Popagandhi

I’ve been freaking out a bit more than usual these days, at all the oddest and most mundane things. Things that wouldn’t have made me bat an eyelid in another life.

Peeking into my wardrobe made me panic slightly. I… have a wardrobe? With clothes in them? I haven’t had one in years, or what felt like it. I’ve lived out of backpacks for far too long. Even when I ‘properly moved’ somewhere, to Dubai last year, it never felt like it could be home, so I never put things into my wardrobe. Not that I had to since I left Dubai every other week.

I could not understand the logic of wardrobe organization for a couple of weeks. Where should blouses, pants, jackets or underwear go in one, and how they should be folded. I now have a permanent room, i.e. a place at which I did not have to pay a daily rate, and which wasn’t a friend’s couch in a random city, but for the first few weeks I lived like a vagabond out of my own room, out of several suitcases. Now I’m doing a little better — most of my clothes have made it out of bags and into the wardrobe. I even got myself an iron so I could feel reconciled with the idea. (Though there’s still a suitcase with some of my possessions sitting in a balcony in The Greens in Dubai, the boxes with my pillow, bicycle, water jug and some clothes from a London apartment near Regent’s Park have finally arrived…)

Life has a funny way of getting back at you. As a child (and a teenager) I knew I would live outside Singapore the first chance I got, but in those daydreams the venues were inevitably in the northern hemisphere. What happened? I got there, found neither America nor Europe as attractive as they once were, yet instead of Bangkok or Bombay — my probable destinations in Asia — I found Kuala Lumpur. Love had a lot to do with that, but life is working out for me in and around this city.

It’s a familiar city. The food, the people, the languages. The fact that I’ve spent most weekends here in the last two years, that I visited very frequently from childhood, and never once thought of it as foreign. It’s a city with my favourite haunts and favourite people in them, one with a circle of friends and acquaintances, and opportunities wherever I want them. One in which I have been paying rent for some time.

For all the insane travel of the past years, I never properly moved into a city. I made bases out of a handful: Bangkok, Bombay, Bangalore, Dubai. I passed through many of the same ones on my way somewhere. I made my plans for every aspect of the year ahead, right down to what airlines I fly and which cities I fly in and out of and in which order, around passing through London at least once every five or six weeks. Chalked up frequent flyer mileage and was upgraded to Emirates Silver way too quickly. But I never had to put anything into a wardrobe.

Never had to buy an air-conditioner. Never had to own a water jug. Never had to do laundry on a regular basis. Never had to go shopping for tables, bed frames, or measure the width of curtain rails. About this time six months ago I agonized over how much I missed owning my own pillow, and plotted madly to aim for some measure of ’stability’, ‘constancy’, and normality. Now that I have it, I’m enjoying every moment of it but I find I have to re-learn some very basic things.

From graduation until now I have aspired to relish whatever I could grab — the quirkier, weirder, the more dangerous the better. I needed to have relatives of former headhunters tattoo my back with tribal tattoos the traditional way — with sticks and needles. I needed to live in a mud brick house in Sana’a’s Old City with descendants of the Prophet. I had to smuggle myself into a Yemeni bus in a full burqah/balto for 12 hours so as to pretend to be a local, since foreigners were banned from riding certain routes for fear of risk of being kidnapped or shot in the head by terrorists. I meandered from Beirut to Damascus to Palmyra, Homs, Aleppo, Antalya and Istanbul in a succession of buses, taxis and trains. I needed to go straight from a longhouse deep in the jungles of Borneo straight to Barcelona so that I could eat at El Bulli. I needed to wander about Europe with no plan and no money. I lived out of a backpack and quite successfully made a living with a pen and a camera. That life? It was beautiful. Wonderful. I consider myself lucky to have had the chance to live it. It was also incredibly hard. And pretty fucking lonely. (Which was okay, for a while.)

Since I’m now here, it evidently got the better of me. I’m never going to give that up, but like all my photojournalist (and other hobo type) friends, I’m coming around to the idea that I’d like a place, and person, to come home to. KL, and the girl in it, is that place and person. Life is, as usual, throttling ahead and I’m fumbling in trying to catch up with it. I’ve learned they always work out in the end.

So here’s to paying rent, painting walls, filling wardrobes and building a life in a city not too far from my own.

P.S. I wrote a book. It’s out at Borders, Kinokuniya, etc.

I know my writing archives here are in an udder mess. I’m trying to work on it.

