Dec 2017 – ARUNDHATI BASU

Night Streets of Rome

It was the morning of Christmas eve when I wrote this but life right now is caught in a tornado of socialising in Delhi where the days are pleasant and the sun is ripe with mellow beauty. The skies are blue and I am getting a few sunrises into my kitty as I head out for early morning runs with the cool wind in my hair. Here I feel the need for four stomachs as I did in Rome (as I always do) for my mother-in-law has been rustling up feasts every day for meals at home, you see. Time at hand is a bit tight so I thought I would share some clips of the night lights of Rome. The Christmas spirit there is all over the city and quietly cemented by the elegance of its ancient Corinthian columns, the cupolas and domes and clock towers.

We drank plenty of wine, munched on bruschetta, pizza, cacio e pepe and aglio e olio pastas, walked arm-in-arm down the streets so softly lit, the old buildings casting half shadows, the occasional pair of lovers around the corner caught in a passionate embrace, men zipping down the cobbled streets of the alleys on Vespas with alarming speed and recklessness, the Carabinieri posted everywhere with their rifles and enough male beauty to make you go ooh. We sat with a fashion designer friend of mine and her half-Italian prince, drank into the night with stories of faraway places and times, and it felt heady, all those stories with sips of prosecco.

An Italian artist from Florence possibly got Rome in a heartbeat when he noted sometime in the 14th century that it is the city of echoes, the city of illusions, and the city of yearning. Because that is what it does for us, produce the yearning to walk its cobbled streets for a long, long time till you want to walk it no more. But how can that even be?

On that note of wistfulness, I wish you all a wonderful Christmas with plenty of mulled wine and Christmas cake and roasts, and I also raise a glass of wine, a deep ruby, to you from my end.

Blessed Virgin Mary stands atop the Column of the Immaculate Conception

Operatic singer at the Temple of Hadrian

Corinthian columns of The Temple of Hadrian

Dec 24, 2017

Arundhati Basu66 Comments

The Rome Diaries

We are back in Rome. Soporific Rome with her unbearable beauty that squeezes my heart with barely contained pleasure, ancient temples and theaters lurking around every corner. It is 4.30 in the morning and I am wide awake because I am just so and Adi is patting me to go back to sleep but I feel like pouring my heart out for it is brimming. From arriving in a boutique hotel in the old quarters of the city where Pope Julius II had wanted his architect Donato Bramante, the Renaissance master, to design the Palazzo dei Tribunali, the city’s justice system. It was an incomplete mission. The stone seats of the unfinished courthouse remain as a quiet reminder of the gap between aspiration and attainment. Every master must have a few tucked into his kitty of achievements.

We walked around in the evening after an afternoon spent drinking Champagne with tuna and cream cheese canapes. The hotel surprised us, throwing in a couple of flaky pastries, their hearts filled with apple and cinnamon, some profiteroles and chocolates, because it was in lieu of the six years we have been married. Eight years made up of frustrating, quiet, joyous, unsettling and delirious moments. For life is such a wonderful concoction of the drama and the dull. One cannot exist without the other and really it would be tedious with only the highs to ride. There are nudges of mortality from time to time with close relatives shedding their mortal lives behind, reminding us that ‘time’s winged chariot’ is ‘hurrying near’, undeniable and as tangible as this plush hotel bed I find myself in.

The neighbourhood around us is networked by medieval alleys aged by the stories of the giubbonari (jacket-makers) who worked in one, the calderari (coppersmiths) in another narrow cobbled one, the baullari (trunk-makers), the cappellari (hat-makers) and so on. You get the drift. The many workers who served the wealthy who lived in the palazzi in the area. At the end of our street lived Raphael once. I doubt the streets have changed much, the faded pastel houses and shuttered windows silent witnesses to the life stories of generations unfolding within.

