Basking in my childhood memories.

Belated Onam wishes to all my malayalee friends.

It has been more than a week since I posted my last blog, and as per my latest mantra, which I found a month back, I am supposed to pen in a regular blog or at least a microblog every Thursday. Last Thursday, I did key in some text in a word document on my laptop, but was unable to beat my inertia and the incessant evening rains to walk down till the nearest Internet Cafe and post it online. Now, to make the link up easier from my end, I have set up this 24x7 unlimited broadband connection at my home in Kannur, and so, am now closing off my much delayed weekly blog.

As expected of this holiday, the sequence of events has so far been pretty eventful (?). For the last few days, I was mostly tied up reconnecting with my cousins who, like me are on their usual staycation or; otherwise working around this new house, setting it up. Rest of the time, which incidentally can also be classified as the major part, was spent hogging, boozing and lazing around.

Although I wasn’t dumped off the flight this time, I did have a good ‘Lesson Learnt’. At the Airport, I found out the real reason why most people detested travelling on a budget airline. Whilst most of the ‘Check In’ counters had beautiful young girls, the Airport’s Authority deputed for us a team of two pathetically slow and lost men. One of which, was an old Chinese man and the other a North Indian guy, who resembled, both by his looks and tongue as a Halwai from one of those streets in Old Delhi. As per the Air India Express norms, I was carrying fifteen kilos of extra baggage, which I later got discounted to ten. Anyways, I ultimately ended up paying a total fare more than the regular ticket. It pained as wisdom dawned at the wrong time, just to remind me that I’d now be travelling on a budget airline (with congested seating) by spending more than the amount that I should have otherwise on a regular airline. And to make matters worse, I’d now have to pay for the earphones and liquor too.

With four hours to spare, I was waiting at the departure gate, fidgeting with my laptop and experimenting ways and means to catch a stronger wireless signal to get online and share my miseries with my facebook friends, when this mid fortyish something lady approached me enquiring for ‘Gate no 17’ in Malayalam. I was sitting right under the board with ‘17’ written on it and so pointed my hand towards it while still focussing on my laptop monitor. She asked me if the seat next to me was free and if she could sit there. I didn’t respond and she didn’t wait for one. She just sat down.


For some time she kept observing me as I was working my way trying to get appropriate WiFi connectivity. She finally broke the ice and enquired if I was a Computer Engineer. That was it. I closed my laptop and packed it off. She had just managed to find what I was so desperately trying hard to - Find a stray sounding board. Like me she was also all excited to go home and seemed brimming with a motley mix of various degrees of joy, coupled with an overwhelming excitement and nervousness and what not. She was travelling on her first return journey back to India after her first ever gulf stint as a Housemaid with a young Qatari family, where she’d just finished her 2 ½ years before she earned her first vacation. And here I was: My last vacation to India was just eight months back and I’d been away from my wife and kids for barely a month and look at the ruckus and drama I was creating. As she kept talking to me, I started getting this feeling that my longing was so puny compared to hers; and more so because I just realized that, that’s the common story of those countless Indian forced singles working on those innumerable menial jobs in the Gulf. I am just so fortunate enough to have my family by my side all the time and I thank God for that.

She had many good things to say about her fertile hometown; the weather she expected back home; the people in general; and above all her kids, who she portrayed as the most naughtiest and yet the most adorable ones on earth. As she kept blabbering about her ‘God’s Own Country’, I kept wondering about my own identity. All that I could contribute about my hometown to our little chat was that I knew my town had beautiful beaches, power cuts, bad roads and lots of strikes. That’s all. I was so embarrassed with my miniscule knowledge of my home town that I got up on the pretext of going to the wash room and just vamoosed off from her vicinity.

I walked away from gate no 17 and hid myself behind a bunch of Nepalese boys lounging on the floor next to the cafeteria and far away from her sight. Till my boarding announcement, I sat there in that corner hugging tightly to my laptop, questioning myself “What am I?” and “Where do I belong to?” Although I was born in Kerala, I am certainly not a pure Keralite. I cannot vouch myself for that identity. I actually know nothing about my so called hometown, Kannur, let alone Kerala. Just because I love being in this place or enjoy savouring the local food and manage to converse in a little bit of broken Malayalam does not qualify my malayalee status. Again, although I spent all my childhood in Gujarat, I am not a Gujarati. I have lived and worked in Maharashtra for ten years but, I certainly am not a Maharastrian. So, where do I belong? Am I just another modern day nomad with an Indian identity? And if I am just another drifter, why do I long to visit these few places again and again and again and what is it that one thing that keeps taking me back to Kannur and Kozikkode and Baroda year after year, every year? Is it the food, or the people, or the place itself? A question, which set me deliberating for days.