Since there’s been an influx of new readers over from Desicritics, I’ve decided to put together a loosely compiled list of Popagandhi posts about India, love and loss, often at the same time. Pick any at random, there’s no method or logic to the way they’re presented.

Comparing four years of India at different points in my life in Diplomats and Physically Challenged Only

An emotional response to to the Mumbai terrorist attacks, in Mumbai Nightfall/My City Burning

Monsoon nights and Indian summers in Bombay, and missing it in Singapore: The Marine Lines

Funny advertising as it can exist Only In India

My rare message of love and nostalgia for Singapore centres around the Indian-ness of My City

How I stumbled into what I do, in the Tollygunge neighbourhood of Calcutta, Then and Now

Feelings of lesbian Asian identity and memories of Sonagachi, evoked in Excavation

Lovers bid each other farewell onboard the Guwahati Express as one starts a new life in Calcutta and the other remains in Bangalore, and I peek into their lives for fifteen minutes, in Portraits Unphotographable: Neha Sahoo

I almost got left behind on a highway in the Indian desert, and lived ran fast enough to tell the tale in 7 Stories to Tell

No matter what I keep coming back to Sudder Street again and again, and keep missing my golden Bengal, Amar Shonar Bangla, where there’s monsoon masala aplenty in Calcutta and You Could Forgive the Monsoon

And the Calcutta I can’t stop talking about is also a Rough City.

Somedays, I am left Dreaming of India

Other times wondering What Am I Doing Here

29 Jalan Berangan, Kuala Lumpur

I wanted to like this place. It opened some time ago in KL to as much hype as any new venture of Paolo Guiati’s, ex-Neroteca, would be expected to have. We genuinely liked Neroteca back then; it was a chilled out space at the ground floor of Somerset Apartments in Jalan Ceylon, away from the madding crowd, had free wifi, lots of Italian wine and beer, decent Italian food (for KL anyway), and real pig. Bar Italia seemed to be taking a page out of that book. At first glance, the swanky but understated shophouse lot on Jalan Berangan (a stone’s throw from Changkat Bukit Bintang) appeared promising.

To cut to the chase, not only do I dislike this place now, I dislike it so vehemently that I am breaking one unsaid rule of Popagandhi.com: to use my site as a platform to complain at length about it. The quick verdict: the food sucked. Bad food is not criteria enough for me to devote such a long space to this. I guess you can put it down to this: Bar Italia had horrible food AND the worst service I’ve ever had in my entire, entire life. Period.

I won’t spend much time dwelling on the food. There were plenty of huh? moments. The menu was as insipid as the wine, but with a table of 8 we ordered, I suppose, a sampling of just about everything. Pastas, lasagnas, fish and meat mains. The food was an absolute let-down — nothing one would expect of ex-Neroteca talent. My fish main gave me the impression that I was better off eating fish and chips from a Malaysianized Western stall. Their pastas tasted of not very much. Fine.

[Reading some forums and blogs, and comments left by Bar Italia defenders (who sound suspiciously like each other), it seems like anybody who complained about the food was told, "you just don't know what Italian food really is!" I write and photograph food for a living; I'm supposed to. But if only the food was my primary complaint!]

Bar Italia has the worst service in KL, which is not an easy throne to ascend to so quickly in several months. You essentially have to out-suck the inattentive, impatient, incompetent and aggressive service levels at all the other restaurants in Malaysia, which is a fair number of them. But that was the one thing Bar Italia did very well.

How well? We weren’t sure anybody spoke English in that place. For an upmarket establishment, that is unacceptable. It wasn’t even like anybody spoke Malay. Service staff chattered to each other in Cantonese, mostly ignoring customers. The Italian dude (was it Paolo?) spoke English, but was more or less incoherent — it wasn’t the accent, it was just how he flitted from table to table mid-sentence without completing any, and went off without properly understanding what anybody was saying.

Since the menu was so badly put together, most of us came away not properly understanding what our options were, and needed assistance. Assistance that wasn’t rendered. Simple questions like “so which pasta has which sauces, tomato or cream?” were greeted with blank stares by the waitress. Did she speak English? Did she speak Malay? Maybe she’s was Burmese? Nepali? Maybe she really just didn’t understand English? Who didn’t even know how to say “I don’t know, I’ll ask,” so we had to ask for her. “Can you get someone who knows to serve us?” Another long, blank stare. It was the same with every other waiter, including Italian dude. Questions were cut short, requests (even for water, or the bill) either never arrived or took half an hour to, nobody was interested in doing business. Dumb (and I mean this in a literal, not-talking sense) waitress went back to chattering in a corner in Cantonese, probably complaining about all her customers. Great — if only she knew we all understand Cantonese too.

