I Cannes

The Oscars were kind of meh when it came to fashion, but Cannes this year is like a candy store. Maybe it’s because there are so many people from different film industries apart from just Hollywood. And some of the most memorable looks were from women from my neck of the woods (by which I mean India and China, because my neck stretches quite far.)

If I had to pick my absolute favourite, it would be Sonam Kapoor in Dolce and Gabbana. Although there were some critiques that the bodice was too tight and her hair too much, overall, it’s an unforgettable look. And the hair is admirably glossy, which might be because she’s a L’Oreal girl. I’m assuming L’Oreal does shampoo (is L’Oreal going to hunt me down for this question?)

The refreshing thing was the colour. So much colour. And the ladies from China showed us how it’s done. My second favourite look was Fan Bingbing:

Zhang Yuqi had a bit of a mishap with her plunging neckline but the drama of her dress won me over

Freida Pinto gave us a lesson in colour too. In fact, though the pink took my breath away, later her Sanchita look grew on me more.

This look on Nieves Alvarez was the first that clued me into the goodness of Cannes:

Like Sonam, Nicole Kidman also showed us princess doesn’t have to mean floor length.

And finally, my girl crush also in pink shoes, Jennifer Lawrence

There are actually more but I’m trying to restrain myself.

Dirty Dancing

Recently, I went for the play Dirty Dancing based on the popular movie. The play had received great reviews and I was expecting all kinds of awesomeness, and was completely astonished to find myself disappointed. Severely lacking was the chemistry between the protagonists Johnny and Baby. The dialogues had been lifted almost entirely from the movie, and yet they sounded hollow. The dancers were accomplished but lacked the sexual energy that characterised the freestyle dancing of the staff.

To restore my original memory of the film, I watched the DVD this weekend and found that the movie has lost none of its appeal for me. At the heart of the film is the hotness of Patrick Swayze playing Johnny and the unlikely attraction that develops between him and Baby.

I was struck once again by how similar I used to be to Baby at the age she played in the movie. A thinker with an idealistic streak, Daddy’s girl, not quite the dancer, a girl with an awkward nose. (A friend told me Jennifer Grey who played Baby later had her nose fixed and it turned out that it made her look entirely plain. My friend was dissuading me from similar thoughts about my own nose).  

And then I realised how like my first boyfriend was to Johnny. Before you die of jealousy, he didn’t have a patch on Patrick Swayze’s level of hotness, but he was rough, considered too rough for me, and boy, he could dance. He was my sexual awakening, but he was also the one that taught me to dance, that I could dance. That all I needed to do was put an arm around his neck and join my hips to his and follow his rhythm. And when my hips got the beat, I found that I could do this alone as well. I will never be a great dancer, but being with him freed my body to music.

I realised that Dirty Dancing was the screenplay of my life in my late teens and early 20s. All the men of consequence in my life since have been great dancers. And by wanting to dance with me, me the girl in the corner, I began to move.

The green-eyed monster was not only a looker but a great dancer who was known for twirling women around the floor. And V, the very first time I met him, a complete stranger, did a bit of a grind with me. A little more than a year on, at the party after our wedding, he put his arm around me and pulled me close and we were grinding on the dance floor to the slight shock and embarrassment of all present. It was probably the highlight of a very blah wedding for me.

Seven years on,ot’s been a long time since we’ve been on a dancefloor together. These days we dance with our children, they watch V in awe and giggle at me. It took watching Dirty Dancing to crystalise that what I have been missing is dancing like that, like we did in the beginning and the middle.

 

 

Bits on marriage from books

Probably because it has been a tumultuous year for my marriage, the nuggets on marriage in some books I read recently made an impression on me, although the books are not about marriage per se. All of them are books I really enjoyed; I’d highly recommend them.

An Education by Lynn Barber: In 2009, a film based on this memoir was released and received enough publicity for me to be convinced that I would love it. Except when I started watching it, I couldn’t get through. One of the changes in me since I became a parent is that I find myself identifying with the parents’ point of view in movies. And in this film, I just could not imagine how the parents of a schoolgirl could support her carrying on, including going on overnight trips, with a man much older. Moreover, I found the unfolding relationship itself unbearable to watch, although I think the audience was supposed to find it romantic. I ended up abandoning the film quarter-way through.

In the book, everybody’s rationale is much better explained, both the parents and the protagonist. Also, this episode takes up only the first half of the book, which then moves on to the other great romantic relationship in her life, that of her husband. (It also goes into her life at Oxford and career ascension which were  interesting as well). One of the things she said that got my attention was that she picked her almost entirely husband for his good looks. That was the main thing that attracted her.

These days, it’s supposed to be all about inner beauty. I remember a discussion on IHM’s blog where most people were hotly shaming those who focussed on such superficialities as appearance. Thing is, though, in a marriage that kind of attraction is a central thing. In the end, you normally have to sex with your spouse and while your feelings for the person do play an important role, at least for many women, it certainly helps if your partner is easy on your eyes.

It would be wonderful if the society we live in was filled with people who had vastly different ideas about what is beautiful, but unfortunately it turns out either due to socialisation or innate nature or both, there is a conventional idea of beauty that many people subscribe to. It is heartening to see some variation in what people find attractive and the force of our personalities, the way we project and dress ourselves, these things sway choices but if we want to think that surfaces don’t count, we’re kidding ourselves.

Barber says one of the things that spurred her marriage is that she gained such pleasure of just looking at her husband who even aged attractively.  Admittedly, people do often change how they look with age (and not necessarily for the better) but I think it helps if you at least have a memory of someone you thought beautiful to go on with.

