A Bowl of Elusive

The first time I met my uncle was when I was nine years old. I mean, I had certainly met him before that – when I was less than two years old – but I didn’t remember that time. My father and his younger brother had not been on talking terms for over a decade and I’m still not sure why. I never asked either of them about it. But in 1999, when my uncle called my grandfather from Mumbai asking him if he could come over to Mumbai where my uncle was to undergo surgery, my father was present in the room and unceremoniously took over the phone call. It didn’t matter that they had not spoken to each other in years. My father asked him what was going on – my uncle revealed that he had recently been having epileptic fits, indicating that he had some neurological problem. On tests like MRI and EEG, it had been revealed that he had a frontal lobe tumor that needed to be removed surgically. My father told him he would come to Mumbai, and he left soon after. I remember this time vividly because I wa

Up until last year, we had employed a cook, whose cooking left a lot to desire. So we ended up ordering a lot of food from restaurants as we were unhappy with the food she cooked. After a while, we compared the expenses and decided it would be better if we let the cook go and ate outside or toggled cooking ourselves and eating out. So we gave her a month's notice and then I started cooking for two. Now my approach to cooking is simple - I follow recipes, which means I like things the way they should be. For instance, if I am making noodles, my carrots would be cut into super-fine juliennes and that is a time-consuming process of cooking. My wife insists that she would be happy with a lot less and maybe she would be, but I just can't get myself to compromise on my process.  It usually takes me whole afternoons to cook these meals - it's a lot of work, but I love it when a meal turns out well. I don't make very fancy stuff, just usual Indian dishes but the way they are tr

Towards the end of her life, my grandmother was barely the person I once knew. Years of suffering and pain, having lost her oldest son, followed by her husband and then her last son had left her a hollow shell of the person she was when I was five or six, when times were happier. So many things plagued her in the last of her days – she often asked herself why God had let her live for so long, while all her loved ones succumbed before her eyes. She not only had her own sorrow, but she had to live through the sorrows and pain of all her loved ones. Dementia started setting in towards the end and she barely recognized me the last time we met and maybe I was relieved. She deserved the much deserved detachment from her reality. You see when I look back at my folks and the people that they were, I often judge my grandmother  with the harshest set of ideals. She was deeply flawed, as compared to my grandfather or my father and uncle. She had a temper. The caste based biases were deeply ingrai

A friend of mine just forwarded a video of the song “Radha Kaise Na Jale” from the movie ’Lagaan’ and as I was listening to it, I was transported back in time when I had first heard this song. I remember they used to run the trailer of the movie between programs on the Zee Channel and I loved it. It was one of the first movies that I had been really excited about and I remember this because my grandfather had commented on my excitement. Ah, songs and the memories they bring with it. As of today, memories are all I have left of my family members. For each one of them, there are memories associated with certain songs. And I thought, why not write about the various songs that hold significance in my life in the form of memories they evoke, be it about my family members or certain moments in my life. My father was the OG music aficionado in the family. He had a Philips 2-in-1 music system and he would buy cassette tapes of his favorite albums. Kumar Sanu, Kishore Kumar, Asha Bhosle & U

If you reach a certain address at the Greenfield School Lane in Sambalpur, Odisha, you’ll come across a big green walled house. That’s my house. My permanent residence. Even though I haven’t lived there for over twelve years now. The earliest memories I have of this house is from 1996 or 1997 when I would come here for the holidays. It was my grandparents’ place back then. And my father would get me here whenever he could. Of course, I’d been here before but that’s only as far as I can remember. I loved coming here because it was a break from my otherwise troublesome life.  And I remember the house being very different from how it is now. The architecture didn’t change but the house’s identity did. For example, when my grandfather was around, the central hall always had this smell of Colgate tooth powder that he used to clean his dentures with and even now, that smell invariably reminds me of him. And the kitchen used to be my grandmother’s kingdom. The kitchen, with walls c

I have been feeling lonely lately. Let me rephrase that: I have been pretty lonely lately. And this isn't just any loneliness, it's existential loneliness. In simple words, I've been feeling like I have no one and nothing to live for. Just today, after many days of hectic work, I found some time to sit back and relax, and I found myself searching for the purpose of life - on YouTube, like the lost millennial that I am. I came across some videos by Sadhguru and the like, but they were way too vague for my taste. You see, my question isn't existential or figurative, its more literal. I am looking for a reason to live, and I don't see one. I am just curious to know, what do people live for? What is the whole purpose of us being here? See, I have always been a bit of a skeptic, never bought into the concept of a deity or a higher power. And in the last few years, I lost most of the people I felt connected to. Wasn't all to Death, so don't be sorry for me.

I usually just refer to it as the "accident", but it wasn't an accident at all, was it? It was a case of mob violence. On 26th February, 2017, at 5:30 am, I was almost killed by a group of angry people, armed with sticks and stones. That day changed me forever. And it's the first time in more than two years that I am willing to tell everyone the details of what happened on that fateful morning. I am Rajinder. I hail from the hilly state of Himachal Pradesh. I worked in retail before getting promoted to the marketing department of the brand I work for, back in 2016. I moved to Gurgaon for the job and took up residence at a hostel in Manesar, at a walking distance from my office. Things were going well.  In January of 2017, a new guy called Shammi became my roommate. Shammi had a big personality and everybody took a shine on him instantly. By big, I mean the kind of macho aggressive that young men usually gravitate towards. But I never had any problems with h

The streets are merciless and they teach you the most brutal lessons. Chotu had no family, no relatives and he grew up in the arms of the streets of Mumbai. Chotu was a pickpocket, a thief, a grifter and anything else required to survive on the streets, all alone. He'd been in schools as a child and had picked up languages and enough education to pass off as a gentleman, something he knew he wasn't. But life was a big pretence for Chotu and he didn't mind being a little different from the street urchins he grew up with. He had friends who'd come up with ideas for scams and cons and he'd plan them out and run them, taking advantage of his innate charm, often conning people of thousands of rupees. After every scam, he'd leave the town for a new one. It was healthy that way, because he hated the troubles his cons created for people and he had to run away from them. His last job hadn't gone that well and Chotu now found himself hiding out in a quaint litt

My uncle died last August. His brain tumor had relapsed after eighteen years and even after a successful operation, his body couldn't bear the stress of the radiation therapy and his condition deteriorated in the months after and he breathed his last on 29th August, 2018. The months leading up to his demise were really stressful for the whole family. Seeing a man lose himself, being paralyzed and unable to speak, is hard. It didn't help that he was the last of my two closest family members. My grandmother was understandably shattered after his death. She soon started keeping unwell and has been bedridden ever since. A few days back, I woke up in the morning, dazed by a dream I'd had. In that dream, I shot my uncle several times in the chest and was trying to dispose of his body, while throwing a party to friends. I just couldn't hide his body well and I was terrified of people seeing what I'd done. I woke up, drenched in sweat. I couldn't understand why I