Ahh... Bombay!

Mansi and Sophie entertaining each other

Landing at Sahar airport was like a slap in the face. Sudden, unexpected (because when you're abroad you forget how things are in India) and stinging. There was this union strike, see, so everything was slowed down and I thought it would take not just a few hours but a few days before I got home. I most often ask for a wheelchair to circumvent the long queues at immigration and customs and am whizzed through like a rocket. This time the wheelchair took forever to arrive and when I raised an eyebrow, the air hostess told me that it was because seventeen passengers on our aircraft had put in a request for assistance. Seventeen??!! Yikes. Is India the only country where a sizeable fraction of the population is old and/or disabled?!

After a bit I saw that the wheelchairs had arrived but we were still waiting. It turned out that there were only about two assistants to push the whole lot of us because the rest of the workers were on strike. Somehow we managed (I began to regret having asked for a wheelchair and thought I might have gotten out faster on my own this time). As if this weren't enough there were some checks on account of swine flu and we had to fill in forms regarding the state of our health while we were screened for fever or symptoms of flu. The area around immigration was choking with passengers who had not been cleared but of course, there's nothing like patience. I decided to take it all with grace, even if I had to wait there till the next morning.

Finally when we got our bags I decided I'd had enough of the wheelchair and being pushed around together with seventeen others and decided to grab hold of the trolley on which my bags had been piled and made my way out. Here too, milling crowds, a mixture of passengers and those who had come to fetch them. In perpetual fear of being knocked down I made my way out to where I caught side of Tuks who had come to collect me, along with Pawar after which I stuck to his side until the car arrived.

***

My return home was marked with a lot of activity. To begin with, S's sister had come to stay for a few days along with her loquacious three and a half year old daughter Mansi who as long as she's awake, cant keep her mouth shut. Luckily she is at the stage when anything and everything she says is cute and you cant help laughing. Then Suhail arrived around 4 in the afternoon. He had come to meet his friend and colleague from Paris, Sophie, who was to arrive that night, and whom he went to fetch from the airport.

Sophie turned out to be a hit with Mansi who even learned a few words in French including "Bonjour" and "Comment ca va". She was also very popular with Shambhu who sidled past her as she was leaning over the railing facing the garden, raised a leg and sprayed her on the arm. I was aghast to hear about it from Suhail though Sophie just giggled and shrugged and said it was normal, if someone regarded you as his territory.

The first few days I was knocked out and mostly in a bit of a zombie like state but having slept and slept and eaten and slept this last week I am finally back to normal.

Skol!

In between all the heavy work which we were subjected to in the workshops :) Ayse and I would periodically take off, call up a couple of motorbike taxis and spin off into the village of Japaratinga which is right on the beach. Our first stop was invariably the internet café in the centre of the small town after which we would walk down to “Mama Pereira’s” , a replica of the beachside shacks you find in Goa. Even the waiters in jeans and T-shirts, resembled those in Goa, laidback but friendly.


What I loved was the beer, which everywhere was served chilled. To keep it cold the bottle or beer can itself is stuck into a kind of thermos flask flask which keeps it chilled almost to the end. Mama Pereira’s was good fun to hang out in, it was casual, frequented by dozens of people during the day, yet not overcrowded, and every now and then a vendour or fisherman would walk through, flaunting his wares. You have little boys cycling down the beach side road, flogging everything from ice cream to locally manufactured CD’s, their little tin containers fitted with stereos blaring out samba music.





While Ayse and I were chilling one afternoon with a glass of beer, this peanut seller strolled through the restaurant, little plastic bags of peanuts strung up along a bamboo pole. I stopped him to take a photograph. He nodded but asked me to wait. Then he fished around for a few seconds in his pocket and whipped out a pair of sunglasses which he stuck on his nose with a flourish. Now, he indicated, he was ready to be photographed.


The one big jolt I got in Brazil was that nobody but nobody seems to speak anything but Portuguese. One in a hundred maybe can get by with a smattering of English otherwise it is mostly sign language. The menu at Mama Pereira’s is entirely in Portuguese but by and by we picked up some of the essential terms. Abrigado means thank you. (If a woman says it, it’s Abrigada), Fish is Peixe (pronounced “peshe”), beer (the first thing I learned from Rupert at Mama Pereira’s), is Cerveja, cheese is queijo. Then I saw a word on the menu which I thought couldn’t possibly be what I thought it was – batata. In fact, like it does in Marathi, it means potato!



