Waiting for menopause

For some women, Auntie Flo is an unwelcome visitor who drops by at an inopportune time. They call her unflattering names and cannot wait for her departure.

In mom's case, Auntie Flo is God. Were she the religious sort, mom would stand at her doorstep and welcome her with a rangoli and aarthi and prepare payasam and halwa. She looks forwards to these monthly visits with the same eagerness she had once reserved for the Hum Log tele serial, going so far as to mark the date on her calendar and counting down the days with anticipation.

You see, Auntie Flo is mom’s Messiah, bringing her much-needed relief from a condition that has tormented her close to 15 years.

When mom spots a corner of her red sari against a white backdrop, she lets out a deep sigh in much the same way drug addicts do when they get their fix. This welcome visitor is the only one who can take the malady away – a monthly misery that afflicts her, and by extension, her family's well-being, and leaves mom gasping for relief like a thirsty desert wanderer.

With a wave of her magic wand, Auntie Flo decrees that mom can enjoy seven days without affliction, seven measly days out of 30 when she’s free to hop, skip, jump if she wants to, squeeze her children to her bosom, apply soap to her chest, sleep on her stomach, cross her arms and not grimace every time her blouse brushes against her.

If auntie is in a generous mood, she extends the grace period to 10 days; if she’s not, she departs, leaving mom as disappointed as an employee cheated out of his Diwali bonus.

“Unfortunately, there’s no cure for this condition,” every doctor has kindly informed her. “You’re going to have to live with it.”

Left with no choice in the matter, mom has grinned and borne it, birthing babies she was unable to breastfeed and rocking them an arm length's away, the mastitis that pervaded her body after delivery seeming no different from her monthly pain schedule.

Apparently, a majority of women suffer silently from this disorder, with the pain varying in its intensity from one woman to another. Chronic breast pain isn’t something that’s discussed in a social setting or even around the dinner table, and mom has found only comic relief in the advice that's come her way: “Come on, it can’t be that bad.” “Women are destined to suffer.” “What doesn’t kill you will make you stronger.” "Chee, how can you talk about this?" “Wear a good-fitting bra at all times.” “Don’t wear a bra.” “Must be just hormones.” "You can't complain of a little tenderness." “Hang in there.” “At least it’s not cancer.” “If you think about it, it will hurt more.” “Pray to God.”

In the last 15 years, mom has had ample time on her hands to test a few of these theories, but every effort has left her disappointed. “But why can’t you carry me, Amma?” her bewildered baby wants to know when she pushes her away. “Where does it hurt? Over here?” she asks, patting mom’s chest out of concern, unaware of the 10,000 hot needles of pain searing her mother’s chest.

For long has mom envied women who take their breasts for granted, mothers who breastfeed and let their babies play patty-cake on their chest, dancers who bob on stage, ladies who wear push-up bras, buxom aunties who nonchalantly whip out a money pouch from their cleavage. So desperate is she that her envy extends even to silicone babes who only complain of backache after the procedure.

Research indicates that more than 60 percent of women suffer from this malediction. Why then does mom feel all alone - despite the presence of a constant companion?

Taare sar par

If I could make a wish upon a shooting rocket this festive season, it would be to make Diwali an eco-friendly festival.

It’s a miracle my old heart hasn’t given out as I tremble under the dining table listening to screeching comets hurtling through the air and atom bombs rocking our walls.

While the children gasp in admiration at the multicolored flashes lighting up the night sky, mom nostalgically recalls organized, muted Fourth of July celebrations that didn’t coat the entire city in a thick layer of smog.

“Just sit in a room with a laptop, OK?” dad sarcastically tells her, conveniently forgetting that’s exactly what he does all day long under the guise of “work.” So, for the sake of propriety and marital harmony, mom stands on the porch, her nose covered, and nervously watches flowerpots ejaculate from a distance. She hopes her children will tire soon of the smoke and din, even while noting the sparks from the Sudarshan chakras and sparklers reflect in their excited eyes.

“What did you buy for Deepawali? Is your shopping all done?” seems to be the opening of any conversation in the past month, and indeed, Chennai seems to be undergoing a retail frenzy as people jostle their way through the throngs despite the pouring rain and shop as though money were shortly going out of fashion.

“Buy something nice. It’s expected,” her mother tells her, despite her protests that her closet is overflowing with clothes that haven’t seen the light of day. Dad's mother thankfully stepped in this season to maintain family honor, saving mom endless hours of browsing the racks for outfits that start looking alike after awhile.

With the precious hours saved from shopping, mom indulged in her favorite activity – expanding her waistline. A few days before Diwali saw her elbow her way through the rough and tough crowd at a famous local sweet shop to sample some of their wares.

