Five Beautiful Things in Bombay

Eckhart Tolle has been popping up in my consciousness over the past month with increasing regularity. It is not serendipity; I think it is synchronicity. And S thinks it has to do with the sheer strength of what Tolle talks about, this is the nature of his ideas, this is the way knowledge moves around the world.
This is a piece of Saturday that quite symbolises what Tolle talks about (http://www.eckharttolle.com/ and youtube Eckhart Tolle for recordings of him speaking; particularly powerful is Your Pain Body is Seductive)
So S and I finally make time to spend a day out in town, no plans, no agendas, no politics (except a film about gay Muslims in the evening). It has been ages since we just wandered aimlessly. And what a day. Bombay is experiencing this strange beautiful dip in the temperature so its down to 10 degrees at night. The light in the day is sublime though its been hazy too. It was golden and orange-y all day long with low long sunsets. Saturday was Republic Day as well so there was hardly any traffic and all the shops were shut. We were about twenty minutes from home when I saw something interesting on the back of a truck and reached for the camera. Shit. (Forgot it and took the husband instead)
Damn, I forgot the camera I say, pouting. Today would be such a nice day to take lots of pictures. Well, says S, why don’t we find five beautiful things today, five things we want to commit to the camera of the mind’s eye.
Nice save Parker I say. How very Tolle. About ten minutes later we see number 1 on the list

1. A life-size red and gold Japanese pagoda on wheels weaving in and out of Bombay traffic

2. What you see when you play hide and seek with afternoon light and leaves in Moshe Shek’s beautiful café - garden (http://www.mosheshek.com/)

3. Walking out of a small sea-hugging park in Cuffe Parade we come upon this beautiful spaniel sitting stock still. We go up to him and want to pet him, make sweet meaningless noises the way you would to a baby. The dog is unmoving and this is strange. Its as if we werent there. More googoo-gaga and the dog doesn’t budge, looks like he’s playing Statue. Suddenly we hear someone say ‘here Buddy’ and he runs like the wind. Buddy was in training and wasn't supposed to move till he heard his trainer’s voice. We watched Buddy being trained for about 15 minutes and he was the most beautiful and well-behaved dog ever.

4. We didn’t get into the first screening of A Jihad for Love (http://www.ajihadforlove.com/) because the Little Theatre at the NCPA is really little and they didn’t expect such a big response; so they were doing a special second screening at 8.30pm. We had very smartly brought along a bottle of gin knowing that Republic Day is a Dry Day. So we got ourselves some juice and Limca and mixed up a few drinks and waited in the NCPA grounds. We were admiring a tree that seemed to have stripped itself of leaves in the most aesthetic and organized way. It was an almond tree. And then from between the bare branches we see something golden flying. At first I think it’s a plane and then realise that it couldn’t be because its path was circular and random. It looked like a paraglider’s sails. Or a UFO maybe. At times it appeared to be motionless and suspended in mid-air. We eventually realize that it’s a bird, a kite or a hawk (the best gliders, birds of prey depend on finding the thermals to conserve energy) that’s been lit up in the back-glow of a massive halogen light on the top of a building. A dark bird is now gold. We were transfixed. It was like watching a lazy golden balloon floating flitting roaming in its own pool of light in the shadow of the waning moon ……

We didn’t find Number 5 however.

I think Mr. Tolle would recommend that we attempt this everyday.

RajuBhai PhotoWallah and Me

Surat, Gujarat, December 20th, 2007

After February 2002 it has been very hard for me to visit Gujarat. I am always suspicious and irritable and living in Bombay does little to endear me to the state or its people. I know that sounds as bigoted as they are. So here I am in Surat, a little irritable but mostly happy because Hotel Embassy is really clean and the TV remote works. And mostly because after this I get to go home and stay there for a while.