Brief Lives by Anita Brookner: The book ostensibly deals with a frenemy-type relationship between two women but what I found fascinating was the description of women of a certain age living alone. Weirdly enough, I found the descriptions of Fay’s solitary existence heartening even though it described many things I feared about living alone – the promise of a house to itself that loses its charm once realised, hours upon hours to be filled, weekends looming – maybe because by laying what might be bare, one knows what to expect. It was also interesting that a life that I found lonely and unfulfilling in my 20s would also apparently elicit the same feelings in an aging woman. Fay’s relationships with the men in her life was also interesting. She married, and quickly realised that partly due to her husband’s expectations and partly her own personality she was doomed to be an convenient adjunct and supporter. She found herself dreaming of a reprieve from the necessity of going through the motions with a person who had no real interest in her except for how she could be of service to him.

The Radiant Way by Margaret Drabble: This would be “chicklit” if written in our times – a story celebrating the friendship between and adventures of three women, albeit about women in their 50s and very well written so as to give the reader a sense of the broader canvas in which these lives enfold. Obviously I loved it for the relationship between the three, how familiar the politics of their relationships were, and also the strength of their personalities and the unconventionality of their choices. Early on, the marriage of one of the women collapses. I found what her husband said to her interesting – he thought she was tired of him and waiting for a divorce and so eventually that’s what he drifted into. And why did he think this? Because the admiration and was support with which she interacted with him in the past had given way to dismissal. There is a  telling paragraph about what goes through the husband’s head that were food for thought for me:

And now [he] was worn out by all that, he had come full circle, he wanted a proper wife who paid him attention, a wife who did not mock him and boss and tease and vanish. He had grown frightened of [her], over the years, of the [person] that he had helped invent. She had become knowing, prescient. She had spoken sharply, foreknowingly, of his own thoughts, of the thoughts and actions of his colleagues: she had treated them and him with scant respect, as though his world were trivial, superficial. Her own had seemed to her solid, deep, serious; once too often she had made him feel that his was hollow, time-serving, transient, peopled by boys playing grown-up power games, while she attached herself to the timeless, the adult. She had excluded him from her knowingness, had indulged him with titbits, in passing. She had sapped his energy: he had felt it begin to wane.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen: Some time ago MinCat forwarded me an article (which we have since tried to dredge up without success) about how a lot of contemporary literature is trying too hard and one of the examples cited was this book. There was an excerpt supposed to illustrate this point, and I found myself thinking: “Ooh I want to read this” which was clearly not the point the article was trying to make.

Last week, I got hold of Franzen’s latest magnum opus and whoa, loved it! First of all, I have no idea why it was cited in that article because it is straight up good storytelling, the writing is crafted but not incomprehensible by a stretch and it has elsewhere been both criticised and lauded for being almost Victorian in its realism.

There is a triangle at the centre of the relatonships under consideration but two points of this triangle are a husband and a wife and the entire thing is an examination of this dynamic, the falling in and out of love and the depths of despair this can bring and also the banal joys and figuring out if they’re enough. And also, there’s the parent-child relationship and how you can love you kids but they may completely misunderstand and then hate you. Ouch. But all in all unputdownable.

 

On abortion

The death of Savita Halappanavar after she was denied an abortion while going through a miscarriage in Ireland revived the discussion on abortion and I found myself thinking out my own position on abortion, which is a little different from the mainstream feminist one.

When I read the chapter on abortion in Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman I felt this tingling of recognition. The debate around when human life begins strikes me as ridiculous. If I recall my biology textbooks correctly (and I do, I checked), algae and even spores and bacteria are considered alive. But mysteriously the blotchy mass of cells that forms a human embryo is not? Heh. I’m not buying it. I am also shocked at the ignorance of some pro-choicers who seem to have an insufficient grasp of fetal development or maybe actually experiencing it stops it from being merely academic and brings the whole issue into the realm of the tangible.

The whole thing is even more messed up when you consider that science, on which we rely on for answers to everything, has not yet entirely agreed upon a definition for anything being alive. So then one might argue that since the entire discussion seems to be based on shaky ground, let’s just randomly set a starting date for life out of convenience (say 20 weeks). But noone says that. They all try to make it sound logical.

But if the textbooks by and large do say that algae is life, why get shifty about identifying an embryo as living? I understand that politically it’s just easier to classify an embryo as non-living but really, it is stretching the imagination especially if you put a sonogram of a 6-week embryo next to spore.

At the higher levels, the debate is not about whether this is life but at which stage does an organism have the right to life. Ah. But even here, it gets sticky. If you say 20 weeks, then why? The fact is that post 20 weeks an abortion becomes medically more dangerous for the mother and therefore that deadline. It has nothing to do with a foetus mysteriously showing signs of life. Saying the latter seems entirely arbitrary.*

I think this: If the entire scientific community can agree that spores are alive, then so too is a 6-week embryo. So we need to stop instructing people to stop saying “kill” when referring to the act of killing an embryo. Let’s call a spade a spade and move on.

If it is alive, then does it have the right to life?  That is the question.

Human society allows its members to end life, even human life, quite a lot. Take capital punishment. Take war. One might argue that an embryo is blameless. Not all the people who die in a war, even a just war, deserve to die.

So the question should be why should we permit human society to end this particular life?

Why indeed? According to me, because:

1. The peculiarities of pregnancy mean that the embryo has a parasitic relationship to the mother. Even putting a baby up for adoption does not solve the issue of the nine months of pregnancy which are pretty damn hard or would be considered so if they weren’t so routine and only happen to women. If the mother’s body is to be taken over by the f, she needs to be the one that decides whether she can do this or not. If science discovered a way to relatively painlessly transfer the embryo from a woman who didn’t want to go ahead to a woman who did, then we could do this discussion over.**
2. Even Ireland, with its restrictive laws, allows abortions in cases where the mother’s life is in danger.  It’s another matter that Irish doctors don’t seem to want to risk being told that they made the wrong call and therefore they play safe with the life of the child while risking that of the mother. But is danger only restricted to the physical body there and now? What about the danger to the physical body by a society that will not accept an unwed mother? Or to a physical body that will starve because it cannot support two physical bodies? And why is the physical only stressed – what about the mind that is not prepared for a child?
3. A baby does not only depend on its mother during childhood. It needs to be looked after for a good 20 years after. It is a huge commitment. And while a woman may be physically capable of having one, she may not be capable of raising one. Which is the greater evil – killing a baby or neglecting a child you do not want, thus condemning it to misery for years and years? It is always assumed that mothers, particularly mothers who have already had children, will fall in love with their children but the large number of neglected and abused children are proof that this is not so.

