SUMMER 2009

The summer leaves are a grudging green,
The sky a reluctant blue.
But the thirsty earth cracks willingly
Alas! Only despair is true.

Memories (2)

I have this theory that children who grow up reading a lot of books, especially sanitized fiction like Enid Blyton (where all characters worth emulating are virtuous without being priggish, and on the whole perfectly adorable), turn out to be rude, defiant, obstinate and generally shorn of the innocence that is supposed to be the hallmark of childhood. Imagine learning from every story book you read that you aren’t worth much if you are not generous and truthful in your ways, and then going on to discover that in the real world not many people reach up to the lofty standards set by Blyton’s characters, and are by no means ashamed of this failing! The discrepancy between these two worlds – Blyton’s and yours – is quite enough to make you confused to the point of going insane. Here I shall not stoop to giving personal examples, but try and present a general picture of what might happen. Say, for instance, you grew up reading (and passionately believing) that promises are meant to be kept, that only a very mean and unhealthy species breaks promises. Then you come across someone very close to you casually breaking a promise (made, say, to you). What hurts and confuses most is not the fact that the person has broken a promise, but the fact that s/he should find nothing wrong in it. What you don’t understand is why that person isn’t trying to cook up an excuse or argue her/his point, why s/he should treat the breaking of a promise as the most natural thing in the world and feel not the least guilty or contrite or ashamed or, at the very least, even slightly uncomfortable. You know – from the little worldly experience you’ve had – that people cannot be as perfectly flawed as a model character in a book given a human touch. You know that perfection is unattainable because perfection consists in being perfectly aware of the imperfection you still bear. But what you cannot digest is the fact that people seem to treat the process of attaining perfection as unattainable in itself. You know that one cannot, with the best of intentions, always be truthful – so strong is the instinct of self-preservation – but you cannot reconcile yourself to the fact that one should be so supremely unaffected by your ideals, pretending, as if it were, that truthfulness by itself is not worth making such a song and dance about.

Like all the positive people created by Enid Blyton, you expect everyone close to you to be witty as a matter of course. But of course they aren’t. Which is only natural, since they have real lives to live; unlike Blyton characters they don’t have all day to hang about doing nothing except being witty for the sake of readers. But this I did not understand. It wasn’t that I expected good folks to be witty in general – more dangerously, I assumed that if you weren’t witty you weren’t good enough in the first place. Imagine making your way in this mean and wicked world with such lofty standards in sight! No wonder I made a mess of things. Very few people made it to my list of tolerable creatures. Most fell woefully short. Strangely, this did not leave me feeling smug and well-pleased with myself; rather I was left discontented and distressed. I wanted to have witty people around me, and when I couldn’t, all my anger was aimed at those who actually dared to flaunt their witless existence in front of me. I felt a bitter hatred for them all. It was as if I couldn’t forgive them for letting me down. It was as if by being witless they had taken the joy out of my life and I couldn’t forgive them for that. Like the books I read so voraciously, it was all a lot of make-believe. I fancied I couldn’t ever be happy with the everyday characters around me. So most of the times I would transport myself to a world where the very characters who peopled my real world assumed qualities that I so cherished. When I had to return to reality I would do so with little grace. Funny child I was, living as I did a Walter Mitty-like double existence – only I remained the same, it was the people around me who changed. It’s not hard to imagine what a cross and contrary person I came across as.

Memories (1)

I grew up in a one-horse small town (excuse the overdose of adjectives, but I merely wish to emphasize just what a god forsaken hole it was). Do I sound unnecessarily bitter? But it’s not because the town I was born grew up in was such a confoundedly small town. Indeed, I used to be quite fond of it for a very, very long time. What was so horribly wrong with it was that it had no soul – and it took a long time for this realization to dawn. However, it’s better that I begin at the beginning.

One of my earliest memories of thinking like an adult: It was an advertisement in some magazine or may be a billboard, I’m not very sure. There was this huge bed (was it an ad of some mattress?) and a cheesy looking couple either sitting on it or standing in front of it. There were words professing eternal romance accompanying the ad. The very sight of that giant bed and the cheesy looking couple whipped up a surge of nausea. I could physically feel the pain of infinite boredom. How absolutely horrendous to live with the same person year after year, with nothing to do but go to office and keep home and stare at each other’s faces like a pair of congenital idiots. The picture opened up before me a vista of unending sameness, so frightening, so utterly creepy as to put me off from marriage forever, or so I thought. The vision continued to haunt me for a long, long time. The matchbox flats in our township made matters worse. There they were, rows and rows of them, none with a personality of its own, housing rows and rows of bizarrely same families. The man who went to office in the morning, the woman who kept home, the children who went to school… You hear of wolves baying at the moon. There were days when I simply wanted to stand on the black, shiny road and yowl at those same-looking houses. I wanted to shatter them all with banshee shrieks. That’s how I came to hate the idea of a ‘settled family life’.

