Night One: The Indian Railways

A man checks the waitlist at New Delhi Railway Station

New Delhi Railway station is a photographer's paradise. Everything is perpetually in motion (unlike machines of the same name). Above the endless roar of trains, you can hear babies cooing in half-sleep, bags rattling down staircases, and voices that make up a nation all of their own. There are travelers, trains, coolies, suitcases, vagrants, and kiosks everywhere, all at once. The kiosks are by far my favourite, because they sell everything that you could possibly need, including what could only be travel staples in India: Hajmola, the Gita and paper soap.

All railway station kiosks have their quirks. In Karnataka (and most of southern India), almost every kiosk is a tea-shop, selling strong, spiced, thimble-sized cups of tea to langourous travellers. In Goa, they sell Bebinca, a rich, elaborate multi-layered specialty cake. And Delhi has fresh juice shops, shelves stocked with seasonal (and not-so seasonal) fruit. Here, have a picture.

Pineapples in the middle of autumn! Who would've thought.

This was the view from our train cubicle. Seven beds cleverly tucked into one, tiny niche. And so night one was spent in the top bunk, drifting in and out of the comfortable, dark, beyond-world of sleep. We woke up only eight hours later, at the very last station, a sleepy border town called Ferozepur.

(Best sleep I had in a week.)

More on Ferozepur tomorrow, though. 

Tomorrow: Ferozepur, a military welcome.

A state of mind

My family and I were in Ferozepur and Amritsar this weekend. We were there for two and a half days, but we did so much that I can't possibly choose just a few pictures out of ALL the ones I took. And I can't inflict a supersized blog entry on you readers, not all at once. So, in the coming days/weeks/month/as-long-as-I-can-stay-entertained, I'm going to put up pictures from my trip in more digestible chunks.

I'll go in chronological order as we go on, but here's an amuse-bouche, to get your buds tingling.

Sadhus at the Golden Temple, Amritsar

It's like what one wise mildly inebriated man once told us: "Punjab isn't a state in India. It's a state of mind."

In the Summer

Film grain: those tiny little spots of noise that make my heart smile.

Just one of the many reasons I would love to have a film camera.

PS: You must listen to this song. And check out this blog of the same name.

From the Archives: A Confession

I found this as I was going through my drafts today. I should have posted this a year ago. But the elusive right time never came, and eventually, I forgot. No worries, though. The word is out, and everybody knows what I did last summer. So here is a much-postponed letter to my dad.

Play along, try not to google the clues. Just pay attention and hopefully you'll figure it out. Have fun!


Dear Pa,

I feel you deserve to know a secret. I went exploring in a foreign land this summer, without you knowing. But you'll have to guess where. The day I ventured out here, I was in transit. In three places (in different corners of the world) but not wholly in any one of them.

Well before I ever came here, I dreamt about being here. In a long, long tram ride. In real life, this tiny city has 73 kilometres of tram tracks, and more than 110 trams! No wonder that's all I could dream about.

This incredibly cool city was one of nine European cities of culture in 2000, hosted the 2007 Eurovision contest, and held the 1952 Olympics. Blah blah blah.

It snows for more than one third of the year , and has an average of 51 days without sun in the winter. Imagine that! So when Carl Ludvig Engel designed this city, he very fittingly wanted it to be The Great White City of the North. His neo-classical architecture was so convincingly Russian that the Gorky Park film crew decided to shoot here instead of Moscow, where the park originally consecrated to Maxim Gorky is. Here, have a picture example of all the Rusky business.

Like me, people who live here love all kinds of fish, except, perhaps Tomato Baltic Herring, which isn't quite so much a fish preparation but a method of punishment in schools in this country.

Where there is fish, there must be water. And my, is there water. This city is built on over 300 islands. Three hundred! But it also has rocks. Big ones. The world's largest continuous rock tunnel is here.

You've probably guessed by now which city I'm talking about. Please, please tell me you peered at the picture above with a magnifying glass, at least?

I had such an awesome time there. It was the perfect last bit of holiday adventure before I went back to being in Delhi's belly again. More fun because it was on the sly, of course. And because while I was there, a giant rainstorm struck the city, and everything got soaked, and my plane washed away. That last part is not true. Unfortunately.

But almost! Because, when I got back to the airport (almost rain-soaked, but well in time!), they told me my flight was delayed. And so I had fun window-shopping in duty free and taking up kind strangers' offers for coffee and conversation for the rest of my time there. I can be such a happy, hippie hobo.

Please don't be mad, Dad.

All my love,

N

Eggs

If you have ever talked to me about food, you must have discovered how much I love eggs. What 42 is to some people, eggs are to me. Ask me for breakfast, and I will offer to make you eggs, any way you like. Ask me for lunch, and I will offer to make you eggs. Ask me for dinner, and I will offer to make you...well, you guessed it.