Caitlin Moran has a great chapter on abortion in her book. It gives a no-holds-barred description of what goes on in a D&C too. This is not a pleasant experience or one that most people would do lightly. This is something one might choose when the preventative options failed. Condemning women to having and raising children because they had sex when they were not prepared to have children is not practical. Sometimes – hopefully rarely – what you don’t want to happen, what you have to tried to prevent from happening happens, and for the good of everybody, the living and the precariously alive, a choice needs to be made.

*It also gets more complicated if you ask why the right to life in these terms and conditions only applies to human life, but that’s another tougher debate.

**And this made me rethink my stance on the rights of men who do not want to have a baby but are forced to pay maintenance for the child because the woman insists on having the child. If the logic is that a human being who is forced to look after another human being should have a say in whether that human being lives and attaches itself to her body, then men, being human beings, should also have some say in something that will involve at the very least a financial commitment for two decades. These will always remain grey cases and I suspect would always involve third party mediation but I don’t think the automatic solution should be that men should be forced to maintain children they state they do not want from the beginning. However, since an act that they participated in now results in a woman having to go through a lot of trouble (whether abortion or pregnancy) the woman should be given some compensation. I think we need to value, in the less complicated cases, if possible, approximately how much that should be. But I don’t think it need be maintaining the child for life in all cases.

*** Let us not say here that people should not have sex till they are ready to have babies. The human body does not work that way. It is not practical. It has never been practiced that way, no matter what we would like to think. Humanity has had to contend with how to deal with unwanted pregnancies for a long, long time.

Name name go away

Some time ago, the interwebs were full of debate after Jill Filopovic’s piece on HuffPost about women taking their husband’s name after marriage. A Facebook post by a friend brought Filopovic’s piece to my attention and of course, there were ensuing discussions. I agree with the basic reasoning, but I also agree with these commentaries on Shakesville. There was also an interesting series  run by Flyover Feminism on naming.

I have always been keen on names and naming. It used to be my favourite part about babies. Now my favourite part about babies is their feet. How they’re scrawny, then they become chubby with little toesies and then they learn to walk and then. Okay quiet. Nevertheless, whenever a baby is born my first question is “what are you going to name him/her?” which I have learnt to be quiet about because people don’t always know or want to tell, but if it’s  someone I’m close to that’s what I’m going to be asking.

I was never particularly fond of both my first and last name. I thought both were odd. My first name was a bother because nobody could pronounce it. My last name was also not one of the common ones in Goan Christian circles. I wanted to fit in.

Good Catholics tend to have a middle name, that’s usually the name of a saint. But my mom had such a hard time figuring out a first name for me, that when she got to discussing middle names with my dad (he was on a ship at the time), he said “just put an A and we’ll decide later” and that’s  what they did. Thankfully, I later discovered that the A is missing from my birth certificate and only present on my baptism one. But for a good part of my childhood, I played around with the A imagining what I’d like it to be since my parents said I could decide. I never decided. Later, I dropped the A.

So I never had a middle name. When we were in Std X and filling up some forms before our boards, our class teacher told us to put a dash in the middle name section if we didn’t want our father’s name to appear there. Unfortunately, my mother didn’t do this when filling out my passport form and my passport now carries my father’s first name as my middle name thanks to some overzealous passport officer. I hated it, until I realised that many people in Hong Kong were using it in lieu of both my first and last name because it’s easier to pronounce.

When I was preparing for my wedding, I had a brief period when I decided to take my husband’s last name. Frankly, I cannot even remember what my logic was. Then, fortunately, he pissed me off in a big way and I came to my senses. V half-heartedly said, “Why don’t you take my name?” and then dropped it, not in small measure due to the fact that he realised he would have to do all the running around involved in a name change because I am historically incompetent about these things and would be unlikely to cooperate in the matter.

So I kept my last name and my husband kept his. Kinda. Actually his name is messed up, also by a passport officer, so it would have been even more ridiculous for me to adopt his naming confusion. But I didn’t know that then. For me, it was a feminist choice.

Then came my babies. While women have made progress in retaining their own names, children continue to be automatically given the father’s name. I have come to accept that this evolved out of insecurities surrounding paternity and that these primitive fears might be around and kicking even today. Even DNA tests cannot establish paternity with certainty. So okay. Maybe.

But I think a more ideal and fun and creative solution would be for new families to adopt new last names, if there is a need for last names at all, that sync with their collective values. Not going to happen in my generation I guess.

Another intersection with naming happened with I had to take a pseudonym for freelance writing assignments. It was fun to think up a name but I got tired when it came to a last name and adopted my husband’s pseudo-last name. Basically because I kind of like it as a last name, though really it is my father-in-law’s first name and I don’t quite like that. So in retrospect I should’ve thought harder.

In my adulthood, I’m coming to like my first name. (Peeps, who know my first name, what do you think? Does it suit me as a person? It is a little la-di-da, which I am not, but it is unusual, which I am). I’m not that hot on my last name. I actually prefer my mother’s maiden name. It’s easy to pronounce also. That might be something to consider. Or an entirely new last name, based on something I admire.

I’m thinking that when and if I have some free time I might consider changing my name. For half my life, I’ve lived with my father’s last name. For the other half, I might do something different. By then, I should know who I am and where I’m going and what will suit me.

I understand that the bureaucracy is a bitch. One of the tyrannies of naming is that states make it so damn hard to do. It’s a control thing. So I would need to wait for a time when I have the time and energy to do this. But it’s an idea.

Do you love the name your parents gave you? Ever considered changing it?

Anatomy of an illness

Stage 1: That foreboding sense (a slight ache, a buzz behind you eyes, an irritation in the nose) that you’re going downhill, which you try to nick with optimism that resting, vitamins, hot soup, steam inhalation, anything anything anything, will stave it off.

