Stamp of Deceit

by NINAD JOG

"You can't have those stamps," snapped my mother. "Give them to me!"

"But I've given Ninad stamps in exchange," Shishir protested.

My mother asked to see the stamps my friend had given me. She took one look at them and told me to give them back to Shishir. She took back the stamps I had given Shishir and kept them on the dresser, out of my reach. "Now it's time to go home," she told Shishir. "It's Ninad's bedtime."

My friend took his stamps and left. He didn't have far to go; he lived in the flat next door.

I could scarcely believe what had happened. I burst into tears and started wailing. How rude of my mother to summarily undo the elaborate trade that I had completed just minutes earlier! What was she thinking when she deprived me of the dozen little treasures? Didn't she have any faith in me?

Wasn't it obvious to my mother that I had got the better end of the deal? I had given my friend ten stamps in exchange for a dozen. Yet my mother had added insult to injury by confiscating the ten stamps that should have been rightfully mine once my friend returned them.

I couldn't stop crying. Perhaps the fact that I had a tiring day and it was nearing my bedtime had something to do with it, for I was only six years old.

My grandfather came into the living room and asked my mother why I was crying. My mother told him how the next-door neighbor had tried to dupe me by giving me a dozen small and widely available Indian stamps in exchange for ten rare stamps of the Isle of Man. She said Shishir could trick me because he was a couple of years elder to me.

My mother told my grandfather that my father had sent me the large Isle of Man stamps from the Middle East, where he worked for the government of Bahrain at the time. One of his co-workers, an Englishman named Boyd Shaw, had given them to him.

My grandfather praised my mother for nipping the stamp trade in the bud. I let out another wail. Who would have thought my grandfather would support my mother? I had fully expected him to support me. Adults were illogical when you least expected them to be, and were all too prone to ganging up on kids.

I was one unhappy puppy that night. My mother consoled me as she put me to bed. She promised me I would get better stamps someday. The chapter was closed. I did not exchange stamps with Shishir ever again.

***

"You have such an extensive collection!" said Prateek as he admired my collection of a thousand-odd stamps. "You have stamps of many countries that I don't have."

"But your collection is bigger than his," Prateek's father pointed out to his son.

I beamed nonetheless. I wasn't used to strangers admiring my stamp collection. Few of my friends collected stamps, and the ones who did didn't seem to be anywhere near as interested in them as I was.

Prateek's father knew my father; I don't know how. Perhaps they were ex-colleagues or perhaps they were childhood friends. At any rate, Prateek's father and his family had come from New Delhi to Mumbai and were paying us a visit.

While I was a couple of years shy of entering my teens, Prateek was a couple of years shy of exiting them. I don't remember how Prateek and his father looked, but I believe they were fair-complexioned and handsome.

I do remember Prateek was quite charming, for I fell for his charm. I agreed to give him a couple dozen of my duplicate stamps in exchange for what he promised would be dozens of stamps. My mother didn't like the idea, but she kept quiet in the face of my father's hearty endorsement.

"I'll mail you all the stamps right after I get back to Delhi," Prateek promised. His father said he would make sure his son would keep good on his promise.

But the stamps never arrived. I don't think they got lost in the mail, for my father did follow up with Prateek's father a couple of times. He said his son hadn't sent them yet; he would send them soon.

I didn't cry over it. Not only was I older, but the disappointment I felt when something I had been looking forward to failed to materialize was nowhere near as acute as the pain I felt when the stamps that I had newly acquired were snatched out of my hands.

***

I was five when I started collecting stamps. I remember the exact date, for I wrote it down in my diary. I was bored at home one afternoon when the postman dropped off the mail. I rushed to the front door and picked up the mail. I was intrigued to see a two-paise, purple-colored Indian stamp of a Gnat jet aircraft on one of the letters. I gave my mother the mail and asked her what the small picture was. She told me it was a stamp, and asked me if I wanted to save it.

I found it fascinating that stamps were so similar to each other in having serrated edges, yet were so different in shape and size and color. I soon learned that stamps came from different countries, whatever that meant. Apart from the Indian stamps that we got from the mail delivered to our home, my father got stamps of different countries from his office for me.

I first learned of Iraq when my father brought me a tiny Iraqi stamp. I was in first grade, and old enough to know that the letter Q had to be followed by the letter U. I lost no time in pointing it out to my parents.

"Write a letter to the Iraqi government when you grow up!" my mother advised me.

Almost forty years later, the country's spelling remains unchanged. Maybe I should have taken my mother's advice after all. I must admit I have ignored my mother's advice on many occasions, but seldom have the consequences been as profound.

***

As I grew older, stamps became my window to the outside world. In a world without the World-Wide-Web, in a country with a single government-run TV channel, in a home without a TV and in a land with a paucity of color-printed foreign books and magazines, the stamps I collected were the diplomats from faraway lands that had honored me by deigning to take up residence in my home.

Stamps were a link to the outside world in yet another way. I was reasonably sure I would never get a chance to leave Indian shores, for it was a given that smart people were the only ones who could go abroad. No one from my family apart from my father had gone abroad, and I didn't think I was anywhere near as smart as him.

Even if I couldn't visit a foreign country, at least I could hold on to a stamp that had originated in one. Holding a stamp was like holding a piece of moon rock. I figured that my friends who didn't collect stamps weren't as lucky as me.

***

Over the years, naiveté started getting elbowed aside by savviness when it came to trading stamps with my friends. Gone was the need for my mother to supervise every trade, and gone was my annoyance on the rare occasions when she vetoed them.

I learned to trade Indian stamps for Indian ones, rare stamps for rare ones, and a stamp of a particular shape for a stamp of a similar shape. I also learned to ask for two rectangular stamps in exchange for a triangular one.

But not all tricks of the trade were learned ones; there was at least one that was devised. I rubbed an unlit candle on a few duplicate stamps until the wax transferred to the stamps. "Plastic-coated stamp!" I would tell my friends when we met to exchange stamps. "You have to give me two stamps in exchange for one plastic-coated stamp."

My friends would look skeptically at the stamp. Never had they come across plastic-coated stamps, they would tell me. I would shrug and say I hadn't either, until my father had got them with his office mail. They could take them or leave them.

Some of my friends would hold the stamp under a bright light and look for imperfections. But there were none, for I had made sure the wax coating formed a uniform sheen.

***

I remember the day when my neighbor Shiv accosted me in the compound of the building in Mumbai that we lived in. "This stamp isn't plastic-coated at all!" he cried. "Look, the coating is peeling off!" he said as he scratched the wax off with his thumbnail from the circular stamp of Singapore. "It looks and smells like wax to me," he added.

I was a deer caught in the headlights. I was at a loss for words. Never had any of my other friends caught me red-handed. Not that I had tricked more than three or four at the most, on no more than one occasion each. There's only so far you can go with plastic-coated stamps. I'm sure I wouldn't have thought twice about pulling a fast one on several other people, if only I knew others who collected stamps.

I mumbled something incoherently to Shiv. I told him I didn't know why the coating was coming off. But Shiv was in no mood to back down. He made it clear that I had to return all the three stamps he had given me, and he would return me the Singapore stamp. A logic that one seemed impeccable - one extra stamp in exchange for the circular stamp and another extra stamp for the plastic-coatedness - had been scraped off before my very eyes.

I must have agreed to Shiv's demand. I don't quite remember, for memory has a knack for failing when you get caught. I could not have possibly disagreed, for the scrawny teenager in me was no match for the larger and stronger Shiv.

A quarter century has passed before I've found the nerve to wax eloquent about the plastic coating. Some of our best-kept secrets aren't necessarily about intimate or private matters; they are about incidents where we have been measurably less than honest.

Try though I did, plastic-coating a stamp was a feat that I simply could not hold a candle to. And who would have thought that it would lead to my feet being held to the fire?

***

Roguish though it was of me to pass off waxy stamps as plastic-coated stamps, it pales in comparison with depriving someone of their entire stamp collection.

But that's exactly what I did with Anmol's stamps.

Three years younger to me, my cousin Anmol and I were quite close when we were growing up. Anmol looked up to me; he often imitated me. Perhaps that's how he started collecting stamps, or perhaps he was just as interested in collecting them as I was.

I was in my early teens when I had a bright idea. Wouldn't it be great if Anmol and I merged our two collections and started collecting stamps together? I must have coerced Anmol into accepting my suggestion; I don’t think he agreed readily. I also told Anmol I could take care of his stamp album.

Anmol complied. He handed his stamp album over to me, much to my delight. I was thrilled that my stamp collection swelled by hundreds of stamps. I remember telling Anmol that his collection had swelled by over a thousand stamps because of the merger, but he wasn't excited about it.

