If you want to know why I'm the way I am, there's a simple answer: It's Genetic.

“See, the thing is…”

“Yes?”

“I have this pain in my tooth, and I couldn’t sleep all night because it gave me a headache, and…”

“Yes?”

“So, I’ve been thinking…”

“That you should go to the dentist?”

“Oh, thank God, I knew you’d come with me to the dentist!”

“Yeah, well – Hey! Wait a minute! What do you mean, come with you?”

Ladies and Gentlemen, the dentist’s chamber again. Overlook the fact that I was there to, quite metaphorically, hold my mother’s hand while the dentist excavated her mouth, and the main problem was that I was back. This is the same clinic I thought I’d never have to see again once my braces came off, and here I was again a couple of years later, revisiting old memories. Cold white tubelights, check. Impersonal marble tiles, check. Everything that precise shade of sterile white, check. How I hate that shade of white. And oh, in case I forgot to mention, nervous mother telling me all about how she hates people putting their hands inside her mouth? Check.

I, of course, am a veteran. I see nothing wrong with the dentist pulling on his gloves and picking up that spoonlike mirror, but my mother’s looking ready to faint. He tells her to open her mouth and sticks the mirror in, and she gags. He tries to prise her mouth open, and she gags again, apologising profusely afterwards. He then tells her to go and get an X-ray since he can’t figure out what’s wrong. Because she won’t let him.

I sit outside the X-ray room, waiting for her to come out. I expect a scared mother, I expect a creeped-out mother wanting to pour Harpic into her mouth (she has an obsessive-compulsive thing about cleanliness and germs, yes), but I do not expect a sheepish-looking mater.

“So?”

“Nothing”

“What do you mean, nothing? I know something happened. You drag me all the way here and deprive me of all the fun?”

“You call this fun?” From an observer’s angle, yes. I’ve been a victim too many times.

“What happened?”

“You know how they put this metal plate in your mouth and hold it in place with their fingers?”

“Yes, and they ask you to bite on the plate, then their finger, and then you have to push the button on the machine so that the X-ray happens. Go on, what happened?”

“You know all this? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know I had to. What happened?”

“Well, I told the chap I had a gagging problem, but he put the metal plate in anyway. And then he told me what to do, but I bit the plate too hard because I wanted to get over with it, and the plate was ruined.”

“You ruined a plate?” That’s heresy in the dental world.

“Then the second time he put the plate in I didn’t want to bite his finger, so I pushed the button in a hurry, and the X-ray didn’t happen because there was no pressure compressing the teeth into the plate.”

“I’m assuming there’s a third time,” I say, eyeing her warily.

“Well, this time I wanted the X-ray to be over and done with, so when he told me to bite, I, er, bit him too hard.”

I stare at my mother fascinatedly. This is too good to be true.

“You bit the assistant? You bit him?”

“He told me to! I also, er, spat into his hand instead of the spittoon.”

"You bit him, and then you drooled all over him?” Yes, I know what that sounds like, but I said it all the same.

“Well, there’s no need to laugh all that much. At least the X-ray was done.” And two plates were ruined in the process.

“I feel like puking. Oh god, can I buy a toothbrush somewhere? I’m feeling sick. I’ll get germs. Do you think I’ll get infected?”

I surface from my convulsions to say “Don’t you think it’s more likely the X-ray guy got infected since you bit him?”

There’s no way my mother’s glare will work. This is better than any of my dental misadventures.

The X-ray guy seems to have warned the doctor. He coughs a little and explains to my mother that she has a gagging complex, purely psychological of course, but she needs scaling done and possibly a wisdom tooth extraction (this time I don’t blame my mother for going grey in the face) so wouldn’t it be more convenient to consult a top-notch world-famous-in-Kolkata dental surgeon?

Literal translation: Go turn him into a werewolf, you.

So we left, and I begged my mother to let me accompany her on all her dental appointments with the hotshot surgeon (who has no idea of what he’s in for), and she grudgingly agreed. That was on Saturday. Today, on Mother’s Day, I handed her a packet and said, “This is for yesterday.” As a former dental victim, I can laugh at her experiences, but I can also sympathise. After the laughing’s done with, that is. She opened it to find a pair of earrings.

“I expected Listerine” she said cryptically.

And then, before she left the room, this parting shot – “Oh, I forgot to tell you, you have an appointment on Thursday with Dr. Surana, I made it before we left the clinic. Just a check-up, of course.”

Dr. Surana is my orthodontist - or at least he was, till two years ago - who does not know that there’s still some dental cement and wire holding my four front teeth together that should have been removed ages ago. I ground my teeth, and I swear I could see an evil grin on the mater’s face. I am now looking forward to witnessing her wisdom tooth extraction.

Homelands.

So if a land is because of its people, here is Kerala.

