Staring at Cameras and Mirrors on a shoot.

Monkey Mind- Oh Damn its running late by 1and half hours already my guests will arrive and make my life hell!

Phone Buzzes- Ms Hypoglycemia- The taxi still hasn’t arrived still…you know this is the 3rd time this is happening to me. I don’t know what kind of people you are!blah blah..

Monkey Mind- That production support guy he has bungled again!!! Oh god! I will get him fired today! he always gets me in trouble on the shoot!

I Speak-Pray Madam Please we have had a real real crisis please adjust please come.

Ms hypoglycemia- Fuck off I am not coming! I have better things to do

Anchor 1- You told me she was Shikha Verma, She is Shikha Sharma. You will make me look foolish on TV!

Monkey Mind- Oh thats because the verma cancelled because she had guests and sharma turned up because I emotionally blackmailed her to come by asking her to do this for other women like her!Didnt tell you cause thats just too much of pre text for you to handlebefore the shoot!

Anchor 2- I am having a bad hair day please make sure that you get it right on the camera or else..

Monkey Mind- Yes Madam! Anything you say! You are vary important person!

Production support- The taxi guy has cancelled to come from Paschim Vihar ask your guest to take a taxi and come herself!
I speak- She has had an abortion last week. Please send her a taxi!
Monkey Mind- Oh god that woman cant afford a taxi! I dont even want to take that chance for her! These production guys forgot to reimburse last time!

Production support- Ask her to pick the case study 2(Ms pregnant) from Dwarka while coming!
Monkey Mind- Oh that pricey bitch would have torn all her hair if she has to share the taxi.That would be too much of bad mood to be handled with cold drink on the shoot! Please avoid!
I speak-please listen this cant happen!Case Study 2 (Ms Pregnant) is hi fi she will refuse to come with Case study 1. Get them on different cars!

Boss- We are rolling the 3rd episode as the second- Call your case studies accordingly~!
Monkey mind-  Oh I think I am fainting! Oh god oh god oh god!
I speak - WHAT?! You Cant!
Boss- Offcource we can. dont waste my time now!

Make up guy- By when you think the payment will be cleared. I need money at the end of this month. Last time you’re these people faltered on the payments big time
Monkey Mind (dude I have no clue!! You certainly don’t look like you have acquired any luck from the last time. Would you feel better if I told you that I havent received my last two payments?)
To him- It should happen pretty soon Ramu! Why don’t you ask the accountant?

Phone Buzzez- The case study 4 cancelled. There was no AC in the car that went to pick her up!
Monkey Mind- I am finished now! this is the 3 rd case study who has backed out!
I speak- What!@!! Send the taxi behind her…I am talking to her! Don’t let her out of sight she cant do this
Monkey Mind ..what kind of a bitch refuses to come when there is no AC in the car!!!
To the case study 4- Listen you come ok? Or I’ll make sure nobody calls you on any show ever again. I am NDTV remember!

Channel Head on the round- You know there should be more shows on sex. Thats the only was we get TRP on channel 2~ The audiences want to be able to discusss SEXXXXXXX.
Monkey Mind- Sex oh no! Whoever wants to talk about his/her sex life on tv!

Long long long time and Pack up!

April Chronicles...

Dreaming April

For as long as I remember I have spent my birthday on April 26th in the mountains with Ruskin Bond(in my dreams silly!). This started at the sweet age of 8 after I was hijacked into his world on reading the short story called 'Women on Platform No 9'.

The story beautifully transcended the margins of sexuality, geography, age and race. It was so 'ME' that I started thinking of this writer as a 'cooler extension' of me living in the mountains. Slowly the duality of the writer and reader disappeared. He wasn't a separate man writing about his life. He was just another 'me' living in Mussorie with Prem and his children smelling the onions frying in his kitchen. This kind of familiarity was turning really difficult to manage on a practical level. So I took in into my dreams to process all the business that we had together. Him and Me.

I could have met him in real life too but for what? What would I say to him when we met?

Hello Mr. Bond. My name is Ruskin Bond too. Pearl Ruskin Bond Sandhu! 

I think its really cruel that you don't know but you ought to know that I have been in love with you since I was 8 years old.(How come you didn't know? You started this whole business by writing Didn't you?~!) Ah no...So it was going to turn into ugly real life if I ever met him really...So I haven't in all these years.

Mr Bond I fondly remember the times we slept together. The times you were whispering stories of the cold sweet mountain air in my ears. The times you told me about your lost loves, poverty, and your tardy typewriter.Oh and It was such a sad walk that we took together the day you met your mother for the last time in hospital. I wish you had let me hold your hand but you were walking so fast in that Delhi heat. Oh and that Vietnamese girl that you fell in love with? Vu Phong. I became her that night you made love to her and the Jasmine and honeysuckle shook in the wind outside our window.

Thats how the dreaming opened doors to my real life. The life that had brought me in touch with this man who meant so much to me that that dreaming was the only real way of meeting him!So like a well behaved young lady I never told anyone about this great elderly love of my life.( Off course I don't love his old age. I love him for his madness!)