I wonder why none of the adults objected to the takeover that masqueraded as a merger, the robbery that took place in broad daylight. I can’t imagine that I managed to hoodwink my parents as well as Anmol's. Perhaps there is some other explanation; I have to hunt for it.

***

While the exact day that I started stamp collecting is etched in my diary and is tattooed on my brain, there is no such record for the day I stopped collecting them. Perhaps that’s because it happened over a period of several years after I moved to the U.S.

I don't get stamps from letters these days, since I hardly get any letters, although I do get a lot of junk mail. I and my friends and relatives have all but stopped writing letters; we email or call each other instead. The World-Wide-Web allows the world to visit you on your computer in all its colorful glory; you don't need a stamp-sized paper diplomat anymore.

And I have left Indian shores and visited a few countries, for it so happened that I didn't have to be particularly smart to be able to leave India.

All these developments have robbed stamps of some of their luster, even when the stamps haven't been shiny, plastic-coated ones with a uniform waxy sheen.

To this day, my stamp albums - and Anmol's - lie in my parents' home in India. I wouldn't say they are gathering dust, for they are tucked inside a cupboard. But you can be rest assured that they are fast asleep. Out of sight, they are mostly out of mind.

***

When I was a little kid, the dishonesty of people that came to light when they traded stamps was inextricably intertwined with the joy of collecting. As I grew up, my stamp collection became a telescope to the wider world that I was certain lay permanently beyond my reach.

But little could I have imagined that my stamp collection would ultimately focus a sharp, laser-like light on my own deceitfulness.
   
For the naiveté of a knave does not have a long lifespan.

Stockholm Syndrome

by NINAD JOG

"Are you visiting Norway?" the old man asked me. He and his female companion were sitting across from me on the ferry to Bygdøy, a peninsula across the harbor from downtown Oslo.

I told him I was visiting Oslo for the weekend from Stockholm.

"So you're from Sweden!" he said, in an aaha moment. "You speak good English."

I smiled at him. I didn’t return the compliment because he had a strong accent, and I wasn’t feeling particularly charitable. I told him I lived in the United States, but had gone to Sweden for a few months to work on a software project.

The old man scratched his head. "So you must be a U.S. citizen," he said. I told him I was an Indian citizen, but worked for an American company and lived in the U.S. on a work visa.

The man was flabbergasted. He took a few moments to digest what I told him. Indian information technology professionals whizzing across the globe on work were not quite as common in the mid-1990s as they are now.

I didn't tell him the project I was working on was coordinated by the British branch of the company I worked for, and I had spent almost a month in London before I came to Stockholm as I waited for my Swedish work visa and honed my computer programming skills. It would have looked like I was showing off.

Short of stature, bald of pate, off-white of complexion and wearing Gandhi-style round-rimmed glasses, the man appeared to be in his early sixties. I asked him if he was from the Middle East. He said yes, he and his wife were from Israel. They were taking a tour of Nordic countries.

We made small talk as we admired the ink-blue water, the sunny skies and the unusually warm late summer weather and saw the Oslo Town Hall and the kids skateboarding on the harbor diminish into the distance.

When the ferry docked at Bygdøy Harbor and we lined up to leave, the man placed his hand on my shoulder. "Can I ask you a question?" he said. "Which country do you consider home?"

I was stumped. That question would have been laughably easy to answer if it had been asked a little over five years earlier. Back then, I had never left Indian shores, although everyone else in my family had. While my father had visited several countries on work, my mother, my sister and even my grandmother had visited Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore on vacation.

But I moved to New Delhi after graduating from college, and stayed there for almost a year as I worked my first job at a small software company. I then moved to the United States to pursue a Master’s degree, and started working for a startup software company based in a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington D.C. It was through this company that I had landed in Stockholm.

***

As I rode in my Swedish boss' car on our way back to Stockholm, I reflected on the many changes I had been through during the previous five years. I had known I would visit the U.S. for higher studies, but I had not been so sure that I would enjoy living and working there. I had never even dreamed that I would get a chance to work in Europe as an employee of an American company.

My boss dropped me off at the Svit Hotel in Solna, a suburb of Stockholm where I had been staying. I opened the door to my room and plunked myself on the bed. And that's when it hit me: I was home. A place that I had been thinking of as no more than a way-station felt like home now that I had returned from Oslo. I might as well have told the Israeli tourist that I thought of Sweden as my home country, I mused.

I soon moved into the studio apartment of a co-worker from the client site who had quit her job and left for the U.S. to move in with her American boyfriend. Living in the studio was a welcome change from living in a hotel, although I missed the hotel's breakfast smorgasbord delicacies and the shorter commute.

As summer gave way to autumn and the trees started shedding their green clothing, I began to look forward to the Thanksgiving break. I could have visited India or I could have visited the U.S., since the airfares to both destinations were comparable, and the client was willing to pay either of them. But I chose to visit the U.S., for I missed my friends more than I missed my family.

I was very happy when my plane landed at Washington's Dulles airport. As my housemate Anand whisked me in his car to our Greenbelt apartment, I was sure I had made the right decision. For I had missed the U.S. even though I had been away for just four months. I might as well have told the Israeli tourist that America was my home country, I thought.

***

My roommates had moved to a new apartment during my absence. That wasn't news; in fact I knew where exactly they had moved to, and Anand had been kind enough to move my belongings into my room at the new apartment during my absence.

But I was nonetheless in for a shock. My belongings were still packed in two dozen or so boxes that were stacked in a closet, for I had sublet my room to one of my former roommates who had been planning to move away hadn't found a good place to move to. I didn't have the energy to open the boxes during my brief stay, even though I had labeled them neatly. I decided to let go and live like a visitor.

I caught up with my dozen or so friends during those three days, and visited many of the familiar haunts - Greenbelt Lake, the University of Maryland and Lake Artemisia. Yet my sense of disorientation was acute, for I was a guest in my own home.

***

I felt sad as I left the U.S. to return to Sweden, for the holiday was over, and I was going back to the land of approaching winter and increasingly short days. But much to my surprise, my sadness turned to joy when I opened the door to my apartment in Stockholm. For I felt as if I had returned to the cozy familiarity of home.

I didn't stay on for in Stockholm for much longer though. I had few friends outside of work and it was too cold. The days were short; it would get pitch dark by 2.30 in the afternoon. Food was also a problem, since I ate predominantly Indian vegetarian food and was afraid of trying out other cuisines. And the only gay club that I visited had its doors shuttered, either because it was closed or because it had moved.

While New Delhi had been a place of hate at first sight, I had fallen in love with picture-perfect Stockholm during my first month there. And yet the ends could not have been more different. My hate had turned to love within a year in India's capital, but just the opposite had taken place in Sweden's.

I decided to return to the U.S. around Christmas. The British branch of the company pleaded with me to stay; they offered to double my salary. They also extended my Swedish work visa by another year, certain that I would not turn down the offer of a fatter paycheck.

But I stuck to my guns. For no amount of lucre could have leavened the loneliness that had gripped me in its vice. I felt homesick; homesick for America. Come Christmas, I was back in the U.S.

***

My stay in Sweden did have its share of lighter moments and odd consequences that continued to reverberate well after I left Sweden.

I remember when I stopped over in London on my way back from Sweden, and went to a restaurant in Leicester Square for lunch. "Tack so mycket!" I said to the waitress when she served me my food, as I sat at the table lost in my own thoughts.

The waitress was startled. "Sir, would you like something else?" she asked.

"No thanks," I said. "I meant to say Thank you very much!"

Upon returning to the U.S., I was quick to resume an activity that I missed doing in Sweden: jogging around Greenbelt Lake.

"Are you crazy to go jogging just now?" my other roommate Anurag asked me one Sunday morning. "It's snowing heavily!"

Sure enough it was, and the ground was already covered with two to three inches of snow. But that didn't deter me from jogging along the mile-long trail around the lake. For the snowy cold of Washington D.C. felt warm compared with Stockholm's unforgiving bitter cold. But those days are long gone; I don't think I can go jogging in freezing temperatures anymore.

***

As I look back on my stays in Sweden and in New Delhi, I can see that I lived in three of the world's capitals - New Delhi, Washington D.C. and Stockholm over the course of six years. I also stayed briefly in another - London, and visited yet another - Oslo. Although that's a record that is easily bested every year by tens of thousands of jet-set people, I cannot help but marvel at it, for I have never equaled it since then.

I don't think I will ever regret telling the Israeli tourist what I told him on that bright summer day just off the coast of Norway: that I thought of India as my home country. For I was far more attached to the land of my birth back in those days, even though I had left it for good half a decade earlier.

My stay in Sweden didn't last more than five months, although I talk about it as if I lived there for five years. But having thought of that Scandinavian country as my home on two different occasions, I won't be surprised if I fall prey to the same instinct yet again at some point in the future.

