Lilyofthevalleyuk’s BlogBarf

Lily’s Dec weekend

December 11, 2008 at 5:09 pm (Asian culture, Family & Friends, Travel) (Camden, Cosmic Dennis, Eid, hair, laos, marriage, mosque, Nilogism, photo)

SATURDAY – tennis, Camden freak show, Chaand Raat

I started off with a piss-poor game of tennis in central London. For my part, and as is always the case, there was more time spent running around collecting stagnant balls than running for the flying ones.

I then went to Camden to watch freaks shopping. Always fun on a Saturday morning. It’s the enhanced version of people-watching. I met Cosmic Dennis. I remember his face from some place. Its easily recognisable – he’s got sticky-outty (Nilogism: sticking out in an endearing manner) cauliflower ears which you find in rugby players or unfortunate men who have had little bunnies nibble at their ears for a few months, and a big wide smile that made him look like a caricature of Tony Blair. He sat down with a mocha and was scanning the crowd with a wide, toothy, ear to ear grin. I got chatting with him. I only do that with Randomers (Nilogism: strangers met in a random situation). He was there for a B-movie convention, and here he is looking chuffed with his spoils:

He gave me his website and insisted I download his Underwear song. Hold on, lemme check it out…he wrote his website on the back of the receipt which is now being used as a bookmark for The Pillowman play I’m currently reading…let me go find it…

HAHAHAAAAAA!!

‘Coo coo coo cumber.

Giant Man.

Giant Plan.’

Awesome lyrics! This man is a genius!

LADIES, GENTLEMEN AND ALL THOSE IN BETWEEN – I’d like to introduce you toooooooooo…*drum roll*…

….COSMIIIIIC DENNISSSSS!

You can hear his Underwear song by clicking on the Capitan Shanty picture, although the Coo Coo Cumber song is really floating my boat. Cosmic Dennis appears to have created MySpace profiles for his 2D stickmen drawings and then added them as his MySpace friends. Now that my friends is an innovative way of expanding your social circle. Nutter. Love it.

Having had a nice chat with Cosmic Dave about his Underwear song, I stepped outside for some fresh air and caught the view above. It reminded me of the view I saw of a night market in Luang Prabang, Laos, when I was descending from a hill I had climbed to get a birds-eye view of the land and then watch the sunset over it:

siigghhhhh…

OK, back to my weekend…

My friends and I have this tradition we started when we were about 12 years old back in secondary school. As with all Woodford Girls, we love our traditions. Every night before Eid (the Muslim Christmas for those narrow-minded lot) we would have a Chaand Raat party (Night of the Moon). We would get loads of girls and only girls, and heap them in a house. We’d dress up in typical Asian suits with full make up and fully coiffed hair. We’d eat ‘til we were sick, gossip and bitch ‘til we felt better about ourselves, dance ‘til we made some space in our bellies, and then top it off with dessert to fill that space. We’d dance to bhangra and garage and then as we matured we got our hands on remixed bhangra which was a combination of the two. GT Road was always a huge hit as was anything Missy Elliot. Then came the Egyptian influence – the eye make up got heavier, the hips swaying become more pronounced and the hand-movements moved away from light-bulb twisting (as demonstrated by the lovely Nick) to more elegant twists and flicks of the wrist. Soon after the belly-dancing belts came along and we all danced like crazy to Kiss Kiss, thinking that the loudness and frequency of the jingling coins was directly correlated to our flair of dancing. We were great! I loved it. Aasyh usually hosted it and as she liked me she’d let me indulge in a few drum and bass tracks like Original Nutter. Imagine a little Pakistani girl in a pretty, colourful Asian suit with a matching, delicate necklace and bangles, flinging her head around wildly as she was head-banging to Prodigy’s Smack My B!tch Up – yeh, that was me.

During the past few years, as most of the girlies have moved far far away to lands of University and I Have A Job I Work, Chaand Raat has consisted of a fistful of us popping over to someone’s house (I usually went in my PJs and greasy hair) to have a good chin-wag. If we ever found ourselves at Af’s place I’d always get her to make one of her amazing cuppas which involved mixing the tea and special special milk in a certain formation (special milk being powered milk but shhh! cos she thinks we don’t know her secret). There was giggling and laughing aplenty and it always ended in big, deep, rib-crunching bear-hugs. The delicate cheek-to-cheek kisses received when greeting each other at the beginning of the evening would always becoming big wet kisses on the cheeks all inclusive of the *smack* sound effect. One of the girlies would give me a lift home to my palace (it would be too late to wake my chauffer at that time) and we would sit in the car which was parked outside my house for nothing short of an hour, pouring out our hearts – the gripes, the reservations, the perverse feelings we had for the wrong people and by the wrong people I mean those our Mothers would never accept, the old times, the stoopid times, the late-night runs to Tesco, the first times of all sorts of things that were along the rite of passage. I always walked up the stairs to my bedroom at the end of the night feeling giddily loved-up and the night usually ended with me lying in bed with my phone, texting the girlies and telling them how much I loved them. Awww. I LOVE YOU GUYS!

