slowly coming to terms with the fact that my time in india is up. and i think to myself: how will i ever leave this place?
on the other hand, i think my rain dance worked, since today, we have a preview of the impending monsoon. soothing calming assuaging pitter patter monday here in this mad and beautiful city.
how i found out about the death of osama bin laden:
we are basking in the glow of the golden goan sun. we’ve exhausted all beach related activities, and the only thing left to do in this small village by the water is to aimlessly wander into the one and only ice cream shop in town. in our elements, we order mango, almonds, figs, and afghan dry fruit ice cream. as the ice cream man gets ready to flex his scooping muscles, i hear the faint tremors of a television broadcast. i turn around to find karazai on tv, and ask the ice cream man what karzai might be saying (i remember uttering the words, verbatim, “what’s karzai saying?”).
casually, in between scoops, he tells us: “bin laden, he dead.” both of us leap forward with a “TURN ON BBC NOW.”
what unfolds is a mix of elation, relief, confusion, and an overwhelming feeling of: what now?
on initial viewing, bin laden’s capture seems like a win win situation. his death offers the extremist community their martyr, the obama administration their limelight in history, the intelligence community the unalloyed success that’s been a long time coming.
what remains unclear is what now happens to the kids who grew up to be young men and women in this time, to whom the war on terror was the backdrop to the coming of age, to awkward limbs, to the introduction of pubic hair, to first periods, to the discovery of pot, to good music, to the loss of innocence, to falling in love, to applying for colleges, to prematurely picking majors, to riding the current of horror that is “finding oneself” in college, to finishing papers in the nick of time, to acing tests and failing exams, to locking yourself in the room and promising yourself that you would not leave until you understand plato and then the feeling of sudden euphoria washing over you as you finally “get it”, to seeing current events on tv match up and pick up where the history books leave off, to formulating your political vocabulary for the first time, to voting for the first time, to caring for the first time in your life what candidates’ campaign platforms say. in short: to the likes of you and i.
9/11 is what catapulted me into the real world. i had had a tacit understanding of history and the passing of time. i had always been a keen reader of the newspaper – pouring hours into combing through them, sometimes cover to cover, reaping the crossword as my reward.
but it was only with the falling of the twin towers that i became an active agent in my own life, of my own time. it was only with the talks of the caliphate, war of/on islam, terrorism, and clashing of civilization that the broader currents of history began to matter to me. i only began to see myself in the world – i mean to really see and to know – with the new dawn of old dichotomies returning to our collective consciousness: east vs. west, christianity vs. islam, abundance vs. deficit, bush vs. rational choice.
and only as these initial confusions subsided, did i see the event for what it truly was: reawakening of the ever-squeamish question on torture, what this means for the obama administration saving face (every year is election year after all), worries over potential backlashes from the extremist community, whether or not osama’s capture extends beyond the realm of symbolic significance. and if it does, what this means for not just foreign policy makers in the white house, but for the lay man and woman, and in particular, to those who have known no other war but this war, known no other age but this age, known no other terror than this terror of fear-based actions and their consequences.
On Canada.
There are token topics that inevitably rears its head when you are traveling abroad. What is Canadian cuisine like? What is the national sport of Canada? How cold does it really get? (And as of late, what HAPPENED last summer at the G8/20?)
The above sets of questions can easily be answered with some shameful mumbling about poutine and smoked meat, hockey and all manner of winter sports, and really really really cold.
And then there are the more nuanced set of questions.
What is the minimum wage in Canada? Which team has won the most number of Stanley Cups? What are some recurring campaign issues?
I am the first one to rattle off social issues that piss off Canadians, but when it comes to others, I realize how woefully inept I am as a Canadian traveling abroad. I don’t have the well-rounded deep-well knowledge of my country as so many Indians I have met do. And this is a cause for shame.
(When I introduce myself as a Canadian, the worst case scenario is tepid approval. More often than not, everyone seems to have a near distant second third neighbour cousin somewhere in Canada, and I am greeted with wide welcome arms.)
i lay this morning wondering: when does the peeling end and the healing begin?
ever since returning from the beaches of goa, my skin has been peeling at an alarming rate. no matter what i do to avoid accelerating this peeling process, it has been shedding as if to make a reptilian go green with envy.
i have a nightly routine of applying the following: aloe vera, coconut butter, calamine lotion. repeat. and during the day, i liberally lather on neutrogena’s ultra light no sheer spf 35 sunscreen. i have never liberally lather on any form of sunblock. ever. and this is coming from someone who has lived along the west coast for most of her life.
growing up, sun was always something to anticipate, to celebrate , to make the most of; the sun was your best friend. there was never the slip-slop-slap culture of australia (“slip on a shirt, slap on sunscreen, and slap on a hat”), but the casual disregard for causal links between being exposed to the sun and the occurrence of skin ailments.
(i remember the first time that “skin disease” entered my impressionable consciousness was when our one and only bill clinton underwent a surgery for a suspicious looking mole. or something like it.)
i have always prided myself in being solar-powered, in embracing with humility, the annual march of the freckles across my face, concentrating on the nose, charging on to my shoulders and my arms.
and yet, the cruel goan uv rays have betrayed my blind faith in the sun. now, my bum glows when we go skinny dipping, reminding all of much fairer and innocent days.
sigh. back to aloe.
On the north end of humid balmy lovely Bombay, there lies a leafy suburb called Bandra. It is on the northern end of the Worli Sea Link (a bridge named after Rajiv Gandhi), and is home to artists, writers, directors, and the like. It has been described to me as the San Francisco of Bombay, and I suspect there are pockets that show promise of becoming the Brooklyn of Bandra too (which begs the question: is it possible for a city to be the New York of India with enclaves that are called the San Francisco of Bombay with smaller neighbourhoods with the reputation of being the Beverley Hills of Bandra?).
It may not be as clean as South Bombay (rickshaw-wallas reign supreme here and the fume from their exhaust-pipes pollute and suffocate), and it is painfully far if you are looking up from the causeways of Colaba. But here, you can go shopping at export-reject shops (Topshop! H&M! Zara!) wearing camisoles and leggings, stopping only to snack on pani-puris, polish off that sweet lassi before hopping into a rickshaw to drive along the seawall on your way to pick up delicious clams and oysters for dinner (likely mercury-laden, but you can’t have your cake and eat it too) before stopping by a friend’s flat for a nightcap. Everything seems within reach, nothing seems impossible, and I am certain that everyone knows everyone else. If I ever move to Bombay (insh’allah), this is surely where I will call home. Never mind the outrageous rental market, if I can find a broom closet that won’t cost me an arm and two legs, I will be as happy as a clam.
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