Zoheb Hassan, where art thou?

I was struck by a bad bout of nostalgia yesterday. I went to this garage sale, where I spent an obscene amount of money on CDs, DVDs, books and some toys for the boy (yes, real toys, for the real boy).  One of the CDs was a Disco Deewane- Star combo. Does Biddu still ring a bell? 

The next few hours were thoroughly entertaining for the boy as his mother transformed into an 80s disco icon, bouncing around, crooning away till he buried his head in shame.

24 hours later, I am like a love-struck puppy, wondering what became of my adolescent crush, Zoheb Hassan, brother of the more famous Nazia Hassan of Aap jaisa koi and Disco Deewane fame, the boy who made me graduate to denim and checks, the boy who made curls look cool, the boy who looked cool grooving with his sister, the boy who knew exactly how to tuck his shirt in, yet make it look like an accident, the boy who should have never turned into a man.  Ideally speaking.

Nazia-Zoheb happened when my brother and I were on the verge of adolescence (at least I was). We were finally bonding, sharing our friends and had just got our first TV, a Keltron black and white.  Both of us, armed with badminton rackets (our pretend guitars), dressed in denims and checked shirts, our sleeves effortlessly rolled up, shirts tucked in or loosely knotted at the ends, would bellow Tere kadmon ko, choomoonga.. or Mujhe chahen na chahen, never realising that they were the most inappropriate lyrics a brother would ever sing to his sister.

Funnily, Nazia was who I wanted to be when I grew up (she made two plaits look cool, which made me feel better about mine) and Zoheb was who I wanted to marry. So what if he was her brother? I could still be her while having a crush on her brother, right? Wonder what Freud would have said to that?

Ironically, Nazia died of cancer around the same time that I was going through a tragedy queen phase of my life, confused about men, career and what to do with myself. It was a sign for me, no less, and I decided to pick myself up and get on with it, be grateful for what I had and find my new life. I was still too depressed to find out what happened to Zoheb, lest it was revealed that he was lolling about in Spain or some such with an exotic beauty, while I was still grappling with a bad-hair life. It was pre-internet times.

Yes, I know that today, the internet can vomit 20,000 or an equally monstrous number or pages on the said person, but I somehow don’t feel right to stalk someone I fancied in a non-internet time through the internet. It feels wrong. 

Do I sound suitably nuts? Well, it is one of my virtues. So I guess, I will keep wondering for a while and wish for my current phase to fade away and for my mind to get over-populated with other inanities that I don’t really care for.  Like Katrina Kaif’s wardrobe malfunction or why can’t the Kapoors get over their Nargis fixation or what happened   at the 19^th fashion week of the year (yaaaaawwwn!) 

Because, to me, Zoheb Hassan, like most unadulterated crushes of adolescence is best left unvisited.

But as I was dancing in abandon for my son last night, I missed my brother, and our badminton racket-guitar phase, which continued right through most of Rishi Kapoor’s capers. So this summer, when he is down for his annual visit (the brother, not Rishi Kapoor) from sunny California, I am already plotting to re-enact our simulated guitar performance (perhaps with real guitars this time, not that I can play one, but I can definitely afford it). I am sure my boy will be delighted. Perhaps embarassed. But at least he will have a story to tell that can begin with, “A long, long time ago, when television was black and white....”

My two best men

The brother and the beau have finally met. For me, this was more significant than meeting the parents, or getting along with his best friend. Because, in my world, the brother was always 'the man', although I don’t think he ever knew it. Never mind the fact that he is younger (but looks older) or the fact that he always thought I should edit my dialogues and compress everything I said into 30 seconds, as that was the maximum he could deal with, or the fact that we both liked talking so much, that sometimes, no one was listening. The point is, as a younger sibling, he was often subjected to my domineering ways (or so he says), for which he is exercising payback time.

The tough thing about men you love is that sometimes, they don’t necessarily love each other, rather apply the ‘guilty until proven innocent’ rule. In my case, all it took was ten seconds and the magic word at 2 am. Beer?

