as non-translating fields. Well, obviously, the persons making this website wasn't aware of it and so all the names had been translated into English. Absolutely wonderful! 

Rather than talk about it, let's do a short quiz. Guess what this name would be in Hindi?

Rich Goddess

Omen

Love Creeper?

Country Rule 

Dream

Peacock

Saffron

Smell

Pass through 

Like Ram

Critique 

Teenager

Drank (Father Peacock)

Light up

Good Luck

Sick

Original Secret

Omnipotent Goddess

Sapphire

Bum God

Love Creeper

Illuminating

Lamp

Like Ram

Handmaids Around Me!

Been watching The Handmaid's Tale slowly for the last 10 days. Savoring is a better word. Just finished the last episode of Season 3 yesterday. So sad to say goodbye to a friend, because that's what June Osborne has become to me.
For those of you who haven't seen it, it's about dystopia in a new ultra-religious country carved out of the US in the times of rising infertility and consequently, extremely low birthrates. Women in this world are relegated to being wives, maids or handmaids (whose sole purpose is to produce children for the husbands of the barren wives). None of the women are allowed to read or go out without chaperone or contribute to society in any way. They are left with no agency/influence of their own. The only women who seem to have any power are cruel bullish women, who train other women for their roles and punish them for any transgression.
Thinking about the suffocating stifling world of these fictional women, I just realized that this dystopia is not all that fictional. I personally know women here in my town, who were married off in their teens before they even finished schooling, have no financial freedom and so are at the mercy of men in their homes, are watched like hawks when they step out of the house, are expected to give birth to boys, and are nothing but glorified house maids (not even that because they are not paid for their daily toiling). To top it all, they are controlled by cruel bullish mother in laws! The same story with girls with college degrees. The only difference between their reality and the world where June is trapped is that they get to keep their babies.
Did Margaret Atwood visit our village before she wrote her novel?

The Voter Card

If there is one thing I dislike utterly, it is going through the process of getting official documents made in India. The mere thought of the red-tapism makes my blood run cold. If I can avoid it, I will. This is the reason I got my driver's license three years after I had started driving in and around the town. Yes yes, I know. I also very reluctantly got my Aadhaar card made only because I could not register my apartment without it.

In 2013, I had just returned to India after 14 years in Singapore, in the thick of the rising hindutva propaganda and the resulting polarization. It took me some time to catch up with the madness and gain some clarity about what was happening. You could say that was the reason I did not vote in 2014. But the real reason was I didn't have a voter ID. And I hadn't toughened up enough to try to get one. 

But 2019 was different. I was disgusted with what was happening in the country. I had to vote, which meant that I had to have a voter's ID. I had tried to get one, somewhat half-heartedly, in 2017 but that quest had ended after looking in vain for a school teacher who was supposed to have a form I had to fill. No teacher, no form, no voter ID!

Then one day earlier this year, I read a Facebook post by my writer-club friend Rinku about how getting her voter ID online was a breeze! Online! That's my world. That's a world I can traverse without standing in queues and going to schools to look for elusive teachers and forms! 

So I visited the website, scanned the required documents, including a fairly decent picture of mine, and uploaded them. I was quite pleased that my picture in an official document for once would be of my choice. You have to see my Aadhaar card and driver's license to know what I am talking about.

In about two weeks, I checked the website again to find that my voter ID had been approved and dispatched to the local SDM's office! Elections were just a month away and I will be able to vote! Yay! I was elated and somewhat shocked. "Technology is queen!", I thought to myself. 

The next day I went to the SDM office to collect my voter ID. After asking around random people, we located the room for voter ID collections and traversed the crowd to reach the counter. The man at the counter checked the website for confirmation, nodded at me, and then searched his messy desk and drawer. No voter ID! He checked with some other people and figured out that my card had been dispatched to a school a few kilometers away from my house. A school again! 

This time, I was given a name and phone number of the school teacher. So, I called her and she asked me to come to the school the next day. She had insisted that I must call her before reaching her school because she was going door to door to deliver the voter IDs and might not be at her desk. Unfortunately, my house was too far for this form of delivery. 

I did as asked the next day and fixed a time to meet her. She came in a little after I reached, soaking wet in the rain. She was a pleasant lady I must say, who asked me to sit while she looked up her stash of cards for one that belonged to me. But where was the stash? It was nowhere to be found. After searching for a while, she said she might have left it in the house of the last person she had gone to deliver the card. Might have?

So, off she went to the voter's house to bring the leftover cards. I waited anxiously for half hour before she returned with the packet and looked on greedily as she went through the voter cards one by one. She did this not once, but a couple of times. But my card was not there. She finally declared there must have been some mistake and the card would have to be in another school. 

