Friday, August 20, 2004
on trafficThe back of the yellow Monolith Urban Star hangs open. I can see the bus guts, dusty metal circles and straps going round and round, nuts and bolts doing a whizzy whirry jig I imagine, in their screw-places. The bus lumbers on and on smack in the middle of the road and I know that Sana next to me is tense. She hates buses; she’s afraid that one will begin to veer inviolably towards the side of the road we’re on, grim and smoky, and squash the car one day, leaving everyone inside wedged in a crushed Coke-can of a car. I learnt how to drive on Peco Road, the heart of Township, and whizzed about amongst ghaday gaariyan, rickshaws, rehris with huge metal sarieye poking out the ends and yes, quite a few Daewoo greens. So I can scoff and beep-beep past, but Sana shrieks small shrieks and gasps when she’s scared, and much to my afsos, she is quite a sissy girl. When we pass the bus, she finally breaks her tensed, alert gaze.
“Stupid bus,” she mutters, and looks out of the other window.
we are the sultans.....of sound
I am thinking that there are interesting things to a word. Consider ‘man’ and ‘woman’. Man is such an abrupt word. You could shoot someone with it, bark it. MAN! You c’mere RIGHT NOW! It’s a snappy word. Man. Crack! And then you have woman. The mouth softens for woman, the word sounds complete. Woman. It undulates, almost. One could use woman in poetry but never man.
‘woman much missed, how you call to me’
‘man much missed, how you call to me’
‘consider O
woman this
my body.’
‘consider O
man this
my body.’
Naah. Baat nahien bannti. And not because I’m a woman and being all ho-ho we are such an ultimately fantastic breed of human, but because the dynamics of cadence say so.
(Hardy and Cummings quoted, respectively...formal literature-taking won't let me sleep if I don't quote properly khekhekhe)
on daal
if you’re stressed, it’s fine dining we suggest
I just had some pretty good daal-chawal.. Daal chawal is supreme comfort food. Everyone makes daal and most people make a really good one. When you don’t see meat too often, you make sure what you eat every day is as good as you can make it. Ahmed has eaten daal all over the country during the various quests for the Red; I’m after him to get recipes. Seriously. Of course, nobody can beat Latif’s daal, but it’d be so wonderful to have different-different recipes from all over the rural place. Latif is Nana’s khansama, he’s whizzed every single one of us cousins about in our pushchairs and he apparently isn’t half as good as the khansamey Nana was fed by growing up. We can only imagine when Amma and my khalas spin tales of the food at their dadi’s house. But Latif, for our relatively untutored palates, is pure delight. Latif ki masoor ki daal, Latif ki fried bhindi, Latif ka qaurma….*blinks dreamily* Nani Nana ke ghar you never left the table without eating three rotis at the very least. And then green jelly, Nana's specialty ;)
Mina at 9:37 PM