So its become an annual ritual now. I dream of being in Ruskin Bond's company every year on my Birthday. We sit down over cups of tea and Cherry cakes. He looks at me lovingly like he has known me forever.  In my dreams he is a vulnerable lost man who desperately needs to know how much I love him. And I really do. And we discuss writing books together. We tear down our silly publishers(but we never make fun of readers!). He even writes funny forwards to my travelogues.

The mountain wind whispers on our dinner table. The 44* Degress of April (of my not loved reality) outside completely disappears in the drones of crickets playing outside his Ivy Cottage home in Mussorie. Thats when the window closes and I can only see warm lights from a distance. I never know what we do in that house after I sleep in sweaty  April heat of my physical reality. But I swear I get up with a sweet after taste of cherry cake the next mornings.

April Chronicles..

April is my most cruel month.Its hot and ungracious. Its unrelenting and hopeless. It also is too long for my liking.

April Memories

Once when I was younger Mom Dad took me to visit Kang Farm in Sasaiyan where TT Uncle had married and settled with his Australian wife 'April'. Theirs was one of those plush mechanised farms in the Terrai. It was so exotic really. They had  Grey Hounds and German Shephards running around without leashes on the farm. The lovely garden which flowered even in April and offcourse those star shaped cookies they served with Tea. It was all too much for the poor little small town  me. But what I most of all I remeber is April, the first blond  relative I had acquired. I must have been 6 years old then. She was so tall and so pretty.So much prettier than my dusky old familiar mom . The registeration of her presence in my memory is like a shock of white heat. A bright patch with lot of light and excitemnet but no details.


Years later one got to know that Uncle had got divorced and April had left him, leaving behind a daughter with white skin and black eyes called May. May wore pink flannel frocks and spoke cute english and was so much prettier and adorable that the natty 12 year old me. By now the farm had 3 Great Danes and a Pomerarian and 5 hens running around . The garden was unkempt and Uncle TT had setlled abroad leaving little May behind in the care of her very feeble and old grandparents who did not understand her language. I was always afraid that the huge dogs would eat May.


The farmhouse slowly lost its charm for me except that one memory of Aunt April that has stayed all these years. For me Aunt April would always remain that enigma I had found walking on Uncle's farm.  That tall strikingly beautiful woman who blasted everone with her sizzling chemistry even when she just walked beside much shorter Uncle TT. Her orange lipstick, her sparkling blue eyes and her loud manly laughter. In burning April afternoons I often remember her peeping through the net of the wooden door calling  Uncle TT to come in for Tea. She was so beautiful and hardy that I dont belive that the house ever divorced her memories although Uncle TT found another australian wife who never visited the farm in India.(for good reason I am sure!)
In the naked heat of April the sharp colours of memory too turn cruel and I remember Aunt April. She gave Kang family that eternal space in my memory with her shadows passing through the thick April sunlight. Strong colourful and cruel. Not to be kept but only remebered.

Memory is made of salt and embers

Memory is made of salt and embers. Look at what I have remebered!

The 1st strange dream of fecundity. Of fairies dancing around a tree bowing with ripe mangoes in a basement near my childhood home. I stood there thirsty for my chance to bite at a mango. But I stood in awe of white sparkling wings of fairies dancing in a circle. The dream comes back everytime I am in a new place pregnent with possibilities.

The taste of sweet parathas packed in a steel lunch box resembling a iron press. It always tasted the same 6 days a week. Mom doesnt make those paranthas anymore.

The graveyard that I passed on the way to school. Thats where our milkman died while grazing his cattle. He was riding a horse and the horse died too.

The little snake kept in a beaker in the Clinic of a doctor who put a menancing iron rod inside my throat to check my tonsils (I think that part of my throat still hurts because of what he did then). The snake looked very very sinister despite its size.

The vacation where Ma Pa and I were coming back from Nanital and the thunder shouted over our Jeep. There were raw mangoes covering the road and some fell on the windscreen of the White Mahindra Jeep that Dad drove.

The stadium where they kept the Ravana effigies before assembling them for Dusshera. It was such a far away place from home. But there was so much magic in it.

The white lily bed near the veranda in the Bareilly house. I think there was some black magic in those pink and white flowers that brought strange sensations to a 12 year old girl's mind.

Gill aunty( and I dont know her name..except Gill aunty..I dont even think her kids know her name) chopping onions and garlic in her little brown mixer sitting on her haunches. Now that she is dead I still remeber her doing that. I think thats what she did at all times of the day . Prepare Tadka for the food.

How I dance crazy to the Nache Mayuri song the day I came back home to celebrate the Summer vacations starting from next day.

The face of My first school principal Sister Adolphus who died. I still have her signs in my report cards of KG, 1ST , 2ND , 3RD, 4TH Class. I dont think she ever noticed that I too existed on this planet. She is gone but I am still here!

The salt stays in my blood, and skin. The embers shines in the anger against all the stays with me but doesnt take me along with it..If only the salt would dissolve and the embers die. The karma would clear up and I could be free.....