“Give me 250 gms of Bombay Kaja, two packets of special mixture, four orders of kuzhi paniyaram, three murukku packets, five kachoris …” she ordered, unmindful of the ghee dripping from a donnai of chakra pongal in hand. Despite sweet, sticky rice not being her ideal fare, she shoved spoonfuls into her mouth as it’s unbecoming of a Hindu, even a non-practicing one, to refuse free prasadam.

The days leading up to Diwali have seen mom balance her sweet and salty taste buds by ensuring that neither one has much cause to complain. Even as her stomach groans in protest at the calorie-laden food, mom ignores the rising vapors in her body and simply loosens the drawstring of her salwar.

After all it’s not for nothing that the new yoga master is teaching her to stimulate her excretory system.

Oh, Shit!

Yoga master to mom: “See how you’re struggling with the butterfly pose? Keep your back straight and press your knees to the ground.”

Mom: “But I can’t!”

Master: “You know why?”

Mom: “Because my body is stiff? Because I’ve never done yoga before?”

Master in front of whole class: “No. I can easily tell that you’re using a Western-style toilet.”

Wow! I wonder what else he can tell based on the way mom opens her hips.

Saagar kinare

“I don’t understand, how can there be lizards in an air-conditioned room?” sobbed mom, surveying her environs in despair.

Barely 10 minutes into their vacation at The Dune, mom spotted her first lizard sunning itself on the bathroom window. “Somebody, shoo it out for me, please!” she pleaded, panic rising in her voice.

Dad sighed resignedly and threw himself on the bed.

“Ma, there are lizards at home also,” offered the children helpfully. “Can we go to the pool now?”

Wowed by the hotel Web site, mom had decided to spend their first vacation in India at the eco-beach resort, opting for an air-conditioned room for the sole purpose of warding off unwelcome visitors.

Perhaps the half-dozen French tourists at the hotel might have found the setting charming and bucolic, but mom could not relax with a lizard in the room. All the warm and fuzzy feelings she had when she spotted the geese and turkeys meandering around the property, the four resident dogs lolling near the swimming pool, the brown-eyed calves in the cow shed and the velvety rabbits nibbling on carrots next to the organic garden, vanished in a trice as she frantically dialed the reception.

“There’s a huge lizard in my room! Please send somebody,” she gasped.

A Nepali lad showed up a few minutes later, broom in hand. Mom pointed him toward the bathroom. He shut himself in for five minutes, gabbed on his cell phone, and emerged to report, “Chala gaya.”

Later that night, as she rinsed beach sand off her body, mom found that “chala gaya” meant the lizard had found temporary refuge behind the shower curtain. She ran out of the bathroom screaming, only to find her children pointing with glee to a brown lizard relaxing on the ceiling.

“The lizard’s baby just went behind the curtain,” they told her.

Mom speed dialed the reception again. “There are more lizards in my room!”

Nepali boy made a cursory appearance and made a great show of shaking out the drapes and running his broom along the wall. “Chala gaya,” he replied again, much to mom’s rising irritation. Barely had she shut the door behind him when the lizards reemerged from their hiding place and chased each other around the drapes mimicking Rajesh Khanna and La Tagore singing Gunguna rahe hain pardeh ....

Mom spent the night cowering on the edge of the bed and listened to the lizards loudly call out to each other while the rest of the family slept soundly.

“Remember Cairns?” she asked dad the next morning. The humans had traveled to Australia a few years ago only to discover that lizards had preceded them at The Great Barrier Reef by a few million years.

What was supposed to be an exotic experience with a view of the sea was marred by the presence of a black gecko behind the four-poster bed in their room. The idiot receptionist had smirked at mom when she mentioned the extra guest in their room. “They’re harmless,” he said, not knowing that mom would rather share her space with a tigress and her cubs.

Despite the sweltering Puducherry heat, mom was determined to spend as much time as possible outside the hotel room. She rose early to head to the beach and promptly showed up for the lavish breakfast buffet each morning. As the children biked around the 30 acres and gamboled with the dogs, mom burned to a crisp under the relentless sun by studiously following them and sitting patiently by the pool sipping hot tea laced with cane sugar, a tubby Labrador for company.

The staff was unfailingly polite and did not expect tips, the surroundings (minus the crawlies) were breathtaking, the food fattening and delicious, and the resident dogs a veritable delight.

“Can we live here forever?” asked Kuki, building a sand castle on the beach. “I don’t want to go back to India.”

“Duh, Kuki, this is India,” corrected her brother.

“I wanna live here in the hotel like Zack and Cody and play with the doggies,” she said. “Please, mom, can we?”

That same morning, mom had found lizard droppings beside her toothbrush on the bathroom counter. When she conveyed her disgust to dad, he rolled his eyes and said, “Stop acting like this! There are lizards all over the world, OK?”

