The best mirror is an old friend

In Monday white at the Government College of Girls in Chandigarh with Harry Bains, Sunita Lal and Suchitra Behl (above) and with Rita Chauhan in school days in Shillong (below)

Today is Sister's Day. Send this to all your sisters - even me, if Iam like one.If you get back 7, you are loved.Happy Sister's Day !I LOVE YA SISTA!!! :-)Girlfriends and Sisters WeekI am only as strong as the coffee I drink, the hairspray I use and thefriends I have.To the cool women that have touched my life... here's to you!National Girlfriends DayWhat would most of us do without our sisters, confidants and shopping,lunching, and traveling girls? Let's celebrate each other for eachother's sake!TO MY GIRLFRIENDS!

When Old Girls Meet

A line in a news item on one of the metro pages catches the eye. Old students of Lucknow Loreto sang the school anthem at a get-together. I try to imagine a group of middle-aged women fervently singing the school song. A bit much really.
The next few days, however, I find myself trying to recall the song. For I too had been part of Loreto away in the north-east hills. The last three years of school for me were at the Shillong Loreto. And what years! Fetes and socials, pranks and picnic, dreams and desires. I can recall so much. But the school song seems to have been lost to time. Days pass and I suddenly am will three other classmates. Four of the old girls of our Class of 1971 manage to get together in Delhi. It starts with my meeting the vivacious Viji, the first of our batch to get married soon after school to a dashing army officer. He is now a Major General. Getting on, girlies! Not just that. Their bright young daughter is my colleague in the newspaper office.
Then contact is established with the gentle Ron, the most earnest and caring of us all. Just the one to be teaching children as she now does, living in Delhi with a senior bureaucrat for a husband. The fourth is the lovely Utpala, the acknowledged beauty of our school. That she was in our class was a matter of additional pride. Now she is a woman of the world with two restaurants of her own in the Capital.
So the luncheon date is at one of her twin restaurants in Mayur Vihar. Of course, the Chinese one. Viji and I meet Utpala after some26 years and I meet Ron after 20, having once briefly run into her some six years after school at the Gauhati railway station. But now it seems that we had never parted. But for the lovely décor, it could very well be the Eee Cee Restaurant at Shillong where we had gone for a noodle treat after the declaration of the results in the spring of'72.

There is a lot to catch up with. But there is no intrusion. Each one talks of what she wants and the others listen. ``Those days were the best,'' says Viji. ``Those friends the dearest,'' says Ron. ``that's because we accepted one another just as we were,'' adds Utpala.
The memory of those times is so vivid. Viji recallsthe Papadi chaat my mother used to make. Ron talks of the dosa Viji's mother made. Yes, the picnic at Badha Paani. The boys of St Edmunds, and the one whose heart Ron broke by not dancing with him at the school social. We talk of the other girls and where they are. The teachers too: Mother Magdalene, Sister Christopher and Mrs. Kohli. We decide that we will meet at least once a month for lunch. Then a larger plan is made to trace out the whole batch and have a get-together. Why just that batch? We could involve the seniors and juniors of our times.
As we go on chatting, all notion of time is lost. The reverie breaks only when our food baroness realizes that she is late for an appointment. She also supplies seafood to a couple of five stars. At our Loreto, in our times, brains and beauty were no rare combination. The three of us feel so proud of Utpala. Every and competition were not known to the class of '71. It was sharing, love and compassion. There is a long drive together and at the end we pose for a photograph just as in the old days. The pictures of the young we are all in black-and-white. This one will be all colour.

``This year the picture of our class was taken off the corridor. Each year they add a picture and one taken off,'' says Utpala who has been visiting the old school now and then. We part and I return home, radiant and carefree after a long long time. Perhaps, it is not so funny to sing the school song together even in middle age. Suddenly, the song actually comes back to me: From East to West of that fair Isle, Where the first Loreto stands…

Do my pictures look like me?

All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this -- as in other ways -- they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it: A John
Berger Quote

My mother liked to keep me in fancy dress and then often enough walk me down to Captial Studio of Chandigarh's Sector 19 on my birthday and get a photograph clicked. I was a doll born after five boisterous boys and precious. This one here has me in my jewels which my father would take out from the bank locker and I would be adorned. Hard times and the jewels vanished. I did not miss them much but my mother missed them for me.

Childhood needs a garden and there was a big garden in the house my father built in Chandigarh. The first one he had built was left behind in Lahore's Garden Town. When I went to Lahore recently, my siblings asked me to look for it. I did not because I had no memories of it born as I was eight years after the Partition of the country. The Chandigarh home belongs to someone else. We sold it. But I often go there in my dreams to be with my dear ones who have passed away to another abode.

I was six and had a tafetta frock in green but that Birthday I wept because the Beeba Bakers would not give an iced cake on credit as a bill was pending. My father and I returned sad. My mother baked a cake in a pot on the stove and decorated it with green and pink burfi. My big brother who lived separately came with his wife and daughter and gifted me a lacqured papier mache bangle box that they had bought in Kashmir. So everything was fine and I was happy. Can't you see it in my smile?