Stage 2: You wake you with a proper body ache and the intimations of fever but decide to pop a pill and ignore it. This is my new strategy because the first day is never the worst day and we need to ration the number of days we take off work.*

Stage 3: By evening, you are flagging. A proper fever has set in. Resignation to the fact that you are indeed properly ill.  You call in sick. Pay obligatory visit to the doc. Veg out in front of the TV, actually enjoying it a little bit.

Stage 4: Huh. You are still not better. Now the illness is getting old. You call in sick again. Panic slightly about “what if you need yet another day”. When you are not better by evening, you go through all the terrible things you might have and Google them to see if the symptoms match. Invariably they do.

Stage 5: You need another day off. If you’re lucky, it’s the weekend. If you’re not, you probably drag yourself in, high on pills, or make that dreaded call to your boss. Either way, you’re pretty sure that you’re never going to recover, and imagine yourself quarantined in hospital with all of Hong Kong in a panic (this is what living in Hong Kong does to one). You go back to the doctor. He tells you not to worry. You don’t believe him, or his new list of medication.

Stage 6: It seems like you’re a little bit better. But do you dare believe it?

Stage 7: You are better but now buzzed on antibiotics you still have to take. Walking up a short flight of stairs makes you feel faint.

But overall you are relieved that you don’t have some mortal illness, and just had the flu. Again.

*This particular aspect has made me see how violent and pointless work is. Why this unstated pressure to come in when you’re ill? It makes me see the appeal of quitting forever and retiring to a farm aka V.

Girls

So the much-awaited trip to Sri Lanka happened. Seven girls, one wedding, meeting after 12 years, though I may have the math wrong. We were flying in from all over the world – Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Mumbai and Dubai.

Of course, it would be too easy if we all got there without last-minute obstacles. First, one girl was offloaded from her flight twice (she had won a free trip that made it possible for her to come). Then, two days before they were due to leave, Curly fainted, banged her head really badly and had to do a whole series of tests to confirm she was okay (she was, except for sore head).

I got the mother of all sinus infections that refused to go away and was freaked out about flying lest my eardrums burst (they didn’t). Because of the sinus infection and the hardcore antibiotics I was on, I was too groggy and tired to pack for the trip until the night before. And then I realised that my shoes and jewellery were in the room Benji was sleeping in so I had to wait until the next morning to put those into my suitcase. So obviously it was chaos in the morning, and the kids rummaging excitedly into my suitcase and flinging things out did not help.

I had to take my suitcase to work and leave straight from there, and getting a taxi at that time of the morning is hard. I tried two taxi services before giving up and taking the MTR which was surprisingly not packed. As expected, there was the usual last-minute stuff that everyone had to give me but I made my escape at 4.30 pm. Downstairs it was pouring cats and dogs and obviously no taxi in sight. My suitcase and myself knee-down were soaked by the time I flagged down a cab.

Things got better from there. Thanks to Curly and our non-stop wardrobe discussions prior to the trip, I had packed about five pairs of shoes so I very easily exchanged my wet pair for dry ones. Unfortunately, I only had only summer clothes, so I tried to buy a pair of trousers but I wasn’t too happy with them and my jeans were drying off so I kept them on.

Before take-off, I dosed myself with congestion-clearing drugs and though my ears popped on the way up (which actually made me feel better), they remained otherwise stable. I had the seat next to me free and made the mistake of trying to lie across it, with the result that I didn’t sleep except for one hour of the six-and-a-half-hour flight.

At some point, I gave up and watched Silver Linings, which I loved. I had expected a dreary film, but it was surprisingly uplifting. It is quite a skilled portrait of living in the everyday world with a mental illness, and the parts involving parents made me weep. I should probably avoid any movie in which Robert de Niro plays the father. In the end though, it devolves into quite a chick flick but I can’t say that I was annoyed by that because I haven’t seen a good chick flick in ages, and the whole first part departed from clichés enough.

I had chosen to fly Jet Airways to Bombay so I could catch up with some of the girls and continue with them to Colombo. I found them in the Martini Bar, which turned out to have no martinis, the first of many laughs we had. There was an extensive menu, and I was determined to eat (Jet Airways food sucks, what has happened to their hitherto talented sky kitchen?) so I could take yet another dose of tablets but it turned out there was no food also. I ended up getting a plate of idlis and eating them in the bar.

We landed in Colombo early in the morning and exited the airport to find that the cab the hotel was supposed to send hadn’t landed up. I had just finished telling one of my friends the story of the driver of the cab on my honeymoon in Goa being drunk and falling asleep at the wheel, so what happened next was doubly ironic. We tried to get a pre-paid cab but there was some shady nonsense going on there, with us having to wait indefinitely while the lady at the counter held my friend’s passport indefinitely. A tout came along asking if we wanted a taxi and we decided to go with him and demanded our passport back. Turned out to be not such a good idea. First, he was annoyingly chatty. Then, he tried to get us into another cab saying he wanted to sleep. We refused. So he proceeded to drive. Then he started falling asleep at the wheel. So we were forced to chat with him so that he stayed awake and stop to buy him coffee where one of us consumed a dodgy cutlet that was to be her downfall.

Finally, we reached Hikkaduwa which is a gorgeous place on the lines of Baga in Goa. Our hotel, Sunbeach Resort, was very cute and bang on the beach. The hotel staff had a dazed look as we tumbled out of the car and started shrieking and hugging the ones who had already arrived. We then decamped straight to the beach chairs and proceeded to pour vodka into anything possible – watermelon juice, coconut, etc.

My stated plan for this holiday was to sit around and gossip, and that’s pretty much what we did in Hikkaduwa. Occasionally we’d make forays into the water where we’d get slammed by the waves. There was lots of photo-taking, including a re-enactment of a photograph taken in Goa 15 years ago almost to the date.