I have just met an enormous man called Rajubhai Cheeniwala who is the city corporation’s official photographer. Since I am visiting projects managed by the corporation’s health department I am being accompanied by the Chief Medical Officer. Which means Rajubhai has to document the Officer’s every move. Which means more bloody Maya pictures. The funny thing is that he has a Nikon D40 and I do too, except mine has an X after the 40. Rajubhai is a little put out. After we’ve spent about four hours together he asks to see mine. No problemo Rajubhai. He is a bit miffed. Once I start using it he begins to interject (constantly) and check what setting I’m using, telling me I should move back a bit, pointing out a better shot, clicking his tongue and shaking his head ruefully when I decide to do it my way. I am all sugary sweet and take his advice because the man is a photographer. It’s his job and he definitely knows more than I do. When I take pictures of signboards and street-life and goats lounging against a brilliant blue wall he is confused and doesn’t know what to say to me. Little wonder then that I have more pictures of goats and stray dogs than anything else. (It was also just the day before Id so there were lots of fattened goats everywhere).
And then there is this little game we had where I would keep trying to get out of the frame or squeeze myself into one corner of it. So he has to keep stopping, telling me to get back in the shot, not look away, to smile etc etc. I am not sugary sweet in these moments and usually looking bored or looking at my feet. Sometimes I try to take pictures of him as he takes a picture of us. Finally, at the last meeting when there are fifteen kids who have travelled from about 50km away, I feel I must say something because I am getting really allergic to being in every picture. So after rehearsing it in my head (to get the Hindi really right) I tell him that surely he has enough pictures of me and shouldn’t he be focussing on the youth-guests instead? And he shoots back totally nonchalant, as if he’s been expecting this, looking at me through the viewfinder as he says: huh, who are you, why would anyone want pictures of you (!!!!)…. I want pictures of Sir.
Wow.

Game Set and Match to the Fat Man with the D40

Signs

December 15th, 2007

We are leaving Purulia and there is a five hour drive back to Calcutta. As we approach the big flyover that takes us out of the town we pass the burial grounds. Curiously, Christian and Muslim graveyards occupy the same plot of land. Perhaps its an issue of the availability of land. Just further ahead and down towards what used to be a river are the burning ghats. A funeral is in progress and I notice from across the road that I can see a man’s legs from below the knees, dark and sinewy with red chappals on his feet, sticking out of the pyre. This is sad and creepy but I cannot avert my eyes, so I ask the driver to stop. I feel like I want to intrude on this very intimate moment. I know this is probably bad karma or something but I can’t help it. There are four people around the pyre, and a priest. They haven’t set fire to it as yet, they are still loading wood onto it. But I cannot get over that the man’s legs are sticking out and that he is going to be burnt with his red chappals on. Why? Did they not have enough wood to cover him up completely? Ten minutes later we pass a dead dog by the side of the road, killed no doubt by a crazy careening lorry-wallah. About an hour later another one. I register the symbols but nothing is ominous unless you want it to be.

The Public v Health (A Rant in Three Parts)

December 28th, 2007

I am in a funk about everything today. I am getting really tired of this word ‘public health’. The public is rarely part of it, we seem to be merely body parts to be manoeuvred into states of desirable health, and what is ‘desirable’ is determined by people (many of whom I quite like actually) with public health degrees from Johns Hopkins and the London School of Tropical Medicine. Public health, at least what I understand by it, is based on epidemiology (essentially, a counting exercise) and trying to get everyone to negotiate bodily spaces and instincts in very much the same way and within a really narrow corridor of possibility. In the context of HIV prevention I think the problem is approaching condom use the way you approach hand-washing, and I am not pleased to find that there a lot of people who work in HIV have come from working on leprosy and diarrhoea. These people know how to make systems work, how to get programs running but surely thats not all HIV prevention is about. Sexuality is a very different sort of science, an inexact science. And they’re mostly medical doctors who apart from over-medicalizing every damn thing, generally tend to operate on the basis of the normal/bell curve. Essentially, its too time consuming and financially inefficient to tailor a program to meet the needs of people on the fringes, so there are all sorts of assumptions being made about ‘the public’: you are not disabled, you are heterosexual (‘naturally’) you want to change your sexual behaviour, you want to be a shiny happy person, you have no dark emotional legacies hardwired into your system that make you choose self-flagellation and masochism instead of self-preservation, you want to be healthy, wealthy and wise.

Oh and the acronyms. The new ones for me (and evidence of the public health approach to slotting people into categories) were: MARA (Most At Risk Adolescents, and they are those kids who drink, do drugs and have unsafe multi-partner sex) and EVA (Especially Vulnerable Adolescents, who are all the kids who hang around with the kids who get all the action). There are different approaches and strategies to how to address and work with MARAs and EVAs. Its also obvious isn’t it that all it takes is one sip/toke/fuck to move you from one classification to the next? How do you keep tabs, how do you count, how do you invest so much faith in this system when human behaviour is so darned capricious. Sex workers and IDUs (Intravenous Drug Users) and MSM (Men who have Sex with Men) are of course meticulously 'counted' and the different shades of red on the GPS maps (some very cool technology at work here by the way) are all these danger zones. How do you pinpoint these people? And lets not even get into the approach of targetting high risk groups and labelling certain people as vectors of disease. Before I left I found that the targetted approach was being so criticised at a global scale that more generalized approaches were being adopted: carpetbomb the whole bloody lot with all the HIV prevention information you have. Now, and I suspect in the wake of the ban on sexuality education in schools (Rant Part Deux), there is a return to targetted interventions since there is a greater sense of "returns on investment". I actually heard someone use this phrase.

