Musings

old songs from my childhood

2018-05-13T11:16:00.004+05:30

Listening to Belafonte on a whim.

It reminds me of my childhood in sudden glimpses. Weekends when parent would be home, something savoury would be in preparation for lunch and Belafonte would be played on an old dusty cassette-player.

words over sushi and blues

2017-05-29T23:38:00.000+05:30

Friday
=====

A friend took pity on my car-less condition and took me for dinner in Cambridge.

We spoke a curiously adult mix of workplace talk, weekend wanderings and reminisces of graduate school derring-do. Perhaps this is what growing up does to people?

Her blunt honesty about ignoring some social constructs reminded me again why we remain in touch (that, among other things). "You see lots of people going oh yeah, I partied, had a barbeque, blah blah. I just say what I did: sat on my bed, streamed some movies and felt perfectly happy doing it. I would rather to go one party, act like there is no tomorrow, and then not have another party for months."

Music to my ears. I gamely rejoin: "Well I hiked. Alone. But I usually make up some reason for having a completely idle weekend."

"You've started watching movies alone, right? You can stop with the idle-weekend excuses too, if you think about it the right way."

The sushi was good and the sake. The lady who sang the blues reminded us we could take her home for $10 as a DVD. I get by with a little help from my friends.

Saturday
======
Naturally, the very next day after such sweet symphonies of introvertedness, I roam around the Boston harbourside and Revere Beach, drinking in the metallic grey skies mirrored in the sombre swells of the deep with every pore of my being.
The seagulls remind me always of Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. Perhaps one of the most influential books I had read.

Broken skies

2017-05-23T05:02:00.001+05:30

As I exited the buildings of the M__ Inc., the sky was the sullen colour that reminds me of a phrase from Neuromancer: "the colour of a TV screen turned off". When I read it as boy, that phrase seemed modern and eternal all at once. Now I wonder how many would remember CRT televisions in the age of flatscreens.

There was a cold drizzle, more like a damp mist.

I used to hatelove these things. The weather was perfect iff you were just about to duck into the broad awning of some well-lit cafe, and the door would welcome you into a merry medley of laughter, the clink of expensive chinaware and the general warmth of human company. And the damp humours of the exterior would evaporate in the expansive jollity like the plot line in some Victorian mystery novel. If and only if. Not otherwise.

Not when you squelch your way through mud and mulch.

Wait. I am winding my way through the concrete jungle of the second largest shopping mall in these United States. Albeit a bit overgrown with weeds between the cracks.

In my mind's eye, I would still be squelching in black shoes and white trousers through the aftermath of a Calcutta rain. Cursing silently and ritualistically at the roar of traffic, the swell of pedestrians, the 20 rupees left in my pocket, the necessity of a bus ride eschewing a cab, at peering in at well-lit cafes, the look of imagined scorn in the eyes of patrons, at having to walk alone to the library ad infinitum ad nauseum. My brief whispers of indignation lost in the teeming indignity that is the city life. Even in teenage I had taught myself the distinction between taking a bus ride because I want to, and taking it because I have to.

The tag on my rusty (and therefore trusty -- I have to say "trusty", like in "he went forth on his trusty steed") umbrella, almost faded to incomprehensibility, reads: "Mohendra Lal Dutt". I could have been walking under ashen skies on concrete pavements my whole life. It fills me up with a sense of something -- hope, resilience, despair, listlessness, belonging all rolled into a roiling mass. And an unceasing ever-seething anger like the embers of a fire ancient men would warm their hands against as they sharpened their flints.

I have missed my bus, so I call an Uber. The road, while often threatening to come full circle, has changed enough for me. It's the little changes that matter. Those are the ones that need a whole world to change to come true.

a favourite passage

2017-05-04T06:20:00.005+05:30

"And so Smiley, without school, parents, regiment or trade, without wealth or poverty, travelled without labels in the guard's van of the social express, and soon became lost luggage, destined to remain unclaimed on the dusty shelf of yesterday's news."

-- Call for the Dead, John le Carre

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/may/22/le-carre-call-for-the-dead?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487

old friends in shelves

2017-04-29T18:17:00.000+05:30

As the years roll by, I have slipped into a strange habit so smoothly that it feels like it was always there, like an ancient bedroom slipper or an unrolled recursion.

