Twenty twenty has been an eventful year. A year for the ages. A year we will remember for a long time. A year that will be remembered long after our time. The year of the pandemic. Covid. Coranavirus. Bats in Wuhan. The virus ignored and dismissed suddenly became real and closed in. Friends and family …
I was at a Lindt outlet store recently. The buckets of truffles, dark and white, hazelnut and pistachio, the pralines, the beautiful chocolate figurines, the Swiss Luxury Selection, the large, blue Champs-Elysses Box, the smell, that sweet, velvety, luxurious cocoa smell. Heaven. Growing up, the closest I came to this experience was the Cadbury’s Eclair. …
There are certain delicacies that I have never quite appreciated. The durian, hailed by so many as the king of fruits makes me want to throw up. It smells like rotten eggs and has the texture of phlegm I just gurgled up. Anchovies, supposedly a perfect blend of smoky, salty and fishy, are just plain …
Growing up in Pune, we never had access to fresh fish. There was fish caught from the local rivers and lakes but to us snobby Konkanis, it tasted like mud, and surely no one wants to eat mud. The Konkan is an area along the western coast of India that runs roughly from the beaches …
It’s Eid today, and it’s a strange one. No family around, no friends around, no shalwar-kameez to wear, no deciding which jamaat to go to, no fighting over parking at the mosque, no embarrassment over going into ruku while everyone else is still raising hands, no oily samosas and halwa puri to buy after namaaz …
When my mother was still a toddler, her father built a small cottage facing the Arabian Sea in a sleepy little town called Murud. This is the house where my mom and her seven siblings grew up, and where I, as a kid, spent most of my summer holidays. Starting the morning with a dip …
Every Sunday morning after watching Micky Mouse and Spiderman, I rode my bike to our local market. I haggled with the ladies selling produce under towering tamarind trees to buy onions and tomatoes and cilantro and green chillies. I then walked my bike to the butcher, Bhagwan, and ordered two kilos of goat meat, before …
Ali Anware died on January 11th, 2020 of a heart attack in the village of Majiri, about hundred miles south of Bombay. He was about sixty five years old. My earliest memories of Ali Uncle, or Ali Bhai or Al-lee, as he was most often called, are from my grandmother’s Nagpada apartment in the early …
My top ten memories of St. Vincent’s (in no particular order)1. The Favorites– Biladwalla – oh the disappointment went you ended up in Furtardos’ German class instead– Mascarhenas – with a body like hers she should have been a fitness guru– Leena – remember Noel placing his school bag on his thighs during her Chem …
He couldn’t quite understand how teenagers could be so listless, so dull, so lackadaisical, swaying their arms aimlessly, feet tripping over each other, some of them shouting left, others whispering right and a couple chuckling as they watched the fat one in the middle trying hopelessly to hold on to his pants This wasn’t funny …