Traditions

I come from a classic south Indian brahmin family, so traditions, for us, were mainly cultural or religious. The festivals we celebrated, the food that we typically ate at home, the way we celebrated festivals etc were all deeply rooted in my parents' background. The only traditions I can remember outside of those were celebrating Christmas and moonlight dinners.

My dad loved the idea of Christmas so when I was about 6 or so, we began celebrating the festival, with a tree fakes up from anything - a palm tree hung with sparkles, a glittering green paper outline of the shape glued to the wall...and he'd slip Christmas presents under our pillows. Goes with his Santa-like urge to constantly do things for other people. And waay back when I was still a toddler, we lived in a house with a gigantic veranda in Bangalore. On full moon nights, my parents would set out dinner on the veranda and give me 'kai-thutthu' - make little morsels of the food and give them to me one by one. The three of us would sit out and enjoy the cool, mysterious light of the moon and the fresh Bangalore breeze for hours.

My family now is as far from traditional as we can get. With North, south, hindu and muslim cobbled together and English as the lingua franca, coupled with two adults neither of whom is religious, and yet intent on balancing all the various aspects of our identity, it's a little hard to know what traditions to follow. And yet, I feel that traditions are important - both cultural traditions and family ones. They give you a sense of rootedness and belonging and a whole set of in-jokes that help bind siblings together years after they have moved to different continents.

So I figured we'd borrow and invent whatever traditions made sense to us. So here's what we do: Cultural traditions include Golu at dussehra ( have blogged about it before) and celebrating Christmas. Religious traditions include going without onions/ garlic/ eggs during Dussehra and most Hindu festivals, making modak on Ganesh Chathurthi and telling the kids the Ganesha/ moon story at bedtime. Making Krishna's footsteps and poha-dahi, butter and lots of sweets for Janmashthami. Seviyan on Eid.

Other traditions is where we really let ourselves go and have fun. So we have a birthday tradition - the birthday person wears a crown and we all sing a silly song to the tune of Holi-holiday by Boney M. On A's birthday, I always make chhole-bhaturey at home since it's his favourite dish. The birthday person gets a dinner out with the family to a restaurant of their choice ( I'm hoping the kids palate moved beyond fastfood quick!!!) and to choose the breakfast menu. And come winter, we have many...going to Mughal gardens to see the gorgeous flowers. Going to Diva for fondue. A picnic in Lodhi Gardens...

Traveling with kids

So we started the vacation on a fraught note. A and I had been having a huge fight related to itso 

our prep was more than a little last minute. I had been unsuccessfully fighting off a viral for two

weeks and was pre-exhausted for the vacation. On the other hand, given the life I lead, that’s par 

for the course. Our train tickets didn’t come through, so we decided to drive through. The friend '

who was to accompany us on this jaunt had to drop out since her back doesn’t permit long car 

journeys. So we set off, plus the kids’ common best friend, packed into the car bought for road 

trips like sardines.

Honestly I wasn’t sure how we would weather the journey. Chubbocks gets car sick and is a notoriously poor traveler, so we usually dose him with an anti-vomiting medicine and leave him free on the back seat armed with a stack of old newspapers, barf bags. The three younger ones were settled on the middle seat, feet propped on the suitcase stuffed between their seat and ours, and an assortment of snacks, books and juices for company. We made remarkable time on the onward journey.

The days at the camp flew by, wading into the icy-cold Ganga river, playing on the rocks and learning to make them skip across the water, kayaking, doing the Flying Fox and valley traverse, singing around the evening bonfire or just lying on the camp bed in the tent in the stiflingly hot afternoons, lulled into a state of somnolescence.

The journey back was something we were reasonably comfortable with, given the onward journey. At most it’ll take an hour or so longer we thought. WRONG!! First of all, every single person who has visited Rishikesh that weekend seemed to have decided to start the journey back that day. Added to that the impossibly narrow roads of the small towns through which the route goes, the staccato, band-aid nature of the so-called highways in UP - in which a good road is built for about a kilometer at which point it turns into 3 levels of road, none of them tarred and most with boulders, massive pits and unexpected turnoffs - expressly for the purpose of torture-testing for a car and its tires (seriously, it could be a business proposition!), your cursing vocabulary or the limits of human endurance! It took 6 hours to cover the first 100 km!

We had planned to stop for a latish lunch around 4 pm at a midway point where we had spotted a Haldirams and other eateries. Instead, thanks to the excruciating pace of the journey, we reached the place only at 7 pm that evening. Meanwhile, post an 8:30 am breakfast, the kids had sustained themselves on a couple packs of Britannia fruit cake and a pack of chips. They had even eschewed juice and water once we explained that we didn’t know where we would be able to stop or find a clean loo. To our pure joy, surprise and respect, the kids behaved like unfledged angels on the entire 11 hour marathon journey! Not once were there yells, moans of being bored, questions about ‘are we there yet?’ There were occasional queries about when we were reaching the midway point since mice has taken over all our stomachs. The rest of the time, they were busy playing with each other, singing funny songs, riddling, reading…at some point, they all slept off using each other as pillows. Puddi curled up like a cat between the seat and the suitcase. Bojjandi used her hip as his pillow. And R used Bojjandi’s hip as his headrest, while Chubbocks colonized the back seat.

It’s actually given me a new love and joy in the kids to find that they were resilient enough to adjust to such a long journey with such little trouble. Looking forward to more road trips now!

The Last Farewell

In the wake of my mother in law's passing, I was thinking about what I'd like done when I die. Leaving a clear set of instructions here for that day.

1. Harvest any organs that may still be useful after hopefully a lifetime of riotous living and donate them.
2. Cremate me in an electric crematorium so I can leave less of a carbon footprint, and please don't put my ashes in that poor Ganga - she's polluted enough as it is! Bury them in my garden or something.
3. Don't have any long mourning or rituals etc - I may get bored and leave.
4. Throw a big, mad, fun party, ideally a cocktail party. But don't serve sickly sweet cocktails- make them inventive and spicy and fun.
5. Tell everyone to dress upto the nines - you know how much I love fashion.
6. Play some raucous rock and Hindi movie tunes and get everyone there to shake a leg and let loose - I love a good dancing evening.
7. Hopefully one or two people will trip over their own feet and fall down, much like I do.
8.Serve great, creative food.
9. Have good conversations, laugh as loudly as you can, sing a song or two...

Auf wiedersehen!