At an intimate osteria we stopped for a spot of dinner. Fine, rich Merlot fished off the high shelves of the establishment by its owner with a bottle grabber and presented with a flourish to go with the carciofi alla romana which is stewed artichoke beloved of the ancient Romans, grilled seafood, creamy pasta and succulent chicken cooked in sweet Port, his craggy face wreathed with smiles as we thanked him for giving us a table meant for four. He had turned away customers even though we were about to finish up and he said, “No hurry, okay? Food is to be enjoyed. You walked in, I liked you both and I wanted you to relax.” A small place filled up with his relatives, their large families divided between the old and young tables.

Simple flavours married together with a dexterous touch. Italian food in an osteria tucked into the quiet alleys of Rome with its unassuming charm and modest menu, a beaming owner keeping an eye on his diners, dropping by to chat in bits,…then pressing our noses to windows of antique shops, armed with giant cones of gelato and swinging by that great Baroque masterpiece of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi at Piazza Navona, fingers freezing and nose tingling with the sudden icy winds that swept through the empty square. A few locals walked through the cobbled square. The crowds of summer have melted away. Vine-clad walls of townhouses towered above us in the alleys, festooned by canopies of fairy lights, as we passed in the shadows of the chiesas and returned to our hotel room to fall into bed with jasmine tea and exhaustion.

Carciofi alla Romana (stewed artichokes as the old Romans liked it)

Dec 17, 2017

Arundhati Basu72 Comments

Malmö

The road from Copenhagen to Malmö is charmed. In just a matter of 186 Swedish Krona (20 Euros) and 40 minutes, we were in another country, and more importantly we were on the Øresund Bridge, synonymous with the Scandinavian crime show, The Broen (The Bridge). There was heightened anticipation thrown into the mix though it is a matter of some relief that you are not stopped by the discovery of a body, cut in half, lying on the bridge (here I refer to The Broen, so calm down and keep your hair on). The bridge is impressive on its own without the need for added drama for it is the longest road-and-rail bridge in Europe linking up the cities of Copenhagen in Denmark and Malmö in Sweden that lie on either side of the Øresund strait.

The bus was stopped at the Swedish toll booth by Swedish cops for on-the-spot checks, a young German Shepherd in their tow who sniffed his way most judiciously around the various bags stowed into the luggage compartment and the passengers. The idea is to ferret out drugs – we were travelling from Copenhagen, home to that druggie-hippie haven called Christiania . The skyline of Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city, was marked by The Turning Torso, a building that looks like it has been twisted along its length quite thoroughly, and the brainchild of the famed Spanish architect, Santiago Calatrava. I had seen his work previously in Venice in the form of a stone and glass bridge, and later The Oculus in Manhattan. The man knows how to boggle the mind.

For some perspective, Malmö is a formerly fortified Hanseatic port that traces its roots to the year 1272. Yet my three points of joy in the old town square had nothing to do with its history.

The first was a shoe shop, the signage of which read Crockett and Jones. What? Shoes from Northampton in Malmö? There we were in the shop staring lustily at these beautiful shoes crafted in leather, the finest stitches in place (with prices to match), from a brand that was started by two heavily moustachioed men — a certain Charles Jones had got together with his brother-in-law James Crockett “to encourage young men of good character in the towns of Northampton and Coventry to set up business on their own”. The tall Swede inside the shop held up a pair and said: “They come from Northampton, an English town known for its shoes.”

That is travelling in a nutshell for you. You never know what lies around the corner.

The second instalment of my thrills was in acquiring a box of Summerbird chocolates. A Scandinavian chocolatier brand pompously priced but hey when a piece of chocolate is made from Trinitario cocoa beans, it wins all arguments. There are three noble species of cocoa beans – the rare Criollo, the common Forastero, and then Trinitario, which is a hybrid of Criollo and Forastero and a blend that brings together the best of both beans.