I have stopped reading new books.

A pause for clarification: the only books I read these days are the ones I have already read. I like the feel of familiarity -- chuckling at the same points, looking up pensively when turning page 256, the sense of unbelievable something at the end of chapter 8. Running my finger down the spines, the yellowed pages. These books and the times when I read first are a window into a childhood that I often neglect to remember (sometimes for weeks) -- of sun-baked tiles and bougainvillea on our balcony, a perfect geek poring over pages propped up on pillows on the bed, in the gap between returning from school and rushing off to swimming lessons or maths tuition.

Now, some of these books are at home, some adorn the bookshelves in my lab. Just for company -- a few stanzas here and a few paragraphs there -- the dashes of colour to cut through the monochrome monotony of a binarised workspace.

It is perhaps a mark of almost everything I am -- the fact that I am thinking about the books in my lab, when writing this sitting at home. I have always been one for gazing at the grass on the other side of the fence -- the rolling steppes of emerald merging into the azure horizon of a calendaresque skyscape. I rather like the idea of being dissatisfied at some level with the present, to have the germ of an itch for the next thing. Not that much of a bad tendency, all things considered.

"to seek, to strive and not to yield"
-- Ulysses, Tennyson

friends and thanksgiving

2016-11-21T09:17:00.001+05:30

"Friendsgiving" 2016.
The eternal schoolboy in me requires the double-quotes, although it is become quite the thing on campuses here, thankfully.

We got together, almost 40 of us at one point, scurrying away from our computers and whiteboards (I would give anything to say chalkboard). Scurrying away, for some of us, from thoughts of whatever corner of the world we called home.

There were bright lights, backslaps and that rich mead of laughter, richer than the mulled wine, the turkey (perfect) and the steady progression of steps by which one attains a food coma.

For all the trumpeting about solitude, I do get by with a little help from my friends.

dinner with friends

2016-07-07T20:16:00.006+05:30

I will try to find the traces of a growing up we almost but never quite shared in the crevices of the silverware and the gaps between the gulps. And ponder over dessert on how some distances are always too long even between chairs at the same table.

Smile grimace grin awkward-hug smile. Some last wisecrack from yours truly like the final flourish before a flicked cigarette stub sizzles in a roadside puddle. Then the walk back home. The walk back home. And the smiles the next day.

Questions

2016-02-26T03:30:00.003+05:30

"Who am I then?"
"My faith."
"Then who is she?"
"My anarchy."

Street smarts

2016-01-16T09:11:00.002+05:30

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

I will be heading back in four days.
It is always either too long or too short, both for days and for words.
Predictably (and hopefully) I will write of the last couple of weeks in short bursts.

Like an exile in my own house, I look around. Almost like old men that stare just a bit longer than needed at the schools they attended, the streets they ran down, the cafes where they met and loved and lost.

I realize that I am searching more for a time that was Calcutta, than a place.

In the glaring embers of a smog-filled sunset, the soaring malls and their soaring prices, in the unchanging cups of roadside chai at Jadubabu's Bazaar.

I am also glad that I earn in dollars and not in rupees. Growing up middle-class in this city of suddenly-discovered consumerism would have been disgusting. I neither miss, nor glamourise, poverty. There is nothing noble -- at least not in the first person -- at having to save up for months to buy a first-hand book or a non-pirated DVD or make phony excuses to avoid watching movies in multiplexes with college buddies. Second hand ad infinitum ad nauseum sometimes kills little by little whatever in us was native and noble and nothing if not first grade.

There was a birth and a death, both of which I was lucky to see. Friends and family.

There was a meet with a young and melancholy muse (exquisite!), a grim-faced ex and some remnants of the old guard and the new.

There was also poetry, old time bloggers and the realization that poetry alone is not enough for a life, although it is more than enough for magic.

But the times I connected most with the city of my birth and growth was when I walked the forever-dusty streets alone. Away from the glaring shopfronts with their blaring patrons, the noveau rich and their hipster affectations. Away from the tea and biscuits with reconnected friends and family.
That is not how I had lived in this hateloved city.
I lived those years walking alone on the streets. From bookstore to tea stall to lab to campus to home. With my dreams and simmering rage for ragtag company: a grief for footsteps that were not there in tandem with mine, rage for roads not taken, rage and fire to drive away the grey, the smog, the slime and the grime.
And that is how I shall remember my city, whether I wish it or not.
The company of lost ships and lost souls and the audacity to dream in a grey-grim sidewalk without a name.

