Jukebox

2014-08-04T01:17:00.003+05:30

Some nights give that validation of life slipping through our hands. Being loved and its constant reminders can be tiring, ironically painful. That subtle tinge of dissatisfaction with myself that I feel like a throbbing nerve as people bid their goodbyes to me. That strange feeling of being suddenly important to people who have known you for years. Of relationships done and dusted, suddenly weighing down on your side. And those old unfulfilled desires to which you are still so insignificant. Life is full of such exquisite ironies.

Love always adorns itself in mysterious quicksands. How much of it will remain when I slip from the pedestal of this American Dream. Of some of it, I am sure. For the rest there is that quintessential feeling of cautious hope that I associate so closely with all my life and the way I have spent it so far. Thus when the weather falls I can only pray for friends to remain this way and for the scope of that hard-to-achieve salvation.

Suddenly the unsurity of this pedestal, of being loved and revered, appears to be humility. Perhaps this is growth.

Perhaps I wont get too carried away.

America, hoping to finding pieces of myself that would unfold greater strength, restrain and new capabilities.

2014-08-04T00:06:00.001+05:30

Suddenly conscious that the possibilities offered to life, no matter how varied they might look now, will ultimately converge down the line.

Wherever it leads

2014-05-11T17:37:00.000+05:30

Ever since Boston rejected my application for a Masters in Creative Writing I have been deliberating over my next piece. It will not be appropriate to say that the idea of what to write on kept escaping me and resulted in this overstretched delay. It will also be inappropriate to say that the decision from Boston has made me feel awfully inadequate about my own creative capabilities. If nothing the professor from Boston left me a nice heartfelt message that, if I am to quote, highlighted more on their 'being dense about my good work' and how there can never be a failure, success or ultimatum to one's passion, only rehearsals. Of late there have been many such instances where nice and kind people have regretted more on their inability to receive me than on mine to be worthy of their invitations. Overall the penultimate month of college life has dealt me with the good, bad and ugly cards to set parameters for the next two years of my life, hopefully in New York. Now that my academic self has somewhat resolved itself it gives me enough time to look back and channel parts of it--- perhaps some gathered wisdom or an embarrassing anecdote shared with Avin on a lazy afternoon--- towards my creative self.

For those like me who feel it as their duty to write, feeling, falling and remembrance come to be necessary exercises. So while my creative outburst was moving towards its culmination, there were ample moments of standing by the balcony ledge, smelling the dusty afternoon sunlight and very often looking at the faces around you, wondering how you managed to be in this wild rumpus in the first place. As I move forward trying to make sense of all the spirited mornings and disillusioned nights, a strange feeling of being old keeps coming back. With that, fortunately, I feel a little wise.

My college life has been a sort of marriage, not particularly a satisfied, monogamous one. My ideas of becoming a writer, like the other lover, was in such active participation to increase the confusion that it was difficult to not feel exasperated at the limited prospects of a less loved monogamy. For me writing was a challenge that I could never live up to. The very vagueness of the idea of good writing seems attractive enough to be chased and ultimately achieved. There is a deep heroic in this sort of success, like those glorified tales of an underdog conquering an otherwise dissatisfied life and rising over its ashes. On another thought it was perhaps led by those poignant covers of beautiful poem books where the evening sun peeping through half open doors can easily be personified to hope, inspiration and whatever drives one ahead. An insatiable quest for life's one true purpose, increased self-awareness and quotes of Susan Sontag could only make this forced juxtaposition of me and some unimportant college assignments so mundane. All I waited for in these years were uninvited mango showers, months of July and the sense of liberation that came with the wind.

In the last four years I have also been overtly conscious of the love I possess for my cities. I have written many times before about Calcutta and how it was to grow up in a city stuck between an unparalleled urge for progressiveness and medieval nostalgia. But in the light of emotions I have recently gathered I felt my puny essays would feel the strokes of chords they had previously missed. I love Calcutta for almost everything. The technicolour hoardings looming over the busy Bypass road on a lit up evening, the smell of soil from my backyard garden, Tagore house and ever-busy phuchka-walas delivering in lightning speed one of the most refreshing snacks there could be. Then there is school and first friendships, my best friend and her crazy antics. Then there are people who basically constitute the very essence of my existence. Durga pujo, Deshapriya Park, tanga-wala rickshaws.

And wooden shelves of Oxford.

Calcutta to me is an unfinished poem that has shown signs of growth, courage and resilience yet has left enough room for whichever ending you want it to be. Its incompleteness is, in fact, a rare generosity. Yet there are moments in love that require lovers to drift apart, to grow away from each other now that they have grown too much into each other. Its about fluttering in whichever way you can, even after your roots are largely intertwined. The need for distance, for this sabbatical from love seems so essential for the very love to exist. That is what i feel now as I move about the city roads. The weight of the city soaked in memories, increased in manifolds, on my back telling me to slip out of its hands, to not let the moss grow beneath my feet.

I remember Rushdie's quote at this point with a slight uncomfortable anxiety.“Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.”

I speak in second person with myself while discussing fears which in the light of day find no logical validation. Then the mild breeze of summer evenings whisper in my ears, 'Necessary Travels'!

I truly hope life continues to offer me moments of such subtle wisdom and whatever braveness is required to keep performing a catharsis of this sort.

Looking forward to useful introspection, windy nights, periods of undisturbed privacy and friendships that will pull me out of them.

2013-12-20T19:34:00.000+05:30

Twenty miles between me and home.

Twenty miles, the sailor thought.

Before there'd been nights he had fought.

And even when it was comfort he sought

A bright diabolic sun is all he got.

And many a night gathered and ended

Many a swords he picked and defended

When every brick of his prison fell

To let cold wind to his prison cell

Rains he got there waiting for him

Warm, not cold, to his skin they seem

He knew not how he walked the leagues

Until he saw vines of grapes and figs

With a scent of woman he had long known

In every morning that his life had shown

From the castle window where he cried and played

So close now, he could hear as garden leaves swayed

Yet closer he walked he found fear and pain

Not joy but risks of losing it again

Home with just dead leaves coming to his way

Yet home has never seemed so far away.

2013-12-12T20:59:00.000+05:30

The evening sky is more blue than black. Patches of blue and black, dissolved in a suspension that tries to touch a passer-by every time he looks up. The mist and his hat--- their edge is where he finds his sky. What lies above is the eternal illusion, of the hope to it, and of the despair.

December has her own appeal with neon lamps and cold winds and hot cakes. But its the cold wind I like and the adequate tension that scatters inside me, through its slightest of touch.

Cold winds and those descending holly leaves....

Cold winds and the saddest of sunlit skies....

Cold winds and the crisp of old books....

Fall comes and I turn back one last time. From February reds to the moist days of June, from a love soaked July to a gentle birthday hymn, only the looking back is all that is there to it. To look back, only, to look back. Cold winds cut inside and meet my nakedness.

What do you find when you look beyond a valley? Homes that are not yours. Children that are not yours. Happiness that is hardly yours. And unhappiness? In that you have had your primal share, to some extent, to some fraction, even though it has retained its ingenuity. The passer-by was there. The mist kissed his hat, it left its immense presence on him. But what formed its weight? I stood above a valley and knew what did form its weight, the mist and all that were above it--- the possibility and its inherent limitlessness. They touched him right there, inches above from his reach was the sky. I knew. Only that he did not. He looked up to find only distance.

One of these days we made love and realized how two people fit into each other.

First came together all that were alike--- a lip for a lip, a hand for a hand. Patiently they met each other, greeted each other and melted into each other.

Then came their unique waywardness---- one's brevity guarded by another's longer legs, one's open emptiness filled by the density of another. Thus came together all the impatient ones.

And at times in sudden hinders of reality when the lips parted, we wondered how a moment can be so complete yet so brittle.

In downward eyes I thanked pain. I thanked for it let me know it, endure it, conquer it. In the end it came down to the inches between our lips. And all I could think of in that opportune moment was what had once been above the passerby's hat.

The cold winds had remembered how I became a woman, in toss of coins not in elaborate exchanges. That was its misfortune as well as its beauty. The tomorrows have been mostly penniless. Yet on the days when the cold winds came to seek you out within me, I have felt very rich.

