Fever pitch

When it comes to being sick, I feel as though I am a cat while the husband is a dog (apart from a hundred other instances when I feel the same way). When I am sick, I retreat. I am best left alone, need no TLC or cuddling or whining or hot soup to be served in bed. Like a cat. But then, cats always like to be left alone, unless they are my current twosome who think they are dogs and give you routine pedicures and hair spas. But more about the aberrations later.

Okay, I am a terribly independent person, who usually lives in a universe that demands an abnormal amount of social niceties, all of which I happily abandon when I am sick and just be the anti-social me and do as I please.

Like a) Not talk to anyone. b) Curl up with a book and not talk to anyone. c) Keep eating and drinking and not talk to anyone. d)Not answer the phone and not make a single phone call and thus, not talk to anyone.

Not that I like being sick or that I fall sick often. I don’t. But when I do, it’s a very private affair.But whatever I do to camouflage, the mother, chirpy and intuitive cutlet No. 1 usually finds out from the inflection of my voice. “Are you sick..?”

Groan! Now she will ask for the gory details.

The husband is not so intuitive. Unless you are swathed in bandages or your face is obviously disfigured or your leg is in a plaster and you are hobbling to the loo, he would assume (naturally) that everything is okay.

On the other hand, he is the type that announces “I am sick” at least 47 times a day the day he as much as has a sore throat or a fever. (Now the M. Pharm in me is appalled at how ignorant people generally are about fever in that it’s the response to a disease and not the disease in itself. Thanks to the poor sods, doctors can have exotic vacations every year)

HE: I am sick.

ME: So eat, sleep, do nothing.

HE: My throat hurts.

ME: So drink lots of fluids, eat, sleep.

HE: Does beer count?

ME: No.

HE: But I have a Man U match and I do want to have a beer to celebrate.

ME: So have a beer.

HE: But I have fever.

ME: So don’t have a beer.

HE: I also have cramps and I feel like I am going to give birth to Danny De Vito.

(Now, speaking lightly about childbirth to someone who has recently given birth is not in supreme taste, but when people are sick, they do strange things.)

ME: So do whatever you want.

HE: I am sick. Please speak nicely to me.

Of all the vows we take when we get married, the one which refers to being there for each other “in sickness or in health” is probably the trickiest (whatever language you took it in). Among all things that tell people apart, what you are when you are sick is a deal breaker. So if you haven’t had your vows yet, it’s time to rewrite them.

P.S. Turns out, getting wrecked on Holi was what did it for the husband, and not the antibiotics and the trying to be a good boy (and failing miserably).

It's a wine-wine

To those who are lost in the labyrinths of the dating game, I’d say, get some sun. Throw in some wine, some music, and watch it all unfold. Or better still, go to the Sulafest (thanks to rationed outdoorsy escapades for the Bombayite) and do it all.

Unlike say, a rock concert, a club night (where you can see/hear nothing), or a brunch (where people are focused on heaping their plates or downing their drinks) , things like the Sulafest are a flea market for singletons. You can drink some, mingle some, flirt some, and move on — space, oxygen and members of the opposite sex are unlimited. You can lie on the grass, say a lot, or say nothing, and it would be okay. When you are drinking wine, it is not treated like you are actually drinking, so no one will hold the too-many-drinks-down against you.

So there I was this weekend with the husband and the infant in tow (no point waiting in treating him to the good life, we figured).

One thing that stood out was hundreds of sweet-somethings wearing little-nothings that, in the city could be voted tarty, but in the hot Nasik sun could pass off as something-I-wore-because-the-heat-is-killing me.

And then I realised, you could get away with anything here, and this is true for men and women. Men can get away with being grunge, dressing down or being OTT, having bad hair days, losing footwear, smoking up behind hedges, living on a liquid diet for 48 hours, grumbling there’s no beer at a wine festival, being nonchalant, aloof or over-familiar.

