The Swami's Visit

Quite often, what we mistake for our earliest memories are in fact our fathers' first camcorder outings. So I won't claim this as my own, but I do remember seeing, at least, a home video of a man known to my family as simply... the Swami.

The Swami, which is an honorific title, is a holy man who tours the world, staying for a few days at a time in Hindu homes. Since the South Asian Diaspora is amongst the furthest flung, the Swami is a very well travelled man.

In the home video he is shown praying in the flat above my parents' corner shop in Newport, Shropshire. Not his most glamourous gig, I imagine, but for us - my two sisters and I - he was an exotic visitor in our otherwise suburban lives.

In what is a particularly uncomfortable scene for me the Swami reaches down from his seat on the sofa to where we children are sat, at his feet, and strokes my head, like I were the cat to his Bond villain. Instead of purring, I stifle a laugh for what felt like an hour, but what the video reveals to have been only a few minutes.

For us, it was the highlight of the Swami's visit. We recounted the story to each other (though we were all there), each time its telling more exaggerated. "It was like I was his bowling ball!" I'd say, not realising how creepy that sounded.

***

When he returned, years later, we were in our teens and had moved house. As he climbed our driveway, I noticed a pair of Nike Air Jordans peeking out from underneath his orange robes. He looked up at the new house, much bigger than the last, a symbol of my parents' success, and declared it bad luck.

"Its shape," he said. "Is like the open mouth of a roaring lion."

I came out to help him with his bags, paused and looked up at the house as if it were a Magic Eye illusion. Maybe the lion would appear if I moved up close, fixed my eyes and stepped slowly back, I thought. But, however I looked at it, it was a new build, detached house with a separate garage joined by a granny annexe extension.

Once inside, he found our house more to his liking. Furniture draped in tarpaulin, at his request, so that when he sat he wouldn't come into contact with the seat. Water too, on his arrival, was poured into his mouth so that the glass didn't touch his lips. He plugged in his mobile phone to charge (it was the first I'd ever seen) and announced his final request - that he stay in my bedroom. As the youngest, he said, my room would be untouched by carnal desires. Good luck with that, buddy, I thought.

That evening, as we gathered in the lounge for a prayer session, we resumed our original positions: children (and mere mortals) to the floor, Swami perched on the covered sofa. This time, when he reached down to stroke my head, he found himself tangled in sticky spikes.

"Any questions?" he asked when we were done. "Anything you like."

It was quiet. I guess we thought if we asked any questions we'd only have to sit there, stifling laughter, for even longer. But it was awkward, so I raised my hand and scanned the room, looking for inspiration, my eyes landing on a painting of the avatar Krishna, in typical pose, playing a flute and dancing with women. Topless women, I'll add.

"Mr Swami?" I said.

"Swami," he corrected me.

"Swami, why's the Lord Krishna always surrounded by women?" I asked. I was fifteen, bear in mind, and if I could just have his secret...

"Sandeep," he said. "You mustn't ask questions of your religion. OK?"

OK. So his question, as to whether we had any questions, was a rhetorical question?

I was glad when he left. And as I helped him with his bags I thought that for a Swami, "free from all the senses", he sure had a lot of shit with him. Checking for his mobile phone, a dance I'd soon learn myself, he was on his way, off to chide more children and put them off the religion their parents so wanted them to embrace.

***

I was reminded of all of this when I went home for Diwali last weekend. It was a similar scene: the family gathered in the lounge for a prayer session on the Saturday evening, except we all sat on the floor this time. And perhaps because this made me feel like we were on the same level, I interrupted the prayer to ask why we didn't say it in English.

"I mean, no-one understands this," I said. I hadn't wanted to start a revolution, but the debate my question had sparked was turning into one.

"Can't you be a Hindu without speaking Hindi?" my sister asked.

"Yeah, why's the religion and the language so tied up?"

You can see that our line of questioning had matured since the Swami's visit, but even still it was upsetting mum. She finished the prayer, put away her books and went to the kitchen.