Now, it is important that you picture a blustery, frigid day when we walked across the three squares in the city. You would then be able to imagine the indescribable pleasure that surged through us as we clapped eyes upon the most wonderful coffee shops I have ever seen. Their warm interiors called out to me, “come, child come”. The coffee shops in Sweden are a coffee lover’s dream. Warm wooden interiors, white walls for contrast, books stacked by the dozen into shelves, antique yellow lighting. It builds up a snug atmosphere where to give in to the Swedish coffee culture of fika — a break that demands a cup of coffee and a slice of cake — becomes a must.

There’s a self-respecting strain of passion for coffee in the country. For one, their historical customs records bear testimony to the fact that the first batch of coffee was shipped into the country in 1685. But it was King Karl XII who sparked the trend of drinking coffee in the 18^th century when he returned to Sweden from Turkey with a Turkish coffee kettle. Coffee in those days however was an expensive drink but who could stop the bon ton when there was a statement to be made. I wonder what Karl XII would have made of these coffee shops. Would he have given up all thoughts of conquering far flung countries and just given into slices of chunky cake and a cuppa?

Stepping out of our coffee haven, we spotted the equestrian bronze statue of King Karl X in the middle of Stortorget, Malmö’s Big Square. He was Karl XII’s grandfather and an illustrious figure in his own right who had wrested the city’s freedom from Denmark. A city that is marked today by the contrast between its present through futuristic buildings and the old through structures of great beauty such as the castle, a commandant’s house and the Rådhus, its 16th-century City Hall that is featured in the lead photo of this post. Later, we headed into its 19th century railway station, refugees crammed into its every nook and corner, waiting to take the train to Lund.

2017-12-12 03.46.58 1.jpg — A blurred view of the Øresund Bridge

2017-12-12 03.46.57 1.jpg — On the Øresund

2017-12-12 03.46.57 2.jpg — The Swedish toll booth on the way to Malmö

2017-12-12 03.35.40 1.jpg — A group of musicians

2017-12-12 03.46.54 1.jpg — Crockett & Jones

2017-12-12 03.35.39 2.jpg — Summerbird chocolates

2017-12-12 03.35.41 1.jpg — Stortorget, the big square in the city

2017-12-12 03.35.46 2.jpg — The railway station

2017-12-12 03.35.43 2.jpg — Skånetrafiken commuter trains

2017-12-12 03.35.43 1.jpg — The coffeeshop inside the Malmö railway station

2017-12-12 03.35.44 2.jpg — Do you see what I mean? On days I imagine myself tucked in a corner in one of these coffee shops of Malmö, absorbed in a juicy crime thriller along with nibbles of cake.

Dec 14, 2017

Arundhati Basu52 Comments

Copenhagen

Life is not life without a polar bear on the piano, another on the guitar and a third on the violin. That is unless you find yourself in Copenhagen on a frigid November weekend staring at three benign polar bears playing music (because it is the food of life, dear knucklehead) to drown out the chattering of your teeth. It was 2015, I was going to turn 35, and my husband had decided that it had to be in a nation that declares itself the happiest in the world.

There we were in a smart city, where the people are smart enough to reduce their carbon footprints by cycling everywhere, the bars and cafes straight out of the pages of slick magazines, where not a speck of rubbish dots the streets… heck, even the streetlights are smart – yet in that smartest of all smart cities, the shower of our hotel room was not quite so sharp. I had expected something akin to the technologically advanced loos of Southeast Asia, but no this idjit here, it sprayed water all over the bathroom. We changed rooms thrice in the matter of a morning which meant that we cadged up a whole lot of bonus points. You can never have enough points if you rely on them as much as we do.

After we had found our point of reference in the city, the Magasin mall at Kongens Nytorv, we walked around the city doing almost nothing touristy. That would include not visiting the 19th century amusement park, Tivoli, or entering the palaces and castles. Not eating bugs at Noma for a fortune. I would like to point out here that The Little Mermaid is poof, bloody underwhelming. Instead we walked and walked, taking it all in. The turquoise towers and spires, girls on skateboards swishing by, bikes just about everywhere and then those trendy bike carts, hip cafes and brewpubs in working class districts such as Nørrebro, the business district of Ørestad with architectural marvels like the Black Diamond Library…During the course of these rambles about town, I loved looking up because oh those vintage street lamps, dangling from wires above the streets like pretty earrings.

