Excess Baggage

I am moving to Tokyo for six months, and the law firm arranged for some of my belongings to be shipped in a big metal trunk. The trunk was shipped yesterday while I leave two weeks later.

Packing the trunk was an interesting exercise – I had to sort my stuff into Things I Need in the Next Two Weeks, and Things I Don’t Need in the Next Two Weeks.

So what went in the trunk?

• Books
• Things I’ll need only in Japan (like a plug adapter)
• Things I use infrequently, but which are important nonetheless (like my sleeping bag)
• Things for seasonal use (like my sandals – not my footwear of choice in London in February)
• Some things which (I realised) I don’t really need at all.

I was pleased to see that there wasn’t too much of that last category. This is not because I am exceptionally austere; I just don’t like superfluity.

I did not have a lot of luggage when I moved from Calcutta to London, and in the six months I have spent here, my worldly possessions have not increased by much – I’ve bought a t-shirt, a casserole, a pair of walking boots, an overcoat, a backpack and several books. And a plant, which I am leaving behind.

The trunk they sent was huge. I had guessed it would be, when HR very apologetically told us that it will hold ‘only about 82 kilos’ (everything I own taken together weighs about half that). But when it arrived, it surpassed all my expectations. I could ship myself in that trunk, if I wanted. I would even have room for a book to read on the way.

Istanbul Top 10 (with 9 missing entries)

Over a month has elapsed since my Istanbul trip, and much water has flown under the Galata Bridge. But I thought the trip called for more than one throwaway post. And perhaps the delay is not such a big deal after all: Istanbul has never been a city in a hurry.

The plan was to do an Istanbul Top 10 post. Over the incredible period of one entire month, I made a list, added and deleted bits, reordered it, wrote and rewrote the entries, to the point where I was sick of looking at it. This morning, I decided to take drastic steps. I struck out all the bits I didn’t like, an exercise which left me with an Istanbul Top 10 with 9 missing entries. This, at least, can see the light of day.

2. The Bosphorus

If you stroll aimlessly around Istanbul, you gravitate involuntarily towards the Bosphorus or the Golden Horn – just as in south Bombay your wanderings lead you inevitably towards Marine Drive. As Lonely Planet puts it, “Divan Yolu and İstiklal Caddesi are always awash with people, but neither is the major thoroughfare in İstanbul. That honour goes to the mighty Bosphorus Strait.”

We spent many hours here – I suspect you could spend a lifetime and still not tire of it. We watched the anglers dangling their lines from the Galata bridge, ate grilled fish sandwiches on the waterfront, marvelled at Constantine’s sea walls and at the elegance of the yalıs – the old wooden mansions on the water’s edge. At Beşiktaş, we spotted jellyfish and bioluminescent life forms in the water (Phosphorus in the Bosphorus, I called it, and the Quaker winced).

But my most memorable Bosphorus experience was on the ferry ride which goes all the way up the strait – from the Sea of Marmara in the south to the Black Sea in the north, zigzagging between the European and Asian shores. There are short stretches where no houses, boats or other modern constructions meet the eye – all you see are waves and hills and seagulls and fog, and the view cannot be all that different from that which greeted Byzas and his men when they arrived in 667 B.C. to found a tiny trading colony called Byzantium. Or, if you believe in the old stories, from what Jason and the Argonauts saw on their quest for the Golden Fleece.

Nested Lists

My critics have on occasion accused me of being obsessed with making lists. Much as I would like to deny it, there are times when I am forced to acknowledge that the allegation is not wholly without basis.

Of late I have been making more lists than usual because I am going on a long holiday and there are twenty million things I need to take care of before I leave. On Sunday I was running through a list I had made last week: Things to do over the weekend. And two of the items were:
• Make a list of things to take to India
• Make a list of transactions to be handed over

I had made a list of what lists I had to make!

Sunday Comfort Food

Scarborough Fair potatoes, seasoned with (what else?) parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.

The parsley is from Morocco, the rosemary is from Israel, the sage and thyme are from Spain, but they were all bought at Waitrose Canary Wharf. I love the food section of Waitrose.

I must admit the recipe is not an original one; I found it online. (Without the internet I am nothing.) My only improvisations were adding caramelised onions and grated cheddar.

Hometown

I now know enough Japanese to make smalltalk (on limited topics) with my teacher. The other day we were talking about our hometowns (Kōbe and Calcutta) and she asked me, “Karukatta wa kireina machi desu ka?” (Is Calcutta a kireina city?)

