Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Floss.

Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself.

Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.

Stretch.

Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't.

Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone.

Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.

Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own.

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.

Get to know your parents. You never know when they'll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.
- MARY SCHMICH

My child writes

During my hodidays I had gone to the beach. Itw was very enjoyable and I liked it a lot. Here's the story.
Today I am going to the beach. We are going to play. We will also build sandcastles. I have caught fish. My mother is going to cook the fish.
The fish has a lot of bones. I have thrown away the bones. My sister wants some. I give it to her. I am now going to eat crab and lobster.
After that we played in the sea and went looking for seashells. I found many seashells and one that can make a funny sound. My sister used a pail and a shovel to make a beautiful sandcastle with some moss and shells.
The sailboat nets were full of fish.
just then my sister spotted a star fish. It was a beutiful, bright-coloured red star fish. It had five arms and when my sister treded on one of them, it broke off. But she knew that star fish can not die and will grow again. Just then, I saw a green thing far off in the distance. I soon realised it was an island called Malaysia. My father let me take a boat and we went rowing off together to the island. In the evening, we had all dressed in swim suits and as we were rusing towards the sea, I slipped on some moss that was on the ground and splashed in to the water.

Later that evening it started raining. I took my umbrella and watched some animals move around. At night, as we were about to leave, I saw a bright yellow light. I soon realised it was a bright light house showing the way for ships. That night, I was happy and didn't want to go home. I had loved the beach very much and I wanted to stay, but I knew I had to go to school everyday.

Showers at eleven

Some weeks are idyllic. Like the last one.
After a brisk long walk, she comes home at 11 to strip sweaty clothes off starting at the front door. If she's still wearing her favourite amber ear-drops, she loves how they glint like her breasts in the warm incandescent light. They give her a glimmer of an idea and she rubs her stomach thoughtfully where the waistband of her skirt has left a blushing red imprint. Amber and red are her colours today.
She rubs in body oil and goat's milk bath gel and feels the grimy layers of the day wash away. She wraps herself in the citrusy orange towel that best brings out her tan. Now she could almost make love to herself, but she has always preferred the other.
She walks into the bedroom and locks the door. She knows he's watching and is sure of it when he puts down his Blackberry at once. Today there is no need to comment on crackberrying.
"When you hold me like this, do you do it because you like it or because you think I like it?"
"Because I want you to like it. And yes, they are soft.." and he lazily rolls a handful of breast around, characteristically tongue-tied.
She remembers the Maharaja of Patiala who cooled off in a swimming pool with chunks of ice floating in it. Bare-breasted maidens lounged at the edge of the pool. Occasionally he surfaced to fondle a breast or take a chotta peg.
"Well, then you can touch me anywhere and it would still turn me on. Why just the breasts?"
"Because they're not always visible."
Followed a long long night. She slept through the second time, but secure in the knowledge it was ok to sleep and she was loved still. The second was longer, he said later. She loved him more for that. And so she was incandescent, every day of the rest of last week.

Sitting on the Mobile

Last evening, the telephone rang while my hands were in the sink. Shreya picked it up, and came to me with a puzzled face.
"Ask who it is and say I'll call back," I hissed.
"I can't understand anything," she said.
I took the phone from her and grumbled a hullo.
It was a newsreader's voice on the line. "In the southern Indian city of Ernakulam..." and the rest was garbled. "Hullo?" I shouted.
Deja vu Sept 11, 2001 when we switched on the television, speechless in the middle of a birthday party, to hear, "In New York..."
Yesterday morning, I had heard newscasts of bombs in Bangalore, bombs in Ahmedabad and seen TV grabs of police patrolling the railway platforms of Kochi. I was four hours away and seemingly safe from fear for myself.
Now the electronic voice brought blood stained visions of beloved family and friends in possible targets like Chennai and Ernakulam, trying to let me know what was happening to them...or friends calling to tell me of tragedy, while watching breaking news, words failing them....
A wavering female voice broke in on the newsreader's garble. "This is why I say you must always write it down."
Familiar aunty voice. Where had I heard her?
"Have you written it down?" It was the same insistent voice that woke me up at 7am Saturday to sell dinner tickets to the World Malayali Conference. I had acquiesced to her already. Now what did she want?
"Why are you going this way?" she asked.
One-sided conversation this. I tried to reply, "Aunty? This is me.."
Static crackle ensued.
The poor woman had either sat on her phone or was squeezing her bag to her side and had dialled my number unknowingly.
This was when I should have hung up and given her privacy. But there was something familiar in her tone. She was talking to someone who was not responding. Deja vu again.
Now I was curious.
"We are going to Chacko's house, you know," she ventured.
A guttural male grunt replied.
A minute later, a male voice said at last, "Where is Chacko's house." It was not a question. Heavy mockery underlined the sentence.
"I don't know," she said.
Guttural grunt again. Point made. Wife put in place.