Of all the people who are susceptible to being stricken by the Stockholm Syndrome, I may be a leading candidate.

Death After Life

by NINAD JOG

"Babli hanged herself from the fan," my mother told me. "She did it in the afternoon, when she was alone at home. It happened two days ago."

I was shocked beyond words. A year elder to my teenage sister, Babli was one of my neighbors in Mumbai. After writing a long suicide note, she fashioned a rope into a noose and strung it over the living room ceiling fan. She locked all the living room doors and closed the windows. Then she climbed on the stool, eased her head into the noose and kicked the stool.

When Mrs. Ganguly came home from work that evening, the front door did not open when she turned the key. She knocked on the door a few times and called for her daughter, but to no avail. The door would not budge. Panic-stricken, she asked one of the neighbors for help. The neighbor broke open the door, only to be confronted by the grisly sight of Babli's limp body hanging from the ceiling fan.

I didn't know it at the time, but Babli's suicide was a cry for help that had gone unheeded, with tragic consequences. She must have suffered from clinical depression, brought on in part by her father's untimely death from a heart attack a couple of years earlier.

I had been friends with Babli's brother Shiv, who was about my age. But our friendship had fallen by the wayside over the years, perhaps due to my parents' ongoing quarrels with the Gangulys and with many of the other residents of the building. It hadn't helped that the Gangulys had a fierce Alsatian dog that had a habit of pouncing upon people when he was unleashed.

We tend to remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when he first hear any bad news. I was sitting in my parents' car when I learned about Babli's death. My parents had picked me up from Bombay Central station, as I had returned to my parents’ home in Mumbai by the overnight Rajdhani Express train from New Delhi, on vacation from my job.

I did not talk to Shiv or to his mother that day. I didn't talk to them the next day either, or the one after that. In fact, I never offered them my condolences. Not that I didn't want to offer them; I just didn't know how to.

I didn't speak to Shiv ever again, other than exchanging quick Hi's when our paths crossed in the building's staircase. His sister's death was the last nail in the coffin of my friendship with the one person who had been my only friend in the neighborhood during much of my childhood.

I don't remember if Babli's funeral had already taken place on the day I returned from New Delhi, but I do know none of my family members attended it.

***

Three years later, I was in the U.S. as a graduate student when I learned about the death of the mother of my friend Faisal. Faisal had recently graduated from the same university where I was enrolled, and had moved thirty miles away to Annapolis, to live close to his work.

After spending a weekend with his friends, Faisal came home and called his parents in India, only to learn that his mother had died the previous day. Shocking as the news was, it was also unexpected, for she hadn't been ill or bedridden. She had complained of severe chest pain in the morning, and had fallen unconscious. Faisal's father and his relatives had scrambled to take her to hospital, but their efforts had been in vain. His mother was no more.

To make matters worse, Faisal's mother's funeral had already taken place by the time Faisal learned about his mother's passing. It is devastating when your mother is not only gone, but is utterly gone when you least expect it to happen.

Faisal's father had called him several times after his mother died, but they hadn't been able to talk to each other, since Faisal had been away from home with his graduate school friends. He didn't learn about his mother's death the next day, since his phone did not have an answering machine that his father could have left a message on. Cell phones were not in wide use in the mid-1990s, and Faisal's father did not have any of his son's friends’ phone numbers.

Faisal's friends rushed to be with him in his moment of grief. They stayed with him for the next few days as they cooked for him, ran errands and consoled him.

But I did nothing of the sort. In fact, I did not even call Faisal to offer my condolences. I cannot claim that I didn't bother because I didn't know his mother. I did; I had met his parents at their home in Mumbai just a few months earlier during my first trip to India after moving to the U.S.

Back when Babli died, I could have claimed that I had received no guidance from my parents on how to express condolences. But I could make no such claim now. For I was an adult, a bird that had spread his wings - however tentatively - and broken free of its parents' nest.

Part of me was reluctant to drive over to Faisal's home with my mother, who was on her first visit to the U.S. when Faisal's mother died. It would have amounted to rubbing it in my friend's face, "Look, my mother's still here, but yours isn't." I couldn't have left my mother at home, but the round trip would have taken a good two hours, and I didn’t want to leave my mother home alone for that long.

***

I was four or five when I first heard of human deaths. A construction worker's baby died of drowning when she dipped him in a large tank of cold water one morning at the construction site adjacent to my building in Pune. The builder halted construction for the rest of the day while the last rites were performed.

I came to know of it because my balcony overlooked the construction site, and because my mother told me. I must have been puzzled, because I asked my mother where the baby went after it died. My mother told me it was reborn as a butterfly or a horse or a donkey depending upon how well it had behaved in its past life. I asked my mother what would happen to the horse after it died. My mother told me it would be reborn as a butterfly if it had behaved well, or as a donkey if it had behaved badly.

I mulled over the matter. "But how does a horse know if it's behaving well or badly?" I asked. "Who tells a horse how he's behaving?"

My mother was stumped. She decided it was best not to tell me rebirth stories. I don't know how she distracted me that morning, but I do know she didn't tell me any life-after-life tales for many years after that incident.

***

The death of Faisal's mother wasn't the first time I heard about the death of a friend's parent. I was six when my class teacher told the class that Romal's mother had died.

"Let's pray for Romal's mother," Ms. Pacheco told the class one morning, when Romal came back to school after a week-long absence. "She has died and has gone to Heaven."

All of us stood up and prayed, as did Romal. I kept casting quick glances at him even as I prayed. Sad though I felt for his loss, I was glad he was back. My happiness easily trumped my sorrow, for I had missed Romal all those days. We seldom ate lunch together during the hour-long lunch break, but we always played together after lunch, and during the two short mid-day recesses.

Fearful of people and anti-social that I was, I hadn't liked Romal when we had first met. But he had always liked me, and had stuck by me and had invited me to play with him and his friends.

I never said a word to Romal about his mother's death. I left the school shortly thereafter, for my father got a new job and we moved to Mumbai. Sad as I was to leave Pune, I was sure I would come back to live there one day. But that day never dawned. I left Loyola school and bid Romal D'Souza adieu for good.

I did get back in touch with some of my friends from Loyola after coming to the U.S. None of them remembered me, for fifteen years had passed. But they were kind enough to take me at my word about knowing them in primary school. I asked them about Romal, but my question drew blanks. Perhaps Romal had also moved to a different school.

***

Over the years, I've come to believe that one life is all that there is. I would have liked to believe in an afterlife, or at least in a mechanism that preserves our consciousness and our sentience long after we are gone. But death is a matter where I'd much rather stick to the available evidence than fly in the face of it.

We worry about what will happen to us after we die far more than we worry about what we were up to before we were born. For having lived life to the fullest, we begin to miss ourselves as death approaches, and we cannot bear to think that an Earth robbed of our presence will continue functioning smoothly without giving a damn about our absence.

And yet I must thank my mother for telling me that the construction worker's baby had turned into a butterfly after it drowned, and I must thank Ms. Pacheco for telling the class that Romal's mother had gone to Heaven. For a child cannot comprehend that a loved one has vanished into nothingness, but the child is reassured to learn that the loved one continues to live, even if it’s in a faraway realm that it cannot access.

***

In recent years, I have expressed my condolences to a number of my friends when their parents or loved ones have died. But those expressions have largely been cursory, just enough to pass muster.

Yet the offerings of condolence that rankle me the most are the ones I didn't express, whether to Romal, to Shiv or to Faisal. For those are the ones where I knew I should have done something, but didn't.

Adam, I'm No Madam

by NINAD JOG

"Ma'am, I'll be with you in just a moment," said the man behind the counter as he attended to the customer ahead of me in line.

I was peeved. How could the man have mistaken me for a woman? Granted, I was wearing a long winter coat and a fur cap as I battled my second winter in Washington D.C. But I thought my outfit made me look like a frail version of the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, than that of his wife Raisa.

I decided to forgive the man behind the counter. He will know in a moment who I really am, I figured.

I didn't have to wait for long. "Ma'am, what can I do for you?" he asked when it was my turn.

I angrily took my fur cap off and thrust it into my jacket pocket. "My car has a flat tire," I said brusquely, in the deepest and most gravelly voice I could muster. "I need it fixed." I didn't tell the man his remarks had also punctured my ego and knocked the wind out of my sails.

"We'll take care of it, sir," said the man. "Give me your car keys and take a seat."

I retreated to the waiting area of the tire store, a large bandage over my ego.

***

This wasn't the first time I had been mistaken for a woman. The previous occasion had been more than a dozen years earlier, when I was eight.

"Is that your daughter?" a woman had asked my father. "She's so pretty!"