There can be no true happiness without pain. That is the irony of it

Khelaghar

2013-12-10T01:14:00.001+05:30

~প্রিয় নলীলাখ্য বাবু ,

আঘাত আর ক্ষতর মধ্যে বোধয় একটা তফাৎ আছে। আমি নাহয় ডাক্তারি জানিনা, তাই গুলিয়ে ফেলেছিলাম।আপনি শুধরে দেবেন তো।আঘাতের চিকীৎশা করতে আপনি বড় ব্যাকুল ছিলেন। আমিও হয়তঃ আরোগ্যের লোভে ব্যাকুলতা প্রশ্রয় দিয়েছি।কিন্তু সেরে যখন গেলাম তখন বুঝলাম যেটা মিলিয়ে গিয়েছে আদতে সেটা ক্ষত।আমার আঘাত ততদিনে তার নিজেস্য আঁধারে এতটাই গুছিয়ে সংসার করছে যে যে তাকে তাড়াতে গেলে আমার আঁধার, আমার হৃদয় সহসা বড় নির্জন হয়ে পরবে। আহত কে যে পুষে রাখতে চায়, ব্যথার শাস্তি তার চিরদিনের।আপনাকে সেই ব্যথার সাথে জড়াব না। কেবল এইটুকু অনুমতি চাইছি যে সময়ে-অসময়ে প্রয়োজনে-অপ্রয়োজনে চিকীৎশার ছুতোয় যদি আপনার সখ্যতার দাবী করি আপনি অপ্রসন্য হবেন না।আমি সারা জীবন কোনো কাজের জন্য কারর কাছে ক্ষমা চাইনি। চাইতে হয়নি আমায়।এই প্রথম চাইছি আপনার কাছে।এই প্রথম চাইছি আপনার কাছে। আঘাত নিয়ে বেচে থাকার অনুভূতি আমার চেনা, এবার ক্ষমা নিয়ে কি করে বেচে থাকা যায় সেটা শেখার পালা। অপেক্ষাই জীবন। তারপর সত্যিই হয়ত কুসুমবনে তরী এসে লাগবে একদিন।

সেইদিনের শুভেচ্ছায়

আপনার অনুকম্পাপ্রার্থিনি

হেমনলিনী~

Dearest Nalilakshya Babu

Perhaps there is a difference between ache and wound. I am hardly a doctor for which I had confused the two. But you are. So you should have corrected me, shouldnt you? You were very eager to heal my ache. And I too, in my greed for recovery, was more than happy to let you indulge in your eagerness. Though at the wake of my cure I realized the one that has been wiped away is only the wound with its scar. My hurt has by then so neatly built its home in its darkness that removing it would only make my heart and its own darkness lonely to a great extent. She who wishes to preserve her ache has been destined to be punished with pain. I will not engage you with it. However, if I ask for your friendship in times of need or perhaps whenever I wish to recover, please find it in your heart to extend that with some gladness. Never in my life have I required someone's forgiveness. Never have I met with that need. But today, for the first time, I ask yours. I know the feeling of living with my ache. Now I need to learn the feeling of living with forgiveness. To live is to wait. And perhaps someday the boat will really arrive at the bank of my garden.

With my heartiest welcome for that day.

The seeker of your forgiveness,

Hemnalini

Without conviction

2013-11-27T12:42:00.000+05:30

Since Mrs. Ghose has said all that I would have wanted to say:

Why the Aarushi Talwar case is a rape of justice

At the heart of the CBI's case in the Aarushi Talwar-Hemraj Banjade double murder is a perverted patriarchal fantasy. The CBI and Noida police are convinced that 14-year-old Aarushi was having an "affair" with 45-year-old domestic help, Hemraj. It was, after all, because of this "affair" that father Rajesh in a fit of rage, on seeing Aarushi and Hemraj in an "objectionable intimate position" killed them both due to grave provocation. Ah, the lurid fantasies of the porn-suffused brain! The deadly mix of lascivious prejudice and moral puritanism that grips our mind when we think of "young women" these days. The automatic suspicion of endless orgies and extravagant nudity with which a brutally patriarchal society gazes at a "modern" young woman's bare arms, clothes and lifestyle. How excitingly value-less these young are, whisper the puritan-pornographers in vicarious glee.

How have the police reached this conclusion of an "affair" between Aarushi and Hemraj? After all this is THE fulcrum of the case, this is THE fundamental pivot on which the entire case turns. Is there any evidence of this fundamentally important "affair"? None whatsoever. Has the CBI in these last five years been able to produce any neighbour, friend, family, observer, and local domestic to help corroborate their story of this so-called affair? No. Do the local chowkidars or maids say Aarushi was having this "affair"? No. Do any of Aarushi's friends believe she was having this "affair"? No. Has any local help caught a glimpse of this "affair"? No.

What an efficiently well-hidden affair it was indeed! The 14-year-old girl was wicked, fallen and obviously very clever too! Must be those T-shirts she used to wear - never trust young girls who wear those tight-fitting T-shirts and smile invitingly into the camera! And since she was below the age of consent it wasn't an affair either, Hemraj was in fact committing an act of rape.

The police, CBI, courts and media remain convinced of this "affair" because in the khap panchayat of our minds, where sexual fantasy combines with misogynist prejudice, minds in which lustful males perpetually couple with nubile young things, where a growing young woman is first and foremost a sexual, promiscuous object, in this prejudiced mind, Aarushi is the 14-year-old Lolita who is defined primarily by her sexuality. Male journalists covering the story drool at the subtext of the story - there is such sinfully exciting frisson in the newsroom from the saga about sex-and-a-14-year-old schoolgirl!

At a notorious press conference - and I used this word advisedly, as that press conference was nothing short of notorious - held by IG Meerut Range Gurudarshan Singh on 12 July 2008, IG Singh simply could not remember Aarushi's name. Sometimes he called her Anupama, sometimes he called her Anuradha. Yet he announced in ringing tones to the public that the-girl-whose-name-I-can't-remember was having an affair with Hemraj and this is why her father killed her in an "honour killing". IG Singh provided a verdict before even the evidence had been properly collected. In the policeman's mind Aarushi is not 14-year-old Aarushi, she is a Sexually Oriented Young Woman of The Modern Era. She Wears Jeans. She Wears Sleeveless Tops. Thus she has affairs. Who cares what her name is and what the facts of the case are? Who cares what the evidence is? This is how it is in the world of "posh" and "influential" people.

The media, which functioned as the trumpeting cheerleading B team of the police and CBI throughout in his case, excitedly bought the police version, male journalists privately sniggering about the posters on Aarushi's walls.

Post Nirbhaya, as we confront the violent narrow-mindedness and hatred that exists in our society towards "modern young women", the attitudes and prejudices of police, courts and media towards Aarushi have been nothing short of revolting, downright nauseating.

Read the Aarushi-Hemraj case in detail and you will see that the police and CBI have absolutely no case. There is not a shred of evidence against the Talwars. There is not a shred of evidence that Aarushi was having an "affair" with Hemraj. In fact, her friends have suggested that on the contrary, Hemraj was a father figure to Aarushi. Throughout the case, while CBI has brought 39 witnesses, the Talwars have not been allowed to call their the 14 other witnesses they wanted, they have not been allowed to call for forensic slides, narco test details or post-mortem reports.

The CBI refused to provide Touch DNA tests to the Talwars because they were apparently too expensive. It's almost as if CBI and courts are hell-bent on convicting the Talwars, even without evidence, in some crazy cuckoo-land-protective zeal for the dead Aarushi who, over-sexy and promiscuous as she was, unfortunately earned the wrath of that bearded bulldog dad. In an earlier article I had written about the stereotypes about the Talwars that have been created by the media.

Why are the courts and police and media so eager to hunt down the Talwars?

Because in the khap panchayat mentality of our law enforcement agencies, the Talwars and Aarushi have become symbols of the so called value-less society which we crave and condemn by turn. An unassuming hard-working dentist couple, who after long hours of work, slept like logs through that hot May night like so many exhausted professionals do, living in a small flat in the suburbs have become symbols of an "upscale" "elitist" society dominated by alcohol, sex, and "wife swapping"" lifestyles. Anyone who defends the Talwars, in the eyes of the police, instantly become identified as members of a society where "posh", "influential" people run homes of dark depravity, where scantily- clad daughters prance about with domestic help where a frivolous "party circuit" seeks to protect each other through expensive lawyers and well-connected friends. Dominated by crime serials and Bollywood images, today investigative agencies are liable to see even a bottle of whisky in a house as nothing less than a mark of a House Of Sin!

In the Talwar case, this caricature has led the CBI to imagine that is fighting a people's war for morality. The CBI and courts, in their own self-image are thus idealistic revolutionaries, up against this privileged class, fighting the war of the public against a depraved aristocracy, this is CBI and courts cast in the role of peoples messiah!

May god save us from such messiahs? Question the CBI about the Aarushi case and you get immediate statements about lifestyle, influential people and shady goings on involving bottles of Ballantine's and Sula. Incidentally, the CBI court which convicted the Talwars believed that after the double murders, Rajesh Talwar drank a bottle of Ballantine's whisky, a bottle of Sula wine, a bottle of beer as well as two litres of Sprite and remained none the worse for wear. Nobody got even a whiff of all the booze on him the next morning!

