You are probably tiring of the number of times I mention the creepy crawlies that my home abounds with, but they really set me thinking. And this evening, it was a snail that set me going. Moving slowly down the white tiles in the bathroom, shaking its head and two antennae slowly, pushing forward in slo-mo. Snails have always terrified me - not for the fact that they are insects (or animals?) that creep me out, but because they move so, incredibly, slowly. No, look at one the next time you see one, and keep looking, and you'll probably get what I mean. Why do they move this slowly? Where are they going? What do they do, you know, in life? I can see why God made dogs, cats and cows; butterflies, cockroaches, and ants; monkeys, horses, centipedes and moths. But why snails? What's their purpose in life? I've always wondered if anyone's tried to understand what goes on in the, erm, minds of these animals. I know they don't have a sixth sense that lets them think outside of their fight/flight tendencies, but well then, what else do they do? What differentiates them from the million others of their kind? What do they do when it's not their season to be alive and about?

There are so many things to think about, especially when you have work to do. I wish my purpose of existence was to read, read a lot, travel and ask questions that other people can think of solving.

I was waiting outside an ATM. The white kurta-ed man inside seemed to be taking an eternity to come out. I started humming, tapping my foot lightly, looking around, till my eyes caught hold of my reflection on the glass doors of the ATM. I stopped humming and tapping my foot. My breath quickened. Calm down, I desperately told myself. They can smell fear. Did I have any food on me, I thought; no. For right behind me, were two street dogs, cream-coloured – you know, the typical street dog kind. One was slowly trotting, coming close to me. The other stopped, and lay on the floor, stretching itself (yes, ‘it,’ not ‘he’ or ‘she’), as if it knew I wasn’t anything interesting.

Do dogs know if we pretend? I put on a calm face, started to whistle (only to quickly stop – what if they think I’m being friendly!) and stared up at the sky and around, all the while keeping an eye on the reflection to see what the canine beast was up to. It came close to me, but suddenly had a change of mind, and thought it would be better to go back to its friend (who in the meantime, was performing athlete-type warm-up stretches – despite my horrific fear, I had to laugh), and started to sniff about it. White-kurta man came out at this opportune moment, and I made a dash in to the ATM and shut the door.

Despite everything I missed about India while in Singapore – the lack of crows (making me cry ‘OH MY GOD, THAT’S A CROW’ the rare moments I spotted one there), the whole cows-on-the-road feeling, the proud ‘Oh yes, I’ve sat on an elephant’ that I told my astonished classmates in college – I had no regrets about dogs, especially the street variety. You have stray cats in Singapore (they terrified me too: I’ve written about them here and here), but dogs in Singapore are all pretty, adored, on leash, with owners who groomed them to their best ability, collecting their poo (dogwalkers always carry a plastic bag) and taking their runs with them, and stuff. Pampered.

Fast forward to Mumbai, India. Street dogs abound in my area, and not only do you have to maneuver about them, but their turds too (it only got worse with the rains – many a time, I’d step on something to hear a squelch: whether it was mush, some tiny animal that I’d just killed, or dog poo, I’d never know). Hours after moving here, I had to shriek to my dog-loving friends to keep the street dogs away. Don’t play with them while I’m there (dogs on leash were ok!). They get into barking matches (thankfully, no howls – street dogs in Ahmedabad would howl through the night, not letting you catch a wink). They pee on the tyres of good-looking Skoda cars. They gang up and threaten the more scared among us by following us about. They taunt the pet dogs tied up inside their homes. As happy as I am that they lap up the leftover food I leave for them, I don’t like the fact that I have to take a particularly difficult way to enter a shop because they have spread themselves royally at the entrance.

Compared to these vagrants, the pet dogs seem like mellow creatures. It’s especially hilarious to see (when you’re at a safe distance, that is) a street dog tease a pet dog; the funniest of all was a large black dog that responded to the calls of a street dog but angrily jumping past every window in the wall of the house it was in, following the street dog that was gaily trotting past, basking in its secure position well away from the barking beast inside the house.

