Austin360 blogs > Globe-Jotting > Archives > 2007 > September
September 2007
Watching her climb is like a shot in the arm
I own a short tropical tree, no taller than a 4-year-old child, and Tammy likes to climb it. She nests in the upper sprays of long, sturdy leaves and chews. She chews the bark and the greenery. She looks like a tiny white monkey, puckish, ridiculous.
Getting back down remains the obstacle (ask a cat). I won’t help her. As a frisky and sassy adolescent, she gets a firm lesson in problem-solving. You got yourself up there, young lady, you get yourself down.
And now what are we going to do about those tattered leaves? Go to your cage!
On the descent, her elastic body stretches. Her rib-cage, as rats’ soft skeletons will do, collapses and her torso goes flat, her back paws still in the foliage for support, her front paws groping for terra firma. She’s practically vertical, snout pointing to the floor. The spectacle makes her papa proud.
Tammy is slightly over three months old. No longer the embryonic, unnervingly fragile fur-fleck I bought on July 4, she’s curious and kooky, tackling my hand and play-biting it, then scampering off, wheeling across the floor, and returning to wrestle with my fingers. Repeat.
She sometimes hangs out alone upstairs on the third floor — she seems to enjoy the hike to the summit — but hasn’t ventured down to the first floor on her own yet. She likes chicken bones.
My arms hurt like sports casualties after my shots last week for hepatitis A and typhoid. (I’m at Dominican Joe as I scribble this junk. A guy just kissed his pregnant wife. How cool.)
I was told to wave and stretch my arms to get the liquid toxins moving through my muscles and alleviate soreness. But that night at the premiere of Ethan Hawke’s dopey “The Hottest State,” where I had to sit still, the pain screeched. The always great Paramount staff gave me Advil. (After the movie, Norah Jones walked behind us to the after-party. She’s as big as the period at the end of this sentence.)
The shots and office visit tallied an OK $201. I talked the doctor down from tetanus and he agreed I was covered for all the other stuff, since I got them as a child and before my 1995 Thailand trip. Ick. Vaccinations, the mere idea, make my stomach turn. I laid down for my shots, and stayed supine for a good five minutes afterward.
India will make it all worthwhile. I am afraid of getting sick there. The place is filthy, crawling with dangerous microbes, germs, gunk.
People tell me to get some loose fitting clothing and all that. Forget it. I’m touring India wearing a NASA space suit. Lumbering I will amble, sweaty and soaked and, just maybe, safe.
This is suitable travel garb for 95-degree tropical/desert climes, right?
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And then my head exploded
Bollywood isn’t a feverish film genre. It’s an exotic drug that I can’t believe is legal in Texas. I know the movies are banned in Kentucky, Ohio and Georgia, which is appropriate and just. Consider us lucky.
Bollywood movies aren’t merely watched and experienced. Bollywood infects you molecularly, pours sequins and glitter into your blood, which then turns neon-orange and starts dancing hysterically and lip-syncing with woozy breathlessness and facial calesthenics.
Am I a wee late to the sorcery of Bollywood? Totally. Like so many, I appreciated its native insanity from a healthy distance, the better to avoid eyebrow singes and flesh scaldings.
Heat. The movies are all about heat — erotic heat, dancing and singing heat, melodramatic heat, fluttering-eye heat, crazy-action swooping-crane-shot heat. Billowing-silk-sari and ’80s motorcycle-jacket heat. Bollywood is the most pungent cheese available, and its own heat melts it into buckets of masala queso. Bring chips, and naan.
Last weekend I watched the sensory-molesting B-wood classic “Main Hoon Na,” a 2004 masterpiece of overkill starring Bollywood royalty Shahrukh Khan and Sushmita Sen, who is a former Ms. Universe and whose hair mysteriously blows in the breeze no matter where she is, be it classroom, bathroom or under a waterfall.
Caroline, who so wishes her first name was Amrita, is my BW expert (she actually owns Barbie dolls of Khan and simmering starlet Kajol), and she brought the DVD over to witness it on my elephantine HDTV. She offered astute running commentary that taught me much. And like any good teacher, she ignited latent passion and active curiosity. Now I’m all about Bollywood.
Anyway, the movie, hyperkinetic and loud and explosive, made my concrete walls rumble, possibly crumble. We were delighted. Tammy the rat chewed Caroline’s slip-ons and toes in elation. Aftward, she destroyed my plant.
Caroline left me only one B-wood movie to watch on my own, “Don,” starring the celestially suave Khan. More would be dangerous, we both agreed. I only own one fire extinguisher.
If you don’t think I’m taking like 10 Bollywood studio tours while I’m in Mumbai/Bombay, the Bollywood capital, then you need to go see “Om Shanti Om”. It’s as simple as that.
Revel, sigh, roll around in all that is Shahrukh Khan, aka, SRK:
As a gauzy dreamboat that sails in the calm, sugary seas of his own magnificent self-regard
As a fan’s smitten pencil sketch tacked above her bed, next to drawings of unicorns and a poster of ‘Disney’s High School Musical,’ which flirts with Bollywood in ways we won’t speak of
As an exuberant Pepsi shill — sweet, bubbly, sinful, whorish
With Sushsmita, a vision that turns my heart to mush-mita
As a Barbie doll. Speechless.
