Smriti Ravindra

White sound of rain crashing off roofs, and on the ground puddles like small lakes.  Fish could live in them.  My father-in-law is in the room with me, drinking tea and staring out the window at the world made hazy with rain, at leaves falling off trees.  Tea, they say, originated in China.  Has to be.  I am restless as I sip, like I want to jump off the window and take a vigorous swim in the Arabian Sea frothing somewhere behind us.  I often tell Daddy that he should take up a hobby - cooking, perhaps, or gardening.  Or else he should start a little something - a club, a shop, a writing project, an effort to teach his grandson Tamil.  But retirement has left him feeling like the rain - free, free falling - and after years of having worked hard he finds all rules of the world cumbersome.  “Besides,” he says, “little comes off such efforts.”  And starts a story.  Seth Uncle was Dad’s friend and fifteen years earlier ...

There is a rage in our house and neighbourhood over a game my son and his pals have named Pen Fight. Essentially, Pen Fight is playing kancha, or marbles, with pens - one pen knocks another off the table, and the person with the strongest pen (read, heaviest pen) wins. You can only imagine how painful this game is to someone like me, who likes to occasionally fancy herself a writer - and it scarcely matters that I rarely put pen to paper. I, like most “writer-types” am a typist, but the pen remains highly sacred to me, and watching them fly off tables and slam upon floors leaves me writhing with physical pain. The advent of Pen Fight has transformed many lives. My son, who so far wanted to be a footballer, now wants to be a pen fighter and play in tournaments. That these tournaments exist nowhere other than in houses in our colony and in grade 4 at a specific school seems to make no difference to my son. Anyway, my son is a passionate pen fighter and pesters me daily for pens, ...

I imagine my mother and her pieces of gold.   She is fifteen and newly married.   She is living in a new country with people she has not yet begun to care for.   In her homesickness she touches this piece of gold, traces another.   Her own mother is growing older by the day in another country.   In those days parents gave more gold to their daughters than could be afforded.   If three pieces of gold was affordable, they gave four.   Once married, in those days daughters seldom returned to their mother’s house.   The separation was too vast for frequent visits.   Daughters became strangers and the extra gold, given despite hardships, was a tacit token of love.   Daughters relived moments through gold – this pair of bracelet, that ring.   In hours of loneliness the bride touched her anklets and wept.   I imagine my mother retrieving pendants and pins from a box, pressing metal against her chest as one would a photograph. ...

I only remember that even then it was very, very expensive to buy prawns in Kathmandu,   and on the exceptionally rare occasions when prawns did enter our house, they came in small numbers   - a quarter of a kilogram, lesser sometimes, to be cooked and divided amongst six people.   Four men, one little girl, one woman.   But first, let me tell you a story. Two thousand years ago, gods roamed freely on earth.   One fine morning, the Sun God was very pleased with the Pandavas and granted the brothers a magical copper vessel.   For the following twelve years of their exile in the forest, the pot would feed the Pandavas and their common wife, Draupadi.   “Let Draupadi serve out of this vessel,” said the generous Sun God, “and there will be enough to feed a kingdom, enough to feed the world.   But the vessel will produce no food after Draupadi herself has eaten.” And so, for the next twelve years, Draupadi served her five husbands, she served...