Oh well, what would life be without a bit of spice. Till the ATM incident yesterday, I was thinking I have become a little better at handling my fear of dogs. Unfortunately, no, I do have a long way to go. Maybe by the time I’m done with my studies in Mumbai, besides being able to speak Hindi fluently (that would be the day!), I’d be better with dogs – not to the extent of being able to pet them, but at least not walk away swiftly in terror? Only time will tell.

Dated 9 Aug 2011 and posted today because, hey, two months on and I still don’t have internet at home

It’s been two months since my massive move back to India, to Mumbai for the first time. And in this short span, I have seen so much: seasons (hot-humid-summer to horrible-rain to current-pleasant-weather), bomb blasts in the city, had endless permutations of pavs (vada-, misal-, bhajia-, etc.), jumped past dog poo, spoken Hindi that makes my new friends laugh in good-natured (I hope!) amusement, among other things. 

The day I landed was a hard-hitting lesson in back-to-India-ness. I had all but stepped out after a shower for two minutes, that I was covered with sweat that was mingling with dust from the roads (yes, it sounds revolting, but you can imagine. I wonder how students on exchange from Europe/the US handle it, but perhaps they have conditioned themselves to the I’m-coming-to-India experience?) Some five minutes after this, I had to cross perhaps the most dangerous road of all times. I patiently waited for the pedestrian crossing signal to turn green, realized vehicles don’t give a damn about it, and ended up running in terror, in between honking vehicles that screeched to a halt so they don’t kill me. I walked around the college campus, somewhat let down by the size of it (the whole campus was as big as the South Wing of NTU), but still happy at how green it was. I was surprised that every girl was in a kurta and chudidar. I found the canteen food good, but it was in a smelly place; I wanted to avoid having to walk over to the other side to wash my hands as far as possible. Two hours outside and I was craving to get into a mall for the air-conditioning (after being frisked and getting my bag checked at the mall entrance). I was disoriented and upset at the enormity of my move. 

Two months on, things have changed. The rains have begun, and the umbrella-hater me has had to walk everywhere with on in hand. Through the slush, into the auto rickshaw, sitting on wet seats, stepping into slush, and the like. Opening the cupboard to find fungus all over my black pair of jeans. Worms in the bathroom, leading the way to other kinds of worms and now, snails. I have gone from the phase of aversion to acceptance to now cold-hearted brutal murder. I have gotten used to saying Rupees and Paise, and not dollars and cents, and the fact that the 50 paise has no value today. I don’t run away from dogs anymore, just stand by and admire the gutsy mongrel doing his business by the tyre of a Honda City. I rattle away in crappy Hindi, know that kulta is a ‘bad’ word, swear more than I ever did, order Indian dishes I’d never heard (zhunka bhakri!), and enjoy my only non-Indian food at McDonald’s, having the McVeggie burger with fries. I negotiate the risky crossing with ease, shouting out the choicest of abuses at sedan drivers, sometimes even in Tamil. I’m used to the delays associated with Indian-ness, and although it gets the better of me very often (and it spirals into a whole hour of grumpiness and Singapore-sickness), I can recover with the help of Amul ice cream, Dairy Milk or Cadbury’s Bourbon. Drinking a can of beer that I queued up and bought at a ‘wine shop’ while the owner threw dirty looks at ‘girls these days,’ was a big achievement. NRI-ness has on the whole gone down, I think. 

And yet, it all feels so weird. I sink in nostalgia when I see Facebook updates on anything to do with Singapore; miss the fact that it’s National Day today and the crazy ads they have for the NDP. I spent a good ten minutes explaining the ‘We must be vigilant’ video they show in the MRTs. I look out for Singapore in charts showing statistics on different countries in class (though they mostly drop it out – either it’s too small or too developed ;)), and ‘lah’ and ‘sian’ have been taught to roommates and anyone else who bothers to hear me rant. I still say ‘I’m going to India’ when I mean ‘I’m going home.’ I miss wearing nice clothes – I’ve been wearing my pretty clothes to school because I don’t know what else to do with them. In a class where pretty much everyone is in a kurta/leggings or pretty tops and jeans, I go with my best workwear, and even dresses, and soon everyone is going to tire of asking where it’s from (and sometimes I feel weird; it feels a little show-offy to say that this dress is from Bandung, a hill station near Jakarta). Terribly miss the variety in food, the outside-of-work life, the endless movies, fast internet and God, the desserts (brownies here are terrible, and cakes, I’d rather not have). 