The next day, as I was packing to return to London, I came across a magazine in my old room. Though the Swami wasn't with us this Diwali he'd found his way onto the cover of Hinduism Today, which had pronounced him, "Hindu of the Year". I wondered how he'd earned the title. Fluent in Hindi? Unquestioning? Looking at the cover, he had a lot of bindis. Maybe that helped. I took a photo of the magazine and put away my camera. I'd been teaching myself photography and Diwali this year had turned into an ethnographic study.

In the car on the way to the railway station I apologised to my mum for upsetting her the night before.

"That's okay, son," she said. "It just upset me, I suppose, that you're willing to teach yourself photography, but you seem uninterested in your own religion."

It didn't feel like my religion, I wanted to say. And the fact that I asked questions meant that I was interested.

But I didn't say anything. I didn't want an argument before I left, and I didn't really want a revolution. I'd had a great weekend, and I knew that when I got home and processed the photos I'd have the evidence in my hands. You just can't say that about religion.

"Mum," I said, as I got out of the car. "Why is Krishna always surrounded by topless women?"

My mum wound-up the car window and started the engine. I guess you can't say that either.

Tales from the crypt

For a self-proclaimed (and obsessed) geek, it came as something of a blow when those vanguards of vanity, Google, announced that I'd reached my peak in 2004. If 'Googling' yourself is considered an ego stroke, then analysing your name via new service, Google Insights, is like checking into a Thai massage parlour. Except, in my case, without the 'happy ending'. The service reported that I was most popular in the United States, followed by India and then the UK. (It seems I'd failed to make an impression on Canada.) It also generated a graph of 'Interest over time' that sloped steadily downwards from 2004 when I was first started blogging, to the present day, as I write to you now, following a four month hiatus.

So, why the silent treatment?

Well, since I last wrote, back in April, I seem to have found myself in love's death-grip. I was already struggling to update the blog when I met Brooky Wook and then embarked on a relationship completely at odds with the legacy of this website: healthy, functional, romantic. For what is essentially a catalogue of my dating failures, is being lucky in love the final nail in what was already the dusty coffin of my personal blog?

Don't worry, dear readers, there's room for one more in this coffin made for two. I won't be cracking open its lid anytime soon and clambering six feet up to a spring meadow of bunny rabbits and love hearts. Being in a relationship brings with it a whole new set of social faux pas, one of which I'm reminded this week, as Brooky Wook prepares to meet my family for the first time.

I was in a similar position last weekend, having been invited to her grandad's 87th birthday lunch in Canterbury. Her dad picked us up from the train station and drove us to the Wook household, where I nervously approached the front door, opened quite suddenly by a man waving what appeared to be a walking stick in the air. This did not calm my nerves. Instead, they rattled with the bag of gifts that Brooky Wook and I had bought her grandad. I pushed them towards the man's free hand like I was popping a flower in the nose of a gun. I smiled, wished him a Happy Birthday and watched as both stick and face dropped.

"It's not my birthday," he said. "I'm [Brooky Wook's] uncle."
"Ah," I said, taking a closer look at the man I'd mistaken for an 87 year old grandfather - tall, fortysomething, with only a hint of grey in his full head of hair. "I know that! ...But it was your birthday recently, right?"
"Yes. In January."
"Well," I said, easing the gifts back from his hand. "Happy... belated birthday!"

I stepped inside and saw Grandfather Wook, behind thick, bottle-top glasses, being helped from his rocking chair by two grandchildren and a walking stick more traditional than that held in his son's hand. Uncle Wook, I learned, had just returned from Kenya, and the stick was a cattle herding staff, used by the Maasai tribe. I imagine he'd thought of using it for a different purpose that day.

But as I left with Brooky-Wook I realised that I hadn't buried social faux pas when I found love. It may be a many splendored thing, lift us up where we belong, be all that we need, but it doesn't free us from the awkwardness that has been the legacy of this blog since 2004. If anything, it makes it worse.

Coconut Boy

While other mums worry about their sons turning to drugs, getting their girlfriends pregnant or joining some sort of gang, mine is concerned with matters more spiritual. (Besides, I don't have a girlfriend, I'm a responsible member of an online community and I just turned down a line of coke because I had a "terrible blocked nose".) The way my mum sees it, the only road I'm heading down is the one clearly marked, 'Identity Crisis'.

