BROTHERS DEAR

While most Indian communities celebrate Rakshabandhan, Bengalis usually prefer to celebrate the brother-sister bond on Bhai-Phonta, which comes a day or two after Diwali.

There are certain disadvantages. Rakhis for Rakshabandan can be couriered, and there are even virtual Rakhis that can be e-mailed. But Bhai-Phonta is when the sister has to touch her brother's forehead to apply tika three times, and it cannot be done long-distance.

With brothers and cousins staying in different cities and countries now, the bhai-phonta is a more a memory than an occasion for many of us. This year, I did manage to have one at my Ma's home, where some of my cousin brothers were present. But not my Bhai (brother).

When we were young, Bhai-Phonta was a much-anticipated event, full of promise of exciting gifts and being the centre of attention.

Mornings would begin very early, to try and catch the shishir (autumn dew) that had fallen on the grass overnight. We would usually leave out thin squares of muslin cloth on the grass the night before, and would collect these before sunrise and wring them out to fill up a small brass bowl with dew.

Then we would be made to rub the sandalwood stick over stone to get chandan (sandalwood paste). And then put it in another brass bowl. After that we would make kajal, by rubbbing ghee (butter) on a leaf and blackening it over a 'pradiper shikha' (flame). We would also take dhaan (unhusked rice grains) and dubbo (trident-shaped grass stalks).

Arranged on a thali (platter), it all looked so good and festive. Proud of our handiwork, we would dress up in gaudy finery (from our recently-received Durga Pujo stock of new clothes). Ma and the aunts would be in charge of the food arrangements - which would be quite formidable but the end results would be totally mouth-watering and worth-the-wait.

Bhai (my brother) was the youngest of the cousins, he would be at home. But the other cousins would arrive, along with uncles (my mother's and my barama's brothers) and granduncles (my grandmother's brothers). Throughout the day, the house would be a-bustle with guests, and full of laughter and happy talk, and the smell of luchi-mangsho (puris and mutton-curry) would linger in the air along with the incense-stick fragrances.

The brother would sit, self-important and cross-legged, on the ason (carpet) laid on the floor. The sister would put dip her finger into the dew-then-sandalwood-then-kajal and each time she would put a mark on the brother's forehead, muttering rapidly the prayer which roughly translated into a wish for a long, long life for her dear brother. The elder sibling would then take the rice-and-grass and bless the younger one who would touch the other's feet.

And then came the nicest part. The brother, especially if he was employed, would put his hand in his pocket, take out his wallet and ruefully shell out some money as a gift to his sister. Of course, many sisters, like my mother would received elaborate gifts of crockery. Grandmother would usually receive saris from her brothers. Grown-up sisters would give gifts to their brothers as well, a shirt-piece, a watch...

But for us kids, it would be cash. And we would count out blessings, and our stash, at the end of the day, happy with love and flush with cash. Who said Money can't buy you Love???

HOW DID YOU MANAGE TO GET YOUR BROTHER/SISTER TO GIFT YOU SOME CASH?

THE DOCTOR IS IN

As a child I loved going with my mother (and brother) to Dr Saha’s clinic. In case you are wondering whether I was mad, let me clarify that Dr Saha (we used to call him Kakumoni – an endearment for ‘uncle’) was a qualified and practising homeopath.

I just loved to visit his small, cool-calm chamber with the green lime-washed walls, the scrubbed brown wooden benches for the patients in the outer waiting chamber, and the inner sanctum sanctorum, where the quiet, thin, reassuring-smiling doctor would sit, surrounded by glass-fronted cupboards full of thick-fat medical books and vials and glass bottles of homeopathic medicine.

Before Maa (mother) embarked on her journey through the entire family’s ailments, Bhai (my brother) and I would demand our share of ‘michhimichhi osudh’ (placebo medicine), which was basically a few dozen sugar globules that form the base (and conceal the sharpness) of most homeopathic medicines. Kakumoni always kept a bottle of these sugar globules in his desk drawer (to pacify pesky kids), and he would patiently and solemnly drop a generous dose of the sweet-nothings on our eager tongues before turning his attention to Maa.

As Maa usually came with a long list of patients (our entire family, and even long-distance patients like my aunt who lived in another city altogether) who had an even longer list of illnesses and symptoms (a very important term in homeopathy – an accurate description of symptoms can allow the doctor to treat the patient without having ever met him/her). As she began her detailed litany (with the patient doctor inserting a perceptive question at appropriate intervals), Bhai and I would wander around.