Some of the girls were very enthusiastic about seeing turtles, but I was determined to be a turtle myself and basically move very very slowly with lots of time in the shade of my shell. So some of us stayed behind and headed to Colombo directly. Only, we ended up foraying out for lunch and stomping around in the hot sun in search of an elusive restaurant called Blue Moon. We kept getting misdirected by people pointing us to some Moonbeam Hotel, until we snapped at them to their consternation. Finally, we ended up in said Moonbeam Hotel. After eating a whole plate of devilled squid, I ended up feeling a little sick on the way back, but thankfully my stomach held.

Our hotel in Colombo was quite charming, and we proceeded to assume we were the only guests there and to make quite a racket. The first night there we ambitiously dolled up and decided to go club-hopping. Unfortunately, the first place on our list didn’t look glam enough for us, and the second and third were closed. At the third place, the PR manager directed us to the sky bar of the Fulbright Hotel. Despite the laser lights, this looked promising, and our waiter earnestly took down all long and complicated food order only to return a good 15 minutes later to inform us that nothing was available because they had no kitchen. Then he brought the drinks some of which weren’t what had been ordered, but all of which were yummy. The upside was that after Curly politely “informed” the manager of the mix-up, our drinks bill was waived.

In search of food, we landed up at the poolside, where there was a really excellent one-man band. Tempted as some of us were to revert to our school days and sing, restraint and my incessant cross-questioning (“sing?” “a song?” “now?”) prevailed. There were a couple of extremely hilarious moments involving a bill and the car ride back home that ended in the defining question of the trip: “What is wrong with you?”

The day of the wedding we woke up late and had our first (and my only) truly great meal in Sri Lanka – string hoppers and potato curry. We then split up with yours truly hell bent on getting a pedicure which I eventually did in this Foot Rub place at the entrance of Odel mall (tip to travellers: the lady at the little massage place will put you off by saying they only do dry massages but actually there is lotion involved and they are very good at massaging). That left me about 20 minutes to race around Odel like a headless chicken, which I belatedly realised has a lot of excellent things to buy for a person from Hong Kong. The guys in the shoe section were amazed/thrilled by me.

Made it back in good time to shower and have Curly drape my sari, which she did like a pro. I fell in love with myself in the sari, if I may say so myself, and ditched the dress that was my backup plan. Everyone else was in dresses, but I have finally become confident enough to be the odd one out.

Turned out I wasn’t though because all the young ladies on the groom’s side were in saris, so I fit right in. Except theirs were impeccably draped (I think it’s the Sri Lankan style of draping and it’s sooo beautiful – Curly was all “oh we should do that with yours!”) and they carried if off like pros, while I kept stepping inexplicably on the back of mine. And also my bra tended to show when I raised my hands but that was because my mum had adjusted it in Bombay without me being able to try it on. Not my fault, though it did not bode well for the dancing later.

We were the only people there on the bride’s side beside her mum, dad, sister and brother-in-law so I think our presence (though noisy) was appreciated. We did get a taste of her mother-in-law though which meant we immediately ditched plans to pair the singletons in our group with the brothers of the groom (who turned out to be married anyway).

We decided to ditch the plan of going to some beachside place to get a drink and headed straight to the Cinnamon Grand where the wedding reception was to take place. There we ran into the bride and the groom and plonked down next to them, quite scaring the poor guy our friend was marrying methinks. Finally, we took ourselves off to the hotel bar to kill time, where of course we behaved badly and made noise and took pictures like it was our own living room.

And we did ourselves proud at the wedding by clapping loudly and hooting when the groom mentioned us in his vote of thanks and then taking over the dance floor and not being demure at all. But we did liven up the party, and the DJ was playing a lot of our old favourites, and we got the bride to dance, ditching the groom which is totally in keeping with the character of our group.

I left that night at 4 pm and had a smooth ride to the airport, check-in and connecting flights. I was to arrive in Hong Kong a couple of hours before V left for a three-week business trip and I was determined to race from the airport to home. I even held my pee till I reached the baggage belt, which I landed at almost first because of my HKID. And then, I waited, and waited, and waited. And my suitcase didn’t come. It never did. This being Hong Kong I didn’t panic either. I had my wallet, passport, phone and jewellery in my hand luggage and unlike the other poor sod whose baggage was lost, I was not on holiday so I didn’t have to buy underwear. I filled out a form, got in a cab and came home.

V and I literally had 15 minutes in the same room and we spent it fighting. The kids had contracted foot and mouth disease the day after I left and I asked V if he had taken them to the doctor again after the initial diagnosis and he said no. I was pissed because he had a weekend. Then he asked me about my lost luggage and I admitted I had left this expensive pearl necklace he had given me in my suitcase and he was pissed. We shouted. He left. I stormed into the corridor and cried. We made up. We made up some more on the phone. Hmmm.

But this is not about V and I. This is about the amazing holiday I had. It was entirely possible that we would be forcing camaraderie, that we would get sick of each other, that there would be outright catfights. There might have been frictions, but nothing more. Rather, we had fun. Loads of it. There was some nostalgia, there was picking up where we left off but there was also living in the moment and enjoying each other’s company. There was lots of laughter. We have all grown up since we left college and but we still more or less like each other. There were people l could pick right up with despite not having seen them for years, there were people that grated me the wrong way, there were people who I felt I needed more time with. But my overall experience was positive, which it has not been in a long while.

I was discussing this phenomenon with Curly, and I realised that while it is possibly true that it worked because it was a short while, I have recently been unable to tolerate people for a dinner, leave alone three days of living in the same quarters. It may be that we work because we were friends in senior college when our personalities were somewhat formed. It may be that length of time we have known each other, if not been closely in touch, forms a bedrock that silences major rifts. We can have conversations in the knowledge that even if they might bitch about you later, they basically like you because that has already been established. Whatever it was, the seamlessness of this interaction gives me hope.

I came back from this holiday refreshed and feeling benevolent about the world. Not sure how long the benevolence will last, and I suddenly have the flu which I am trying not to panic about. But yeah, it was good.

