Still Trying to Cope with a Crisis

Friday, March 8, 2019

Bombay

Still Trying to Cope with a Crisis

     Namaste from Bombay!

      It was a surreal sort of day. I awoke with the immediate knowledge that all was not well with my world. It is a disconcerting feeling with which to wake up. My daily prayer included, of course, a fervent one for the retrieval of my data. I used my Ipad to blog and found that, overall, I was feeling much calmer. I suppose the initial shock of my loss had dissipated and I had reached a point of calm fatalism. If I did get my data back, I’d rejoice. If I have lost it, well, all is not lost with the world. The purely essential material I need has been saved and can be recovered from other sites. I will have lost a lot, no doubt...but hey, you live and learn and you roll with life’s punches. 

     I spoke to Llew for about 15 minutes—once again, he told me that nothing was ever as bad as our mental energy can make it. He managed to get my mind off it for a few minutes and cheered me up.  Then, on impulse, I tried to get my friend Delyse in Connecticut on WhatsApp and she too answered on the second ring! This too is a rarity as she never usually picks up her phone. She too sensed the crisis in my voice and then proceeded to commiserate with me. Naturally, she too said she would pray to help me get my data back. We too talked about other things—books we are currently reading, movies we have watched, etc. and then it was time to call off and get on with my day. 

     I had my breakfast—a broon with some spreads—I need to finish these before the end of May when I will be heading back home. Hence, I have decided to have one broon every other day and my muesli breakfast on in-between days. So, when the breadman’s bicycle bell sounded, I went into my balcony and called hm upstairs. I have very little time to just sit in my balcony actually—which was something I would imagine myself doing when I first rented this apartment. I guess once I got my TV, I was much more focused on watching during meal times than sitting in the balcony and eating.  Besides, I found that the crows are quite intimidating here. If I sit with a plate of snacks, you can be sure they will come to the balcony and eye my eats. I do not need that stress!

     After I finished with the gym, since I got no call from Himanshu about the status of my laptop you then, I called him. He told me that what I had recovered with Meredith through the Stellar Data Recovery Software I had purchased was my entire hard drive. He said that last night at about 9.00 pm, he began to work on the retrieval of my deleted files, He was told that the process would take about 18 hours. So, he told me that late tonight or, more likely, tomorrow morning, he will be able to tell me how much has been retrieved (if at all). In other words, I will have to stay calm and patient for at least one more day before I can figure out where I stand. Oh well.  Meanwhile, at the gym, the male friends I have made there told me that there are Apple stores on Hill Road and Linking Road and that they would be able to get my work done--for a good fee, no doubt, they said, but it could be accomplished. It was good to know that.

  After an hour’s workout in the gym (I am trying to melt the extra ounces/pounds gained through one week of five-star hotel eating in Kerala), I got back home and did some reading. Although I do not have my laptop with me, my IPad is a great substitute as I had purchased a keyboard as an accessory that works with the Bluetooth device as an attachment. Hence, I can type almost at my regular speed—which I could never do on an IPad’s built-in screen keyboard. I am aged to catch up with work email and found that my friends had already starting reading my blog post of yesterday and were contacting me to find out where I stood. It is so nice to know that one’s is not a voice in the wilderness but that real people are actually out there reading what I hammer out. 

     I had an early lunch—at 12.30 pm today because my one broon made me hungry and also because I had a 1.00 pm appointment with Denzil Smith at The Bagel Cafe. I did not want to eat carbs at the cafe or to drink their regular (non-decaff) coffee...so I made sure I went there with something substantial in me. Since it happens to be a Friday in Lent, I could not eat the chicken curry in my fridge—all I ate was a bit of dal and some delicious peas and cauliflower. 

Interviewing Denzil Smith:

Denzil Smith’s name had been mentioned to me through many of the recent people to whom I have been speaking. He is the producer of the show Bombay Jazz which I shall be seeing on March 16 at the Prithvi Theater and is very active in the Zonals competitions which is what I am investigating right now. Denzil is an actor, a producer and a director, but he makes his living mainly by Acting.

With the current crisis on my hands and the lack of a laptop, I 
going to this interview without doing my homework. So really I did not know anything about Denzil. All I knew (from his name) is that he was probably an Anglo-Indian—the first one I have spoken to in Bombay, so far. Come to think if it, I wonder if Neale Murray (whom I interviewed about three weeks ago) is an Anglo-Indian. In actual fact, he turned out to be extremely impressive in the breath of work he has undertaken over a very long career as an actor. His Hindi movie Badla starring Amitabh Bachhan was releasing today and during our interview, he actually started getting texts from friends who had seen it and were getting back to congratulate him. He has won the All-India Critics Award for Best Actor in a Negative (Villain’s) Role and, get this, has acted in both parts of The Best Exotic Mariegold Hotel with the likes of Judi Dench, Ronald Pickup and Celia Imrie. Besides this, he has starred in The Viceroy’s House with Hugh Bonneville and Gillian Anderson. He showed me many pictures of himself and the stars of all these shows. He has done Hindi movies, English movies and English language theater, voiceovers, dubbing, you name it. A true working actor. I thoroughly enjoyed our chat and his offer to email me pictures right away. I will now be seeing him in performance at Bombay Jazz on March 16 at the Prithvi Theater.    