Again there were bits of Durgapur that were breathtakingly beautiful. No one can begin to imagine the beauty of the riotous krishnachuras in full bloom and the shy yellow radhachuras popping up ever so suddenly amidst a sea of red. Then there were the sal trees. Never have I seen such stately plants that could delight you every which way. They had sturdy branches that made you dream of climbing them till you reached the top like Jack and the Beanstalk and disappeared into a world beyond the clouds. They looked lovely when draped in green, the leaves were big and luscious and made you want to paint them. They looked majestic, arrogant even, when bare. The dry leaves made a carpet on the ground for miles around them, and the way the leaves cracked when you stepped on them was pure music. The flowers were almost orchid-like in beauty. Big, brown and ungainly, they looked as no flowers should look, the very antithesis of charm, tenderness and delicacy. But to see them strewn all over the roads was like seeing the first days of creation – full of unexpected magic, the beauty yet to come, but the solidity of success evident all the same. Then there were the ‘forests’, as I liked to call them. Expanses of trees nestled closely together, especially along the road from MAMC to ABL. They made you think wistfully of picnics though nobody in their senses would choose them as picnic sites!

I am by no means a nature lover. I cannot gaze at a sunset for hours and go into raptures over it. I find it dreadfully boring to stare at forests and plains in an attempt to drink in their beauty. Rather, I find more lasting beauty in human beings. People are so much more beautiful than trees and so infinitely full of variety. It is a much greater pleasure to look at people, think of people, wonder about people, than nature. But that is not to say that nature always leaves me cold and unaffected. Not indeed. Nature too turns me on, but only fleeting glimpses of it. The sudden view of a river winding its way down a sylvan patch can send a shiver of joy up my spine. Likewise, the krishnachuras of Durgapur, which were always there for you to feast your eyes on. You didn’t have to gaze at them at the poet gazed at the daffodils. But they were there, right outside your window, or across the road, ever ready to lift your spirits with a flash of red in the middle of extremely trying times. That’s how I appreciate nature – not as an idol to be gazed at in speechless adoration, but as a friend you can turn to in times of distress.

But to move away from nature. Durgapuja was a livewire occasion in town. People dressed in their garish best, feasting on gossip and egg rolls… but that is another story. There were a couple of pujas in Benachity, if I remember correctly, which were always a big hit. The kind of pujas people queued up in droves to see. I don’t recall their names – I do have a vague feeling that one was called Nabarun, but again I’m more unsure than sure. Anyway, those were the two hot and happening pujas in town, and if you had to be in the ‘in’ crowd, you’d have to go and see them. Everything about those pujas was a big draw, from the almost humanized and lifelike idols to the luridly painted scenery that served as backdrop. And it was that painted scenery, year after year, that made me draw my breath in wonder. The picture was supposed to represent ‘heaven’ with gods and demons leering at each other from behind clouds. The background would be ‘heaven’ and the foreground would be our own familiar world, necessarily a placid village adorned with majestic palms and vacant-faced women with pitchers returning from the evenly blue village pond. The picture, inexpertly drawn as it was, had a strangely magnetic quality about it. It compelled you to believe that there was indeed a heaven behind the clouds even if you knew to the contrary. It made you believe that gods looking like the royalty of a past time were indeed stomping about in the sky above you, just behind the clouds. The sky you knew so well was actually a blue dome that covered the earth like the lid of a jar. Looking at the pictures I got, though it sounds absurd now, a feeling of divinity. The world suddenly became a fairly simple place as it must have been in the dawn of civilization. Good was good and bad was bad, and there were no puzzling shades so to speak. Just as certainly as there was heaven above and the earth below, so were there gods with noble soldiers and demons with their evil henchmen. Years hence, I’ve never been able to recreate that mystic feeling which overpowered me every time I stood before those pictures. But I remember when I was very young, about two or three maybe, I used to sit on a low stool (mora) in the garden and bend over and put my head down so that I could see the world upside down through the gap between my legs. I simply loved doing it. For the world – patch of sky and garden green – viewed upside down looked like a quaint, out-of-the-world place that couldn’t be anything but heaven. So whenever I wanted a glimpse of heaven I’d sit on the mora and look at the panorama through the aperture between my legs. Childhood lends magic to the mundane and the commonplace, so strong is its own magic. Heaven in ludicrously amateur paintings, heaven in the world viewed upside down! These are just some of the things that stop me from loathing Durgapur as much as I’d have liked to.

