The more things change…

March 23, 2006

Aah, home. It’s been a while since I had an experience so surreal without any significant substance abuse preceding it (unless you consider my food intake in the past 24 hours – I’ve probably single-handedly caused another day of starvation for all of Somalia). Anyways, its back in the madhouse – which, with my mother gone to Africa for the foreseeable future, is rapidly deteriorating into the sort of early eighteenth century Bedlam so memorably captured by Hogarth for posterity. My dad is filling the gap left behind by her by assembling the sort of menagerie he has secretly always yearned for (despite my mother’s protests, and sanity, we usually had three dogs, and among other animals were graced by the presence of a squirrel, rabbits, a turtle, and three chicks – I think he not-so-secretly always missed his childhood, where he was surrounded by pets notable among whom was a bear-cub whose mother had been shot - till it grew too wild and had to be given away to a circus). As I write, ‘the family’ now consists of:

One father, euphemistically called eccentric (the kind of patriarch Gerald Durrel probably had wet dreams about)

One grandmother with no teeth, flesh, or language to speak of

One servant boy who laughs loudly at guests and openly ‘collects’ any loose change he finds lying about for his ‘bank’

One dumb, docile Doberman who mistakenly believes he is some long-lost cousin of Bambi

One parakeet with a shrill whistle, a reluctant vocab of some ten odd words (that’s still more than my grandma’s), and an incomprehensible affection for the dog (actually its mutual, they spend all day together and seem to have some sort of Starsky and Hutch deal going, though thankfully without the hairdos)

Two cockatoos that I don’t yet know well enough to describe

Twelve budgerigars

And

(lemme see if I can get this right)

Three zebra necked sparrows (or something like that – I obviously don’t watch as much Discovery as my dad)

We’re also looking around for a pup at the moment, though despite my best efforts I can’t seem to interest dad in a Great Dane. We’re hoping to find a good mongrel with decent descent (as far as traceable – we like the element of luck something like this brings in – you really don’t know what you get till its all grown up, by which time you love it too much anyways. Besides, don’t underestimate the element of surprise – it really does add spice to our daily lives)

So, after the usual tour of his menagerie and his garden, I was introduced to the new love of my fathers life – furniture making! Though I must say his designs are damn good. For one, he had designed this excellent bar, which I wanted immediately I saw it. With his lifelong love affair with antiques, it isn’t surprising that all his designs have this lovely dated, period feel to them, with intricate detailing, curlicues and whatnot.

Over dinner, I had a conversation with my father about drugs (something that has never really happened before, I have always previously shared gyaan and experiences with my mother – but with her gone, my father and I find ourselves having weird conversations sometimes – like the time I couldn’t decide between two pairs of heels and called him up to consult since mum wasn’t available: he told me, in a tone of rising panic, to buy both just to get out of that conversation). It all started, innocuously enough, with a discussion of the state government. Dad started telling me of all the crazy things they were doing, including removing limits on the number of theka licenses available in the state, and reducing prices of liquor to canteen rates (shit, if a bottle of bacardi now costs only 150, I think I wanna come back and study in Punjab). Then he told me that they had opened a legal vend for marijuana somewhere in hoshiarpur! Apparently, recently the cops have been on this major trip in Himachal, burning fields of cannabis and fining the owners, and Hoshiarpur is like on the border, so the Punjab govt. has opened a shop there where bhaang can now be legally purchased! Imagine my surprise, considering the global campaign for marijuana legalisation and the current topicality of such a move, not to say thoughts of a more personal profit. Anyways, my dad took this for naiveté on my part, and the next half an hour became this mincing duel, where we were both trying to educate the other and share our extensive knowledge while steering clear of admitting any personal involvement or experience with various forms of the magic weed. So, he’s trying to enumerate the derivatives, and how they’re consumed, while I’m trying to take this psuedo-scientific tone, like what I have is textbook knowledge that dried leaves and buds make something called…what was it…weed, and extracted resin gives you I think what they call hash, while bhang is just the green leaves pounded into a paste. And he’s saying yeah, I think ganja is what those sadhus smoke up in a chillum, and hashish you heat and crumble and roll, and how you can’t tip a joint like you would a fag … all the while carefully refraining from any anecdotal references, a tough job for such inveterate story-tellers as himself and myself. And then I’m making this Habermasian argument against licensing and legalisation as a means of control while he is arguing for it on the basis of price regularization and quality control. Anyways, you’d think it couldn’t possibly get more bizarre. Well I brought up (I can never resist) how pot is actually so good for you, and that brought up opium (ok, in Punjab its tough to keep opium out, it practically infuses the atmosphere there is so much major, and respectable, consumption of it – if it were legalised it would be the new whiskey of the state). So then were discussing how derivatives like heroin and cocaine aren’t healthy (expert benders of truth and reality we may be but even we can’t stretch it that far) but opium in its pure form is. So there’s me with how it formed the base of most of Chinese traditional medicine, and this anecdote about this young man who went home with some and hid it in his grandmother’s medicine bottle (she suffered from migraines and body aches) and forgot it, and the next time he went back she couldn’t stop raving about it – how every since she started taking this ‘new medicine’ she hadn’t had a single day of pain or headache, and how she’d never felt better. And then him telling me about how his grandmother was addicted to it, and she was so strong and healthy in body and mind well into her nineties. (my massi suspects that my grandmother takes it too, since one of the symptoms is usually incessant tea dinking, but considering her current rapid deterioration I tend to doubt it). I’ve heard enough stories by now of completely respectable people (including prominent politicians) nursing a habit – in fact, it’s still considered a sign by some of good living and raeesi, but I must admit I was a little surprised when dad started telling me of people we know socially, mostly old people, who took it on ‘doctor’s orders’ – people whose diabetes or arthritis were kept under control, whose heart problems disappeared, who became rosy cheeked and years younger. The only side-effect, as far as my dad could tell, was that it made your teeth rot and crumble. Oh well, with all the money you’re saving on medical bills, you can afford a good dentist right?