"No, that's my son," my Dad had explained. "He looks like a girl because his head is covered with a shawl. I'm taking him to the doctor, since he has fever."

Being mistaken for a girl was the last thing I needed when I was sick. I had felt like giving the woman one tight slap on each cheek. But all I could do was squirm in the scooter's sidecar and hope the woman would leave.

***

Bad as it was to be mistaken for a girl, being teased for being girlish was no better.

"Ninad, let me tell you something," the drawing teacher told me when I joined a vocational high school in Mumbai in eighth grade. "If any boy ever hits you, just pick up a rock and lob it at him."

I laughed heartily, for never could I have imagined an adult would give such bizarre advice. Only later did it dawn on me that the drawing teacher had been half-joking, for he had surmised that I was too girlish to withstand any bullying, beating and rough-and-tumble play.

***

While people have mistaken me for a woman over the years, I too have mistaken a few women for men. But thankfully, I've always managed to avoid the gaffe of calling them men to their faces.

Back when I took a public transport bus to high school at seven in the morning, I would run into a cute guy at the bus stop. Effeminate that he was, he appeared to be a year or two older to me. We smiled when our gazes met, but we never spoke to each other.

I saw the boy's mother accompany him to the bus-stop one morning, and overheard them talk to each other. I was surprised that the boy had a girl's voice, and was even more surprised when his mother kept using the female form of Marathi verbs while talking to him. Only then did I it dawn on me that the feminine guy whom I had a crush on was actually a masculine girl.

I'm not sure if I was feeling drowsy that morning, but I do remember that the realization made me wide awake.

***

Years later, when I told my parents I was gay, my mother did her best to persuade me to marry a woman and have kids. The mid-twenties was a perfect time to start a family, she said. My mother and my grandmother weren’t sure if I was truly homosexual or whether I had been brainwashed by someone who had forced himself upon me against my wishes. But they couldn't comprehend how I could use my homosexuality as a reason to refuse to marry a woman. To them, it was no more than a lame excuse. They told me my ability to sire my own kids was too precious a resource to waste.

I could see why my mother insisted that I have kids. India has no Social Security and no social safety net, so having kids is an essential investment for the future. One’s own children are the only ones who can take care of people in their old age.

I explained to my mother that I wasn’t physically attracted to women; in fact I was physically repulsed by them.

But it was a while before she understood that being homosexual meant being attracted to masculinity and being repulsed by femininity. "Why don't you marry a lesbian?" she finally asked me. "Many lesbians look and act like men, so you'll be as happy with them as you’ll be with a man!"

I told my mother lesbians were still women, no matter how masculine some of them may be. Besides, I had no desire to enter a marriage of convenience, and I was sure no lesbian would want to marry me either.

What I didn't tell my mother was that looks and physical bearing apart, I barely got along with the few lesbians whom I knew, for reasons that were hard to fathom. Most of my friends were men, evenly split between gay and straight.

In fact, there were times when I wondered long and hard if I was a misogynist. For not only had I not succeeded at striking anything beyond a nodding acquaintance with lesbians, but the few straight women whom I was friends with were co-workers or family or my male friends' wives or sisters.

I didn’t have a female friend whom I could point to and proclaim in all honesty, "There's a woman who I became friends with on my own, without any middleman's help."

***

But circumstances can change, and so can people. With enough will-power and effort, something that lies hopelessly in the realm of the insurmountable can slither silently into the reign of the possible.

Earlier this year, I was goofing off at Washington D.C.' annual Gay Pride Parade Festival, pretending to man one of the booths of the Asian and South Asian gay and lesbian groups when a woman approached me. Fair-skinned and flat-chested, she was a couple of inches shorter than me. Her hazel eyes twinkled as she smiled at me and tilted her neck to throw back her long black hair.

I recognized her instantly, although I didn't remember her name. We had met at the Heritage gay and lesbian event a couple of months earlier, where I had seen her sitting by herself on the staircase by the bar, lost in thought.

She reminded me her name was Pat, and I reminded her of mine. We started chatting, and she told me she had grown up in Cambodia, and had come to the U.S. as a refugee after living for weeks or months in other Southeast Asian countries along the way. We swapped stories of childhoods spent in India and Cambodia, talked about what we did for a living and asked each other where we lived. I learned that Pat too lived in a northern Virginia suburb of Washington D.C. In fact she had also parked her car at Falls Church metro station, so we decided we would leave together.

I noticed that Pat was quite content in chatting with me. She wasn't mingling with the Asian lesbian's group, whose booth was adjacent to the one we were standing in. "Aren't you a member of AQW?" I asked her, using the group’s acronym, Asian Queer Women.

Pat shot me a quizzical look. "It's only my second time at a gay and lesbian event," she said. "The Heritage event was the first."

That made perfect sense. I flushed with pride that she had preferred to chat with a known gay devil than with the unknown lesbian angels sitting at the neighboring booth.

Just then there was a sudden cloudburst. Pat and I huddled together as people rushed to take shelter in the booths. We watched a few hardy souls strip to their shorts and dance in the rain.

The cloudburst ended just as suddenly as it had started, and my friend Vuong joined us. I was aware that Vuong and Pat knew each other, for I had seen them chat at the Heritage event.

About thirty minutes later, Pat and I decided to leave the festival. I offered to drop Vuong home, since he lived close to me. As the three of us left the booth and headed home, we ran into Kevin, an old acquaintance of mine who was taking pictures of people for Metro Weekly, Washington D.C.'s gay magazine. Vuong and I posed for a couple of pictures, but Pat preferred to stay out of the limelight.

***

As we walked towards the Metro station, I patted myself on the back for breaking a big barrier. Here was the dawn of a new friendship, a relationship that had sprouted without the need for a middleman to sow the seeds. I hadn't sought out Pat; she had approached me. But it was a promising start nonetheless.

The Metro train was crowded, and the three of us sat on separate seats as and when they became free. We got off at the Falls Church station after thirty minutes. While Vuong and I had to make our way to my car, Pat had to head to hers. I gave her a tight hug and kissed her on both cheeks, as is quite common in the gay and lesbian world. "See you next time!" I said.

"See you!" she said. I looked at her as she sauntered towards her car, her long black hair swaying ever so gently in the light afternoon breeze.

"Pat is so sweet!" I told Vuong as we walked towards my car. "I was surprised that she hadn't heard of the Asian Queer Women's group."

Vuong gave me a blank look. "Pat's not a woman," he deadpanned. "He's a guy."

I could have fainted right then and there. I would have, had I been a Victorian-era society lady.

"Really?", "Really?" I asked a couple of times just to make sure. “Yes, really,” said Vuong.

I was largely silent during the ten-minute drive to Vuong's. My ego was punctured and the wind had been knocked out of my sails. At least I didn’t have a flat tire.

Having chatted at length with Pat at the gay Pride event, only to learn that she was a he, Pride had truly come before the fall.

***

I've exchanged a few emails with Pat since that day, but I haven't seen him. He has told me he would like to get together at some point, but he has said he has been too busy.

I’m not sure if Pat knows that I mistook him for a woman when I cozied up to him on that dog-day afternoon. He probably does, although I like to think he doesn't. Whether he does or not, I plan to bring it up and say sorry to him the next time we see each other.

For few pleasures are more supreme than asking someone if they had noticed the swift kick I had given them during our previous meeting, and having the gall to apologize profusely months after doing it. Justice delayed may be justice denied, but an apology delayed can cause malice to fester.

When all is said and done, boys will always be boys.

Mama Ranade and I

by NINAD JOG

"Uncle is eager to see you," Aunt Tai told me. "He has been asking for you all the time. Will you come over in the evening?"

"Yes, I will," I promised.

But I didn't go that evening; I stayed home. I didn't go the following evening either, although I could have easily accompanied my father on his scooter on the four-mile ride to the hospital.

I had never been particularly close to "Mama Ranade" as I called my uncle, or to his wife, who was my father's elder sister. That was perhaps because my aunt had disapproved of my parents' "love-marriage" and had boycotted their wedding.

Aunt Tai had been keen on arranging my father's marriage to a fair-skinned, green-eyed woman of her choosing, perhaps to one of Mama Ranade's sisters. But my father had gone his own way. He had fallen in love with my mother – a dark-skinned, black-eyed, bespectacled woman from a different sub-caste – and had had the audacity to marry her against the express wishes of all his siblings.

My parents’ wedding had been a doubly sad occasion for my paternal uncles and aunts, since fair complexion was synonymous with beauty and dark complexion with ugliness in many parts of India, especially among people from my father’s sub-caste.

***

One of my earliest memories of the Ranades was when they came over to visit us for a few days in Pune. I must have been around four at the time. On the morning after they arrived, my aunt told my mother to stay at home and cook lunch for all of us, while she and my uncle took me to the park near Deccan Gymkhana.

