Time

At once timeless and fleeting, a memory is the most painful reminder of what once was.

Material things can be trusted - trusted to be there, to evoke a familiar feeling in the pit of your throat, to make your hands reach out and feel them and amaze at how they felt exactly the same so many years back. If only for the part of the universe that can be felt and touched and seen, time flows backwards and stops at that precise moment when your friends first handed you that card and that last time you proudly wore that jersey. Time stops - yes - and that wonderful trickster that we call our heart will relive those moments, and as Thomas Hardy said, "Maybe, what as interlude / I feign, I shall believe." Slowly the day, time and hour comes back to you as a throbbing in your head and a catch in your voice, a pathetic slowness in your step. The time that retracted itself rushes back like a tightly wound spring and we are left not unlike on a rollercoaster - neither here nor there just an aching emptiness that slowly closes.

A memory, however, is a slightly different thing. It does not transport, nor does it relive. There are no gradual reminiscences and piecemeal collaboration of hazy thoughts. Time does not rewind - it jumps. Backward, and back again. For a split second, everything flashes, crystal clear, lovingly familiar and untouched by the malignant claws of that Old Hag they call Time. Sight, smell, taste, touch all return, or maybe YOU are back there. You can feel the sweat pouring down as you shout in jubilation, you can feel the agony of another ligament twisting, the frustration of another romance foiled. Then it's gone. The present does not pull you back, slowly, then rapidly - no spring action for a memory, no. It's just gone. You wonder if it even happened, this eerie vision. But it did. The senses are proof enough - each saturated with familiarity, the state variables that from a million different combinations picked the right one. Senses that drip with vividness, and grief. The memory lives and dies like a firefly - ethereal, ephemeral. Leaving behind not grief and emptiness alone, but senses that reach for something and grab in the dark for that which was never there.

So what's cooking?

Tamilian households are well versed with the "Maami." Once used to address your Mama's wife, before he became 'Uncle' and she 'Aunty' owing to fashun pressures, and by many Madisar-sporting women thrown together in the same house for a function, its now the acceptable way to call your cook.

A colorful thought that occured to me... imagine: "Gomathilakshmi, konjam sambhar konduvangoolaen!" ["Gomathilakshmi, respectfully if you please get some sambhar please"] as compared with "Maaami, kozhandha chips kaekkaraan". ["Yo! This here kid is respectfully asking for some chips"] [Clearly, Tambrahm Tamil is exceedingly polite and all] The latter prevents the respected Smt. Gomathilaks from tottering in hurriedly with the chips and bumping into equally respected (unless her daughter ran off with some fellow) Smt. Jayalaks, who has the sambhar. Abstraction and Object Oriented Programming, thy 'amma' is the Tambrahm household.


Now that introductions are done with, lets bite into it, so to speak (cooking-eating pun serendipitously intended). Many houses these days, with lesser joint families, more working women and genetically kitchen-shy men, know the Maami. In which case they also know that there is probably a strong nexus between these 'help' and general physicians that results in your fair mother's BP being played ping pong with (or basketball, if you are a Vadivelu fan). Consider:

"Maami Rasam ready a?"
[Yo! Is the flavored water respectfully done yet?]

"Illa ka, puli pudhu batch so alavu theriyala. Uppu karam eduthu vechurukkaen neenga paathu sollungo."
[No, elder sister! The tamarind is different from yesterdays, since yesterday's got used up in yesterday's food. I have respectfully set apart the salt and pepper items, please peruse and respectfully advice]

"Ippo enna pannirkael, Maami?
[*strained* So what's cooking now, yo!?]

"Thanni kodhikka vechurukkaen ka"
[I've set the water to boil at a respectful temperature, elder sister]

"Oh! *saniyan*"
[Oh! *Accursed liege to Saturn who is entering not only my house but various houses in my horoscope and resultantly throwing all planets in disarray* (note how the oh! is not respectful)]
"Seri Maami, idli suttacha?"
[That's ok. Yo! have you respectfully baked the rice-cakes that are to come out as soft as baby's bottoms?]

"Illa ka, maavu ok va nu paarungo"
[No elder sister, you respectfully check the dough first na]

"Ellam en neram dhaan! Seri naane sudaraen"
[All my bad time. (Note that this is redundant since Saturn sitting anywhere in your house indicates this, as any respectful Tambrahm would know already)
The remaining part of the sentence has one of two meanings:
a) Ok I will bake them myself, said with a resigned sigh.
b) Ok I will brand you with that hot iron, said with an evil glint.]
"Seri Maami, enna dhaan pannirkael?"
[No problem. Yo! What HAVE you done today?]

"Appalam suttutaen ka!"
[Elder Sis Elder Sis, I heated up those papads!]

Author's musing: Seriousa, ivalaam Maami a microwave oven a? [Are these cooks or microwave ovens?]

Blush-worthy stuff...

Amongst the few, very few places that the Chennai I know of has to offer the average guy "in transit" in his life, so to speak, EA mall would have to rank pretty high up there. Amidst its mind-boggling cornucopia of stores big and small, the distant-middle-of-nowhere-small-town-guy in me was caught thinking, "Where in the world did this spring up from? What are those tinted windows on the top floor for? Is that a basement or an atrium? Coffee for 65 bucks? Hey where's that rad place called Citi Center? Where's the rest of her dress?" and so on. Efficiently compressed, that would be, "WHAT THE FISH?!!?".

Sociologists will agree when I say it is hard to decide if the clear spurt in consumer spending (earning too, maybe?) is more radical than the sudden influx of, dare I say it, Babes! I'm no sexist (Mostly. Other times, I'm with a friend and we're intolerable. Political correctness and humor just don't go!) but my god what happened to my city? It's got a freaking makeover! Brands walk past me where once malli-poo's did! I see committed people without a mama over their shoulders. It's like coming back home to find a usually conservative wife greet you with Victoria Secret's summer collection!

Which reminds me of a pretty harrowing experience. While Escape is undoubtedly one of the biggest attractions at EA (of course, I'm not speaking about the average generation old rich guy who uses his dad's cash to actually SHOP at one of the ridiculously overpriced stores there) it was quite unnerving to enter 'Blush'. A little known fact is that every theater in this very indulgent multiplex is themed after something. However, Blush does not, as many teenage guys wistfully believe, screen adult movies. I'm sorry if I broke your hearts, but the deception had to stop somewhere.

No, Blush is themed "after women, and the things they cherish". That's all jolly good, but is it just me, or does watching a movie there make you feel like you're sitting inside a powder box? I mean, half the time I kept looking up half expecting the roof to tilt open and a long, snotty, overly made-up nose to peer in and brush me with one of those ridiculously fluffy instruments women use. Let me assure you that is not good cinema! Not to mention scary for the guy sitting next to me!

That said, the movie was certainly entertaining. Penelope Cruz certainly brought a lot more to the party than Kiera Knightley did the last 3 editions, and I, since we have already established am not sexist, refer purely to entertainment value. On an equally serious note, her performance as Jack was extraordinary, as was her patented sexy latin lisp. Finally, some of the love-making scenes were really intense and realistic until a friend pointed out the screen was the other way.