They grin.

And grin some more.

They seem to enjoy work. Miracle it is.

And they make watching the world go by seem like the most desirable thing ever.

And we went during the wrong season, but there was colour everywhere.

--------

Tudo o que quiser
(Everything you want)
Tem que entender
(You've got to understand)
Nas palmas da mão
(In the palms of the hand)
Se tiver porquê
(If there is a reason)
Frágil nessa terra
(Fragile in this land)
Fácil derrubou
(Easy it fell)
Quando jogou fora
(When you threw it away)
Tudo acabou

(Everything ended)

It's Portuguese, but what the heck. Nitin Sawhney has answers to everything. Especially for people who can't write holiday posts.

I Grow Old, OR, Why I Hate Quizzing.

It creates normal, unassuming human beings into egomaniacs on stage who have to get the better of the question marks. It promotes superciliousness, smugness and all other forms of general asshole-ness. It does not come with a warning sign that says “Addictive”. It got me Student Council posts in school that I didn’t want. It also gets me worked up.

Today the MP Birla Smarak Kosh Quiz took place. I have attended it for the past five years and it keeps getting better. The quizmaster, CP, always asks kindred questions (kindred questions being, of course, the ones we can answer) and Annesha and I were in the fourth row, two boisterous girls squirming in our seats at the terrible guesses being made onstage. We notched up our own points and won it in the audience, laughed more than we used to laugh onstage, and cursed the fact that we never got to participate in SK. And somewhere between it all I felt strange, because I’d never be at a quiz in my school uniform again.

Long ago before we became the cool kids who went festing, and long before people found out that all we did at the fests was quiz (and then we weren’t cool anymore), I was your average vegetable. Then someone sent me for a quiz with two people I absolutely detested. We bickered through the first quiz, guessed through the next, and then started winning. And then my teammates became my best friends. Then we realized we weren’t really quizzers. We knew nothing. We were there for the food packets.

We guessed, wildly. We laughed at our own guesses even more wildly. We thumped each others’ backs and created minor stage accidents with mineral water bottles and microphones when we found out the guesses were correct. And then our school, which had just woken up to the fact that a quiz club existed, decided that most of the good quizzes simply weren’t worth going to. So the metamorphosis happened – we became quiz spectators. We went to quizzes to watch them, and we yelled out answers from the audience, and grinned inanely when chocolates were thrown at us. As if they were roses. Encore. We applauded ourselves. Above all, we enjoyed ourselves more than when we were onstage.

But today I felt like Prufrock. There they were, kids in class ten and eleven, taller than me by almost two feet, and they got to be onstage. And here I was, five three or thereabouts, getting all excited because I knew that Oprah could recite Bible verses as a kid. Quizzing is the one thing I had to prove that my irrelevance mattered. I might not have been a good student, but my vagueness paid off. I could connect answers. I could identify paintings. It was the only place I got to be a know-it-all, and now I’ve passed out and can’t be superior when I’m afraid of getting ragged in college. School quizzes are fun and sporting. Open quizzing is ruthless, cold, and the only thing I have left, apart from college quizzing, which scares me now because, well, will the teammates laugh on stage if we make a stupid mistake? Will I get on a team at all?

And then we shuffled out amidst some patriotic programme outside Madhusudan Mancha where grotesquely costumed people were waving flags manically to "I love my India". Didn't improve my mood. To make it worse, I had to pass by my old para to collect some wayward mail, and the buildings were all newly painted in colours I couldn’t recognize. And then the old phuchkawala (he’s told me everything but his name) informed me that his son’s off to Amreeka. To be a phuchkawala there. And that made me feel terrible in the everyone’s-growing-up kind of way, and I walked into my house muttering darkly “Do you know what Dustin Hoffman’s mother called him when he was a kid?”

“No”, my mother said.

“Tootsie” I growled, and then started laughing hysterically. For a whole five minutes. Quizzing has been my bane and my crusade, and I never could figure out why I ran around school trying to get the team invited to quizzes when the organisers had no idea our school even existed. No one in school cared. We didn’t even win all that many. And I hate it. I hate it because it’s the closest I can get to being passionate about a sport. As a spectator and an ex-player.

Oh, and to top it all it seems I can no longer sit on the swings in the play area because there’s a sign there that says “Kebol Shishuder Jonno”

Excuse me while I go hit my head against the wall.

A Farewell Post Gone Awry

I leave for Kerala in two hours. The reason I’m typing this out now is because the past one week I have been subjected to, in no particular order, a lot of shopping (which I detest), a lot of eating (which isn’t too bad), a lot of dancing (which I didn’t know I was capable of), a lot of socialising and goodbyes to people who are leaving (I malfunction in such situations), and the crowning glory – an underaged hulk of a boy throwing up all over my bathroom.