In Nyhavn, the 17th century waterfront, where Hans Christian Andersen lived during the 1800s and where old townhouses in peppy colours line the canal, people queued up for boat rides. We queued up for piping hot churros and chocolate at Rajissimo, a chain of cafés in Copenhagen which serves homemade ice-cream, coffees, waffles, basically all kinds of fried dough, and tells you ‘to be good to yourself’. Who am I to bypass such wisdom on an icy evening?

After, we sat outside by the canal at one of the old bars, wrapped ourselves in blankets kept outside on the chairs and sipped on chilled draft beer. When we moved inside to try out more varieties of local beers, three giggly girls who manned the bar shared stories with us of the curiously oriental décor of the bar. In Nyhavn, on the evening of my birthday, we also almost entered a strip bar mistaking it to be a Chinese restaurant.

The one touristy thing to do in Copenhagen which is quite unmissable is the Carlsberg Beer Factory. Its brewery dates back to the year 1847 when the founder J C Jacobsen, a Danish industrialist and philanthropist, started brewing beer using new scientific methods in the Carlsberg laboratory.

The story of the Jacobsens is worth exploring and you will also find yourself quaffing free pints of icy beer apart from gaping at the brewery’s astonishing collection of beer bottles, apparently the world’s largest, numbering about 16,600 different kinds. The numbers might have gone up. They are vintage beer bottles, hundreds of years old. I spotted Thomas Hardy’s Ale, said to be produced only once a year and first made in 1968 to commemorate Hardy who spoke of a strong Dorchester beer that would be “the most beautiful colour an artist could possibly desire, as bright as an autumn sunset.”

Now Carlsberg’s ambassadors are tall and muscular. Jutland horses who are part of the staff. Louise and Laura, Jern and Oda Brit…they have names labelled outside their stables with their lineage — their far (father) and mor (mother) listed out too — for they have stellar genes. They could easily play the role of warhorses for which they were originally bred but they have made the switch to tamely carry beer around the city in old carts during special occasions.

A dream birthday trip that included a helluva spat when I stomped off to see The Little Mermaid by myself. Now I wonder what we fought about but I remember taking the train by myself to the Langelinie Promenade and caught her photo thus on a dull rainy evening when the bent of my mind did not allow me to be partial to an insipid little mermaid waiting for her prince to show up.

The hotel room that is worthy of a mention because it earned us points and an upgrade

2017-12-07 12.16.01 1.jpg — ‘It’s bloody cold. Can we just go inside?’

2017-12-07 12.04.32 2.jpg — Carlsberg Brewery

Carl Jacobsen and his crew at the brewery

The Carlsberg gardens reveal the Jacobsens’ enthusiasm for art

French sculptor François Jouffroy’s ‘The First Secret’ (1839)

2017-12-07 12.04.30 2.jpg — The brewery’s collection of beer bottles

2017-12-07 12.15.57 2.jpg — Deserted train stations in the Ørestad district

2017-12-07 12.15.58 2.jpg — In the Ørestad

A blurred bit of The Black Diamond in Ørestad

Magasin du Nord on the grand old square of Kongens Nytorv

Dec 12, 2017

Arundhati Basu56 Comments

First Snow of the Season

I am smitten by snow. There is no earthly reason why I should not. I do not care about the slushy aftermath of it, really, I do not give two hoots. Because right now it is glorious. I am wrapped up in my fur throw watching it snow prettily, a few extremely buttery garlic knots and pizza slices in my stomach. It has been snowing since morning and my world is quite so white and wonderful.