Women can be coy, mysterious, slutty or smart. And a lot can happen over wine (never mind if stomping doesn’t look as good here as it does in France). For instance:

You’ve had so much Satori that you are being a slut (and I must agree with Paul Giamatti’s views on merlot in Sideways)

You can’t remember if you spoke to guy with cute butt, so you ask his name for the third time, because you are Chenin blanc-ed out!

You are happy as a bird for no particular reason and giggling away like a hyena, or whatever animal that comes close to it, and you blame it all on the Shiraz

Midway through the evening you decide that you no longer have to hang out with the guy you came with, because, you are so red and he is so white.

You begin to you question whether, in your search for coupledom, you may have passed the gentle Pinots for the aggressive Cabernet men.

You think getting a tarot card read would not be a syndrome exclusive to singletons afflicted-by-coupledom syndrome. Never mind if it was rather dear at Rs 100 per question, and no, questions could not be combined (so you couldn’t ask, “Will I go to Cappadocia on my honeymoon with X after I get that Y job?”)

You could flash your changed relationship status, either through your just-acquired ring/squeeze, and just giggle, Aishwarya-like.

About the grapes and the music, well, frankly my dear, I didn’t give a damn.

Arm candy

Now that I’m in possession of an infant, I am constantly looking at things anew. One of them is how people engage with a baby at social outings and what it says about them. I was surprised to find that on an average, the men seem more eager to pick up the baby than the women. I wondered why.

A friend suggested that since parenting is more a thing of equal partnership among men and women — unlike another era, when men contributed the sperm and the women more or less did all the work — the men might seem to be more at ease in displaying prowess.

But that didn’t explain the single men who were all keen on their new arm candy. The last time we did a brunch, at least four single men were all rapt attention for the infant, chose to hover around him, pet him or carry him, and of course, pose for photos with him.

And then I realised what it did for them. It certainly pitched them higher in the eligibility gradient. It made them look good. It had the I-am-not-afraid-to-speak-my-feelings-or-show-that-I-am-vulnerable kind of vibe. It made women look at them differently.

In an era of Facebook profile pictures — usually chosen to reveal your current state of mind — a picture of a single man with a baby seems to say, “I am not afraid of commitment,” or simply, “I am ready.”

It seemed slightly trickier for women.

If she is single and looking, she could be thinking one of two things: The first is, “If I go all gooey on this baby thing, he might think I am putting pressure.” So she seems cool, nonchalant.

The second is, “If he still hasn’t seen my nurturing side, now is the chance to show it.” So she is effusive, all over, and very demonstrative.

On the other hand, if she is single and not looking, she doesn’t care what the men think, so she takes to the baby as she would a cat or dog (provided she is an animal person)

The rather large-hearted husband felt that since the men were more likely to get the picking up of the baby right and not the harder stuff, they would just do what comes easy. Also, it’s visually more documented, and the men are suckers for that. The women, he said, would not do the obvious, but could be trusted with the harder stuff.

I think if you are trying to get a grip on relationship status in a roomful of ambivalent men and women, just throw a baby in and watch the changing dynamic.

When a single man picks up a baby, the women are thinking, “Hmm.. this looks like a good sperm to invest in.”

The men are thinking, “Hmmm.... he’s got the female eyeballs now. Clever.”

As for me, I am thinking, the more people that offer to carry the infant, the less I have to carry him, so be my guest.

To grey or not to grey

Yes, I have been greying, and have decided not to do anything about it. The mother is concerned, the aunts curious, the friends sceptical, the husband surprisingly cool. Most men and women seem to have an opinion about it, which they don’t express, but I can see it in their eyes. “She is ageing,” they seem to say. Of the two who did tell me they approved, the man said, “It does justice to you.” The woman said, “I am proud that you have let your greys be. It reflects your individuality.”

So whatever Aishwarya Rai may have to say, I’m not covering my greys, even though I’m “worth it.”

It’s not random, it’s not a statement. I actually did the math.

Today you’ll colour because you are just 30 and don’t have a boyfriend, and want to look good in photos.

Tomorrow you’ll colour because your boyfriend/husband shouldn’t start making eyes at other ‘younger’ women. Also, you want to look good with him in photos.