I cannot explain any of the above, I’m simply not in the mood. I’ve had to pack like a maniac, scamper all over the city and clean a smelly toilet, and now, finally, I get to run away for three weeks. On a train. It’s unhealthy the amount I like trains – not the cold, sleek Japanese variety, but the smokey grey kind, heavy with dust and passengers. I love the feeling of sitting on a swaying berth by a window, reading a book that will eventually drop into my lap, overshadowed by something outside – a field, a river, a long line of half-built houses. I love the fact that Kolkata to Chennai Central is a two-day journey in the belly of a giant centipede that crawls its way along, without realizing that inside it things are being shared. Food. Business cards. Stories. Memories.

When I was a kid, all I ever wanted was one of those large toy train tracks that you could assemble in your living room and watch a model train go round and round. Instead, I got jigsaw puzzles and Barbies and other fluffy things, with the result that I still visit sites dedicated to model trains. I drool over expensive Lionel train sets. I know they cost well over $1700 but I still dream of sitting in the middle of a big room, a huge remote control with shiny knobs in my hand, laughing insanely as a beautiful little train runs up and down sinous little tracks. I do not usually blow up the train at the end of the dream, so maybe I’m not that big a megalomaniac, or whatever the term is. I just want a train. And I love little Bertie Pollock in Alexander McCall Smith’s 44 Scotland Street series – he’s such a brilliantly written character. And he loves trains too.

I set out to write a post about Kerala, but somewhere along the trains came in and now they won’t leave. Did I mention railway tracks? They are the most beautiful things on the planet. Imagine yourself walking along one, slowly and aimlessly, right into the horizon where they converge. There is a mad precision to their symmetry. There is a purpose to their angles and lines. There is imperfection and ugliness in trains – they lurch, the bellow, they creak, they throw out nuts and bolts and other bric-a-brac, but they still manage to stay together. They’re a mad scientist’s dream. I can’t wait to get on one of them.

I know I’ve gushed all over this post, and am very unapologetic about it. My posts never turn out the way they should. Comfort yourself with the fact that I shall soon be in Kerala, being laughed at for my hideously colloquial Malayalam, the same Malayalam which in Calcutta makes my friends’ mouths fall open in a beautifully synchronized motion every time my mother calls. Here in Calcutta I’m a Southie. There in Kerala I’m a Southie betrayer because I speak better Bengali than Malayalam. So I don’t really belong anywhere in particular, except on trains. There you’re just another traveller, and that suits me perfectly.

And the last

I've written two posts already and I'm typing again, and my glasses are hanging askew, and I don't know what has come over me. Ignore these, ignore everything. I need dinner right about now.

I'm changing my blogger password to something I won't remember. But how is that possible, is it possible to type something in while you're consciously trying to forget it? There, I've started again. I was feeling silly at first, and then I felt angry, and now I really, really wish I had something better to do than type this. But I don't. I'm feeling a little hysterical.

I need to go take a walk.

And,

I hate it that I can't go to the king of my country and say, "Give me a fleet of ships and a horde of sailors, and I will sail to new lands and bring you back rubies and dried flowers." It is disheartening when you come from the country that was the hotbed of the spices and the rubies and the elephants and everything else. What can I bring back from the west, a burger? But we have that here too. I hate it that I can type "Spain" into Wikipedia and get a whole page about it, nothing is new and nothing is there to be discovered. No, I don't mean that, there is loads to be discovered but it has already been seen and commented on before, and you are in danger of hacking through undergrowth and coming across a little clearing populated by bearded loons who say they wanted to run away from the world too.

It isn't dangerous and you aren't pioneering anything by doing it, travel is now just a matter of taking breaks from work and doing things like family bonding, and you will never be sanctioned to go explore as much as possible - take my ships, bring me new ideas. If the sailors die, what of it, they were explorers. I hate it that there are no emperors today, just too many boundaries and too many permits, and airfares. Always the airfares.

The Mind Wanders When Dinner Is Late.

I know looking fresh-flower beautiful is a prerequisite, but one can overlook that at times, can't one. I wish I was a Rajput princess married to a Mughal Emperor who tamed elephants. And that is not Jodhaa Akbar talking, I really think it would be nice. You aren't expected to give exams or have a career or handle life with a mobile phone where everyone's a call away. You need to communicate through scrolls. You are only expected to train as a warrior and look beautiful and wear iridescent clothes. Then you can get married off, Mughal emperor or not - no worries about never finding a man who will like you. And you can be a part of a harem where you'll be left alone if you make sure you're aloof and disdainful, and then you can pet bunnies in luxurious gardens for days on end. That would suit me, right about now.

And even if you don't train in the martial arts you can carry a catapult around and let fly that knoblike tikli thing on your head right into your opponent's eye.

I don't even know why I'm writing this.