Truth be told, it's because they're just that versatile. You can use them in coatings, fillings, and main courses. You can cook them with vegetables, in fried rice (or noodles), or just by themselves. You can fry them, poach them, scramble them, boil them (eugh), foam them, age them, devil them, bake them, shir them, soup them, spiderweave them, and probably even dance with them.

The only thing you can't do if you want to successfully enjoy an egg, in fact, is to break it on the way home.

So it's only natural that I want to share with you some of the fun ways I've used eggs recently. And boy, I've used a lot of eggs. Perhaps a personal best? Thirteen in one day. And that's just to bake with.

Let's start simply with fried eggs. Here, have a look at my lunch and dinner from [some day] last week. For lunch, spaghetti with chunky tomato sauce and a fried egg on top. Yolk, just runny. Yummy. And another fried egg as part of dinner. This time with a yolk that wonderfully, sunshinily spread itself out in the pan. Topped with Italian pizza seasoning herbs (!), and eaten with toast. I can't even begin to tell you how good this was.

I'll just leave you to drool for a bit.

And then, I took the day off from classes to bake! It was my daddy's birthday on the ninth, you see. So I set about, with all the zest in the world (and tons of the lemon kind in my fridge), to bake. The trouble was, I didn't know what to make. AND, my sister had eaten all the eggs.

Okay, she'd eaten two of them. But two out of the six eggs I had carefully planned my undecided recipe around? Man.

But like every time things go wrong, things went super right afterwards! I went and bought a zillion eggs, and I didn't break them on the way home. I separated the whites from the yolks for seven whole eggs without mixing them up, or leaving bits of the shell in the mix. I measured and sifted the flours (which I usually don't have the patience for), and didn't even yield to the temptation of adding any whole wheat flour into it. I beat the whites till they were softly peaking, added some sugar, and beat till they were beautifully meringue-like shiny. I followed a recipe, for heaven's sake, for probably one of the few times in my life. And then, I poured the whole mix into baking trays without letting it collapse!

I felt like a superstar.

I won't bore you with the details of how much I enjoyed making the strawberry topping, which I smeared all over everything. Instead just look at how it turned out. Sponge cake with strawberry filling. All professional. All natural.

I made lots more cakes that day. One large-family-sized cake, and twenty-four gooey chocolate cupcakes. They smelt so good, I was afraid I'd finish them before everyone else could taste any. I didn't.

I had cake batter instead.

A note: I have a simple, delicious, new go-to recipe for chocolate cake. Ask me for details! (Or cake.)

World Photography Day

In honour of World Photography Day (19th August), and also because this is my final year in college and next year I can take pictures of more exciting places! I thought I would document my day there. Of course, getting there involves walking to and from college, which is far more exciting than college itself on some days, so this set of photos isn't strictly constrained to campus grounds. But there's enough Stephania floating around in the archives, anyway. Here's my photographic ode to Delhi University.


8.15 am

11.45 am

3.05 pm

Happy days, these. Starting in yellower-than-sunshine stop lights on my favourite way to walk to class, sprinkled with ephemeral rainstorms, friends, their full wallets(!), lost keys and by-the-by astronomy lessons, and ending with a nap that quintessentialises college life: whatever you want, anywhere you like. Man, I'm going to miss this place.

Happy (belated) Photography Day, everyone!

Yeni

Yeni, the Turkish word for new. I like how it sounds like yes and no, the mixed up feelings you get when change has just blown you into a new place.

Or a new time, for that matter.

Why do I say that? Because this blog is a year old. A long-term relationship with the slow picturisation of my life. Much has happened in the past year, and yet it doesn't feel like all that long. It's been a much-awaited exploration of a lot for me, and I'm glad I've had somewhere to reflect on them, and someone to share them with. Thank you, everyone, for patiently following, commenting (and complimenting), and mostly, keeping me company.

I'm just going to continue to look out my (new house's) window, and show you the view.

A bit of wabi-sabi from the trenches.

Because every time she saw him for the last time,
that thing ensconced by her ribcage
shattered
into a zillion shards of coloured glass,
scattering haphazard rainbows
of sparkling broken light.

Like pieces of a butterfly's wing,
hidden in the mossy brickwork
of a walkway
they were going to build over.

      (PS:       Our college is nuts. Just thought I should tell you. They're covering up everything charming about the building in marble that reeks of money, without actually making sure all the stuff underneath works. Water, electricity, ventilation. Boy, some alumni are going to rave.
     PPS:      This photo is entirely unedited. The first in a long time. Maybe I should get back to doing that some more.)