Salt City Chronicles~

The day I finally picked up my bag and decided to go it was a Friday. I was jobless(thanks to you) fancyless and without a camera. I was jarred inside, had a rootcanal gone bad and not enough energy to heal or deal with any rest of my life. I just wanted to jump out of my skin! And I hopped on the Kashi Vishwanath Express with an Outlook and Lonely Planet Guide. The train tickets had been purchased on a freinds credit, I borrowed a neigbours camera threw some red and purple kurtas in a tardy old travel bad and Off I went away from the heat grime and hopelessness of Delhi.

The 3rd AC was comfortable. I was moving away from the mess of Delhi and I knew nobody on the train( it would be allright now!)

Everyone loves Tea

Osian’s 4 th floor office overlooking the Qutub Minar and a jungle of laburnums was the one place where they valued tea drinking. Everyday at 10:15 and 5pm the smiling office helps would bring you tea in spotless white crockery cups. Actually you could have the tea with milk or the lemon tea which danced in its blushing orange color inside those white cups. Even the last nip of that tea sparkled henna orange inside the mug in the light that fell from my window. I think I lived for those cups of tea when I was there. There wasn’t much else to life then. I learned to bow to my tea there!

But If you had grown up in UP you would grow up thinking that every man’ duty is to offer you a cup of tea if you offer them your presence. It has a Buddhist philosophy to it. No enemy, no rascal, no poor man is poor enough to not have tea to offer. It is indeed serious tragedy when the inanities like tea have to be disposed in conversations and customs! Tea is nice, Tea is Cheap, Tea is infinite, Tea is invigorating, and Tea is awakening. Let’s have Tea! No matter how full you are, No matter how acidic your intestines are…There should never be a time to say No! to Tea.

In Lucknow Tea was the bridge that connected us to the landlords (Pandey’s), their daughter’s (who liked bathing naked in the common courtyard to thus expressed horror of my Dad!) board flunking history as told by her sobbing mother while passing on the plate of Namkeen. The recipe of the pickles that Pandey grandmother made in Benares and the rogue stories of the Uncle's Bank of Baroda customers (he was the manager there!) Tea was also the time where all the gifts received on Diwali would be layed out in front of us on the taj mahal like carved wooden table. We (the sandhu family) would keep muttering rishwat rishwat rishwat under our breath and wipe out the lovely sweets. How could anybody refuse anything that was offered with chai!

When I grew older I started evaluating my friends based on the Tea experiences they gave me. You have to understand that it in not just the tea in the cup that makes the tea experience! But everything else outside that cup that does.

At Saumya’s house in Vishnupuri(Lucknow) the tea was always a little weak for my senses. The stress was always on the accompanying snacks (biscuits, mathri, shakarpara, whatever we could squeeze out of the kitchen). But what I loved was the lemon grass flavoring in the tea for which we had to jump a 4 foot wall. It was lovely when it rained. We would go on the roof and look at our old school) (St Fidelis College, Vishnupuri, Lucknow) and sip and slurp (sip less and slurp more!)

At Safura’s house in Okhla (Delhi). It was the tea that straightened the kinks out of ones head. It was hard crisp yellow label brought in big cups of different makes with no sugar and very little milk! You want tea? Or you want sweets? Have tea now and buy sweets later from outside!
In one my previous basement office the tea was mostly made by Ram a househelp from Nepal (a Tony Leung of Chunking express lookalike). He put some strange concoctions of Nepali masala along with touch of cinnamon and basil. In the office people either loved it or hated it. One ones who hated it had conspiracy theories about how it tasted like the Office dog’s pee. And to be fair to them I think they could have been right! But they never had tasted office dog's pee so they should have expessed it in some more beleivable way! Anyway the point being I liked that tea! It was the only reassuring energy boosting ritual in that office where people often forgot that humans needed food! I liked it for its frequency. If you were working more you could demand more rounds of tea (the same rule did not apply to holidays or money alas!). So my best days were days of 7 rounds( 11am, 6pm, 11pm, 3am 7pm 11am 6pm) It meant that you had worked more than 24 hours at a stretch and that being considered and noted you had been awarded with more teas!