A few years from now, you’ll colour because you don’t want to be in PTA meetings where other mothers look younger than you.

And then, you’ll colour because you want your child to think you are hot.

Soon you’ll be 50 or 60 and still be colouring because now, you can’t stop. The transition is just too drastic and scary.

Okay, I know that when you are 70, it will make you look 65. Point is, how does it help?

When I was in this dilemma of “to colour or not to colour,” I performed a little experiment. I sent out a mail to 10 girlfriends, carefully picked as they represented a sample of women who held their own, who called a spade a spade, who were achievers in some way.

I got three replies: One said since she started greying in her twenties, she had no choice but to colour, and now it’s just a habit. Another said that somehow grey didn’t suit her complexion. The third said she didn’t want to announce her age yet to the world, but when she is finally okay with ageing, she will let the greys grow out. Till then, why not colour?

The seven who didn’t reply suggested to me that they were uncomfortable discussing this.

At my wedding, a few decidedly 60 plus uncles and aunts came with shocking black manes — wattles, eye-bags, wrinkles notwithstanding. Did it make them look younger? No. It sure made them look weird, though. So the problem is not whether to start, but in not being able to stop, I figured.

Recently I ran into a male anchor friend, reasonably good-looking in a George-Clooney-salt-and- pepper kind of way, and his mane was coloured too, (although the roots were showing, and that’s a bigger problem with men). His explanation: “It looks better on TV”

The thing with ageing is that unless you can control it at every level – botox, tummy tucks, colour, face lifts, hair transplant, you name it — it just doesn’t work. Because then you just look like unfinished business. It is cooler to just look your age.

Comfort in numbers

Research is a weird thing. As long as you have numbers and statistics, you can practically report anything and get away with it. For instance, you can publish a study on the fact that 90% of the people who dig their noses begin from the right nostril and then move on to the left when they are satiated, unless, of course, they are left-handed.

I recently read that couples matched on the basics of DNA testing are likely to have better sex. And one which said that dogs who wag their tails on the left side are marginally happier than those that wag their tails to the right side. And believe me, such research is not cheap. Somebody somewhere got a grant sanctioned that allocated huge funds to the same, deployed robots and other hi-tech trappings, not to mention 500 dogs allotted for the study, and obviously, owners to document the learnings.

If I were a cat, I’d say, “Poor sods! Why wag at all? And how totally presumptuous of the human species to assume that the owners had anything to do with the dog’s behaviour.”

Another study says that the heavier your snores are, the more calories you burn. There goes any residual desire in the minds of the pot-bellied and the simply fat to hit the gym or go for that run. “Why work out when I can snore my fat away?”, the men are bound to say.

Such is research. The weirder it is, the better. So it doesn’t really surprise me why not enough research is reported on things that are more relevant, more every day? Like what goes through the minds of people who drive SUVs in the city of Bombay? Or wait till 1 am and seven times the permissible alcohol content in their blood streams so that they can finally drive them at speeds that make them look good, killing a few cops or passersby on the way, if need be?

Because if there had been such research, the likes of “US-returned beautician” Nooria Haveliwala or Puru Raj Kumar or Manu Sharma or our very own Salman Khan could have read it and not spent nights in jail with unpleasant cell-mates, two tubelights, one fan and no mosquito repellants.

Poor Nooria. Had she done this in the US, she would have at least spent the night in a better smelling cell, there would have been a bigger window perhaps, may be even air-conditioning, and definitely no mosquitoes. But then, would her daddy be able to bail her out? I doubt it.

But then, may be no one volunteered to do research on such trivial offences, and may be dogs and cats and moustaches and snores are keeping scientists really busy. Also, ridiculous research is safe, it doesn’t ruffle any feathers and more importantly, makes good copy. Evidently, we all read them and chuckle from time to time. It’s a win-win. Someone is paying for them. Someone gets paid to do them. Others, like us are paying to read them.