My mother would have liked to accompany us, but she was duty-bound to accede to her guest's demand, for the guests were from her husband’s side and were elder to her husband. My father was at work, since he had not been able to take the day off.

I played on the swings and the slides in Sambhaji Park as I usually did when my parents took me there, and I looked with wonder at the toy fort and the toy town in a corner of the park. When it was time to go home, Mama Ranade took me in his arms and we made our way to the park's exit.

But I became visibly upset. Something was clearly amiss. "Fanta!" I cried, pointing to one of the dozen drink stalls near the park's exit. "Fanta!"

My uncle and aunt were at a loss. They had no idea what I was referring to. They approached the stall and asked the vendor. The vendor explained, and handed me a bottle of the cold orange drink. I was happy; nothing was amiss anymore. I didn't know it then, but the price my uncle paid for the foreign-brand drink was no chunk of small change for him. He wouldn't have bought it for himself or for his wife, but he couldn't bear to deny me my wish.

I don't remember much of the rest of their visit, but I do remember my father getting angry when the Ranades left. "Mama Ranade has painted a design on the wall!" he cried, pointing to a finger-length brown band on the wall by the bedroom door.

It was a band of snuff, snuff that my uncle shot snuff straight into his nostrils every day. On the morning before he left, he wiped his fingers on the bedroom wall, whether by design or by accident. My father had to spend quite a bit of effort restoring the wall to its pristine green-colored state.

***

Not long afterwards, my sister and I moved to Mumbai with our parents. I started meeting the Ranades every couple of months, since we lived in a neighborhood on the other side of the railway lines from the Dadar Tram Terminus neighborhood where they lived.

Over the years, I saw them tutoring various school kids at their home in the evenings, and often all day on Sundays. My uncle supplemented his income as a government clerk, while my aunt added to hers as a school teacher.

And yet you could tell they were doing it not for the love of money, but for their love of molding young minds. Perhaps it was because the Ranades didn't have any kids, for both their daughters had been stillborn. Each of them weighed over nine pounds, probably because my aunt suffered from gestational diabetes that went undetected during both pregnancies. The Ranades’ stillborn babies became another statistic in India’s high infant mortality rate, as did my elder brother, who died within twenty days after his birth.

The kids whom the Ranades tutored came closest to being the family that they had been unable to build.

***

"Dev Anand!" cried Mr. Ranade. "Doesn't he look like Dev Anand?"

All the half a dozen or so men and women in the room stared at me and swung their heads from side to side in an arc to mean yes. So did my aunt, as did my father. I blushed and lowered my head. I was a couple of years shy of entering my teens, but I still managed to blush like a child when I found myself unexpectedly at the center of attention.

"Look at him," Mr. Ranade said a few minutes later, pointing to a Bollywood star cavorting in the fields on the black-and-white TV screen in the Ranades' living-room. "Ninad looks exactly like him!"

I ignored my uncle's remark. I could not recognize any of the Bollywood stars, even though I was familiar with their names. All of them looked the same to me. All of them danced on screen. All of them argued. Every star fell in love with a starlet, and they got married at the end of the movie.

But I couldn't ignore my uncle's remark when I kept hearing it month after month whenever I went over to his home. He didn't have to be watching a Dev Anand movie to tell me I resembled the actor. My uncle's comments piqued my interest. I learned to identify Dev Anand, and saw as much of him as I could during the weekly thirty-minute program of Bollywood film songs that the sole government-run TV channel broadcast on Thursday evenings.

It wasn't long before I started imitating Dev Anand's actions: the frequent nodding while speaking, the raising of the eyebrows while asking questions, the sudden wave of the hand, the characteristic gait, and the rapid-fire dialogue.

"Ninny imitates Dev Anand so well!" my father would often say. "Don't you think so?" he would ask my mother. My mother would agree, although she never seemed quite as enthusiastic as my father.

I started spending a lot of time in front of the mirror, practicing my Dev Anand imitation. I wouldn't say I spent hours doing it every day, but I did spend quite a few minutes. I also took pains to comb my hair the way Dev Anand did, so I could resemble him even when I wasn't imitating his movements. I could do all of this at leisure since I was a latchkey kid - home alone all afternoon on weekdays until my parents and my sister came home in the evening. My father's praise had clearly gone to my head.

I even showed off my Dev Anand imitation to the Ranades. My uncle appreciated it, but I don't quite remember if my aunt did or not.

***

My father called me into the kitchen one evening. He had got back from work, and was sipping his evening coffee. "Ninny, I've been meaning to tell you this for the past couple of days," he said. "I've noticed you imitate Dev Anand all the time, literally every single waking moment."

My jaw dropped.

“I think you’re doing it without being aware of it, rather than doing it deliberately. Isn’t that so?”

“Yes,” I said. There was no way I was going to admit the truth.

"This has to stop," my father told me. "It's not a good idea to keep doing it."

I was crushed. There was no escaping the fact that my father was correct. I had started walking like Dev Anand even when I walked the short eight feet from the bathroom to the kitchen; from the kitchen to the living room, and from the front door into the outside world. I nodded and nodded when I spoke, and I waved my right hand every so often. The imitation had become second nature to me, and I was just a wave and a nod short of fancying myself as the star.

But stung by my father's remarks, I shed within minutes what I had perfected over weeks.

***

"Mama Ranade complimented Tai for painting the bedroom and for clearing all the clutter away," I heard my father tell my mother when I entered the kitchen one evening a year later. My mother asked my father how my aunt had managed to do it when her husband was ill. My father said his sister had done no such thing. My uncle had woken up in his hospital bed, and had mistaken his hospital room for his own bedroom. The illness had clearly made him delusional.

I sympathized with my uncle's plight, but I found it mildly amusing nonetheless. Little could I have known that I would have a similar experience over two decades later. Mistaking my hospital room for a hotel room when I was hospitalized in the U.S. for severe head trauma, I would chide the hospital orderly for changing the sheets on my bed, and tell him I didn't need the towels to be replaced, since I planned to check out of the room the next day.

***

Three days later, my father got a phone call from his elder brother when he came home from office. "Mama Ranade is no more," my uncle told him. “He passed away a few minutes ago.”

My father said he would head over right away. He asked me if I wanted to join him.

"Don't take him," said my mother. "He's too young to see a dead body. Besides, it’s evening, and it will soon be dark."

But I insisted on going, for I wasn't an utter stranger to death. I had been devastated when my grandfather passed away a few years earlier, but I figured I could face it now. For I was younger when my grandfather died, and had been much closer to him than I was to Mama Ranade.

When my father and I reached the Ranades’ apartment, we found the living room filled with crying relatives, mainly women. The men were on their way home from the hospital. An ambulance soon arrived with Mama Ranade’s body. My father's brother and his son Shubh were among those who helped carry the bier three flights up the stairs to his home.

It was soon time for the funeral. Most of Mr. Ranade's relatives and friends had already arrived, for they had been told the previous day that the end was near. Funerals are conducted within a few hours of a person's death in my community, for the body isn't preserved in a morgue, and starts rapidly decaying in India’s tropical heat.

My father asked me if I wanted to join him at the funeral or stay at my aunt's home with my aunt and all the female relatives, for women do not attend funerals. I decided to accompany my father, partly because it was the first funeral I would ever attend, but mainly because I didn’t want to sit in a room full of weeping women for hours at a stretch.

The men placed Mama Ranade's body back in the ambulance, and we headed over to the electric crematorium by the Dadar beach, which was about two miles away. Indian ambulances typically split their time herding critically ill people to hospital or acting as hearses.

Once we entered the crematorium, my cousin Shubh marked Mama Ranade’s body with ash under the direction of the priest as the priest chanted religious chants. The dead person's son usually performs these rituals, but Shubh had volunteered, since the Ranades were childless.

I was in awe of Shubh, for he was just a couple of years elder to me, yet he was so mature and so unafraid. I on the other hand still blushed like a girl at the drop of a hat.

My father and I waited at the crematorium for over an hour, since my uncle's body was the third in line, and the undertaker told us they had to make do with one crematorium, since the other had lost power. I can still remember the smell of burning flesh that permeated the complex that night, although the memory is mercifully no longer as vivid as it could have been.

My father and I left for home around 1 a.m. My uncle's body was still in line, but Shubh and his father and the other relatives said they would take care of it. The undertaker said he would give them the bones and the ash the next morning for Shubh and his father to disperse into the sea.

I took one last look at Mama Ranade as his cold body lay listless on the bier on the cold stone floor. Gone was his easy wit, and gone were his jovial smile and his raucous laughter. His terminal illness had made quick work of sapping his flesh and his bones, for he looked rail-thin and considerably shorter than the five-foot seven that he had been.