And then the whole thing about sexuality. There are indeed some Masters and Johnson moments to sex, but what about the whole vast terrain of myth, memory, intimacy, fantasy, passion, darkness, instinct that sexuality is? How can you expect seventeen year olds to ignore all these intuitions and ‘be safe’. I am not advocating wanton-ness (or maybe I am) but I think that how ‘safety’ is constructed is also problematic. As if there is a mythical bubble of information, resources, youth friendly health centres that are going to protect you even if you don’t want to be protected. Everywhere I go on this trip I hear doctors, parents, teachers, elders rallying around prevention efforts because of their fear-based understanding of HIV. It’s a great way to get them to work for the larger plan, this idea that their youth/the shining future of shining India will be decimated, ravaged by this horrible killer disease called HIV/AIDS. Worse still, such fear based messages only serve to reinforce the status quo: marriage, monogamy and compulsory heterosexuality, as if these things are in themselves protection. It couldn’t be further from the truth. It is all very sinister and interesting. What bothers me is the certainty with which these delicate issues are talked about. When you have an educational flip chart talking about sex and puberty and growing up and more sex, there appears to be no room to articulate confusions except with the trite line: adolescence can be a very confusing time.

And I dont say this out of spite or merely because I think I am on the other side of things and most certainly not because I think I should be anti-establishment (being a rebel is too much friggin work), but out of the knowledge (my own) of personal fragilities, and how it can be really hard to change, how confusing all this moral and cultural terrain can be. The certainties of this sort of sexuality-talk worry me a lot, mostly because I wonder how and why everyone else seems so certain and I'm perpetually uncertain.

Oh, and the worst part.
In Gerwa, a Santhal village in Purulia district in Bengal, I attended a meeting with the whole community. The NGO that works in the area had organized it and wanted the young people to ‘perform’ for us after they had told us about their HIV prevention work. The boys and girls decided to sing. They started off with these deep throbbing rhythmic drum beats in a slow looping scale, and from their mouths ululations, a sort of local dhrupad. Between the layers of the melancholic opening rhythms they inserted a more urgent beat, something more visceral and bodily. It was beautiful. Everyone started swaying and moving, babies stopped crying, two old women from the back of the room joined in, their shrunken frames housing such powerful voices. Then suddenly the NGO guy jumps up and starts singing (badly badly), appropriating their beats : AIDS rog aar hobay na, aar hobay na (There will be no AIDS no more). More cringing from me. The village looks at their feet, swallows, and has no choice but to give him the beat he needs to make his clunky jingle work. The man is emboldened by their show of support and really starts to belt it out now (dont have sex before you get married, get married, stay married, dont have extra marital sex, dont go to prostitutes, dont do drugs, dont drink alcohol) and it sounds like a hundred drowning cats on coke who are all committed to the prevention of HIV/AIDS in vulnerable young people. We didnt get to hear any more of their beats and Santhal people are known for their music and dance and you hardly get to see or hear any of it in mainstream India; a great opportunity lost!

I wanted to cry but I couldnt. Sometimes all you can do is lie back and rant.

End of Part One

Fifteen Minutes

Toopran, Medak District, Andhra Pradesh
December 8th, 2007

Everyone but everyone has a mobile phone.
Almost everyone has a digital point and shoot camera.
A lot of people have film recording equipment.
This is also probably because we are in Toopran mandal (block) about 90 minutes outside Hyderabad (‘Cyberabad’ is a laboured moniker)
I am thrilled at how much technology there is in rural Andhra and am always asking to see, touch, feel and asking people to narrate the biographies of these objects.

This surfeit of technology means many things in the context of what I am here to do.
One, that the excitement around it is overwhelming. This is magic in the palm of one’s hands isn’t it. It is all-consuming and all-powerful to the extent that there is no protocol about its use. As it is there is little protocol during a village meeting except that I get offered chai first. It is very hard to listen and focus when everyone in the room is messaging or talking or passing phones around the room. I feel a bit stupid and snotty to tell people to shut their phones off. Ditto for meetings with doctors, district officials, HIV testing centres (you would think that people would want some time alone to feel anxious, but I find that testers and testees alike are on the phone even during HIV pre-test counselling). I find that nearly everyone I meet wants my mobile number and I have to find ways to sweetly say that I don’t give it out. Why on earth not, don’t you want people to call you? I have no response.