At Trisshur, aided by my MIL’s cooking I ended up undoing my strict diet regimen and went about on a hogging spree. On one such hogging spree, as I was devouring a sumptuous stack of Appam and Stew, I overheard Tara conversing on phone to her grandmother, her Ammummu, based in Kozikkode, firstly explaining her as to how they were related and then later on wishing her as it was Ammummu’s birthday today, to which Ammummu asked back, how old she had turned today? Tara’s Ammummu is eighty eight years old and passing through the initial stages of dementia. She cannot remember anything for long; doesn’t even remember her immediate family and so doesn’t have any memories at all. It is all wiped off. I was instantly taken aback by this sudden spate of anxiety and was found asking myself as to what would happen if I were to pass through a one-way phase like that? With the kind of work stress and pressure that our psyche is subjected to these days, that stage doesn’t seem very far off. I am someone who lives and breathes each day by recalling my good old memories and going through something like that would be as bad as being born again every day. Through the consequent days I kept talking to myself reminding me of those wonderful days I spent as a child in Baroda and those many two/three week long annual visits we made to Kannur visiting our relatives and celebrating Christmas every year with my cousins visiting from all over India. Those were the days.

My dad grew up in a joint family and he was the eldest kid in his Tharavad, which comprised of four families with sixteen children in all, living under one roof. My dad’s ancestral home falls within the Naval Defence Security Corps Zone and we had a small pristine beach aptly called ‘The Baby Beach’ all for ourselves. As kids we used to laze around there the whole day and I guess it is there that I actually fell in love with the beach. As I kept fishing deeper and deeper into my memories I drew out reels of us kids sitting potty on those beachside rocks shoo-shooing those little crabs with small sticks in our hand, while dragonflies hovered around us. Each day our respective parents, would drag us from the beach and our many hideouts within those niches in the rocks to take us back home and make us squat in a line on floor on our forced lunch and later in the night deposit all of us in a row in the portico room with a firm reprimand to go to sleep instantly, which we would otherwise spend fighting for that elusive blanket all night long and end up dosing one over the other.

As time went by, people got busy with their routine lives and the usual Christmas crowd went shrinking. Families started visiting at their own convenience and we kids hardly managed to regroup under one roof. The tourism industry in this place flourished and some of our playground, the verdant backyard to our Ancestral Home was taken over by the Mascot group, who later developed a resort at that location and the navy released a restraining order on the use of the Baby Beach by civilians. I guess it is these events coupled with my unquenched childhood longing to be free that keeps haunting me and pulling me back to Kannur. I now firmly believe that my childhood memories keep wandering around in the form of ghosts around those loosely dumped rocks along the azure seaside and such myriad places that I carry good memories of. These spirits keep calling me and pulling me back enticing me into this familiar neighbourhood year after year. This I believe is true.

Few years back, my dad wilfully relinquished his rights off his ancestral home, and for many years, we didn’t have a house of our own in Kannur, but we kept visiting. There were times when there wasn’t enough room at any of our relatives, but we still visited the town and stayed at the very Resort which gobbled up our playground. Last year I brought myself a property in Kannur and laid institution to my own home within my so called hometown. I have since promised myself to relinquish myself of this nomad tag and make myself eligible and worthy of belonging to this place. I also know that I need to expend a lot of effort towards that, which I will do for sure. Meanwhile, till my abilities to reminisce are still intact, let me just stretch out, relax and bask in my good old childhood memories.

 

Homeward bound...

Ramadan Kareem to one and all.

Tonight I leave on my much awaited vacation to India. It is Thursday and unofficially that day of the week when I am supposed to write my blog. However, I have to check in at the airport by 21:00hrs, so this ‘blogging night’ thing doesn’t look like something happening tonight. Fortunately for me this is the holy month of Ramadan and we have shorter hours at work. Today I was back from work at noon, and so have gathered just enough time to squeeze in a blog. I am done with all the difficult packing and what remains is just to finish this blog and find enough room to fit in my laptop in the suitcase, which apparently looks like a very difficult task to accomplish.