This has to have been one of my all-time favorite conversations with my dad; right up there with the time I almost talked him into describing his LSD trips to me.

Next post: a socio-historic analysis of the widespread social acceptance of opium addiction in Punjab as understood and theorized over the years by your humble narrator – with various collected anecdotes thrown in.

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March 28th, 2006

My grandmother just died. About an hour ago. Actually two hours now I suppose. It wasn’t entirely unexpected; she’d been a breathing corpse for a while now. Visitors always said how it would be merciful for her to ‘go’ now. How this was no life, and how she’d had a long and full life. But somehow it was still too sudden. Dad had decided only yesterday that it was time to start calling her siblings to come and meet her one last time: her eldest sister was here today when it happened. I found out when dad came upstairs and told me to get dressed. The first thing that happens when someone dies is an invasion of your house and privacy. It’s almost immediate – hordes of relatives and random morbid acquaintances descend on your home like a swarm of locusts. Before you know it, lechy distant uncles are ‘holding you comfortingly’ while you overpower the irresistible urge to kick them in the balls, while megalomaniac distant aunts start giving orders with such panache, and ‘understanding’, of course. For an avowedly anti-social person (especially when it comes to the ‘family scene’), I really do pick my moments to come home, don’t I? This very morning I caught myself thinking ‘let her last till the fifth, please let me leave for Delhi before it happens.’ Ah, well I can’t really expect results from someone I don’t believe exists, can I? And the deities of Chance have never exactly been my best buddies – even if luck is being a lady, as a bisexual I only stand a fifty percent chance (at all times) of hitting it off. Which is, I suppose, what you would call ‘a reasonable percentage’. They’ve brought in these slabs of ice, which they intend to put under her, but ‘the ladies’ won’t let them yet. It’s funny how instantly, automatically, her room, with her body, has been turned into the ladies seating area, while the men get to sit outside. People walk in, look at the body, nod here and there at a recognized face, pay their respects to the bereaved (so far my dad and I – my mum’s uncontactable in the wilds of Africa (ugh, lucky her) and my brother’s on his way home. I don’t suppose at times like these the animals quite make the cut as ‘Family’), and make a beeline for their preferred seating area. Seeing as how I very conspicuously did not know what to do with myself, I have been allowed to come and sit upstairs, in ‘the bliss of solitude’, such as it is. I have only a very vague idea of how these things go (I’ve avoided them most of my life), but apparently the path (the praying) will happen tomorrow, after (I think) the cremation. Which means tonight is just --- ? that’s right, more people coming over, much more crying (I think I’m fairly dehydrated already, the tears are almost a spontaneous physical reaction – besides, I come from a weepy family, I’ve inherited the flair for melodrama from my grandmother, who spent all her life trying to be the star of a great soap – if only she were here to enjoy this). Though draped as she is in white, and lying as she is on ice, and being as she is now, mere skin and bones, she would fit more in a low-budget vampire movie with bad lighting and no script, though I suppose there’s too little cleavage around for us to qualify as one. But its horrible how instantly there’s so many people, so much to take care of, you aren’t really given time to pause and regroup. But I suppose that’s the purpose of it all – distraction. Besides, it drives home the point very dramatically that life moves on – you can’t mope around all day when there’s another twenty people to be served tea. And the really nosey, irritatingly presumptuous relatives do give you an emotion other than grief to focus on – anger. But it’s still unbelievably horrible when you’re standing there howling your eyes out, wishing for nothing but some privacy, and some random idiot comes and asks if the VIPs have arrived yet!! I mean, really. Half the people who came seemed more interested in who else was showing up (most commonly her youngest brother, who is a Governor), and were unabashedly crude about their curiosity. Ours is a nation of socially condoned voyeurism: there really is nothing more acceptable than treating someone’s personal affairs like a roadside drama. Of course you’ve got every right to watch, comment, dissect, interrupt and pass judgment out loud, and so what if you don’t know the people concerned too well. In fact that gives you the distance required for objective analysis – it makes you an even stronger authority!

Ok, I’m not denying the realization that expressing anger is a cop out of dealing with sorrow, but I’ve sort of had it a little with being put on display at the moment, so...