His bushy gray mustache and his bald pate were the only two features that appeared unchanged. Nostrils stuffed with cotton balls and head tilted backwards, Mama Ranade’s face looked stressed, as if he were still in great pain. Peace may not have eluded him in life, but it had certainly deserted him in death.

***

To this day, Mama Ranade's funeral is the only funeral I've ever attended. My grandmother and an aunt died a few years ago, but I did not attend their funerals, for I was in the U.S. while they died in India. When you don't see a dead person's remains, the logical part of your brain knows the person has died, but the emotional part of your brain thinks they have disappeared.

While Mama Ranade died and so did my grandfather, my grandmother and my mother's sister simply made themselves scarce.

I still do not know the exact cause of Mama Ranade's death. Maybe he died of a heart attack or maybe a stroke or maybe some other malady. I could have asked my father or I could have asked Aunt Tai, but I haven't asked either of them to this day.

***

Of the few scattered memories I have of my uncle's passing, one has remained more steadfastly with me than the others.

"You didn't come to visit Mama as he was dying," my aunt said to me moments after I entered her flat and we waited for her husband's body to arrive. "It would have made a world of difference if you had come yesterday or the day before."

I hung my head. There was nothing I could say.

I have often thought of why I never visited him in hospital when I could have. I don't think I was afraid of visiting a dying person in hospital with tubes sticking into him all over. Perhaps I resented my uncle for setting me up as Dev Anand, especially since I had fallen back to earth a few weeks later. I knew he did not abet my preening and my pretense, and I know he wasn't aware I had stopped doing it. Yet I couldn't help reflexively point my fingers at him.

Perhaps I thought the longer I postponed visiting him, the longer he would survive. He could not possibly die before meeting me. I was simply trying to prolong his life by putting off meeting him.

And atheist though I thought of myself even back then, I had implicitly assumed that I would surely meet him after I was done with my own time in this world.

But it's far more likely that all these speculations are nothing but after-the-fact justifications that I have concocted to keep myself from feeling guilty. Maybe I was in denial about his impending death, and maybe I just didn’t care enough about him to wish him goodbye.

If only I had spent even a fraction of the time with him in hospital as I did at his funeral, it could have gone some way towards repaying him for his kindness in buying me a bottle of cold, refreshing Fanta in the park in Pune on that hot summer morning almost four decades ago.

Close to Mama Ranade though I was not, my blatant refusal to honor his pleas to meet him on his deathbed will surely merit more than just a passing mention in my Book of Regrets.

Confessions of an Ex-Vegetarian

NINAD JOG

"Try the chicken burger," my friend Bablu urged me. "I'm going to order it, and so should you."

Might as well give it a try, I thought. What the hell! I figured I could always stop eating if I got nauseous. My friends would take care of me and do the driving if I got sick.

It was the summer of 1993, and I and four of my friends from the university were headed to Virginia Beach for a day trip in my small Mazda hatchback car. I was feeling highly charged as we entered a McDonald's restaurant at a rest stop, perhaps because I had driven at a whopping 95 miles per hour for a few seconds on the highway just a few minutes earlier, much to my friends' alarm.

I made a Herculean effort to suppress my disgust as I took the first bite of the burger. I was taken aback at how tasteless it was compared with the spicy Indian vegetarian food I was used to eating. I plucked enough courage to finish the burger, and was surprised I didn't feel nauseous. "I did it!" I told my friends excitedly. "I've become a non-veg eater!"

Eating a chicken burger once in your life scarcely counts as losing your vegetarianism, but that's how my parents and I saw it when I was growing up in India. Back then, the boundaries between being a vegetarian and a non-vegetarian were fairly clear. You could be sure that someone who proudly claimed to be a vegetarian had never eaten any meat or fish or poultry in his life even by accident.

***

Having a chicken burger while heading to the beach wasn't the first time I had tried eating "non-veg." Back in 1990, when I had moved to New Delhi to work my first job after graduating from college in Mumbai, my father's friend had urged me to try some mutton at a party. "You should at least try it," he said. "No one likes to remain vegetarian these days."

I decided to follow his advice, partly because I was ready to be adventurous and partly because I was living with him for a few days, rent-free, as I looked for my own room in New Delhi.

I tentatively lobbed a small piece of meat into my mouth. It was spicy but rubbery, and I could not grind it no matter how hard I chewed. Finally, I gulped it with a glass of water. Only years later did I learn that the meat must have been rubbery from being overcooked, like many Indian dishes - both vegetarian and non-vegetarian - often are. The experience was so unpleasant that I resolved I would never try eating non-veg again.

***

But my resolve didn't last forever, although it did last a good two years until I moved to the U.S. While spending a weekend at my father's friend's home in Baltimore, I accompanied him and his family to a buffet lunch at the home of an East Asian friend of his. As I helped myself to the various dishes, I noticed a food item that I had never seen before. White, bulbous and as long as my thumb, I could tell it was some kind of seafood.

I looked around for guidance, but Mr. Mattoo was nowhere to be seen. He had probably gone outdoors to mingle with the other guests. I summoned the guts to eat one of the pieces. I could chew it easily, and I liked its taste. I tried another piece and then another. I was flush with pride. I had done it! I may have failed to eat mutton, but I had eaten no less than three pieces of the seafood.

I boasted about my accomplishment to Mr. Mattoo later that afternoon as we headed back to his home from the party. Mr. Mattoo glanced admiringly at me. "Congratulations!" he said. "What you had was shrimp."

Months later, I came across the same item at a dinner party at my friend Steve's home. Sitting in a large bowl amidst a mound of sautéed zucchini, bell peppers and broccoli, it was just as small and bubbly. I wasted no time in making a beeline for it. "I love shrimp," I told the host, pointing to the little finger-sized delicacy in the bowl.

Steve gave me an odd look. "That's not shrimp," he said. "It's baby corn!"

Steve must have noticed my embarrassment, for he assured me that shrimp and baby corn looked maddeningly alike. I took his word for it, with no questions asked. Only much later did I learn that the two look quite different from each other. Ironically, I had never seen baby corn - let alone taste it - when I was growing up in India as a vegetarian. I don't think it was available in the markets back then.

***

Although I had attempted eating something other than what I thought were vegetarian items on three separate occasions, my initiation into non-vegetarianism was far from complete. Beef was a hurdle I was confident I would never cross. Fish too belonged to no-man's land, even though I could at least entertain the notion of eating other seafood such as shrimp and mussels.

The logical part of my brain told me that eating beef was no different from eating pork or chicken or any other "non-veg" that involved killing an animal. But the emotional part of my brain had a beef about trying the meat of an animal that was as common and as loved in India as a pet. Atheist that I am, I doubt if Hindu religious strictures against eating beef played much of a role. I think my reluctance to try beef mirrored a Westerner's reluctance to eating dog or cat meat.

Like many of my aversions for particular foods, the one towards beef also fell by the wayside when I least expected it. I had accompanied three of my college friends to an Indian classical music concert in a Virginia suburb of Washington DC, when we decided to grab a bite during the afternoon break. A hot dog stand beckoned, so all of us ordered hot dogs. I must confess I did not feel even a modicum of disgust as I had my first hot dog.

It was striking that all four of us beef-eaters were Hindus, albeit Hindus from Mumbai, which was arguably India's most Westernized city in 1996.

***

It's just as well that I tried the hot dog at the music concert. For I moved to Sweden a few months later, to work on a software project for a horse racing company at the Solvalla racetrack in Bromma, a suburb of Stockholm. The racetrack boasted Sweden's largest restaurant, a mega-seater that could serve hundreds of patrons simultaneously. But on days when there were no races, the restaurant featured no more than a couple of dishes. On more than one occasion, I would go to the restaurant for lunch, only to learn that they offered a choice of three different dishes: beef, beef and beef.

Eventually, I tried Yakiniku beef, a Japanese grilled meat dish at an Asian restaurant near Solvalla. I also remember the hot dogs that my Swedish supervisor and I had when we stopped at gas stations on our way to and from Norway on a weekend road trip from Stockholm to Oslo.

***

My father was horrified when I told him I had eaten beef. "It's okay if you eat any other meat," he said, "but please stay away from beef."

I could see where my Dad's disapproval was coming from. Apart from being a vegetarian, he had grown up in a small town in India where he knew cows and bulls that had individual names and responded when you called them. Eating a pet animal was more than what he could bear.

But my father did backtrack a little towards the end of the conversation. "Although I would advise you not to eat beef, the ultimate decision is yours," he told me.

I don't recollect if I ever told my father that I never really developed a consistent and sustained liking for beef or for any other red meat for that matter. When friends ask me why I avoid red meat, I tell them I stay away from it for health reasons, since it raises my bad cholesterol. But new research shows that it's industry-processed red meat - like cold cuts and the meat in hot dogs – which is harmful for health. I'd better look for a different excuse, for my friends have never believed me when I've told them the truth.