"Coconut boy," she calls me. "Brown on the outside, white on the inside."

While there might, at least, be parts of me that resemble a coconut - brown, covered in hair and full of a white, milky fluid - at this time of the year, when my colour fades, it's quite easy to 'lose my roots' when they're not so etched onto my face in hues of burnt sienna, sepia and mahogany. I'm invited to fewer dinner parties, considered less effective as a token person of colour, and stopped far less by police men.

It takes just a two hour journey up north and one weekend with my family to bring that muddy colour back to my sweet cheeks and to remind me that my roots don't stop in Shropshire, but in a land far, far away, to which ex-pat relatives still squint and admire what remains of a changing culture.

I found out this morning that my cousin, a graduate from Kings College London, is in India to get married.
"That's crazy!" I said. "Has he even met her before?"
"Oh yeah," my mum replied, nonchalantly. "At the engagement party, I think."

He's my second cousin in as many years to go east to find the perfect Indian bride. Some send for the brides to come over to the UK. Others, like my cousin, get married in India with a view to bring their brides home once 'the paperwork' is ready.

On the one hand, I think it sort of represents a failure, as if the groom-to-be was no match made in heaven for the British Indian girls he would have seen on the arranged marriage circuit (which I like to imagine is like the selection process of American Idol; Simon Cowell as busty bride-to-be).

On the other hand, it's like the son or, more often, his parents, look to India for the 'old fashioned decency' quickly escaping British Indian girls. (It's being replaced by ambition, I'm pleased to report.)

What they don't know - or fail to see - is that the kind of girl that insists on a wedding register at the UK Border & Immigration Agency, is probably pretty ambitious. And that India is going through it's own (belated) sexual revolution (after ironically triggering western 'free love' movements of the 1960s and 1970s, with the rediscovery of its ancient culture of sexual liberalism).

The pursuit and purchase of the 'perfect Indian bride' might be more a case for Trading Standards than Border and Immigration control. Ambition and sexual liberalism is completely at odds with the requirements of my cousin, his parents and other British Indians who look to India for 'old fashioned decency', as impossible to attain as the 'impaling on a stake' position of one of its most old-fashioned texts, the Kama Sutra.

Nevertheless, I wish them luck. If I'm like a coconut, and life a box of chocolates, an arranged marriage is like a curry. It's hot, it's exotic, you can pick it up or have it delivered, but soon enough that shit's going to really hurt.

New hymns

I'm back home with my parents for the holidays, where keeping up with the Jones' has escalated to a point where my family is no longer honouring its own religion, but instead joining the neighbours for midnight mass at the local Catholic church.

It's not typical behaviour for a Hindu family, but then mine has never been a typical Hindu family. Neither has it shied from Catholicism: My sisters and I went to the Catholic school opposite our house. (We got Christ and convenience - it was a 2 for 1 deal.)

As such, we knew what to expect from the service - lots of lengthy Bible passages, lots of time to 'reflect', lots of standing up and sitting down.

I didn't, however, expect there to be quite so many apologies. Soon after we arrived we joined the congregation in one massive plea for forgiveness.

It was a funny way to start, I thought. "Let's get this party started," I imagined the Father saying. "With a big fat, 'I'm sorry'." I wasn't sure why we were apologising (we weren't even late), but I joined in all the same.

It wasn't long, however, until my complicity turned into awkward silence. I was the only member of the congregation not saying 'amen,' 'thanks be to God,' or 'Kyrie Eleison' (I didn't even know what the last one meant, but I liked to think it was Jamaican patois); I was probably the only one censoring parts of Christmas carols, by refusing to sing them.

I wondered how the rest of my family could, not least because the church insisted on performing songs impossible to pick up. New ones, in an attempt to be relevant, employed all sorts of strange 'blue' notes, unpredictable key changes and song structures that eschewed the tried and tested verse/chorus formula of the last hundred or so years.

But then, I thought, that's not unlike my family at all: blue, unpredictable, unusual; also, unlike new hymns, relevant, at least to me. And, in a weird way, honouring its own religion.