Sometimes, when the truth stares at me like the dregs from a drained mug, I cease to wonder why I walk away from things. I have spent so long without, it feels a chore to be with anyone or anything.

Home

2016-01-01T10:46:00.002+05:30

Home is where one listens to Ebong Indrajit and mother makes breakfast.

It is also the room where one had written, fought, loved and bled for two decades.
It is also where now one ponders over roads not taken. I know.

On translation: Near scattered clouds

2015-11-30T00:11:00.001+05:30

Near scattered clouds
(very loose translation from the Bengali song "Akashey chhorano megher kachakachi", By the band Mohiner Ghoraguli [Mohin's horses])

In tattered sky-scraps 'tween scattered clouds
One may catch glimpses of your house
A fleeting escape to those walls,
Of dreamscape azure and silver glass.

A tabby sunning itself on the roof
Weaving dreams of the mist and air,
And the timeless glare of the grey owl
Of hours and days (years?) uncounted.

And then the dark doors part in a sudden hush
And then your smiles are strewn in the wild flowers
Up the garden path, braving briar and nettle
Waiting for the clouds in the sky to settle.

There is no street name, nor address
For errant knights or postmen to follow;
Just a red-limned lane of half-bricks and dust
That touches eternity when it kisses the clouds
On a voyage into the setting suns of unknown skies;
And then the moonlit curve of stairs forever spiralling
Nameless and unnamed, the best haven for foundlings.

And there you wander and your song swells and throbs
In the sparkle of laughter and the throes of sobs
And fire-fettered the wind flirts with your wayward locks
As dark as shadows deep when the evening falls.

There is no street name, nor address
For errant knights or postmen to follow;
Just a red-limned lane of half-bricks and dust
In tattered sky-scraps 'tween scattered clouds
One may catch glimpses of your house

Seafood and Irish ditties

2015-10-26T06:51:00.002+05:30

One of my housemates, a postdoc, is leaving for sunny California. A farewell luncheon was called for, which finally converged into a whole-day Boston trip. We had mughlai paratha and malai kebabs at a Bangladeshi restaurant in Cambridge while cricket matches played on mute from television screens. Then onward to a brief tour of Boston, a city I like for its cleanliness. Also remarkable in its lack of ethnic diversity. I am yet unsure whether I should like or dislike the latter, or simply learn not to bin the world into a histogram of only two categories.

We had dinner at the oldest seafood restaurant in America, opposite the oldest tavern in America. Something was fishy here. All puns intended.

The Irish pub had a bunch of mostly college-goers. The two old men in a corner were singing some very old Gaelic songs, that would not have been amiss in some mead-hall in the emerald isle itself. One of them later confided that he was astonished at the number of young folks wanting encores of some of the oldest of Irish sing-along songs. As we entered, the only bunch of Indians in a sea of proudly-Irish Bostonians, the bar broke into the chorus of Molly Malone.

And suddenly I was bellowing along with the rest of them, thumping my fist and sloshing my drink, as Molly traipsed down streets, regardless whether wide or narrow, for every soul in that tavern. I had heard it a decade ago while in high school from some friends who had been on an exchange trip to Dublin.

Later I get into a brief spat with a drunk man, walk with my friends around the unearthly cleanliness of the Boston waterfront, be sick on the shoulder of the interstate thanks to the merry overdose of seafood and explain the cause to a rather large and curious police officer.

The next morning one was more than a little glad to be Alive, alive ho!

Leaves of grass

2015-08-07T06:52:00.001+05:30

It was June or July in Calcutta. 2008. I think a part of me still walks around Camac Street in the sweltering heat of a tropical summer, talking glibly of Geurnica, Guevara and Gandalf. It was a time of peace, of dregs of schoolboy humour and many farewells.

We had gone into Pantaloons, you and I, where I could afford to only glance at the Adidas and Nike racks. With an air of appraisal, considering which one to purchase. I couldn't have afforded a single thread. I had left behind thankfully the gaggle of the rest of the chaps with their back-slapping and bonhomie and cricket scores. They would all still be there the next day, the month, the year.