What are little boys made of?

Most of you know who have been reading this blog for a while know that when I was pregnant with Benji I was sorely disappointed when I was informed that I would be giving birth to a boy. I had not really factored in the possibility that I would not have a baby girl. I didn’t quite know what to do with the news of a boy.

I had grown up in a female-centred environment and although I was married to a person of the male persuasion sex, I didn’t know boys all that well. I thought girls were more interesting and fun. I knew how to raise a girl; I had plans for a girl. I had no idea what to do with a boy.

Some of you tried to console me by saying that it was a great opportunity to raise a feminist boy. I found that to be small consolation because frankly, while I knew how to raise a feminist girl, I didn’t think I was up to the responsibility of the feminist boy. V questioned my feminist credentials altogether because he pointed out that if I objected to people not wanting to give birth to girls, then how could I myself have a sex preference. Let it be known that I have stopped objecting to people not wanting to give birth to girls. I think their reasons are misguided, but a closer inspection reveals that their reasons pertain to real social and economic conditions that exist (such as dowry, disadvantaged inheritance rights, the responsibility to protect honour, lower earning capacity) as opposed to my reasons which were based on stuff in my head.

Let it also be known having now given birth to both a baby boy and a baby girl, I can confidently say, there is NO DIFFERENCE. That is, there is no difference unless you want it to be. And I am completely sold on little boys now, in fact, I may even have a slight bias in their favour now. At a completely personal and illogical level. Everybody should have one. Because sometimes they stomp around in their collared T-shirts and cargoes looking like little old men, ranting and railing. But seriously, there is no difference.

I also realised that if anybody is up to the task of raising a feminist boy, it’s me. It’s a bit like when I thought, I can’t be a teacher, I’m not good at it. And then I realised that there are people who suck much more than me at teaching making a full-time living out of it. Same with parenting. There are people who have not given a thought to socially-constructed gender difference, ever, and most of those who have think only in woman-centric terms.

But feminism and having a real actually boy on my hands to raise,  whose future I feel somewhat responsible for ensuring is not bound tightly in nonsensical strictures, have given me perspectives I don’t see in other people.

And having a baby boy and a girl, I am realising how far feminisim has come for women of my social class (urban, elite, educated, upper-middle-class Indian) and how masculinity continues to throttle men. Thus, women in our circles have gained much ground in being allowed to do many many things that were hitherto out-of-bounds to them, but men have pretty much stayed the same. Thus far, it has always been assumed that the things to aspire to do are the male things because they are the power things, and no one imagined that anyone would actually want to do the female things. I think we are just at the point in history where we are collectively begin to make a start at processing that.

And right now, in raising my toddlers, I see that my son is the one with more restricted choices though I guess as an adult my daughter will face larger disadvantages due to her gender.

Let’s start with clothes. The violence of the pink and blue segregation starts at birth and apparently affects both genders equally. And by at birth, I mean literally, though in some cases it begins before when the parents go shopping for the baby’s clothes and everything is colour-coded. In the government hospital I delivered at the baby boys were given blue hospital garments and the girls pink. The boys were issued blue birth cards, the girls pink. This may have been to make it easier for the nurses to distinguish (even the mums wore colour coded outfits in the ward – chequered PJs for pre-delivery, pink for post) and maybe there are a couple of disorders that one sex is more prone to than others (like males are more prone to kidney dilation and subsequent UTIs, though ironically I know this because my daughter bucked the trend and had dilated kidneys) but I don’t think they are generic enough to need to colour code all children so dramatically.

At home, I had made a conscious choice to avoid blue and have a mix of clothes for my son. Most of his baby clothes were hand-me-downs gifted by family and close friends. Most people tended to weed out the most obviously girly stuff when sending me hand-me-downs but I still got a few pink onesies. I did not hesitate to put my son in these, though I will admit that as he grew older I do hesitate dressing him in pink.

And, I have never dared to dress him in skirts or dresses, though I suspect he would like to. My son loves playing dress-up with my clothes. He also is very attracted to girls in tutus, possibly because he finds them cute but more likely because he wants to be them. I think this is natural. Tutus are cute. My son also loves messing about with my make-up. He also likes watching and imitating my husband shaving. My daughter is equally attracted to these things. The difference is that she gets to indulge this attraction to the girly stuff and my helpers and I get to indulge our attraction to frills and frippery on her.

To do the same with my son in public would be crossing a line of convention that would come down very hard on him if we did. Even though it’s just clothes. I won’t do it unless I sense he really wants it. If that situation arises, I will go to battle for my son’s right to wear anything he damn well pleases.

Recently, a photo of me giving Benji a swimming lesson got a lot of comments on Facebook. The first one was from a friend who erroneously assumed Benji was Mimi. I’m pretty sure because he was wearing a pink wetsuit. The wetsuit was borrowed from his cousin Lala and my sis-in-law did ask if I minded putting him a pink one. I didn’t care and neither did Benji. I thought the pink suited him in fact. I didn’t think he looked like a girl because honestly babies and toddlers look androgynous to me, unless they have gender markers like long hair, earings (I have refused to pierce my kids ears) and dresses.

Then there’s toys. Benji is naturally attracted to cars, anything on wheels really. He also likes toolboxes. Most of the toys he gets are gifted, and if we buy him something it does tend to be cars because that’s what he tends to go for. So we have a bias in favour of “boys” toys in our house and Mimi tends to play with those as well. The only difference we noticed is that Mimi like soft toys, mainly animals; Benji never cared for them. At one point, I got them a cooking set. V’s cousin who was visiting pointed out that the utensils were pink and I gently said it didn’t matter. Benji played with them for a bit, but isn’t very into it (he’s totally into watching cooking shows though).

