Summer

The heat and the humidity are catching up with me so my brain is not at its best right now. What I like to do most is to listen to music, read and yes, clean up, because that doesn't take much brain power as such. Last week Tukaram, the two ladies and I took a look at the spare room next to the kitchen where the ladies have been requested to sleep. The things that emerged from it were amazing.

At first, the two beauties joined me in looking up at the loft and gawking at the odd looking heaps and bundles with which it was crammed. They very cooperatively seconded my feelings of disgust though they didn’t quite as enthusiastically back up my suggestion that we start to actually deal with the mess. Well, at the end of about two hours we had found stuff which had been rotting there for I don’t know how long. Mouldy slippers belonging to my grandmother, moth-eaten cardboard files, a huge mysterious trunk filled with holes which had been shrouded in a faded cotton sheet, whose contents nobody had bothered to check for a lifetime, because, the two maids, (when asked why they’d never bothered to take a look at it) said, “it was locked.” So we broke open the lock and found that the trunk was quite empty. There were not even any rats or roaches in it. It turned out to be the one my mom had taken with her on her first trip abroad when she’d sailed to England to join my father in the summer of ’53.

Well, the room is looking a whole lot cleaner and more respectable minus the junk. And now there is this huge loft up in the study where I'm working right now, begging me to also take a look and relieve it of the rubbish which is decaying in it. I will, soon.

Computer Hassles

My computer's on the blink. I haven't been able to use it since Sunday and the computer engineer who showed up yesterday whisked it off for god knows how long, saying there was some problem with the motherboard. So I have swiped my father's laptop and am watching him do a restless jig in the background. What to do. I told him I use it a lot more than he does and that it makes more sense for me to have it than for it to be sitting around in his flat so he can look up his mails for five minutes every day. He sighed and gave in. He probably thinks, first it's my shirts, then it's my camera, then it's various other knick knacks I've bought, now she wants my computer. Yeah, that's what daughters are for, to help lighten their dads' loads in life so they can walk light and easy on this earth.

A Tantra Session

Lyn who passed through Bombay on his way back to San Francisco last week, conducted quite an interesting session for us last Saturday evening, based on the "Tandava dance" He talked to us before that about Tantra being the philosophy of acceptance and oneness, rather than an attitude of rejection which negated all desires.

Lyn had spent six months in India on this particular trip, and visited Kerala, Auroville (which sounds like an intriguing place) and Chennai where he met George over lunch. It's not his first trip to India either, he's been coming here since the late eighties - almost for twenty years. Anyway it was fun talking to him and we also exchanged a lot of music on his last evening here.

Five Star Crap

It wasn't a case of overeating or indigestion. No. It was downright food poisoning. Five star food poisoning. As bad or worse than what you can get from eating bhel or pani puri from a roadside stall. Baaaah! It took me over three days to recover but now I'm back to normal and my stomach yearns for food again, at mealtimes. Too bad. When I told Ariela about my being ill on the phone, she said well maybe I would lose some weight. Not half likely. The pound or two I lost has probably come right back.

Ouuuchhhh!

This morning I woke up feeling like I could go the next fifty years without eating. There was this huge rock in my stomach which I suspect was either the tuna steak I had last night or the lemon butter sauce poured liberally on top of it. Our German friend Veronika had invited us to the Trattoria for a meal which I had looked forward to, all day and now look where I've landed.

So I decided to meditate for a bit on the heaviness inside me, bordering on pain, and came to the conclusion that it felt more like a hangover. The question which naturally followed was, can you get a hangover from eating Tuna? No, well, I remembered that the evening had also involved some red wine, but not that much. We shared a bottle of Cabernet Shiraz between the four of us which is pretty decent. Nobody can accuse us of being alcoholics.

So anyway, today, instead of starting with breakfast as I usually do, I decided to begin with my morning exercises, went on to have a shower, then moved to the breakfast table. Maybe the muesli or the coffee helped because along the way there was a good long burp which kind of lightened the load in my tummy - I presume by helping me let out what P calls "gaze", which she also suffers from and for which reason she probably burps and groans all day. Well now I know what she feels like, but don't know why she does, considering she never eats tuna or lemon butter sauce.

I am currently struggling back to my normal state but it is going to be a while before I actually feel hungry again.

+++

I've finally had a haircut though my father says it looks like the hairdresser removed a single strand of hair from either side of my head and left the rest the way it was. Ok. I'll leave all of you to decide the truth of this statement when you see me in person. Veronika who had gone on at me to cut my hair when we met last week, said to me yesterday: "You call this a haircut?" Then she spent the first five minutes of dinner looking at me like she'd bit into a sour lemon. But I didn't give her a chance to go on looking like that, I was as charming as it is possible for me to be and she finally had to stop looking disgusted.