Eat, dream, love

I am deeply suspicious of women who don’t ‘do’ food. It’s not about whether you cook or not, but about how much food gets you going. What I mean is that if I don’t see a gleam in a woman’s eye when food is mentioned, I know she can never be my friend. I have tested this out, and can say with much confidence that each and every one of my friends is into food. Show me a woman who can eat and I’ll show you integrity. And if she can eat like a man, she will never let you down. (Men, take note)

Also, food makes me happy — thinking about it, cooking it, eating it, planning it, remembering it — there are so many emotions that ride on food, that one lifetime is just not enough. So women who don’t do food bypass all these, and turn out, well, pretty shallow in my opinion.

Whenever I find myself with a woman who I am not even mildly curious about or at a loss for what to say to her, I find that she is not into food. Try it yourself and you’ll see what I mean. Women whose vocabulary does not meander into food or food-like substances are seldom worth knowing. And women who pick at their food should never be trusted.

Naturally, off my list are women who go to fancy restaurants, but never really eat, or women who think having a sandwich counts for food, or women who always decline anything that is offered to them, either because they are not hungry (What is that? Where has eating for taste gone?) or because they don’t ‘feel like it’.

On the other hand, a woman who holds forth on the roasted brownness of her baby potatoes in thyme or the desired crunchiness of green chillies in a mustard gravy pickle, or the texture of a perfect tsi-tsi-ki, or the gooeyness of a brownie made in heaven (or at Rebecca Vaz’s Baking Tray) – is a woman worth knowing.

For those of you who have to live on a diet of coffee and cigarettes simply because that is the only way you can look like stick insects and walk the ramp, or pose for a swimsuit calendar or whatever you contract requires you to do, my apologies. I know that even reading this article would be a taboo, as it will make you think about food, and that is so not cool.

I recently found myself at a dinner party with a TV actress, who kept pondering aloud over every item on display — whether she should be eating it at all, as she had to display her navel in her next shoot, whether a cheese cake had fewer calories than a trifle pudding, and such insignificant details. I thought to myself, I am so glad I don’t have her job and wondered when would she stop worrying and start living?

So if you eat to live, you are not my kinda girl. Size zero notwithstanding.

Are you dating a shampoo or a conditioner?

The weirdest thought came to me when I was in the midst of my hair-grooming ritual for a Sunday brunch this week. At the bottom of it all, there are only two types of men in this world. There are the shampoos and there are the conditioners.

The shampoo man pokes your existential dilemmas and all the scabs you are dying to hide, digs out your rough bits, makes you cry, gets all the muck out of you, cleanses you of ‘issues’ and extraneous stuff, and eventually leaves you to be your free, uncluttered self. The conditioner man smoothes your rough edges, soothes, tames the frizz, nurtures and nourishes you, and stays on to help you... well, sort of, bounce and shine.

Every man wants to be a conditioner, but whether they like it or not, quite a few men have to do the dirty work of being the shampoo. Ideally, what is recommended by experts is a combination of shampoo and conditioner, the sequence in which they appear being of prime importance. Women usually graduate from shampoos to conditioners in men, but sometimes they could end up with a shampoo man, and never know what a conditioner man could have done for them.

The jury is still out on whether one man can be both. For the moment, at least trichologists or hair-care experts will tell you, “Shampoos are supposed to leave and conditioners are supposed to stay. How can they be together?”

By that logic, the shampoo-cum-conditioner concept, in men or hair-care products, is at best, an oxymoron.

Most women have been through more shampoos than conditioners in men and it takes quite a few rinses to know if either of them is doing a good job. But then they say, it’s never too late to discover a good hair product. In my experience, the twenties are about shampoos and the thirties are about conditioners. If you are well into your thirties and still haven’t graduated from shampoos, you need to take note and figure out why.

On the face of it, they could look the same, so there’s no telling the difference really. The difference is in texture, in how your hair (metaphorically, you) feels after they’ve left.

It’s easy to forget the shampoos once we reach our good hair days, and are basking in conditioners, but we must all remember that it’s they who made us what we are. So here’s a quick thank you to all the shampoos of my life.

Now, why didn’t I talk to L’oreal or Garnier before I wrote this? Beats me.