And there began the bonding.
Both think that beer is something you drink when you are thirsty.
Both believe that the fridge and the larder should be full of juices and cheese and chocolate and ice-cream and preserves and things that they will never eat, but what if the food in the supermarket runs out?
Both believe that a moody remote is good reason to buy a new DVD player, which is good enough reason to buy a new TV, a hometheatre system, a fridge, and a washing machine — it’s always better when you buy in bulk, is their justification. Also, you get a free coffeemaker, so that’s great, isn’t it?
Both believe that the body can be challenged to consume the most toxic form of food at 4 am.
Both go to sleep with the television on, but wake up the second you switch it off.
Both buy clothes they never intend wearing but squirm when you ask them to give them away.
Both can spend an entire day watching squirrels and cats, and eat a lamb while they are doing so.
Both spring into extreme masculinity mode even if you mention in passing that a guy is sweet on you.
Both are extremely anal about their gadgets and wires, and treat them as if they would a lover.
Both take longer to get ready and spend more time in front of the mirror than I do.
Both have a natural aversion to smaller men and believe they should all perish.
Both have no qualms sleeping over their food, but will raise hell if they spot a crumb on their gaming station.

It’s funny how the things that have always irritated me about my brother are the very things I have to deal with all over again with the beau. But I think its all my doing — I remember I said in my very first column, I have always dreamt of having a boyfriend who was like my brother. Endearing, adventurous, spirited and someone who makes me laugh. Guess I am paying the price for it.

Bring on the moms

I have a feeling that at some level, men don’t really know what to do with their mothers post the age of eight. For a very long time, they are in denial about this, as they are with most things, till one fine day, they meet a woman who can “do mothers”. This is the point at which they are at first in shock and awe, and then eventually heave a jubiliant sigh of relief, as if exclaiming, “Take her…and do what you want with her. Amuse her, talk to her, listen (most important), call, write, bitch, gossip, whatever. But leave me out of it…please..”

It’s almost as though handing the mother over to the woman of their lives gives him the sense of freedom to do more important things. Like playing more pool. Drinking more beer. Watching more television. Hanging out with more miscellanous and utterly random people.

So now, I am now communicating with two mothers — his is definitely more tech savvy than mine, so in a sense is easier to do. As for mine — I have to either talk or listen. Fumbling with either of the two will immediately get her antennae up, as will a slight inflection in my voice, which will set her thinking, “I wonder what’s wrong and how I can fix it..” She believes in a strict two-way communication, so no getting away with an sms or an email. And there is no way you can avoid a confrontation. May be that’s why I have become quite good in that department.

The fact of the matter is, moms are clever, and men cannot match up to their astuteness. So it’s never possible to have an open-ended, “wassup” kind of conversation with your mother, and avoid the sticky areas. Ask me. I am a veteran with moms. At a recent birthday do of a friend’s baby, she couldn’t help observing how well I was “doing the mother-in-law”. I tried explaining to her that I am basically a friendly person, which she banished instantly as rubbish. “Lalli, don’t give me that… you don’t get along with seven out of ten people. Just admit, you are good at the stuff..”

May be I have become good at the stuff, having largely the mediator (and foster mother) for my twin siblings for the most part. They both have issues. My sister is of the opinion that my mother suffers from selective hearing (read: she hears only what I have to say). My brother is largely exasperated that she doesn’t get the concept of time lag between his speaking and the words being delivered to her (he lives in California). So, more often than not, they are talking at the same time, and no one is listening. At some point, out of the extreme need to be heard, he calls me and downloads for the next one hour. And then she calls me and downloads for half hour after that. Such is my life!

You had me at Chak de!

(This was written soon after Chak De!, a movie that made me look at Shah Rukh Khan in a whole new way)

Dear SRK,

You had me at Chak De!
Actually you did have me at Fauji, a long long, time ago, although the “I say chaps” guy lingered longer in my memory. And then you did have me at Circus, and then at Baazigar.