***

For all the progress I had made in becoming a non-vegetarian, fish loomed as a seemingly insurmountable hurdle. Fish was no red meat, but I had always chickened from trying it. I couldn't stand the smell, and I nearly threw up when I tried the tuna curry that a friend from graduate school once made especially for me.

As my stay in Sweden drew to a close and I prepared to return to the U.S., the British branch of the company I worked for invited me to stop over in London for a couple of days. At a dinner that they organized at Rules - reputed to be London's oldest restaurant - we were served steamed salmon as the entree. I didn't quite like it, but I think I finished all of it.

I don't quite remember how many times I ate fish after having it at Rules on that wintry evening in 1996. But as the years passed by, my aversion towards fish made way for tolerance, and tolerance broadened to liking.

***

One evening, when I was at a shopping mall in Bethesda, Maryland with Venkat, my then-boyfriend, I decided on a whim to try some sushi. Five years had passed since I had tasted my first chicken burger, but I was just as fearful I would get sick from eating raw fish. I made a mental note of where the restrooms were located in case I needed to use them. The psychological barrier that kept me from trying raw non-veg was a formidable one.

Venkat didn't eat any sushi, but he looked at me with an amused expression as I had it. He told me he didn't think I would get sick, and I was pleasantly surprised that he was correct.

While cooked fish had been the penultimate frontier, eating raw fish was surely the most final of all the hurdles. And yet it was sushi that beat cooked fish in the race to appeal to my palate. For while I like cooked fish, I simply love sushi.

***

My journey on the path to non-vegetarianism has been a slow and checkered one. I like to think it's over, but past experience cautions me not to jump to conclusions. I’m pretty sure I’ll never eat a monkey’s brain or drink snake’s blood or try an animal’s liver, but I’m open to trying venison. I’m not sure if I can bear to eat bear meat, though.

My food preferences have also changed over the years, sometimes almost imperceptibly. "Is it veg or non-veg?" I used to ask about restaurant dishes when I lived in India, for I took care to stay away from non-veg. "Is it Indian or non-Indian?" I asked when I moved to the U.S. Now that I've been living in the U.S. for almost two decades, the questions uppermost in my mind are "Does it have refined carbs or is it made of whole grains?" and "Is it fried or is it baked?"

Ironically, I eat two to three times as many vegetables now that I've become a non-vegetarian than when I did as a vegetarian. Back when I was younger, I treated rice and bread as entrees, and vegetables as side dishes that I ate in miniscule quantities, like most Indians of all ages still do. It’s a truism that my salad days were woefully bereft of salads. I made the change after I noticed several family members being stricken with heart disease and diabetes at early ages.

***

I know my father will never even try any non-vegetarian foods, for it goes against his principles and his core beliefs. My mother says she would like to try, but her deep-rooted disgust at eating a dead animal's remains comes in the way. I believe my sister took a shot at it several years ago, but gave it up for good. I'm the only turncoat in my family, the only one who has strayed from the straight and narrow path of vegetarianism that people of the Brahman caste are supposed to follow.

Many of my American friends still see me as a vegetarian, because the seafood and poultry that I eat don't really count as meat. Besides, I seldom eat meat when I eat out with them, for many meat dishes at restaurants feature fried meat, and I avoid fried foods like the plague.

I may be a vegetarian as far as my friends are concerned, but to this day I remain the lone wolf in black sheep's clothing in my family.

No matter what others think of me, I see myself as an omnivore who loves to ruminate and regurgitate, one who enjoys providing food for thought to those like you who are patient enough to read what I have to say.

Fair and Lovely

NINAD JOG

"Ninny has become so white!" my father said. "I could barely recognize him. I looked right past him in the rush of arriving passengers."

My mother stared at me. "He has become white as a foreigner!" she said, her eyes filled with wonder. The appreciativeness in her tone was unmistakable.

It was the summer of 1993, and I had just returned to India on my first trip home after living in the U.S. for two years as a college student. I hadn't noticed any change in my complexion, but I took my parents' word for it.

***

Not that my skin color mattered to me, like it does to many Indians. Perhaps because I don't have as much visual acuity as people around me do. There's nothing wrong with my eyesight, nor am I color-blind. But I'm not good at perceiving the looks of people and objects, and I'm sufficiently challenged at drawing and painting that I failed a state-level drawing exam in middle school which my friends passed easily.

But my paucity of visual skills may be just part of the reason for my indifference towards my skin complexion. Raised in India, where fair complexion is synonymous with good looks, I was lucky enough to have a complexion that's fair by Indian standards. Indifference would have been a luxury that I could have ill afforded had I been dark of complexion and asymmetrical of facial features.

***

Fair-skinned though I was always told I was, I must have tanned sufficiently from living in tropical India while growing up. For when I first met a fellow Indian student in the U.S. whose contact information I had, he gasped. "You're so black!" was the first thing he said to me. "I thought you'd be fairer!"

I was taken aback. The remark was quite unusual, coming from an Indian, albeit one who was whiter than me. He said he had expected me to be fairer, for people from my caste were light-skinned, and he had figured out my caste from my surname. This guy had a point. Fair though I may have been by Indian standards, I was on the darker side by the standards of my caste.

***

My parents are not the only family members who I've heard speaking glowingly about fair complexion. Several years ago, when a cousin of mine had a daughter, my grandmother told all her friends how fair-skinned the baby was. The child's birth weight, eye color and other particulars came a distant second.

My sister and I were sure our grandmother practically worshipped fair complexion, especially since she herself was white as a Caucasian. But it didn't quite add up. For the man that my grandmother had fallen in love with and married, back in the 1930s, was black as an African.

I doubt if my grandmother would have married my grandfather if she favored fair-skinned people above anyone else. Matters weren't made any easier by the fact that my grandfather was from a different caste than my grandmother, and inter-caste marriages were taboo at the time, as were so-called "love-marriages."

Over the years, I think I've figured out the reason for my grandmother's joy at her great-granddaughter's fair skin. The baby was fairer than either of her parents: something that's uncommon but not unheard-of in India. Extolling the baby's fairness was my grandmother's way of conveying her surprise.

You'd think my parents must be light-skinned, given how glowingly they spoke of my fair complexion when I returned from the U.S. But my mother is dark-skinned, while my father is almost as light-skinned as my late grandmother, although the contrast between their complexions isn't quite as stark as the contrast between my maternal grandparents.'

***

Whether they are dark-skinned or light-skinned, Indians tend to uphold light skin as an ideal. Women in India use cosmetics with names such as "Fair and Lovely," since fair equates with lovely.

But what struck me on a recent visit to India was to come across women dressed from head to toe, riding scooters and mopeds in Pune in broad daylight. Even their eyes were covered by sun-glasses. They weren't Muslim women wearing burqas; they were women wearing colorful head-to-toe clothes to keep themselves from being tanned. Looking like a zombie by covering yourself up was a small price to pay to keep from getting dark and ugly.

***

My own professed indifference to my skin color ended with a bang when I was found to have a vitamin-D deficiency recently. I had two choices to raise my vitamin-D level. I could take supplements or I could sunbathe. While I'm free to take supplements all year round, I can sunbathe only in late spring and summer, for it's too cold in the Washington D.C. area to sunbathe in other seasons, and the sun's rays don't contain enough vitamin-D-producing ultraviolet-B light in other seasons.

So off to Delaware's Rehoboth Beach I went - with the goal of sunbathing for a few hours without wearing any sunscreen. I can't swim and I don't play volleyball, so walking around in the bright sun and wading in the water was all I could have hoped to do.

"I want to become dark-skinned like you," I told one of my Indian friends. "I wouldn't have had a vitamin-D deficiency if I had sunbathed all these years."

My friend gave me an odd look. Refusing to toe the line on aiming for the preferred fair complexion was simply the latest example of my reluctance to follow the norms.

Bare-chested and wearing nothing but shorts, I spent four hours in the blazing hot sun and got badly sunburned. My chest and back turned red over the next couple of days, and itched a lot before it turned brown and the skin began flaking off. I felt like a chameleon at times and a snake at others as I molted for days on end. It was a novel experience for me, and an unsettling one at that. I’ve been scared a few times in my life, but never have I jumped so thoroughly out of my skin.

I must have got what I bargained for, for the new skin that grew underneath the burned white one had a tan brown enough to make a White man proud.

Wade in the water though I did at the beach, I had surely gone overboard. I was red-faced when I realized that what I now saw in black and white terms had left me black and brown all over.

All may be fair in love and play, but there's little that's fair when you sunbathe without applying any sunscreen.