What I did buy, with some prize money that some high-school competition had favoured me with, was a copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Why that American poet? Maybe a part of me was wishing to be close to that country, where my best pal since middle school was going for college. A part of me maybe wishing for something far, far removed from this city that I had anchored myself to for the next foreseeable years. The city where once, suddenly now in the past tense (!), we would spend our schooldays traipsing about, bending rules and breaking curfews, entering the girls' school in the next block under the flimsiest of pretexts or being idiot savants steeped in colonial public-schooling at the British Council Library (more idiot than savant, any day).

It was suddenly going to be very grown-up in Calcutta, I realised, after this high school business was finally over. And very solitary Calcutta. A part of me wishing that I had done more and spoken less, had more choices than to stay on in this city that I loved and hated in the same breath. It would be many years until that starry-eyed kid would be hammered enough on the anvil of mediocrity to realize "wishes are like dishes - they both need doing."

The sun was scorching outside, and the stark blinding light through the shop windows cast refraction shards of molten fury on the ceramic tiled floor next to the bookshelves. All show, no business. But on that day, the boy still clung on to the rhetoric and the sound and the fury. Clung on to the last iota of stubbornness, that this was not it, that there was another chance to battle and best that mire of mediocrity. Inscribed the date onto the first book he had ever purchased with money other than his parents'. Spent the rest of the prize money sending chocolates to his best bud's sis. Considered it a deed well done, straight out of his Bogart-addled teenage.

And in the years that would follow, trudging along a path trodden into mud by my city's countless nameless, faceless others, that book and that day would be a gentle reminder that there remained a path less taken. That lilacs still in the dooryard bloom'd.

The pages turned yellow very soon, as is wont to happen with Indian reprints. And now it sits somewhere in my parents' flat back in that city, nestling against Nineteen Eighty-Four and Gorky's Mother. I did not bring it with me when I made the journey to Whitman's land. It was needed no more.

On roads re-taken and (Sal) Paradise lost

2015-06-15T05:08:00.001+05:30

Watching On the Road on Netflix reminded me of the book, when I first read it. A sweltering Calcutta summer of 2009. When the world was young and so were we and so was love, lust, innocence and nonsense and art and all other demons and their angelic brood and the sheer idiocy and naive bravery of dreaming dreams untainted by the grey arsenic of reality.

They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"

Now in a sleepy evening half the world away, after lifetimes have passed and boys become men and girls become women and lovers have loved and parted and shouted and suspected and screwed and bled and avenues broadened and schools reopened and bro-codes broken and funerals attended... I learned to finally outgrow my Sal Paradise and outlive the magic heroism of shambling after my Dean Moriartys.

At a certain age, one begins to judge the childhood heroes (pointless as it is, a necessary pointlessness, if one is to "grow up"), and question their methods for madness, their wisdom for cunning, their laughter for mockery, their deeds for debauchery. At that age and point in life when you can choose whom to smile at stars with, and whom not to, unfettered by whatever claims the past may have - the cavalier promises and musketeer posturing. And that is when you begin to realize: That some things define who we are and what we stood for, once, before the anvil of Life hammered out the wide-eyed idealism with heedless hedonism, cheered on by the spotlit crowds awed and adulating the hurtling spectacle of impulse and gratification that is now you.

It is a strange path today, taking these stumbling steps to be what one was in a life-age past. But it's worth it -- the steps lead back to a world that was cleaner, maybe a mind quieter, and rooms emptier (but again, cleaner) and with something dangerously approaching a conscience. It is always worth the effort, I am told. And then the calm eyes, balm on soul scorches. Whispers in the depths of darkness. There is always hope. Become who you once were when we met in a sweltering summer in 2008. Come back before home stops being home.

--

Weekends generally require a rendition of Auden, with special emphasis on "working week and Sunday's rest". Its a balmy evening in Brandywine, Amherst. Returned back from Boston the day before, still some stuff left unpacked. The Auden ritual has been observed. Why do I do this? This following of ritual, as a blind tribute to lost years, lost words. A man of habits mayhaps, just like the British with their morning tea and a newspaper, followed by elevenses and whatnot.