In fact, Rajesh, for the CBI, is an ogre of monumental proportions who slays his daughter, slays Hemraj, drags Hemraj to the terrace with superhuman strength and then consumes vast amounts of alcohol. What on earth is such a man doing being a dentist? He should be a mafia don!

Read the court judgements on the Talwars and you will find lengthy, flatulent sermons on the depravity of society and value-lessness of the freaks of nature who inhabit the world these days. Our law enforcement agencies are clearly watching far too much TV.

The emphasis is always on moral and social perceptions, rarely on facts and evidence. The television coverage, the frenzied pictures and the crazy headlines have transformed the Aarushi-Hemraj case from one that should be based on fact and evidence, to one based on perception, moral judgement and bloodthirsty public opinion baying for punishment of those "elitist" people seen to be polluting our society. The highly coloured, distorted copy produced by newspapers is primarily responsible for this murder by perception, this rape of truth.

I have followed this case since it broke five-and-a-half years ago. I write this piece in self-reflection and in introspection at what the salacious and sensationalist media coverage has done and the manner in which a media witch hunt has served up to the gallows, two people who, I believe are innocent. All of us in the media need to introspect at the manner in which we have covered the Aarushi story. We need to ask where the gloating glee over the sexcapades of 14-year-olds, feverish whisperings about enraged fathers and "cold-as-ice killer mothers", has led us. In the race for TRPs, and sensationalist headlines, we are all part of a massive and scandalous miscarriage of justice simply because of the preconceptions we have chosen to revel in.

The first team of the CBI gave a clean chit to the Talwars and instead seemed to be accusing the domestic help. In the polygraph, brain mapping and lie detector tests, the Talwars showed no deception and no knowledge of the crime. Krishna and Rajkumar showed deception. The first team described Krishna as aggressive, disloyal prone to lies and deception.

The first team proved, on basis of sound reconstruction tests that you could not hear what was going on in Aarushi's room from the parents' room particularly if the noisy air-conditioner was on. It was proved that neither of the Talwars woke up to switch off the internet at night as the internet router goes off and on through the night, and the CBI did not include router activity in its closure report. But for some inexplicable reason, in September 2009, the first team of the CBI was suddenly changed. Why?

Consider this: In 2008, a CBI investigation officer, Anuj Arya approached veteran journalist Nalini Singh. Nalini runs a Nepali channel. Arya asked Singh if songs were playing on her channel between 11.44 pm and 11.55 pm on the intervening night of May 15-16 2008, the night Aarushi was killed. Nalini checked her FPC and found that indeed songs were playing at the time.

Arya then provided the name of the song and asked if this was the song that was playing. Nalini once again checked with her producer and confirmed yes, it was the very same Nepali song that was playing at the time. This was the same song the CBI officer had heard being hummed by Krishna and the other helps in the narco tests. If all three were humming the same song, was it not logical to assume they were watching the same song together on TV and thus were present in the room where there was a TV, namely Hemraj's room? Does this not support the conclusion that there were more people in the flat other than the Talwars, Aarushi and Hemraj, given that Hemraj's room which had access to the flat has an entry from the outside too, so there was no need for a forced entry?

A crucial bit of evidence was suppressed by the CBI. The blood and DNA of Hemraj was found on the pillow of Krishna, recovered by the police. Why did the second team of the CBI describe this entire finding as a typographical error?

The Noida police say they were forced by Dr Talwar to look for Hemraj in Nepal. The police said Talwar refused to give them the keys to the roof, a "refusal" later cited as an attempt to mislead the investigation. Why could the police not simply have broken down the roof door if they had been determined to search the premises in a professional manner?

The first CBI team found no evidence of the so called "surgical weapon" that had supposedly been used to slit Aarushi and Hemraj's throat. The first team of the CBI recovered a khukri from the house of Krishna. The first team claimed that if there is one weapon that can inflict both a sharp injury and a blunt injury, that weapon is the khukri.

An energised public opinion and a crusading media are in the mood to take on the high and mighty. These are times when abuse of domestic help and tortures inflicted by the rich employers on poor staff are chronicled every day. Who hasn't seen those shocking sights of middle class family parties at restaurants while a skinny maid stands by the door struggling with the spoilt-brat infant?

Too often the rich get away, employers get away, and poor servants are left carrying the can for the misdeeds of powerful employers. This is often the truth. But it is also often NOT the truth. We have to honour the truth by not letting the truth become a formula. We must honour the truth by not letting the truth become a lie. The truth is not a morality of play of rich vs poor. The truth is not a street theatre about evil employers vs vulnerable domestic helps when both are media creations rather than real people. The truth is to be established, case by case, irrespective of class, creed, caste or community. The truth is not reliant on who belongs to which social strata. The truth must be supported by evidence. The truth sometimes goes against public opinion. The law must uphold the truth even if it goes against public opinion and the prevailing climate.

Today Tarun Tejpal stands charged with sexual assault because nobody can refute the glaring evidence of the letters, emails and apology. But the Talwars have been sent to jail on no evidence, on cover-ups and on suppression of facts. They have been carried to jail on a swelling tide of media frenzy, public opinion, and the khap-panchayat mentality of pornography-suffused puritanism which is the hallmark of our law enforcement today.

It's time to switch off our pornography-suffused puritanical gaze in the Talwar case. It's time to stop fantasizing about the "affairs" of 14-year-old schoolgirls. It's time to stop demonising busy working parents as homicidal representatives of a "swinging" lifestyle. It's time to stop attacking those who defend the Talwars as English-speaking Marie Antoinettes who oppress servants. Social class and caste are not determinants of legal guilt. Moral judgements are no substitute for facts and evidence. The Talwars themselves re-opened the CBI closure report as they wanted a fair investigation to find their daughter's killers.

As a society we owe the dead 14-year-old and the dutiful Hemraj our commitment to the truth. Three words must animate the courts and media now as the case goes forward: evidence, evidence, and evidence.

On rusty evenings

2013-11-07T21:02:00.000+05:30

I was sixteen, so was the porch where I and Jeremy Goodman had been sitting every evening in those years. Jeremy Goodman, the septuagenarian companion of my slow, indulgent years of teenage brought the perfect ambience for those evenings. After Independence, Democracy had just become the latest commodity. We had commemorated heroics of Binoy-Badal-Dinesh-Kshudiram-Bose-Gandhi-Nehru again and closed the chapters for good. As their valour had solved pressing issues and wiped away most of the colonial masters, our job had been gracefully done. For those who had the bliss to take birth a decade later, it was our time to recline.
The ancient smell of Goodman’s soiled carpets, white teacups, and solitary existence of sugar cubes make my teenage appear like a figment of yesteryear’s imagination, an imagination itself too old to put up with the tensile forces of memories trying to fetch it about twenty years thereafter. I sat with Goodman, the erstwhile English merchant and discussed the words creaking beneath his gramophone.
Ghalib, Faiz, Farhaz with couplets counting the layers beneath my heart….
Iqbal Bano and her desert of solitude…
My debates with him on how overrated love actually was
and pithy phrases of Urdu in between teaspoons of Namkeen…
provided sufficient lyrical contribution to the vines of bougainvillea and money plant behind us. Did we notice the colour of sky? Did we notice migratory birds that our very trivial town liked boasting about during every winter? I know not.
Goodman believed in trivial things. Trivial things, he liked saying, led to trivial failures and ushered disappointments that one could hardly be sad about. His sadness hovered between the verses of extinct poets. ‘Vasl ki raat’ heard Goodman, and started deriving meanings for it--- allegorical, symbolic, metaphorical, ironical. Yet some of them were left to reach out for. This saddened Goodman.
I left him behind. I sought eyes for wilder rumpus. My tarot card read change and so I did.
“Aaj jaane ki zid na karo!”, the Gramophone implored, though not for me. We have talked about it, Goodman and I. We believed the best farewell was no farewell at all. That there were no departures. And if there were no departures there was no distending our hearts, no pulling it over dry, desert-like ages to the extent that it aches. The heart remains spread out in open ended chapters, in little pieces of one that have been invested all throughout. Journey seemed less impossible that way and the love we tend to exchange at each of its stops, far less futile.
Goodman died shortly after I had left my old town for college. Twenty years later, his records lay in some dark corner of his rusted inheritance.

The Lunchbox

2013-09-26T10:52:00.001+05:30

I am tired of bad movies. So are many others like me who have grown exhausted with the plethora of crass dialogues, rise and fall of Khans, unnecessary sex and raunchy item girls with breasts of questionable size. But The Lunchbox gave a delicious first look. Also its cast and the reliance they have gained through previous works provided the necessary encouragement without which it is rather a risk these days to venture hindi movies. All in all, an acute sense of inertia-of-rest that I feel only for college every morning coupled with a break required from not doing anything provided the last push I needed to catch an early show.