So this year we thought we’d get the old crowd back. And here we are!:

We ate and ate. I nearly ODed on the Jaffa cakes which Aaysh, being the perfect hostess, kept replenishing. There were three desserts – sticky choc cake with Cornish ice cream, gajrella and some pudding thing. I had seconds of each. There’s one who is married, one who just got married and one due to be married (plus the one or two who are considering marriage but are in two-minds – but shhhh! its a secret). So we discussed marriage – we discussed venues, outfit colours, jewellery, tailors, venues, seat covers, photo albums versus story books, buying from Green Lane versus buying from Pakistan, guest numbers, card thickness of invitations, colour schemes, buffet versus seated meals…thinking back I realise that we failed to mention the actual issue of the groom.

The other hot topic, and always an ice-breaker among Asian girls, was hair removal – laser, epilating, waxing, threading, aloe vera versus talcum powder, salon versus in a back room round some random lady’s house who makes you lie down on a dirty towel that has not been washed for two months, plucking, regrowth rate, thickness change on regrowth, pain thresholds, dilatory cream…I’m not even exaggerating.  It’s funny how shy people can be when they are in a room with people they don’t know or haven’t spoken to for a long time, but as soon as the personal topic of hair removal crops up, there is not an ounce of bashfulness and even the most introverted will proudly declare her tried and tested, fail-proof method of removing those stray hairs from your butt-crack. Being a hairy monkey I was a key contributor to the discussion (on hair removal, not the specific butt-crack hair topic). I also picked up some good tips.

There was lots of catching up – finding out what career paths we all took (although Facebook took the surprise out of most the answers), the latest bra sizes (one of them had reached a 40G !)…And then there were the stories…the stories!! There was the one of the girl who had a bob haircut but shaved half her head off completely and went around with an invisible baby in her arms who would cry in class because apparently it needed to be fed – said girly would produce fantastic impressions of a wailing baby and managed to keep a straight face the whole time, even after telling the teacher that she must be excused from lesson to go feed the baby; there was one about the porcelain doll which had her own mini Woodford uniform made for her, complete with kilt and skirt belt, who would have the sign ‘She’s watching you..’ pinned to her and be found hanging by a noose in random corners of the school – the first years were so afraid that their parents complained and demanded the taunting be stopped at once; there was the memory of the area under the stage where some girls would crawl with candle and ouija board to conduct a séance and speak with the dead; not to mention how someone found out the code to the payphone and everyday for months thereafter there would be a queue of girls waiting to call their mates/boyfriends/grandmothers in Israel/family in India for free….they were silly stories but they made us all roar with laughter ’til tears rolled down into plates of gajrella.

I went to bed after having a girly little chat with Honey until the wee hours of the morn.

SUNDAY – chipmunks, park, nuclear bunker

Ladoo woke the whole house by leaving her phone downstairs. It had an alarm set.

For 6.50am.

It was a Sunday.

The ring tone was ‘Funkytown’ – Won’t you take me to Funkytown..!

It was the version sung by Alvin and the Chipmunks….

Jeeez, that has to be the worst way to wake up.

We played tennis in the afternoon as I was determined to get some practice in to improve on my general piss-poor performance.

The court was icy and the swings appealing so we ditched our rackets and ran…

I jumped on the roundabout, relaxing as the world slowly went round until my git of a brother and two Judasian (Nilogism: having traitor qualities akin to Judas) sisters decided to hold me captive on the roundabout by spinning me around non-stop and thus not giving me an opportunity to get off. I yelled threats. They pushed harder. I pleaded for sympathy. They laughed. I cried tears. They stopped spinning it and ran. GRRRRR!

I love driving, so on the way home I took a little detour through the Essex country lanes were we stumbled on a once secret nuclear bunker. It was closed but am definitely going to check it out soon. Its open during the day for you to have a gander. Instead, I propped the camera on the roof of the car, set the timer, and took a picture of us siblings in front of an extraordinary sunset.