On the east coast of Brazil the sun rises so early in the morning that we were mostly up and about by five o'clock. By six thirty several of us would have gathered in the garden where we had our meals, waiting desperately for our morning coffee and by seven the multi course breakfast would start to appear in bits and pieces, at Willi’s resort where the group was staying during the workshop.

The sun also sets early in these parts. By three in the afternoon it begins to get cool. This is when, if we were at Mama Pereira’s, we would get onto the beach because it was no longer very hot. It is by and large a clean, quiet and pretty beach. By five the sun starts to set and by six it is pitch dark. During the workshop days dinner would be served by six and by seven it looked like there was nothing to do but go to bed. The first few days I was zapped, just not used to this kind of routine. Then things settled down and by the time Ariela, Thomas and others arrived, we would just hang out, order ourselves a Caipirinha (white rum based drink with sugar and lemon – very nice!) and chat till late. Sometimes Thomas or Paul or someone would get out their guitars and entertain us. At some point I will write about the workshops. (Four in the space of about twelve days!) Maybe when I’ve sorted out the pictures I got from Silvia, the Brazilian woman who attended the sessions. She is an anthropologist and film maker and one of the few people I met who spoke English fluently, mainly because she had spent three and a half years in Winnipeg doing her PhD in social anthropology.

Saturday Evening In Frankfurt

On Sabine's balcony

It was good catching up with Suhail this weekend. He came over on Friday afternoon and as usual a good bit of our time initially was spent in trading news and getting familiar with each other’s current situation. We were determined to stick to our Saturday evening date with the group which somehow seemed a bit different from back home because in Bombay (or rather India) our timing for the meditation is from half past ten to half past eleven whereas in Europe it is from 7 to 8 in the evening. It was a lovely evening, the sun was in the midst of setting, the sky was a lovely mixture of blue, grey and pink and suffused with a typical twilight atmosphere.

We had had kind of a hard day - most of all Suhail and my friend Sabine with whom I’m staying at the moment, who had done some hard core shopping after breakfast. The shopping was for the evening meal which was originally meant to be a surprise for Su. The surprise was that he was going to have to cook for us. In fact it was more of a shock as Su had been expecting to relax and have someone else take over the kitchen for a change. In spite of some nasty sounding rumblings from deep inside him, we ended up with the most delicious fish concoction, sprinkled with herbs and baked in the oven and an equally mindboggling dessert – ice cream with slices of fried mango.

Suhail had just spent an hour chopping and cleaning and putting things together before we settled down for the meditation. I played a CD which I had burned for him and for an hour we sat back and watched the evening sky. I realised how much this kind of simple ritual helps to bond people, to make space to integrate feelings one has been experiencing during the day, if not the entire week, space for gratitude - for everything, from your own body, (eg to the senses, which are like a window to the world,) to the presence of various friends without whom life would be like a saltless diet. The tiredness of the day miraculously slipped away and at the end of the hour we felt ready to go on with the rest of the evening which we then did, with great gusto, together with Sabine and her friend Rolf who joined us later.

Tomorrow Ayse and I take the flight to Recife in Brazil so I don’t know when I will next be able to mail. Anyway keep well all of you. And sooner or later we’ll catch up with each other.

(Incidentally while shopping Suhail bought a card reader for me which now enables me to transfer my pics to the computer so as to be able to upload them).

Greetings From The Home Of The Frankfurter

Sachsenhausen - the quarter where Sabine lives

This is really a dumb thing to do but though I remembered to bring my camera along I forgot all the connecting cables - the charger and the USB cable - which means I wont be able to post any pics until I get home. Or unless I manage to find a USB cable which suits the camera. The memory exercise they showed us to do in the acupressure class seems to have had the reverse effect. Think I was doing much better before I started to activate what they call the memory point. Oh well.

It is rather nice to be back in Frankfurt after a gap of three years. This time, since we're flying out of Frankfurt to Brazil I thought I'd spend some time with Sabine who has moved from the busy street she used to earlier live in, to a quiet neighbourhood in the same locality. In some ways the flat is much nicer. It's airy, more cheerful, and has a wonderful terrace adjoining the living room with its floor to ceiling plate glass windows from where you get a view of the sky and of a lot of shady trees through which you see the tops of the nearby buildings. The disadvantage is that it is not as close to the restaurants and shops which the other place was. There you had to just walk down to the street and within a hundred meters on either side you'd find a mix of Mexican, Italian, French or German restaurants. Now all the shopping and the eating out involves a steep climb down the hill and then some amount of walking.