Earlier on, I put on my boots and warm jacket and rushed out to the waterfront. The park had turned pristine white, only footprints showing through the snow (someone was out running too), brown autumnal leaves now caked with snow, the dark brown of the barks adding some contrast to the startling white outside. I was hoping to meet Alex again. He is the best looking boy I have met in some time. Now Alex is a golden retriever before your eyebrows touch your scalps there. He is quite the blonde, with well-groomed hair standing in little tufts and bits about his face, and he has a weakness for jumping on unsuspecting humans to share some of his drool-some happiness. Alas, I did not spot Alex today. I had met him by the waters yesterday so I made my way back there hoping to catch him playing in the snow. Instead I saw, shivering with delight through a curtain of snow that the waters had turned a shade of steely teal, globules of snow dissolving into the ripples and sheathing the boulders. The bridge and the cranes at the port — they had vanished behind a wall of dense white fog.

Then Adi and I walked to the store a couple of miles away, not a good idea – which we realised in a while – but besides fingers turning immensely numb inside the gloves because I was taking photos more than walking, I did spot a squirrel duo up in the branches of a tree with blobs of snow around on them. One chomping on a nut and the other had spotted just one, so it was chuffed. A little tableau of survival playing out right there in front of our eyes, though blurred by snow.

Dec 9, 2017

Arundhati Basu79 Comments

Christiania in Whispers

Two years ago for my birthday, Adi booked us on a flight to ultra hip and modernist Copenhagen. The emphasis in the Scandinavian city — where everything is cutting edge, where nothing is stick-in-the-mud or capable of inducing ennui — is on going green. Cycling is the national mantra, hotels and restaurants are overwhelmingly environment friendly, organic food and beer is de rigueur. There hygge is embraced by bringing the outside into the inside — inexpensive, cosy elements which transform the interiors with an intimate and warm touch at once. It is just fitting that there should be a green quarter in this city. Truly green.

Christiania. Utter it and you are usually faced with ecstatic reactions. A cousin sister-in-law of mine calls it the land of ‘sweet air’. Her friend had gifted her a piece of land in Freetown Christiania. Another chap, one of our building residents and a Sheldon lookalike, went into raptures. ‘Isn’t it just wonderful?’ he asked us with a gleam in his eyes as we chugged on bottles of beer on our terrace a few months ago. My reaction was a piteous ‘erm’.

On that shivery November day in 2015, beneath a sky that was a dome of soulless grey, we took the metro to the Freetown of Christiania. After we had passed a few whimsical statues, cyclists clad in coats and beanies, and a church with a serpentine spire wrought in gold it seemed, we entered the bohemian quarter. A sign announced, ‘Now you are leaving the EU’.

Beyond the gates stand a district which was once a military base. Abandoned in the ’70s, it was taken over by hippies and declared as an autonomous neighbourhood, where lay the beginnings of a self-governed and self-sustained society. The Danish government of the day granted it the status of a ‘social experiment’ and therefore exempt from taxes. The buildings inside are shabby but inhabited. As proof, you spot pairs of mud-coated tiny and big wellies propped up outside the worn-out doors.

Only bikes ply within the neighbourhood. It is a car-free zone, you see. Badass graffitis pop up on the walls of old barracks, a cafe or two shows up, pop-up markets sell hippie paraphernalia, and then there’s the stretch of Pusher Street where cannabis is rife in the air. From behind wooden kiosks smothered in camouflage nettings, a guy in dreadlocks whispered, ‘Brother, you smoke?’ I whispered to Adi, awed by the public nature of it, ‘Does he mean hash, baby?’ And the fellow whispered again, ‘Yes, he does’. A game of Chinese Whispers.

