Nani-processor

Watching my Nani learn how to use computers is a very interesting exercise. While teaching her I am learning so many things that I thought I already knew about her.

The Hindi word for maternal grandmother is nani (नानी). For the last five years my nani has expressed persistent interest in learning about computers. I spend very little time per year with her in these years. I am living in Bombay with her for a period of three months this time, so we have started our sessions. 

To learn to use computers is a multi-layered challenge slowly unfolding itself in front of her. Simple words such as click, screen, folder, minimize, maximize, etc. are familiar to her only as sounds: she does not know the exact pronunciation, spellings or  meanings. This experience raised my curiosity about my septuagenarian friend and her relationship with the English  language.

My nani was born in 1941 officially. When asked when was she actually born she adds conspiratorially that she was actually born in 1942 but her well meaning teacher changed her year of birth on record, to let her start a year early with school; a practice not uncommon even today. 

My nani has had ten years of schooling in a school where the medium of instruction was Marathi. After school she went directly to her provisional training in midwifery. This training did not require any skills in the English language. Only the technical words were in English, she could write and express herself in Hindi or Marathi. So she never actually learnt to use English in college.

More importantly, she identifies, she never developed any literary skills in any language, never read any books to mention. She has never written anything other than forms for her work. Much earlier, in her childhood, she had written essays for language classes at school. The mantras for such essays are copy (from the black board or a book), learn-by-heart and write word-to-word.

I have a feeling I will write a lot more about this topic. 

Just Like That Only

I am standing at the exit of a double decker bus about to get off at Kurla bus sthanak. The rain is relentless and the road is full of water. There is another bus a few feet ahead of ours. I am craning my neck, trying to see the route number of the bus to decide if it’s the one I need and if I should run for it as soon as I get off this one. But I was unable to see its number.

A sixteen year old boy jumps aboard. He must have had a good view of the bus ahead. I am sure he noted that I was trying to see the bus no.

“Did you see the route number of the bus ahead?”

The boy shakes his head in a yes.

Starts looking out of the bus.

.

.

Maybe he hasn’t heard me.

“Did you see the route number of the bus ahead of us?”

     “Yes.”

Looking out intently.

.

.

May be I am not being clear.

“Do you know the number of the bus ahead of us?”

      “Arree! haan re bhai!”  [irritated  Why! Yes brother]

.

.

“Umm... so… will you tell me?”

.

.

The bus arrives at the bus stop. We get off the bus.

Programming

‎#include<stdio.h>
int main()
{ 
int weight_kg; 
int jobs_applied_for; 
int jobs_got;

for(weight_kg=90; weight_kg>75; weight_kg--)
exercise&diet;
do
jobs_applied_for++;
while (jobs_got==0) 
}

Reality Check

I have been pretending it is not over. I have been in denial.

I am sitting on the maroon sofa, with a gentleman of two and a half, who lives next door. Dignified and well behaved. Eating his chocolate from a steel katori. Sitting well balanced on the edge of the adult sized sofa, feet gangling in the air.

My mother tells me that he comes every few days, walks around, plays with the walker/tread-mill, the soft toys and leaves. He never insists on taking them home: he goes home with the assurance that they will be here whenever he comes back.

One day he will come back and some of the toys may have moved, changed, gone, given away. They are not actually his.

MySpace@mumbai.in - 3/3 Good Night's Sleep

At bedtime, I take a thin sponge mattress off the living room bed, and spread it on the floor, cover it with a sheet, and lay down to sleep a full night of well deserved sound sleep. Only that it’s not a full night sleep and there is a lot of sound due to the air-planes at the Sahar airport in their entire decibel-might. My grandmother cannot sleep very much on the days she doesn’t get much exercise (read: every day). So she wakes up at 4 am and starts to clean the steel dishes, without intending to be noisy, I am sure. Then at 5 am, the alarm on her mobile phone goes off. I have tried to teach her how to turn it off, but she forgets. It stops after 40 rings. At 5:15 the muezzin of the local mosque decides to sound the azan on a loud microphone. He announces “prayer is better than sleep.” I am of the opinion that sleep, actually, is much better than prayer. While I am still dreaming of throttling the throat of a muezzin, at 5:45 am my mother’s mobile phone alarm goes off. I give up.

I still lay there, unable to open my eyes, aware of the loud reading of Koran and its translation read by my father after his morning prayers. He believes that we may get salvation if the holy words only as much as enters our mind through our ears.

I open my eyes and get up. I see my grandmother. An excitement takes over my body and mind. I can see her, in flesh and blood. She is not a voice from a telephone speaker as she has been for the last two years. I hug her. “Good morning Nani!”

MySpace@mumbai.in - 2/3 Home

I walk 100 meters towards my home to meet the Vada-Pav snacks-stall in front of the Shital Cinema. The stall is approx. half the size of the halal food stall near Columbia law school. The stall is open and the two male cooks and the their boss, the lady owner, stand near it. Hot and spicy vada-pav is all you need on a rainy day like this. I finish my vada-pav and a fried green chili in five large bites, I have been craving one for past two years.