Sometimes, as the movie suggests, even a wrong train can take you to the right destination. Destination, on a philosophical level, can be the cause as well as effect of one's destiny. And 'a person's destiny', as Murakami reminds us, 'is something you look back at afterwards, not something to be known before.' Thus when Ila hestitates to thank the person who, instead of her husband, received the lunch she made with love and gave it back with heartfelt appreciation reflecting from licked-up steel containers, Deshpande Aunty tells her to give it a go. She says, 'Ek thank you to banta hain na!' The first step to live a happy fulfilling life is in the appreciation of minute gestures.

Ila is one of the myriad faces of a city that lives less through time and more through its work. Mumbai with its early morning school-goers, its unique dabba-system, coming and going of trains and offices populated with brittle, yellow files is a city that has no time to rest. Yet there are people like Ila who has a moment to spare, to chat with her well-meaning neighbour, to peep through the window to admire the last glimpse of a dabba she prepares everyday with immeasurable care. Ila stops for she wants to get noticed, for she is one of those few who have been gifted with vision, not just sight. Yet the hustle-bustle of the huge city and its important works forgets Ila and all her smallness to inflict upon her a solitude that is actually its own.

What do we do when we wish to let go of something we cannot release ourselves from? We share. And thats what they do, Ila and Saajan, lost faces in the map of a city that tends to forget. They share the empty spaces around them with paneer kofta and little anecdotes from otherwise mundane days. They share the trials and tribulation of each new day, episodes of dead wives and sick fathers, once watched television soaps. Each one puts in the lunchbox a letter with their share of smell for the day while the other receives and sends it back with his own. Happiness, for people like us, is a matter of state. It grows and shrinks without complaints, in whatever room the state in which we are now, allots for it. Ila and Saajan remind us that as they find happiness which now demands just an acknowledgement of its little endeavours and simple goodness--- not a second child from a marriage too futile to love, not the excitements of a new romance. Friendship, as one said, is love without wings. And when we have too many strings to keep us from flying, the wisps of a friendship becomes enough newness to look forward to.

Also Shaikh in his simple charming ways puts forward a face of the city that is engrossed in work even without its competitive machinations.

Bhutan has formulated Gross National Happiness but for Ila and Sajan it is the journey that is all there to it. For people who can let go of cumulative measurements of mirth and sorrow, the journey, or at least the promise of one, can suffice for everything--- the meters to proceed, the steps to retreat, the new cities to be admired and the old alleys to be looked back at before leaving. In the end, life is not how fast we advanced but the count of smiles we received in every step we took. For people like them are not made for big achievements or even insignificant ones. It is their sole duty to remember forgotten stories and to teach how we celebrate life, and all the little big things, by giving a moment to each one of them. Perhaps that is the reason why Ila folds the letter which carried the road to Bhutan, to remember the story of how she has once moved even when movement and change had become empty vessels. For sometimes when we remember old stories, we get hope to build new ones.

This is not a movie review. Yet to sum up in a line the acting was impeccable. The director won my heart not just by showing the essentials but also by letting go of inessentials. The voice of Deshpande aunty, the feet of Ila's ailing father were enough to capture all that they had to add to the essence of Ila. The movie has all the right ingredients along with the perfect blending. In the end it leaves you sad, happy and hungry with the lingering sense of something vital that we have put aside for a long time.

What is it? Well I would say the simplicty of malai kofta and dum aloo.

It progresses like a well-written novel and for an aspiring author, one can know where the goodness of a good movie lies.

What my father means to me

2013-08-17T00:43:00.000+05:30

My father is growing old. Few hours ago he completed another year of his life, another journey round the sun and now he is on a new one. As a young man my father has led the most exciting life any youth can dream of. He joined the Marine when he was in his mid-twenties and has been rowing his ships through the waters of the world since then. He travelled new lands, married the woman he loved, raised a prosperous family and otherwise was engaged in keeping himself happy. The good taste of an old wine, French cologne, Italian cuisine were the simple things into which he loved to indulge and seek happiness. My father’s world was precise, defined by parameters those in themselves were not far-fetched in scope as well as in their future translation to reality--- or such was my idea about his world for a long time.

As a little girl I would seldom find my father at home. For a long time I thought that was the norm, that fathers are supposed to stay away in lesser-known lands and earn money, that they are to miss birthdays and festivities, that they appear only in random photographs hung on the wall. Being a father seemed like a whole lot of bad luck, someone who misses all the fun. I had this strong belief that fathers might have done something terrible for which they are being severely deprived and punished, as was the simple rule of childhood which said only bad things brought worse punishments. It took age and growth for me to realize how simple rules might transform themselves to strange paradoxes; that it might not be bad things, just things, to bring to us such huge prices to be paid; just things, that unlike the many bad things we do, provide us with not even the slightest allusions before bringing us down.

I have vivid memories of my father and me catching up in lazy afternoons after he returned from his voyages. Looking back now I find them to be the most intimate of moments I have spent with anyone so far. One thing my father has always maintained is to never bring his work back home. He had this simple theory that his work only brought us separation, only took him away from a part of my childhood that no father would miss for anything in the world. Yet the world intervened and kept building its ridge. The world brings us together and the world sets us apart, and it does everything beneath the garb of all those things that were inevitable, that were meant to be. Thus in those summer afternoons we spent in our not-so-beautiful house, with less money in our closet and with a happiness that is even less in my present world, my father described to me his own childhood set in the background of some idyllic village. It had the raucous laughter of six siblings who shared almost everything, starting from lunch money to clothes bought for annual festivities, but it taught me that sharing is beautiful and that sometimes when you share nothingness it grows to a love that you learn to cherish as you move on. The simplest thing about childhood was that it was always simple. That even though my younger self tried to imagine all the things my father then told me and live through those long-lost joys vicariously, I was a child who did not know the greater reasoning behind what she was doing. Such was the power of childhood that even my vicarious joys attained through half-imagined, half-remembered things stood out to be greater than all the other kinds of pleasures that have henceforth arrived to replace them. It was a different time that my father talked about, a time when schools charged 6 rupees from their students but gave them back football matches on rainy days. It was a time when friendship was a strength that was regarded above races that we now run to throw them away. It was a time when people changed but their love remained. It was a time when people learnt to win but not to forget what made them win.

Leaving our old house and its shabby neighbourhood was easy for me. To confess the truth I have no friends there. All the friends that I have now were made once I arrived at my new house, the one that has been my home for fourteen years now. I was ecstatic to leave behind narrow alleys lined by moss-covered, open drains. New things gave me new vision and I did not have much to miss. Almost all my old playthings were brought with me to that new-found newness whose towering waves filled my life. I liked everything about this newness, the smell of paint from walls whose colour I liked, the nor’westers that came in through the southern window, the money-plants which I then learned to take care of. And in the hustle of all these changes I failed to notice that those precious afternoons have been left behind. A bigger house gave us empty spaces, spaces that we mistook for something crucial for a better life and its private aspects, spaces that started from an indulgent luxury only to become a habit whose presence I now regret. In the end empty spaces took the physical form of that ridge which the world has started to build long ago. We stood on their banks and dropped into them our golden afternoons only to never look back at what we have thus lost.

Change is constant. Even if we do not realize it exists and influences our life in the most unsaid, unfelt manner. Change was there when it devised the arrival of new friends who came to us following the traces of old ones. Change was there when every time we foolishly gave our hearts even after they have been broken the last time. Change was with faces who came to us and left and in those who stayed back but were not quite the same. Change was when my father stopped sending letters to us. Internet was then the latest addition to our list of commoditized pleasure. Thus letters and handwritings left their room but only half of it was occupied by emails, brevity being their trait. Empty spaces grew.

As per the laws of physics, when you hold an empty space and run against the wind, it makes a wailing noise. As life ran faster and faster the empty spaces beside us made wistful noises, only that we were too engaged to detect noise or seasons. Even though his voyages became shorter my endless examinations kept me away from father. Distance brought with itself a set of antonyms that found purpose in defining us. I was everything that my father was not. He was the man to strive through separation while I grew to despise it for all that it had snatched away from me. He was brave patient and buoyant while I was bruised time and again doing things that drowned me deeper into the sea. He was venerable for his might and strength while I found solace in the smallness of unrecognized words. Lack of understanding brought differences and an absence of clarity brought quarrels. Our visions appeared rarefied to one another, esoteric, often to be dismissed. Lack of words, as I could not realize then, is better than the clumsiness of wrong words. But that’s what we gave each other, a hive of wrong words that doomed over our sky like the ash-coloured darkness of a perennial monsoon.