As I still negotiate the space between ‘I love India and it’s so much fun’ and ‘Ugh, why did I come here’ I guess the brain has already started leaning towards the former, and the heart is slowly following too – a sense of acceptance that one good life’s done and another has begun, and the optimistic self tells me I have to give things in India a fair chance. Thanks to the besties who still call/email from Singapore and keep me in the loop – so much so that sometimes I feel like I’m just on extended holiday in India – and the new ones here in Mumbai who make it so much fun – I guess I’ll survive.

It's bye-bye to Singapore. Spent my last few days in the country frantically meeting people, saying goodbyes, taking endless photographs, packing stuff into cartons and suitcases, weighing things endlessly on the weighing scale (only to know I’ve still screwed it up!) and trying to pack everything special about the country with my friends into few days. 

And when I reached Mumbai in less than 5 hours (on an Air India flight that took off and landed on time, yay!) I felt completely disoriented. It was hot, sweaty, I was amused with how I was actually making my way around in Hindi, and finally the fact that from having my own room, a queen-sized-extremely-comfortable bed, I had reached an apartment I shared with 5 other people, to a bathroom that had a long creepy worm and promised to invite snails when the monsoons arrive. 

I spent a whole day in my new institute, and was tested right at the start with the extreme inefficiency still rampant in my country, sadly. Documents I’d sent all the way from Singapore were promptly lost, and I had to do it all over again there and then. I was asked for a way to calculate my CGPA (apparently, Second Upper Honours don’t quite tell you about my performance in university!), and asked for a migration certificate although it’s been three years since I graduated, asked for originals of documents whose scanned copies I’d sent via email. I was irked to the extent that I asked the officer how a reputed institute such as this was still stuck in age-old procedures of faxing and original copies, only to shot back to say all that might work in Singapore, but not in India. It was a great ‘Welcome to India!’ 

I was shocked at how much prices had gone up (somehow things are different when you’re not with your parents and are spending your own money!), confused with the endless cellphone provider options, suddenly felt like buying an iPhone only to realize 750MB data plans cost over Rs.2,000 a month. All the same, it was a relief to be able to go into any restaurant and know that you can order a vegetarian dish freely.  

It feels strange. This blog was started when I was new in Singapore, a way to help me connect back to India and laugh at and adjust to things in Singapore. Now, I’m convinced that I’m returning to Singapore in a few days after this vacation. That I will take a flight, sleep a few hours and get to work. Think of lunch, dinner, and where Chinese, Thai, Greek, or Italian food would be part and parcel of everyday dining out. It’s strange that these are things of the past, at least for the next couple of years. 

Oh well, for now, things have been put on hold thanks to a comfortable trip back home, with my delightful nephew keeping me extremely amused and occupied (this deserves a whole new post!). But Mumbai beckons next week, and it’s back to figuring out life once again!

- I should rethink the name of this blog. Really. To quote one friend: 'Idhu boangu!' Chennai gal is moving. Back to India. Far from Singapore. Far from Chennai. To Mumbai.

- I have always thought of myself as a less materialistic person. My prized possessions are notebooks (the kind you write in), greeting cards given by friends, scribbles on the back of flight tickets, my camera stuff, books - basically, things that are tied more to experiences than the happiness I get with possessing them.

- Oh, how wrong I was. Over three years of working, I've amassed nearly 40 kgs of clothes. I don't even want to check how much the carton of books weighs. I've always dreaded this moment, but for reasons cited in the above point, I'd always thought my worst nightmare when moving would be the books.

- Going back to studying is incredibly exciting. The feeling of being responsible only for myself, and not for an organization, a team, a boss or a client. Even though I'm worried about how I'm probably going to be among the oldest in my class.