As usual a lot of time has been spent in catching up with the news, and also in sampling the different cheeses spread out on the dining table at meal times, and also the variety of fruit. Talking of food, Suhail is probably already in the train from Paris, on his way to Frankfurt for the weekend, unaware of the plans which Sabine and I have, to get him to produce dinner tomorrow - just giving him an opportunity to exercise his culinary skills.

Brazil, Here I Come! (Take Two)

Beachnear Recife

The last time I set out for Brazil I ended up spending four and a half months in Germany with a broken leg, recuperating at Ariela's place. And though the experience finally turned out to be wonderful and something I would never want to miss, I hope the trip to Recife on the west coast of Brazil (where I am soon headed) will unfold, without the aid of any such excitement or dramatic incident.

The visa has come through after a lot of haggling by the Brazilian consulate who required a letter of invitation from the owner of the guest house in Brazil on his official letterhead. Willi Graber who runs a modest guest house in Japaratinga mailed back saying that as he was a really small operator he didn't have an official letterhead but that he would see if a hotelier friend of his would send us the invitation. Somehow my travel agent managed to swing a deal and the visa came through without my having to break my neck (or another leg). Now Bablu who is also supposed to be joining the rest of the gang up in Recife is struggling to get his visa, having been asked to furnish a complete itinerary detailing his three week stay in the country. I mean, we're all going to be hanging out in Japaratinga with the local shamans.

You'd think that all Indians were scrambling over each other in their haste to leave their own country in exchange for Brazil!!

The Week Gone By

As I am sure my goddaughter (God-dottie) will testify, I make a lousy godmother. I am a zero at remembering birthdays, I dont remember to give people gifts (maybe I'm just stingy), I'm not the most sympathetic person on earth for a high energy teenager to turn to (oops I keep forgetting Dottie is no longer in her teens - she is entering her late twenties even if she doesn't quite look it). But one thing I'll say ... I am always happy to see God-dottie when she does bounce into view as she did last week, quite out of the blue.

Devika, studying dance therapy in the U.K. is back home on vacation and landed up here with Jyotsna and Ravi before they returned to Pune. I offered her our group to experiment on so perhaps she will take me seriously and when she is through with her studies, we can occasionally sit at her feet and get some gyan on our pscyhe through dance and movement.

***

Ever since Master Shambhu appeared in our lives last summer, S. my executive assistant, has become as soft brained about cats as I am. She keeps bringing strays home to feed though I insist on her taking them right back where she found them, as Shambhu doesn't like to share his territory with other felines and can get quite mean and grumpy when a visitor does occasionally saunter in. A couple of days back anyway, there was this cute as hell kitten wailing away in our compound so Saru asked the guard downstairs to bring it up, which he obligingly did. We fed it milk and some raw beef which it happily gobbled down, after which it settled down nicely in my arms, purring away so it was rather sad to have to send it on its way after a while. Luckily Master-ji happened to be gallivanting at the time so we managed to avoid high drama.

Training Group Meet

Cooling off in the afternoon

Mary and Ayse supporting Bablu in the water

The highlight of our training group workshop in Goa in August, was Mary's lessons in the swimming pool, during which she learned to float. As we prepared to go into the pool for the first time her face was a study in fear and misery as she was terrified of water. Though she is from Kerala and is familiar with the rivers there, she apparently never, in all these years, learned to swim or float in spite of several people including her sisters, having offered to teach her.

The first few minutes in the water were filled with squeaks and squeals but within half an hour there was this peaceful apparition floating on the surface of the water and refusing to get out. "Can't be me!" she said incredulously, when she did. "Mary cant float and this person was doing just that. So very simply it cant be me."

During a session

Heinz slicing the fish

Other highlights (apart from the actual work) included excellent barbeque fish prepared by the caretaker of the Goa house which had been offered to us for a week by Bablu and Mary's friend Aparna. The house itself was huge with this huge long old style verandah running down the length of it, overlooking emerald green fields. It was quiet most of the time except in the evenings when the nearby temples often competed with each other to set the neighbourhood ablaze with their loudspeakers spewing out various bhajans. Once they even had karaoke evening so we were subjected to about three hours of loud and utterly tuneless singing. Poor Heinz had a hard time falling asleep because some evenings the racket would continue well past midnight.

Sandeep and his wife Vimal, the caretaker and his wife very soon became part of the family and Sandeep who loves to chat, would entertain us with his opinion on politics, his childhood experiences and generally help out with everything. Their five year old daughter Priyanka loved hanging out with us and practised her English now and then.

Priyanka acting coy

Ayse in Indian garb

Heinz - morning contemplation

It was great having Ayse and Heinz with us and Ayse lead us in some of the water exercises and other stuff during the workshop.

The training group in Goa