Swedish 101

NINAD JOG

January 1997

Here's a brief lesson in Swedish, a language in which Java is pronounced Yhava, where the entrance to a car park is called Infart and the exit is called Utfart.

Many languages have words whose meanings in other languages are absolutely hilarious or downright offensive or plain different, and a recent stay in Sweden acquainted me with several such Swedish words and phrases.

As if infart and utfart were not enough, Maximum Speed is called Top Fart. The word for vacation is semester, and a dinner jacket is called smoking. That could be one reason why there don't seem to be any non-smoking restaurants in the Swedish capital Stockholm.

Shopping for shampoo in a suburban Stockholm store, I chanced upon a bottle that advertised its contents in bold letters as BAD SKUM. It sent me into paroxysms of raucous laughter, much to the alarm of a couple of dear old ladies shopping nearby. Face it: you would too. I later learnt that Bad Skum (pronounced Bahd Skoom) meant Bath Foam or liquid soap.

A bookstore yielded another linguistic gem: the Swedish title of author-in-hiding Salman Rushdie’s novel The Moor’s Last Sigh translates to Moors Sista Suck.

When someone greets you with the Swedish equivalent of How's It Goin'?, a common response is Bra!, which means good. If you're feeling real good, you say jättebra, which is Giant Bra, or very good. The goodbye greeting is Hej då, pronounced Hey Dough. Now that I'm back from Sweden I use the expression to greet any piece of dough: upon getting my paycheck I go, Hej då!

As in Britain, the preferred Swedish morning greeting is Good Morning rather than the informal Hi of America. Written God Morgon, it is pronounced Goo Moron. Calling people morons to their faces the first thing in the morning can be a supreme source of sophomoric satisfaction.

Swedish is notorious for concatenating compound nouns into tongue twisters of formidable length, and the entry for the longest word in the Guinness Book is allegedly one such word. Smaller examples abound: boxershorts and restaurangparkering (parking for restaurant patrons).

A Swedish colleague mentioned a compound word that is strange even by Swedish standards. There's a town in Sweden named Rå (å is pronounced aow), through which flows a river named Å, in which lives a species of fish named ål. Fish caught in the part of the river flowing through that town are called Rååål, pronounced raw-aow-aowl, stressing each syllable. (How appetizing does this sound: Hello there. I just had some rååål for dinner.)

Fortunately the hilarity is not all one-sided. Swedes point out that Skor, a brand of chocolates sold in the U.S. means shoes in Swedish. "Americans eat shoes!" was their excited refrain.

It was Swedish colleagues who first pointed out the signs saying Slut on juice dispensers in restaurants. "Press it and see what happens", was the risqué exhortation. I did, and in addition to getting a glass of juice learnt that slut is the Swedish word for operate or finish.

While hyphenated family names are common in many cultures, Swedes go a step further. They even have hyphenated first names such as Ann-Sophie and Karl-Axel Axelsson. More often than not, both first and last names are hyphenated - as in Ann-Sophie Eriksson-Lindgren and Anna-Stinna Glitter-Johansson. (And here I'm violating an unwritten precept that people with last names such as Jog shouldn't make fun of Glitters and Car Axels.)

Having added the three characters å, ä and ö to the script, which foreigners have trouble pronouncing, Swedes have replaced most W's with V's, gotten rid of Q's except in names such as Lundqvist, and supplanted unpopular C’s with massive doses of K's. Thus Cuba is written Kuba, and China is written and pronounced Kina. Kinda kute, kinda kool.

Part of my daily commute to work involved taking a bus headed for Hagalund after passing train stations with interesting names. One snowy October morning I reflected about how my journey had brought me from Maryland to Hagalund via Stadshagen and Hagsätra, and I wondered where it would take me next. All those destinations have unprintable meanings in Hindi and that reality was sobering.

As my stay in Sweden drew to a close, I launched a frantic search for Bad Skum in the stores. Apparently word had gotten around that evil foreigners were mocking the product and the skum had been cleaned off the shelves. Swedish colleagues at work anxiously tracked my progress: "Did you find any Bad Skum over the weekend?" became the preferred Monday morning query in favor of the more pedestrian "How was your weekend?"

Despite my best efforts I was not able to get hold of a bottle, so I settled for the next best alternative and bought a bottle of barberskum. To this day it produces a smooth shave.

When Names Ring Bells

I recently found myself cc’ed on an email exchange between two of my friends. Sanjeev asked Kau if the name Manisha rang a bell. I couldn’t resist answering, even though the question wasn’t meant for me. I told Sanjeev I was reminded of Manisha Koirala, a Bollywood actress. Sanjeev was surprised. He said he didn’t think I knew about the actress.

Sanjeev had a point. My ignorance of film stars is legion.

But Manisha Koirala was an exception. There was a time – almost three years ago – when her name was on my lips night after night for several nights, as I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling.

Faceless Names

I can seldom match a film star's name with their face, on the rare occasions when I recognize the name. If someone shows me Hema Malini's picture and tells me it’s Manisha Koirala, I’ll take their word for it. There are exceptions, of course. I wouldn't fall for it if someone tried to pass off Lata Mangeshkar as Manisha Koirala.

I can match film stars’ names with their faces for a few days after seeing a Bollywood movie, but I'm unable to recollect ever having seen them just a few weeks later.

It's not that I don't see Bollywood movies regularly; I do. I dutifully see one once every five years.

Hypochondriac that I am, I'm afraid I may have prosopagnosia – an impaired ability to recognize faces.

Repeat Tautology

One of the most glaring examples of my face-recognition deficiency occurred almost two decades ago, when my newly-minted friends from graduate school introduced me to one of their friends one fine evening. A couple years older to me, this person was lionized in the Indian media for his academic accomplishments. I had heard about him years before I first met him. As I shook his hands that evening, he told me we had met before. I remembered meeting him, and I remembered what we had talked about. But for all I knew, I was seeing his face for the very first time.

Embarrassing as it was, there was more in store. When I ran into him and his friends in the Beltway Plaza mall near my Greenbelt home a week later, I approached him and introduced myself.
"Hi," I said, "I'm Ninad."
He flashed a wide grin. "I'm Sanjeev," he said. "We've met twice before!"

It was the same Sanjeev who was now asking about Manisha. I can recognize Sanjeev quite easily these days, having met him many times over the past few years. But I'm still plagued by uncertainty if I run into him in an unfamiliar locale, or if he is by himself.

Just the other day, I spotted a familiar face grinning at me from about twenty feet away, outside the Sri Siva Vishnu Temple in Maryland. I didn't grin back at him. I didn't smile either. I turned around nervously, wondering whether Sanjeev's evil twin was grinning at my evil twin.

Only when I noticed there was no one behind me did I muster the courage to flash Sanjeev a smile. It's best to err on the side of caution, I figured. That's what cowards do anyway!

The incident in the Beltway Plaza mall may have been the nadir of embarrassment, but it wasn't quite the apotheosis of prosopagnosia. The direst dulling of my face-recognition capabilities was still fifteen years away.

Nameless Faces

In the days after being hospitalized for severe head trauma from being hit by a small branch of a falling tree, I didn't recognize anyone's faces, except those of my close relatives. I also mistook my roommate and my close friends for people whom I knew from a decade earlier, even though those people had only been mere acquaintances.

My face-recognition capabilities were restored as the days in hospital turned into weeks, but people's names continued to be a blank slate. When an ex-colleague visited me in hospital, I told him point blank that I remembered who he was, but I couldn’t recollect his name. “Darn!” I thought, when he reintroduced himself. “His name sounds so familiar; we used to meet every day. How did I forget his name?”

I do not remember his name anymore. People don’t fall by the wayside, but memories do.

A week before my release from hospital, I remembered that the Director of my group at my former workplace was an Indian from Mumbai, a native Hindi speaker fluent in Marathi. I could recollect his face quite vividly, but his name drew a blank. The tables had been turned. Faceless names had made way for nameless faces.

After my parents left my bedside for the day at 8 p.m., I would apply all my vigor to remembering the Director’s name. It was unquestionably the day's most intellectually demanding pursuit.

My efforts were partially rewarded after a couple of days, when I remembered his first name was Manish. But try as I might, all my attempts at appending a surname would zero in on Manisha Koirala. Much to my frustration, it was a story that repeated itself night after night. Only after being released from hospital did I remember his name was Manish Choudrey.

Distinct though Manisha Koirala is from Manish Choudrey, the two are maddeningly alike when your brain wafts aimlessly through a skewered haze.

As the years shoot by like a bullet train, and callowness gives way to mellowness, I hope the demons of head trauma, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease stay forever at bay. Let's hope I never forget my own name. But one can never be sure. We can tell when a name rings a bell, but who knows how the bells of the future will toll?