But there were moments, at the end of birthdays or beginning of a new year. Moments when it occurred to both of us how evanescent our fights and contradictions truly were. Moments when an all-encompassing silence would wipe out all the jumbled up noise and confusion. They came to me like a recurring epiphany of the residual love that always exist in bonds like these, its weight so significant that no matter how far we go the locus never truly shifts. Sometimes I and father bonded over more trivial issues like the hilarity of my many failures and sometimes at the stranger turns that we faced with death, loss and deeper garbage. With time, with new desires and goals, these moments changed their form. Sometimes they were deep like grieving nights, and sometimes crisp like the breeze of a fun spring evening. And when all that was to change had changed there came a moment of reckoning. I knew it was there when I looked into his eyes, every single time--- that simple sense of security that is perpetual and remains even when homes have been washed away and histories have been overwritten. That what is truly ours stays, no matter the time, no matter the change.

Belated happy birthday Dad.
You taught me the essence of home through your homecomings.

(Pictures by Sailik Sengupta)

What William heard

2013-07-21T12:05:00.000+05:30

There was a hint of rain in the air

on once a fine morning

as I woke up gently surprised

to find him beside, singing.

The night before was a tender song

with sea waves humming beside

He broke a kiss which slowly faded

and then he chose to decide.

There was a madness in raging winds

as they spoke to me through the fire

as often he has told me before

to listen to my heart's desire.

Neither him nor the wind does know

that my heart has fled long before.

Its his through which I feel the beat

and try to hear my silent lore.

But the wind was lost and so was he

when his heart touched my empty core.

As he paved his way into me I found

all I have lost have come to the fore.

He made his footprints with the sand

on little drops of my past, I fear

and they rose up into his heart and spoke

thousand wishes of my yesteryear.

In his voice I heard my own

to my utter delight or despair

the night reminisced my stubborn dreams

whose colours are now on the wear.

Love they asked for, to grow again

that which he gave me in plenty

there came a moon with silver arc

in my ocean that has long been empty.

Years that I have tried to mend

and guarded from dreams erratic

indulged in their old broken game

to write on my life what seemed like an epic

They whispered and fell on his open arms

as he moved along my breasts and curve

And I felt he was my long lost friend

who knew how to read each of their verve.

It seemed like ice beyond the fire

as I counted flakes one by one

'A new life will come to us with dawn'

said he, 'our darling, handsome son'.

Then I knew my heart's desire

has both been found and fulfilled

as he who made me his at first

looked into my eyes and kneeled.

I held him to reach peace and sleep

and woke up to his song and rain

on that morning covered in blue-green mist

with my heart's desire in me again.

And oft when now I think of bygones

with our son playing in fields below

an angel sings me that morning's song,

with William,my love, beneath her golden halo.

I and...

2013-07-01T20:55:00.000+05:30

Diaries

Cold drinks
rooftops

guitary ranting

Orange evenings

circular walks

Park Street

Smoked Whiskey Cream

Metro rails

breezy departures

with a hint of Tridib beyond The Shadow Lines

no Circle of reason

only abstract poetry

of Any Colour you Like

and You…

2013-06-13T01:52:00.000+05:30

At the dawn of my awakening, this thought appeared from the horizon beyond night. Of all the spirited friends we have or will ever have, only one stands out and stays true to its virtue. Loneliness, I wonder, has been integral to each one of our lives. And no matter how much we try to cover it with denial, the truth is that we are all fond of it, in our own crooked ways. We like to be left lonely, at some time or the other, from the plethora of things with little or no meaning, from the many relations that stay with us just for the sake of staying. Truth is we would rather be lonely on a night before fresh rains, or on a winter afternoon that can be well spent peeling off oranges beneath the sun than be encapsulated by a surplus of noise-like people saying noise-like words which get involuntarily discarded. And even for those who have been gifted with less meaninglessness, even for them, loneliness gives that vital excuse, that opportunity of being sad, only to get back to those whose absence have left them so.

In the end, there is only little we can do or gain without loneliness.

Weekends and homesickness

2013-06-09T00:46:00.000+05:30

A man riding his cycle passed by me making a loosely curved pattern on the concrete. The sky has no hint of the sunset orange even when it is almost six by my watch. I have been walking through these roads for the past one month now. Roads of a new city, with new trees and a new air all around. The newness here is continuous and spreads over every place I see. The buildings, the unusually tall pillars, the policeman standing on the pedestal placed at the centre of the Chauraha, the purple bougainvillea, everything was moulded in this newness. Newness that was apparently new but actually empty, newness that took only a few days to be explored, and then it was all the same.

I have never been away from my mother. For twenty years we have lived together in a circle having a certain small radius around which the seasons changed from summer to winter and then summer again and inside it we kept growing in frequent changes complemented by periods of extensive sameness. And in the twenty first year of life I have come out of that circle and rushed outside along one of its tangents. So if one asks " What was the colour of twenty one years that we spent together and apart?" I'd say the colour of joy, the colour of sorrow, the colour of desolation, the colour of reconciliation. Twenty one years went by with twenty one different colours, each coming out of a faucet and spreading far and wide till the eyes can stretch. That is where you and I have met Mother, one place after another, in twenty one years.

Kanpur and Kolkata have between them a finite number of differences. But they are distinct.
Back in home there was a plenitude of people, noise and rain. Also there was an abundance of vehicle on the streets. There was this urgency behind travel; everybody had a purpose behind coming out of home, a definite destination full of opportunities that was to be reached in minimum possible time. Regardless of sunshine, rain or moon I have seen series of cars lined down the street, yellow cabs and steel coloured buses running and running far away. Here the travel seems much more random and even though destination was specified for each one of us living here, we could reach it in self-determined pace. Travel here is self-induced and slow, carried out by cycles or occasional walks.
Back in home even work had in itself a constant velocity by which it was driven forward, towards completion. Work there was monotonous and tiring, same old, same old. Over here it often feels like a journey through knowing, the allusions of a new idea, a new achievement encircles it. Work here allows digression into hobbies and other allowable leisure. Back home these activities would usually come at the cost of important work getting potentially delayed and piled up. Over here work floats like a rudderless ship and even after considerable procrastination it always reaches the shore.

Once he has moved away from that usual place where he belongs, one can realize how much space of our quotidian life is occupied by the bonds and camaraderie whose presence have been taken for granted. Now that I am in a foreign land that suffers from an acute scarcity of known faces, these extensive slots of loneliness have come up to the surface. One day, as I was walking back to my room after calling it a day, I heard this noise weeping in the wind. This was the noise developed from the lack of noise, from the empty holes that now remain in place of all that I have left behind. The wind here is not frequent. It hardly blows and when it does there exists the feeling of a queer weight. It is the weight of an insipid sadness and remorse which result from a change that has now lost its newness.

I am no wayfarer or romantic who finds a part of his own reflected in every new place he arrives. The dry winds, the steaming heat and the artificial fountains have further dried up. It is raining in my city. Like every year the rains have brought a maddening west wind and fresh mangoes. What good can newness really bring when one realizes how many stories of his old place are being ignorantly discarded? All I want now are the old parts of my old life assimilated together to make me all that I was, before.

On the other hand, an epiphany came to mollify the cacophonous pain which reverberates within the wind in the void. The virtue of loneliness does not lie in manifesting how deep-rooted were the things that have gone missing. In fact it shows us the strength we have in us to strive through the present with a pocketful of hope; hope that pulls us forward from how we are now to how we once were, intact and complete.

I hope someday it will rain here.

2013-06-08T16:38:00.004+05:30

To Jeba, my best friend and the most beautiful girl I have ever met :)

What was the colour of the ten years that we spent together and apart? The colour of joy, the colour of sorrow, the colour of desolation, the colour of reconciliation. Ten years went by with ten different colours, each coming out of a faucet and spreading far and wide till the eyes can stretch.
That is where you and I have met, one place after another, in ten years.
As I laid the bridge over troubled waters