I had grand plans. That I would document it all on my phone. Capture Christiania in stills. But the signage at the start of Pusher Street declared ‘no photos’ because ‘buying and selling hash is still illegal’ (right), and my beloved, who lives by the rulebook, confiscated my phone right away. I sulked and stomped, wheedling in phases to extract my phone, but he would not budge. ‘Rather me than some druggie,’ he said. Organic vegetable stores, decrepit but colourful house fronts, yoga studios, a boutique or two, bikes, a lake, a tiny temple with a miniature goddess, muddy tracks… in my field of vision it unravelled rather like a post apocalyptic scene. Soon the heavens burst above our heads. We ran through the mud-caked paths in Christiania soaked to our skin, feeling grimy and the urge for a hot shower to slough off the veneer of slovenliness. Later we sat in a bakery on Dronningensgade and comforted our soggy selves with flaky bites of stuffed pastry and pizza.

I am not its biggest fan but the notion of Christiania is unconventional. Anything that bucks conventions is a winner in my books – the fact that there can be an alternate way of living and a place where no one owns private land is intriguing. Like my cousin sis-in-law, you too can own a share of this hippy haven. But it does not make you a stakeholder in the property or allow you voting rights. It is symbolic — a donation to the cause of the people of Christiania who are buying the 85-acre land from the government in parts. Also, there is the strange dichotomy of it – within the paradigm of a strictly law-abiding city, it is incomprehensible that Bohemia might prevail, but exist it does and with an avant-garde flair.

Dec 8, 2017

Arundhati Basu58 Comments

Vignettes

Central Park looked like a big beautiful canvas as I strolled through it to the American Museum of Natural History in the Upper West Side. Dried leaves glowed in vivid tones of gold and russet. Old men read books on benches which tell stories through those small plaques. You might take a seat on one but oh do leave some space for the couple’s dog who loved hanging out there too. They are all long gone… what remains is the warmth of the thought that you share the bench with souls that might have dissolved in ether, but they too savoured the solitude, as much as you do now. Beneath those flaming bowers, bright-eyed squirrels scurried up and down wire fences, a man stooped to gather a bunch of leaves in his arms, to throw them in the air, let them rain upon him in a shower of gold as his partner waited to capture it on her camera with a bashful grin, an old man rowed his boat serenely by.

Then I found my way to the pink granite largesse of the Natural History Museum where the suggested amount for entry is $23 – but you can shell out what you want to enter it. I wanted to pay a buck and see what their reaction might be (just to be perverse) but then I rose above that notion. Those mighty quotes of Ted Roosevelt staring back at you — exalted thoughts and words, they make sure that any pettiness is put to shame. Right after, I lost my mind — to the beauty of animals carefully preserved by an American taxidermist towards the late part of the 19th century, reproductions of dinosaurs from fossils, the Mayan gods, paraphernalia from the Silk Route, hunting apparatus of the Amazon Indians, strange shrunken heads that looked like tiny balls with hair flowing from the heads, sewed up lips and head because the South American people such as the Shuar counteract violent death and the need of the soul for revenge by keeping the spirit trapped inside the heads.

2017-12-04 07.30.47 1.jpg — The ultra tall Barosaurus defends its young from the Allosaurus up front. An encounter that might have taken place in the western part of the US about 140 million years ago.

2017-12-04 07.30.40 1.jpg — An alarmed African elephant

2017-12-04 07.30.39 1.jpg — Early copy of the Koran retrieved from somewhere in Africa.

2017-12-04 07.30.38 1.jpg — Golden wares of Samarkand where caravan roads converged, bringing in exotic goods from China, India, Armenia, Persia and the Near East.

2017-12-04 07.30.37 1.jpg — Colossal Olmec stone head from Southern Verz Cruz and Tabasco in Mexico

Dec 5, 2017

Arundhati Basu81 Comments

Twilight

The sunset’s fiery kiss to the Hudson today on the second day of December stopped me short in my tracks. These spectacularly beautiful days are altogether unmissable. I want to trap them in my fists, shut ’em tight and hold time in my hands. How does one let go of these evenings of flaming oranges and lavenders, rose gold and smoky blues?

The Christmas lights are up. It seems that Bayonne with its worn-out air can also go ballistic with decorations. Less is clearly not more here.

Dec 3, 2017

Arundhati Basu49 Comments