Alphabet Street

When my dad argues that there are thirty more letters in the Hindi alphabet than there are in the English, he refers to the languages as 'ours' and 'theirs', respectively. That's because he's talking to our Indian visitors, who've travelled from Madras, by way of New Jersey, last week to London, and now to Shropshire, where they're staying with my parents and discussing - at length - the respective strengths and weaknesses of Hindi and English. There can't be enough letters in either, I think, as I listen to them debate in an odd fusion of both languages.

Roti and respectability

I've just explained this to a friend and she thought it was hilarious. Hopefully you will too. Hopefully some good will come from my evening, before something bad comes from my mouth.

You see, I'm full. Like really full. I'm so full I can't see my feet.

And it's all because I've just been caught in a cycle of roti and respectability, of cauliflower and chapati.

My aunt, who is staying with us this week, has made alloo gobi - a curried combination of potato and cauliflower, which, she tells me, is disrespectful - for some reason - to eat alone. Not with a loved one, of course (this is the land of the arranged marriage, after all).
"You mustn't eat without chapati," she said.

But it's also quite bad, I understand, to eat chapati alone - without the curried combination of something else. So, imagine my difficulty tonight in trying to synchronise my chapati and my cauliflower.

Each time I finished one I was served more of the other.

And so it went until both were finished at exactly the same time. And most of my lower torso had completely vanished beneath my big belly.
"More cauliflower, Sandeep?"
"No thanks, Aunty ji."

Like a tree.

There was a television advert for a bank or an insurance company - I don't remember which exactly - but I'm pretty sure it was for an organisation for whom the level of emotion was completely inappropriate.

It featured a montage of faces, each dreamily looking upwards, sharing the wishes that were somehow facilitated by said organisation.

"I want to be a gymnast,"
"I want to be teacher,"
"I want to be a sex pest," and so on.
And, the closing thought, "I want to be a tree."

The latter was my mum's favourite. She likes trees - she couldn't quite see how banking or taking out insurance would allow her to become one. But the thought became something of a catch phrase for her. "I want to be a tree," she often said, dreamily looking upwards, fantasising of a life more peaceful and serene.

Well, that dream has slowly been hacked away at for several years. And last night it came crashing to the ground, when my dad committed axe to trunk and bought the whole fucking tree down.

Concerned that it was growing out of control, dad was determined to assert his, and fell the tree that loomed over a main road in our front garden.

Obviously, there are precautions that need to be taken when dealing with a felling so close to a busy road. For my dad these precautions, and the costs involved in taking them, were to be - at all times - avoided.

The tree, he decided, would be felled by himself, his shopkeeper friend, a chainsaw, and a bit of rope. And in the hope that the twenty-foot beech tree would fall this way and not that - onto the road and to the injury or death of its innocent users.

But, while still shedding the tree of its branches, onlookers must have observed this potential tragedy and complained; for when the police arrived the men dropped their chainsaws and their plans.

But not for good.

Determined to fell this tree, without any financial cost to himself, and undeterred by the warnings of the police (and soon after the local council and two tree surgeons), my dad decided that he would return to the tree, under the cloak of darkness. And, if his shopkeeper friend wouldn't join him, he'd get his best man on the job.

81-year-old war veteran, John would trade his walking stick for a chainsaw and fell the tree in exchange for fire wood, such was his quality of life. He lived alone, in the bad end of town, and would use the wood to heat his abode through to the summer, if he'd make it.

To my dad being compassionate and frugal were two mutually exclusive things. You couldn't be one and the other. Saving money, he thought, was a cruel thing. And so he watched as the old man boarded a step ladder and began to saw at the wood.

But before they were done, the local council returned. The tree, they suggested, may not be ours after all. My dad may be fined, the old man deprived of his fire wood and my mum, whose dreams had been dashed, sawed and partially felled, proven right, after all.

Being cheap and wise, she'd always insisted, were mutually exclusive. In trying to save money my dad had incurred additional costs. And had he learned his lesson?

"I think I'll get John to make a start on the tree in the back garden," he said over dinner the following night.
"Why don't you just do it the right way," my mum said. "For once."
With that she got down from the table and stood her ground, strong and firm. And not at all unlike a tree.

People. Pets. Places.

