The First Onam

My first onam in the US some years ago saw me diligently making payasam for my roommates. All said and done, I was a bit homesick and plus it made my parents happy to know that I was involved in some form of celebration. It came out OK, as far as I can remember, but it took so much effort that the subsequent six Onams saw me just pick up the phone and call people to wish. I have, correction - had, this block when it comes to Malayalam dishes. I couldn't say which was what, much less cook any of it. So when I heard HG rattle off dish names and ingredients, I was rather looking forward to a first true Onam. The Real McCoy thing. With rice aka chor, sambar, cabbage thoran, avial, kootu curry, inji pulli, potato thoran, pineapple pacchadi, semia payasam and pappadam. (So much for the block! Ha! How about them apples?) Oh wait..I forgot the best part - this sadya had non vegetarian items of chicken roast and fish fry too on the menu list, a concept completely foreign to me, one that caused my mother some frowning before she satisfied herself with "Oh but I guess Sunday is not Onam". People can satisfy themselves whichever way they want. HG wasn't backing down. And I was thinking .. "yum".

A drive to the Indian store in Indy saw a bit of this looking-forwardness wane off. HG was driving, having freshly passed her learner's permit. She was also yelling, at me (the instructor of American road rules), that n+ years of driving slow will not permit her to go the highway speed limit right off the bat. She was also yelling at me that n+ years of driving has given her enough skills to avoid hitting parked cars. We wont go into whose fault was what - but there was a moment where I thought - Aye, will this Onam be pulled off OK? Or will there be a meltdown?

But making ups happened. And cooking was started on Saturday night. I was up first with my sambar. And we realized there was no daal. Or rather, the "right" daal. HG said use this other daal, I think it should be OK. Silly me, even after witnessing her debacle , I still listened to her. Half hour later, we were tasting feet-like stuff in yellow and making faces. Us -0, things-that-went-wrong -1. Thankfully, the international store here sold daal, so off we went. We then realized that we are running quite late on our schedule. So I went into Speed mode, freaking the heck out of HG who said later, just call me when you're done. And I did. Sambar was done.

Chicken was then marinated. Cabbage was next (again me), along with HG making her kootu curry. We had gotten frozen bengal gram for kootu curry and there were panicked phone calls to aunts (since Moms were sleeping) about whether this was the right stuff. But we finished it off. Cabbage first, Kootu curry second. And things were said, like "oh this is your cabbage, I would have made it this way" and "oh so this is what kootu curry is". Fish was marinated as well. And potatoes were boiled for the next day. Inji pulli was begun. More frantic calls to mums (this time they were up) were made. Without any further catastrophes this too was passed. Tired that we were, we called it a night. It was past midnight. And there was still much to do.

And of course, we got up late, close to almost eight. Guests were supposed to come by 130 pm. Potatoes were frantically cooked by me. And I was pretty sure we wouldn't make it, when HG went into zen-like mode. Fear not, she said, things will get done by 10.30. And things did get done, amazingly. Damn, this woman really goes when she goes. Not without bugaboos though. The pineapple "refused to boil" in HGs words. My sad jokes about them being Mexican pineapples, and thus something that needs reckoning, were not appreciated. Curses were flung in all directions - at the pressure cooker, at the size of pans, at the pineapple, at me. But everything did get done and every bit was perfect looking. And both of us were looking happily at each other. The end was in sight.

At 130 pm the guests sauntered in wishing happy onam. The dishes were photographed and then dug into. Yum was the most frequently uttered word.

HG was truly happy. She was tired, but she had done it. Thrown our first onam sadya as a home and a family. She was up for the challenge, always was. This was her doing, with a lot of good help.

Best part is, there are plenty of left overs.

Yum.

The Porn story

I grew up in a disciplined and a very protected household, with the result being that I never hung with my schoolmates. I was never allowed to join any school team, even though I was very good at sports, and was only allowed once in an inter-school event. I never ventured out to any of classmates places and no one in particular came to mine. The overall effect of such was that I was introduced to most things came late in my life. Especially guy stuff - like knowing all the mallu bad words, and watching porn.

This was before the internet, at a time when video stores were prolific. Sure, there were movies with adult content in them, but these were all fast forwarded by my dad at first and my big sister later on. Dad even yelled at our video store guy for giving a kid a comedy movie (I forget the name) involving a sperm bank. A watchful eye was kept on my viewing activities. Then, we moved video stores and this new one had a rack dedicated to porn. And I would scheme, from being filled with boyish curiosity, on how to go about discovering it. One afternoon, my friend E's place became free and he invited me over. And that was were the first screening happened (I was in the 11th) amongst other gents who had a rather exceptional knowledge about this stuff.

The video store content however remained elusive.

A short time later, my parents had to leave leaving me the sole occupant of the house for a whole weekend. A-ha. Among the list of banned things that I was going to do, a visit to the video rental was going to be one of them. Among the others, if you must know, was trying to play basketball at the nearby church playground, watching late night TV and smoking a cigarette on the terrace. Plans were made, and nervousness was quelled. The video store guy after all knew my parents, both being frequent temple goers. But I had a feeling it might be OK. The day came and I rode the bike to the place.

The rack was empty.

I quelled further nervousness and reasoned with myself. If I didnt ask now, there'll be no tomorrow. Maybe he just shifted it.

I asked.