On Death

I don't quite remember when I first learned about the existence of death. But for a long, long time, I refused to acknowledge its inevitability. Since I grew up among a lot of medical people, the knowledge of death must have seeped into my consciousness quite early in life. But, paradoxically, I was also quietly confident that those who died did so because they had the misfortune to have lived their lives before immortality was invented. Just as a child growing up early in the 1940s must have known quite certainly that it was only a matter of time before the British left India for good, so did I grow up with the calm assurance that immortality would be discovered long before my time was up. I had queer notions of immortality. Sometimes, I imagined it to be a kind of eternal existence, tranquil, peaceful and embracing the whole world. Sometimes, I would imagine immortality to be a smooth and endless transition from one life to another. But to me it never was nothing, it was always something or the other, very real, inevitable and waiting just round the corner. For the time being, however, there was death. To me the cruellest part of death was symbolized by an unfinished story or book. One day, you were there, ravenously devouring it or idly flipping the pages, dog-earing a page to carry on the next day, and the next day you weren't there anymore. You had ceased to be. The story or the book would never be completed by you. The story would be there forever, just as inexorably as the irrevocable fact of your not having finished it despite wanting to. As cruelly true as Genera;l Dyer's Jallianwalabagh massacre. As cruelly true as the Holocaust. A dark, evil shadow hovering over the survivors. Haunting them in wakefulness and sleep. As determined to seek revenge as Caesar's ghost.

Parting

The sun broke into a dimpled smile,
The trees whispered in open delight,
The river burst into throaty laughter
'Coz you said you'd sit with me awhile.

The clouds frollicked across the sky,
The flowers waltzed in the lazy breeze,
The stars tumbled riotously from above
'Coz you just wouldn't say goodbye.

The birds sang ceaselessly into the night
And ten million stars lit up our fairy world,
As moonlight played its magic melody,
We lay wordlessly, holding each other tight.

Now the stars have dimmed, the music is gone,
The river is silent, the flowers wilted,
The magic wand has snapped, the melody dead
As light years apart, we wait for a bleak new dawn.

On Laziness

The magic spell of sheer laziness is hard to conjure away. It does not spring upon you full blast, but creeps on you ever so slowly that the laidback pace in itself is irresistibly enchanting. Its tender warmth first caresses your feet and you feel a rush of pleasure. Then its gentle waves rise slowly, patting your legs with the infinite tenderness of a child masseur. Up our knees, past your waist, the balmy waves of a delectable sloth rise higher and higher, drenching you in the sweetness of ambrosia. Till you are soaked to the bones and so weighed down by the nectar of inertia that you find it impossible to move.

It’s a cast iron spell, deceptive in its apparently soothing redolence. Everytime you attempt to shake it off and rise, you are thrown back into inertia by a powerful gust of chloroform. Till you are only too glad to give up trying and resolve to simply enjoy the fruits of sloth: a tumbling basketful of what ifs, when ifs and only ifs; memories, both real and made up; futures, woven in fantasy; passion, human, superhuman and subhuman; the cheerful burial of values; the wanton indulgence of sin.

Yet another nameless post

Old, familiar books
Spruce in dust jackets,
Verdant dreams
Trimmed to size,
Motley mementoes
Cluttering up the brackets,
The skyline behind the highrise.

One fine day
I threw them all away
Knowing there would
Be Heaven to pay.

I rushed pell-mell
On to the dusty, sun-baked streets,
Running away from hell
And cupboards full of wild beasts.

I left behind
The childhood tales
Of wonder and horror
And the adult waiting room
Of perpetual torpor.

Well, here am I,
Fairy of the Elysian lawns
Here the nightingale
And there the bluebell,
The murmur of divine songs.

Goodbye monsters, goodbye ogres,
I cannot wish you good day.
You’re the stuff that life is made of
While I’m in heaven to stay.

It’s only sometimes
When I’m shaping mortals
Out of the clay
The Master has given me,
Do I strain to hear
The tolling of the Inchcape Bells
Deep in the hell of the sea.

Another Nameless Post

Dancing on the graves
Of infant dreams
Killed and buried long ago,

Exulting on the ashes
Of distant visions
Gone up in cigarette smoke.

Cannibalistic exhilaration
Of a hungry soul
Feasting on fresh minds,

Ecstatic jubilee
Over rotting remains
Of dead desires.

Wild, wild addiction
To noxious fumes
And the hangman’s noose.

Nameless Post

The morning dawns
Hesitant, the pale sun lingers
Awhile, full of pity,
Reluctant to turn its harsh glare
On the little men and women,
Arrogantly unaware of their big dreams;

Slowly bringing out into sharp relief
The smoke rising from the asphalt,
The luminous waves of heat
Dancing in the sun; the putrid
Stench of uncollected garbage
Spilling from a broken vat;

The rancid whiff of genteel poverty
Wafting from shabby tenements
Brazenly bedecked with tinsel,
Buckets of washing
Jostling for a beating and a shower
On the paved quadrangle under communal taps.

A steaming cauldron of everyday smells:
Detergent, toothpaste and spices in oil
Cowdung, urine and tea on the boil
Stale sweat and the sudden
Rebellious fragrance of a stray gulmohur,
Nauseating, fascinating, infinitely reassuring.

A rich canvas, vibrant, beautiful,
Oozing the filth of life from every pore
My heart’s delight, my soul’s repose
My daily breath, my life’s grace,
The love I feel for it all stabs me deep
And enfolds me in remorseless embrace.