Just as we thought the nightmare was over, the bill came and had an additional entry for 80 ringgit for 3 glasses of wine we never drank. A simple “can you look through this again” request was pointedly rejected by Italian dude, for no good reason other than him saying “no”, flatly. We’d tried to take the bad food and terrible service in our stride all night, but this was too much. Only when 8 angry people glared at him did he abruptly throw a hundred ringgit back at us… literally.

No matter how bad food was anywhere, I don’t think I’ve ever felt “I’ll never come back here ever again and you don’t deserve to call this a restaurant”. Well, I’ve found that place, and Bar Italia — 29 Jalan Berangan — is it.

If only my enthusiasm for other things was as boundless as my enthusiasm for writing about India…

Well, I’ve taken it somewhere else! The good folks at Desicritics have been asking me to write there for a pretty long time. Two years on, I finally got around to it. Thankful, of course, for any further platform to ramble endlessly about India.

From my inaugural post, India From the Outside In –

As an outsider, India has been the most welcoming of countries. Being an outsider also afforded me some luxuries my upper middle class Mumbai or Kolkata-born NRI (female) friends could never dream of. I’ve gone, in the name of work and mostly adventure, crawling through coal mines in Meghalaya, hanging off Mumbai locals, driving autorickshaws to Pondicherry, running about in the rain in Cherrapunjee, trekking about the vicinity of Darjeeling, wandering about Bhubaneswar and Bihar alone, wading knee-deep in water in Sudder Street, smoking with Shivaites in Orissa, hanging out on film sets in Chennai, and been caught amidst the crush of chariot juggernauts of the Puri Rath Yatra.

I ramble at length about what it means to be Indian, and why I feel desi… ‘live’ from Bombay. Read it!

a lifetime ago in Darjeeling

Leading a life on the road can make your vision hazy. This globetrotting lifestyle of the past years, particularly the last one, has been rewarding, challenging, and fulfilling as far as my proclivities for adventure and excitement go. When your backpack is left half-packed, and you have pillows, clothes, shoes and toothbrushes strewn all over from Dubai to London, home is just a state of mind.

Singapore was always home. It was here where I was born, here where I endured an education I disliked, here where I learned, loved, lived, and came into my own. Singapore was home because home meant the same neighbourhood from the day I was born; the same home, one filled with laughter, love, and conversations in three languages across three generations, often in the same sentence. It was here where I sat plucking beansprouts and white hair for ah ma, not at the same time, threaded her needles, and grimaced at the Teochew opera they listened to on the radio every day.

When you live your life on the road, and you pack up and leave every five days, never staying in one place for more than three weeks, life elsewhere moves on often without you. Now home is the same one, but in a neighbourhood I don’t recognize. I can’t sleep from the endless construction noises, and the house is shockingly empty. Dad, mum, me. And the birds. Things have moved on without me, and people too. My old haunts are no longer the same. My friends are mostly abroad. Or gotten married, given birth, migrated, mourning their recently deceased parents, no longer really here. The more I stay the more restless I get; I feel like I don’t belong. Like I don’t know this place anymore.

I don’t even really live here. I’ve moved back ‘here’ from the Middle East, but ‘here’ means Kuala Lumpur, where I now rent a house and am setting up a base for myself, no matter how temporary. Friends, love, soon, dog and home office. Some semblance of sanity, some semblance of a home.

In the midst of the ups and downs of the past month, and the struggle to move on with my life, the way everybody else seems to have, the only thing that seemed to be able to make it all better was to run back to India, into the welcoming embrace of the motherland that’s adopted me. It’s hard to describe how, but it has something to do with how the moment I touch down in that country everything makes sense to me and is immediately warm, fuzzy, and lovely. I’m in Madras tonight, then going to float about in a boat somewhere in Kerala, then Bombay, where ‘home’ will be the same the way I left it, with the same people and the same places. Life doesn’t go on and on, but India does.

Triplicane and Arcot Road, Colaba and Victoria Terminus. Chowrasta and Park Street. Singapore may have given me life, but India is love.