Er, cheta, what happened to all the ..cough..blue films?

Oh that. I gave them all away and I stopped that stuff.

I was so suprised and taken aback that I blurted out "Why?!" and immediately regretted it. I didn't want him to think of me as a horny teenager, but I was just so immensly suprised at why this guy would do this ..now... after such a long time of harboring these films. Thankfully, he didnt appear to think any such thing.

"I just stopped it. Got up one morning and decided to get rid of it all. It's not because I was scared of being caught or anything. I just couldn't do it, couldn't go the temple every day and look at His face. So I got rid of it, didn't even sell it for money."

Hmm.

As I left the place, I waved to his little girl. Maybe having her in the house was one reason.

'Tis an Iron and Wine afternoon

The return of Ykas from vacation saw the resumption of animated talking between him and Sequence L.

I wouldn't say that the residents of the graduate student office are characters right out of PhDcomics. For one thing, there's only one white guy in this room. And everyone here are hardworkers that maintain regular hours and are fairly normal to talk too, . But there is a lot of cross-talk and there are certain quirks.

W, the white guy, is a baseball fan. Him and the Puerto Rican-Ramirez-die-hard-follower get together often to shoot the baseball shit. W is not exclusivelly a baseball fan - he can talk any sport with anyone who cares to listen. During the world cup, there were frequent REALLY LOUD curses coming from his end one day. I thought his research was collapsing.

"You ok W?"

"Yeah I will be once USA fucking scores".

You get the drift.

Then there are the South Koreans. The wise, aged, been-there-done-that couple of guys who are silent except when they start jabbering in korean. The newest member to this club, Sequence L, is not welcomed wholly by these two wise men, but is tolerated purely on an origin-ship context. The lady south korean, Dr. Ho, on the other hand, is the most hardworking amongst all of us - extremely focused and a general joy to have a next desk person.

Incidentally, Sequence L (you might have guessed) is an expert on gene sequencing analysis. He worked for a bit before returning to grad school and always begins his questions with the phrase "Back in the day, when I was..".

Then there's young Ykas. Him and SL are a match made in heaven. Both love to jabber - ceaselessly.

The chinese are a group on their own cherishing their native tongue. The bot who sits behind me speaks English in a very mechanical voice and goes 5 days in a row in the same clothes. the other guy constantly clears his throat once he starts thinking. A, when she was here, would get so mad at this sound that she would boost the volume of her headphones to deafening proportions. Unfortunately for me, her headphones were leaky and thus there I was stuck between the throat-clearer and bad-sounding-bhangra. Throat-clearer's wife is quiet, for the most part, until she connects with three other chinese women. Then it becomes a chinese allegro of what I assume is fashion and gossip (since our field is not terribly this exciting).

And me? I ain't much of an office talker, but I used to curse when shit didnt work. But not anymore. Since I got rather intimidated by Dr. Ho's quiet working routine.

Most days will find me behind headphones. This afternoon found me hooked on Iron and Wine after one of HG's music suggestions.

The Facebook reduction rules

I recently realized that the number of FB friends that I have is getting a little too much to handle. There is a limit to manageable social connectivity, as I understand it, called the Dunbar's number (about 150 social contacts) and the aim was to reach this.

So, it was chop down time. And here were some rules.

1. Keep people you meet almost on a constant daily basis. This list included officemates, fellow graduate students, IT support staff (very important!), cricket mates and other sports-mates.
2. Remove faculty though (I didn't really have any on my list but this seemed like a general sound scheme).
3. Remove religious nuts thanking god at every moment (even if they fall under Rule 1).
4. Remove away the dude who gets 10 comments for every status message he shares and you can't figure out why (Exceptions - those who fall under Rule 1).
5. Keep people you've truly enjoyed drinking with, and others who were OK drinking buddies (for now).
6. Keep people you think you'll truly enjoy drinking with.
7. Remove people whose friend request you've mulled on for a week to begin with.
8. Remove people from high school whom you sent a friend request. You wanted to see where they ended up and now you know. Some have become fat and ugly. Most have jobs.
9. Remove one time meets. There's only so much you can chat about that one meet.
10. Remove people who take too many Farmville, Barmville and other permutations of sillyness. There's only so much Hide **** Application you can do.
11. Keep people whose blogs you read, whose photography skills you admire and who have cute kids.

And the most important part is this - if you do get caught, make up an email-got-hacked story. You know - My email got hacked, people started getting random shit from me (Didn't you get any? Oh consider yourself lucky!) so I had to delete everything including facebook (And I'll surely add you as soon as I get on FB).

Trouble is, am still a 100 away from landmark number. So I need more rules. I suspect I might just use HGs filtering method of does-this-person-irritate-me.

A certain malluness has crept into the apartment

As I type this, there's Yesudas singing his trademark Guruvayoor songs in the background.

Soon that'll be replaced by the mallu playlist. And one head will bob up and down.

(Sometimes though, Janis Joplin gets broadcast. This incidentally is a new as well)

HG walks around sometime with a thortu on her head.

There are lamps being lit quite religiously every Monday.

And a never ending collection of Malayalam movies. Dasan and Vijayan et al.

All curses that are flung at each other are in the native.

Fish is being made. This has become quite regular. There is a talk of a fish biriyani.

And the menu for a first Onam is being planned in detail. Which includes non veg, much to my mom's consternation.

Ah..the good stuff.