Somewhere along, you lost me….for a very long time. You were busy prancing around in your Tommy Hilfigers and DKNYs or singing unchained melodies to chiffon clad lasses in deserts or haystacks. And I was suitably distracted by the other Khans and life and general, and it didn’t really matter much.

And then, out of the blue, you had me at Swades again, when I was hit by a surge of patriotism, wanting to build dams and get electricity into people’s homes and write on inland letters and postcards all over again…

The thing is, I never really had a favourite Khan — I find superlatives very hard to negotiate — reason why I don’t have a best friend, the best book I’ve ever read, the best movie I have ever seen, the best thing I have ever eaten or any of that.

Chak De changed everything for me. It’s irrelevant that after years, a movie had me choked, or the fact that my I-hate-Hindi-movies beau was as taken in by its implicit honesty and passion as I was, or that it had no songs, and no pervading gloss. But it all added up to the larger outcome — I had found new respect for you — something that will help me forgive everything you ever did. And that, to me is big.

I find the world of sport and movies about fascinating — probably because it is an alien world to me — a world that I could never really be a part of. When I was a little girl, all the big, bad girls were always into sport, while I was the nerd who sat on the first bench, knew all the answers and did all her homework.

I so wanted to be like them, but my puny frame, weak lungs and tam-bram upbringing never really allowed me. The closest I came to was being a reserve player in the volley ball team at school, and I was so petrified that I would have to play that I fell ill on the said day, and everyone thought I was the traitor.

Finally, after all these years, sport and me have kind of reached middle ground, what with the bro and the beau’s collective passions. I can now survive a game of cricket or golf or football and sometimes even ask the right questions without being totally off the mark.

So when I watched 16 feisty girls of seemingly different shapes and sizes (some who reminded me of me) get together and survive the collective politics resulting from their disparate energies, I am awed.

I think of the man who got them to think of the whole instead of the self…and yes, I know its all about good screenplay and direction and all that. But at the end of the day, it’s what you see. And I saw someone who was large enough to be smaller than the team. And that did it for me. So, SRK, I salute thee!

Lost in translation

There is something about queues. It's like when you finally get to the end of it and reach your 'said destination' i.e the person at the counter at the end of the queue, you are expected to give a completely choreographed performance. And so when I waited inordinately long in line at the US Immigration last week, I realised that an act at the end of it was in order. Not that I hadn't done it before -- it's just that you never really get used to these things.

So as I waited, I shifted my not so ample frame from one foot to another, itching to open a bag of crisps, but wondering if that would be against immigration etiquette. An hour later, I was the 'next in line', waiting to be summoned. I could see from the corner of my eye that the Immigration officer, who was bordering on cute was having an exasperating time explaining what 'extra pressure' was to a bewildered Japanese tourist, who was having his index fingers thumb printed, not to much avail. I made a mental note of applying 'just the right amount of pressure'. And voila! It was my turn.

"And how are you today?", he asked in a voice that only Americans can. I was, by this point suitably distracted by a family that had nearly paraded their heirlooms in front of another officer. 'I don't know, I am too dazed..it was an awfully long flight," I blurted.
'Ah, I see (sound effects of pages of my passport being flipped here).
He then asked me what I did in Bombay and I said I was a journalist.
"What kind?", he probed. I was distracted again.
 "Magazine or newspaper?" he prodded further...
"Oh, yes, newspaper"
"So what do you write on?"
"Men, women..."
Curiouser and curiouser...
"People, places, celebrities, trends, lifestyles, attitudes.." I did some damage control...
"So you are a generalist, not a journalist.." His verdict was out, and my passport was stamped.

I seriously have to re-examine my job, I thought.

******

And then there is something about brothers. Even if you have been in queue for two years, there is still no performance expected at the end of it. By this I mean, on either side. So it's okay to unwrap your Xbox 360 and gloat over its goodies the exact same night that your sister has crossed seven seas (I am not sure, I wasn't counting) to meet you. It's okay to have piles of laundry so high, that you can't walk around the house without being run over. It's okay to have stuff in the fridge so old that illegal aliens have acquired permanent residency status. It's okay to have mails unopened, houseplants unattended and consequently withered, books and DVDs unreturned..