Breach of promise

I've googled out the right term to describe the mess Philo, my friend, has got into. "Breach of Promise" satisfies her. It reassures her that she has been wronged and that it matters in the rest of the world too.
Her "husband"(her word) is missing, which means to me that he doesn't want her. And I'd drown rather than chase someone who doesn't need me. So I'd be kinda glad that he left before he set up home with me.
Philo stands steadfast, determined to fight. Unlike mine, her morality says once fucked, forever chained. Mine says that sex is not immoral.
Philo was last with a man 17 years ago. The ideas of right and wrong in that era abide with her and it's gratifying that she's able to see it in black and white.
Of course, it will hurt her more than someone who's able to view it dispassionately in browns, greys and all the in betweens.
My survival mechanism is practical, hers is the stuff of great stories. Her desire for revenge, her quick mastery of the internet for the purpose...My stories end quickly as I allow no great sorrow to engulf me. One sorrow is replaced quickly by a myriad joys.

Rich women who say so

I am rich. There are richer. Kinder. Better.
Never did I want to be rich. This identity is puzzling.
Just being me was the best. And I am still the best - I do need more reminders now.
I preserve one discoloured hair on my head and one above my knee. I am not greying, but browning. It's been eight months since the henna I infused with coffee overnight in my $ 50 cast-iron pan. After half an hour of agony at having my head resemble a Martian nightmare, off went the henna. Two more hours would have got my hair tinted like the iron pan if it were polished and sun-shined.
With my one colourless hair, peacock-yellow kurti, peacock-pink cuffs, dangly ice-pink earrings and ice-pink pendant on a black thread, I go to eat at Poison Ivy and meet the owner of the restaurant, as we are her only customers. She is poison, 59, peppery and woman of the soil(-ed singlet). She is poison to me as my birthday boy-man did not get a compliment from her, but she cooed and darlinged the other two men at my table. Grrr.
He must have been too much man for her.

Two mid-notes here:
Peacocks are not pink, but my pink was as cocky as it could get.
And shouldn't I be glad she did not coo at him? Well, if she were competition, I would be glad.

I listened squirming while she said how much of this miniscule country she had owned until the "Prim and Proper" govt (PAP, as in the smear) bought it at $1 for every square foot. How she did not have to earn her living. How she was president of a sporting group and would soon be the prime minister of Somepore. How she would not go to China as there were too many Chinese, or to India as there were too many Indians.
Obviously. She is neither one or the other, a Singh-Lim. Dagger-carrying frog in an equatorial well-island. Should I blog officially about her on my food site? My poison might show. Not afraid of her dagger. She should not have pointed out that she was wearing it. Some things are impressive when left unspoken.

Why haven't I recorded this important milestone: the second time I got published in this country. It's on a broadsheet's online version, from which a tabloid of the same family picked it up, after ASKING permission! Hey, I own copyright! Does that make it the third? The online publishing doesn t count, does it..So let's maintain that it's the second.

This woman in a tight grey tshirt and jeans asks: How do u stay so thin? And I wriggle out, I think, but not really, with: I eat. No, seriously, she says. And I look past her spectacles and see the determined look that shows she doesn't believe me, that she wants to know how I stop myself from eating, that she thinks she eats more than me. Me, the glutton. Who ate a quarter of the chocolate cake that everyone else avoided, two green(mint) murukkus and fried potato shreds for breakfast and banana chips for tea, three quarters of the bottle.
Genes? Jeans? I am wearing a tailored forgiving sunny salwar kameez. She is wearing a tight grey tshirt. She has bigger boobs: what I wouldnt give for a handful more. And a bigger paunch, if possible. Mine is large enough, even if it doesnt show in my carefully flowing kameez. She has a larger surface area, definitely. And she is wearing JEANS. I do too. But even at 47kg, I do not wear tight grey tshirts; at her circa 65kg, I'd wear a kaftan or a pretty poncho. I am proud to have issues of forearm underhang and bra seepage. Without those, I would be a pariah during bodygossip sessions.

The American Connection

Two long sleepless nights of compensating for a week of separation! 3 cheers to licensed sex and killing the ghosts of the last Princeton trip!