That Beautiful Country

Once

I was in a country

Its language all too clear

Now lodged in my memory

Twisted lime on the sore.

Terrain of drenched greens

This place of no shadows

Where the verbs and the nouns

Entwine in splendid verse

My laundry upon the rainbow

The moon yo-yoed thru' the day

My chores were just silly songs

My feet in warm and scented herbs.

One day

I fled that lovely country and

The sun that dreams away the years

Love, he said to me, in this place

You are cheaper than the whore.

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Book Review: An Autobiography Of A Sex Worker by Nalini Jameela

I am 51 years old. And I would like to continue to be a sex worker.” This is how the candid and defiant opening statement in Nalini Jameela’s autobiography in Malayalam, Oru Lymgika-thozhilaliyude Atmakadha, goes. It at once throws a challenge at society’s double standards — harsh on prostitutes and soft on the clients. Nalini Jameela, who is the coordinator of the Kerala Sex Workers’ Forum, reveals her sordid story with no trace of compunction. Nalini was a 24-year-old widow when she entered the profession to feed her two children. At that time she did not think about the repercussions of her act. She writes, “I was earning Rs 4.50 at a tile factory near Trissur. My mother-in-law served me with an ultimatum to either give her five rupees a day to look after my children or leave the house. I recounted my woes to a friend, who introduced me to Rosechechi. Rosechechi promised me Rs 50 if I spent time with a man. The first thought that came to my mind was that my children would be looked...

SnooTea: Just My Style

(Photographs by Minu Ittyipe) It began on a lark to spiff up my morning cuppa. Oh well, I just wanted a change from what I had been drinking all my life. I am not complaining about the faithful brew that I stir up with tea dust, it does merrily improve with two extra spoonfuls of sugar but I was just plain bored with the regular. My concept of a cup of tea was corralled in the traditional Indian style- coppery coloured liquid topped with plenty of milk and sugar but now there was in me this undeniable thirst for a more delicate bouquet. Tranquilitea, Coonoor Curiously, though grown in our own backyard, few of us have heard of the orthodox leaf tea, forget the Silver Tips, Golden Tips and the White Tea etc.. that quietly find their way to the export market. To make a foray into this relatively unknown terrain, I headed for Tranquilitea, a tea lounge in the Nilgiris, for a cup of “Tippy” tea. On a sober note, you are cautioned not to confuse “Tippy” with the more commonplace “Tipsy” for...

How Big Is Arundhati Roy's Conscience?

The Kaavya Vishwanathan episode : a young Harvard student writes a book called How Opal Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life and it gets published by Little, Brown. The writer is accused of plagiarizing from Megan McCafferty’s book. Kaavy apologizes and her books are pulled off the shelves. It all reminds me of when in 2001, I compared Arundhati Roy’s book The God of Small Things to “ To Kill a Mocking Bird’’ (published by The New Indian Express) and later in 2003 compared Roy’s book to Ulysses by James Joyce (published in the Vijay Times). There are marked similarities but it didn’t bother Roy’s big and magnanimous conscience –even a whisker. This is not to bash Roy. I had heard about Roy a long time ago, in 1984, when she was a little Ms. Nobody. And from then on admired her guts and loved her style. Five of my friends had spent years of study under Mrs. Roy, Susie's mother in the school called Corpus Christi. And they extolled her "virtues'' on and on ...

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