2013-05-31T13:19:00.001+05:30

রবি ঠাকুর,

তোমার আর আমার
চিরকালের গান, চিরকালের প্রেম|
আর তার সাথে চিরকালের আমি|

A playhouse I had started weaving once in the deepest of my mind

And counting the sleepless nights I spent needs a way I'm yet to find

A traveller sings the song of dawn and then he passes by

My recess takes in a little breath and ends in the next sigh

He calls me once, to come out and play

But for joining him there, I find no way

Those things of mine that the rest belittled are scattered everywhere

I build the house with a small lump of past which I have in my share

The one I now have found in this play as my new mate

Finds the throne of this royal game betrothed to his fate

For he binds together all that was broken

In a spell that makes me wonder often

A playhouse I had started weaving once in the deepest of my mind

And counting the sleepless nights I spent needs a way I'm yet to find

2013-05-18T17:14:00.000+05:30

To come up with a word or two on love one needs to start with a torch of courage in one hand and an impossible friendship in the other. The idea came to me few days back while returning back to the heat in my room after work leaving behind the evening. Let me stress further on this impossible friendship I have stumbled upon. To me the impossibility of a friendship did not reside in bringing together two people from either poles. Somehow the impossibility here indicated to me the possibility of a deep rooted fulfillment which two people have found amongst themselves and have then succumbed to with a sense of satisfaction never seen before. I read something more beautiful to describe the cause of such a saturating happiness more appropriately.
"A principal fruit of friendship, is the ease and discharge of the fullness and
swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce."
A week back, walking past the various unnamed trees that sway their leaves to disrupt the lifelessness of silent, scorching afternoons, I felt a loneliness sinking inside and dragging me down. Much like a saviour to escape me from that oppressive pull an epiphany arrived and whispered to me. It said that there exists a face of loneliness looking at which one finds reflected the depths of his strengths, rather forces, that buoyant up one in face of such strange, despairing desolation.
Long after two hearts have distended enough, to reach each other through bonds that stretch far beyond the reach of their individual lives and their limited, measured capabilities, comes a promise to stick together even when the dreams end and the passions dry up. Perhaps, now that i can write about rising above the last thread of subtly coveted selfishness, I know a thing or two about love.
In the end colourless sadness and ceaseless procrastination open gates for greater words and musings which put an end to writer's block (if you know what I mean! :D.. )

2013-05-01T01:10:00.001+05:30

I will tell you exactly how growing up feels like, it feels like living in a circle. You might fall in love with the sky and the sun and grass and even the harsh winters I suppose, you might go out to reach the end of the world and yet all you do is staying in a circle. As the years pass by, as you tend to grow, the circle shrinks, little by little. It leaves behind people, those who it thought are not meant to be with you through the years. One by one it selects and excludes those who choose to separate from us for the disparity between them and our natural selves have somehow become torturous to the way they would like us to be. Then again it discards those whose measured views and understanding of life have compelled upon them such an overbearing spell that it guides them to declare us to be mere idiosyncrasies, better to be avoided for the sake of a more vital sanity. Thus in this endless wearing and tearing between all sorts of people, the circle takes a call to grow less than what it was, remaining with those coloured with the same shades of spirit and love, as are we. After a prolonged reduction, we are left with a handful of people. The crowd around might have been long gone but those who stay, are in fact, those who really matter.

A humble author and seven husbands

2013-03-30T18:37:00.001+05:30

I love Ruskin Bond. When I first read about Rusty in his “Room on the roof” I wanted to write him a love letter. I was determined about posting it, to send it to his Mussourie home amidst vineyards and cool orchards. I have not searched for pictures of his home. I have imagined it in my mind; that is the kind of house I would love him to live in. I wrote about myself, about the warm feeling which his eyes set in me every time I turn to see his little portrait on the back of his books. I wrote some more about my hatred for fishes, about the guy I loved, about my wishes to spray-paint the walls of neighbouring houses, about my thoughts on photographs. And in the urgency to divulge many a thing, the letter went on and on but never really went to the place it was supposed to reach.

In time the letter started to become yellow and stiffened, crumbling into folds that have now set deep gorges across it. From the status of a letter it elevated to that of a scrapbook which held emotions burgeoning out of the many phases I found in life. The day they sold my bicycle I wrote to him how a part of childhood depleted like brittle sand. Now that the days of watching the neighbourhood riding its crooked paths were over I wished to go beyond the places where the bicycle could possible take me. Another time, it was night if I can recall, I chose to write that I was scared of shadows creeping out of us, taller than we can ever be. I wrote about days that seemed less hopeful than others, I borrowed accounts from stories that were not mine to tell. In all the veracity I was trying to portray, I kept running in circles on a green pasture which seemed like the only place of hope I could travel to. Every night I would slide the letter beneath my bed after adding one or two lines until one day a virulent procrastination gripped me. I was less enthused, less bemused than before. I felt few things in my fist, and even fewer things to write about.

Last night I picked up a Ruskin Bond book after a whole year. I have missed his gentle boggy eyes, soaked in a lukewarm love. But a year has gone by. I have lost a lot of vigour I had before, to run away like Rusty. Few of those dreams that gyrated around me all the time have now sublimated. I now eye for the more possible, more achievable destinations. Misty mountains have been replaced by California blues, let us suppose, or Scottish farms by Goan churches. Last night was one of those nights when nothing happened, last night had on it the burden of normalcy or the sadness of not being exceptional, not standing out of its clan. Last night failed to bring back old lovers or new ones. Deserted by both memory and belief last night seemed like an itinerary, travelled a million times before, with no new promise to offer. And on such a banal night I read a story of love, of betrayal of murderous fit, unfaithful husbands and a black spider. I wonder how the author who has been my constant source of hope and beauty for fifteen years changed his path. Of how the author who wrote about seeing his dead father by the riverside has traversed the desolate corridors of a woman of ruthless kind. The author who would speak about enchantment was suddenly talking about remorse, about vicious anguish, about all that was dark amidst the marshy forests of his Mussourie.

For a while my faith in him felt desecrated. The sunshine which I saw in him seemed to have left. Let there be one author for eternal hope, I have always prayed and there he was, in the letters of his book, in the blackness of a ghastly love, with the optimism he induced in everything now ephemeral like the smoke rings coming from cigarettes. And when the fervour of heart was over, there came an urge to revisit all that I have gone through in this blasphemous night. Somehow I could not contain in me the idea of my faith in him shattering this way.

With rationales I started afresh, contemplating all that I observed. And then I learned like I have always learnt from him. That his trees still grow in Dehra unlike I have envisaged. That faith might divert its course for a while and yet remain the faith it was. It might seem adamant and bewildering for the time and yet find its way to be loyal. And as I let go of my fatuous stubbornness with a sigh, we, I and his coolness, bonded like lovers.

A bird sang from a distant perch on midnight, long after I have stopped hearing Simon & Garfunkel on Jango....!!
With that I fetched my old letter from under my bed.

Holi

2013-03-27T00:43:00.000+05:30

For the first few minutes before I started typing, my time went trying to unearth a better title. Maybe it is because of Pamuk’s ‘Other Colours’ lying beside me on the table or what I cannot say but I wanted a title that gives the impression of some weighty literature or even the faint possibility that I would create some in future. I have been writing for many years now. From juvenile experiences to meaningless infatuations, from backlashes received after producing pitiable exam papers to endless striving through years of suffocating sadness, slowly I have developed a way with words which goes hand in hand with my continual endeavour to learn more about literature. Yet when it comes to writing something that would probably metamorphose my life or all the meanings I have added to it, giving it greater essence and purpose, I find the opportunity fleeing like quick sand. Scanning through the sooty memories of disparate glories scattered over twenty odd years I realised that greatness is still a long shot. Thus for a perfectly well-spent day of an otherwise banal life, let us start with the quotidian name which it has received. Today is the day I played Holi.

Memories related to this festival from the early years of my life are rather numbered. My father being a sailor man hardly stayed home during the time I was growing up. Somehow Holi seemed to be the most depressing day in the childhood of an ebullient girl. I remember spending the Holi morning at my grandmother’s place, sitting on her balcony playing with plastic toys while the twins and their cousins, who lived next door, would scream and splash colours at each other. I would not say I missed my father, or even having a sibling. At an extremely unripe age like that claiming to feel the absence of a person would be bit of long-drawn exaggeration. Incapable of realizing what I was feeling I approximated it as sinking down in nothingness which seemed to be a reasonable surmise. Now I know that I felt something close to segregation, of being left out from the childish banter which every child deserves. Finally as the vivacious air settled down at the end of the twin boys’ colourful mirth, my grandmother would come to take me in for lunch. As she put me down for the afternoon nap I would tell her in details about the colours the neighbourhood boys played with and how I always secretly prayed that the elder of the twin brothers would win in the game they devised of throwing water filled balloons at each other. At times I tested my grandmother’s wits by asking her uncomfortable questions about my so-called seclusion. But she always had a sanguine answer that would buoy me up from those void layers (of melancholy) I was swimming in.

In few years my days of despair were over as I moved to a new home and found new friends. Yet those few solitary days of Holi I spent in my initial childhood come back to me every year as the festival arrives; maybe because the wounds of our childhood leave indelible impressions or because the tender love of my grandparents has set its coolest shade on my life in those years or maybe because I was less used to the absence of a parent that has always left my life half full.

Today I played Holi with friends. One could sense in us the juvenile excitement since yesterday as we carefully fulfilled the important errands required for buying colours and water balloons and other accessories indispensable for this joyous event. Avin’s house has been the holy abode of all our dreams and games for the past three years. Ironic that I knew Avin’s house before I actually came to know Avin. We moistened each other’s face with blue, green, yellow and ran over the roof like ragged urchins. We painted the walls with coloured water which, I feel now, has washed away part of the disappointment I have been carrying with me due to my many failures in this year. In our jocund participation and raucous laughter we disrupted the silence which the afternoon sun casts everyday on the neighbourhood.