What do you say to that? The Japanese word kireina means both ‘beautiful’ and ‘clean’. Calcutta is a beautiful city, but even its greatest admirers would not call it clean.

It is not uncommon to hear negative comments about Calcutta and Bombay, often from people who have never visited these cities or bothered to look under the surface. Calcutta is my favourite city in the world, but when people speak ill of it, I usually adopt a superior, condescending attitude, rarely bothering to contradict them, much less launch a passionate defence. Perhaps this is because Calcutta is my hometown; perhaps it is because I am cool like that. But sometime back a classmate from college said negative things about Bombay, and I got uncharacteristically worked up and made some rather caustic remarks. I must have been in a bad mood that day because usually, when someone criticises Bombay, I tell them my favourite Bombay story.

When Sarbajeet was interning at a law firm in the summer of 2007, he had to go to a company’s office for a due diligence. The firm gave him the taxi fare, but in those days we were poor and a taxi ride was a lot of money. Sarbajeet naturally opted to keep the fare and take the local train.

Sarbajeet was carrying a laptop which belonged to the firm. When he was boarding the train at VT, in the crush of people trying to get on the train, the laptop bag slipped from his shoulder and fell on the platform. Sarbajeet himself was swept into the compartment by the crowds, and with throngs of people behind him fighting their way into the train, it was impossible for him to get off. He watched helplessly as the laptop lay where it had fallen and the train started to move.

At this point, someone picked up the laptop and started to run alongside the train, shouting, “Yeh kiska laptop hai?” Sarbajeet frantically shouted that it was his, and this man, this complete stranger, running full tilt to keep up with the train, threw the laptop into the compartment where it was passed over people’s heads to a shaken but deeply grateful Sarbajeet.

Ask anyone who has stayed in Bombay for an appreciable period of time, and they will always have a story to tell. Because Bombay is like that – an unpredictable city, a crazy city... I’ll say it then: a great city.

Ferry Cross the Mersey

Last Saturday I happened to be on a large bus full of people – some young and some old, speaking different languages, hailing from different parts of the world. But this was the Magical Mystery Tour bus in Liverpool, so our motley crowd had one thing in common – we had roughly similar tastes in music.

As we were passing the River Mersey, our guide mentioned that the river had a prominent place in pop music. He said, “Besides giving its name to Merseybeat, the river is also mentioned in a number of songs, notably Ferry Cross the Mersey, made famous by...?”

“Gerry and the Pacemakers,” fifty-two voices answered in chorus, and I knew I was among friends.

The 59th Street Bridge Song

I just spent a three-day weekend visiting friends at Oxford and Cambridge. Oxford and Cambridge are cool places. People cycle around town and punt on the river and park Austin Sevens on the Senate House roof. They wear T-shirts which say, "Do NOT ask me about my thesis." But what struck me most was how quiet these places are compared to London, just as – when I first moved to London – I was struck by how quiet it is compared to Calcutta.

The thing about a fast city is that, well, it is fast. And if you work in a law firm, the pace is positively frenetic. It is almost an experiment in practical philosophy – when you frequently work fifteen-hour days, you learn surprising things about yourself. You learn a little more about what makes you happy, what makes you sad. In a particularly busy week, when free time means a half-hour interval after you return from work and before you go to sleep, you learn what your priorities are. You learn about the incredible awesomeness of weekends.

You also make interesting adaptations in behaviour, and pick up new skills. I can now carry out a credit card transaction while talking on the phone, I can read a book while walking and step onto a moving escalator without taking my eyes off the page. I'm still not the most efficient person in a supermarket (that'll be the day), but I no longer behave like a complete idiot. One day, in the course of an hour-long lunch break, I managed to buy a sandwich, sushi and an overcoat, eat the first two, and still have half an hour to sit in the park and watch people go by. Of course, the desirability of being in a situation where you have to pick up skills like this is debatable.

When I was small, I would read whilst eating, and this was a perpetual bone of contention with my parents. They argued that it was unsocial, that it was an injustice to the food (and to the book), and that, on a more practical level, I would spill gravy on the pages. Now I have a better appreciation for what a luxury it is to do just one thing at a time.

Istanbul

On the shores of the Bosphorus, they once built a city beyond reproach.

Now the successors of Suleymān the Magnificent clamour for EU membership, and on their trams they put up warning posters such as these.

I thought it was a warning against wearing scary masks on public transport (or perhaps a reminder that what seems like a devil with horns on the 9.45 to Zeytinburnu may in fact be a chubby businessman with a juvenile sense of humour). But apparently the sign says Please give priority to passengers who are alighting.