We grieve over people and pets but also over places. And while they never die, as such, our relationships with them can change, remain desperately the same or end altogether. In that sense, the towns and cities in which we spend our childhoods, teens and adult lives, are like the relationships we have with people and, to some extent, with pets. They do, after all, get run over by cars; they are loved and are lost.

The places where I've lived, I suppose, are like the girls I've loved. I've played kiss chase in the town of my infancy, got hot and heavy in the suburbs of my teens, and played the field in the the travels of my twenties.

Now that I'm moving to London - the big smoke - I wonder where the analogy will take me. A fat girl with a cigar? I certainly hope not. But, in the meantime, I'm revisiting an old love, having moved out of my flat and in with my parents.

If the travels of my twenties were like playing the field, moving back with my parents is like being castrated. Long gone is the freedom and the flirtatiousness of my young adult life. It's back to curfews and cooked dinners.

But I can't complain. The food is really very nice and there's no where to go out anyway. It's given me time to think. And yesterday I took our dog for a walk down memory lane. Well, actually Mill Farm Drive, the street where my parents live.

I found that either the houses have shrunk or I've grown. I'd walked the streets as a teenager but, for the first time, could see over its fences, and into the gardens and trampolines of its backyards. I saw not the past but what could be my future.

Young families, new money, old people - in relationships with their places more stable, more kind.

I wondered, when the fat lady in London sings, and my twenties become my thirties and those my forties (as the sequence goes) if I would find myself, on a street like this with a life more ordinary.

Marriages, mortgages, divorces, down payments.... Our relationships with people and places are complicated things! I'll stick to having pets, I thought.

That was until I had to use the poop-a-scoop in my hand. If there's one thing that's true about all relationships: shit happens. You love, you lose and, occasionally, you pick up the shit and move on.

Le Moonwalker

Ooh la la! Check out my photos from Paris on the link below.

• Paris is for Lovers [via my Flickr photo stream]

Washed Up

When I moved out of my family home into my own place one of first things I bought was a plastic washing up bowl. It's more symbolic than it sounds.

To me, it, and all the new kitchenware I'd bought, represented a new independence and a break from the Indian culture on which I was raised.

I'd never seen a washing up bowl until I went to my girlfriend's house. English people, I discovered, put their dishes in this bowl, soaked them in hot water and, some time later, rinsed them off. It seemed to be the antithesis of the Sisypheon ordeal that was washing up in my house.

My long suffering Mum stood making hot chapatis while we ate, and somehow managed to finish hers first and be at the kitchen sink quicker than we could say alloo sag. (My pronunciation always slowed me down somewhat.)

There would be no after dinner conversation. The trays had to be washed - jaldi, jaldi - before the colourful culinary delights left stains in their steel compartments. Mum would stand, hunched over the sink, scrubbing the trays as they clanked, one by one, before her.

The plastic bowl, I observed, allowed my girlfriend's family to dispose of waste liquid into the sink, whilst keeping the washing up water relatively clean.

It was perfect, I thought. While the dishes soaked I could...listen to Radio 4, read the newspaper, have a glass of wine - do all the things we never did in our house. I could...be white and middle-class. All thanks to a plastic washing up bowl.

It wasn't long, however, after moving into my own place that I began to find the plastic bowl a bit cumbersome. I couldn't get much in it and I didn't get much out of it. It just became another thing to wash up. And while I let things soak I realised that I didn't care much for Radio 4, I never bought the paper and I didn't know how to drink wine without getting drunk.

I took it out of the sink. And my washing up bowl, for some time, became my fruit bowl.

Some say multiculturalism is a melting pot. I think it's more a plastic washing up bowl. And I've decided - and can only imagine its cultural ramifications - that I'm getting a dishwasher.

Ask the Lonely

It’s as common a question as I’m ever asked. And remember, I’m from an Indian family, and it’s more common even than questions regarding my ultimate wedding to a nice Hindu girl, or my decision to not study law or medicine, or why I’m not more like my cousin, Dinesh. It’s so pressing, in fact, that my dad himself, a man of few words, and certainly not with a vocabulary of emotive language, felt it necessary to ask: “Don’t you get lonely?”