Our building is new, only a few years old, so the cement and sand from the construction-times still sit in the parking lot in plastic bags, solid with age and experience. There are other remains, iron rods and large wooden frames and doors, broken and strewn across the floor. The parking lot has not been painted yet. It has a dusty rough cement surface; even the floor is unsmoothed and full of dirt and sand.

The stairs leading to my floor are tiled, but the grey cement from the tiling process is still on the white tiles. Attempts at cleaning, if any, were grossly unsuccessful. Another gross attempt is found on the walls of the stairwell, made by incidental outburst from a desperate mouth that... just... couldn’t... hold... betel-juice... any longer!!!! By the time I reach the fourth floor, it is clear that there is more than one mouth in question and these mouths are of different holding capacity and level of expertise in spitting. Someone was a real novice, maybe a first timer: it looks like diarrhoea on the wall.

I reach home. Home is a flat apartment on the fourth floor of this new building. Inside of the home is shiny and clean. The tiles are new and shiny and are kept immaculately clean. The walls are decorated with relatively cheap wooden frames with mass produced art. The windows make eighty percent of one of the walls. There are collapsible iron rails on these windows that work as pretend walls, to create the feel that ours is a respectable Muslim household safe from the evil eyes of the men who may take away the innocence of the womenfolk with their looks. 

The sample space of Muslim womenfolk of my home consists of only one individual, my forty-five year old step mother, the convert. She is the one who bought the cheap art on the wall. Also guilty of the brown drapes, the navy blue bright-gold frilled covers for the deep maroon sofa, and many other such things that make my home one of the clean but gaudy and distasteful middle class Mumbai homes.

I take my shoes off in this drawing or living room and keep them neatly under the bed or sofa. I put my bag in the space between the computer table and the sofa, designated as such. There is one bed room which houses a double bed, a cupboard, a TV and a TV table, a dressing table, and seven square feet of free space to walk in and out. The large window is almost unapproachable from ground. One has to sit on the bed to open and close this window.

I look for a pair of change in the clothes cupboard and wonder how will I do this today? My mother changes in the bathroom after she takes a bath. She comes out dressed. Wet but dressed. So does my grandmother. My father comes out with a towel wrapped around the lower half of his body. We all go out of the bed room and he closes the door when he changes. I am not as important as my father and I find the bathroom too wet to change. So I improvise. My grandmother lives on the bed or on sofa in front of the 24” flat screen TV in living room. My mother lives on the bed in front of the 40” plasma screen TV in the bed room. That leaves me the kitchen and the space between these rooms for changing. I change here.

Then I turn to my laptop PC, one of the fixtures of my nomadic life. It has been temporarily living on the dining table. I am one of the more privileged people in this country with two internet connections that work almost always. Only for a few hours in the last 7 days has it happened that both of the connections refused to work. Of course the internet connections are slow, I can’t hope in my dreams to watch a streaming video on WSJ, Economist or YouTube. Service Pack 1 for Win 7 is 700 MB. It will have to wait 3 months until I reach USA.

MySpace@mumbai.in - 1/3 The Bus Ride

Not a long time ago I boarded an MTA bus near 125^th and Amsterdam and felt that I was in a crowded bus: there were no empty seats and I was standing very close to someone else. Of course there were some seats that were ‘unoccupied’ since there were two oversized people seated on the seat for three. I have never seen anyone ask someone to move and make place for them in the time I spent in New York City.

I board a BEST bus near Bandra-Kurla Complex in Mumbai - the financial center of India and feel relieved that I was in a not-so-crowded bus. Of course I am standing, and none of the seats are empty. There are people in front of me and behind me, their shoulders touching mine. Every few minutes there is a stop and more people board the bus squeezing in. Now my back is touching someone’s back. Someone else has to get off and is trying to get to the exit. She has to squeeze past us. We offer a symbolic gesture of the recognition to her effort by moving our shoulder, pretending that we can actually make space by doing so. She does squeeze past though; everyone does: one has to do what one has to do.

The smell of fresh sweat, mixed with the smell of the cool and smooth steel rod overhead that I am holding to, and the smell of monsoon rain on the road and dirt is very deceivingly familiar. I used to live in Mumbai in 1996-1998. But that was 13 years and 47 kilograms ago. Standing in the bus, my nostalgic emotions demand I feel comfortable here, but my body’s response is of discomfort and inconvenience.

The bus conductor is adept in making his way around this crowd shouting, not really shouting just speaking very loudly and determinedly, things like “keep moving forward”, "go ahead if you want to get off” etc. Another of his favorite lines is “give change.” A sign on the inside of bus demands the same in somewhat outlandish good-language: “tender exact fare.” I will go with the former translation which captures the matter-of-fact hardness of his attitude. I may have some change in my bag. To the dismay and grunts of my ‘contacts’, I try to open my bag, find my wallet and take out the change. That was a good lab scale experiment in warping of space in the universe, the pressure levels were approximately the same.

I get off the bus. The trip was almost eventless. I did slip on the wet steel steps, the grooves smoothed with wear, getting thrown all three steps in one smooth movement; but I did not fall down. I soiled and tore a small hole in my new shirt. I stepped off the bus and into, well, a scale model of a seasonal river.