As the arduous gallivanting subdued with all its fervour the hour of reclining arrived. We sat there for a while, stuck in a state of silent torpor like a bunch of inactive birds exhausted after a flight through stormy rainfall. The water dripped down the wings we managed to develop in those few hours. Back then it felt that there was no hint of apprehension, that the expectation I have from me could be set aside like some secondary purpose, that my tryst with someone who I am not would finally meet its fatal end thereby liberating me to the world I so dearly long for.

The evening reflected itself on the glasses of alcohol which we all wanted to savour at the day’s end. I knew my departure for the day was called for and I set for home walking past the fluorescent street lights into which a swarm of insects were flying. Owing to habit I seldom pay notice to the people walking around me. However, today there seemed to be a lateral resuscitation within this apparent getting lost in myself. The evening appeared more hopeful. It seemed like an evening for the ones who have lost their way or for those who have planned to begin a journey from a wrong path. Riding my humble auto I headed home listening to The Rain Song on a day when there was no rain, only a shower of evening fragrance that brought to me a hint of July. Suddenly there was the wholesome feeling of being amidst green, amidst friendships that asked for little in return. Suddenly I felt less angry with myself, with my mistakes in the past which then seemed to be pardonable. Suddenly there was the feeling of being a part of those neighbourhood kids whose world I have been carrying in my pocket for all these years.

Vicarious

2013-03-23T20:05:00.001+05:30

Suddenly this afternoon I remembered an old game which I and mother used to play during younger times, at night. Younger times they were, when we both would be up oppressed by a windless summer night, waiting for father to come home from endlessly long voyages. Mother, then in her thirties, would hardly be able to indulge in some meaningful conversation with a girl so young that even dolls made little sense to her. As silence would only thicken the moist languor smeared over our faces on such nights we discovered this game. One was supposed to write on another one’s hand as the latter closed her eyes and tried to guess the thing being written. Needless to say I always won. I had the edge of motherly love which let me win even if I mumbled out ridiculously nonsensical words that I would have been unable to repeat the very next moment. Nevertheless, that’s what mothers do. They never let you lose even when you do not win. Before this little story digresses any further from its rather strange name I would trace my way back. Many years later when I grew up and came across this word it took me back to those nights when I remember to have laughed the loudest.

Vicarious. Something experienced in the imagination through the feelings or actions of another person.

Many of you might not agree with me but the very idea the word suggested seemed like that thrilling juvenile adventure (yes, let me be little dramatic) I had in those sleepless hours with mother. Trying to imagine what she was thinking, trying to see the same before my eyes as her fingers ran over my back, a vicarious pleasure filled my inside.

Since I had that faint idea of being vicarious I have applied it often in my life.

On too many early mornings when I had to be at school studying mind-numbing algebra, I imagined undisturbed slumber. Vicarious slumber!

Every time I was dragged forcefully to learn Tagore songs I did not understand, I would imagine hearing Paul, Peter, Mary or Dylan in my mind. Vicarious music!

Soon after that, as I was forced to study poets or authors in Bengali I never liked, I would read Tagore in my mind. Shishu, Binodini, choto nodi, Shesher Kobita….. Vicarious literature!

Of the few meaningless trysts I had with even fewer men and their conversations over coffee I thought of the right one, of the endless conversations we would once have while having a less insipid meal. Of Dylan, of Cohen on days of rain without a raincoat. Vicarious romance!

Without Dylan I will not be half the person I am today. I owe that to him as I wish further to be his blue-eyed son. Even now after winning a few battles, I tend to be vicarious from time to time. To escape from a stolid present where nothing amuses one too deeply, I keep drifting between a lost childhood and a coveted tomorrow, oh so vicariously! Part of me longs for the evening spent at didar bari fighting with brother, part of me thinks of a house on Scottish lands sipping tea with kids whose names I do not know. But none of me wishes to stay here as I am now, like an exhausting continuum. The oceans lying ahead of it are dead and the wind brings redolence of only the last day of autumn, no spring to follow only perpetual fall.

With great loss comes great power? I wonder how else I developed the skill to swing over vicarious existences in such beautiful synchronization. As the grim dusk expands on the evening sky my vicarious twins return to their imagined abodes leaving behind my humourless phlegmatic presence. Every day they take me to newer places of past and future, either forgotten or unimagined. I wonder what Camus meant when he called for one’s very existence being a rebellion. Am I imposing such behaviour towards myself by such deliberate avoidance of living the reality? The words fail to appear at this juncture thereby proclaiming a silent tirade.

Of all my vicarious experiences only one fails to appear before me, the ones that would give a hint of those nights that have gone a decade ago. Me and mother gave grown older. Even though we have not grown apart something prevents me to sleep beside her. Of course the many sheaths that have deposited themselves on me require space, some privacy I believe, reducing the idea of setting for a vicarious journey with her to be unwarranted, ridiculous!

My handicaps have become so unavoidable that the sky lowered to touch my back in consolation like my mother once did.

Heat

2013-03-23T00:00:00.000+05:30

It is March and the heat is already oozing out of invisible orifices present almost everywhere. Calcutta summer and it’s very own oppressing ways have acquainted themselves with me for the past twenty years. The dull white morning heat and the sultry fumes that originate from it together devise clandestine processes to unleash such unrestrained atrocities which only ascend a steady curve as the hours of the day pass. I go to college every morning witnessing a city full of irascible sweat, pissed off, about to explode any moment. A depressing humidity distends out of everything, of the people around me as it casts an impervious sheath of wily magic, perhaps borne out of disappointment, heartfelt and integral of every being walking, talking, doing all the important chores it was meant to do.

College itself brings its own lot of miseries every day. Added to mundane lectures, approaching deadlines and over-pouring dustbins the heat there takes almost a diabolical turn. The fastidious people with intentions a gazillion-miles away from my own easygoing self disrupts the faint redolence of childhood I would try to detect with the delicate wind in the air. My fantasies and idiosyncrasies find themselves endangered being out in the heat that has now gone resplendent with the afternoon sun. Their existence results in catastrophic outcome, one which ridicules me out loud and then flies away with those once beautifully knitted fetishes for amateur desires. The menacing humidity lingers to my nude incapability like a gelatinous mixture. The moist desperation to escape to faraway lands, to my grandfather’s home up there in the hills gets dissolved in it without leaving a trace. I stills struggle to figure out the day when I tumbled forth, like a rolling stone, to a world of contrasts. Sluggishly the sun gentles itself to cut some slack in a lurid disaster that then seeks its daily conclusion.

I walk past the trees, the pebbled roads and the barren field with a football bouncing on it, every evening. I try not to read beneath the myriad faces, between the countless lines I hear. At times, when I stumble on a pebble on my way I look back, to find friends I have left behind or an unfinished poem beneath my bedside lamp.

I look high up to the empty roof as it brings back you and I seated on its precarious edge, laughing over silly despairs. I miss the crows over our heads that evening moving in circles.

Our roof had love blowing in the wind. Now I miss a blissful shelter that has desolated my heart, after evaporating with the heat.

A tad less than

2013-03-20T23:52:00.001+05:30

Somehow this title has been hovering in my head since the middle of the day. Of late things have been like this, little short of whatever they were supposed to be. Then again I think I am wrong. The definitive hour when this phenomenon started goes back quite a few years. Perhaps we are all too tired, of the mindless rambling all around, of treating non-problems as problems, of a relentless exhaustion from which there seems no respite, no escape…. Perhaps we are all too tired and sleepy to feel that we are that way. The hurdles I pass, the tests I give everyday somehow fail to provide that idyllic rush of happiness, that sense of relief and success even after I have crossed all of them.

Did I take the road not taken?
Has that made all the difference?
Questions have baffled me, making me reach the end of my wits. In the end they disappear somewhere like the white clouds which rotates over my morning coffee every day. But the misty enigma which sheaths tomorrow’s vision persists and thickens itself every day. When I was younger I used to derive some sort of saccharine pleasure from this mystery, even if my tomorrow was part of that not knowing. Somehow the unknown had a romantic notion, perhaps of an adventure or of a realization. Perhaps that’s what childhood is all about, to descry a far-off horizon and to be happy with just the knowledge of its existence. Discovering that could be postponed by a silent procrastination. Let Dylan and Cohen make sense today, let the tambourine play this night. Tomorrow’s morning and all that would come with it could be taken care of, after the tambourine ceases to play. Childhood was like this.