Musings on homecomings

2015-02-23T11:05:00.000+05:30

I have not yet decided when to go home this year.

Which makes me think of what life is going to be like - a sense of acceptance of gradually being a stranger in one's own city. Hometowns, like much of life, moves on. The roads where one played on bandh days, the maidans of mud-splattered soccer, the schools where one walked in and grew out of, the cafes where you loved and lost, the books you read and re-read.
All those places are not vacant, waiting vainly for the return of some prodigal son. There are, and always will be, the next batch of loud voices and bright eyes, those same old phrases on young lips, the songs and the sunshine. Same as before.

By the steps of the same narrow bylane, a group with a guitar, a bandana and a Guevara T-shirt. Nothing's changed, not even the rhyming nicknames even.

And I will see my nephews and nieces in discordant step sizes. It seems that only yesterday I was getting them to say "bye", and now they are fiddling with iPads, joining cricket coaching, reading Potter and whatnot. With the polite smiles at this stranger that suddenly blusters into their familiar lives, one they have to call "uncle/kaku/mamu", one they have to be extra-nice to because of ... just because he comes so very seldom.

And the ones I will not see again. Last year took way too many. Some of course pushing 80, not entirely unexpected. Some far less, hard blows and unexpected. Four times, four lives that had, in ways large or small, shaped me into what I am. The voice over the telephone made steely with the effort of not betraying a single tremor. The facts. The hour, the day, the nursing home.The contrition. The vast distances palpable. The finality.

It is of course very natural. This sense of observing the lives back home in these discrete steps. Both the ones that are growing up and the ones that have passed away. It just makes you grow up, if the anvil of life hadn't hammered the child out of you by now. It makes one think of chicken stew made just so by aged but imperiously self-sufficient hands, of gestures of generosity so great and all-encompassing as to defy utterance, of lives and times that can flicker out with a sense of finality that is deafening.

It makes you wonder, I suppose, on many things in the grey light of a half-dawn, or the soft limned shadows of a snow-crusted evening. Of what life is, what it should be and where it is headed.

old jokes, new year

2015-01-03T12:53:00.000+05:30

The same old jokes, the reassuringly never-changing one-liners and ribbing.

That's what the New Year should be about, at this time of life I think. That the best parts of yesteryear remain as constant as ever. And the new things ring joyfully close to the old cheer, which gives more a familiar welcome from the sameness.

We have become resistant to change, at some deep level. As a generation. Or rather, this coterie from my generation.

with a little help from my friends

2014-12-21T09:39:00.004+05:30

I traveled to New York last year for Christmas. Spent it with some very old friends. And a schoolboy's cavalier little promise of meeting in the Big Apple ~~came true~~ was made to happen.

Shall be doing the same thing this year. In a country too new to grow roots in already, this seems wonderfully like the beginning of something that could grow into a tradition. And we need tradition to call it home.

But that trip is for next week. For the here and now:

Driving to Cape Cod to catch a sunrise in 4 hours with my roommates. Then a quick peek into Boston. Back home and a short stint at the lab, as planned.

That gives me Monday to get into the groove of things (neural networks are temperamental creatures) with work, do the last minute reshuffling of packed bags. And then the bus to NYC. Sinatra.

The first time I visited that place, it was all the movies and the music and the aura. And a meetup that was also a 5 year promise being kept..
But this year, it would be the friends. Growing into a tradition swiftly, one hopes. And long, long talks over good food and good cheer. It's strangely reassuring to know that your friends are looking forward as well to this very day, with as much bated breath as you. Maybe I am not as much a Lone Ranger thingy as I project myself to be, on an overdose of Aragorn. After long hours, strange paths, bitter winters, bitter words and bitter endings, after the flotsam and jetsam of my diligently burned bridges leave behind only the sick smell of charred conversations, after the sour turns bitter... who better to cast aside all this and talk and talk till the stars fade and the eastern sky blushes like a desert bride with the ones you grew up with. After all, I do get by with a little help from my friends.