But, at the same time, it's okay for you to lie in the exact same posture in bed when he leaves the house and when he returns. It's okay for you to tell him you don't really want to meet any more family. It's okay for you to ask him to take you out for a drink at midnight, because you just 'feel' like it. It's okay for you not to talk when you don't want to.

Because no matter how much older you are, you will always be the 'little' sister that stayed a foot shorter.

He shops, she shops

I hate shopping. Malls make me tired, restless and impatient. Choices leave me miffed. Trying on clothes and shoes is an ordeal. Retail overdose makes me claustrophobic (I am the shop-around-the-corner kinda girl). So when I volunteer to shop with someone, it is a really big deal.

This weekend, I offered my services to the beau — he needed a clothes rack and some groceries (to finally inaugurate his new microwave, on which his only successful experiment was making Act II popcorn). Now the difference between the beau and me when it comes to shopping is the difference between multiplication and subtraction. So while I was looking at items ‘on the list’, he was enjoying the wanderlust…

He actually contemplated a 20s pack of toilet roll which had a special offer of ‘buy one get one free,’ at which point I had to intervene and tell him it was a bit excessive. “But it’s cool no? Think about it, we don’t have to worry about toilet rolls for a year!” Shudder…

At the billing counter, I noticed the trolley was pregnant with a hundred things I hadn’t picked and he had slipped them in while I wasn’t looking. There were varieties of cheese spread, a hundred cheese slices, cartons of juice(that I have never seen him drink), cookies, doughnuts and croissants (that never get eaten), pasta sauces, self-serving pasta bowls encased in wicker baskets (which he thought was really cool, I can’t fathom why) toothpastes, air fresheners galore. And the only item he really needed was not available, to his glee, and my chagrin.

The fact is, the beau loves being surrounded by things he doesn’t need. He has over 200 Play Station games of which he has opened nine (and he is threatening to buy more). He has a hundred t-shirts and he still wears the same one (or what appears to be the same) every time I meet him. He has an assortment of colognes he never uses, juices and sodas he doesn’t drink, snacks and savouries he doesn’t eat, but ‘just in case someone comes over.’ There are DVDs unopened, books unread, clothes unworn—some of which he doesn’t know the origin of.

I remember the rare occasions when my dad would take me shopping for ‘that Diwali dress” or something equally inane. He would stand at the door puffing his cigarette, and say, “One, two, three, go finish it off” and leave me to my devices. And if I ever liked two dresses instead of one, he would say, “Just take both, so we don’t have to come back again for your birthday!”

Ditto when I went mall shopping with my brother in the States. Costco was his mecca. It’s is the kind of place that monster families with twelve kids should shop at. Not single men who do their laundry when they run out of clothes to wear. So, if you need one set of batteries, you buy a pack of 20, because it’s a bargain. If you need muesli, you buy six of them. If you need detergent or fabric softener, shampoo, toothpaste, or even toothbrushes, you buy them for the whole neighbourhood. I could never understand why my brother had to drive ten miles to shop for things he didn’t need when he could get them at the super market next door. The reason? I am not sure. But may be there is a thrill in knowing you have struck a good bargain, even if it is for things you don’t really want.

Stumped!

I am amused at the way cricket changes the climate of this country and its people, no matter who or where they are.

My normally chirpy maid walks in looking like a thundercloud. When I enquire if something’s wrong, perhaps a domestic crisis? (there usually is—a thief walks into her house and sleeps over the night, her husband disappears with alarming regularity, and such like). She says, “India haar gaya, didi,” and looks melancholic for the rest of the morning as she potters around doing her thing.

My watchman goes missing, and I catch him leaning over a ground floor window.
My natural-born-killer gym instructor goes wide-mouthed staring at the television in the middle of an intense workout, leaving me entangled in a complicated piece of machinery.
My designer buddy at work is suitably distracted.
My normally communicative and prolific beau gets cryptic, with messages like, “Am in mourning..”