Sometimes, we went to the watch-repairing shop next door, and watched the painstaking minute craftsmanship of the watch-repairer. More often, we would go to visit the potter who had his potter’s wheel in a shed behind the doctor’s chamber. I loved to see how he would coax the clay into beautiful jars and pots on the fast-spinning wheel with his deft-gentle and always-muddy hands. His wife would take the newly-created vessels and dry them, and later put them in the oven. Some of the vessels would come out all fiery red, and some would darken further into near-black. Once the kindly potter gave Bhai and me a set of coloured clay birds (green parrots, grey pigeons, brown magpies), delighting us no end.

But we always hurried back to Dr Saha’s chamber when it was time for him to make the medicines. We would watch fascinated as he measured out different medicines from their dark glass bottles into small clear-glass phials (with cork stoppers) filled with the aforesaid sugar globules. Sometimes he would make puriyas – individual doses of medicine put in a sweet white powder (called sugar of milk - what a lovely name) and packed inside small square white papers. Each set of puriyas or phials would be carefully labeled with the name of the patient, with instructions as to when and how much medicine to take – all written in Kakumoni’s neat-minute handwriting.

And, buoyed by a final parting dose of medicine-less sugar of milk, we would happily wave goodbye to the good doctor, always looking forward to the next visit with a sweet anticipation.

DO SHARE YOUR GOOD DOCTOR MEMORIES.

SCRATCH AND WIN

Although I have always felt that ‘scratch’ sounds rather offensive, I have felt that winning something for free was a splendidly fun thing to happen – a pure slice of luck, based not on any achievement of the receiver, but solely and wholly on the munificence of the giver.

When we were children, it was customary for us to visit our mamabari (mother’s brother’s house) once a week. Usually it would be a Friday or Saturday afternoon, and we would return home in the evening. Walking towards the bus-stop from mamabari, we would inevitably stop at a shop selling soft-drinks and cigarettes. Baba would buy his usual packet, and light up one cigarette from the smouldering coil of coconut-rope hanging beside the shop precisely for this purpose. And we would clamour for our weekly quota of empty calories – I would have my Goldspot which left my tongue all orange and my insides all bubbly and happy, Bhai (brother) would have a bottle of the more substantial Milkose (chilled milky drink) or some mango-flavoured syrup.

Once, the manufacturers of Goldspot announced that under every cap (of the bottles), there would be a picture of some character from Jungle Book (of the Rudyard Kipling-transformed-by-Walt-Disney-variety). If we managed to collect the requisite unhealthily-high number of such caps, we could exchange them for posters and caps and other unnecessary but tempting things.

It seemed a perfect case of scratch-and-win, or rather, poke-and-win. I would grab my Goldspot, ask the shop-keeper to hand over the cap, poke out the rubber lining from under it, and…become the proud possessor of a tiny, crinkly-edged picture of Mowgli, Baloo, Bagheera, Ra and their other jungle-pals.

But my once-weekly quota made for a very slowly growing collection. To add to my impatience, my brother flatly refused to switch over to Goldspot to aid the growth of my cap-collection. Finally, after quite a few weeks of solitary cap-collecting, the shop-keeper came to my rescue. On hearing about my plight, he reached down, and from the debris at his feet handed me a whole bagful of soft drink bottle caps, which included a very large number of Goldspot caps as well.

I was overjoyed at my sudden bounty and spent a blissful hour or so poking out an entire jungle-full of pictures from under the caps. In fact, so pleased was I with my dozens of Sher Khans and suchlike that I totally refused to part with them for the sake of a piddly poster or two. And so, the means themselves became an end for me, and I kept my plastic menagerie for a long long time, fingering their crinkly circular smoothness and smelling their faint orangey tang.

Alas, Goldspot has long breathed its last (being a victim of global business politics – its owner, Parle Agro, sold the brand to the cola-giant Coca Cola Company, whose orange brand Fanta gradually pushed Goldspot into obscurity and annihilation). But the scratch-and-win freebies are flourishing, the latest, in my case, being a blog-tag awarded to me by Double Dolphin.

I quote: ..."the rules:

1.link the person who tagged you.

2.copy the image above, the rules and the questionnaire in this post.

3.post this in one or all of your blogs.

4.answer the four questions following these rules.

5.recruit at least seven (7) friends on your blog roll by sharing this with them.

6.come back to BLoGGiSTa iNFo CoRNeR (please do not change this link) and leave the URL of your post in order for you/your blog to be added to the master list.

7.have fun!..."

The person who tagged me is Double-Dolphin (on 22June2009). THANKS! (AND I did not have to scratch, either!)

I BLOG, therefore I HAVE WON! And the seven people who get the award are:

Zillionbig, Aparna, Sujata, Jyothi, SGD, Swaram, Nona.

REMEMBER ANY SUCH INSTANCE WHEN YOU, ER, "SCRATCHED" AND WON?