- Going to Mumbai is even more exciting. Never mind I'll be staying in some corner of the city, far from anything happening. Never mind that after three years of comfort in a room all for myself, I'll be sharing a room with two other people. Never mind the dollars will stop coming in. It's Mumbai!

- With just over ten days left before I make the second biggest move of my life, all I want to do is write, and write. Keep listening to music. Praise MSV's genius in Ninaithale Inikkum. Forget work and handover. Forget packing, shipping, 20kg boxes, and Air India flight strikes.

- And if you're wondering why this title (if you do understand it at all) - just two Tamil words I haven't used in ages. I suddenly realized they used to be part of everyday vocabulary!

I'm highly amused by my own thought process. In the ten-minute walk from the train station to home, my mind thinks of at least a dozen things. Amazement at the fact a train is speeding away on a bridge a few metres above my head. The moon and its stage in its fortnightly life. Why some women look pretty in skirts and why I can never pull it off. Counting the number of people smoking in that ten-minute distance. The old man who has his special little flashlight to shine at the rubbish bin to see what he can rummage to recycle and earn a living. Bus numbers 24 and 22. The song on the iPod and the lyrics that struggle to escape my lips loud and clear, and that sometimes do when there are fewer people around, and just the process of this happening.

Today's was occupied by rebirth, karma and the hand of God in our lives. Nothing religious. Nothing rebellious. Nothing that questions or doubts. Simple curiosity.

So our lives are predestined and all our fates have been sealed by God long ago. So long ago that it's ridiculous to even slap a time-frame on it. God probably thought of my current birth some twenty-thousand births ago. Of what S/He would make me do, what I'd earn good credits for, what I'd repent for, what I'd pay for. Of what my karma is going to be. So why did S/He decide my life should go this way? What about those who're not quite enjoying their time on earth - what if they are paying back for bad things they did in the previous birth and end up doing worse things in the current birth because of the terrible life they have to lead? Are they just caught in an infinite loop of bad karma over and over again?

Thinking these thoughts is just amazing. So much fun. That's why I loved Sophie's World and being in Athens, where Socrates, Plato and Aristotle lived and debated, gave me that thrill. That's why I wonder now if I really did go to these places, see and live all those things, and that this day one week back I was relieved to have made it to the airport in time to take the flight back home. What if I'm just a pawn in someone else's game, a character in a story like Sophie was? What if cities, parents, books, Rahman, tennis, Obama, Osama and all that were merely inventions of a woman or a man who is scripting my story? Ah, the challenges and questions life throws at you!

And a much awaited journey came to an end as I stepped out of the Emirates flight and immediately took off the fleece jacket that had saved me during the cold and windy days in Greece and Istanbul. Directing the cab driver to my apartment, telling him which 'deck' to stop at, and simply looking at the red-and-cream apartment buildings, simply felt weird. All I could think of was if I had really lived here before, gone to see some of the most beautiful places in the world, and actually returned. The mind was playing tricks, I was disoriented.

It's 1.30am now, and I'm wide awake, working on Spark, typing this and that, and looking at the photos from the 12 days I spent there, memories of roads made of cobbled stones, cafes and people watching, innumerable 'Hello ladies, are you from India?' questions, stuffed peppers, handsome European and Turkish men, 4-euros-for-half-a-litre housepour wines, of digging my hands deep into the pockets of my jacket to shield them from the freezing cold, and even thinking what kind of warmth holding a cigarette (and maybe taking a puff!) would bring. It's not fun to be jetlagged and thinking of what's gone by - and so quickly at that, I should add.

The ever optimist I am, though, I'm glad to have been there, done it - and to be back. Glad to be able to walk barefoot on the floor, wear shorts, not layer two tees to keep me warm, and weirdly, even craving to have my tau-guah noodle with chicken rice chilli and teh-c, to enjoy everything Singapore while I can. And I'm going to try to fall asleep, thinking of the Ayasofya ceiling, the awe-striking cliffs of Meteora, the Blue Mosque lit at night, the view of the Parthenon from every road, and the brilliant blue of Santorini's waters.

More on the trip, the sights, the people - weird, interesting, creepy, the food and everything else - hopefully coming soon!