This usually follows a tour of my flat, and is becoming as obligatory as the tour itself; my response as short. “No,” I say. “Of course not.” But, for some reason, people tend to equate my single life with a life of bleak loneliness, posing the question with a tilted head and a look of concern.

The truth is, I’m too busy to feel lonely. And, in fact, I’m rarely even alone. Sure, I don’t have a girlfriend, a life partner, a Hindu wife, or whatever else people think is the opposite loneliness, but I’m so inundated with visitors asking me whether I’m lonely that I’m, frankly...not.

English Tea

"What happens when you leave tea in a cup overnight?" My Gran asks - in Punjabi - while I sip on a good English cuppa.
I reply the best I can - in English. "Er, Santa Claus drinks it?"
"The cup stains black."
"Right."
"So, what do you think happens to your insides when you drink tea?"
Surely not, I think to myself. Overwhelmed by this, I take one last breath of fresh air before the stale lecture about what I should and should not be drinking begins.

Water, milk and orange juice are all good apparently. (One can only imagine the colours swilling inside my gran's belly.)
"Do you drink water?" She asks.
"In my tea I do." It's a good job I didn't mention all the Guinness that was had last night.

She actually believes this stuff though, that's the funny thing. She actually thinks, as I write this, that I'm staining my soul, or what remains of it, black. You see, she thinks it's despicable that I speak so little Punjabi, though I can understand most. I would like to defend myself by saying that she's been in England for fifty years, while I've seen the occasional Bollywood movie, and still my Punjabi is streets ahead of her English, but a) it's a bit disrespectful and b) my command of the language is not yet that great.

I'm now fearing for my insides as she shoves a large and brightly coloured Indian dried milk pudding under my nose. I try some.
"You like?" That's the most English she can manage. That, and "you no like?" depending on the situation.
"Yes Gran," I say. But, like brightly coloured, saccharine Bollywood movies, it's definitely one for small doses. And so I decline a second helping - or forcing, rather.
"You either like it or you don't. I don't understand." We're back to Punjabi now and then, in a shock move, she unleashes a torrent of English. "You like it? You no like it?"
I swear to God, or rather many many limbed Gods, if my family weren't Hindu they'd be Jewish. And so I open my mouth, though not to speak, take another bite and think this would all taste a lot better with some good English tea.

Sorry for the Delay

Sorry for the delay…Man, I start a lot of sentences that way.
“Sorry for the delay in replying…”
“Sorry for the delay getting here…”
“Sorry for the delay in child support, Little Jimmy (which is what we’ve called him)...”

I am sorry for not having written sooner. Although, to be fair, I have been writing – but it’s been so sub-standard that I’ve had to lock it away in a safe. Perhaps one day it’ll appear as a bootleg at a book fair. (Do authors have bootlegs? This is how much I read.)

This lack of anything interesting to write about, I’m sure, comes from a lack of doing anything interesting. You don’t want to know what I’ve been doing. Although, now I feel obliged to tell you, before you draw your own – very sinister – conclusions.

I’m currently fifteen miles (and five years) from my flat, and in the town where I spent my formative years, house-sitting for my parents while they sit on a Balearic Island, soaking up the sun. And since I’m unable to compromise the life of comfort and convenience that I have become accustomed to at the flat, I find myself driving between my two residences several times a day.

All this is very tiring. So much so that I’m getting my chores all mixed up and have started watering the dog and walking the plants. This is one reason for my delay in writing. Another is that things are particularly busy at work. I don’t imagine if I worked day and night that I’d get everything done. And so, when I’m wide awake, and less busy, I’ll write more. I am really sorry for the delay.

These Boots

If I flirted with happiness in America, it's certainly been given the boot today. And it took a severe kicking when I found myself violently thrust into life – or something like it – in Cruel Britannia.

I’m staying with my parents in Telford, Shropshire this weekend, my sisters in tow, and suddenly my post-vacation blues have been given a harmonica and a bottle of Southern Comfort. My family, though usually served on the rocks, have been pretty neat and, at least, have appeared interested in my travels.

There was a moment however, shopping with my sister and my mum, when I thought I might become irrational. We went to a fabric shop, a garden centre and a car accessory store, none of which stocked anything that I could use: I don’t have a car; I don’t have a garden; and I have little or no interest in buying fabric.

