My family and other people

The humans that see most clearly are the babies. They see through their large, bright, clear, unclouded eyes before the world confuses them and shuts them up and basically "gaslights" them. Of all the things Rashmi said when she was little, the one that pleased me the most was something she came up with when she was not more than three or four. We were in our driveway, in the car, about to go somewhere. Suddenly from the car seat in the back, a meditative voice popped up, "মা, যারা আমাদের দুষ্টু লোক, আমরা তাদের দুষ্টু লোক।" ("Ma, those who are our bad guys...we are their bad guys.") She used to still talk in Bangla then. In today's world of the good "us" versus the evil "them", not too many people will appreciate the equivalence drawn between the two. Another thing Rashmi said when she was five was of less universal import, in fact it was very specifically about me. "আমি চাই তোমার অনেক বই হবে, অনেক চুল হবে, অনেক টাকা হবে।...

I really only planned to write about Dolly, the girl who sat in the kitchen with thick books. She's the one that's stuck with me the longest. She's the one I've agonised over and felt guilty about the most, maybe because, as a book lover, she was the most like me and it was impossible to resist the comparison between us and put her out of mind as someone belonging to a different world, living by different rules. My plan had been to mention Gauri and Noni only in passing, but they took up an entire post. This one will be about Dolly, but first, I have to mention a few others. There was an older girl, Tulu, who was there only for a few months. She was a motherless girl from a "respectable" family (indicated by her Dad's and sisters' good clothes and the fact that they sat in the living room on our chairs when they brought Tulu over.) She got involved with a boy in the neighbourhood and was promptly sent home. Then there were the two little sisters in...

During the years from my eighth grade through college, a series of little girls worked in our house. I always try to lighten the impact of that statement by adding qualifiers when I tell people about it. "My grandmother lived with us you know. She needed someone to run errands for her", implying that they just did occasional light tasks such as fetching her ball of wool and knitting needles. My grandmother might have been the original reason for employing a full time child in addition to the part time adult daily help, but those kids did anything that was needed - washing dishes, cleaning the house, making tea. We thought we were good people because we were mostly kind to them and gave them enough food to eat and joked and laughed with them. After all, the common wisdom went, in their villages they would have starved. Here we tried to teach them to read and write and they were dressed quite nicely in hand-me-downs. Whether they should have been sent to school, whether it wa...

Parties in India have become super fancy nowadays. Every wedding looks like it's part of a Bollywood film. Bars to serve alcohol are set up even at kids' birthdays. In our days things used to be a lot simpler. Also environmentally friendly. In Kolar, every public feast had the exact same menu - goat biriyani cooked South Indian / Hyderabadi style (strongly flavoured with mint), accompanied by a raita made with yogurt, cucumber and tomatoes, followed by a warm lentil payasam . In my mind, still, that is the ultimate feast menu - the reason why I keep eating biriyanis and saying to myself, "no, not this one." The eager diners would sit cross-legged (or with knees bent to one side) in long lines, on folded cloth or mats laid on the ground, and be served on disposable plates made of sal leaves stitched together with twigs. Some of the liquid raita or the payasam would leak through small gaps in the leaves. But that did not detract from the eating pleasure in the sligh...