Like each one of those trips which takes us home, for me this one too, is special. In fact, this one is special in ways more than one. But there is a small tag attached to this event, which reads ‘If - you – can - fly!’ Yesterday night, as I was packing my bags, the song playing on my mind was not John Denver’s ‘Country roads’ but R Kelly’s ‘I believe, I can fly’. Although, my version was not driven by the same depth and meaning with which R Kelly sang his, my humming did have its own story attached to it.

Since I landed in Doha on 15 Dec 2008, while planning to travel alone, I have never been able to fly out to India on my first attempt. The first time, my trip was rescheduled four times owing to visa issues and two months later as I was all excited and waiting for the ‘Check In’ formalities to be completed, the girl on the counter, just dumped me by saying “In that case Sir, you cannot board the flight”. No, I did not smell bad or ogle on her assets or pass a trite comment. The reason for her reaction was the most absurd and silliest that one could ever imagine – I was not carrying the Credit Card with which I booked this ticket. However, I was determined to fly and I finally did travel on the same flight by buying myself another ticket. My second trip, which was planned somewhere in August 2009, had to be cancelled altogether and later squeezed down from a month to just a weekend as my closest friend and buddy at work Ashlin, who was away on medical leave would not be able to return back in time.

I was awake packing most of the night yesterday and so was really tired through work today. But as soon as I left office, I had this wonderful feeling of being content and was singing and talking gibberish to myself all the way on my drive back home. As soon as I reached home, I undressed and walked around my house naked as if I was the lone man suviving on earth. There was a sense of accomplishment; I had just done with the 'Close Of Business' stuff preceeding my vacation and believed that this time there would be no comebacks. I reclined on my sofa, stretched my legs out, let out a big yawn and dozed off.

Next scene, I found myself standing on that same point as last year; but this time around I was holding that eponymous Mr Murphy (who was on the other side of the Check In desk) by his neck questioning him crudely “What can possibly go wrong?”

I pushed him back brashly shouting “I don’t have any issues with my visa. I have purchased my ticket with a valid Credit Card. My team is well staffed. My leave is approved by the Client and I already have my Exit Permit in hand.”

And as I walked away from him throwing my hands around screaming “I have closed all the possible ifs and buts this time and if at all anything has to go wrong, it should be purely my doing. No one can stop me from going home, but myself”, I heard this faint voice asking “Which Airline?”

I turned back and looked at his face. He had this twitchy smile and piercing eyes, which now, slowly moved away from mine rolling up, trying to shift my attention to those black clouds growing behind me and rapidly engulfing our vicinity.

I was taken aback by a sudden sense of panic and as I scampered for the nearest fire exit, my antennae picked up a bolt of lightning which busticated me into a freefall.

I jumped off the sofa and woke up screaming “Air India, Air India Express, Air India Express”

Mr. Murphy had just revealed to me the weakest link on my tour itinerary; that one soft spot, which could sink my vacationing plan into total disarray. Needless to mention, I was now worried. This was the peak season and cancellation of my flight would mean being stranded in this place till they make me another arrangement. And, another arrangement would also mean, longer flight travel as I’d have to travel mostly to another destination and then wait for the Indian Airlines connecting flight to Kochi. Shucks. Such a scenario would hurt me at the wrong place, and that too real bad and so I decided to find out what’s happening at the airlines office.


My call to the airlines office was answered by a mallu lady who sounded very lethargic and distraught with work and this is how the call went about.

After the initial greetings, I enquired if the days flight to Kochi would leave on time tonight to which she retorted back saying “Koll dhe eyerport” (Call the Airport) “Well, maam…errr….mmm. I am just calling to enquire… like … if the flight is not cancelled or not”

"Whoot? Wheey?” (What? Why?)

“Actually maam, I am supposed to travel tonight by this flight….errr …I-X-4-7-4 and….like…..I, I, I just wanted to know if the flight will ….. you know …. If it is like scheduled or cancelled or what ..…I am not used to travelling by Express and someone told that…. You know…. It is like…. usually ….it is cancelled or delayed”

“Yenny budy kolld you fram this offhis?” (Anybody called you from this office?)

“No”

Then she banged the phone after passing on this rebuke “Then whey arr you spradding fhalls roomers. Yit yiss noat kanselled okay” (Then why are you spreading false rumours. It is not cancelled okay) added with a nice dose of unmentionable abuse first in English and later in Malayalam. Both of which felt like a tight slaps on my cheek.