“Not in Canada and Europe,” replied mom defiantly.

“If we go there, you’ll complain about the cold,” said dad irritably.

“I just want to go to a warm place with no lizards, that’s all,” responded mom peevishly. “That’s not unreasonable.”

“I told you, there are lizards everywhere!” said dad, stomping out of the room.

Somebody, please tell me he’s wrong.

Pee aur jee

Now that the entire waiting room of patients and their relatives at The Apollo Clinic on a certain evening know about mom’s UTI, it stands to reason that you should be similarly apprised of the situation.

“No need for appointment, ma’am. You can walk in,” said the receptionist over the phone.

Mom was suitably impressed. “No appointment?” she thought, thinking back to her other life where it was usually next to impossible to see a doctor the same day. “So, you think you might be pregnant? Let’s see now, Dr. Very-Busy has no openings until spring. Would you like to call back?”

Mom was equally thrilled when the receptionist didn’t ask her the nature of the problem. “Doctor-patient confidentiality,” she presumed, comparing it to schedulers in more developed countries. “You say you’re passing white stools? Hmmm, that’s odd. Too much white chocolate, hon’?”

“Maybe that’s why desis speak highly of medical care in India,” thought mom, as she walked into the clinic. As she waited her turn, mom filled out a registration form, frowning when she came to the religion question. “None of your business,” she wanted to write, leaving the spot blank. For some reason, the practice wasn’t concerned as much about her blood group as it was about her religion.

When her turn arrived, mom was surprised to see that there was no nurse escorting patients inside. The doctor sat in a consulting room, while a woman with orange flowers in her hair and tinkling bells on her feet entered and exited the room at will, which would have unnerved mom had she been lying naked on the examination table with her feet resting on stirrups.

As the kindly doctor examined her fully clothed form and asked the relevant questions, mom tried not to leap up from the examination table, where she found remnants of the last patient’s hair entwined in dry jasmine flowers. Obviously the grey cotton sheet that covered the table was changed as often as the slipcover on her sofa back home.

“You can collect the urine sample container from the receptionist now and drop off a sample tomorrow,” said the doctor, writing a prescription. “The lab’s closed for the day.”

“You’re giving me a prescription even before my results come in?” asked mom, wondering what the logic was.

“Yes,” said the doctor simply. “We’ll adjust the medication based on the results.”

Mom thought it best not to pursue the matter on a full bladder and walked toward the front desk.

“OK, madam,” the male receptionist was nodding into the telephone. “One urine sample container aa? No problem.”

Turning to an orderly at the far end of the room, he called out, “Thambi, get one urine sample container for madam!” just as mom reached the reception to pay.

“What?”

“Urine sample box ya!” he repeated, raising his voice in case anybody in the waiting room hadn’t heard. “Hurry up! Madam is waiting.”

Pretending to be very busy examining her sandals, mom thought back to a similar scene that had played out at home an hour ago.

“Amma, we’ll be right back. We have some work,” she had said, trying to usher dad quickly out the door.

“But it’s already dark,” her mother-in-law had said, an unasked question hanging in the air.

“Er … yes. We’ll be right back.”

“It can’t wait until tomorrow?”

Not wishing to appear rude, mom had to admit that she was going to the clinic nearby.

“Oh my god, what happened?”

“Nothing. It’s just a UTI.”

“Oh, OK,” said grandma, along with her sister who was within earshot. “Drink lots of water and go see Dr. Very-Nice who is our family doctor.”

As they turned to leave, father-in-law wanted to know where they were going.

“Clinic aa? Why?”

Leaving grandma to explain, the humans bumped into dad’s uncle and his wife, making their way up the stairs for a visit.

“They’re in a hurry,” called out grandma. “They need to go the doctor.”

“Why? Everything OK?”

"Aaaaargh! Can this get any worse?" thought mom, running out the front gate.

When the cursed container finally made its way to the reception, mom walked over to the pharmacy. As one of the three men present filled her prescription, she noted that none of the medication came with directions other than the doctor’s illegible scrawl.

“When do I take this?” she asked, holding out a bottle.

“You have burning sensation when you urinate?” asked the pharmacist.

Mom nodded, suddenly aware of the other customers in the store.

“Take this twice a day for three days. You must be itching also," continued the man. "Take this antibiotic twice a day for three days. Any more questions?”

Mom collected her things and left the building, glad of the darkness outside as she made her way toward dad, who preferred to wait in the humidity with his hands in his pockets.

“What took you so long?” he asked.

“Madam, madam, one minute!” an urgent voice called out behind her as they started walking home.

Mom turned to see the security guard running toward her.

Handing her a packet he said, "You forgot your urine sample container.”

Cook Sukh

Four days.