In Ganapur village I am meeting with a Family Support Unit, family members of Peer Educators who are trained to talk to village elders and community leaders about why sexuality education for young people is important, that its not going to make them raving promiscuous sex fiends. I notice something interesting. Where once the television was the focal point around which the rest of the room is organized, decorated and venerated the way religious iconography and idols are, is now the mobile phone. The television is covered up in an old cloth and on top of it is a Nokia 3310 in a flashy shiny protective plastic cover. There is no signal here but there most definitely is somewhere else in the village.
Whose is the phone? I ask
Nana (father) of course comes the answer
Of course. Some things do not change so fast.

The other disturbing thing (for me at least) is that I am constantly being filmed and photographed. I am all these things in their eyes: the visitor, the outsider, the expert, the city person and not just any city, but Baamb-bay. This means that my visit creates interest, and news. I am mortified to enter the front room of a little house where the monthly meeting of the Velgu Project (micro-credit and health project) is underway and find that there is a sleek little Sony handheld pointed at my feet, filming me taking off my shoes, slowly moving up my body, backing out and following my progress into the room.
Why are you filming me?!!! I squeal. Please put that away
Why not madam you are our guest
Yes but I am not here to be filmed I say into the all seeing eye
Anyway, you have a camera too comes the reply
Yeah but I am not using it so you can’t use yours
But madam, they want something to show on the local cable news tonight
I am in deep deep shit. I better behave myself.
Anyway, the camera doesn’t get put away and I beg further that they film the rest of the group as well. Reluctantly, Fellini Rao pans to the shrunken little woman in the corner, the bored NGO people. I wish he would get my profile instead, just zoom out a little, hopefully when I'm smiling. It’s a way better shot.

But mortification aside I would love to see their footage anyway, to see what gets recorded and what gets shown. There is not much editing that happens here unless it is a big wedding, and for that the tapes have to be sent away to Hyderbad. Festivals and community events are filmed extensively, as they have ever since film came to villages, and long before reality TV came to us. I wonder what the porn industry is like in Toopran and the implications it has for young people. Again, I think there is still wonderment and magic in the use of technology, which I find interesting. We are blase or irritated once the sheen of sheen-iness wears off. There is so much management of these objects that our lives have to take on. Here, things are still special, old technologies are still new. The other thing is that the digital divide is being bridged really fast but the power dynamics are intact. There is a very definite notion of who holds the camera and decides what is shown. I wish my friends Shaina and Ashok and all those critical art and media practitioners could see this. There are divides that continue to exist, some very real distances of perspective, power, control. I would much rather prefer to talk to the men with cameras about all this but I have to focus and talk about district-integrated approaches to HIV prevention instead. Bugger.

Eat/Drink

Sangli, November 28th 2007

Small town hotels are the biggest champions of bastardised Punjabi cuisine so doesn’t it just make sense to ask for the local fare? The most convincing evidence in favour of this rule is the sweetened scrambled eggs you get in Gujarat that I have written about elsewhere. Somehow the malai chicken and cashewnut curry a la Ludhiana is somehow considered to be more special than the Maharashtrian pitla, or the Andhra pesarattu. Bengal however presents a slight variation on this general rule. Hotels in small town Bengal cannot be clubbed with others in India; Bengalis' obsession with their …well, everything about themselves, deserves a whole post on its own.

Watch the maitre d’s eyes light up and chest puff out when you earnestly say that you really want to get to know his culture, his food, his people. He will tell you how superbly his mother makes it, he will tell you how old the recipe is, he will be upset if you tilt the bowl and leave the oil dousing his native curry behind, he will be annoyed if you eat it with curd as this good Tamilian eventually does. Always go with the native fare. Always. Now I want to go to a Punjabi small town hotel and see what’s on their menu.