On routes, roots and bridges

2014-11-15T20:59:00.001+05:30

Fall colours are essential.
As are yellow leaves (fallen into the sere, haha!) drifting lazily down just outside the window.
A carpet of gold outside the door, not yet trodden into a sodden mass of mulch.
Hot coffee on cold nights, when you look up to see the icy fires of the stars pricking the firmament. And naturally Thus Spake Zarathrustra from Space Odyssey has to be playing on cue in the back of the head. Or the Star Trek theme. Somehow.

A long hiatus from writing on the blog. One would like to say that the interregnum has been productive in tangible forms, thus the lack of need for blogging: for the usual semi-defined ephemerals and self-bolstering diatribes alluded to in here.

One would be half-truthful of course, like most things in Writing and in Life. Let us merely say that it had its ups and downs, the moments of unmitigated douchieness and blurred boundaries - some bridges burned, others still a little rickety; and the notion - a reminder actually since the halcyon days of yore - that in life, as opposed to songs, the Summers always end.

Maybe I am still getting used to this unaccustomed earth, and instinctively prone to grasping like a drowning mariner at those rare straws - that remind me in another universe of lost rain-drenched Park Streets, the rows and rows of books at Oxford as a child, afternoons spent wandering about the streets of Macondo. And its a precious thing, this memory, and equally so are the handful of persons that can remind me of it amidst the coffee-fueled death marches to looming deadlines and trips to Walmart that doggedly define Real Life in all its (b)anal splendour.

It is so very easy to forget the roots. Why are we doing what we are doing? What made the decidedly arduous journey worth it for each of us - that which fueled us above and over the wicket-fences of safe homes and the reassuring bylanes of familiarity? What balances the columns if we were to total up all the things that we jettisoned - the glad, the sad and all those broken souvenirs kept over the years but now suddenly an addition to the airline baggage limit - over the side on this voyage?

On that note, with maple leaves drifting outside, distant birches murmuring in the morning sunshine, I shall end these words with neither a holler nor a sigh.

--

Postscript
There will come a time when the well will dry. When there would be an end to laboured sonnets recited to bygone evenings, when the pang of crossroads not taken fail to take hold on starry nights. Or stop my Bogartesque posturing at some lovely lady with that certain faraway wistfulness about her - like a echo of some childhood Macondo/Nishchindipur; the joy being purely at mouthing the film-noir lines, the thrill in only those cinematheque moments that give some meaning to existence, the final answer never ever mattering.When one stops yearning for the creative, the elusive and the ephemeral and accepts the world as it is.

There was a time, not too long ago, when this man would never have dreamed that day would come. It hasn't come yet. But it will. An end to the cinematic overtures, which is really a filler for things too difficult to speak out straight. To be spoken only when time, place and person converge in some heady moment of truth. It will happen.

Hankering for Edgar Allan Poe

2014-10-19T05:43:00.000+05:30

A sudden desire to re-read Edgar Allan Poe.

Specifically the Fall of the House of Usher. And another, I think it was called The Red Death.

I had first read them as a young schoolboy, alone in the winter afternoons at home. The chill in the air contributed to the horror and grimness of the stories. It was a book from the library that my father had chosen for me, and it had those old style full-page illustrations. All very gothic and horrifying in full colour.

Wanting to read that specific book. Or a print of that very edition. Those are so very rare to come across these days. Modern books look so cheap and are so godawfully expensive! Hah!

On summer and other waits

2014-10-11T21:29:00.001+05:30

I think long odds are meant to be beaten.

That huge distances of separation can be made into magic, so that when meets do happen it is nothing less beautiful or terrible than poetry.

That "tho much is tak'n much still remains" -- enough for a last attempt at living it the way it should be. That will have the bus-rides and plane tickets, house bills and bickering; but also the sound of Baez on a rainy Saturday morning at home over coffee. Oblique references to Abani at returning home.
The movies, music and places that weave a different kind of poetry when two people are in that perfect symmetry. Its not the smell of new books, but the mildewed musty welcome from dog-eared yellowed tomes that are old comrades.

That a wait is so much more when it is worth the wait.

It is not all a dream. I have seen it in friends, albeit once.

That if there ever was a time for taking a mad chance, for cauterizing old wounds and taking on glibly the chance of new bruises -- it is this.

That I have never been more certain not to do again the usual litany of those late nights, sudden fevered touches over wine, Pink Floyd and darkness, messy one-shots and the inevitable knowledge that "this is not it." Which has littered most of my undergrad. It is worth the wait.