It’s that time of the year, I think.

In my childhood— the era of residual test matches; my super enthusiastic dad would engineer a few days of ‘casual leave’ or ‘sick leave’ as the case may be, to catch the game at home.

I remember it pat. My mother would walk in after work in the afternoon, day after day to find a house laden with testosterone, as my dad and his beer buddies sprawled all over our not-so-ample house and produced sound effects that left my super-disciplined-teacher-mom baffled.

It was an early induction into male bonding— I rushed home from school on my lunch break to hang out with dad and his boys, bursting into the house with “What’s the score?” and being greeted with stoned silence or extreme sound, depending on which way the match was going.

It was also a time when domestic tension was writ large. The kitchen would be a mess, dishes would pile up (Shankar, the hired help also joined the cricket revelry), beds would be unmade, clothes unwashed, showers abandoned, the air would be saturated with smoke and masculine aggression, and my mother would curse the game and the TV.

It all came back to me when recently, I was trying to grab some sleep at normal human hours with some intense PS2 sound effects in the background. I almost turned into my mother, when I suddenly realised— boys will be boys. And thank god for that.

Unlike my dad, who was at best, a trivia king or a walking encyclopedia, my brother actually played the game when he came of age. He still maintains he would have made it somewhere in the team, had he not been of Tam-Bram be-a-doctor-or-engineer-or-your-life-is-doomed upbringing.

So it was school or college by day, and matches by night—the sad part is, he still became an engineer, although he has found a way to pursue his passion by playing in an LA County team now. When I visited him last, he asked me to get him a cricket kit— I had never been in close quarters with bats, thigh guards, elbow guards, crotch pads and helmets ever in my life, and sort of got a kick out of it.

The fact is, I never got anywhere in any physical sport, and usually wound up in the reserve team in volley ball at school, praying fervently that no one gets hurt and I don’t actually end up playing. So I was surprised when I found myself in a bowling alley recently and discovered that I was as good as the boys (if not better).

I think I know what works about men and cricket, or men and any game. It’s about not having to talk.

O brother!

It was the same time last year when my brother was down from America for his annual bonding time with family. The funny thing is, he slept most of the day, and when he had his quota of sleep and food, he would call me, and make a plan for the evening. It continued in this manner for the whole six weeks that he was here, with sporadic visits to geriatrics in the family, which he pretty soon tired of, so it was over to me again.

It was a tiring, but exciting time, with me having to work two shifts of work and play with equal intensity (no less than 100% will do for the bro). Not that I am complaining. He and I are real buddies, we talk about everything under the sun (I listen most of the time), and we love doing stuff together.
And the best part is, we always end up saying yes to each other’s plans, and it is never out of politeness. Random pub-checking, impromptu traveling, eating anda pav near Cooper hospital at 2 am, watching English films dubbed in Hindi and laughing our guts out, taking off to Lonavala for breakfast, and pretty much anything that involves food or drink.

It was almost like having a boyfriend on call—someone who always says yes to your plan, someone who will try anything just because you want to try it, someone who’ll ask the head waiter for a peppershaker that you fancied, someone who is sentimental when you want him to be, someone who is not when you don’t, someone who can be a man and figure out what’s wrong with your car engine, and yet be in touch with his feminine side to understand your womanly woes.

My best friend has a similar thing with her brother. She loves his energy, his drive, the way he is inspired to experiment with his life, the way he almost always has the balls to do so, the way he can think out of the box and is equally kicked by what she is thinking, and the way he can play brother with his intuitive wisdom about stuff that she can sometimes miss.

And then, it got me thinking—would we really like to date our brothers? And if so, are we setting a huge precedent for our prospective or existing partners? Because a lot of the putty that has gone into making your brother is you. And I don’t mean this in a vain way. Simply that climbing trees together, playing marbles and learning how to string a kite at age 10, signing his report card when he has mostly reds, and being a part of his first break-up perhaps creates memories that the finest suitor cannot replace.
But then, that is a whole new putty to start working on. And a whole new set of memories to create.