Worse still, immersed as I was in Telford's Saturday shopper crowd, I thought what a generally unattractive people the British public are. Sure, there are the occasional gems – Kiera Knightly, Catherine Zeta Jones, Princess Diana – but it’s always the same old story: they move to America, or they marry a Douglas...or they die.

Still, I shouldn't judge England by Telford's standards. It’s not like its streets are flooded with talent scouts, looking for England’s next top model. The attractive people, they’ve realised, have fled to the cities, or at least, a little north, to Shropshire's county town, Shrewsbury.

With this thought, and some (northern) comfort, I wandered the garden centre and resisted the temptation of irrationality. I did not smash the terracotta pots that I held for my sister, but instead subjected her and the rest of my family to a rather thorough (though not wholly comprehensive) slideshow of my travels.

Swigging on our memories, happiness and I flirted again, and I thought to myself, with all the rationality of a drunk, about taking another trip. This time however, I'll be heading north and back home, to Shrewsbury. And though these boots were made for walking, and maybe one of these days that's what they'll do, tonight I'm looking forward to taking them off, putting my feet up and having a drink, perhaps a Corona, to the future.

The Blackest of Sheep

Everybody claims to be the black sheep of their family. Statistically speaking, such claims are most often made during family holidays. But for the blackest of sheep there is no such thing, and no more have I felt my blackness than last week when a chain of events confirmed my position on the outer branches of the family tree.

"We're planning a family holiday!" my sister Uma said, in a barely audible mixture of excitement and poor network reception.
"Oh yeah? Where to?" I said, in an audible yet curious mixture of fascination and fear, remembering the rows and sulks of family holidays past.
"The South of France."
"Cool," I said, assessing the relative pros and cons of location versus company in my mind. "I'll have to call you back later," I looked at my watch. "I've got a date."

During which, incidentally, my mum had phoned and left a message on my machine. "Hi San," it started. "We’re trying to book a family holiday and need to ask you something! Can you call us back?"

And so I did, having decided that being in the South of France might outweigh actually being with the family. But, it turns out, I had misunderstood my mum's message. "We were trying to book the holiday on the Internet," she explained. "But couldn't work out what the security code was that they were asking for. Don't worry though - we worked it out and booked the four tickets."
"Only four?" I asked.
"Yeah," my mum replied. "You don't mind staying behind to look after the dog, do you?"

Curb Your Enthusiasm

I was surprised to find my parents enjoying the HBO sitcom, Curb Your Enthusiasm. My dad, I think, sees himself as a sort of Larry David figure, bald and broody, albeit without a career in Hollywood, experience in stand up comedy or the hit TV show Seinfeld in his writing credits. When I left the DVD box-set of its second series at my parents place for a couple of days and returned to find it still in its case I asked whether they'd like to watch an episode. "Nah, we've seen it before," my mum said. "No, this is the second series. I haven't seen it yet. Shall I put it on?" "No, that's alright. We saw it yesterday." "What - all of it? Back to back?" "Yep." "In two days?" "Yep." "There are ten episodes here," I said, taken aback by their marathon session. "Well Dad, what did you think of it?" Without turning to face me and with his enthusiasm clearly curbed he said, in all seriousness, "a bit repetitive."

Home is where the noise is

Home, I've decided, is not necessarily where the heart is. I left mine in (or near) San Francisco, but that wasn't home. (But then that, I suppose, was its appeal.) Home, on the other hand, is what you can't wait to return to but then – soon enough – can't wait to leave. It's upstairs in this 12 X 12 room, walled in thin plasterboard, surrounded by my sister's appalling taste in music and 25 almost identical new brick houses. It's the writers' block that's kept us apart and, at the same time, the hideous muse now pushing the keys.

Are we programmed to hate our homes to build our own? Is an innate aversion to the home a necessary impetus to procreate? If we all stayed at home we wouldn't reproduce. (Of course, in some southern states of the U.S. they manage both, but we only need look to their President to see why that’s a bad idea.)

In traditional Indian culture, rather unfortunately, the youngest son (in this case, muggins here) is expected to live with his parents indefinitely. That is through teenage rebellion, his roaring twenties and marital life. So, if an evening with the blood relatives seems a bit much at least I’ve something to look forward to.