That rhododendron is worth it. And that we both are waiting for summer and a chance.

Long shots and montages

2014-09-12T08:31:00.000+05:30

Ballygunge Place.

"It was here, right? Wallrush. What was it, 3-4 years?"
"Yes. They had those film screenings inside. And folks on the pavement, strumming guitars to Shelter from the Storm. 2009. Summer. You were wearing ... let me see ... that white tee with an American eagle in blue in front. If you had worn that today ..."

"Hah! Haaah! Na, my sis took it with her. That would have been the complete package for you, wouldn't it? Another check, damn you!"
"Yep. What is life without look-backs in nostalgia. And those checks have all bounced, ne'er fear."

Jamini Roy eyes

Side-by-side on a worn staircase, bang on the pavement. Shared Goldflake and steaming chai in earthen cups. And faint glimmers of lost college heydays. Trying to relive as much as we could the magic of that first summer - kids just a year out of high school.

What did we lose on the way, I wonder. Being hammered on the anvil of life for the next 5 years.

"College life was shitty without you."

Yes, it could have been otherwise. Amicable, amiable and whatnot. Stayed in touch. But lord, what a story this sundering and sudden kinship makes!

"Yeah right."
"Does he read poetry to you? Long distance wooing?"
"Not really that sort. But that's the best part right -- the one you are with has to be different from ... this." Expressive arm wave, encompassing if it could the rickety wooden bench, the tea-stall, the bamboo-upheld awning. Passing beyond the heat, the shimmers of summers past, the sameness of it all even after all these years.

"Yes. Absolutely! You get it, right? I would want to be this lone solitary ranger thingy for as long as I can. Keep the juvenalia alive. And maybe... well, you must have a family by then. Well of course, the sole purpose of your family would be to provide a suitably cinematic setting for my story, right?"

Eye roll. Large, distended eyes. Like a Jamini Roy eye. shojolo-dholo ayoto aankhi. Hah!

Christmas, Bogart and Kill Bill

"OK - moving on! So naturally I would visit you for Christmas."
"This is after I have moved to New York. Yes, and you have taken me to meet your friends there."
"Indeed. That's another one. The wedding next year. Very film noir right, if I am part of the party giving away the bride?"
"Nah, that's the Hollywood movie part of your lost grails. Very proper old-school Hollywood. Not noir."
"Unless ... unless I plan a Kill Bill-"
"Oh shut up!"

"Anyway! Where were we - me visiting you over Christmas. A sudden visit - a la Agontuk. Naturally, a favourite 'Uncle' to your children. Strange, expensive presents and capering about. Oh, but you shouldn't have. Eto kichu korar ki dorkar ... ki je korish na. Stories galore of distant lands. Aar nijer ki khobor? Oh, I'm the confirmed bachelor boy. A firm handshake and a nod to your man - both honourable men, of course. You get the point?"
"Hah! Haaah! Go on then!"
"And then it's time for me to leave. A flurry of goodbyes and handshakes all around. It' snowing outside. Light snowflakes. Christmas lights in the distance. The taxi is waiting at the end of the short walkway."
"You must be in a longcoat. With the collar up. Make sure you have one."

Long shots and montages

"Aye aye, sir. And then, Madame, then! - At the very moment you are shutting the door, you hesitate for a fraction of a moment. What if? A nameless, senseless wondering at what that mad life would have been like if you had chosen a different path -"

"And that moment is the sole thing that gives your life meaning, that gives everything meaning!"

"Yes! YES! Exactly! But then you look back at the warm yellow light spilling onto the driveway. A welcoming fire by the hearth. Your children (yes, multiple dammit! Go forth and multiply and all that), their father and the real, tangible warmth of humanity. And you know your choices were all the correct ones, that that welcoming fire by the hearth is what a person needs."

"We then have a long shot, of you walking away.."

"I turn back once, just as you shut the door to go back to your family. A sliver of gold bands across the face briefly, then is gone. You do not look back."

   Silence. You look up. I am suddenly aware of how much the same you look. And the hush of evening on sun-warmed stones.

   "Cut to the taxi moving away?"
   "No. Maybe the camera on a crane. Pulls away from the scene. The dark figure making its way slowly through the empty driveway."

