Hyderabad boy rescues Bombay girl

PU raises a cup to Harsha's support. (Image: PU Selfie2014)

Virtual friendship redefined with friends exchanging banal recipes from YouTube in aid of insomnia & other such nocturnal mental disorders

14th May, 2014, Bombay: In a bizarre turn of events last night, in a crumbling apartment of a housing society in the western suburbs, a girl finally learned how to make decent, edible tea after nearly three decades of ignorant existence.
And loved it.

The girl, one PU, 29, was online and as per addiction, chatting with her friend, one Harsha, resident of the Himayatnagar locality in Hyderabad, post-dinnertime on Tuesday evening at her Khar residence. With supper put behind a good three hours early, in a vain attempt to regularise her recently disturbed sleep cycle, the extended wakefulness yielded acute hunger pangs in the said girl, originally hailing from Vadodara, Gujarat. Marking a year in the city on the day, she was keen not to celebrate in any significant way.

On revealing the intensity of her atrocity, the friend of nearly a decade suggested she have some tea. We enquired further about Priyanca’s acumen in tea-making and she revealed, "I can't make tea to save a finger, leave alone my life! In the decade that my nanaji stayed with us back in Baroda, he asked me to make tea twice and regretted it on both occasions."

The tutorial was administered via a YouTube video, the link to which, Harsha sent on the chat applet to PU. So easy did the video make the process seem, that she was inspired to refresh her culinary talent in the hot-beverage-making department! The girl entered the kitchen at approximately three minutes past midnight and put some water to boil in a saucepan. At the serendipitous discovery of lemongrass in the deep recesses of her refrigerator and finding all the other ingredients (ginger, pepper, clove, cinnamon and cardamom) by the time the water started to boil, she was encouraged to administer them into the saucepan and claims to "have enjoyed overseeing the recipe first hand, for the first time."

On further probing about how the tutorial came about, PU said, "My friend Harsha is a photo-journalist who keeps late hours on account of his own assignments as well as gatekeeping his photo-journalism magazine, Galli. I figured cribbing to him might be of some use. After coming up with outrageous suggestions such as ice cream at 11:40 pm (why not, you argue? With the spate of attacks on daft women travelling in autos late at night without a care for their blingy handbags that get stolen in a split second without the thief having to put up much of a struggle, the notion of stepping out alone at the hour was insane), he finally said 'चाय बना ले (make some tea)'. First I thought he'll tell me how. After patiently waiting a few sentences, when I had to finally ask for the recipe, he said his is an 'annual event' because his amma makes chai  for him. All these spoiled boys living in their parents' house!  The mention of his amma made me miss mine. But instead of moping about missing home, I decided to explore the YouTube link he had sent in the interim, and get to work."

PU's newly acquired talent comes at a time when her existentialist angst had begun to peak, she rues. In the wake of several extreme epithets being bestowed upon the corporate writer, from 'multi-talented in the singles domain' to 'over-qualified in the eligible bride market', her epiphany has led her to vow she 'will make masala chai every night!'

In refusal of any special commemoration however, PU has declined any direct or indirect self-invites to tea, even at honourable hours, as a clear sign of selfish demeanour. A trait, she declares, Bombay has instilled in her in the year gone by. Ironically, the achiever reveals that she has accomplished the feat of surviving a whole year in Bombay once before, at the start of her career four years ago. Her anguish in the back-linked blog post about Salman Khan not being punished for murder seems to have ominously been answered. Everything else, she says, remains much the same...

House of Light

I was in Navsari a third time this Holi. A few of us with the Pune connection gathered at Veeram's home of his childhood (thank god, his folks haven't sold it off like every other small town Gujarati who either migrates to Amdavad, Bombay or New Jersey).

The three-day stay - as always - was to be a relaxed affair. You take in the house itself - decades of history fitted and carpentered into functional yet artful furniture, fixtures and detailing. Some of the chairs, and now tables, even restored or replicated from old designs for Veeram's love of shapes and endeavour to re-imagine for higher comfort.

Forms new & old: Veeram's abode in Navsari

When I was still in Pune and would visit him at his Kothrud house every weekend for our late-into-the-night musical sessions, he would mention Navsari often. Sometimes he would talk about the peace of the town, sometimes of the beach a short drive away and sometimes just how easy it was to be there. He built up the castle for a whole year in my head. To me, it sounded unreal, surreal almost. His sister would rave on and on about the place. What about it, was still a mystery.

The typical trip encapsulates a drive around town at least once, see the two lakes, eat street grub, keep up so late you hear the first birds chirp in the morning and indulge in the ultimate debauchery of unlimited music and its faithful companions, and sleep till your eyes can shut no more. Yes, the lights in this house seem to never go out. Soft, buttery, warm yellow light fills the house even in the wee hours for the architects work as if putting the world to silence with their thought and infinite obsession with optimal aesthetics to serve every purpose - sometimes small, sometimes unquantifiable.

Going to Navsari also extends to driving 14 km down the narrow state highway to Dandi - the sea-facing town whose beach Mahatma Gandhi honoured with the breaking of the Salt laws. There is a commemorative Gandhi Ashram set up on the highway, which we were dutifully ferried to on our first trip last March.

This time, our visit to the beach went a tad beyond the usual frolicking in the water and cricket on the sand. Before the short trek through the dry loose sand onto the beach, we were led to the Kanai Creek lighthouse. My host had been there too many times already, so gave it a miss. However, this was my first visit to one! Having recently finished PD James' The Lighthouse, I was even more intrigued by the black-and-white tower. The whodunnit revolves around a murder in a revived lighthouse on Combe Island some distance off the Cornish Coast. That combined with my unfulfilled wish of visiting a lighthouse on two previous occasions - in Pondicherry as well as at Guhagar - had fed my curiosity to a tipping point.

The Kanai Creek lighthouse

Unlike both my previous experiences, where for one or the other reason (women unaccompanied by men not allowed; entry post 5 pm prohibited respectively), I couldn't explore this port phenomenon, the little lighthouse of about 5 storeys at Kanai allows legitimate ticketed entry. Of course, the caretaker had run out of ticket stubs, and in all probability, pocketed the income. An odd instruction as we entered the edifice blocked our way up, however – we were asked to remove our footwear at the entrance, like a temple or one of those old cheap Cyber Cafes where keeping the place dust-free was a constant concern. The request remains unexplained since most lighthouses have that last bit of vertical thin-stripped ladder to climb which is safer with a pair of rubber soles under your feet. That last upright phase of the staircase is really an iron ladder that leads to a floor doorway, which in turn opens to a small 2.5 ft archway into a circular balcony around possibly the biggest lamp I’ve ever seen at close quarters!

Perhaps I haven't seen any other big lamps - at close quarters or otherwise. But when my photographer friend Harsha showed me the video of Yenga Pona Raasa from Maryan, I couldn't help notice the sequence whence the female lead, Parvathy stands in the way of the light in the lighthouse gallery.

Female lead, Parvathy in Yenga Pona Raasa from Maryan

Isn't that not-allowed? Shot almost the way I imagined James' Combe Island, Bharatbala brings alive for me a memory and awakens inside a wish to discover more ports and lighthouses along this country's vast coastline. May be some day, I will extend my love of the beach to the things that belong to the coast...