MON – EID

Woke early, Mother screaming, didn’t get out of bed cos was too cold. Went back to sleep and was rudely awoken by my Mother threatening to pour hot curry on my face if I didn’t get up right that moment and get my butt into the car. I put on a manky pair of brown trousers and a big fat jumper over my PJs as it was far too cold to even contemplate removing a layer of clothing. Layering up on your PJs is, as I have discovered from years at university, the most quickest and effective way to hide the body odour cumulated during your sweaty night of tossing and turning in bed. It also means you retain a certain amount of that snug feeling you feel when you curled up in your warm duvet, so when you jump on the train or get in the car you can fall right back to sleep.

I stumbled down the three flights of stairs and towards the front door in my stinky zombie state and grabbed a mould-green scarf which was all scrunched up as I usually wrapped tightly round my neck, and wrapped it round my head in what I thought was a similar hijab-like fashion as my sisters. Mother, as I was walking through the threshold, managed to yank it off, pins and all, and mummify me in a neatly ironed blue scarf with matching pin.

‘Where you goin’?’ Hustlaa yelled from the kitchen.

‘A fashion show’, I replied and was flashed a glare of reproach by Mother.

It was 8.15am and we were on our way to the mosque for Eid prayer. Mother always treats a trip to the mosque as a prime occasion to try and find a husband for me. As we’re segregated we don’t really get a glimpse of the opposite sex. Deep down inside (her jubba), she won’t admit it, but I know she wants me to dress nicely when I go to the mosque to try and catch the eyes of one of the old ladies who, by the way, always have a whiff of curry about them which is evermore apparent when 20-odd ladies are crammed together to pray in a room the size of a toilet. She wants one of those curry-smelling ladies to eye me up. She would love it if one of them comes up to her and says ‘Oooh is that your behti? Kitni soni lagti hai!’ [ ‘Ooh is that your daughter? She is very pretty!’]. And then that lady would ask about my background – what am I doing? Can I actually read and write? Mother will add something about the amazing meal I cooked for the family the other night, which is, as you know, bull, but makes me looks good. And then it will transpire that Curry Lady has a son or nephew or some far off relation of a similar age and that it would be nice if Mother stayed in touch and how about you come round for tea next week? Tea would turn into wedding planning and I’ll be hitched in a month and preggers in two with a nice bouncing baby boy (obviously) before this time next year.

I feel for Mother. For no matter how colourful the scarf that she pins to my head to cover my haram hair, no matter how sparkly the pin she uses to hold my scarf, no matter if my shoes are matching, or how skinny and tall I look, no lady has ever really approached her with a line of conversation similar to the one above, much less a curry lady.

It was 8.15am. I can’t remember waking up at that ungodly hour since May this year, and that was only as I was attended exams that would dictate the course of my career. The few occasions where my eyes have actually been open when a 8.15am approaches is usually down to the fact that I hadn’t actually gone to sleep by then. Such as this weekend just gone by where I partied in Paris…awesomeness…

After I had taken a little nap in the sajdah position (I was feeling as snug as a bug crammed between two fat curry ladies and was comforted by the feel of my PJs on my skin and the homely smell of curry) and been booted out the mosque, I dropped Mother off to do some communal curry-stinking/cooking at my Aunt’s and took Ladoo and Honey to Big W aka Woolworths to take advantage of its demise. We hunted around for an hour and ended up purchasing two pairs of pillow cases for 1.38 each. Bargain! Although not so much a bargain if you consider the travel cost – what should have been a 15 min journey took nearly an hour as I got lost, thrice, and had to make phone calls to two separate people to find it.

Here’s Ladoo and Honey enacted The Nativity Play to a crowd of Big W shoppers:

At some point we went to pick up Hustlaa form the hospital (ingrown toenail boys and girls, no need to panic) and all gave him a big Eidy hug. Notice lovely Nick being a part of the family frolics. Aww.

I then went to Big Mummy’s aka Gran’s house and dined with my dad’s side of the family and then rolled along (I was pretty fat by then) to an aunt’s house to continue dining with Mother’s side of the family. I am now typing this so stuffed that I feel I should puke to make some space for breathing purposes. I’m fearing rolling into bed because I can imagine myself, as the moment I roll onto my stomach, to be comparable to a full tube of paint being squeezed hard and all the paint projectile vomiting out. With the amount of gajrella I ate, I liken myself to an orange paint tube…