Rock the Temple

You know you've made it when you're recognised at the temple. True story: Today was the birthday of a multi-limbed Hindu deity, and in Birmingham the believers were out in full force to celebrate. It is true that there ain't no party like a Hindu party, and of course, sansharma.com was there to testify.

Once there I found it odd that so many "Aunties" (as is the blanket term for older female Indians) were paying me the sort of attention usually reserved for elephant-headed idols and monkey-tailed Gods, when one turned to me and whispered, "We’ve seen your web site." Even more strange, I thought, since the site is unknown to the general temple going public. "I didn’t know if your parents knew," she added cautiously. Knew what, I wandered. My experiments with the Hindu diet? The dabbling in horseplay? My penchant for non-Punjabi women? (All of which are recklessly documented on the site.)

She declined to elaborate and returned to the festivities, leaving me to wonder how I would cope with my new-found fame, or rather infamy. Maybe I ought to get a disguise...elephant head?

Four Weddings and a Final

I went to a wedding yesterday, but it was not my own, and although I am going away it is not on a honeymoon to Barbados. It is in fact the last day of my spring break before I return, without a wife, to England’s Barbadian equivalent, Lancaster, where I will resume my studies, much of my social life, and pick up my final instalment (getting weepy) from the Student Loan Company, only to spend it willy-nilly on beer and the like.

My final semester at Lancaster will be interspersed with alternating exams and weddings, as it is the season for both. Yesterday was my cousin Sunny’s wedding, next weekend is my cousin Rajesh’s registrar service, the weekend after is the proper Indian ceremony and the weekend after that is another cousin, Vicram’s. So you might be wondering what the probability is that three of my cousins are getting married within three weeks of each other, but to recap my explanation from yesterday’s post, ‘cousin’ in our hybrid society is a blanket term encompassing second-relatives, friends of the family or just fellow British Indians in the locale.

Sunny is the latter, and his wedding was a traditional Indian affair, an all day programme at the Sapphire Banquet and Conference Suite in Digbeth, Birmingham, during which the groom arrived on a white horse wearing a veil, the two families exchanged gifts, formally a dowry, and three meals were served while the couple, tied to each other with a literal knot, walked around a fire and were thus wed.

My grandma kept a lookout for a “nice Indian bride” so that I could one day soon tread the fiery path to marriage, while I in fact had an eye, but not for marriage, on the young lady in the pink sari at table number 23. This would have pleased my granny had lady in pink not been Muslim, which in her words, is “worse than marrying a white girl.” So, there you have it. Our short lived, glances-across-the-room relationship ended with a relative statement; no plans for marriage, not even a phone number! I hope I do better in my finals.

...seeks "nice Indian bride"

I’ve that familiar ringing in my ears that follows a raucous shindig, except tonight’s jamboree was no keg carrying red cup affair. I’ve just returned from what in Punjabi is called a Sangeet, or what you might call a sing-song, and the second part of the three day affair that is an Indian wedding. My cousin, which is what we call fellow British Indians whether blood related or not, is getting married tomorrow when I’ll have more to report. Until then I’ll leave you with what you might call a funny anecdote, which in Punjabi means “embarrassing story”: I was sitting at the party tonight when an uncle (or older British Indian male) came over to say hi. As I started to stand to greet him I realised that the wallet chain that usually keeps me looking somewhat ‘street’ (even at a sing song) was caught in the narrow space between the seat and the chair leg. Any upward motion lifted the chair with my derriere, and until I could free myself I looked either rude or the victim of a practical joke.

It wasn’t the first time tonight that I felt victimised at a rouse of comedy: My mum’s suggestion that I look out for a “nice Indian bride”, was initially received in jest, but when I overheard my Grandma suggesting the same, on my behalf, to her senior associates, I saw the serious side. The funny thing is though, if I were to meet anyone at a traditional, family only Indian wedding we would either already be related or soon to be – and if they were British Indian, by association we’d be cousins, right?

More tomorrow night readers, at which point I might be fixed up. In which case, you’re all invited. (No wallet chains.)