THE GREAT CHOCOLATE DIVIDE

When we were young, many many moons ago, chocolates were not as plenty on the ground as they seem to be now. Now, every passing guest will bring a gift of chocolates to my two daughters; the fridge is full of yet-to-be-unwrapped Dairy Milk Chocolate bars and other goodies.

The overabundance of chocolates have made them mundane and deprived them of the luscious magic of the past. For us, chocolates were magical stuff to covet and lust for. When they came into our possession, we relished the joy of ownership and the pleasure of anticipation for a long while (almost till the chocolate itself was in danger of melting because of being clutched in our grubby hands for a considerable time). And then the unwrapping of the shiny silvery foil and gazing into the sweet delights of the best brown colour in the whole wide world. And the love affair continued at the first bite …and the next…down to the last licking of the gooey mess in the folds of the foil or the tips of the fingers.

It was understandable when we learnt in college that the word chocolate had its roots in the Mexican ‘xococatl’ – a fittingly exotic origin for an out-of-the-world flavour.

The appeal of chocolates was all the more because we got to eat them on rare occasions, and then usually it was a small Cadbury’s éclairs or a 5-Star bar that had to be divided with great care and eaten with great relish.

So, you can understand our (my brother and mine) round-eyed, open-mouthed delight when my maasi (aunt) once gifted us a whole set of chocolate bars. The Amul company had then recently launched chocolate bars in different flavours, and maasi had generously given us the entire range!

We felt like monarchs who had been given the entire earth to rule over. There were orange-flavoured and coffee-flavoured chocolate, bars with nuts-and-raisins, rice-crispies, butter-scotch, peanuts, a dark chocolate one and a regular milk chocolate one.
Just the weight of the carry-bag and the feel of the rectangular bars (worth more to us than gold bars, at that moment) transported us to a kind of ecstasy.

And then came the difficult part. Like most monarchs who have to divide and rule, we too had to divide the booty to eat our share. Easy-peasy – eight bars, each neatly sectioned into sixteen cuboids. So what was the problem?

The problem was me. I was the glutton, gobbling my share in a matter of an hour or so, OD-ing on this unexpected bonanza, blissed out, but not satisfied. My prudent brother had a bite here and a bite there, and had kept the rest of his stash in the fridge, planning to enjoy his bonus a little at a time.

If only I would let him (Boy proposes, greedy sister disposes - this was the rule in our house). I remember coaxing him and cajoling him, then threatening him so loudly that my mother had to settle the sweet-dispute. Finally I used the pacifist-but-extremely-discomfiting ploy of sitting right in front of him when he would take out a bit of his hoarded treasure, and staring at him with starving-eyes, till he would be forced to shell out a cube or two (being a soft-hearted little fellow).

Ah, bliss all over again. Chocolate enjoyed through ill-gotten means tasted even better than the legally-devoured stuff.

DO SHARE A CHOCOLATE MEMORY.

P.S: THANK YOU, SCRIBBIT, FOR THIS MEMORY CALORIE-TRIP. (This post was written for Michelle’s Write Away contest).

SIBLING RIVALRY

Since my brother is visiting us along with his family for our annual bout of sibling revelry, here's a reminiscence about the daily bouts of sibling rivalry that occured when we were young and together.

Anything and everything edible given to us had to be shared equally. I was the more pugnacious of the two, and would set out complicated rules and regulations dictating the terms and conditions of the partition of every single morsel that came our way.

If there were two separate but similar things, like say, two toffees, then, obviously there were no problems. Each one eat one - was the rule.

If it was one piece of something which had to be divided equally, like say, a piece of cake, then the rulebook (authored by me) said - one of us would divide the cake (or cutlet, or...) and the other would choose his portion first. The rule was scrupulously fair in its nitpicking - the person cutting the piece would be very careful to cut it equally, because otherwise the other would get to choose the bigger piece.

The even more complicated rule for things that came in uneven sizes and in larger numbers (a bunch of grapes, or a bowl full of berries, maybe) was : the first person would take only one, the second would take two, and then the first would take another. Then this cycle would be repeated again and again till the entire loot was evenly distributed. WHY this particularly complex process, you may wonder. This was because the first person would usually end up getting the biggest piece (chosen first) and the fourth-largest piece, and the other one would get the second and third-largest piece. Now 1+4 equals 2+3, and although we never had weighing scales, we never had any complaints about unfairness either.

Ah, the deviousness of dharma (justice/righteousness)! Later on, when I read/saw the Mahabharata, I was amazed at the complicated routes taken by the righteous to achieve the victory of virtue. And, of course, I felt completely vindicated in my rule-setting, although everybody else felt otherwise, including my brother.

DID YOU HAVE ANY SUCH CONSTITUTIONAL RULES LAID DOWN FOR YOUR SIBLING?