mustard oil musings ...

the book i am reading these days successfully achieved what every book in a north-Indian's bag secretly aspires to gain access to: a mustard oil stain. Except my book is lucky, it got two.

the oil leaked quietly out of the lunchbox i packed for myself this morning with the dum-aaloo curry made with kashmiri mirchi. confident that there won't be an oil spill owing to the tupperware box, i had snuck the box in a paper bag and kept it casually in the tote i carry to work.

the jacket of the hardback, depicts a spiney stark cobalt blue. a heavily pregnant, moisture laden beavy of monsoon sky heaped over a Bombay sea, now suddenly looks rundown for the yellow oil taints. almost as if a Mark Rothko painting tried imperfectly by an amateur. half a letter eaten by the stain, three other trying to unsuccessfully cower behind the murky gold.

what good are indian curries steeped in mustard oil if they cant cause some spillage on to any thing animate or inanimate that comes even remotely in contact with them! almost like the Midas touch, a brush, a stroke of the mustard oil always elicits an emotion from the human around it.

if it touches a piece of clothing, you immediately rush to wash it, tide it out of the cloth, who wants a stain on their dupatta or the chikan-kari dress they got stitched from the tailor in alaknanda, tell me?

the oil by virtue of its texture not just stains the object at hand practically but also figuratively. the smell staining your senses can seem pungent if you are at home, in your country or city of birth, at the same time it can summon a forgotten smell of the achaar grandma or maa used to make if you happen to be in vides.

the paraphernalia around the removal of the stain is always so clamourous. our visual, knee-jerk reaction to it being that of wanting to immediately get rid of it. but this time, i like it. that my book looks read, worn out, slightly crabby right on the face of it, smelling of home, of a home away from home, i didnt rush with a washcloth to taper the smell off.

the power of smell is so often neglected by people with most sense working, that it is in moments like this that you realise that the back of your throat has hit a dry spot and you crave for the sound of your mother's bangles as they jangle while collecting one morsel of rice with daal and aam ka achaar for you.

another memory that comes back is that of stained pages of school notebooks and books. classmates with dog-eared notebooks, not covered with cellophane or brown paper would often draw them out of their bags uncaringly and i would smoothen the edges of my notebooks, feeling a pang of nameless pride. 'my notebook is so tidy!' whereas it had very little to do with me than with the way my mother cooked and then packed our bags with the lunchboxes.

while other tried to sometimes wipe the stain off using their elbows or cuffs, i would watch think of the hurry in which their mothers would have wrapped their boxes, that a small spillage was caused and had seeped in to the new notebooks on the first day of class. some children continued using the golden-paged notebooks for all things mathematics, hindi, english and geography, while some turned them into 'ruff' copies