I must be the only man on earth, who, after being abused and reprimanded by an unknown lady, was not just feeling normal, but rather elated, jubilant and ecstatic. It was like I had earned some much deserving accolade. That is what the feeling of ‘going home’ does to us. We don’t give a damn about others. We don't give a damn about what people say or do. We just don't care. We are just happy to go. We just go.

This current trip to India is a very momentous one for me. Yes, it is a welcome break from this monotony called work, but it also has something much more sentimental attached to it.

I land in Kochi where, this will be the first ever trip when my wife and kids come to the airport to receive me. During all my earlier visits, I have had to take a prepaid taxi and suffer an anxious and reckless drive till Trisshur.

At Trisshur, I expect to track down and meet my long lost friend from CREC days, B Manoj Kumar a.k.a  ‘Mandu’, who, as per my sources would be supposedly visiting his in-laws during that period.

From Trisshur, we travel to my birthplace and hometown Kannur by road via Kozikkode dropping by for my favourite Chicken Biryani at the Paragon Restaurant.

At Kannur, for the first time, I’ll be staying with my parents in our own house after so many years of parking our asses at some or the other relatives place.

Later on we board an overnight train to Chennai, where I dump myself on one of my closest friends from the CREC days, Harish Kumar a.k.a ‘Talli’ after a span of five years and also plan to meet Girish a.k.a ‘Beedi’, one of my first roomies from Hostel A, whom I’ll be meeting for the first time after we guys graduated.

At Chennai I also expect to meet some of my Facebook friends whom I have never met in person and also plan to attend one such friend’s sister’s wedding!

From Chennai we take a train and travel one night and two days on what will be the longest train journey for my two little boys to Baroda, the place where I spent all of my childhood.

At Baroda, our journey converts into a hegira and attains purpose as we meet the latest and youngest kid in my family, Anuj.

The whole family returns back to Doha on 17 Sep 2010 on a Qatar Airways flight from Ahmedabad.

So that’s it. Just finished posting the pictures and read through the text for the last time. All I want to do now is publish this post; log off; pack the laptop and ressh to tha eyerport yend khatch mei fleit (rush to the airport and catch my flight).

The blog seems done; but not yet. It wouldn't be complete unless I welcome and thank two new followers to this blog: My Facebook friend and a TWI girl Vidya ‘Bidia’ Rajaram and the lovely little cousin sister that I don’t have, Anisha ‘Kuku’ Prakash.

Well, that should do it. Bye, I am going away on a vacation but funnily not going away from any of my friends. I will be online whenever I am able to muster enough spare time from lazing around and yes, will definitely carry on with my Thursday night blogging ritual.

I am going home. And this time I believe I can fly, unless of course the girl behind the ‘Check In’ counter screws my plan by giving me another jolt or jhatka.

I am off finally…. Homeward Bound…..

Thursday Nights / Blogging Nights

It would be very ungrateful of me if I start this not by thanking a certain Mr. Waseem Munawar Khan. Waseem is the first official follower to my blog, and thankfully not the only one. I have two more followers, and yes, both of them are very pretty women. But don’t doubt their intentions, they are here just keeping a watchful eye on me. One is my wife and the other is my sister.

Waseem is an old friend. And by old, I meant that not in terms of his age, but in terms of the span of our friendship. I have known him since 1998, when we both were working for Gammon India on the Sion and Kurla Flyover Bridges Project. Waseem toiled hard at the casting yard located some 20kms away to make accurate concrete ‘I’ girders for this peculiar pre-cast segmental bridge, which some boys on the site managed to erect in all the possible wrong directions.

Sion Flyover was my second Bridge project. The first time I visited this project site, I wondered if we could ever build a 750m long road-over-road Bridge there. With thousands of vehicles plying every minute; subways; cables running across buildings and crossing over; all sorts of utilities running underneath, of which no one (including the public works department) had any clue; old buildings butting right at the edge of the carriageway giving absolutely no leeway what so ever to park your equipment, this flyover seemed one of the most difficult things ever to build. But then we were young, and we knocked off the 17month challenge in just 12, albeit mostly through brute force than with any technical excellence. Anyways, the company got a hefty bonus from the client and made huge profits. The boys learnt how not to build a bridge (the hard way). The commuters had a wonderfully smooth flyover to drive on (only till the first monsoon). And some very unlucky residents now had a pier in their garden or a bridge deck in their balcony.