By now I was at the end of my tether. Technology had not been the queen I had thought. Before leaving for another wild goose/teacher chase, I randomly picked up the set of voter cards on her table and looked through them. There it was- my voter ID with my name printed clearly! 

How had the lady missed it, not once but twice? She took my card from my hand incredulously and looked at my face and back at the card and said "This picture doesn't look like you! No wonder I missed it. This person looks so thin!"

Thank you mam for that observation! One would think you would look at the name instead of the picture. But these words were only in my mind. I was so happy to have that piece of plastic that I almost hugged her, and went back home feeling like a queen! 

The Tale of the Maroon Sweater!

After months of insisting I take a sweater to a tailor to put a zip on it, my mother finally gave up on me and asked a dear friend of mine to do the job instead. Now this friend is an accomplished dentist,  a busy one, who has hardly any time for her own chores, but she isn't accomplished enough to say no to my mother. So she took the sweater and dropped it at the tailor's, and called me up and asked me pick it up the next day, as she was too busy. Big mistake!

I promptly forgot about it, as I do most such tasks. After a week, I suddenly remembered the task of the sweater and sheepishly drove to the shop, some 5 km away. There, I met a gentleman with a white beard, who asked me to describe the sweater. I had to scratch my head to remember what it looked like- a rather difficult thing to do because I had done everything in my power in the last few months to ignore the sweater and anything to do with it. My sketchy description must have been good enough because his eyes lit up and he pulled out a cloth bag from under a table. Shaking his head, he smiled sweetly and said "Yeh to nahi hua", meaning "This one hasn't been done yet". 

I felt such a relief- the delay was not my mistake, but the tailor's! But I dutifully sweet-scolded him, telling him how far I had come from for it. He promised to fix it the next day and asked me to come for it again in the afternoon. But who remembers the next day? The mountains call, the rivers whisper, and I have to listen to them, don't I? 

After about 10 days, my mother asked me about the sweater. I told her rather indignantly how the tailor had not done the job, and how careless people here are, and how my precious time is wasted in such things etc. But that very afternoon, I sent my driver to the shop to pick up the dreaded sweater and be done with it. He returned empty-handed. No one in the shop knew what sweater he was talking about! It seemed to me that this shop was competing with me in its disdain for the sweater!

Another week passed. This time my friend reminded me about it, so I made the huge effort of going to the shop again. The person in-charge looked at me askance when I asked him to give me the sweater. He had no clue what I was talking about. I asked for the older man, and I was told he had gone for his namaz and would be back soon.

So I waited with my arms folded, muttering under my breath and frowning. Those who know me well know how impatient I am. I make life hell for those who make me wait, but here, no one paid any attention to me. All three tailors were busy doing their stuff, sitting in their small chairs, surrounded by hundreds of jackets strewn around them. It was as if I and my frowns didn't exist. My impatience didn't bother anyone but me. 

After about 10 minutes of standing looking at the mess, I saw the white-bearded man coming towards the shop. I was ready to burst into a tirade, but one look into those eyes and all my anger vanished. I haven't seen such kind eyes in my life I think. That and his body language, which was neither overtly apologetic, nor arrogant, just full of calm good-cheer, completely floored me. I managed a saccharine-laced complaint about the missing article, but even that stopped once he said "Woh maroon wala half-sleeve sweater!".  He knew! He knew! 

I spent the next 15-20 minutes standing patiently as he pulled jacket after jacket from the piles on the floor, trampling on them with his shoes in the process. It was the most ridiculous scene. There were two huge piles, each with at least a hundred jackets each. When I asked him about them, he said one pile was of clothes already fixed and the other of the pending jobs. Mine was surely to be found in the first one.

Seeing the older man bending over double to find my packet, the other tailors joined in the search. 

Finally, a small packet was retrieved, resulting in much cheering from everyone! I asked the gentleman to pose for a photograph with it and he obliged happily. 

I left the shop with my mother's sweater, grinning from ear to ear. It was only when I was nearing our house that I remembered that I had not made the payment for the work done! No one had asked!

Such is the pain and the pleasure of living in a small town!

Pleasures of Living in a Small Town near a Famous Cricket Stadium

Pleasures of Living in a Small Town (near a Famous Cricket Stadium):

On the way to pick up Aloka from school, I saw scores of cars, police bus and jeeps, at least a hundred policemen and a couple of (token) policewomen, and quite a few housewives crowding around our local neighborhood mosque. 

Fearing the worst, I stopped to ask about it at a neighborhood shop.

