Getting back to sushi

The peace and quiet of a place can get deafening when you are just back from a trip to India. (Also explains the long break from blogging; pre trip to post India trip just consumes so much mental space).

Its so silent here I can hear my own footsteps on the sidewalk. Never easy to return to a silent world where things have their place and they work like they should...


Especially not after a trip where all carefully guarded rules in your head have been ruthlessly tossed around like a tumble dry in a washing machine and nothing is sacrosanct anymore.

Stepping into India from Japan (and reverse) makes you realise one thing and that is how opposite the two countries are in every darned respect. Chalk and cheese doesnt even come close. Try sushi and bhel puri. Sushi is subtle - the tastes of fish and rice wrapped gently in sea weed - all left to the taster to interperet and savour the flavours, at his own pace. Bhel Puri - an explosion of spicy, sweet, tangy, crunchy hitting your tongue from the time of contact, not giving you time to decode the sensations racing through your veins, leaving your palate tingling long after the onslaught- too late by now to go back to the dull flavours of salad and soups!


And so with India. The minute you land its an abashed blast of sensations - sight, smell, sound...the whole gamut. Nothing couched, nothing coy. Its life, real sized. No scaled down sense and sanity of the developed world.

We rattle down from the airport into the heat and energy of the city in a Mumbai taxi - now just a collection of metal spare parts glued together by prayer and lots of Goodwill. The driver's faith in Destiny and the natural order of things (as he saw it) also seemed to work in keeping his (and our) optimism together. We ask him why he and his clan doesnt junk the scrappy cabs in favour of new ones and out comes the reply, in cocky 'bhaiyya-ese' - 'Yeh loha hai. Ise banane or bigadne me kitna time lagta hai" ( roughly - this is metal, can be made and unmade perennially). So much for our 'out-of-whack-totally-clueless' concern. (His thought bubble: "we are moving forward aint we, mate").


Welcome to India I think. The tumble dry has begun. Things baffle me momentarily. I feel a bit like Alice in Wonderland.Its then that I register - its been a while since I stepped out of India, I had neat forgotten what it was to live here and that what works for the rest of the world doesnt for India.






And so I begin rewriting the rules in my head. Start singing its tune. By the end of the trip, I am in sync. Nothing surprises me anymore. Not caterpillars smoking hookahs or white rabbits in waistcoats....


Whats more, I find it now hard to get back to sushi ....