Long shots and montages. That's how life should be played back.

Juvenalia or bust

2014-08-07T05:57:00.001+05:30

So we all wanted to live our lives out like in the movies. Or books. Or like one of those existential-crisis kind of plays. With a therapist in the plot. You get the point.

There's supposed to be high drama, unrequited non-endings, laconic one-liners etc.
And I'll be damned if I ever grow out of it!

Somewhere in the middle of trying to live one's life like a book, it is possible that one's life itself becomes a minor detail. It's an endless game of trying to make "Real Life" emulate the final chapter of some book, or a stanza from some poem, or making events such that a movie quote becomes eminently apt. The human factor is mostly incidental.

And then all that you are left with is really just a bunch of quotes and pop-culture references and snatches of lost sunshine. There's no orchestra giving the OST as a camera pans out. The once-faithful audience has long since moved on to 2BHKs, housewarmings, engagements and other such non-essentials.

So what do you do? "Grow up"? Try to pick up the threads of a monochrome life. Swallow the regurgitated mire of Everyday. And tell yourself, alright, I can teach myself to live like this. Like everyone else. The dulling opiate of domestication. The lulling comfort of soft arms, soft words and small thoughts. Yes, there is comfort in that for every trudging traveler. The little streams and fields, far from the thunder of the seas.

Then one day it dawns - this is a lie. This life of pretense-normalcy. There are no strident chords here, no thundering stanzas soulbled into a starry night. Just the comfort of everyday - warmth, smiles and softness. And you shudder to think that one day you might even forget the yearning - the nameless yearning for something just beyond reach. Is this soft happiness worth trading the senseless maddening quest for lost grails and grim voyages?

Left behind as always are the casualties. Guilt-trips for when you were weak, when resolve relented enough to let the tempting solace of mortals seep into you. Scattered in the wake like one half of a pair of shoes - nothing more senseless. And what reason do I give you then - because your words "forked no lightning"? Because you were quiet, and agreed and smiled and nodded, and offered yourself with good heart and clear soul? Because the cooing of doves can never for long lull the wanderlust of one who has seen the swoop of hawks. And so they pay the price of my singular madness.

The voyage for its sake alone! To think young and be naive and drink deep of the wells of those darkling eyes!

Homewards

2014-07-26T18:28:00.000+05:30

Simon and Garfunkel tracks on. Check.
Buying Bengali sweets from the Indian store. Check.
Ghore ferar gaan on loop. Check.

   17 days. Internship ends. NYC. Delhi. Calcutta.

   Home.

   It will not be the August of 2014 that I return to. It's the baked pavements of a 2009 summer, blues riffs on guitars by the gutter in the backdrop. Green benches and back-gates. Or late nights near 8B, 2010 maybe. Football in a village field, muddy rules and clear souls. Whiff of "bep"-rolls and the trundle of trams. "Meet me in front of Music World." Before the place got shut down. After-parties and their aftermaths on sun-warmed terraces. Snatches of technicolour in a monochrome past

Home. To listen for the echoes of voices long gone elsewhere. To try and replay those rained off Test matches once more.

Home. Of cooked food. And breakfast in bed. Tea, just right. La familia. Old friends and new tales. And of course, "ekta dishi phone hobe?"

Even though I am visiting somewhere called Home, it's the somewhen that will always tear my eyes into the final gloaming of a westering sun, over the tangle of antennae and jumble of rooftops.

On translation

2014-07-18T16:54:00.002+05:30

Two decades

A chance meet after a score of years,
Once again, after a decade or two --
By the rustle of rice stalks
In an Autumn wind --
When evening brings the nesting rooks
In the midst of river reeds and waving grass

In the hunt for dewdrops by soaring kites
Swooping gently like the droop of sleeping eyes
By the windows of the gnarled trees
Shadows pooling in the eventide
Crawling in the bracken as in our childhoods lost
With the mist of two decades entwined
If, timeless, we were to meet again!

-- Inexact translation from "Abar bochhor kuri pore", Jibanananda Das.

Snowbird, blue skies

2014-07-18T08:10:00.000+05:30

Snow bird in a blue sky
Soon to melt without a trace
Too harsh the honest glare of day
And Summer's fields of parched, cracked clay.