Relief! Pride! That was just the Bangladesh cricket team come to our little village mosque to offer Friday prayers!

The Letter from Canada!

I received a birthday card from my mother's brother, Sushil mama, a couple of days after my birthday. It came all the way from Canada, and what a way!

Take a look at the address. The colony Himachal Vikas Pradhikaran doesn't exist, the village Sidhpur is some 3 km away from our village and the pin code is incorrect too. It doesn't even say Dharamshala or Kangra. Just HP! 

How did you conjure up this address Sushil mama! It is a beautiful lie! 

The fact that it reached our side of HP is surprising enough. Is there no other Sidhpur in the entire Himachal Pradesh? 

Once there, the only reason his card made its way to our house is because my mother is so well known in the village and nearby areas. The postal guys recognized her name and corrected the address. Can you imagine this happening in any other place?

This is one of the truest pleasures (and surprises) of living in a small town!!!

The Tale of a Passport-Sized Photo

Today, I went to get my passport size photographs taken for opening a new bank account. To save time, I chose a shop right opposite the bank. It is important to say this because really, there was nothing at the outside of the shop to encourage a customer. It was a tiny hole in the wall place, with a dusty hand-written board that said PHOTOSTATE (yes, with an e). The only indication that it was also a photo-studio were a couple of framed pictures showing through the glass door.

I walked into the shop, no bigger than 6 feet by 8 feet. The man inside was busy stapling a bunch of sheets that he had obviously photostatted. After a brief nod to my request for photos, he ignored me totally. There was a bench with a very dirty velvet cover that I did not want to sit on, so I stood around, waiting for him to get done with stapling. It had to be a rushed job, because he was totally consumed with it and refused to multi-task to any extent. After sometime, he asked me to sit down on the bench, which I did with trepidation.

While waiting for him, I looked at various things inside the shop. The first thing that struck me were very bad pictures of people framed up. There was one of a stunned looking man, another slightly blurred one of a serious looking old woman, another over-exposed/faded one of a couple of kids, and one of a young man. That picture of the young man was the most amazing of all. It was totally blurred. I could make out the shape of the face and that the young man had a mustache, but the picture was majorly out of focus. An obvious mistake- even a child would tell you that- but lo and behold, it was framed in an ornate frame!

The second thing that struck me was a collection of really old looking cameras in a showcase. I mean each looked at least 10 years old and very dusty. Why would anyone display these cameras? I was reminded of Kanto, our gardener, who recently bought a second-hand canon camera and was so proud of it (until it broke down a month later). Maybe, this shop sells second-hand cameras, I thought to myself, but makes no bones about them being very second hand.

As I sat there admiring the pictures and cameras, and trying hard not to think of my clothes getting dirty on that bench, the stapling was done and the man took out his camera from its packaging. Quite an elaborate process that- first he took out a bulky black bag, then a cardboard box from inside it, then unwrapped some bubble wrap and finally took out a point-and-click camera. That's certainly a first-hand camera, I thought to myself. My photo was taken in a single shot and the man briefly smiled looking at the picture, implying the picture was good (or did it mean it was suitably blurred?).

By now, I was in a hurry to get done. At my age, I don't care to see how I look in passport pictures- as long as it looks like me and meets its bureaucratic requirements, I am OK. So I didn't even bother to check it before it was printed. After a few minutes on the computer, he finally printed the set of 8 pictures and patiently cut each picture with a pair of scissors.

This photo of the photo doesn't do justice,
but you get the drift.

When I finally took a look at my picture, I was taken aback. This was not me! This was someone 10 years younger with flawless skin and no wrinkles! And two shades fairer! I am telling you no foundation I had ever used (and I have tried many) has had that kind of effect on my heavily pigmented middle-aged skin.

When I looked up enquiringly at the man, he smiled broadly and said "Thoda photoshop kar diya hai"!

That's the pleasure of living in a small town. And that's exactly the pain.

P.S.: Well, dear Mr. photographer, when you were at it, couldn't you have made those eyebrows a tad darker too?

It's a Girl!

Yesterday, I was at once shocked and delighted to hear my driver say with a long sad face "uskay beta hua hai ji". (Alas, she has given birth to a son). 

Then I realized he was talking about their cow! At least in some species, daughters are awaited eagerly...

The Phone Call!

Written on December 29, 2013:

Phone call I received yesterday went something like this. 

Caller: Hello madam. Mujhay pehchana?
Me: Yes Raj. Kaise ho? (Raj being a worker at the church I had contacted to confirm the timing of the service on Christmas)
Raj: Hanji mein Raj. Actually meine pee rakhi hai.
Me: Acchha? Koi na.
Raj: Actually mera birthday hai aaj. Isi liye meine pee rakhi hai.
Me: Happy birthday Raj.
Raj: Thank you madam. Same to you.