The other good thing to look for is the Rooftop Garden Restaurant. Most hotels will have one and this gives you the freedom to actually have your dinner outside your dank room lit only by the glow of Indian Idol. A RTGR is usually divided into a family section (where un-chaperoned ladies like myself may dine and sip beer) and a bar section (for groups of men to inhale alcohol and peanuts and chicken tikka). At Lotus Residency in Sangli I was shocked to find that the RTGR was not up to scratch. Most upsetting were the caged birds, no doubt in keeping with the Jungle Theme (masks, lanterns, excessive potted foliage). I asked them if they would consider letting the birds go. The restaurant manager asks why, don’t I like birds? Yes I do but not in cages. I mention this again as I check out and the guy at reception says I am the first guest to be upset by it. Apparently, it’s a useful distraction for families with children. Bastard cruel children (boys I suspect) who want to bother the poor things. I watch the birds over my roti and curry and telepathically send them suggestions to feed on the malai chicken and cashewnut curry, fuck, and produce mutant children who grow so big they break the cage and escape into the wilderness (or Bombay).

The matter of drinking is a little more delicate. A quart of vodka or gin goes a long way when you are too tired to read, too tired from being on the road and the inside of your head reverberates with whatevers on your personal mobile stereo device, and the TV is broken. I didn’t need it in Hyderabad because there are enough bars, restaurants and friends who would take care of this (tip of the nib to Srikanth for a delightful evening in HYD). But I forgot to take it on my trip to Sangli, and had to walk around for ages before I found a booze shop. But that was on Day 2. I wanted a drink on Day 1. The bell-boy seemed to figure this out too, magically! As he puts down the bags and settles me into the room (at 6am) he sleepily asks me if I need anything else, and that if I did I should ask only him.
Even if you want drinks madam I can arrange it. (Leery Grin)
Thank you, I don’t need any drinks (Yes yes comrade I do)

Luckily though I run into Vishal (who I know from the Point of View/Gol Maal days) who is doing a video doc workshop with a Positive People’s group attached to the NGO I am checking out (you could probably run into Peter Piot or Robert Feacham here, Sangli being the epicentre of global funds and global experiments on HIV prevention, care and support). So we meet for a drink and dinner on the RTGR of the other hotel in Sangli I’ve stayed at before, Hotel Ratna International. Being back at Ratna is like coming home. Meena Seshu, the amazing woman who is responsible for the VAMP collective (www.vampnews.org) and the extremely well run Sangram (www.sangram.org) has brought the HIV world’s attention to Sangli. There is a steady stream of people who want to visit their programs and understand why they work so well. Hotel Ratna International therefore, as crappy as it is, is entirely capable of hosting all sorts of guests and their interesting workshops and meetings on sexual behaviour, women in prostitution, HIV/AIDS and suchlike. They remember me although its been about eighteen months since I was last at Ratna. They know I like the beer cold and the Kolhapuri Mutton Curry spicy. And without asking the waiter brings me curd on the side.

Shelter

Sangli November 28th, 2007

Hotel Lotus Residency
Hotel Platinum (For Truly Precious Services)
Hotel Akaash The Presidency
Hotel Embassy
Hotel Green
Hotel Tip Top
Hotel New Ratna

There is probably something on the internet about how hotels are named. I prefer to ask at the reception; its also a good topic of conversation with the manager who inevitably wants to talk to this woman on her own.

“Its my daughter’s/wife’s/mother's name”
“We couldn’t decide and had two names so we put them both in”
“Because madam, we do give you precious services and platinum is the most precious metal”
“Because it is our national flower”
“We want to attract foreign businessmen”
"Because our service is tip-top"

Anyway, now all I want is cable television and a remote control that works. After a day being silent and observing, seeing, listening, listening, grinding my teeth, biting my tongue, there is nothing like a dank cold room, a coca cola doctored with vodka and a re-run of Friends. When you check in the man who takes your bags up to your room gives you a towel, a small tablet of bright pink alkaline chemicals passing for soap, and the TV’s remote control (I think these are nicked quite often). The more savvy hotels, like in Sangli this time, will also have a bunch of phone chargers (no doubt left behind by people like me) for different models and will loan you these if you’ve left yours at home. I like these little touches that make me feel at home.
Most of these hotels are about five or six storeys high, built in the most arse-brained manner ever, are usually quite grimy and scuzzy, and have very poor ventilation. I tend to be a slightly different kind of difficult and will make them take me to a room that gets sunlight (I am unable to function without the sun outside my window). I rarely opt for the Presidential Suite because they are usually decorated quite frighteningly. Its either over the top Gujarati Baroque (the most defining features being the velveteen bedspread in royal purple with yellow tassels, and pictures of physically impossibly buxom village belles looking coyly into the sunset). Or its Old World Rustic (pictures of rural life; bowl of lowly vegetables immortalized in plastic – gawaar beans, arvi etc with apples and pears and ears of corn, and strawberries thrown in for good measure). Anyway, ugly furnishings can be dealt with and make for good stories.