That’s how long mom lasted in the kitchen after bidding adieu to Iyer maami. (Pssst, the family ate out two of the four days, so technically it’s only two days in the kitchen, but mom would beg to differ.)

“I can do this,” she stoically told herself, waking before the rest of the household to fetch the milk packets from the gate and ending her day by cleaning out the kitchen sink with a dull crick in her neck and her back screaming for mercy.

“Of course you can do it,” encouraged grandma over the phone. “We all manage. Didn’t you cook over there all these years, along with working outside the home?”

Mom did have a larger house to run there, but the kitchen chores didn’t seem as draining, thanks to a dishwasher and an open kitchen plan that wasn’t designed to make the woman of the house feel like an outcast while the rest of the family lolled in air-conditioned comfort.

Dad (muah! muah!) pulls in his weight in the household by doing the dishes, for which mom is truly grateful, even though she wonders why she feels like building him a temple when he clears the sink as he is a major part of the family and not a house guest, but somehow, kitchen duties here would daunt even Martha Stewart.

“Why are you always in the kitchen, Amma?” asked Kuki, pulling mom by the hand one sultry afternoon. “Come with me. Come. Come.”

Mom’s heart melted at the filial concern and she allowed herself to be dragged away from peeling potatoes. Her little one led her to the bathroom and said, “Come, Amma. Just stay here and watch me go potty, OK?”

Right. What a wonderful trade-off.

“You know what your problem is?” said dad, looking up from his laptop. “You don’t know how to enjoy life. You love making things harder on yourself.”

In a fit of indignant retribution, mom flipped the pages of The Hindu newspaper to the classifieds section and called the first number listed under “Home Services.”

“I need a cook,” she said to the woman on the other end. “Somebody who can make North Indian food.”

“Wokay madam. Full-time aa? Come-and-go aa?”

“Come-and-go, but the person has to make vegetarian North Indian food,” repeated mom.

“Wokay madam, no problem. Will Muslim or Christian do or you want only Brahmin?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said mom. “As long as she can make North Indian …”

“Yenna madam, Naarth Indian means fried rice and noodles wonly no?” interrupted the woman.

Mom’s eyes widened. “Er … of course,” she said slowly. “But it would be nice if the person could also make chappati, dal and …”

“Yes, yes, tiffin items also in addition to sambhar, kootu, poriyal,” cut in the woman. “Don’t worry. I have one party in mind. When can she start?”

And so, the following morning, Shakeela arrived to take Brahmin maami’s place in the kitchen.

“What? Muslim aa?” asked grandma over the phone.

Mom braced herself for fireworks.

“Can she make our food?”

“Ma, she can make Chinese!”

“That’s all right. Can she make our food?” repeated grandma.

As my humans’ repertoire of “our food” is limited to sambhar and rasam, even Rani the maid can pass the test with flying colors. Instead, it’s Shakeela’s skill at preparing Hakka noodles, palak paneer, mushroom omelets, aloo paranthas, etc., that leave mom salivating, even as she pats her widening gut in dismay.

The lady does have her drawbacks, of course, but four months in her homeland have taught mom to lower her expectations on personal hygiene.

“Please wash your hands before you start cooking,” she instructed, wiser after her last encounter with a cook.

“OK, madam,” said Shakeela, washing her hands thoroughly on the first day – with NO soap - and drying them on her synthetic sari. Mom bustled around the kitchen, mortified at the thought of telling a grown woman to use the bar of soap right in front of her face.

“In addition to salary, she needs monthly bus charge and two days off a month,” said the agency lady. “If you don’t like her, we can always send a replacement.”

“Didn’t they mention I need coffee-tiffin also?” asked the new cook. “I have sugar, you see.”

Shakeela’s is the first human face mom sees every morning. Even though she doesn’t speak much, the woman is far from quiet. The tinkling of her glass bangles as she boils milk and chops vegetables is often accompanied by the sound of crockery chipping and steel vessels crashing on the floor.

Moving at the speed of a bullet train, she’s done with her chores in less time than it takes mom to stop scratching around in her pajamas and figure out what day of the week it is.

“You don’t eat any meat aa?” the cook asked mom on the occasion of Ramzan.

“No,” replied mom. “Why? What did you make at home today for the festival?”

“Nothing that you can eat," the woman tactfully replied.

Mom's glad she was spared the details, but she refuses to believe that there's no vegetarian Muslim dish that she can enjoy.

Leona Helmsley she’s not!

In a wave of self-pity last week, dad accused mom of the following:

“You care more about dogs than you care about me people,” he said.

“No, I don’t,” shot back mom.

“Yes, you do,” argued dad.

“Of course not!” muttered mom.

What an unfair accusation!

Mom cares very deeply about ice cream also, so there!