Speechless.

The Tale of Dry Cleaned Jacket!

After almost a year of living here, I finally felt the need for a dry cleaner- my black wool coat was a mess. So, I asked a friend for a nearby dry cleaner. Her response was cryptic- she asked what I wanted cleaned. When I told her it was a coat, she said "Ok, for your coat you can go to the dry cleaner opposite Sacred Heart. Don't go to him for sarees." I had never heard of such super specialization in dry cleaning but I didn't probe. Maybe I should have.

So the next day, I went looking for the dry cleaner who was OK for coats. It was a small hole-in-the-wall shop right opposite the most famous school in our area. There, I was greeted by a middle-aged man who smiled and bowed as I approached. His smile stayed put as I showed him my coat and asked for it to be dry-cleaned. This is how the conversation went.

Me: When can I pick it up?
Man (smiling): When do you want it?
Me: When can you have it ready?
Man (smiling): Tomorrow
Me: Tomorrow morning?
Man (smiling): Tomorrow evening.
Both smiled at each other.
Me: Will you give me some receipt?
Man (smiling even more): Nahin ji, koi zaroorat nahin. (There's no need for that)
Me (feeling uncertain): How much will it cost me?
Man (smiling ear to ear): Koi na. Le lenge ji. (No problem. We'll take what's right.)
Me (totally flummoxed, but disarmed by all that smiling): Ok, thank you.

I went back for the coat two days later and found a little girl at the shop. When I asked her for her father, she asked me to take a seat on a bench and wait for 10 minutes while her father finished his breakfast. I had stuff to do, so I left. I returned the next day and the same man greeted me with an even bigger smile and a reproach that I was late- "Kab se tayyar hai ji, tussi aye nahin". He took out my coat from a cupboard and quickly wrapped it in newspaper (no plastic bags in HP) and handed to me. I made the payment and came back home.

A couple of days later, on a bitterly cold morning, I took out my coat from the newspaper wrapping with the intent of wearing it and was shocked to see that it was no coat but a kind of poncho. I had been given someone's else's clothing! I went down to mom's room to tell her but could not- I was laughing so hard. When I finally managed to tell her, she said that the same shop had mixed up her jacket too just last week, but she had noticed it right there and got her jacket back.

So, I went back to the shop. This time I found a tough-looking woman at the counter. When I told her what had happened, she said "Oh, this belongs to an Angrez (foreigner). She had come for this shawl yesterday and I searched and searched and finally told her we didn't have it. When she insisted that it was in my shop, I told her that was impossible but why not she checks thoroughly at home while I do the same in my shop"! Feeling total empathy for the Angrez, I asked what  her reaction to that proposed solution was. The lady said "O maan gayi ji"! (She agreed!)

Now, came operation Search-for-this-non-Angrez's-Coat. A lot of hangers were moved here and there, a lot of jackets were brought to me, and after a lot of "Is this your coat?" "Is that your coat?", she finally found my coat and gave it to me.

This time I checked and made sure it was indeed my coat before it was wrapped in a newspaper. As a parting advice, I told the lady to start tagging clothes and giving out receipts. To that she said "It is not needed. I never make a mistake. I was sick so my husband took over the shop for a few days. It's he who creates these problems. You see, he is not right in his head."!!!

The Electricians!

I woke up at 3 am- freezing! Why was the room heater off? Oh, no electricity! It was a first. We rarely have electricity cuts, and certainly never at night. I wrapped myself in the razai and went back to sleep. At 6, I got out of the bed to complete a promised deliverable and still no electricity. Then I noticed that the meter light was on. Dang! It was no power cut, but some other problem.

By 7:30, mom had called three different electricians, hoping at least one will turn up. By 9, all three had arrived! Mom and I bit our tongues and giggled in embarrassment.

But none of the electricians left upon seeing the others. Two of them watched as one fixed the burnt meter wire, while mom made small talk with them all. I heard mom say something about me to them, something about English and Facebook and how good I was. Really mom? Curious, I step out of the kitchen where I was pounding chutney manually (no electricity you see) to see what was going on and I notice two faces that looked very familiar.

Then it struck me- they were my conversational English students from a nearby hotel! I had been teaching them without knowing that these students, electricians in the hotel, had done the electrical wiring in our house when it was being constructed. No wonder mom had called them to fix our problem, and no wonder they had turned up.

Of course, I forced them to speak to me in English, much to their embarrassment. Mean of me to transfer the embarrassment to them no? :)