There are two things that bother me. One is the hygiene quotient of the sheets (I take my own). I am quite aware that many of these hotels are fuck-stops for guests and hotel staff alike. I also assume that men don’t clean up after themselves properly and I am not one for sleeping on sheets with unknown men’s semen stains. In Purulia this December I was convinced of this. The other is rats. In all these years, though, there has never been a rat in my room, not even in the most scummy of hotels. But it happened in Sangli this December. All I shall say is that I was screaming and stranded on the toilet (which made calling ‘housekeeping’ difficult). Eventually, the men with sticks and brooms arrived, the rat was taken away (I begged them not to kill it however. They just laughed and looked at me strangely) and I got my room changed. This ruined my stay somewhat because I couldn’t get to sleep for fear of being engulfed in a swarm of rats, and would have to check my room thoroughly (with the door wide open so that my screams could be heard) before I could begin to wind down.

The Archies Gift Store

Sangli, November 27th, 2007

I am waiting for a call from the Zilla Parishad (district administration) to let me know that I can meet the District Collector (the head of the district administration). It was supposed to be at 11am but you know how busy these men and women can be. I am to interview him about how district-wide approaches to HIV prevention with young people are being planned and implemented. I browse fast and aimlessly at a Reliance Broadband Café (which by the way are excellent and are all over small towns as well). You cant ever really be bored on the internet but looking out at the bustling sun-soaked Sangli street outside I decide to browse there instead. First stop, the Archies Gift Shop. I haven’t been inside an Archies in years, mostly because I don’t buy paper cards anymore, and also because there is only that much junk I like to hoard. Archies Gift Shops are fascinating places, there are all sorts of geegaws and doodads you get in there; I look at some of them and wonder what those darn factory managers outside Guangzhou were thinking. A garland of plastic sausages with smiley faces (I kid you not) with Happy Birthday on them? A little plastic rodent-like creature smiling toothily, planted on a plastic plinth, surrounded by a garden of little red hearts that say I Love You? I remember some stuff from circa 1990 and look for them. A plastic red heart with a Band-Aid on it saying I love you so much it hurts. And a condom housed in an upside down test-tube with a little wooden hammer and a sign saying Break Glass In Emergency. (Someone actually gave me this once, a vague classmate who discovered that I had a boyfriend. I remember being mortified but mostly because she gave it to me in front of the whole class). Sadly, these product lines have been discontinued in favour of rodents and sausages.

So I decide to look for blank cards instead. There are none. However if I wanted to send a birthday card to my sister’s husband’s sister I could. Blank, empty plain cards do not exist anymore. They are all shiny and covered in the most flowery mawkish verse ever. The little girl behind the counter sweetly asks me if I need any help. I scowl and say no, I’m fine, just looking. But I am definitely the kind of customer she does not get at 10:30 in the morning so she decides to chat. She’s from just outside Sangli and wanted to get away from the village. Her elder brother’s wife’s cousin’s husband owns this shop and needed an assistant. She had to fight very hard to be allowed to leave and go off to Sangli to get a job. Unfortunately she decided to leave school too. Suddenly, mid-prattle she grabs my arm and begins to finger the bracelets on it. They’re really cheap and shite bought on sale at Accessorize but fifteen of them all packed together in shades of coffee and bronze are quite fetching and go rather well with today’s general ensemble. For some reason I also quite like them, as shitty as they are.
I like these she says
So do I says me, pointedly
Where did you get them?
Mmmm someone gave them to me (not the truth but I know exactly where this is going and am thinking ahead) So its special to you, a friend gave it
Yes, a special friend. Wink wink, you know what I mean girly
Maybe you can give me one
Nooo, I would feel bad then. Its all I have to remember that friend by
But then I would remember you (I gotta hand it to her)

Before I know it she has slipped one slender bracelet off my wrist and in a smooth movement it is now on hers
I am aware that we have been holding hands this entire time And also that the elder brother’s wife’s cousin’s husband is now peering over the top of his newspaper in a mixture of interest and consternation.
See how pretty it looks on my hand says the little girl (As I write this I realise that I never asked her name)
I am usually not possessive about my stuff and have readily given jewellery away to friends if I think it suits them better. However this does not suit her and one bracelet by itself looks silly, you need the whole set. Why am I being so anal?
The phone rings
The DC wants to see me NOW
Ok I have to go, give me my bracelet back
Are you sure ?
Yes I am fucking sure, now give it back grrrrr
What if I gave you my banana, would you give me one?
So I grab the banana and run for my meeting