Many years later during one of my nostalgic phases, I googled for ‘Sion Flyover’ and got a wikimapia link, which took me to an interactive map giving an aerial view of this bridge. I just loved hovering over it, getting a bird’s eye view of the favourite bridge project I worked on. However, my heart broke when I read the title, which read ‘Worst Flyover Ever Made – Sion Flyover (Greater Mumbai/Bombay)’. And why shouldn’t it? As a young Engineer, I slogged real hard to make this structure into a reality and gave it everything I possibly could. While I kept hustling between the Design Consultant’s Office in Navi Mumbai to the Client’s Office in South Mumbai helping them decide where to put the next foundation and negotiating traffic diversions with the authorities, some of my friends on site toiled hard on those miniscule construction spaces provided, digging manually to find that one spot clear of utilities to fit in a foundation. Later on, we worked with breakneck speed to erect those heavy steel and concrete structures within the two hours period (when traffic was fairly lull) after midnight, every night. We worked hard and partied harder. Both made possible by a very generous Project Manager who, on one hand overburdened us with backbreaking work (even on Sundays) and on the other allowed us to splurge company money to our ‘whatever’ content. I remember getting petty cash vouchers reimbursed for watching movies, having food at elite restaurants, guzzling loads of beer at Mondy’s / Garage Pub, playing pool, browsing internet and yes, celebrating late nights along with the dancing girls in those myriad dancing bars spread across Mumbai, all under the heading of ‘Client’s Entertainment’.

As I write this, I close my eyes and travel back to that construction site, some 12years back and I see a bunch of enthusiastic haggard, sweaty boys toiling, working hard, playing harder, unaware of the negative aesthetic impact this structure was to make on their city. While we worked like dogs and revelled like spoilt princes, we forgot that we were being used like machines to make a product, of whose real value and social impact we were intrinsically unaware of at that age. Day in day out the boys were fed with a military like decree to achieve timelines set by a very naïve Planning Engineer (that’s me) and pushed into brute slogging to sustain the management’s animalistic appetite to finish each tasks ahead of schedule, close it and get a reward. And of course this came at a cost, which was made up bartering against quality and at times worksite safety.

At the end of the project, most of the boys including me got rewarded by a promotion and better pay, but what did my city get? The answer: An atrociously disfigured and awful looking scar. If you took a walk under the bridge’s obligatory spans, commencing from the Central Labour Institute towards Sion Hospital, occasionally looking upwards on the underside of the bridge deck, you’d not miss noticing its lament blotched by the scars left from those numerous badly finished construction joints and repair works undertaken to accommodate the omissions. The dirge is as much about rampant corruption as much as it is about bad workmanship and the prosaic design. It is sad, but well, that’s the way things work in my country!

Sion Flyover is the place where I actually took my first real lessons on Civil Engineering and Construction Management. It is also one of those places, where I made many friends for life; one of whom is Waseem. As time went by, most of the boys moved on and some rose to high levels of management in their respective companies. I too moved on, and on my journey ultimately landed up in my current position working for Halcrow who are the Design and Supervision Consultants to the Lusail Development Project in Doha, Qatar. Two weeks back I got a pleasant surprise when I met Waseem again after so many years. He had just landed Doha to join Parsons, who are the Project Management Consultants to this project that I work on. The construction world is surely small and round. Only the other day, I was talking to Sachin Ghule who works for the Qatari Diar, our Client to find out that he worked on the Pune-Satara Road Project for HCC, where I worked in the Project Monitoring Cell. Instantly we were reminiscing about the good old tough times, which some very few lucky boys like me and Sachin and Waseem have experienced while working long hours at those many construction sites spread across remote locations in India and the delectably savoury food served at the Engineer’s Mess at HCC Sites, which no other company has so far never matched.

Finding an old friend is so invigorating and enriching. So much that this epitome of inertia (I, me myself), who used to hit the bed immediately on reaching home, now finds enough time and energy to take his old friend around this new city smoothening his acclimatisation. And that is exactly why I want to thank Waseem. Firstly, for giving hope that my forthcoming days, both at work and otherwise would be worthwhile and secondly, for giving me a valuable tip to ensure the longevity of my blog writing stint. So taking his advice, I have decided to have a fixed time and day for my blog writing. I have decided, come what may, I will write a blog every Thursday night.

So, thank you Waseem, for giving me my newest mantra – ‘Thursday Nights are Blogging Nights’