The Headached Grace Of LU

LU. Thats what we called it when I went to LU( Lucknow University) It used to be the space of action in the laid back city of Lucknow. In the TOI supplement you would read things like ' Another bout of firing in the Campus. Two students injured' 'Incidents of eve teasing on the rise' 'A girl stripped naked in the examination Hall'..after a point you would nonchalantly say..yeah so whats new? But If you were me you could never imagine in your worst dreams of doing your BCOM from there!

Delhi is the dreamwonderland for middleclass girls of Lucknow. SRCC and St Stephens college came to me in my dreams! If I scored good marks I could go to the other side of the polished eclectic divide. Away from the Bindi Belt sensibility! And I did all sorts of things before fate threw me into George Ellen college aka Lucknow University!

There I was a victim of fate in this lumpen land. And If I had the arrogence of thinking it would be easy getting in I was so wrong! I had missed my couselling day by four days! And there were some 15 thousand people vying for that one seat! I could go to Hell or Stepehens they didnt give a damn
Two people cared. One was my mom who pushed me in that purgatory of the last counselling for admissions saying ' They cant refuse you! You were in their merit list' The other was this Pankaj Misra lookalike( Sorry Pankaj my love!)higly armed student leader present to help the needy ones like me.He wanted my vote in case I got in! I would have given him the vote to become the Prime Minister that fateful day! (Imagine being pushed to enter hell and not being allowed in because of other miserable ones) I pinned my hopes to this man. And he got me in at 7pm sharp 3 firing in the sky later! If he stands for elections to the PM's post I will gladly vote for him even today.He had the might of what it takes to move things.

SO then it started slow motion. I got full sleeved kurta salwars stiched.I was the bindi belt youth now! There would be no 'hanging out with friends' in this college! You never attended classes( didnt dare to I should say) and showed up only during exams when it was safer. You passed reading those Atom bomb Noorul Hassan guidebooks. And you never mentioned your political affiliations. It was the kind of place where you automatically spoke for the party that was in power. CIRCA 2003 It was the Shining India BJP.
When I was there I kept cribbing that my life was ruined. I would never have any stories of college days to recall!I would never ever match up in debates with the LSR, HINDU ilk.But life is strange. People and places change their tastes on your tongue.Of late I have started missing that discourse of the small town. The kind of things that matter to those I went to college with. How they never talked about big cars and never measured people with small sticks of the labels they wore or the accents they had picked up.How the teachers were like kindred Patriarchs who would call you 'Beti' and pester you about the egjamination tikit. How it would take 15 minutes of brisk walking to reach from one classroom to another. How the Jacarandas and Gulmohure went mad in the maddening summer. Those wooden staircases creaked and the walls were crumbling forever.

It did something to me which I am greatful for in retrospect.It brought me in level with the 80 percent India and made me one of them forever.I realise this when the facade of luxury that I have built with much labour breaks down. When the car breaks down at a scary( to others) suburb. When I can take my bag and travel to any small town India and can take public transport with sweaty men rubbing into me and yelling toddlers dropping saliva. When I deal with atrociously bull headed babus and crazily vulnerable and criminally inclined young men. It helps If you have been to Lucknow University! It gives a strange tow of grace. Its like getting a training of becoming the connosieur of bullock cart ride. Years later you realise that it was slow but it moved!

That you never got any cool freinds while you were there but you earned an understanding about the real sweat and blood India. That you didnt have Acs in the classroom but you got a degree that is recognised in the whole wide world( Unlike some of those fancy private institutes) You never heard of Campus placements but you got a campus that had history that has volumes written on it by fancy firangs. That you paid some 2000/per annum and there could be people from any remote village sitting next to you helping you with the buisness administration paper. That you didnt have filmstars attending your college fest but your lumpen looking colleague would tease you with verses from 'Madhushala'. That you never could find college romances but you found the kind of friends who never moved over!

A heady heaached grace! But grace neverthless!