From The Bagel Shop, I walked back home. It is still very pleasant in Bombay even in the afternoon and I am still enjoying walking all over the place. Bandra is such a pleasure to explore on foot. I pause often to take pictures of flowering trees—I do not know their names but their blooms are vivid and remind me of the flowering trees I had seen in Hawai’i. 

Back home, I continued reading The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson—you can tell that my mind has settled down as I can now concentrate when I am reading. It is a very charming novel, beautifully written and it is moving along at leisure.  It reminds me very much of the Mapp and Lucia novels of H.F.Benson that were also set in Rye and that captured the life of the privileged upper middle class before World War II. Very enjoyable indeed. 

My window on Broad Street, Oxford, through the Martin School webcam also continues to keep me in a good peaceful mental space. I thoroughly enjoy watching students on their bicycles tear down the street, groups of kids being taken on conducted waking tours, the Oxford sight seeing bus plying like clockwork every half an hour, stopping to pick up and disgorge passengers from outside the Sheldonian Theater, seeing dozens of people per hour go in and out of the Weston Library. I recall that I did those exact same things when I lived in Oxford and I relive my times there—some of the happiest times in my life. 

It is also fascinating to see the city through varied weather conditions: yesterday, for instance, it was pouring and colorful umbrellas were up as condensation on the camera lens distorted images and occasionally one could see a fat raindrop slide down the lens. Today, the rain had gone but the city lay under thick gray cloud cover and the sun was absent. I keep corresponding by email with my friend Sue in whose home in Oxford I now live when I am there and she sent me pictures of crocuses and yellow forsythia in nearby Abingdon where she does voluntary work to announcer the arrival in England of Spring.    

I stopped for a pot of tea and a few nuts—I am watching my weight—while watching a new British TV program starring Clarissa Dickson Wright (she is the other half of the Two Fat Ladies—after she lost her partner Jennifer Paterson, she is going solo as a TV presenter). Clarissa comes from aristocracy—her father was Surgeon-General to the Royal Family. She studied Law at Oxford and was a practicing barrister in London for decades before she switched careers completely, began cooking and making a living out of doing so. She hit the jackpot with Jennifer Paterson when they did The Two Fat Ladies series.  She is, in fact, truly enormous and she has aged since the duo did the older series. But she is still interesting. In a series called A History of British Food: Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner, she talks about the history of British food—truly fascinating. She is visiting farms, monasteries, medieval university dining halls (New College, Oxford), food halls (Fortnum and Mason) to tell us how food as it is known in Britain has evolved through the centuries. As a history and food buff, I am loving every second of it.

Not too long after, I left for Dad’s place to visit with him and Russel.  I found Dad tied up at the dining table with Ewell, who started off as my colleague at Jai Hind College in Bombay where he taught Accountancy decades ago and became a close friend of mine. He evolved into a family friend over the years that I have been away from India and helps Dad with all his Accounting and Taxation work—a truly stellar friend and a wonderful human being. I went into the bedroom to speak with Russel with whom I spent half an hour.  Russel is so happy and so excited that he can do all Valerian’s exercises and although he is dreading his return tomorrow (Russel does not like Valerian for some reason) and keeps telling me to tell him not to come, he is doing better every day. Praise the Lord!

Dad told me that he would not be joining me for Mass today. And Russel told me there would be Stations of the Cross today before Mass—so I set off alone.  The Stations (instead of being 14 in number) were compressed to just 7 but they were very moving and deeply spiritual. I was just amazed to see how many people attended them—the church was packed on a weekday evening! It was also beautifully orchestrated with a large number of people involved as commentators, readers, etc. It has been many years since I have attended The Stations of the Cross. In my parish in Connecticut, we have a program called Taize every Friday in Lent and I have often served as a commentator on that one. 

After Mass, I stopped to buy some vegetarian soup packets for Lent (Tomato and Basil and Golden Vegetable) and walked home for my dinner. I had Tomato Soup and more Peas and Cauliflower while continuing to watch The Sinner. And then I did some more reading of my novel and went to bed. 

I can only hope and pray that tomorrow will bring me good news...

Until tomorrow...