A few months ago, Benji pointed to some dolls in a shop and said “I want dolly!”. This was probably influenced by one of the stories I read him about a girl who had a favourite dolly. But hey, dollies can be fun. They have hair to play with and pee if you feed them water. He has also been interested in these toy strolleys that kids have here. V was very uncomfortable with getting him either, and I figured I’d press the matter if Benji continued to show interest. The issue was solved when V’s  friend visited and gave Mimi a doll. Benji promptly appropriated it with V and my two helpers yelling “No, dollies are for girlies!” and me counter-yelling “Don’t say that. Anyone can play with dolls.” As I suspect will be a pattern in our house, Benji resolved this by firmly wanting to play with the doll and V being unable to deny him anything he really wants. Benji even took it to bed with him two nights. Neither he or Mimi are particularly gentle with it, but Benji at least showed some interest in feeding it or putting it under a blanket. Mimi is more interested in my turtle (a love-gift from V to me that has joined their toy basket), doggie (which makes annoying noise, gah!) and meow-cat. One day, I found V feeding the dolly ice-cream so I guess we’re all making progress.

My kids are still toddlers but my experience to date seems to indicate that my son is getting the rougher edge of the socialisation stick. We have come a sufficiently long way as a society for even my traditional-minded father-in-law to gift him grand-daughter a toolkit. But how many people would gift a boy a doll?

To have or not to have?

One of the points in this post struck a nerve and much of the discussion in the post segued into why do people assume everyone is going to have kids, how does anyone know whether I want kids, how do I know whether I want kids, etc.

So I decided to do a post about that.

First let me say that I believe that not everyone wants or should have children. I fully accept that there are people who would be happier without.

I have also come to believe that the number of people that fit the above category are few. Let’s just say that if I were to advise my friends on whether to have kids or not, I’d say have at least one.

It is possible I am saying this because I chose this and now I feel the need to usher everyone else into my corner. But I don’t feel that way about other things, like, ironically, marriage which I think has its good points but could be given a miss , or, say, getting a tattoo, or even full-time work. So I hope I’m not entirely biased by the fact that I have children, though it is the reality of having children that has changed my perspective on this issue.

This post is mainly for the ditherers. And the ones who are ruling kids out on grounds that are not quite clear to even them. And those that declare they don’t want kids ever, but deep down there’s a maybe lurking.

Sid mentioned in the comments on that post that sometimes when people make statements ruling out children, it’s a plea for people to share their own experience.

So I’m sharing mine.

I was quite well-known for never wanting to have kids. Or to get married. I kind of announced that to my family when I was about seven a propos of nothing. And I stuck it consistently thereafter.

I disliked children. I disliked the pressure to like children more than I disliked children, though I didn’t know that then. I liked the odd child but maintained that I disliked children so I didn’t get cornered into cooing over all the other children I didn’t like.

When I was 17 I had my first boyfriend. I still wasn’t hot on the idea of marriage but coupledom made me realise the advantages of partnership. So I wasn’t quite sure I was anti-marriage anymore though I was quite sure I didn’t want to marry my boyfriend (I even told him so) and quite sure he wanted to marry me. After about four years of him, I was almost resigned to the idea that we would probably, eventually, get married. Fortunately, we broke up.

But I stopped saying I was never going to get married. And I figured I should stop saying I was never going to have children also. Because when I was with that boyfriend, I had famously named our future children.  I didn’t particularly have any affinity for children then, but the vague idea of little hims and mes running around was cute. Plus it was the dream you’re supposed to dream. Plus I liked naming.

Nevertheless, I realised that if I could get so entrenched in a relationship with a man, then anything would happen. I should stop ruling out things, especially big things. Especially when I was 21.

I remember when I had first met V and he asked me what I thought about marriage and I said: “I don’t particularly want it, but I think it’s inevitable.” I was 23 then. I had realised that rail against it as I did, in the current social set-up, it was probably a good bet. And by then, I had tried coupledom and  experienced its benefits. And I also knew that if my position on marriage could shift so dramatically, so too could my position on children. That it very possibly would. All the ideological reasons for not getting married/not having children blur slightly when it’s your own personal decision and your own life stretching ahead of you.

I didn’t have or want children right after I got married. I tend to think that unless you’ve had a long period of living together with loads of interactions with both sides of the family before officially tying the knot, then you might as well sort those things out first before having children. But there are no rules. Some people really want children right away, and why not then? I had married early so I luckily had time on my side and I was in no rush seeing as I didn’t particularly like children.

About a year or two after I moved to Hong Kong, my attitude to children shifted very slightly. Chinese kids are super cute. Even the very little ones. I saw Chinese babies as a different species, actually, separate from other annoying children. I found myself smiling at a couple of them. And then slowly noticing that some other kids were cute too.

All along, I had always got on famously with my cousin’s children. Children actually tend to follow me around like the Pied Piper even as I claim to not want to have anything to do with them. Maybe because of that. Or because I’m the only adult not going coochie coo. And actually saying something halfway interesting to them. I’m a bit of a kid myself also. My three-year-old niece came to Hong Kong and she basically attached herself to me like a tail. My in-laws to whom I had always said I didn’t like kids raised their eyebrows.

V told his boss once that I was happy to keep moving around and she said, oh then she’s not ready to have kids because when you want to have kids, you nest. Righto, I said.

Five years into our marriage, on his 34^th birthday, we were coasting along when V raised the subject of children. We weren’t exactly in the best place in our relationship then. But we weren’t in the worst place either. We were both in a good place job-wise. But still, I was taken by surprise and came up with lots of reasons why we shouldn’t do it right then. V pointed out quite reasonably that there was never going to be the perfect time and we should just do it.

My sister at that time had been trying for a child. Her difficulties in getting pregnant may have also galvanised me somewhat. There’s nothing like the thought of not being able to get pregnant to make you want to get pregnant.

Though I didn’t quite want to get pregnant. I was more like, huh, okay fine then. My sister got pregnant and I was all into her baby-making journey. And occasionally I would smile at a baby on TV and V would smirk at me. Because me actually thinking a baby was cute was a huge step.