When I grew up everything stayed at its place. Music still elucidates all the wonderfulness it has on windy nights. The road beside me house still looks beautiful when soaked in moonlight after midnight. The 2a.m. tryst with a certain chocolate cookie which drives me through endless periods of hapless introspection is the indelible part of childhood in my adult self. What changed was me. With an unfelt hasty snatch I was removed from the centre of the space that once used to complete me. Now there is just an oddity, of belonging somewhere where everything has upturned itself.

Travel in a lost land is tiring. Through tenuous inroads it leads us to mirages of helpless despair. An impediment it appears indeed. The doable gets tougher and even when it gets done the sense of an ending hardly appears. Then again what more can one get from a mirage? Of lost hope and lost dreams I wonder what is more painful. Both bring an unfinished ending, one whose sour aftertaste exacerbates the prominent declivity which comes with it.

Once I started a cab-ride with someone who told me I was his favourite woman. In this long road which I should not have taken, it has been the only journey which brings back an old fragrance. That was my brief period of adultery, with childhood, against my adult self. Someday I will perhaps get back to my old lover once again, and his cab full of darkness to talk about Floyd or to read the books I dare not read alone. Ironical that his darkness seems more resplendent and sanguine than the juncture at which I stand with sunlight full of paleness. It heals the palpable wounds on my idiosyncrasies. It smiles like Edelweiss, every time it meets me.

Nameless

2013-03-14T00:41:00.000+05:30

Perhaps the toughest part of creating an article is not embedded in creating it, but in naming it. Oddly enough this fact has never bothered me until now. Of all the pieces I have written, of all the poems I have weaved, I have always begun with the name, always. As if the name in my mind gave the image of what I was about to reflect in words. The title in bold gave me a sense of strength, a wave of confidence which made me believe that I was capable of doing what I have just started, that my words will sit together in mellifluous harmony to paint a picture never seen before. Today, standing at a clueless juncture that separates today from tomorrow, as I begin to bring together few aimless words wandering before my vision on paper I wonder how eloquent the irony of life can be.

Four weeks before this night, as the last hues of crimson sunk beneath that unknown place where it travels every day, my friend died. My friend died with the dolorous rays of the sinking sun that evening, departing from life in the most unsaid manner, much like the sunrays which die every day. Certain changes I believe never take place. Sandip’s death seemed like one of that kind. As preposterous as this thought might sound, the idea of his not being here, alive, appears the same to me. Nobody said that the sense of an ending will always be an accomplishment. As much as we rush to end certain things, others like the last day of school, last chapter of a great book, a handful of childhood dissolved in our mature self never really end, never really bid us adieu! For three years, Sandip and I sat together, everyday, and tried to define a better tomorrow for ourselves. Beneath books of algebra we passed mindless jokes and trivial secrets. We blinked our eyes as the teacher would hush us for disrupting an air full of decorum and silence. Often I would discuss boys with him while he would seek advices to woo few of my friends. Sandip and I went away in different directions, much like two birds that lived and chirped on the same tree and one morning, one fine morning chose to migrate away, in different directions. Years later as that fateful evening came with no wind, no sun, no birds around us, Sandip got hit, by a bus and left our hearts, bare and barren. Like the numb sun and silent sky which give no hint. And now he keeps me waiting, for a closure I suppose, to the chapter I started writing with him. It had my friend who loved him a lot, who gave him her entire heart for real, once and for all. He keeps her waiting too, I know it for sure.

Of late I have let myself indulge into periods of prolonged contemplation. I would have used the word introspection but that gives the promise of a consequent conclusion, one that makes us realise where it went wrong and often seeks another lateral promise of making corrections. This entire process of pondering does not provide a befitting panacea to all my woes. The times are (surely) a changing. So much that Dylan and Cohen and Young have to keep alive in me that one silent hope which I had gathered after being abandoned like a waif by the other types. Hope is a fleeting device, one needs to tie it by one’s bedpost, talk to it every day, smile at it every morning and stroke it to sleep every night. Otherwise it mingles into nowhere without a clue, like the most ruthless irony if there was ever one. Or maybe it is just me who has been gifted with such ephemeral forms of faith of late. For years I have waited for things to reveals themselves to me, through books, through music, through lessons, through love, through loss I waited with an endless, insatiable desire for one epiphany that would perhaps put an end to everything that is now grimly holding me back. Well as I have read Virginia Woolf I could correct this act of folly soon enough----- “the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come.” Honestly, one knows this truth all along. Things do not open up themselves, light never shines in the night sky. If there was one thing that life had to reveal, it was this fact that there never was a thing to be revealed. We need to find our own playthings, make our own happiness and eliminate our own sorrows. Yet one needs to rely on such divine intervention and wait for it. Otherwise the little illuminations of everyday that, though faintly, gives the hint of it, goes unnoticed.

A life without waiting is a life without aim or such is what I would like to believe. A life that waits is the one that tries to reduce the meters in order to diminish the wait. It is the life which tends to move through unaccustomed recesses and find new ways, the life which dares to come out of its own for a make-belief or a possible dream. Perhaps it was in those dark corners of mind where these thoughts were etched, that my love for travel began. When I was younger summers used to be reserved for travel. With time my summers grew shorter, summers were no longer the time to see faraway lands, summers ceased to take me to my grandfather’s house. Summers for me became as wilted as they were for anybody else. What was sadder, it became indiscernible from autumn, winter, rain, the other seasons of school and work and games of no fun. My ideas of travel and all that was romantic about it became like a secret lover, one with which I had a certain illicit commitment, to be revealed only in the arcane scripts of my notebooks. The postcards and pictures I would pin up there became yellow and broken in time. The snow-caps of Peling or the orchards of Missouri looked alike, stained and almost unidentifiable, like the old chapters of once an interesting time. The lesser I crossed the roads the more I wandered in my mind, the more determinate my dream of going to a foreign land became. Travel brings its own perils, especially this stagnant kind of mind-travelling where you walk in the velocity of lightyears in spite of staying put. Perhaps it is a kind of unimaginable fantasy I indulged into, the one that poured out of my insanity to proclaim a kind of hegemony on my other saner half, the one that went to school, did her lessons through the many seasons of love and loss.

Between love and loss I wonder what can bewilder man the most, especially a peripatetic man. A wayfarer loves his ways and he leaves one in search of another. I am no traveller, yet I have had my share of this game. Of the many loves I have known or the many losses I have felt it is hard to sort out which one has debilitated me the most, which one was so empowering that in its vigour it penetrated a numbness into all my senses. The greater was the love in a thing the more shredded I was in the pain of losing it. The louder the wail was after losing those precious threads, one for an avuncular tie, one for a brother, one for a friend or one for the child I was, the more I wept after every tiring night, a deeper, desolate meadow of absolute hopeless tranquillity followed it. Yet I fell in love again with the little success and surprises of life, with the new friends I made, with myself now so adult. And why this endless desire of risking the heart all over again? The fine line that exists between courage and foolhardy is the one along which we row our oars.

In the end I know what I am looking for, a room of my own. A room to live and breathe in, a room for journeys and a room for the author who will liberate the stories I like, the ones that have a dead brother, a lovely friend, a weeping girl and a magic rabbit, the ones which need to be told for my sake.

Anrin & I

2013-03-06T23:01:00.002+05:30

TO IRIS

where did we part,my beloved of the east

upon some moss ridden rock does our sepulchre lie

where for once did our love strain and heave

to fall anew,a martyr,

a stranger to our creed less divine;

and the lunatic rain caressed my bleeding being

every leaf did mock my burning soul

until the darkest abyss from beyond did grow

to engulf my sordid soul from within;

and in death did i seek a morbid friend

the clamorous world now a dreaded foe

for men and beast alike did seem

scars upon HIS divine embroidery;

till upon a stranger land

i saw an iris smile at me

lone was she so i sat for long

and there ne'er we spoke for once and still

i knew her of her own free will

and i loved her more than i ever could love

and she loved me till she could love no more

and in a frenzy of passion did i pluck her out

and took her to my humble home

there she wilted under my loving gaze

as in brazen sounds did we serenade

our love through the silent night

till she could sing no more,

and fell upon my arms dead

so no love ever i lost but two

and in HIS altar did i pray

he forgave for the one before

but not for the one i lost that day

for i had killed his heavenly child.....

~ by Anrin Chakraborti

With Anrin I have walked a path

so long that now I fail to recall

when and where it was formed from two

and yet has seemed to be one all along

Often as my musings bring back

dust left behind an hour so fateful

they all seem alike, red blue or yellow

in the shadow of a night that had prevailed till then

We have been lovers at the altar of art

and friends of a kind only we know of

with poems and songs that live in us

being cohorts of a dream I dare speak not

My prose of quartets fumbles in the end

To speak of what love we have shared

in evenings that have fallen from grace

and mornings of a certain sunny despair......