We didn’t get pregnant right away. I had an ovarian cyst and was warned I would need surgery to have any chance of getting pregnant. I was upset about that, not so much because it hindered my chances of getting pregnant but because I wanted to go to India and surgery meant I wouldn’t be able to. As it happened, my sister-in-law’s mother-in-law who’s a gynac put me on a regiment of yoga and ayurvedic drugs and I tried not to be such a stresshead and one fine day, I was pregnant.

How did a person who doesn’t even like kids decide she’s ready to get pregnant? Well, because there were a few kids I did like. And I had been reassured by people exactly like me that I would like my own kid. There’s also the matter of your husband really wanting kids, even if you don’t. A woman is not obliged to have kids just because her husband wants them, but it’s something to consider. At least once.

I was in love with my child the moment I saw a blob beating on the sonogram, and it’s only gotten better ever since. And I didn’t have pleasant pregnancies, deliveries or post-partum experiences. But my children are worth it. No question.

It is also possible that my positive experience owes to the amount of help I have. I have a husband who does his fair share. I have employed people specifically for the task of helping. This was all deliberate and we made choices to enable this, but yes we were also lucky to have the option. Had I had no help though, I would still have had one child and managed. The really hard bit is the first six months. The slogwork eases off a lot as the child grows.

I have come to believe there is nothing like raising a child; it’s one of those things must-do-if-you-can things. I think giving birth to a biological child that is a mesh of you and your partner is a special experience, and this is not to discount the wonder of adoption.*

It seems like in the past, there was silence around the difficulties involved in raising children. Maybe because it was women’s work and women were silent about everything they did. And now there’s a lot of noise about how hard and how much work and how much it costs to raise a child. It’s productive that this is being acknowledged. But maybe it gives the impression that raising a child is all work and no play.

The reality is that it’s a lot of play. A lot, and in a great way. In a way that makes you stop and smile in joy with all the sounds in the background moaning erased. Okay, my kids are just toddlers and things will definitely change, but I think the playing will go on for a good 10 years. And that’s a reward in itself. It is hard to convey what the reality of raising a child is, but I tried once. That post has a similar discussion to this one and some interested comments so I’d recommend people interested in this topic read that as well.

This very well-written article crystalised something I’ve been sensing for a while in the people around me. The decision about whether to have kids or not has become something like the quest for The One. Stage 2, perhaps. Thus, you spend your early 20s caught up in this idea that the perfect someone is out there waiting and when he appears you’re going to just know it. Admittedly, this did happen in my case, but I’d wager it’s fairly rare. I agree that one should have a good feeling about the person one commits to spending the rest of one’s life with but that feeling might dawn gradually and everything might not settle itself quite so magically.

And then with kids, there has been a huge push from feminist and other circles urging people, but specifically women, not to automatically have children but if and when you really want to. Which is well and good. But it seems to me that amidst all the rhetoric, some of those whose minds the thought of having a child might have crossed seem to be overthinking.

Many people I know seem to be waiting for the right moment and that feeling that will tell one it’s the right moment. Some of the questions Urvashi asks in her piece reminded me of those people. How do I know this is what I really want?

In a discussion related to Urvashi’s piece, Haathi pointed out that there are plenty of people who are not agonising existentially and who decide to have children for quite prosaic reasons. Like their husband wanted them. Or their mother-in-law. Or they were scared by the biological clock. In the circles I move in, these are supposed to be the wrong reasons.

I question what I used to think were the right reasons though. If you’re dead broke, or in a situation that would give you no time to look after kids and you can’t get out of that situation, or your home is a violent and unstable place, then, yeah, probably delay having children. But if things are relatively stable, but all ducks are not in the row, then go for it because the ducks are never all going to be in a row.

* I am not on board with people who casually say, oh just adopt, though. After I had my first child, I realised that I would struggle with adoption. It would work for me as an option if I couldn’t biologically give birth but I would have struggled with it. I need the hormones that fuel you in those early days of childrearing.  So I can understand now why many people feel they cannot adopt.

Feminism 102

Seeing Like a Feminist by Nivedita Menon: Everyone needs to read this. It’s like the Indian version of Cailtin Moran’s How to be a Woman except admittedly a tad more theoretical and not funny-storyish. When I say “Indian version”, it’s located in the Indian context but it very much draws on global streams of thought in feminism, sometimes contesting them from the Asian context, often synergising. And when I say “theoretical”, there are some big words like “hegemony” in there but Menon actually does asterisks with simpler explanations to these and she also at the outset tells the reader that they can ignore the references to theoretical texts, which she included only in case people wanted to look them up. So please don’t be discouraged by that. I want everybody to read this book so that we are all up to speed on the currents of thought right now so that you don’t have to be the one having delayed epiphanies while those you have read the book stand by inwardly eye-rolling. If circumventing the inner eye-rolling of the likes of me isn’t enough motivation, it touches on just about every sticky little subject – marriage, prostitution, (yeah, I put those both next to each other intentionally), commercial surrogacy, abortion vs female feoticide, Valentine’s Day, honour killings, and should being called a whore be taken as a compliment. See, I got you with that last one, didn’t I? Now go get this book and read it as a favour to me. It’s only a slim volume anyway.

The Fabulist Feminist by Suniti Namjoshi: I first encountered Namjoshi’s work when I read one of her Blue Donkey stories in a textbook at university and I wanted more. So when I saw that a collection of her work was out, I had to get it, even though it meant sacrificing Maggi in the service of transporting a hardcover from India to Hong Kong. Of course, it doesn’t occur to me to just buy the book in Hong Kong because that would be stretching my kanjoosi too far. It is a great read alongside Seeing Like a Feminist and also while eating breakfast and your children are pottering around occasionally putting sharp-edged things into their mouths as the stories are short. It also makes you think, I wish these were illustrated so that I could tell their children these stories to amuse them instead of leaving sharp-edged things around the house. Or that I could photocopy them and circulate them at dinner parties with the appetizers (they are shortish stories, often retellings of fairytales) so that people would quickly ingest them and go “oh” and stop whatever ridiculous thing they were saying thereafter. Forever.